So—you’ve found the time to coach and you’ve scheduled face-to-face meetings. Now, what do you bring to the table that will capture your team’s attention? What can you show them with that will help them meet quota or beat their previous best or blow away their sales goals? How do you become essential to your reps’ success? When will you get your Gatorade moment? Great coaches turn their teams into raving coaching fans. Here’s how to do it.
Find Opportunities for Improving Selling Skills
Your first priority as a coach is to help your reps get to a point where success is inevitable. Outcomes are driven by Stages, Stages are driven by Activities and Activities are driven by Skills. There are many activities and skills that help a rep move the sales needle.
The most important activities and skills to manage are the ones related to opportunity starts and sales velocity. If a rep can start enough deals and handle them efficiently, this will solve nearly 80% of the most common sales challenges. Starting deals is directly tied to prospecting skills and velocity is tied to communication skills. Begin with assessing those skills and help ensure that the rep is proficient and comfortable starting and moving deals.
Teach Adherence to Process
Without process, success is unpredictable and unsustainable. With process, success is inevitable. Make sure each step of your process is well defined and relevant. There should be concrete objectives and milestones for each process stage and they should be measurable. Process leads to predictability and a rep can expect the numbers to fall into place when they follow established guidelines.
Model Awesome
If you want your team to be successful—show them what success looks like. Paint the target. If success is X number of calls or increasing average deal size or moving opportunities through the pipeline faster, make sure your reps know what those numbers looks like and the kind of success they bring. Make sure there is no doubt what the minimum requirement is for success. Leave no ambiguity.
Model activity levels first with those of your highest performance segments. Have discussions around what changes need to happen in order to have time to create activity mixes that match the top performers. If the activity mix is benchmarking favorably, turn to skills in stages with lower advance rates.
Jump in When it is Most Helpful
Deal coaching is just one area where a coach can make a difference. A good coach can learn to spot areas of opportunity in any stage of the sales cycle to help improve skills (like proposal writing) or set activity goals (like prospecting calls) or help with closing. The key is to look at every stage to find areas where your help will be appreciated and make a difference.
Watch for deals that have slowed or proposals that have stalled If you can see that a rep doesn’t have enough starts to hit quota, help them with their calls and discovery. Coaching technology can help you pinpoint where your efforts are best directed.
Help Them Level Up
Every rep, from those with challenges to the most successful, have the potential to be even more successful. Recognize their success. They do want to know that their contribution is valued. Take the time to find out what they are doing to drive their success. Ask your reps what roadblocks you can help them with so they can lift their success even higher.
Don’t just celebrate their wins, celebrate their improvement. Remember, coaching doesn’t just drive production, it drives engagement.
Conclusion
A good coach can help win deals. A great coach changes careers, changes companies and changes lives. As each member of your team realizes your genuine interest in developing their skills as a production rep, you will find they begin to see coaching in a different light.