• When this is a Weakness, an individual might believe that coaching means helping salespeople with pricing and technical questions on an ad hoc basis.
• When this is a Strength, an individual might schedule multiple coaching conversations with salespeople each week to improve their skills and help them win more sales.

If your company needs to grow, it is worthy of your time to focus on the importance of sales coaching, how to improve in this area and how effective coaching can drive sales growth for you and your organization. Skilled coaching helps drive sales growth by:

1. Empowering Your Sales Team:

Coaching is about empowering your sales team by providing them with the tools, knowledge, and skills necessary to excel. It's not just about telling them what to do but leading them through a self-discovery process; a more effective way to teach them how to sell better. Effective coaching involves asking many questions of your salespeople about what happened on the sales call to uncover what happened, what was missed and what needs follow up. For example, instead of asking “who will make the final decision?” an effective coach will ask their salesperson “what did they say when you asked them about their decision-making process?” This approach initiates a broader discussion with more coaching opportunities and builds the salesperson’s confidence and competence, helping them to perform at improved levels.

2. Improved Sales Skills:

In theory, Coaching helps sales professionals hone their skills, whether it's prospecting, handling objections or closing deals. But coaching sales tactics is not always effective because it does not address the underlying problem or reason for lack of performance. For example, if a salesperson is not making the prospecting effort that was agreed upon, it may be that they do not recover well from rejection, so just coaching them to make more calls is not going to be helpful.  However, uncovering if rejection is a problem and coaching them on how to be more resilient will improve their skill levels, not just for today but in the future. Selling is fraught with rejection and unless your salesperson can bounce back and go on to the next prospect, a salesperson will forever struggle with prospecting. Given regular feedback and guidance, they can refine their techniques, resulting in more successful interactions with potential customers.

3. Customized Approach:

There are 21 Sales Core Competencies that a salesperson must master to be an “elite” salesperson. That is a long list for any coach to effectively address, however, that is the goal. Some of these competencies are inherent in the person such as desire to excel, commitment to do what is necessary to achieve success and taking responsibility for their own actions and results, not blaming others or the organization. Other competencies however, must be coached such as how to get to the decision maker, how to overcome need for approval in order to ask the tougher questions and in today’s world, how to utilize the many social selling skills to connect, build credibility and find new relationships.  One size does not fit all in sales. Coaching allows you to tailor your approach to individual salespeople's strengths and weaknesses. By understanding their unique needs, you can help them reach their full potential.

4. Feedback and Accountability:

There is a 5-step process that every Coach should follow when coaching their salespeople.

• Gaining insight is all about what is happening in the field on a sales call or what is not The Coach can gain insight firsthand by observing a call or gather it from huddle data where you review sales behaviors and results. For example, how many calls and appointments are your salespeople supposed to make, and what were their results in a certain timeframe? Then, most importantly, what behaviors did your salespeople exhibit to get those results and if not to goal, how will they change their sales behaviors
• Giving Feedback is when coaching sales behaviors gets more difficult. Here are a few tips:

1. Makes sure feedback is timely and specific
2. Review the Good, Bad & Ugly (find something good to point out)
3. Ask questions to help them self-discover
4. Gain agreement on the real problem

• Demonstration of the sales behaviors you want and expect can be hard for many Coaches because they may not have come out of a sales role but they can demonstrate the questions needed to be asked and the sales approach that should be followed. We call this the Shadow of the Leader.
• Practice - Roleplay is never anyone’s favorite activity but once the sales manager has demonstrated the sales behavior, it is important to have the salesperson role play. Don’t call it role play, just name it a practice session but make sure they do it. Muscle memory needs repetition!
• Action Plan is putting the learning into action. Is the salesperson going to call the prospect back and ask those additional questions about their current provider? Make certain to identify specific actions that will take place, set a follow-up to discuss the outcomes, inspect, then coach their sales behaviors again. And don’t forget to celebrate the success and address the failures.

Effective coaching involves regular feedback and accountability. It helps salespeople understand where they can improve and holds them responsible for their performance. This accountability can drive better results and encourage a culture of excellence.

5. Measurable Results:

The impact of coaching on sales growth is not just theoretical. It can be measured through key performance indicators such as larger account sizes, improved conversion rates, revenue per salesperson, and customer satisfaction scores. In order to ensure that coaching improves sales results, it is important to establish the metrics that will be measured and tracked in order to provide insights as to the coaching effectiveness.

We work with companies establishing Success Formulas that reflect the effort needed at each step of their sales process. For example, a company could track dials to contacts, contacts to appointments, appointments to sales opportunities, opportunities to presentations and presentations to closed sales. Many of these stages can be reflected in a company’s CRM. If these are tracked regularly, it is an ideal way for a Coach to identify at which step a salesperson is struggling. With strong coaching, many skills and the results of these steps can be improved, resulting in improved sales results.

Conclusion:

To fully harness the power of coaching, it's essential to foster a coaching culture within your organization. This involves making coaching a part of your company's DNA and encouraging all levels of management to engage in coaching activities. By implementing a coaching program within your organization, you can tap into the potential of your sales team and drive sustainable sales growth.

What is Constructive Sales Feedback?

There are many opportunities in the day of a sales coach to provide sales feedback so what makes it constructive?  Constructive sales feedback should include:

• Asking enough questions
• Listening to understand
• Drilling down on answers
• Discovering your salesperson’s motivation
• Getting commitment on next steps
• Having them practice their skills for development
• Refining and improving strategies
• Demonstrating effective skills in qualifying, presenting and closing
• Helping your salespeople improve skills, not just close the deal at hand

The importance of constructive sales feedback involves helping salespeople self-discover what they are doing wrong or should be doing differently. Strong sales leaders will ask questions versus tell a salesperson what to do.  In coaching sales behaviors, how you say something can be more important than what you say. Instead of saying “You should have asked your prospect about their current provider”, you could ask “What did you find out about their current provider?”  Asking questions will allow salespeople to self-discover, which is a key result of constructive sales feedback.

When Should Managers Provide Constructive Sales Feedback?

According to Objective Management Group, our sales evaluation partner and pioneer in the industry, many sales managers believe that coaching means helping salespeople with pricing and technical questions on an ad hoc basis. Strong and effective sales coaches, however, schedule multiple coaching conversations with their salespeople each week to provide constructive sales feedback, improve their skills and help them win more deals. It is important that sales managers set aside specific time for intentional coaching, not just coaching to a specific deal or proposal. Sales managers should put time on the calendar weekly for 1 on 1 coaching with salespeople that can be used to prepare for an upcoming call or debrief after a recent sales call.

There are many opportunities for a sales coach to provide constructive and important feedback to their team:

Why doesn’t coaching occur as often as it should? One of the most difficult skills for most sales managers to overcome is their need for approval from their salespeople. Coaching is different than managing and requires clear direction, discussion, examples and demonstration of what is expected of a salesperson. This can be hard for a manager, who also wants their team to like them. They may not want to come off as critical. The importance of providing constructive feedback and coaching sales behaviors is a critical part of the development of a sales manager. A strong sales leader and coach must be adept at asking great questions, listening closely and staying focused on developing salespeople to be their best. Their primary focus is developing their salespeople and achieving goals through the efforts and success of others.

Huddles Help Coaches Focus on Critical Sales Performance Metrics

Huddles as defined by Verne Harnish, founder and President of Gazelles, are:

1. A communication process or system that allows for sharing of real-time information
2. An opportunity to focus on "burning platform" issues for a team or company
3. A way to bring sharp focus and attention to a critical business driver
4. The most important 15 minutes in any company meeting

Each company should determine the most important few sales activity data to capture in their huddle regularly each week or month such as contacts, appointments, proposals, COIs etc. If a sales manager does not schedule a regular and timely means to monitor what is going on in the field, in real-time, they cannot coach or adjust the play or get in front of any client issues or trends. Huddles provide real-time information so that sales managers can make real-time decisions and provide real-time feedback or coaching. This is vastly different than waiting for month or quarter end reporting on results because huddles capture what is happening now, this week. The sales performance metrics that are captured in Huddles can then be used to coach salespeople to impact current deals.

Coaching with Sales Data Insights from Where’s Walter

We suggest a technique that we have labeled as “Where’s Walter” pictured and explained below.

Coaching a salesperson’s activities can be simplified into two areas: their effort vs. their execution. Effort is described as evaluating if they are doing whatever it takes in the area of outreach and working hard to attain their goals. Execution evaluates their effectiveness in the sales process.  Are they doing the right things to take a prospect through an effective sales process or do they have a problem?

Using Where’s Walter for Sales Data Insight

As a coaching approach, we recommend sales leaders place their people into one of the four boxes noted above and then have these conversations below with the salespeople in each quadrant. These are guidelines of course but should be adjusted. One word of caution, do not soften too much. Coaching is hard work and leaders must be tough and direct at times to identify real areas of concern and development.

Execution Results & Effort
“ Bob, thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled as this will help you achieve your personal goals and objectives. Just as important though, I also want to thank you for your consistent effort. You may not realize this, but others on the team look to you and follow your lead.  The way that you execute on sales skills “week in and week out” sets a great example for the rest of the team. Thank you. Now, Bob, what else can I do for you?”

Execution Results but Lacks Effort
“Bob, I want to thank you for the results you are generating. You must be thrilled as this will help you achieve the personal goals and objectives you have for your family. I am worried about one thing though; can we talk about that? Bob, how long is our sales cycle?  (120 days). Okay, so based on that and looking at our success formula, then the results you are getting today are a result of what? (The activity I did a while back) That’s what I was thinking and that is why I am concerned. Based on the activity here (show them the data), you are headed for a slump. Is that where you want to be?”

Effort is There but Poor Execution Results
“Bob, obviously based on the numbers you see here, you are not on schedule to achieve the extraordinary year to which you had committed to manage yourself. But this is where I’m confused.  The data I have- that tells me about your effort- indicates that you should be at or above your goals, but that isn’t the case. My experience tells me that it can only be because of one of two things: either the data you are entering is not accurate or you are failing to execute properly. Which one so you think it is?”

Lack of Effort and Results
“Bob, I have to tell you that I cannot figure this out.  Your effort and results are a total surprise to me. If several months ago, someone said to me that you would be failing, I would have said ‘no way.’ (Show Bob the job posting you used for the position he is in and his resume then show him his current sales activity and results.) Bob, I take a look at this (job info) and I think – ‘This is what I hired.’ I look at this (the results) and I’m thinking ‘This is what I got.’ Bob, did I make a mistake?”

Using the Where’s Walter platform gives sales coaches a framework to use performance metrics from Huddles to generate conversations, identify areas for salespeople to focus on and most importantly, gain insights for immediate coaching to improve skills, performance and results.

The importance of that step, the customer’s decision-making process, may just be the most important step in the buyer’s journey. Salespeople can gain a great deal of information from CRMs and lead nurturing data and best practices from industry research systems like Relpro and IBISWorld, however, these will not give them insights into a prospect’s specific decision-making process. There are nuances in every company as to how they approach an important purchase and elite salespeople are skilled at asking great questions in order to uncover those in their qualifying discussions.

Questions to Ask About Your Customer’s Decision-Making Process

One lead (or prospect) lead nurturing best practice is to just be direct, ask the question. We coach salespeople in the commitment step of the sales process to simply as them “When you’ve made a decision like this in the past, what was your process?” Simple enough but the prospect may give a surface answer, making it seem much simpler than it is of course. Of course, you must have already uncovered that you are working with the decision maker but rarely in a substantial purchase, is there just one making the decision. They may be the ultimate decision maker but the decision impacts others that they will want to gain input from. Skilled salespeople help the prospect think through this by drilling down from their surface answer and will ask further questions such as:

• “Will that be the same process you follow this time?” and
• “How long does that normally take?” and
• “Who will this change impact in the organization?”
• “Who all needs to fall in love with this solution to gain approval?” and
• “Can I go with you to present to the committee?”
• “How will you tell your current provider?”

The bottom line, it may not matter how much your direct contact likes the solution you have recommended, if the customer’s decision-making process is unknown, you are at risk of losing the deal. Those important questions need to be asked and salespeople who master these close more sales.

From the coach’s perspective, one of the findings from our partners at Objective Management Group is; Managers who are effective at helping their salespeople get prospects to commit to a decision have 40% more top performers than managers who are ineffective at coaching on decision making.

Why is this so predictive of success for coaching? If managers are helping their team to regularly uncover the decision-making process and gain commitment, then they’re probably coaching on several supporting skills also. Getting a prospect to agree to a decision means the salesperson has uncovered a compelling reason for them to buy, they have thoroughly qualified the opportunity, and presented a need and cost appropriate solution at the right time. This takes active listening, many insightful and challenging questions, and the ability to pushback appropriately on potential stall tactics.

8 am daily paper check with our entire sales team and manager and each region did it at the same time, every day. Paper check meant, our boss opened the competitive papers and asked us about any businesses advertising in our territory that we did not have running in our paper. This was of course, in front of the whole team. So, my first lesson on the importance of feedback in sales was frequency and consistency matter. I knew that I had to be ON IT or look like a weak link on our team. The second lesson about the importance of feedback was transparency. We all went under the same daily scrutiny and although this was painful at times, it also brought us together as a team. It was competitive, it was fun and we rooted each other on. This feedback process also allowed us to share some best practices and teach the newbies so that they knew what was coming and how to get better.

Adaptability in sales is essential and that is another lesson I learned at The Dallas Times Herald. During my 6 years there, my territory was split 4 times so I gave up strip centers and advertisers to my co-workers and had to go deeper into my current client base, selling them more or finding new ones in a smaller territory. I was blessed with a North Dallas area and was able to adapt and continue to outsell my complacent Dallas Morning News opponent.

My boss, a wonderful guy named Eddie, was a master at understanding the importance of feedback and would always find a time to point out the wins, the great sales, the creative approaches and he was famous for slipping us producers a $50 here and there as a bonus. Which of course, we went out and blew that night at the Elan, dancing and drinking a few cocktails. I grew to love feedback, as all salespeople should, but of course, the quality of it matters. Coaches should be direct, fair, instructive and consistent in their feedback to make it work its magic. Not everyone is as lucky as I was to have an accomplished and encouraging coach.

The coach is so important when it comes down to it. I would certainly not have been as motivated or as skilled or as inspired to canvas my territory, stay out late and build ads until 8 pm at night without Eddie. So how do coaches become better?  Here is one great resource from our partners Objective Management Group: The Ultimate Sales Coaching Guide with another downloadable below.