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If you’re looking to drive momentum in your company’s growth, sales coaching should top your list of priorities. It can make a world of difference – to your employees, your culture, your customers, and your bottom line. No surprise then that over 750 corporations feel that sales coaching tops the list of factors that drive business results.
Why sales coaching is more important than ever
While the obvious benefit of sales coaching is to improve employee performance through practice and feedback, it ticks many more boxes.
Companies that provide optimal coaching realize 16.7% greater revenue growth annually. Sales coaching can not only boost revenues but can help identify and replicate best practices, assess the effectiveness of your sales strategy, and minimize attrition.
Equally importantly, salespeople in today’s challenging market need all the help they can get to reach their potential and deliver day after day.
Here’s a quick roundup of the top reasons why sales coaching needs to be a business priority.
5 reasons why you need sales coaching
1. Increase in revenues
It’s easy to see why nearly 60% of high-growth companies prioritize coaching as an integral part of a sales training program.
For five years in a row, CSO Insights’ Sales Enablement Report has consistently shown that sales coaching has the greatest impact on win rates and quota attainment. The report shows that dynamic coaching showed a 32.1% improvement in win rates and a 27.9% improvement in quota attainment.
67% of companies that invested in formal sales coaching over three years experienced high revenue growth and higher quota attainment.
2. Improved sales rep performance and employee morale
83% of young employees in the current workforce actively want to learn new skills. Sales coaching capitalizes on this to make sales reps engaged, productive, and efficient. It provides a framework where representatives can analyze their behaviors and improve their skills, building a culture of learning and improvement.
This is important because traditional sales training models prioritize revenue and quota attainment, but do very little to support the individuals behind these numbers. When you use sales coaching to help people improve their skills, it shows that you care about them and their growth.
How salespeople feel about the company reflects in how they interact with customers. Sales coaching ensures that sales reps feel understood and supported as they handle the pressure and rejection that comes with their job.
3. It builds a consistent and repeatable sales motion
Sales coaching isn’t just effective for the individual, it can help you understand and assess the effectiveness of your sales model and identify gaps and growth opportunities for the entire function.
Done right, sales coaching can correlate performance and results to set a strong foundation for the sales team. Besides, it can establish a distinct and on-brand customer-facing personality, so your sales reps new and old represent your company in the same way.
Additionally, sales coaching ensures that sales teams can better collaborate with departments, such as Marketing, Product, and Customer Success teams to improve the customer experience.
4. It reduces the reliance on ‘sales heroes’
Far too many sales teams have ‘star’ salespersons who are known to bring home the big numbers. While this is great for the bottom line, it puts all your eggs in one basket. Not to mention the impact on the morale and motivation of other team members.
When you focus on sales coaching, you prioritize the equitable growth of your sales team, while identifying and sharing best practices that ‘sales heroes’ exhibit so other employees are motivated to keep learning and growing.
5. It aids in timely support, intervention, and course correction
In sales. timing is everything. Sales coaching can help you catch and track issues before they impact internal performance and external perception. By having a framework and cadence for sales coaching conversations, you can identify trends and behaviors that need further intervention.
Sales reps need be closely monitored, especially when selling age-restricted products or services that require additional scrutiny in several countries. Implementing an age verification system in these cases can be invaluable, helping ensure compliance alongside effective coaching.
Why you need sales training and sales coaching
Sales coaching is not the same as sales training. To put it simply, sales training is knowledge-focused ( products, customers, strategies, competitors, etc.), while coaching is mindset and behavior-focused that uses this knowledge in the field to drive results. . This means that effective sales coaching is personalized and tailored to the skills and needs of an individual.
You need both sales training and sales coaching.
Here’s why: Sales training is a foundation, and sales coaching is a way to build upon this foundation by providing the right support and resources – at the right time.
What should sales coaching include?
When you think about sales coaching, you need to look at
- Skill coaching: This focuses on developing the skills and behaviors of sales reps by developing the knowledge, mindsets, and behaviors they need for success. These skills include empathetic communication, storytelling, active listening, consultative questioning, time management, etc.
- Deal Coaching: This in-depth and contextual approach focuses on deal or account-specific strategy and execution while the sales rep is navigating their deals. It focuses on the resources, strategies, and tactics needed to engage the prospect and move them along the sales funnel.
Common sales coaching challenges and how to avoid them
Here are three common reasons why sales coaching doesn’t reach its potential
- Sales coaching is vague: Employers and sales managers aren’t sure what to focus on. Without a starting point, they simply don’t know how to define and measure performance and improvement.
- Employees don’t know – or think – they need coaching: It’s not easy to imagine why. Sales reps may not realize they need help – because they’re most likely blind to their own behaviors or weaknesses.
- Sales coaching is hard: Selling is a tough job that takes time, effort, and motivation. Understandably, It’s the same for sales coaching.
Relying on a manager’s or an employee’s intrinsic motivation for sales coaching can only go so far. It's not easy to change behaviors, track performance, and remain objective while doing so, over extended periods. It needs a system and a process to anchor it.
As we can see, data and technology have a big role to play in overcoming the challenges associated with sales coaching. And this is where sales coaching tools can help. Besides providing data and insights that can help track and improve performance, they can provide a solid framework to build a sustainable sales coaching program.
You might also like
- A Sales Coaching Guide for Growing Businesses
- How to Build an Effective Sales Coaching Program to Manage Team Performance
- 3 Ways To Automate Sales Coaching Using AI Software
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