Want to convert prospects more efficiently and generate more revenue as a sales manager? Then you might want to invest more time into smart sales coaching. 

With the right sales coaching template and action plan, you’ll be able to consistently improve the performance of your team. Each week will generate more sales than the last week, and each rep will steadily grow and develop in their role. 

Coaching is also essential for effective sales onboarding as it helps develop positive sales habits in new team members from day one.

In this guide, we’ll break down what sales coaching is, what strategies you can implement, and tools you can use to improve your coaching.

Table of contents:

• What is Sales Coaching?
• Framework For a Successful Coaching Session
• Techniques to Use In a Sales Coaching Strategy
• The Challenges of Coaching
• Best Tools to Improve Coaching

What Is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching is an ongoing process of training, where sales managers try to improve sales reps' performance. 

Sales coaching sessions aren’t just focused on the sales manager giving the sales rep instructions. Instead, sales coaching is a more individualized approach that helps a sales team find new ways to achieve their goals.

It can be seen as a kind of mentorship and development process. Sales managers use data in their coaching sessions to evaluate the reps' performance and identify the areas that need improvement. 

Effective sales coaching aims to achieve the following four things:

• Finding new ways to help sales reps achieve their goals and targets
• Developing the overall skills of the sales team beyond just finding ways to hit higher figures
• Correcting and improving on sales tactics that don’t achieve results
• Focusing on sales tactics that do achieve results

Framework For A Successful Coaching Session

The sales coaching process should be well-structured. Some ad-hoc coaching sessions will happen, but it’s important to follow a clear sales coaching template. 

A template provides a plan for you as the sales leader to follow and outlines what you will focus on over a dedicated time period. This can be broken down into daily, weekly, and monthly sales coaching activities. 

The best sales coaching template will include many of the following points:

• Weekly check-ins and check-outs
• Win/loss sales reviews and establishing tactics to boost win rates
• Regular goal-setting sessions
• Daily pulse checks
• Evaluation of sales cycle times
• Workshops led by sales leaders
• Performance reviews
• Strategy reviews
• Brief role-play sessions from various angles
• Call recording and review sessions
• Evaluating last week’s performance and next week’s goals

A sales coaching template works by adding a corresponding checklist to each of these activity points. This helps the sales coach guide the session and ensures that you cover everything.

While it is important to use a standardized framework in your sales coaching plan, it’s equally important to tailor and customize sales coaching templates to match the specific needs of each sales rep. 

To achieve this, coaches should have a sales playbook that covers best practices for different areas of the company’s sales process. This could include sales activities like:

• Cross-selling
• Up-selling
• Negotiation
• Competitive differentiation

As sales teams evaluate performance and key metrics and discover areas to improve, the sales coach can reference this sales playbook to ensure best practices are being enforced.

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Techniques To Use In A Sales Coaching Strategy

Sales coaching templates provide a roadmap to steer coaching sessions. Within this, there are many specific skills, tactics, and strategies that can be applied in peer-to-peer coaching. 

Here are some of the best techniques to use within a sales coaching template:

• Knowledge sharing sessions. Instead of only focusing on a one-on-one coaching conversation, you can run cross-team sessions. Talk with the most successful experienced reps and share their most effective selling activities so that other reps can learn from them.

• Data-driven coaching sessions. It’s important to have specific objectives in individual sessions and understand which sales metrics to focus on to improve sales performance. This should be measured by sales data, like demos completed, a pipeline review, revenue earned, and any other metrics that measure sales performance.

• Self-diagnosis. Ask the sales rep what areas they want to improve in. This will help them understand their own learning needs and get them excited about one-on-one coaching.

• Individual sales rep meetings. Sales templates should leave room for regular one-on-one meetings to review performance and establish an action plan for the coming week or month.

• Establishing trust. It’s important that the sales rep trusts the coach and believes that they have their best interests in mind.

The Challenges Of Coaching

Sales coaching conversations and sessions are important for all kinds of businesses, but they also come with their challenges. 

It can take a long time to coach reps, which can detract from building more sales pipelines. And after coaching sessions, some reps may still require further assistance on topics outside of the strict schedule. 

In addition, sales managers often lack the time they need to focus on effective one-on-one sales training. So, it can be difficult to provide more support and assistance to reps that need it. 

Many sales coaching strategies don’t focus enough on the numbers and data and are too generic. This results in less actionable feedback for individual reps to use. It also means fewer insights for coaches, which prevents them from being able to improve their strategies or coaching templates. 

Best Tools To Improve Coaching

Better coaching starts by using the right tools. Here are two great tools to improve both the coach and the rep's experience. 

Lattice

Lattice is a great performance management tool that empowers managers to better understand people and transform their approach to performance and development.

Aircover

Aircover is a powerful sales tool that is used for in-meeting sales enablement and support. With Aircover, you can coach and enable sales reps even when you’re not on the call.

Aircover allows sales managers to review notes, action items, and topics discussed in one-on-ones to provide more actionable data to coach your team.

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Conclusion

One-on-one coaching might be time-consuming, but it’s important if you want to win more deals and maximize revenue. 

Following all the necessary points above will help you to develop a smarter sales strategy, improve weak areas in your sales process, and ultimately close more deals in your sales pipeline. 

Start maximizing your sales reps’ performance by using the right tools. Check out Aircover and its suite of sales tools to empower your team today.