How to Create a Coaching Cadence That Drives Continuous Sales Improvement

Above all else, there is one common thing that connects the most successful sales teams together - continuous improvement.

Sales is a game that you need to practice regularly to ensure you are achieving your potential. For teams, this doesn’t happen organically. You need to build systems and processes into the business for ongoing development.

You may have some individuals who are super keen to learn, so they are out there testing the latest tech strategies and evolving their individual performance. But unfortunately not everyone in your sales team is going to be this proactive, they need some direction and guidance to adopt this mindset.

Repeatable improvement across your team as a whole comes from your ability to create a culture of coaching. On the surface, this sounds like a simple concept, but in practice, it is much more complex.

You need everyone on your team to be willing and able to fail in front of their colleagues. They have to seek and desire real and actionable feedback on their day-to-day activities. For most traditional salespeople this is foreign territory because they need to be vulnerable.

So, how do you facilitate continuous improvement in your sales team?

There are three key things that will help drive this idea of continuous improvement in your sales team:

1. Tap into their internal motivation. Sales is a tough slog and you come up against a lot of rejection every day. It takes a strong sense of will and internal motivation to keep turning up and doing the activities that will help you hit your targets. First-time sales managers often forget that they aren’t moving around pawns on a chess board. You are dealing with real people and real emotions and you need to build a relationship with them. You need to understand more about what their internal motivation is so that you can use it as a guide for overcoming day-to-day challenges in their role and help them pursue excellence. It’s not about your business goals and targets, it’s about the unique drivers that get your reps out of bed every morning and make them hit the proverbial pavement for you.
2. Embed a culture of coaching. This concept takes your reps on a journey of identifying their areas of opportunity and playing an active role to help them improve their trade. It’s important that this process is a two-way dialogue between the coach and the sales rep. Too many companies look at sales training as a one-way delivery of information and they don’t actively engage in the process or look to action the outcomes.
3. Hold them accountable for their actions. By understanding your reps' motivations you can hold them accountable for the actions that will contribute to delivering on these motivations. You would do so through regular meetings and interactions with these individuals.

The best way to act on these three key drivers is to create a coaching cadence in your business. This coaching cadence will simultaneously improve your team’s sales skills, tap into their internal motivation, and hold them accountable for the actions they need to do in order to be successful in their role.

So how do you create a coaching cadence like this? Here is a 5-step process to help you get started.

Step 1 - Identify the types of meetings you need to conduct

There are three different stakeholders for a sales manager and subsequently a need to create three groups of meetings. The first is the individual sales rep, the second is with your sales team as a whole, and the third meeting you should have is with management so that you can set expectations with executives.

Individual meetings

There are a few things you need to do with your reps in these individual meetings to set them up for success.

• Create a business plan so that they can be the CEO of their own territory.
• Put together a personal development plan. What are they trying to achieve? How are they trying to improve? How can you help?
• Review their pipeline. This is obviously a priority because it is a leading indicator of the targets you have both set.
• Work on their skills. Use these meetings as an opportunity to identify areas of opportunity and help them work on their skills.

Team meetings

From a team perspective, your meetings will likely be less frequent and have a bigger picture agenda. For example, you may look at a quarterly business review where everyone can be held accountable for what he or she are trying to achieve for the quarter by sharing their goals with their peers.

You may also choose to have more regular pipeline updates, team coaching calls, and team-based daily routines which form a key part of the coaching cadence.

Management meetings

Planning and executing meetings with your management requires an entirely different skill than working with your team and sales reps. You need to talk in a different language and think through the lens of the people in these positions. How can you share the story about your team’s progress and how it is directly influencing the greater goals of the business?

Step 2 - Set the duration and frequency of your meetings

After identifying the types of meetings you should have, you then need to determine the duration and timing of those meetings.

How often are you going to have these meetings?

You may have meetings daily, weekly, and monthly - depending on their agenda and objectives. In most cases, the more frequent meetings will be one-on-one with your reps and the team meetings, whereas the executive meetings will be less regular.

By setting a regular cadence of meetings it builds habits and accountability.

Step 3 - Schedule your week

Before you set the cadence for your meetings, you need to identify when the best selling time is for your reps. Because you don’t want to chew into that optimal selling time with pipeline or update meetings.

The best way to determine your optimal selling time is by thinking about your customer. When are your customers going to be most available to receive a call, answer an email, or have a meeting?

Block these times out in a weekly calendar by creating a rating scale of Poor, Moderate, and Optimum selling time:

With a strong understanding of the ideal selling time for your reps, you can then align your weekly meetings to the times in the calendar that are either Poor or Moderate for your reps to be contacting your customers.

Step 4 - Map out your quarterly plan

As I mentioned previously, a number of your meetings won’t occur every week so it is also important to map out a quarterly plan. It may look something like this:

In the above graphic the red text represents the individual meetings, blue represents the team meetings and the green is the quarterly executive roll up.

There is no “one and done” way to approach a quarterly coaching cadence, but this example will give you a well-tested approach to the rhythm of meetings you should be having.

As you can see the quarter begins with an individual business plan review, team-based business review and pipeline update, and the executive meeting. Then as you get into the swing of things there are monthly sales coaching meetings and business plan reviews, weekly pipeline updates, and a number of other important meetings that create a cadence of learning and development within your sales organisation.

Once you plan out your quarterly meetings it gives you some real structure and purpose to your one-on-ones and day-to-day team habits. It’s no longer just the same old questions being asked every week because the focus is on coaching and continuous improvement over a period of time.

Step 5 - Communicate with your team

The most important thing to consider when you are building a coaching cadence is that you communicate clear responsibilities and expectations with your team.

You want to demonstrate that coaching is at the forefront of everything you do. That failure is ok and feedback is encouraged. That the continuous improvement and honing of each sales rep’s craft is a top priority for the business.

If each member of your team genuinely feels as if their development is the number one priority for you as the sales manager, then ultimately their performance is going to exponentially improve over time. Helping you move closer to your goals and targets.

Hopefully, these tips will help you build your own coaching cadence and go a long way to creating a high-performing sales culture.

Happy coaching!