As its core, coaching is about how you view your prospect. The level of respect and belief in your prospect and people in general is crucial for truly adopting a coaching philosophy to the sales process.

 

Sales coaching is for everybody, every day. It is the most critical competitive skill that any sales organization can have. It is the most potent tool available for improving sales performance, maximizing productivity, and achieving revenue growth. The goal of sales coaching is to increase performance by helping sales managers make the most of their organization’s resources—starting with their salespeople.

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The first objective is to help you make the leap from manager to coach, so that sales coaching becomes an integral part of how you manage. The broader objective is to help you create a sales culture first with your team and then with your organization.

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Do you know why sales coaching is the most critical part of your job as a sales manager and why it is the best vehicle you have for helping your team achieve and exceed goals? As you increase your effectiveness as a sales coach, you will transform your salespeople, helping them make the journey from ordinary to extraordinary. You will see them take responsibility for their own development. You will build a cohesive sales team that not only performs but can coach itself. Sales coaching will help you accelerate the sales productivity of your salespeople and strengthen your relationships with them. Leadership is about vision. It is about making the future better.

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The first step in leadership is vision. The second step is empowerment. The third step is coaching. While all three are interrelated, the only one that pervades all three is coaching—that is how you get better at the other two.

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As a sales manager, your sales leadership is what makes each day better for your sales team. There are two ways to get better: work harder and/or change.

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Your sales coaching will help your salespeople see other possibilities and do things differently. You and your salespeople are your organization’s most valuable assets. If you are not improving every day, your organization cannot benefit from your talents or remain competitive. Every organization and every sales professional has blind spots. Sales coaching turns those blind spots into perspective.

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“The goal of sales coaching is exactly like the goal of parenting – to create independence.”

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Sales coaching starts with you. You have two tasks: to coach your direct reports and to get coaching for yourself. Even if your organization has a compelling vision and is technically advanced, without developmental sales coaching as a way of life and feedback as a mainstay of communication, your management and your sales force cannot con- continuously improve and get to the next level fast enough. Organizations that knit sales coaching into their DNA will be the winners.

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“Sales coaching builds on training and turns it into a everyday activity rather than an event.”

 

The purpose of a great coach is to help ensure that you have the heart, knowledge, skills, and tools you need to make sales coaching a part of how you lead your team. The sales coaching approach is not about long, laborious coaching sessions. It’s about taking short spurts of time to help salespeople improve, become responsible for their own development, and create an environment of support in which this happens. It is a strategy for helping all the members of your sales team meet their objectives.

 

The benefits of sales coaching are many. Performance improvement certainly is at the top of the list, but sales coaching is also the key to retention and stronger relationships. Becoming a sales coach even makes “the boss”—the evaluator—part of your role a lot easier because coaching helps eliminate disappointing surprises and leads to much better evaluations. If all it did was help salespeople become more productive and successful, that would be enough. But it also teaches salespeople how to self-coach and remove their own obstacles, and it fosters peer coaching and self-coaching so that salespeople learn how to find their own answers and the learning is continuous and consistent.

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Not only does this achieve the best and fastest results, but it is time efficient in that you can coach in 15 minutes or less. Initially, when you are coaching your salespeople, their dependency on you as the coach is higher. But the more you coach, the less their dependence.

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Sales management without sales coaching is equivalent to management of a sports team without a coach. It’s unheard of. Your sales- people will “play” better and win more with you as their coach.

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“Coaching by asking - teaches salespeople how to remove other obstacles themselves.”

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Most of the sales managers we work with want to coach. Most of the salespeople we work with tell us that they are hungry for coaching and feedback. Yet many salespeople say that they don’t get feedback on how they are doing—unless it is to tell them that they are doing something wrong. They complain that their sales managers don’t take the initiative to coach them. Sales managers say that salespeople don’t ask for coaching from them. Everyone is acutely aware of the need for continuous improvement to remain competitive. Many sales managers see sales coaching as the path to continuous improvement, but they aren’t sure how to coach. One sales manager expressed what many feel when he said, “I’m wondering if what I do when I ‘coach’ is really coaching.”

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“The power of sales coaching is in the questions you ask.”

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Being the sales coach to six, eight, or more salespeople can seem as if it takes Spartan strength. You may not have many role models to follow. The culture of your organization may not be there yet. There may even be a bias against coaching.

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You can take the leap from manager to coach. You can transform your team, yourself, and even your organization. You as the sales coach can use each day to increase the performance of your team and get better and stronger and win again and again.

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“Preparing to coach, doesn’t require a lot of time.”