Whether you decide to find coaches in-house, or use a platform like MentorCruise, finding the right coach for your staff can help you win new business in the long run.

What is sales coaching?

Sales coaching is the process by which a senior salesperson or peer trains an individual and helps them improve upon their sales processes. Sales coaching can occur in the onboarding process, after a salesperson is welcomed into a company, or when a salesperson wants to upskill and take on more responsibilities. In fact, according to a study by Highspot, 64.5% of sales reps have experienced sales processes that are more complex.

Essentially, sales coaching aims to improve upon an employee’s sales readiness by refining how they do sales and introducing methods and strategies to increase leads and consequently sales-based conversions.

If you’ve never implemented sales coaching before, it can be difficult to know what to expect. Some managers are resistant to hire coaches because its financial impacts aren’t immediately tangible. However, investing in coaching can have a real impact on the bottom line. Here’s what to expect from a sales coaching programme.

Why coach?

Any skill gaps in your sales team will cost you money in the long run. If you have a team that simply can’t upsell, or one that finds it hard to fill the pipeline with new leads - until you fill these skills gaps, you’re missing out on new business.

Sales coaching can come in a variety of forms and have different goals in mind. For instance, in the process of digitization, sales reps can be coached on how to make better use of the apps at their disposal or how to effectively communicate asynchronously. These can help improve the efficiency of your sales team as a whole.

What to expect

Once you’ve found the right person to coach you at MentorCruise, you can do an introductory call to see your compatibility and how the potential coach can help you. Here are the few things that you need to communicate:

• A short introduction of yourself and what you do.
• The reason why you want to have coaching sessions. For example, you might want to learn more about direct LinkedIn outreach, or you want to learn more about cold outreach and the perfect drip campaign to close an email lead.
• Your availability and commitment to the programme. This allows the coach to fit their plan based on your needs. If you don’t stick to the programme, the whole experience will end up being a waste of time for both you and the coach.

Milestones and regular check-ins

Once you’ve entered into a coaching relationship, both you and the coach will need to define the specific milestones to achieve and how regular the check-ins can be. Types of milestones include:

• Daily milestones: Sending email campaigns, lead prospecting, drafting (better) cold emails, etc.
• Weekly milestones: Total leads gained for the week, mastering a new cold outreach tool, etc
• Monthly milestones: Increasing sales, increasing the value of each sale closed, strategy review, etc.

How to measure success

You can measure your employees’ performance via a number of metrics both before and after they are coached. These include tracking a coachee’s progress (or lack thereof) towards sales quotas, any increase or decrease in the number of deals closed, and the frequency of successful upsells.

On a longer term basis, you can measure the staff retention rate within your sales team, whether salespeople who undertook coaching have been promoted, and their overall job satisfaction. Finally, you can look at their reaction to the training qualitatively.

The benefits of sales coaching

There are a number of different benefits associated with sales coaching, but the headline is that it’ll improve your sales team’s performance. We don’t need to tell you that a more productive sales team means new business. Training up your sales team via a coaching platform such as MentorCruise can help your staff - and your business - reach their potential.

• Improved sales metrics. An upskilled sales team means you’re more likely to have improved sales metrics. Coaching can help improve lead quality, the size of your pipeline, the amount of deals closed, and the amount of successful upsells.
• Improve company-wide performance. Coaching your sales team as a whole allows your company to address large-scale deficits through effective guidance and create meaningful change in the way you do sales.
• Higher staff retention rates. Staff learning and development is key to retention. Research by LinkedIn shows that 94% of employees would be happy to stay at a company for longer if it invested in their career development.

Sales coaching models

There are a wide variety of sales coaching models available that cater to different needs. The model that you choose will depend on your employees’ current skill level, their knowledge gaps, and more.

No matter what coaching model you are looking to implement, you can connect with leading sales coaches on MentorCruise. Visit their website to get started today.

GROW Coaching

This type of training is suitable for staff who have been in sales for a while, but still need to identify areas where they can improve. For example, it could be a member of staff who is great at B2B selling, but needs help selling directly to consumers.

This is a common form of coaching, due to its simplicity. It is focused on each individual salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses, helping them to fill gaps in their skills and knowledge. GROW is an acronym, which spells out the following:

• G - Goals: What does the sales rep aim to get from the coaching sessions?
• R - Reality: What is the current situation? How close are they to achieving that goal?
• O - Options: What stands in the way of achieving these goals? What options do you have to achieve them?
• W - Will: What actionable tasks can the salesperson take away to help them improve?

Here’s an example of a GROW coaching model in action:

• Goals: the trainee wants to improve their B2B sales numbers as they are behind on their targets.
• Reality: they are making few sales in this area, and need to improve to hit targets.
• Options: they don’t understand B2B selling, having a background in B2C.
• Will: shadowing of a colleague with extensive B2B knowledge to be organised, to improve the employee’s skills in this area.

CLEAR Coaching

While the GROW model is particularly self-reflective, with the coach simply acting as a guide throughout this process, the CLEAR coaching system invites the coach to take a more active role.The coach asks more targeted questions, attempting to get to the crux of what they could get from the session and helping them achieve it.

This model is particularly useful for less experienced salespeople, who may need a bit more of a helping hand in identifying their shortcomings. This is because they get more intensive support from an experienced salesperson who helps them to identify areas of improvement with the aid of their own knowledge.

Here is how the model works:

• C - Contact: The coach finds out the salesperson’s goals for the session.
• L - Listen: The coach listens to the trainee’s thoughts on their current performance in this area, and how they can improve.
• E - Explore: The coach asks questions aimed at helping the coachee identify actionable solutions to their problem.
• A - Actions: The coach helps the coachee come up with actions to help achieve their goal.
• R - Review: At a later meeting, the coach and coachee review progress, and if necessary implement future actions.

Here’s an example scenario of how this type of coaching could play out in a sales environment:

• Contact: The coach speaks to the coachee and finds out that they are struggling with closing deals.
• Listen: The coach invites the coachee to expand upon their closing issue, finding out more information.
• Explore: The coach uses their experience of closing deals to ask more questions and get to the root of the coachee’s struggles.
• Actions: The coach helps the coachee come up with actions they can take to help them close more deals.
• Review: At a later meeting, the coach helps the coachee to review their own performance in closing since the last meeting, and helps them to set further goals.

Deal Coaching

While the previous models discussed are all based on long-term development and are quite wide in scope, deal coaching is very focused on what’s on a salesperson’s to-do list right now. This type of training is best conducted in short but frequent sessions.

Here’s how it works:

• Step 1 - Identify what deals the coachee currently has in the pipeline, and how far along they are.
• Step 2 - Decide how strong these opportunities are on a scale from 1-10. For example, a deal that is highly likely and potentially lucrative would be a 10, while an unlikely deal that would make a negligible amount of money is a 1.
• Step 3 - Identify who is making the buying decision, and what relationship the salesperson has with them. Could this relationship be improved?
• Step 4 - What actions should be taken to close as many of these deals as possible?

Deal coaching is at its most effective when it occurs frequently, helping salespeople improve their skills over time by focusing on real-life cases.

How to find the right coach

Finding the right coach is the key to success. When it comes to sales coaching, you need coaches who have been there and done it themselves. This leaves you with two options - picking a coach from your internal sales team, or hiring externally.

However, burdening your senior salespeople with coaching responsibilities can put a severe drain on their time.

Get expert coaches on MentorCruise

Recruiting externally, from software like MentorCruise, frees up your senior staff to carry out their tasks, while ensuring that your more junior staff get the coaching they need to succeed.

MentorCruise’s expert mentors are in the top 3% based on customer rating, and are all but guaranteed to help you achieve your coaching goals. We’re so confident you’ll be happy, that every coaching session with our expert mentors has a 7 day free trial. If you’re not happy in the first week, you can cut ties with the mentor without having spent a penny.

Find a mentor using MentorCruise today, and help your staff unlock their potential. Click here to get started.