How to provide individual sales coaching?

Companies’ sales departments are all about performance. As a sales manager, you want to hire the people who close the most sales and generate the most revenue.
But that doesn't mean you want to neglect underperforming sales representatives. The sales manager's role is to grow talent and nurture potential.
This means working hand in hand with your sales reps to drive performance. Sales coaching is a perfect collaborative approach to achieving this.
Here's how you can support your salespeople throughout their learning process.
As a sales manager, you carry a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.
You have to oversee the achievement of quarterly goals, recruit new talents, prepare events, manage key accounts... Why add another task to your already busy schedule?
Well, coaching is a way to gain productivity on all these tasks. It allows you to support your salespeople's performance, instead of managing it.
Through coaching, you stand on the side of your teams and allow everyone to take on more responsibility. Without having to constantly monitor their prospecting and calls, you give them the keys to self-learning.
At the same time, coaching helps you get closer to your sales reps and coordinate them under the same vision. It helps achieve key missions such as :
You want to unlock your talents' hidden potential? You have several possibilities in your hands.
Sales coaching services have grown significantly in the last few years. Individual coaching is particularly popular among young salespeople to increase their skills and expand their career opportunities. However, although sales team coaching holds great potential, companies still invest very little in it.
There is a good reason for this: sales managers are the ones meant to nurture and empower their sales team. There are the ones who have carefully recruited their talents and sought to rally them around common goals. It makes sense that they take the role of coach.
However, if you are a sales manager who doesn't have the time or resources to grow your talents, you can seek out external coaches:
Hiring an external coach doesn’t mean you let your team down. Your sales reps will appreciate providing them with sales experts who can closely support their learning.
Just like professional coaching, coaching individual employees cannot be improvised. You need to know how to manage people’s personalities, provide them with the right support, and closely track progress.
Here are 5 tips to follow to achieve personalized coaching:
In any coach-coachee relationship, learning initiatives should come from the coachee. That's why you can't force coaching sessions on your salesperson. They should first express to you their learning aspirations and their sales development needs. You can ask them these questions to come up with the subject:
These answers should be compared to your field observations and performance data.
With these questions, you show them that you are the ally and not the enemy of their professional development. You also help them to become aware of their professional aspirations. If their answers suggest they are open to individual coaching, you can then agree on a common plan.
The key to effective one-on-one coaching is to define common goals and allocated time to achieve them. Once you agree on these expectations, you can more easily implement coaching actions and progress together. These goals are varied :
You might soon realize that coaching is a lot about dealing with personal motivation and character. No one responds in the same way to individual coaching. Your challenge is to adapt your approach to the person you have in front of you.
There are generally 4 types of personalities that you need to manage:
These characters are stereotypical abstractions; each of us fluctuates from one category to another. It’s up to you to connect to the real person behind the sales rep.
What is coaching without concrete applications? To ensure your coaching bears fruit, you need to set up planned and regular follow-ups :
When you have already coached for a few months, it’s time to make a first inventory. You can compare performance figures, talk to your salesperson about their feelings and progress, and discuss any communication issues.
If the results did not live up to the expectations, it’s okay. As long as your sales rep has grown new abilities and mitigated his or her weaknesses, there’s no reason to worry. Improvements will follow.
Data has become an invaluable way to add intelligence to business processes. But it is not limited to technical departments. Sales teams can also leverage data and AI to track and improve performance.
Sales intelligence solutions already exist on the market that helps to:
As an expert in conversation intelligence, we have designed a tool that helps sales managers analyze their sales calls in real time.
It provides you with several key features:
With this tool, you’ll have access to fine-grained data to coach your salespeople.
Want to provide personalized coaching to your reps? Try Noota for free.
Best CRM Software Options for 2023: Boost Sales, Enhance Customer Retention, and Streamline Operations.