With proper sales coaching techniques, managers can empower their sales representatives to be high-performing and bring in more revenue for the company. This means they can close more deals and achieve their quota easily. When this happens, the business can earn more and grow better.
Thus, managers must drive high-impact sales coaching through the following:
1. Create A Template
Setting a solid foundation for your sales coaching session is crucial to success. Without it, you may not get the value you’re aiming for. What you need to do, then, is be careful with the steps you take before, during, and after each coaching session. It’s best to follow a plan or a template during coaching sessions to ensure that you’ll make the most out of every minute.
However, each coaching template should vary depending on the company’s sales process. So, a good starting point is to draft a plan that will help you understand the goals of the company. Then, use it to form questions about how representatives have done so far to achieve such goals. By then, you should also ask about their previous performances.
If they’re doing great, then complement them and suggest other ways to upscale their performance to an even higher level. If you want, you can also utilize a sales coaching template to boost the performance of your team.
2. Give Yourself Enough Time to Prepare
Pretty much every presentation requires a great deal of preparation to be successful, and the same applies to sales coaching. As the facilitator, you’ll need to engage your team members, ask thought-provoking questions, and share insightful ideas and opinions. Without proper preparation, you may not be able to deliver these responsibilities.
3. Offer Advice
As mentioned, you’ll need to offer advice to your reps, especially those who are consistently underperforming. Its purpose is to give sellers a guide to achieving their objectives and improve their selling capability. It’s not about micromanaging and telling your agents what to do every step of the way.
However, as a manager, you should know the right way of delivering your message. A piece of good advice delivered poorly may not have a significant and positive impact.
To make sure that you provide your advice in the best possible way, you must first assess your seller’s expertise. From there, evaluate whether they need facilitative or directive advice: reps with less experience often need a more directive approach, whereas the veterans will do better with facilitative advice.
4. Use KPIs
Data is the basis of any wise business decision. As the sales team leader, it’s your responsibility to create key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep track of every member’s productivity and performance. Some tracking methodology you can use are average deal size, sales funnel leakage, quota attainment, win rate, and revenue. These are some of the most effective KPIs you can use to decide the approach and deliverance of sales coaching.
In addition, you can even use these KPIs to create a training program that fits every employee’s needs. However, if you need more metrics to make evaluations better, feel free to personalize your own metric according to the needs of your company.
5. Create Different Coaching Scenarios
Most importantly, you may need to create varying coaching scenarios. That’s because sales reps have different skills and expertise that they like to use during sales stages. Assuming that all your sales reps are the same will do them an injustice. So, keep this in mind if you want to create a powerful sales coaching session.
Sales coaching programs shouldn’t be targeted to only one or two types of sales reps. Instead, your plan should cater to everyone regardless of skills and experience. To do that, you want to design a program that takes all of their skills and combines them.
Use multiple coaching scenarios so that each sales rep can relate to what you’re talking about. Lastly, try incorporating different types of skills that your sales reps need to learn to become successful.
For instance, new sales reps might benefit from intermediate strategies, while veterans will do well with more advanced scenarios. Or you can utilize a round-robin arrangement to focus on each type of sales group. That way, the others who have gone such coaching won’t waste time attending it again. Instead, they can focus on their work while waiting for their turn.
Conclusion
The ultimate goal of sales coaching is to guide your team members to become better and more productive representatives of the company. However, it needs to be impactful so that it’ll yield positive results. Thus, you may want to consider the tips mentioned above.
