Effective sales coaching can have a huge impact on your business. The biggest benefit is its contribution to revenue:
- Sales coaching boosts team performance, with real-time coaching increasing annual revenue by 8%.
- A structured coaching program can lead to a 28% higher win rate and 88% increase in productivity.
Research from The Brooks Group shows a culture of coaching can make a difference in today’s competitive market. Our survey of hundreds of sales leaders reveals that coaching is critical when your strategy is to build opportunities with new accounts.
We found successful teams prioritize coaching conversations, including joint calls with sellers, opportunity/deal coaching, and funnel coaching/pipeline reviews.
- 83% of top-performing teams are effective at deal coaching.
- 79% of top-performing teams are effective at pipeline coaching.
- 72% of top-performing teams are effective at joint call coaching.
This coaching ensures sellers focus on more profitable opportunities and discard those that are unlikely to close early in the selling cycle—taking the right actions to build a pipeline of qualified opportunities.
But some sales organizations lack formal, well-executed sales coaching programs. Gartner research reveals only 40% of sales professionals report a well-established coaching culture at their organization.
The takeaway is clear: Organizations aiming for improved performance and revenue growth must invest in high-quality coaching.
5 Best Practices of High-Impact Sales Coaching for Managers
Sales coaching is the practice of evaluating and instructing sales professionals to improve productivity, reinforce sales skills, and ensure consistent performance and success.
This post walks you through five best practices that can significantly enhance your sales teams’ ability to perform at a higher level.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #1:
Coach to a Sales Process
Data from the Best Practices of High-Performing Sales Teams report shows that 95% of teams that meet or exceed revenue goals follow their sales process all or most of the time.
Manager coaching is a best practice for driving sales process adherence. Sales leaders who conduct frequent one-on-one meetings (weekly or monthly) with their sellers are more likely to have teams that follow their sales process consistently.
- 71% of teams with managers who coach on a weekly or monthly basis follow their sales process consistently.
- Only 29% of teams with managers who coach quarterly or annually follow their sales process consistently.
Having a structured sales process in place provides “something to coach to”—a standard framework for evaluating and coaching—and improves the seller’s ability to close more deals.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #2:
Deliver Structured Evaluation and Feedback
The core of effective sales coaching is evaluating behavior and providing feedback to improve performance. But many sales professionals feel some level of anxiety or defensiveness about being evaluated. No one likes to feel that their behavior is under scrutiny.
Follow these five recommendations to increase the likelihood your team will respond to your assessment and act on feedback in the field.
1. Anticipate Nerves
You can reduce the stress of being evaluated by reminding your team that these check-ins are for their individual development and success. The best coaching simply adjusts what they’re already doing to help make them more effective and to close more deals.
2. Give 3-Step Feedback
Keep the feedback positive by starting out with three examples of things they are doing well and should keep on doing. Follow with one thing they should STOP doing and end with one thing they should START doing.
3. Focus on Specifics
One common complaint about feedback is that it’s not in-depth or specific enough to act on. To avoid this, make a list of the top eight to ten competencies and score their performance on each. Focus on no more than three competencies at a time and provide specific suggestions.
4. Collaborate on Solutions
Your sellers will be more willing to change their behavior if they have an active hand in the improvement plan. Make coaching a collaborative process by asking questions that get to the root of the issue. You want your team to consider the logic behind their own behaviors. This added self-awareness will help them recognize and self-correct in the future.
5. Plan and Then Execute
As a coach, your role is to hold the sales professional accountable for following through on their commitment. Have your sellers write out a plan of action after your evaluation and revisit the plan at your one-on-one meetings. Ownership will lead to better execution of the new strategy.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #3:
Develop Sales Skills with One-on-One Meetings
A vital component of an effective sales coaching program is one-on-one meetings. Check-ins with individual team members—either in person or virtual—are essential to find out what’s going well, what needs intervention, and what action steps should follow. Follow these four tips for productive one-on-one sales meetings.
1. Set and Keep a Schedule
Block out an hour weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly and stick to a regular cadence so the meetings become routine. The structure will help both parties prepare and take the meeting seriously. Getting into the habit will reduce the temptation to postpone or cancel—even when you’re swamped.
2. Don’t Inspect, Develop
Don’t make the meeting an interrogation, and avoid the temptation to do all the talking. This is their time to tell you what’s really going on, ask questions, and seek advice. Try not to focus solely on numbers. Look for trends in what they’re doing well and where they can improve.
3. Be Efficient
Prepare an agenda and leave time open to discuss needs and ideas. If you’re using a structured sales process, you’ll be able to streamline conversations around opportunities and find out exactly how deals are progressing.
4. Plan Next Steps
Make it clear what kind of follow-up behaviors you expect, as well as how you’ll measure those improvements. Then, start the next meeting with a review of how they played out with the prospect.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #4:
Build a Sales Culture with Team Meetings
Bringing the whole sales team together is another important coaching opportunity. It’s a time to recognize, educate, communicate, and motivate. But running an effective meeting is an art. The key to an effective team meeting is to balance discussion of sales numbers with development opportunities.
Motivate your sales professionals to push themselves toward higher performance and give them the sales coaching they need to do so. Use these four tips to make sure your next sales team meeting is as productive as possible.
1. Set an Agenda
Make your time together as efficient as possible by setting a clear agenda beforehand. While some of the topics will change week to week, your team should know the structure you’ll adhere to.
2. Make Meetings Interactive
Make your team meetings interactive by getting input from team members ahead of time—perhaps during one-to-one meetings. Share responsibility for meeting leadership. Designate team members as subject-matter experts and hold time to share successes.
3. Encourage Honest Dialogue
Carve out time in your agenda for sales professionals to share issues and brainstorm solutions. Make it clear that this isn’t a time for complaints; it’s a time for team members to raise issues they want to work out within the framework of the meeting. Addressing one issue may also solve or prevent others.
4. Create Value
Your team meetings should provide a venue for learning, skill development, and motivation. Include an educational aspect that will immediately benefit your team. Be sure to follow up with a discussion that details how the rest of the team can apply what they’ve learned to current opportunities.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #5:
Observe Sales Professionals in Action
There’s no substitute for seeing your sales professionals in action. “Ride-alongs” and joint sales calls are an opportunity to observe behavior during a live selling scenario—in-person or virtually. You can see firsthand where to focus coaching and can record calls for later review.
Sales professionals are more likely to incorporate feedback given during a ride-along because they’re able to connect it directly to their daily reality. Follow these three tips to execute joint sales calls with the biggest impact.
1. Plan Before Each Call
Have your salesperson create a plan you can review and adjust if needed. It can be helpful to roleplay the appointment to align on purpose and roles. The plan should include meeting attendees, purpose and outcome, and the coach’s role on the call.
2. Resist the Urge to Take Over
Your goal is to position the sales professional to succeed in front of the prospect or customer. A sales manager who takes over the meeting demotivates their sellers and robs them of valuable learning opportunities. If you need to intervene, then approach it in a way that presents a learning opportunity.
3. Provide Actionable Feedback
Sellers’ performance improvement hinges on the post-call debrief and how you deliver your feedback. Give your comments in actionable, bite-sized chunks. Use this sample joint call audit (or one you create) to evaluate how the seller performed at each step of the sales process, gauge where improvements are needed, and craft a focused coaching plan.
Sales Coaching Best Practice #6:
Create Career Roadmaps
Top sales performers want to develop their skills and move up. The last best practice of effective sales coaching is helping your sales professionals build a roadmap to reach their personal and professional goals.
Organizations must be very intentional in how they plan and communicate career development to attract and retain sales talent. Use these four tips to make sure your sales professionals know you’re invested in their career development.
1. Understand Every Seller’s Goals
To coach your team members effectively, you need to understand underlying motivators and values. Tools such as the DISC assessment are invaluable for revealing personal styles and driving forces. Incorporate sales assessments into your talent management strategy to see what drives your team and how to tailor your coaching.
2. Make Short- and Long-Term Plans
Meet with your team members individually to discuss their career objectives and develop a plan to track progress. Talk over how they plan to reach their current goals by leveraging their talents more effectively, as well as how they can prepare for potential future roles.
3. Promote Open Communication
People respond if you take a genuine interest in their future. Foster open communication by asking about your team’s lives and sharing a little of your own. Establishing personal connections and open communication will increase loyalty and the drive to excel.
4. Walk the Talk
Top sales performers want to develop their skills and progress their career. Branding your company as a place that provides opportunities for growth will help attract and keep the talent you’re looking for.
Grow Your Business with Sales Coaching
If you plan to generate more new business this year, then you need to evaluate how well your sellers are showing up as they present themselves to the market, prospect, pre-call plan, and execute customer meetings. Focus your coaching efforts and seller development on the areas that most align with your strategic priorities.
Leveraging effective sales coaching techniques can make or break sales performance. Use these sales coaching best practices to deliver coaching that builds a stronger team, increases sales productivity, improves retention, and enhances your bottom line.
Contact us at The Brooks Group to level up your company’s sales coaching efforts.
