What is Sales Coaching?

Sales Coaching is a professional training program followed by managers to maximize sales rep performance, allowing reps to quickly learn skills and exceed quota. The process is planned out to focus on each rep to find out areas of improvement, improving knowledge and skills, self motivate the rep and give personal feedback.

The ultimate goal of sales coaching is to create an environment where all team members are self-motivated and strive to improvise, excel, and take greater responsibility for collective growth. Effective sales coaching is the key to long-term organizational success and individual performance improvement.

Benefits of Sales Coaching

• Accelerate learning.
• Increases productivity
• Improves employee retention rate.
• Achieve behavior change.
• Increases quota numbers.

Sales Coaching Techniques:

• Use Data: Using a data-centric approach can be more impactful while implementing a coaching process. With theoretical explanation, also use data-based facts and metrics for more impact. Keep track of important metrics on a monthly basis, show them how the change in performance affects the metrics and how to improve upon that. Compare each salesperson to their historical performance, the team's average performance, and/or your top salesperson performances.
• Have a mixed coaching approach: A good coach should have a balanced mixture of different elements like a teacher, a counselor, a guide, a cheerleader. A coach should understand the person’s motivations, assess their strengths and weaknesses, encourage and inspire them to achieve greater results, adopt a unique approach with each individual. The coaching-style may also vary depending upon the specific goal of coaching. There may be specific skill coaching, strategic coaching to tackle a specific problem. The point of having a mixed style is to not streamline a set of processes which will not be exciting after a while.
• Leverage coaching tools: Today many sales teams are opting for advanced AI-based software to improve the team's performance. Sales enablement software uses a data-driven approach to analyze and improve various aspects of sales activities. This softwares can also be leveraged for coaching purposes.

There are various softwares you can use to improve and simplify your sales coaching techniques. These tools include software and educational resources you can use both individually or in combination with each other.