I love a Top 5!
Top 5 Led Zeppelin albums.
Top 5 countries to visit.
Top 5 books you’ve ever read.
Here’s my take on the Top 5 theme - Top 5 Benefits of Hiring a Sales Coach.
Sales coaching refers to the training, tools, resources, and support Sales Managers and Coaches give to sales teams. The objective is to improve the skills of the team and hit revenue targets. This coaching can be done in house or with an external sales coach.
1. Make sure your salespeople are completing the right activity.
Results are not the most important part of sales, that particular moniker goes to Sales Activity.
Sales activity should be based around Quantity – Direction and Quality (‘QDQ’) and salespeople should plan accordingly:
Quantity – Are you doing enough activity?
Direction – Are you doing it with the right people?
Quality – With skill, knowledge & enthusiasm? Selling to meet real needs?
For high performance in sales you need to focus on all 3. For example, we’ve seen salespeople attend networking events, not bother to engage with people and then say networking isn’t for them. They’ve ticked the ‘Quantity’ box, but that’s all.
A sales coach should review these plans and get their team to tweak them as required.
2. Ensure your team are selling to meet real needs.
This is the key in modern Business to Business (‘B2B’) selling, but most salespeople, up to 80%, don’t do it.
Taking the time to understand the needs of your clients sends the message that you’re interested in them and want to create a solution to meet their needs. This will lead to stronger relationships that can lead to partnership.
The sales coach can do this by discussing individual clients and prospects with them and completing joint calls with the salesperson, with the specific objective of giving them feedback on their needs-based selling skills.
3. Ensures accountability.
Most sales people want responsibility in their roles, but with responsibility must come accountability.
The role of the sales coach should be to create this accountability. By teaching and empowering their teams, coaches encourage their salespeople to use their initiative and solve their own problems. The alternative is that the coach constantly tells them what to do and they become totally reliant on the manager for everything.
Over time this will lead to a motivated and inspired team and the coach can focus on higher level initiatives and further developing the team.
4. Increases win rates and improves results.
Developing the skills of the sales team will result in improved sales results.
Research has found that Sales Managers at high performing sales businesses (sales businesses where over 75% of salespeople hit their target) spend significantly more time coaching than Sales Managers at average (25% - 75% hit target) and low (less than 25% hit target) performing businesses .
5. Develop friendly competition.
Winning sports teams thrive on friendly competition within their team. Sales teams should be no different.
You can consider coming up with a ‘deal of the month’ or other ways to reward activity. Salespeople are outgoing, enthusiastic people and love it when the job is interesting and challenging. Creating a culture of gamification can achieve this. One of the best ways to do this is to ask the team, they will be sure to come up with good ideas.
All sports team have sales coaches, why would we think that sales teams don’t need one?