What is sales coaching?
Sales coaching builds upon the skills and knowledge that sellers learn during sales training. Once sellers learn the fundamentals of selling your company’s products and services, sales coaching refines those skills and expands on selling behaviours. Effective sales coaching must be personalised for every seller – leaders should also provide real-time sales coaching to address learning opportunities in a timely manner.
Why is coaching an important part of sales enablement?
The most successful sales organisations understand that sales coaching plays a key role in their overall sales enablement plan. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your company creates the top sales training programme and equips reps with the best sales enablement tools. Sales coaching takes enablement to the next level by ensuring sellers correctly understand and apply what they learn. Additionally, it allows sales managers to deliver practical feedback that can help sellers improve their performance throughout the selling process. This results in improved performance, greater efficiency and revenue growth.
The challenges of delivering sales coaching
Despite the importance of sales coaching, many leaders don’t provide adequate coaching to sellers. Studies show that most managers actually spend less than 5% of their time coaching. When asked why this is the case, the most common reasons include their overall lack of time and the challenge of creating a clear process that’s efficient and scalable.
These reasons are understandable. Providing personalised, actionable and timely sales coaching is far from simple. After all, sellers prefer different communication and feedback styles. They also have varying levels of experience, knowledge and confidence. This means that leaders have to take the time to create a sales coaching process and approach that is most effective for everyone.
What is a sales coaching platform?
A sales coaching platform is a great resource to help overcome the challenges of delivering ongoing coaching and feedback to sellers. This type of sales enablement platform streamlines the coaching process and makes it easy for sales leaders to assess skills, create tailored coaching plans, deliver feedback and provide additional training and resources. With a sales coaching platform, sales leaders have everything they need to help sellers grow their skills, work more efficiently and become better at their jobs.
How does sales coaching work?
Sales leaders often struggle with sales coaching because of complex processes, as well as the number of people involved. Communication, clarity, individualised planning and staying up-to-date are nearly impossible if you rely on a manual coaching process. That’s why sales coaching software is a must-have for any sales company. To better understand how exactly coaching software works, let’s dive into some common features and functionality.
- Skill assessment: When it comes to coaching, sales leaders first need to assess their reps’ skill sets. The best sales coaching software gives managers and sellers the ability to assess and rate skills to uncover opportunities for additional development.
- Call and meeting recording: Sales coaching tools also allow teams to embed videos or record sales calls directly within the platform. This provides leaders with quick access to buyer interactions that need to be reviewed for coaching sessions instead of jumping from tool to tool.
- Practice scenarios: Once sales leaders provide coaching to reps, sellers should then practice applying that feedback to ensure their skills and knowledge are improving. Coaching solutions support practice and role-play so everything is stored in a central location for easier review and feedback.
- Tracking and insights: Coaching platforms also automatically track skill levels and progression over time. Sales leaders can access this data to see how sellers are developing in their role as a result of coaching.
Never stop growing.
The perks of using a sales coaching solution
From assessing skills to tracking development, the best sales coaching software makes the feedback process more efficient and effective than ever. Here are a few of the advantages of using a sales coaching platform.
- Increased engagement: Personalised coaching targets skills gaps and areas where reps might not be as efficient as they need to be. The easier you make it for sellers to assess their own performance and ask for feedback, the more they’ll be engaged with the coaching process.
- Stronger relationships between leaders and sellers: A sales coaching tool is a great way to strengthen the relationship between a sales manager and reps. Together, they can build actionable, personalised coaching plans for improvement which also results in added engagement throughout the coaching process.
- Creates a culture of learning: All too often sales coaching becomes a one-off task that doesn’t take place consistently. Since a coaching platform makes it easier to provide ongoing coaching, organisations can instil a culture of ongoing development that encourages sellers to grow in their careers.
- Streamlines sales enablement initiatives: By using a unified enablement platform that includes sales training and coaching, teams get a holistic view of their entire sales enablement strategy so they can identify what’s working and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Hone skills and deliver coaching with our sales coaching platform
No matter how great sales managers are at coaching, staying up-to-date on progress takes a lot of organisation and intentionality. And, without the right sales coaching platform and resources, it can be easy to put coaching on the back burner. That’s why we’re here to help. Our sales training and coaching platform empowers teams to improve essential sales skills and deliver personalised coaching which can result in 76% more closed-won deals. Interested in learning more? Get a demo.
