How to Provide Effective Sales Coaching

Effective sales coaching is critical to ensure the ongoing success of any given sales team. Although there are inevitably going to be reps who have raw natural sales talents, that’s going to be an exception and not necessarily the rule. Besides, even someone who is a sales superstar can always learn new tactics and the best way to sell a specific product or service.

With that being said, sales coaching isn’t something that you can just guess at. You need to have a real, thought-out process in place. When you provide effective sales coaching for your team, you can bring them more wins and more success. In this blog, we’ll lay out a 7 step guide on how to enable sales coaching in your business and how to make it as effective as possible.

 1. Set Clear Objectives for Coaches and for Reps

First things first, you need to set objectives for both coaches and reps alike. Find the right goals for your business. What do you want the sales coaches to achieve through the training process? What skills do you want your reps to learn and what outcomes do you want to come as a result of the coaching?

When you clearly define objectives for coaches and reps, you can ensure that the coaching process is customized to help everyone hit their KPIs and reach their goals. With that being said, yours shouldn’t be the absolute final say with no wiggle room. You should encourage collaboration.

 2. Keep it Collaborative - Be Ready to Teach and to Learn

The coaching process isn’t static. It should evolve and iterate based on the needs of the business, the goals of the reps, and the knowledge of the sales coaches. As teams learn more about each other and as they understand their own goals, the coaching process should reflect this.

This means that not only should reps and coaches provide feedback to each other, but they should also self-evaluate. A good sales coach will allow their reps to determine their path and help them become better based on their personal goals. Sales coaches can also make suggestions for reps to improve, but reps are more likely to respond and improve when they’re allowed to determine their own targets and focus on what they perceive as their weaknesses.

Just make sure reps aren’t running away with control over the coaching process. It’s still helpful for managers and coaches to talk with reps and make sure their goals are aligned with the business as a whole.

 3. Focus on the Holistic Wellbeing and Growth of Sales Reps

Sales reps aren’t robots. If they were, they wouldn’t be very good at their jobs. Sales coaches should reassure sales reps and ensure that the well-being of sales reps is paid attention to. When sales reps are unhappy or mentally unhealthy in the workplace, their performance will suffer and they won’t be enjoying their job anymore. When a sales coach can recognize this, they can address the issue and find a way to relieve the stresses and emotional strain of the rep.

When a sales rep is happy in their position, they’ll be able to grow in their role and hit their goals more easily. Sales coaches can check up on the health and burnout of employees by asking them questions about how they’re doing and by listening to employee concerns. Make sure reps are comfortable sharing with you and encourage open communication. When reps bottle up these issues, it can lead to problems for them down the line.

 4. Review Actual Sales Calls and Find Value in Their Best Moments

Senior sales reps only have so much time. While they can certainly teach new reps some tricks, they’re not going to have the time to train them fully. Sales coaches can help, but it’s difficult to give a group of reps individual attention at all times. Instead, it helps to have training resources that reps can turn to when they’re needing some extra support.

This is where sales call review can be useful. By listening to the best reps make their calls, they can learn a lot about how to interact with customers and how to sell the product or service. However, listening to call after call can sometimes get overwhelming and it might not always be productive.

Instead, you should implement conversation intelligence that can record all sales calls, separate the wins, highlight key phrases and keywords, and help reps identify what’s working in these winning calls. This helps reps to perfect their scripts and learn the right things to say to close a sale.

 5. Measure and Analyze Your Coaching Outcomes

Reps aren’t the only ones who need to be analyzed. You should also be measuring KPIs and outcomes from your sales coaching. Find out what methods are leading to more wins for sales reps. Find out what lessons are leading to success. By paying attention to outcomes, getting feedback from reps, and monitoring your coaching you can find out what is working and what isn’t.

If you have a great sales coaching process in place, it won’t necessarily stay that way forever. As the market changes and as new trends arise, you need to make sure you’re flexible and able to make meaningful changes to your coaching process if need be.

 6. Hold Sales Reps - and Sales Coaches - Accountable

Make sure everyone is being held accountable. This means finding out what support reps and coaches need to do better. Here are some important things reps and coaches need to be asking:

• What kind of challenges are reps and the team facing?
• Has performance improved or declined in a given time period?
• What additional support is needed to do the best work?
• Are there any specific suggestions for improving processes?
  

Asking these questions allows you to measure progress and optimize your sales coaching. It also makes sure that reps understand it’s partially on them to make the sales coaching process work. They need to also be making an effort to improve and optimize their own processes.

 7. Update, Iterate, and Evolve Your Training Content

Your sales coaching will consist of workshops, training sessions, evaluations, and other in-person or live virtual interactions. But when you’re not actively working with your sales reps, they should have access to quality training content at all times. This means providing them with a training hub that has content that you continually update, iterate, and evolve. This allows reps to grow at their own pace outside of the usual training regimen.

Create a Successful Sales Community with Flockjay 

If you’re looking to create a successful sales team, it helps to have useful software tools to make the task easier. That’s what Flockjay is here for. Flockjay is a Sales Elevation Platform that provides tools for sales coaching, peer-to-peer learning, sales rep motivation, and much more. Flockjay works for sales teams of any size, located anywhere. Whether you’re in person or remote, you can connect your sales teams and help them collaborate like never before.

If you’re interested in bringing your sales team to the next level, make sure to choose Flockjay. Get in touch with us today for more information and find out how our platform can benefit your business.