The best way to improve your performance is to get a coach.
For a sales team to contribute consistently and predictably towards their sales goals they need to be effectively coached and mentored.
Providing useful advice is certainly a desirable outcome of coaching, but most sales managers need to rethink how they go about doing this. Effective coaching starts first with establishing standards of excellence, and coming to agreement with sellers about what those standards require.
Coaching sales behaviour against agreed-upon standards enables managers to help each salesperson, regardless of their performance history, come to their own realization of what they can do to improve.
3 Steps to Standard-based Sales Coaching
- Establish standards for customer engagement – If you don’t have agreed-upon expectations for how your salespeople should engage with customers and how your sales managers should engage with their salespeople, then establish those first. Standards for effective sales engagement should include:
- Ideal pipeline characteristics – how large and how dynamic should they be?
- Ideal customer profile – what do your best customers look like?
- The customer buying process(es) – what are their buying preferences?
- Aligned seller process steps, with verifiable outcomes at each step
- Opportunity qualification criteria – when will you walk away from a deal?
- Cadence and criteria for sales management
- Assess and diagnose against your standards – With clear standards, your sales managers then have objective criteria against which to assess and diagnose performance issues, regardless of any salesperson’s tenure or experience. By examining each seller’s pipeline shape, managers can identify skill, time, and activity management issues. Standards enable your sales managers to proactively identify issues and prescribe corrective action, before they grow into big problems.
- Coach effectively against standards – Effective coaching entails observing what happened relative to a standard, knowing why it happened, and reaching an agreement with the seller on how they can comply better with expectations. The diagnosis needs to be based on objective criteria and accurate observations, then a salesperson will be more open to listening and acting.
But good coaching is both a science and an art. While coaching to objective standards is important, there’s also a human side to coaching. It’s important to understand the preferred work style of each seller to coach them effectively. Using an assessment tool like DiSC can help sales managers better understand their preferred style and how to best align with those in their charge.
Too many sales managers rely on informal, on-the-spot coaching alone. The best practice is to establish a regular cadence for formal review of pipelines and opportunities, and take the time to prepare for each coaching conversation.
Contact SalesXL to coach more effectively to your standards of excellence – and keep your sales team’s performance on track.