At many companies, sellers are promoted to sales management positions based on their selling track records and not necessarily on their leadership or coaching skills. That’s why it’s crucial for sellers to be exposed to sales coaching at both lower level and higher level positions. As sellers work their way up the corporate ladder, they learn more about the principles and techniques behind their past successes, and ultimately, become better sales managers.
Knowing how to sell a company’s products and services is obviously a prerequisite to guiding and training sales staff. But on its own, it’s not enough. Sales managers must be strong people managers who can develop teams and equip them with the knowledge and skill sets that set them up for success. Simply put, managing a sales team’s success by evaluating their pipeline and quotas met isn’t the best strategy.
Today, more companies are putting their emphasis on coaching, and providing sales managers with the tools to do this effectively. According to a sales enablement study by CSO Insights, companies that implement dynamic coaching programs receive 28 percent higher win rates. Research also reveals that organizations that provide an optimal amount of coaching achieve a 16.7 percent increase annual revenue growth.
Here, we’ll discuss our top tips for sales coaching to move past quotas and into long term success.
7 Tips to effectively coach your sales team
Are you starting from scratch? Trying to improve the sales coaching program you have in place? Bringing your initiatives up to date? Here are a few crucial first steps to get you started.
- Harness experience and write the sales playbook. Take a deep dive into your company’s sales history, evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and interview the sales leaders on your team to understand what their top strategies are. Then, take the time to compile all of the information you’ve found into a comprehensive sales playbook that anyone can follow.
- For more sales tips, tricks, and tools, be sure to download our Sales Playbook guide by clicking here
- Delegate sales coaching responsibilities. Effective coaching requires more than handing out documents for your learners to read. Coaching implies there are leaders who are sharing their valuable knowledge with their teams. Choose people who have experience, time to invest, and the personality to engage well with others. Then, give them an incentive to be a part of your program. Remember, a lot of top salespeople may see this as a burden rather than an opportunity. Investing in a sales training and enablement platform with video coaching capabilities, like Bigtincan, can streamline this process.
- Create engaging and accessible content to support your coaches. As you’re writing your playbook, incorporate graphs, charts, images, and relevant articles as often as you can. Make sure all this information is easily accessible and searchable on mobile devices. You want your people to be able to engage with content at their own convenience and quickly recall information when they need it.
- Use video content to your advantage. Training is exponentially more valuable when it is interactive. Utilizing video content is one of the best ways to engage your audience. Remember, video works two ways — record training videos and send them to your sales people. Then, have your employees record themselves practicing crucial skills like sales presentations, and incentivize them to send their recording back to a sales coach for feedback.
- Break training up into bite-size pieces. When you ask your learners to consume too much information at once, they don’t retain it. To combat this, create short, microlearning modules of information your sales people can grasp in a few minutes at a time. Alternate between created and curated content, sales coaching sessions, and milestone assignments or quizzes they can complete to show their progress.
- Keep your playbook updated and make training a habit. If you’re putting your salespeople through initial training and then leaving them to their own devices, you’re doing them a major disservice. As products, technology, and processes change, utilize coaching to keep all your people up-to-date, no matter how long they’ve served on your sales team.
- Incorporate milestones and incentives: Through gamification, you can motivate your sales people with meaningful rewards for completing training milestones and reaching new sales goals. Create a training program valuable enough that they will see real results by following it. If your people don’t see the point in learning and improving, your playbook will sit untouched and your sales coaching program will become obsolete.
Wrapping up
Sales coaching is a process that’s full of nuances but having a concrete plan in place is a surefire way to get your sales team on the right track. By following these best practices, such as delegating responsibilities, holding your salespeople accountable, and creating high-quality content, you stand the best chance as a sales coach to improve the overall performance of your sales team.
Remember — coaching is vital to driving your company’s sales performance and profitability. To effectively coach a sales team, it is important to hold both your team and yourself accountable.
Sales Coaching with Bigtincan
Bigtincan Zunos is a modern learning management system (LMS) that provides an all-in-one sales training and coaching solution. Our mobile-first platforms allow you to coach and train your teams from virtually anywhere, while video coaching features allow coaches to keep the experience personal and realistic to in-person scenarios. Contact us today to set up a personalized demo!