How To Identify Sales Coaching Opportunities?
Sales coaching should not be a one-time activity, but managers should make it consistent to help sales teams close more deals.
The sessions can help your organization scale its sales strategies and target bigger deals.
A 2021 sales coaching survey by Second Nature shows 96% of those interviewed agree productive sales coaching positively impacts the performance of sales teams.
To make sales coaching a consistent process, managers need to correctly identify coaching opportunities and take advantage of them.
What Is Sales Coaching?
Coaching sales reps is the process of guiding individual salespersons to help them develop behaviors and habits that they can use to gain selling success.
The process involves evaluation and monitoring each rep one-on-one to help them improve productivity and achieve consistent success in leads and conversions. It is a formal, continuous process that follows specific sales coaching models.
Coaching sales reps is not done by the sales or HR manager only but by an entire team of managers. They follow sales coaching best practices for guiding reps to understand how sales goals are achieved. They help develop their skills and correct and reinforce behaviors.
Main Sales Coaching Opportunities
With a good understanding of what is sales coaching, managers should actively look for coaching opportunities.
Unlike in sales training, where reps get baseline selling knowledge, sales coaching gives them a continuous opportunity to harness their skills and achieve their goals.
Here are coaching sales reps opportunities managers can tap into.
1. Leads Versus Conversion Rates
The sales funnel is crucial to the success of an organization’s revenue goals. The funnel strongly defines what is sales coaching because that is where managers can walk with reps to boost sales.
Managers might notice a large number of leads in the beginning or middle of the funnel. However, total conversions could be few compared to leads.
It means the reps are missing important steps in leading potential customers. It is an opportunity for managers to coach reps to identify opportunities and use them.
2. Skills And sales rep behavior
In the past, reps focused on transactional and product-centered selling. Today, customer behavior has changed, and a different approach is necessary.
Reps today require a value-based approach where customers expect results. It means the reps must create value-added content and change behavior to win leads. Managers need to consistently build reps’ skills and conduct behavior change sales coaching.
3. Total calls, emails, and length of calls
If reps are actively engaging leads, the number of emails they receive and send will be high. Total calls will keep growing too.
Managers might notice a particular rep engages with leads during calls for a very short time compared to others. This is an indication the rep might not know how to keep conversations lively.
A particular rep could be receiving and sending too few emails compared to others which indicate there is a problem. The managers need to create customized sales coaching models to help the specific reps improve their communication skills with customers.
4. Sales pipeline/funnel coaching
The sales pipeline does not just focus on leads and conversions only but on attracting more traffic into it. The traffic comes from multiple channels, and each requires a different approach.
It provides managers with an excellent opportunity for coaching sales reps on how to increase traffic, keeping them focused on the brand, and walking them through the funnel.
Pros & Cons Of Sales Coaching
Pros
- Some many benefits and challenges that come with sales coaching, as follows:
- Managers identify barriers affecting sales productivity
- Promotes an environment where reps continually grow and discover opportunities.
- Improves on feedback and openness
- Reps develop confidence and improve behavior
- Promotes creativity, freedom, and belonging
Cons
- Coaching requires the utilization of a lot of resources
- During coaching sessions, an organization could lose sales opportunities
- Not every rep achieves an ROI based on the coaching resources used on them
Summary
Coaching sales reps benefits organizations in different ways. Managers need to correctly identify sales coaching opportunities and use them.
They should develop customized sales coaching models that focus on challenges experienced by reps in the sales pipeline. Reps build confidence, enhance communication and develop problem-solving skills.
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