Is Your Sales Team Getting the Most out of Your Sales Coaching?

A col­league of mine from Miller Heiman sur­veyed a num­ber of sales man­agers by ask­ing how much true coach­ing they have done in the last 60 days. The shock­ing truth? Three-quarters of these man­agers admit they only coach spo­rad­i­cally and say that coach­ing time just isn’t a pri­or­ity. Com­pa­nies that rely on sales and cus­tomer ser­vice teams under­stand that improv­ing sales coach­ing skills is an invest­ment worth mak­ing. How­ever, sim­ply hav­ing your man­age­ment team ded­i­cate sales train­ing time and sales coach­ing to your sales team will not be enough if you neglect some key facets of sales coach­ing, which were high­lighted in a Bloomberg Busi­ness­week arti­cle that pro­filed a sales tech­nique called “Hypothesis-Based Coaching.”

When an orga­ni­za­tion invests in sales coach­ing, there still may be missed oppor­tu­ni­ties and gaps in the sales train­ing that could lead to improved con­ver­sion rates, higher rev­enue, and bet­ter sales fore­cast­ing. When exam­in­ing your sales coach­ing pro­gram, there­fore, it’s worth not­ing some key fac­tors, that, if neglected, could be dimin­ish­ing your sales coach­ing return on invest­ment (ROI).

When it comes to sales coach­ing, once size does not fit all. Does your sales coach­ing approach fit with your com­pany cul­ture? Your brand? How about the unique per­son­al­i­ties that are in your orga­ni­za­tion? Sim­ply apply­ing an off-the-shelf, blan­ket approach method­ol­ogy for your sales coach­ing team is not going to max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of your sales train­ing pro­gram. There­fore, when look­ing at your sales train­ing con­tent, don’t just hand it over to your man­agers and give them the green light; spend time eval­u­at­ing your orga­ni­za­tion and your sales goals. Tai­lor your sales train­ing con­tent effec­tively based on who you are as a com­pany and where you want to go.

Coach­ing your sales team is a bit like fill­ing up your car; it’s an ongo­ing process if you expect to keep dri­ving. Sales team coach­ing val­i­dates an employ­ees’ job per­for­mance, and needs to be con­tin­u­ously done with a bal­ance of prais­ing and cor­rect­ing. Unlike ded­i­cated sales train­ing events and work­shops, sales coach­ing is a con­stant job that requires care­ful atten­tion and a strong rela­tion­ship between the man­ag­ing staff and the employees.

Sales coach­ing is an ongo­ing process, but this doesn’t mean that your man­age­ment should take the lib­erty to use their day-to-day sales train­ing mon­i­tor­ing as an excuse to throw in per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions. There is a time and place for per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions, and these should be struc­tured meet­ings that are meant to pro­vide spe­cific feed­back and guid­ance so that your sales team can hit cer­tain mark­ers and goals to under­stand how they are per­form­ing over­all. In con­trast, daily sales coach­ing is the inter­ac­tion that man­age­ment has with the sales team to advise the team on best prac­tices and offer feedback.

Your sales coach­ing pro­gram needs to be adapted company-wide and have infra­struc­ture behind it to sup­port it – it should not be done in a vac­uum, in other words. Pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions mon­i­tor and mea­sure their coach­ing effec­tive­ness and engage all lev­els of man­age­ment to make sure that coach­ing becomes a part of the cul­ture – not just a trend that rip­ples through.

With the pace of tech­no­log­i­cal change that’s occur­ring, sales train­ing method­olo­gies that worked well in the early 2000s (when your man­agers may have been trained), don’t nec­es­sar­ily apply to today. Sales evolve, just as indus­tries do. Is your com­pany up-to-date on the lat­est trends? Does your sales team truly under­stand your cus­tomer and your customer’s needs? Sales coach­ing needs to be imple­mented with an aware­ness of the full pic­ture – both within your company’s unique cul­ture, and exter­nally, to the indus­tries your team is ser­vic­ing and the types of cus­tomers you are targeting.

Invest­ing in sales coach­ing and work­ing closely with your sales team are great steps, but make sure you plug the holes and fill in those gaps fully by tai­lor­ing your sales coach­ing process so that you get true ROI out of your train­ing investment.