Modern sales leaders must engage in sales coaching on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean spending onerous amounts of hours reviewing every detail of each rep’s pipeline. It means seizing every sales coaching opportunity as it comes about.
You see, sales coaching comes in all shapes and sizes. Coaching reps around key deals is important, but it’s just as important to coach them on hosting meetings, presenting demos and other fundamental sales activities that lead to closing business.
That’s why we’ve defined three categories of sales coaching for every management team to use with reps: account coaching, meeting coaching and general coaching. Read about them in more detail below.
Sales coaching models for management to utilize
1. Account Sales Coaching
This type of sales coaching will generally come from pipeline reviews or individual instruction around key deals and account planning. This usually takes place on an ad hoc basis, but you should dedicate at least 60 minutes a week to this specific activity.
Schedule a weekly meeting with each of your reps to review their pipeline and key opportunities. Have reps talk through the deals they are working on (both for this month and this quarter). Strategize with them on where each deal looks good, as well as what it’s going to take to win.
This coaching session is your chance to uncover what’s blocking reps from winning and where they need help with opportunity progression.
2. Meeting Sales Coaching
You can probably guess that this is where a manager either attends meetings with reps or sits in on conference calls. The manager and rep work through pre-call planning together and / or run through a post-call debrief.
After the meeting is over, provide feedback for your rep on how the ran the meeting and kept to the agenda. Did she ask good questions? Did she convey the value proposition? Take roughly 20 minutes to prepare detailed feedback for the rep to learn from.
Meet with each of your reps at least once a month for a deep-dive session on meeting coaching. You’ll likely do this more casually on a weekly basis.
3. General Sales Coaching
Sales leaders should meet with each of their reps for a general one-on-one session frequently. Set a schedule to meet every week for 30 minutes or every other week for 60 minutes.
This is where reps can talk about what’s going well for them – anything from general attitude to work processes to personal issues. You should also ask reps where they need help: What obstacles are getting in their way? What do they see as inefficient or ineffective?
In addition, review each rep’s activity metrics and sales KPIs. Provide feedback and assign specific action items for the rep to perform before your next meeting.
Sales coaching is a vital part of sales management. Grab a copy of our sales coaching agenda to use in your weekly one-on-one sessions with reps.
