Building an effective sales team goes beyond recruiting, hiring, and onboarding the right talent. It requires managing your team with proven sales coaching training strategies to ensure members reach their full potential.
While some sales team members may have natural talents or much experience, others may need more support to excel. Regardless of talent or experience level, however, all reps can benefit from proper guidance. This is where sales manager coaching, including the integration of cutting-edge sales management software like Revegy, comes into play.
In a 2021 survey about companies’ sales priorities, 96% of team leaders said that sales coaching had a significant impact on the overall effectiveness of their sales reps. Survey participants also reported that a top priority was to scale sales coaching efforts—and with good reason.
Sales coaching works. When coaching a sales team correctly, it equips sales reps with the necessary resources and confidence to secure bigger deals, navigate common obstacles, and cultivate strong client relationships. To succeed in sales coaching, let’s dive into what you need to know.
Understanding the Role of a Sales Coach
Armed with extensive experience and expert knowledge, a sales coach provides sales professionals guidance, support, and sales training, elevating their selling skills and performance. With personalized coaching and practical advice, a sales coach empowers salespeople to overcome challenges, increase their confidence, and achieve their sales goals.
What is Sales Coaching?
“Sales coaching” can refer to any mentoring system or technique designed to assist a sales force in maximizing sales performance and achieving company goals. Sales coaching is:
- Inclusive and valuable to all members of a sales team regardless of tenure
- Individualized so that each rep receives the type of mentorship they need
- Based on detailed data and analyses
Sales coaching helps your sales team achieve higher success rates. A sales team becomes truly unstoppable when its members feel a deep sense of purpose and are empowered to realize their immense potential for personal and professional growth in their sales roles.
What Does Effective Sales Coaching Look Like?
While pretty much any talent manager or sales team leader can appreciate the benefits of good sales coaching techniques, it’s essential to know what does and doesn’t make a coaching system effective. Common coaching mistakes and pitfalls include:
- Adopting a cookie-cutter approach
- Telling reps what to do instead of empowering them to find solutions independently
- Focusing too intently on numbers instead of skills-building
- Failing to evolve with marketplace trends, etc.
A great sales coach works with team members one-on-one. They offer individualized sales training and best practices. And they help team members make the most of powerful sales enablement resources that simplify the process of account planning and opportunity management.
Revegy helps individualize your company’s sales training with reliable, data-based analyses that make it easy to identify and address each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. You can rest easy knowing that each of your sales reps will receive the personalized encouragement, assistance, and information they need to reach their full potential.
What are the Benefits of Sales Coaching?
Adding insight-led coaching solutions like Revegy to your company’s sales coaching methodology can boost your bottom line in a big way. But that’s not the only benefit. Here are others to consider.
A High Return on Your Sales Coaching Investment
Gartner’s research in 2019 estimated that B2B sales representatives only retain approximately 30% of the information they receive during initial training. These retention rates can plummet within a month to an abysmal 13%.
Adding effective sales coaching techniques and resources can improve these statistics. People – including those on your sales team – learn best and retain information more effectively with long-term reinforcement and guidance.
Revegy’s easy-to-use sales execution platform supports and empowers sales reps of all experience levels by giving them the resources they need to simplify sales workflows, align internal sales teams, uncover account insights, and accelerate the sales cycle.
Redefine Sales Best Practices
As any sales coach will tell you, star players develop winning sales strategies that yield exceptional results. For example, one sales rep might understand how to network within accounts to cross-sell and maximize wallet share, while another might have a unique way to apply data collected via sales team tools to predict when an account is at risk.
Revegy can make these strategies—and more—accessible to your entire sales team, as experienced by Comcast Business. Revegy made it easier for Comcast’s reps to build stronger account relationships, better navigate obstacles, and boost sales performance across the board.
Retain Your Best Talent
Sales team members who consistently achieve their quotas aren’t just hard to find; they can be even harder to retain. High employee turnover is especially problematic within sales departments, so an effective retention strategy is crucial.
High turnover rates aren’t necessarily about money. According to research from the Conference Board, a company can expect approximately 58% of its employees to eventually seek employment elsewhere when they aren’t presented with ongoing opportunities for professional development.
Remember, people need to feel empowered, contribute to meaningful goals, and see a real future with their companies. A great sales coaching system can help provide these motivators and entice your best talent to stay on board.
By bringing genuine, ongoing opportunities for professional growth, Revegy helps top companies like Comcast and others retain their most talented reps and benefit from their expertise and tenacity over the long term.
Best Practices and Sales Coaching Tips for Modern Companies
If you’ve researched sales coaching solutions, you likely already know that, like the companies they serve, each approach to coaching is unique. One option might work well for one company but fail at another, so choosing solutions that fit your team’s needs and company goals is essential.
Look at Your Sales Methodology
When assessing your sales coaching needs, the best place to start is to look at your existing sales methodology. Does your salesforce rely on multiple processes to manage the sales cycle, for example? If so, consider technology like Revegy software to help streamline sales workflows.
Not sure what might work or whether a system you’ve already implemented is suitable for your team? Ask your team about their experiences via a survey or other internal feedback collection method.
Adopt a Data-Based Approach
Without solid sales and account data and a way to analyze it effectively, you’re flying blind. Data is at the heart of any reliable sales methodology, so you need a data-based sales opportunity planning solution.
For example, Revegy’s sales enablement technology can do more than organize your account management activities. It can give sales reps the powerful resources they need to:
- Ensure each interaction with their clients is high-impact
- Simplify complicated account data
- Identify high-value deals and close them more quickly
- Boost company revenue and personal performance
- See, plan, and complete a path to close and retention with each of their accounts
The right technology can make it easier for sales team leaders to track each rep’s activities and performance and customize coaching efforts. For example, Comcast leveraged Revegy to implement a periodic plan review system that broke sales progress into six elements and assigned overall performance ratings. This allowed for further sales coaching that was perfectly tailored to each rep.
Ignite Sales Team Engagement
Most sales reps don’t just stumble into their careers. Instead, they pursued sales professions for pointed reasons. For example, some reps are great at communication and love interacting with others one-to-one. Others are competitive and enjoy winning a sale from other vendors.
Sales coaching is most effective when it is personalized for each team member. User-friendly sales operations like Revegy enable sales coaches to individualize their coaching techniques and create easy ways to invite sales reps’ feedback, offer self-assessment tools, and unveil insights into account problems and solutions.
Experiment with Various Sales Coaching Techniques
A successful salesperson employs various strategies to close sales, communicate with clients, and increase wallet share with their accounts. Good sales coaches do the same by incorporating proven techniques like:
- Tactical coaching, using data to improve account management success
- Tailoring sales approaches to specific markets or clients
- Personalizing coaching to assist individual reps with skills like communication, building trust-based customer relationships, etc.
Unlock your Sales Team’s Power
Within your sales team, there are shining stars who excel at problem-solving, building relationships, and managing accounts with remarkable finesse. Don’t let their talents go untapped. Instead, seize the opportunity to involve them in your sales coaching program. Encourage them to present their winning methods during team meetings, inspire individual reps to share their insights, and foster a culture of knowledge exchange.
By elevating your best performers, you’ll create a dynamic sales environment where wisdom flows from all directions within the team. Consider integrating a solution like Revegy into your company’s sales methodology to supercharge this process. With Revegy’s support, you’ll empower your sales stars to share their knowledge and inspire the entire team to reach new heights of success.
Embracing Ownership: Instilling Personal Accountability
One of the most significant challenges sales coaches face is instilling a strong sense of personal accountability, even among highly talented team members. The truth is, even the best performers encounter obstacles or face unexpected setbacks, and it is essential to eliminate tendencies toward shared excuses within the team and encourage your sales reps to take ownership of their choices and roles in their performance.
Ownership is the Key to Empowerment
Going from feeling like business outcomes are beyond one’s control to feeling empowered to affect those outcomes positively is an incredible transition. Empowered employees are employees who are more creative, more innovative, and feel more personally invested in the work they do every day.
Revegy gives modern-day companies data and insight to help sales reps make better-informed decisions and hone their selling instincts, ultimately increasing their sense of empowerment.
Ownership is the Key to Accountability
Helping your sales team adopt an “ownership mindset” doesn’t have to require inordinate time and effort. Like Comcast, you can facilitate the behavior by:
- Making sure each team member has a firm grasp on all professional roles and responsibilities, as well as any expectations that come with them
- Equipping each team member with the right tools for the job (e.g., effective sales account planning software from Revegy)
- Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and teaching team members how to measure them
- Teaching SMART thinking when it comes to goal-setting: Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound
Ownership is the Key to Responsibility
As sales reps take more ownership of their performance, they’ll transition from task-based to big-picture thinking and forgo feeling responsible only for individual projects or accounts. They’ll understand their role in achieving the company’s long-term goals and view their success within this context.
Ownership is Being Part of the Process
Team members who feel that sales coaching is a team effort are more likely to feel proud of their own—and their role in others’— work and are personally invested in the company’s success. For this reason, transparency is essential, and the sales team’s and the company’s progress toward goals should be frequently communicated. It’s also important to ask team members for feedback to zero in on what’s working and identify areas for improvement.
Streamlining Insight-Led Coaching with Revegy
In 2023 and beyond, the right account management software is necessary for companies serious about helping their sales departments become as efficient as possible. Revegy takes the guesswork out of sales by providing teams with failsafe blueprints that show them exactly how to achieve their goals.
Understand the Health of your Accounts
Mastering the fine art of maximizing wallet share in B2B enterprise accounts is quite the endeavor. Keeping tabs on the sheer multitude of factors influencing the health of a given account can be daunting.
Revegy’s account management solutions revolutionized Comcast’s approach by identifying data trends and uncovering critical account insights to strengthen its sales approach. The outcome? A heightened sense of empowerment among sales reps, a surge in significant deals, and a thriving bottom line.
Rest assured, your company can experience the same remarkable benefits.
Achieve Flawless Decision-Making Every Time
Integrating Revegy into your sales coaching will unlock a world of possibilities. You can seamlessly set priorities, craft sales strategies that align with client needs, unify account data, and effortlessly identify key players within accounts.
Experience the “Comcast effect” and discover a newfound ease in identifying and pursuing opportunities. Then celebrate repeatable successes as Revegy empowers your team to achieve consistent results. Even complex sales activities like reporting and presentations become more accessible and manageable with Revegy.
Refrain from settling for the ordinary when you can elevate your sales coaching approach with Revegy’s game-changing technology. Embrace sales excellence and seize unparalleled growth opportunities.
Watch our Customer Connect 2023 on-demand content here and learn more about Comcast’s effective sales coaching techniques and Revegy’s support in achieving its sales goals. You’ll also gain valuable knowledge from industry experts and leading companies. Discover the evolution of the sales process and how to create a seamless customer experience with Gartner’s Bill Voltmer. Learn about account planning benefits and best practices from Siemens’ Charlie Jonesrebandt, who will also share how Revegy enhances strategic planning.
Revegy Success Stories
Step into a world of success with Revegy’s remarkable solutions for enterprise account management. Read our case studies here and discover how Revegy transformed sales and account management for industry leaders like Fujitsu, MarkLogic, Siemens PLM, Comcast, and many more.
Success is the direct result of informed decisions powered by the right tools. Let Revegy provide unparalleled capabilities to navigate complex sales landscapes, seize valuable opportunities, and achieve remarkable outcomes.
Ignite your Sales Potential with Revegy Today
Discover the secrets to effective sales coaching and help your sales reps reach their full potential. With Revegy by your side, critical sales tasks like setting priorities, creating client-centric strategies, unifying account data, and identifying key decision-makers become a breeze for you and your team.
Are you ready to revolutionize your sales coaching? Book a demo with Revegy today and achieve sales excellence. Don’t miss this opportunity to unleash your sales team’s potential and see the way to win®.
Now On Demand!
“Sales on the Move: Embracing Agility for a Changing Sales Journey.”
Watch our on-demand webinar, where we delve into the key elements of an agile sales approach from start to finish, featuring Luiz Martins, CMO of Revegy, along with esteemed guest speakers Donald C Kelly, Founder and The Sales Evangelist, and Doug Inda, SVP of Enterprise Client Development at Syndigo. Discover how to adapt to tighter budgets without compromising sales performance, leverage technology to streamline processes and close more deals, provide meaningful value to buyers amidst abundant data, succeed in a remote sales environment with effective communication and virtual presentations, and position yourself as a trusted advisor in today’s ever-changing sales landscape. This is your chance to increase your pipeline and propel your success forward. Watch on-demand here!
References:
https://www.revegy.com/platform/opportunity-planning-and-execution/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2021/11/22/how-to-cultivate-an-ownership-mindset-in-your-team/
https://www.conference-board.org/press/professional-development-survey-retaining-talent
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-coaching
