Taking advantage of sales coaching opportunities can have a tremendous impact on not only an employee’s personal development but also on their professional growth and, ultimately, their performance. I’m sure that everybody reading can look back throughout their lives and identify an individual who took them under their wing and helped them to achieve both short and long-term goals. In sales specifically, continued training and honing one’s craft is a long-term process that should be undertaken daily. From a management perspective, the importance of taking the time and interest on an ongoing basis to coach your Sales Team cannot be overstated. Doing so helps not only to motivate and empower individuals to excel but helps you to identify and develop high-potential employees. Continue reading to discover tactics and opportunities to coach your salespeople, and watch as their confidence and, ultimately, their sales performance soars! Sales Coaching Opportunities Request that your salesperson create an elevator pitch that will help them win appointments. Discuss some ways to fine-tune the pitch to make it more effective. Have your salesperson research the business issues of a particular customer or industry and discuss some potential questions that will help uncover a prospect’s needs and requirements. Discuss how you might support their requirements Ask your salesperson to develop their top ten lists of client questions regarding the salesperson’s and your organization’s ability to support the needs and requirements. Have them develop their answers to the questions and evaluate them. Have the salesperson list their fact-finding and subjective questions in advance of an initial prospect discovery meeting. Review the list to determine if the questions will yield the needed sales information. Attend an initial sales call with your salesperson. Ask them to develop a prospect’s existing situation/desired outcomes document after the sales call. Review it for accuracy and effectiveness, and use it as a road map to determine what the salesperson knows about the prospects’ needs. Use it as a coaching tool to determine how well the salesperson listened to the prospect’s requirements and determine what information is still needed. Ask your salesperson what their objective is for a particular sales call, and request that they develop a sales business meeting agenda. Evaluate the agenda and discuss any refinements. Ask your salesperson to summarize a sales meeting and check to see if they have accurately captured the potential buyer’s selling conditions and needs. Determine if the salesperson has a complete understanding of the buyer’s requirements and recommend any additional questions that they should have asked. Have your salesperson create a strategy document outlining what they know about a prospective company, what their buying process is, who the key decision makers are, what their organizational requirements are, what the individual decision maker’s requirements are, and how you are going to support their desired outcomes. Help them evaluate and refine their sales strategy. Request that your salesperson develop a list of their clients’ top-ten buying requirements and write out how they are going to support those needs. Evaluate their answers and role-play how to develop effective benefit statements that will support the expressed needs. Ask your salesperson to develop a list of their top-ten client objections and the answers to those objections. Discuss ways to effectively handle the objections. Help your salesperson prepare for a group presentation. Have them outline their understanding of the organizational needs, the key decision makers’ requirements, and how they are going to support their needs. Discuss ways to craft an effective presentation that addresses the buyers’ requirements and business imperatives. After the sale is won, ask your salesperson to discuss how they are planning to support the implementation of the sale, manage the implementation, and ensure that the client is satisfied with the results. Evaluate their plan and get agreement on the required action items and steps that will ensure that implementation is successful. Remind them to look for referrals and testimonials once the client is happy with the results. About Sales Focus Inc.: We are the Sales Outsourcing pioneers and have developed the most effective and proven process in the industry. Our repeatable S.O.L.D.™ methodology has been implemented in many Fortune 500 companies as well as within small and mid-sized organizations across the globe. Our success speaks for itself and has resulted in well over $15B in revenue generated for our clients since our founding in 1998. Focusing on client acquisition, and building and launching dedicated sales teams on a national level, all while reducing the cost of sales is what makes Sales Focus Inc. (SFI) unique. We create repeatable and sustainable business processes designed to maximize sales results in a short period. SFI can provide dedicated sales teams across the country or across the globe to meet the needs of each client. Our sales representatives are thoroughly trained using our Sales Master Training Program for both tactical and strategic solution-based selling. Sales Focus Inc. is committed to providing our clients with constant sales intelligence in the form of daily, weekly, and monthly reports, allowing our clients to own the customers. Whether our outsourced sales teams are feet on the street or inside sales, Sales Focus Inc. is committed to driving down the cost of sales, generating immediate revenue, and building “Intelligent Sales Outsourcing Solutions”.
