Sales Coaching 101: The Ultimate Guide to Developing Top-Performing Reps

It seems that every day, more and more research appears that touts the benefits of sales coaching. One recent study even found that firms with well-implemented sales coaching strategies grew revenue nearly 17 percent faster than those without.

So, by now we all know we need to start coaching. But, do you know how to properly implement sales coaching within your organization? We’ve broken proper coaching down to its basic elements so you know how to establish a successful strategy.  

Use the Right Data

If you are building a foundation for sales coaching, then data is the concrete that forms it. Tools to collect and disseminate data are crucial to evaluating your team’s performance and your effectiveness as a sales coach. You need insights into call metrics, meeting effectiveness, and conversion rates to understand how reps perform and what needs to be improved.

Think about the Golden State Warriors. Just like they know getting Stephen Curry open in the right place guarantees 3 points, you’ll know that your team has to hit the phones to drive more revenue.

Create Visibility Between Actions, Goals, and Outcomes

Sales coaching requires visibility, ownership, and understanding. You should clearly define goals and the path to achieve them. If you ask a rep to set three meetings per day, you must also provide them with guidelines around who to call and what to say to give them the best possible chance of making it happen. Hold reps accountable by making your data visible so they (and others) can easily see where they stand. You can foster some healthy competition among your reps with gamification like contests or leaderboards.

Furthermore, create visibility between individual, team, department, and company goals so each rep can understand how their personal actions contribute to overall success. Just like each position on a football team follows a particular path, show your players the plays you need to run to win.

Coach the Individuals

Individual sessions are a cornerstone of sales coaching. These meetings allow you to work directly with each rep on a personal level. During these sessions, be open, conversational, and consultative. Spend time talking about deals they are working on, their next steps, and if they need anything from you.

Also, use your data and discussion to identify each reps strengths and weaknesses. Consider non-traditional metrics like the time it takes to make a follow up call, or the outbound calls by time of day, which can be easily improved by adjusting a rep’s behavior.

Develop methods to employ their strengths and training to improve their performance. One-on-one meetings also give you a complete understanding of your team on both micro and macro levels.

Educate, but don’t Disrupt

Now that you’ve identified what must be improved, find a method of educating your reps. The training should be quick, effective, and easily digestible, but it cannot occupy time that your reps should be selling. When you decide on training topics, focus only on the one or two most pressing, like researching prospects or maintaining relationships. Then, once performance has improved, move to the next. Just like a coach makes adjustments to his team between games, this will prevent you from overloading your reps with too much information and gives them time to apply what they have learned.

Align Motivation and Goals

The rewards in many organizations consist of basic sales commissions, but it’s important to incentivize the actions that lead to a desired result. If setting meetings is a key contributor to success, you can reward exceeding goal with something that provides value to reps. Remember, prizes don’t always have to be monetary. You can give days off, the opportunity to work from home, or a dinner. Decide what your play of the game looks like.

Provide Ongoing Feedback

Like education, your feedback and input into the team should be an ongoing process. Don’t wait until something goes wrong to weigh in. You should constantly monitor ongoing deals and provide guidance and input. Use call monitoring and recording, real-time analytics, and in-person sessions to track progress and discuss the positives as well as the negatives. A coach doesn’t give his team the plan and leave the field when the game starts, he’s there every step of the way to make adjustments and provide praise.

Celebrate the Wins

One of the most important aspects of sales coaching is to be positive. Celebrate the wins with your team, reward them for doing well, be optimistic and upbeat. As a coach you are there to uplift, encourage, and empower your team. This increases workplace happiness and leads to better employee engagement and retention.

Sales Coaching Over the Years

According to The Bridge Group, sales quotas have increased an average of 6% year-over-year.

As a result, sales reps will need to hit these ever-increasing targets as well. What can you do to help your team reach their goals? The key is increasing your reps’ productivity through consistent coaching.

Rep productivity maximizes sales results while minimizing cost, effort, and time.

Meanwhile, consistent coaching is about finding actionable solutions and strategies to drive revenue, helping your reps prioritize and effectively allocate their time and resources, and enabling your team to develop professionally. CSO Insights found that formalized coaching improves win rates a significant 5.3 percentage points above average for an actual improvement of 11.5%. Plus sales coaching can increase sales productivity by up to 88 percent.

Prioritizing sales coaching can help increase ramp rate, reinforce a structured sales process, promote the sharing of best practices, and include the tracking of metrics. Let’s take a look at these aspects.

Increase Rep Training and Onboarding

Increases ramp rate – There are many facets of the sales onboarding process. They include all the stages of your sales process — identifying your target personas, understanding your products and services, evaluating the competitive landscape, learning policies and procedures, and much more. With an influx of new information, it’s critical that new hires receive reinforcement of information in small increments through consistent coaching. This practice helps reps recall and utilize information more readily so they apply it more easily and become productive more rapidly.

Reinforces a structured sales process — According to a study by Vantage Point Performance, companies with a formal sales process grow revenue 18% faster than those without one. A sales process should always be evolving to adjust for changes in market, products, and competitors. Always look for ways to strengthen and optimize your process. Make note of prospect objections and roadblocks. Determine the best way to work through these rough spots and modify steps accordingly to ensure efficiency. To accomplish this, gather important information during your consistent coaching sessions and listen to calls or call recordings.

Sales Call Best Practices

Promotes the sharing of best practices for sales calls – Sharing of best practices help sales management coach more effectively and efficiently. Research by CSO Insights showed that on average 60.1% of a company’s revenue is generated by the top 20% of its sales people. Sharing best practices, as performed by these top reps is an excellent way to coach the rest of the team for better results and provides a scalable, self-sufficient coaching framework. In fact, according to Aberdeen Research, companies that adopt best practices across their sales teams had double the quota attainment of their peers. One easy way to share best practices is by developing a library of call recordings. Share them with team members during onboarding, to provide examples to those needing to improve certain skills, and for overall reference for your entire team. Not only will this sharing improve skills and understanding, it will promote teamwork.

Tracking Sales Metrics

Includes the tracking of metrics – Sales has become more focused on data. A study by Aberdeen Research shows that businesses who use analytics have 15% more team members attaining sales quota. The tracking of sales analytics offers valuable insights about efficiency and effectiveness of sales reps. Analytics help identify weaknesses in your sales process so you can fine tune it. They reveal areas of focus for coaching sessions ensuring continual performance improvement. A few metrics you may track are: outbound calls per day by rep, call connect rate with decision makers, and average calls per sale. If you really want to help your team reach their ever-rising goals and increase productivity, be sure to incorporate consistent coaching in your day-to-day sales operations.

Sales coaching can drastically increase the effectiveness and performance of any organization by individually equipping and empowering reps to own their success. We know how to implement sales coaching strategies within our organizations, but what does it actually do for reps on a personal level?

It Reveals Strengths and Weaknesses

Sales coaching uses data, analytics, and even call recordings to identify how performance can be improved. When you implement the right tools, you’ll know how many calls your reps need to make to drive meetings, opportunities, and revenue. Then, once the optimal strategies are identified, you can see which reps are exceeding or falling behind target numbers and how to set them back on course to ensure success.

When you combine quantitative and qualitative assessments from data analysis along with  individual coaching, you gain a clearer picture of your reps’ strengths and weaknesses. Based on your conclusions, you can then adopt a training program that addresses your team’s specific needs. Proper training should only address one or two issues at a time, such as how to set more meetings, or how to follow up. Since learners forget up to 50 percent of what they are taught in 24 hours, reps need time to fully absorb, comprehend, and utilize the content.

It Fosters Collaborative Relationships

Regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings are a cornerstone of successful sales coaching. Once armed with data, you can give each rep actionable insights into their sales processes. Individual meetings serve as consultations and are a time for you and your rep to have a two-way discussion about ongoing deals and potential roadblocks. It also gives you insight into the qualitative side of the equation, where you can coach reps to make adjustments to their sales pitch during the prospect’s discovery process.

Phil Jackson, arguably the greatest NBA coach of all time, encouraged collaboration rather than competition amongst his team. He maintained that a great leader wasn’t always the one that scored the most points, but rather the one that elevated their teammates’ performance. The same can be applied to a sales team. Strategies like team incentives encourage high performing reps to help less successful ones improve.

It Aligns Personal and Company Goals

A successful sales coach gives reps direct insight into how their personal objectives contribute to the company as a whole. In fact, the data collected allows sales managers to see how the actions made by sales reps directly impact the company’s bottom line. By tracing this path, sales managers can build a plan to have reps drive the factors that lead to the achievement of company objectives. Employee engagement is also increased because reps can see directly how the actions they take contribute to the betterment of the organization.

It Provides Insight and Feedback

Just like how an NFL coach makes adjustments to the team’s strategy in the midst of a game, a sales coach needs to support their reps as they make their way through the sales process. Ongoing support turns every deal into a learning opportunity. By actively working through deals with your reps, you help them to overcome blockers, handle objections, and understand subjects like integrations, technology, security, or feature gaps.

When reps are coached through active deals, it increases the potential of winning the account, as you can address issues before they lead to a loss. Additionally, it creates an experiential learning process that empowers reps to win more customers on their own.

It Creates Positivity

While learning from mistakes is essential, sales coaches must reinforce the positive. Especially in sales, much can be learned from the wins. It’s critical to examine why a customer made the purchase. Afterward, you can learn what features made a difference, what type of conversations were had, and even what competitors you were up against.

Reinforcing the wins also has a notable effect on employee satisfaction and causes reps to feel more engaged and motivated.

How to Scale Sales Coaching

Hermann Ebbinghaus’ research shows that learners forget up to 50% of what they are taught in just 24 hours and that ongoing repetition dramatically increases retention. Coaching is a great way to provide your sales team with ongoing repetition in short sessions. Unfortunately a survey by the Sales Management Association revealed that 77% of firms say they don’t provide enough coaching. So how much coaching is enough? According to this report, 3-5 hours per week is ideal. If you have eight reps on your team and aim for 3 hours per week per rep, how do you effectively accomplish this while continuing to do everything else you need to do as a manager? To improve your sales coaching and effectively scale it for consistent results, here’s what you need to do.

Bite-sized sessions

Short, frequent coaching sessions will keep your reps productive while learning on the job. These brief sessions allow your reps to pick up, develop, and practice new skills. Repetition, with feedback, reinforces and strengthens the skills that your team members are learning so that they become new, established behaviors.

One size does not fit all

Remember that all of your team members are starting in a different place. Some have more experience plus they all have different backgrounds and knowledge. This means that coaching must be individualized for each team member. Assess each rep at the start to understand what they already know and where they need to improve. Working with each individual to strengthen areas where they are weak, and reinforcing those where they’re already knowledgeable, will help them build confidence and proficiency.

Listen

Listening to rep calls live, or via recording playbacks, allows you to provide valuable feedback. When reps are new, you can join calls in progress to help them along, providing necessary support to increase close rates while showing them how it should be done.

You should also provide written or verbal feedback during or after calls are complete. Listening helps you identify what to focus on during future one-on-one coaching sessions too. Replays can be used during these future sessions so reps can hear what they did right and wrong during previous calls.

Leverage Teamwork

New reps can listen (on mute) to live, top rep, calls to hear how they position your product, address competition, and respond to objections. All team members can listen to replays of top rep recordings to improve their call techniques. Reps can listen to each other’s live calls and recordings to provide feedback for improvement too.

Utilize analytics

Dashboards and analytics are useful to you and your reps. Access to this valuable information helps individual reps remain accountable to themselves and their team members. They are easily able to see where they are accelerating and falling short, so they can make adjustments. These stats allow them to see, at a glance, where they stand in comparison to other reps.

For sales leaders, data allows you to easily know why reps are doing well or struggling. Analytics simplifies the coaching process by providing valuable insights, helping you constantly identify new coaching opportunities. This makes it easier for you to guide each rep to reach their full potential more rapidly. Want to learn more about the power of analytics? Check out this guide.

Implement these components to effectively scale your sales coaching across your organization. Your team will produce consistent improvements and coaching will become an effortless component of your day-to-day sales operations.