7 "Must Do" Sales Coaching Strategies

This article is dedicated to the parameters and principles that require sales leaders to implement and deliver successful sales coaching. Let's take the analogy of a professional athlete. The general manager of a sports team came out and said were no longer can ask our players to practice, rather they are now just contracted to show up for games. This seems so simple but all too often this is exactly what happens in sales. Sales people attend training often with reluctance and void of professional enthusiasm; therefore, the application of what was caught typically has fractional success. This is not to say there is not a value to sales training, sales leaders strategically followed up sales training with scheduled and consistently applied sales coaching practices performance and numbers will dramatically go up.

Here are seven strategies

we suggest that you deploy and please add any other suggestions within this

blog post:

1.      Beware of the dreaded “T” word-

Coaching must be void of

training. What is meant by this is that sales leaders must not rely simply on

training as the development resource for their teams. Training alone simply does

not work, whereas with coaching as a

reinforcement to that training could be a powerful combination.

2.      Knowledge is power-

Sales leaders must have

the knowledge to deliver the coaching as it relates to the sales process. For

example, if the organization has a proprietary way of handling a price or

competitor objection, this must be documented, taught, and known by sales

leaders. All too often sales leaders will simply rhetorically mandate that someone overcome an objection or handle price

objections when in fact there may not be a defined sequence or process.

3.      Be relevant-

Sales people learn

directly to what they're experiencing. Sales people learn best when the

material directly applies to what they're experiencing now. For example, if you

have a sales person who's working on a deal and he or she practices handling an

objection to win a deal, their association with coaching will exponentially

increase in terms of a positive relationship.

4.      Make the time-

Practice must be

scheduled. For far too long, we've asked salespeople to role play and practice

only to be received with rolling eyes at the national or biannual event. If

organizations had scheduled practice sessions where sales people could receive

factually driven reports of how they're doing in terms of their strength and

areas of opportunity to improve, they would experience a distinct advantage

over their competition.

5.      Are all questions created equal?

Sales leaders must possess

the ability to ask good sales coaching questions before giving advice. One of

the most common flaws of sales managers and coaches today is they will hear one

bit of information and immediately jump in and start providing

how-to type information. On another

front, sales leaders will typically resort to the way they used to handle

things which can create an experience of being discounted in terms of the mind

of a sales person.

6.      Confidence is key-

Selling confidence is a

very brittle thing. One of the biggest oxymoron that occurs in the sales world

is that when someone is not hitting their numbers and a sales leader will look

at a sales rep and say, "You must sell with confidence," as if

there's some magic button on the sales person's body. Confidence

comes from two things: practice and positive reinforcement. If people feel like they're performing better, or

getting better, or improving, that will transition ultimately to the actual

sales interaction with the prospect or customer.

7.      Be a team player-

Sales teams must act as

teams. One of the most powerful things that a sales leader can do is facilitate

peer

to peer coaching where people work

together and not act as individual entities on a team. For far too long, we

evaluate people simply on their individual merits when maybe they've done an

excellent job but for whatever reason one of their prospect's budgets got cut.

Therefore, they're viewed on paper as failing when in fact they could be very

good at selling. If we pair people up in teams where those two people can hold

each other accountable and attend practice sessions together and meet on a regular

basis to review how one another is doing, to assist one another, that is what a

good team does.

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