No matter what season it is, football season…baseball season…bbq season, we can all use a little help getting coached up. Whether it’s route running, home run hitting, or getting the edge on the latest rib smoking techniques, if you’re not learning, you’re not improving. And like anything worth doing, the key to success is reps. Lather, rinse, repeat. An excellent coach is the make it or break it for any breakout success though. A mentor of sorts to ensure you’re constantly improving to be at the top of your game so when your name gets called and you step up to the task, you’re glad you said, “put me in coach.”
Sales coaching is table stakes for any great organization. To grow and sustain a successful sales department, you need to invest in your reps (and leaders!), teach tactics, reinforce methodologies, and sharpen skills. The quality of coaching you provide has a significant impact on the effectiveness of your sales team.
But what separates an average coach from an excellent coach? How can you ensure your coaching provides each member of your team with the support they need to succeed?
At Performio, we have years worth of sales coaching experience to share. So we sat down with Brent McNamara, our Director of Revenue Enablement, and Danny Miroyanto, Head of Enterprise Sales, to pick their brains on what makes some sales coaches more effective than others. In this article, we’ll share what we found, walking you through strategies, tools, and practices you can employ to improve your coaching and equip your sales reps with everything they need to flourish:
- The sales coach’s role
- The business impact of sales coaching
- Tips and techniques for effective sales coaching
- Sales coaching tools
- How to become a better sales coach
Sales coaching vs. sales training
Let’s start by clarifying the difference between sales coaching and sales training.
Sales training brings new sales reps up to speed on the basics of selling your products or services. Additional sales training may also be employed when introducing new sales processes or strategies. It’s usually a one-size-fits all approach to providing a baseline understanding of sales concepts.
Sales coaching is an ongoing process to promote continual growth in an individual’s sales performance. It’s a one-on-one endeavor that identifies their strengths and weaknesses, targets areas for improvement, develops core competencies, and holds them accountable for their progress.
As for what that looks like, sales coaches win through others. Their job is to empower their team, and the performance of their team is the marker of their own success. They have to be humble, flexible, able to understand and appreciate the challenges at hand, and ready to give a lot of their energy to others. A good coach can be the difference between an average or underperforming team and one that excels.
Sales coaches work with each individual separately to recognize their potential, and then equip and inspire them to reach that potential. They’re the ones people turn to when they need help, and they also give others a push when they need it, ensuring that the team stays on track toward performance goals.
The business impact of sales coaching
Sales reps require an average 15 months of onboarding to reach peak performance, and yet their tenure is only an average 18 months before they seek new opportunities elsewhere. This grim reality presents sales organizations with several opportunities.
On the one hand, anything you can do to speed up the onboarding process will give you more time with your sales reps operating at full capacity—and sales coaches can help you get there. And on the other hand, giving your sales reps the dedicated coaching they need can not only raise their individual contribution ceiling, but also improve their morale, helping them feel supported and valued, improving retention rates as a result.
And contrary to popular belief, sales coaching is for everyone—not just underperformers. Every person in every organization can benefit from a coach’s guidance, leading to the dual benefits of improved performance and reduced turnover.
Sales coaching is one aspect, but there’s much more you can do to get new hires up to speed quickly. To learn more, download our free ebook, Accelerate Onboarding: How to Shave Months off of New Hire Training.
Tips and techniques for effective sales coaching
Effective sales coaching is a matter of stripping away the barriers to coachability, working with your sales reps on their level, and equipping them with the teaching, resources, and guidance they need to succeed. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to accomplish this.
Foster an environment of continual coaching
There are two fundamentally different approaches to sales coaching.
One approach sees coaching as something to employ on an as-needed basis. Sales reps go through their initial onboarding and training, but that’s pretty much it. Someone may check in with them every six months or so, but there’s no established process for ongoing one-on-one improvement.
Personalized coaching doesn’t come into play until there’s a problem—and by then it’s obvious that an individual is being coached because something needs to be addressed. This environment leads sales reps to view coaching as a disciplinary measure, making them react defensively to the prospect of being coached. This in turn makes the coaching far less effective, as no one operates well when they feel like they’re being targeted.
The far better approach is to treat coaching as a continual exercise that everyone engages in because we all want to grow and improve. In this environment, coaching is simply a part of sales reps’ everyday cadence, so there’s much less reason to become adversarial to the process. Small problems are caught and addressed early—well before it would otherwise become necessary to single out a rep for corrective action.
As a sales coach, part of your responsibility will be to foster this kind of culture. You need to illustrate that you’re going to be a coach from day one. Set a regular scheduled time to meet with each of your coachees—typically on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. This is their time to work with you on whatever they need help with, and it’s also your time to offer tips and suggestions for improvement. Then find ways to connect and offer feedback regularly outside of these sessions. The more you can normalize coaching, the more effective it will be.
Everyone will have specific issues to work on in their coaching sessions, so no one feels singled out for their shortcomings. And if someone continues to struggle, you’ll have a longstanding record of engaging with them on the matter, giving them every opportunity to improve before minor issues turn into a bigger problem. If corrective action ultimately becomes necessary, it at least won’t have come out of the blue.
Meet people where they are
Everyone you coach will be different. Effective coaches treat each coachee as an individual and cater their coaching accordingly.
To do this well, you need to invest in high quality communication at the outset, and encourage the same from the people you’re coaching. Make a concerted effort to learn who they are, what backgrounds they come from, what teaching styles work best for them, and what problems they’re going through that you can help them with.
For example, you could have them share about a successful call that went well, and discuss why it went well. Then have them analyze a call that didn’t go as well as they hoped. This gives you a chance to see their self-reflection skills in action, and it can reveal what they tend to focus on and value in sales interactions.
When you don’t take the time to understand where a coachee is in their learning journey and where they are in their sales career, your coaching ends up being superfluous or irrelevant.
If you want to start talking about advanced negotiation tactics with a seller, you have to make sure that they understand the basics of negotiation first. At the same time, you don’t want to cover the basics with someone who has already mastered them.
So you need to work with your coachee to learn what they know and what they need help with before charging in with general advice. Good sales coaching isn’t about having the perfect talking points or prepared advice. It’s more important to understand how to listen and ask good questions, so you can develop a deeper understanding of your coachee’s scenario, help them work through challenges, and cultivate a connection that leads to greater coachability long-term. Without those skills, you’ll struggle to make an impact with your coaching.
When possible, your coaching should be targeted to something they’re actually experiencing in real time. If your rep is in the middle of a deal cycle, look for opportunities where you could accelerate the deal. Then use that active deal as a live example to offer guidance that is immediately relevant. This will make it much easier for your coachee to grasp, apply, and remember your suggestion than if you had simply offered it on its own outside of the context where they’ll actually use it.
Finally, consider the methods of communication you use. Some sales reps will learn best one-on-one, others over the phone, video, or email. Some will need more written documentation than others. Some will benefit from taking courses outside of your internal systems. There’s no single right way for approaching these things—you just have to learn how your coachees learn best, and then adjust your approach to each individual.
Identify a list of competencies for your reps to master
One of the first things you should do as a sales coach is to identify a list of competencies that make for a great salesperson at your organization.
Start by creating a large list of competencies that apply broadly to salespeople in general. It can include things like:
- Problem solving skills
- Negotiation ability
- Discovery tactics
- Understanding of product knowledge
- Goal setting
- Adaptability
Work with sales leaders and other coaches in your organization to whittle your large list down to around 25 competencies that are most directly applicable to your context.
Those are the competencies you’ll focus on right now, but save that larger list for future reference. Whenever there’s a significant change in sales processes, a new product is released, or you change employers, you’ll want to reference it again, repeat the exercise, and re-identify the specific competencies to track at a given point in time. You’ll tend to find some overlap, but a lot of differentiation between different contexts.
Once you have your narrowed list of competencies to work on, you’ll need to determine how well your coachees stand up to each one. For each sales rep, look at which competencies they’ve already mastered, and which ones they could use some help on—because no one will be great at all of them by default.
Then use that information to inform your coaching strategy for each individual. Focus on one to three areas of improvement at a time. You don’t want to overwhelm your coachee with everything you’ve identified all at once.
Perhaps you note that one sales rep isn’t great at negotiation. You’ve seen it in deal cycles. Conversational intelligence has identified it in call recordings. They’ve expressed a desire to grow in this area. You know that’s an area worth focusing on with this rep. Now you’re empowered both to work negotiation skills into your coaching with them and to actively track their progress in that area to ensure your coaching efforts have been effective.
As each rep improves in one competency, you can shift your focus to the next competency from the list that they need help on. This makes for a great way to keep your coaching on track and targeted toward specific skills they’ll need for the products or services they’re selling.
Empower your coachees to learn by practice
Far too often, coaching ends up being little more than one person telling another person something they need to know and hoping they’ll absorb it. They do presentations, they talk about strategy, but no one actually tries to do it.
Even once you’ve narrowed down your coaching to the most applicable areas, you still need to present it in a way that coachees can take in, remember, and use. Don’t just hand them information—walk them through using it.
Using role-play can be a great way to accomplish this. Instead of simply telling a sales rep what they’re doing wrong and where they can improve, demonstrate it for them.
Have your coachee play the part of the customer so you can play the part of the sales rep, and go through a scenario together, modeling what it looks like to approach things differently. Then reverse the roles, and have your sales rep put what they’ve learned into action. Give them plenty of chances to practice before making a call, and then when they do it for real, it’ll feel as if they’ve already been in that situation.
Measure the effectiveness of your sales coaching
The goal of coaching is not merely to impart information but to see growth and improvements over time. To know whether your coaching has been effective, you need to track the progress of your coachees. Ideally, you should be able to see a direct correlation between your coaching and the creation of new pipelines, closed sales, or whatever other metrics you choose to track.
Start with that list of core competencies you created. Determine which competencies you’re focusing on with a given rep right now. Together, identify the metrics associated with that competency or other ways that you can measure progress. Take note of what their current performance looks like. And then watch how their performance improves (or doesn’t) with your coaching.
Is what you’re doing working? Are they implementing the things that you’ve coached them on? Are you seeing a change in behavior? If so, you know you’re on the right track. Keep on with the methods you’re using, and as your coachee becomes proficient in one core competency, shift to the next.
But if you aren’t seeing any changes, then you may need to shift tactics. Take some time to identify where the problem is. Does your coachee need more hands-on support? Is there a particular roadblock standing in their way that you can address? Would they benefit from a different teaching style? Don’t keep pushing forward with something that isn’t working until you’ve figured out the reason and come up with a solution.
Be direct and transparent
A common complaint from sales reps undergoing coaching is that their coaches aren’t as direct with them as desired. Whether because coaches don’t want to hurt their coachee’s feelings or because they just expect them to fill in the gaps, coaches sometimes beat around the bushes, sugarcoating the problem or making vague allusions that lack specifics.
This only serves to frustrate your sales reps, causing them to miss out on vital information they need to know. If there’s a problem they have to address, then you must be fully transparent about it. Explain exactly what they’re doing wrong, why that creates an issue, what they can do to correct it, and what improvements they can expect to see from making that change.
Obviously this doesn’t mean being cruel or berating sales reps for their mistakes. That’s as likely to make someone leave the organization as it is to help them improve. You can broach problems tactfully while still being direct. For the most part, this comes back to fostering an environment of continual coaching. When your sales reps know that they (along with the rest of the organization) are expected to be continually learning and improving, then finding a problem to address can be seen as an exciting opportunity, rather than something to be ashamed of.
Celebrate wins
Positive feedback is one of the best ways you can motivate your sales reps. You should be giving out praise regularly. When they’ve been struggling with something and finally get it right, make a big deal about it. When they get something right on the first try, celebrate it. When they’re making steady but unexciting progress, point it out and praise their continued efforts.
And while celebrating wins is beneficial for everyone, it can be a particularly helpful tactic when working with people who need to become more coachable.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself coaching someone who seems to have put a wall up. You need a way to get through their defenses and help them understand why coaching is important and how it can benefit them. It’s hard, because that wall is something they ultimately have to take down themselves, but you can help push them toward that by feeding them small wins.
Give them a simple assignment with an easy outcome, and then celebrate the heck out of their accomplishment. Even though the specific task may not have been much on its own, the positive affirmation they receive from having completed it can help to awaken the desire to become more coachable in order to continue improving. Then you can build on that initial assignment with something bigger and more important, and continue from there.
That initial small win can often have a ripple effect that leads to more and more wins and celebrations compounding on each other until the employee reaches the state of coachability you want them to have.
Sales coaching tools
Many sales organizations use technology to improve their coaching and onboarding. Let’s take a look at a few examples and consider how they help you coach more effectively.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms
CRM platforms, like Salesforce or HubSpot, offer a centralized place to keep track of all customer interactions. Any time a sales rep sends an email to a lead, makes a phone call, conducts a demo, or performs another customer-facing activity, it should go through your CRM. This offers a wealth of sales data you can use to track and manage your coaching activities. Most of the metrics you’ll focus on improving with a coachee will be trackable through the CRM.
Conversational intelligence solutions
Conversational Intelligence Solutions, like Clari Copilot (formerly Wingman) or Gong, record and automatically transcribe video calls and phone conversations, while also monitoring emails and other text-based mediums, and they use artificial intelligence to pull actionable insights from all communications. For example, they can detect when a negotiation is taking place in a call, allowing you to instantly jump to that portion of the recording or transcript. So when you’re working on negotiation skills with your coachee, you’ll be able to easily see how they’re performing. Additionally, these tools can identify things like filler words in a call, providing an objective metric you can track to see how your coachees improve over time.
Sales enablement software
Sales enablement software, like SalesHood or Bigtincan, provides a centralized repository for sales knowledge. You’ll use it to store everything from onboarding materials to product datasheets to competitor analysis and more, all of which sales reps will need to reference during their coaching. Additionally, many of these platforms allow you to build whole training courses to use with your coachees, aligning all the specific documentation they’re going to need as they move through the process.
Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) software
ICM software like Performio allows sales leaders and sales reps to track their sales activities, see how far along they are toward meeting goals and quotas, and know what they can expect to earn in commissions. And much like CRMs, ICMs generate a lot of valuable sales data. As a sales coach, you’ll be able to look at the dashboard for your coachees to see where they’re doing well and where they need improvement, allowing you to identify gaps in their performance that you can focus on. Since these gaps are directly tied to your incentive structure, your coachees will also be highly motivated to improve in these areas.
How to become a better sales coach
Beyond the techniques and tools that you’ll use as a sales coach, there’s plenty you can do to work on yourself and become an even better coach. Let’s take a look at a few methods for self improvement.
Continue being coachable
Whether you’re stepping into a coaching role for the first time, or you’ve been coaching for years, you will always have more to learn. The fact that you’re reading this article right now indicates that you understand this principle. Maintaining that coachable attitude is one of the most important ways to become the best coach you can be.
Just because something has worked well for you, that doesn’t mean it will work the same for everyone else. So you have to stay open to new ways of doing things. No matter how good at sales you may already be, there will always be new techniques to learn, new processes to master, and new strategies to employ. You need to be your own model student, lead from the front, and practice your own advice before passing it on to your coachees.
Additionally, keep in mind that even as a coach, you too are going to make mistakes. Be quick to acknowledge where you went wrong, address the problem, learn from your mistake, and do better going forward. And don’t try to keep that process hidden behind closed doors. Allowing your coachees to see your growth is a tremendous way to model what it should look like for them.
Seek out a mentor
Even coaches need coaches. Unfortunately, those won’t always be provided for you by default. In many cases, it just gets assumed that if you’re good at selling, you’ll automatically be good at coaching. And first-time coaches can often find themselves lacking direction on how to proceed.
If your organization hasn’t already paired you with a mentor, then you need to take the initiative to seek one out for yourself. This is especially crucial as a new coach, but it’s valuable no matter how much experience you have. Absolutely everyone can benefit from a mentor.
Look for others who have done your job before, or who are doing your job now, and ask them for advice. Be proactive about setting up times where you can share resources, run problems by them, and learn how they would handle different situations.
Encourage feedback from your coachees
It can be all too easy to treat coaching as a one-sided exercise. You’re the expert, and they need to learn from you, so you simply impart your knowledge, and they absorb it. Right?
But the best coaches make it a collaborative process. Give your sales reps an active role to play in their own learning journey. Let them help you determine which areas you’re going to focus on together, and welcome their input as you make progress.
You should even be willing to learn new things from your coachees. For example, if they show interest in a sales strategy you’re not as familiar with, you could suggest they research it on their own, and then report back to you with their findings. You gain their insight, and they get a chance to teach—which further reinforces what they’ve learned.
As much as you’re able, make coaching a two-way conversation.
Engage in self-guided learning
There are so many resources available to help you become a more effective sales coach, but it’s going to be up to you to pursue them and reap the benefits.
Start by looking into whether your organization offers any continued learning benefits, such as access to external courses or seminars. If they do, don’t pass up those opportunities. If they don’t, it’s worth making the suggestion, but in the meantime, there are plenty of free resources available as well.
For example, many coaching courses have websites full of free articles you can read without paying for the course itself. Then there are podcasts and blogs that are chock-full of valuable information. And of course there are myriad books on becoming a better sales coach, which are a pretty inexpensive investment.
We asked our expert sales coaches which resources they’ve most benefited from that they would recommend to others. Here’s the list of suggestions they came up with to get you started.
Sales coaching books
- The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
- The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth by Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth
- Coach the Person Not the Problem: A Guide to Using Reflective Inquiry by Marcia Reynolds
- Co-Active Coaching: The proven framework for transformative conversations at work and in life by Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandhal, and Laura Whitworth
- The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey with Sean Covey
Podcasts for sales coaches
- Modern Sales - B2B Selling Podcast: iTunes, Spotify
- The Pavilion Podcast: iTunes, Spotify
- Sales Strategy & Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul: iTunes, Spotify
Sales coaching websites/courses
- The Co-Active Training Institute
- The Command Center by Force Management
- Sales Academy
- Sales Coaching: A Foundation of Successful Sales
- Value Selling with the ValueSelling Framework
Empower your sales team with Performio
Sales coaching is all about empowering sales reps for success. And one of the best ways to supplement the coaching process is with a dedicated Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) platform like Performio. Sales reps need transparent access to their compensation and performance data in order to do their jobs well and stay focused on sales.
Without the ability to track their progress, sales reps have to spend time performing homebrewed calculations to see how much they can expect to earn. This shadow accounting doesn’t just harm morale and impact trust, but it can also cause major problems when a sales rep’s calculations don’t line up with what they’ve actually earned.
Performio’s Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) software gives your reps real-time insights into their performance, how far along they are toward their goals, what they can expect, and much more.
Want to see what Performio can do for your business? Request a demo today.