How to Build an Effective Sales Coaching Program to Improve Performance

As a sales leader, you want to be a key influencer in your teams’ careers. You want to help them develop skills for the long run and close those key deals in the short term. 

As a sales enablement manager, you need to implement and manage a variety of coaching programs and measure the various teams’ progress on these initiatives.

As a sales team manager, your success relies completely on rep performance. The messaging or talk tracks they use determine the team’s ability to meet their quota. 

We discuss how you can achieve this using Granular feedback loops.

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Granular Feedback Loops

Granular feedback loops are concrete, evidence-based feedback that help reps learn to stay on message and adopt talk tracks that are proven to work better. This process is repeated until you achieve the desired outcome.

There are 4 steps involved :

• Launch an Initiative
• Managers Coach using Scorecards
• Reps learn / improve
• Track progress

Create an Initiative

Choose one or more key skill-sets or points to coach reps on for the next 2-3 weeks. These could be a basic skillset like understanding customers’ pain-point or informing the potential customer about a new plan and so on.

We call these coaching points collectively a Coaching initiative (or simply initiative).

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Once you have determined your initiative, inform the managers about the idea and coaching points. Explain to them the agenda of this initiative so that they can realize the potential impact.

It's important to get buy-in from your managers and team to complete the scorecards.

Here are some best practices:

• Create a Slack channel or email trail informing the managers of what’s expected of them. e.g. score at least 2 recordings per rep in the next 1 week.
• Inform reps in those teams what they should expect from this initiative.

Managers Coach using Scorecards

Managers can evaluate reps on these coaching points/skillsets using Scorecards.

Scorecards are short-cuts to coach the right call recordings with the help of AI recommendations, requests from reps, and structured templates. It helps to track progress and promote a coaching culture. 

The managers score the quality of their reps’ conversations on a scale of 1 to 5 and add personalized feedback to explain scores and help them improve skills over time.

And sales-enablement teams can track participation and progress of different coaching programs to guide the team to sales excellence and establish a culture of coaching

Reps learn / improve

As the managers score rep skills, they get feedback on a call-by-call basis.

Personalized feedback and links to high-scoring recordings help explain what they need to do better. Reps improve skills over time with concrete feedback loops and as a result, enablement programs succeed as reps’ scores improve. 

Share top 2 rated scorecards with the team.

Tip:

• Be sure to provide links to the top-scored recordings so the team can watch them.
• To ensure all reps watch these top-scored recordings, we recommend asking reps to watch the recordings and leave a comment highlighting two components they want to implement on their recordings.

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Track Progress

As the scores get updated, check how well the team is doing (on a scale of 1 to 5).

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In your team meeting:

• Recognize and/or reward top-ranking reps.
• Play snippets from the top-rated 1-2 recordings for the team to learn from.

Also, call out managers who score more recordings than others.

Every week check the team scores for each scorecard to ensure they are moving higher. You can even compare how different teams are doing in terms of their scores.

For each coaching initiative, set yourself a time limit - for instance, In the next 4 weeks, we will try to get as close to 5/5 on competitive coaching.

Looking to implement sales coaching program your organization? Connect with us. Let us know your thoughts on this.