There is no shortage of important responsibilities for sales managers.
From overseeing sales operations to ensure that the rest of the team is set up for success to evaluating and optimizing strategies to maximize results, the job of sales coaching is not to be taken lightly.
But beyond all of the processes, goals, and outcomes that make a sales team successful, there is also something to be said about managers doing everything they can to support the team on a more personal level. Creating relationships in business – especially sales – is crucial, even on an internal level. Not only does this foster a culture of support, but it can also result in better overall team performance.
Identifying the best way to motivate your sales team and implementing sales coaching software in the process takes time, empathy, and of course, coaching.
Sales coaching is the act of helping sales reps develop, improve their performance, and achieve their goals. The purpose of sales coaching is to create an environment where continuous growth, discovery, and learning are encouraged above all else.
A function of sales enablement, powerful and effective sales coaching is personalized and inclusive for each team member within the sales organization. We all work, learn, and find motivation in different ways, so applying the same sales coaching technique across the entire department is an ineffective approach.
It’s also important to note that sales coaching is not showing your reps the right way to do something every time. How would that be beneficial for their overall growth? (Hint: it wouldn’t.)
Rather than providing a step-by-step roadmap, sales coaching is about serving as a guiding light as reps navigate the world and challenges of sales. It takes an approach that focuses on skills and techniques rather than metrics and numbers.
For example, sales coaching might include sitting down with a rep and reviewing the transcript of a customer call to pick out what went well and what could’ve gone better. Or even something as simple as holding recurring meetings to ask where they need more support.
Thoughtful sales coaching can have a positive impact on your bottom line, but there are a few other benefits that your entire business can experience through this sales management practice as well.
The constant turnover of sales reps can present a larger issue to your business. You worked hard to lock down that talent, and seeing them walk out the door due to lack of growth opportunities is disheartening. Not to mention all the time you spent training and onboarding them.
Sales coaching plays a huge role in professional development. According to a study of 400 participants, 70% of employees indicated that training and development related to their job influenced their decision to stay at their current job. That number only increased for younger, emerging members of the workforce.
When you offer the training and development required for a salesperson to succeed, they feel the satisfaction of doing a good job and associate it with your coaching. This is a recipe for increased employee retention rates, and it will motivate reps to seek opportunities that will support both their professional development and employer.
After sales leaders have been participating in coaching for a certain amount of time, there’s the possibility of noticing trends and best practices that result in success. This shouldn’t be taken lightly. Just because one sales rep had luck with a tactic doesn’t mean replicating it with another customer will be as fruitful. However, when given time, best practices can show themselves.
Every business and customer is different, and sales coaches have just as much to learn through observation as salespeople do through being coached. Over time, sales managers can accumulate a list of best practices that they can incorporate into their sales coaching. Finding what works for your customers when selling your product is crucial, and the observation it takes to coach someone in sales can teach managers just that.
Every employee has to go through extensive training before starting a new position, sales professionals included. However, as time goes on and reps become more wrapped up in their work, it’s possible that some of that training can be forgotten.
Sales coaching offers the perfect opportunity to avoid that by making training a constant part of the job, just in a different style. For sales training to be effective, it has to be consistent and focus on long-term growth and learning. Lucky for sales managers, they can achieve this through coaching.
Like most things, sales coaching is well worth the effort, but it’s not easily won. When incorporating this professional development technique into your sales org, you can expect to encounter these challenges.
The sales department exists within your business to close deals and generate revenue for the company. That’s no mystery. However, focusing all of your time on that can happen at the cost of authentic and effective sales coaching conversations.
While a closed-won deal provides the immediate benefit of revenue, the perks of sales coaching might be a bit harder to communicate to higher ups. But if you play the long game and carefully track performance improvement, you might have a case.
Offering the same pieces of advice to each sales rep you coach will land you in a tough spot. It might work for some, but others might be left in an even worse position than they started.
Avoid generic action plans by getting to know each person on your team. Identify where they excel and where they struggle. Find what motivates the sales team and inspires them to work harder. Through empathy, you can reach anyone.
A key purpose of sales coaching is to identify ways to improve your team’s performance. But for that to happen, they need to feel engaged in their development attempts. Preaching to someone week after week with the same old coaching techniques is one thing, and getting through to them is another.
An effective sales coach will check engagement levels throughout all of your sales coaching sessions. Make sure your lessons are resonating and that people are gaining something each time. It’s a fine line to walk between telling someone how to do their job and coaching them in hopes of boosting their performance and confidence.
Whichever tactics you end up implementing for your sales coaching, there are a few important tips to keep in mind in your approach. When coming up with a plan of action, ask yourself where the following components can be incorporated.
Observing your sales reps in their natural selling habitat is a good place to start with sales coaching, but narrowing it all down to identify opportunities for improvement can be difficult. This is where sales data comes in.
Make sure data has a place in your sales coaching strategy. Sales performance management software can monitor your sales team’s progress, effectively identifying success and picking out areas where certain employees could improve. This data surrounding progress can be viewed at both a team level and with individual reps so you can gain direction for both group and personal coaching sessions.
Pay special attention to sales metrics and KPIs and the activity levels it takes to sustain them. That not only offers a good place to start, but a benchmark metric to monitor progress after sales coaching sessions as well. Trust your gut when looking for areas where you can support your sales team. But when in doubt, lean on sales data.
There are a lot of outcomes that can be considered a success in sales. Closing a deal, hitting a group revenue goal, or increasing profit margins across the business are all wins, but they happen at different levels. Your sales coaching needs to reflect that.
Take the multifaceted aspect of sales into consideration when ideating strategies for training and coaching. From a big picture level, you can offer training that helps people within the organization better understand your customers and target audience.
Working with the team, you can focus training on establishing and maintaining valuable and mutually beneficial relationships with customers. And at an individual level, offer coaching on customer messaging based on the results of activity metrics.
Feedback is a gold mine for your sales coaching strategy. You aren’t in this alone – you have an entire team working with you on this who all care about the personal and professional development opportunities that you provide. You can’t be the only person throughout the sales organization to decide where people are succeeding and struggling.
Remember to ask salespeople where they would like to learn and develop more. Keep it open ended and come up with a game plan together. Again, make sure to do this regularly on an individual and team basis so you are approaching problems as they arise.
Another way to leverage your team is by having high performers participate. Your team isn’t going to want to listen to you coach them forever, and switching it up with a new teacher can muster up more excitement and motivation.
Lucky for the amateur sales coach, there are an abundance of sales coaching tools that can serve as guiding lights in your sales coaching program. The list below contains real-user reviews from the best sales coaching software on the market.
To be included in this list, a product must:
*Below are the top five sales coaching software tools from G2's Fall 2023 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Operations to grow and increase productivity. The #1 CRM for sales coaching, Salesforce Sales Cloud is built to help companies sell faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
“I appreciate that the Lightning interface is user friendly and allows for customization so that you can guide the user through the processes you would like them to complete.”
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Review, Kris G.
“The only offside I can think of is the complexity of implementing and training part of using the tool. Since it's a very robust tool. The knowledge needed to fully maximize the tool is also enormous.”
- Salesforce Sales Cloud Review, Rowel C.
Gong offers conversation intelligence capabilities that can capture customer interactions on multiple devices, such as phone calls, video conferences, and emails. This gives sales managers a glimpse into what was said, helping them offer best practices moving forward.
“As a new employee, Gong has been invaluable in my being able to come up to speed more quickly. I can find very relevant meetings that I can quickly review to pick up tips, pointers of great presentations and demos, learn about deals and use cases, go back in time to see the progression of a deal, and more. The summary information about each meeting, next steps, highlights, identifying competitive deals provides enormous opportunities. I also really appreciate the transcripts as well. As I progress, Its helping me review my own calls too.”
- Gong Review, Mark M.
“As far as downsides go, the only thing I don't like about Gong is how it speaks about me in third person. It will says "Holly made introductions" and sometimes I wish it used "I" to refer to me so that I can copy and paste into a recap email.”
- Gong Review, Holly M.
The mindset behind MindTickle is sales readiness. MindTickle is a data-driven sales training and onboarding software that focuses on finding the most effective ways to coach sales reps and improve their performance moving forward.
“The most helpful part of Mindtickle is that I'm able to learn at my pace, recieve feedback in a timely manner, navigating through the platform with ease and complete the missions. I use it often and check how my peers are progressing as well. The implementation was easy and fun.”
- MindTickle Review, Julian G.
“They do have great support articles online, however, I do wish they would have a little more detail or go into more advanced support content for different customer scenarios. Some of their help articles are out of date and need attention.”
- MindTickle Review, Lily K.
Chorus by ZoomInfo is backed by 14 technology patents and is one of the fastest growing conversation intelligence product at the moment. It helps track and analyze customer engagement.
“The ability to record and access the conversations whenever needed, not only via Chorus but also via Salesforce. It has allowed me to ensure that the information collected is accurate and that I am confident in what I share with my sales partner. This has helped us plan for future calls with prospects. I am also a fan of conversation tracking and coaching. It has helped in improving our approach and not dominating the conversation.”
- Chorus by ZoomInfo Review, Chistian R.
“The user interface could be improved a little. It does take some training and time to be familiar with the navigation. Specifically, the UI on creating playlist is a little confusing.”
- Chorus by ZoomInfo Review, George L.
SalesLoft is a sales engagement platform that focuses on customer communication and sales cycle optimization. The purpose of using this tool is to identify best practices to replicate success in various sales interactions. SalesLoft can automate sales tasks and provide insight into team and individual performance, fueling the sales coaching process.
“Highly organized and intuitive - makes tracking your daily efforts easy. Easy to add new contacts to cadence and manipulate steps as necessary. We have customized our cadences for our various target audiences and this enables us to drill into the specific points of interest that are relevant to the potential customers.”
- SalesLoft Review, Mike B.
“What would be even more useful is if Salesloft fed back information about the best time of day and day of the week when my emails have the best open rate and response rate, so that I could leverage that in my outreach. Currently, I have to play around to see what works.”
- SalesLoft Review, Fiachra D.
At the end of the day, we show up at work to do our best and get paid. The purpose of sales coaching is to make that experience as efficient and rewarding as possible. Yes, your sales team is there to generate revenue for your company, but it’s a whole lot more enjoyable when growing in the process.
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