How to Build Coaching into Your Sales Process

Sales coaching can be a transformational strategy for your sales organization. Coaching instills your team with a mentality of constant improvement in a supportive environment.

Just as importantly, it also helps ensure every prospect has a great experience, and every customer is set up for success.

Poor conversion rates and customer churn erode market goodwill, while also wasting marketing, sales, and customer success team resources. Coaching helps to ensure that doesn't happen.

With quality sales coaching, you'll create an efficient and focused sales team that takes your company to new heights.

What is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching is an important strategy to constantly improve your sales performance. Good coaching provides a constructive framework to offer feedback and accountability, while celebrating success.

Sales is the engine that drives business. Sales coaching? That's the tune-up. In 2021, technology can support sales coaching with tools like AI, call transcripts, and more.

If sales is a priority, sales coaching needs to be part of your performance improvement. Ready to learn more? Here are 5 tips to improve sales coaching. 

Tip 1:  Schedule Onboarding Coaching Sessions with Each Team Member

As the old adage goes, "start as you mean to continue." If you're implementing coaching for the first time, this helps give each person dedicated time to focus on improving. When new talent joins your team, onboarding coaching sessions ensure alignment.

Coach for performance improvements likely to deliver results for your business, like:

• Creating a positive first impression
• Gathering insight about why the prospect is shopping
• Asking for the close while building trust
• How to portray your brand consistently

This sets the stage for your team to evaluate their own performance and receive feedback.

Studies show that 75% of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching approaches.

Tip 2:  Set Continuous, Collaborative Coaching Sessions That Include the Whole Team

Predictable sales moments - like demos - are perfect coaching opportunities. However, there are a range of other great coaching opportunities that you can use to involve the team.

For example, consider group evaluations where every team member provides one piece of constructive and one piece of positive feedback to every other.

This type of coaching approach is just one example. However, any type of collaborative, shared coaching exercises can help build culture, trust, and accountability across the team. These efforts should be consistent and ongoing, so that your team builds the habits they'll need to be successful.

Companies with dynamic coaching programs achieve 28% higher win rates.

Tip 3:  Track Your Results

You're investing in coaching because you want results. Tracking progress is critical to ensuring you're meeting those goals. By tracking coaching spend and performance over time, you'll identify wins - and reduce waste.

Remember to add up not only finances allocated, but also time spent, when considering spend. Another important metric to track? Coaching spend versus close rate. This simple calculation will help you correlate the impact that coaching has on your business's bottom line.

But this metric alone won't provide the full picture. Tools like call transcriptions, sentiment analysis, and AI evaluations will provide the context you need to effectively track sales performance.

Here at Calldrip, we look at KPIs before and after coaching to gauge its efficacy. Typically, we see a dramatic increase in appointments set.

Calldrip's all-in-one lead response software includes built-in sales coaching tools including human-led review, call scoring, and AI-powered review. Learn more about it here.

Companies that provide an optimal amount of coaching will realize 16.7% average annual revenue growth

Tip 4:  Have a Plan Before You Pick Up the Phone

An awkward start can derail your entire sales conversation. That's why it's important to have a game plan before you pick up the phone.

When your sales team knows the plan and all of its elements, they're more likely to be successful. It also ensures that leads have a consistent brand experience.

One way we address that at Calldrip is by creating scripts for our customers, so that they have a rough plan prior to getting on the phone. The ultimate goal is to book an appointment, but a lot has to happen before you can get there. A strong phone sales plan will empower your team to take the right conversational steps to earn trust before asking for the appointment.

These scripts typically include a proper introduction, ways to diagnose the customers needs, tips for seizing the appointment, and finishing strong.

Make sure your phone call plan builds trust, encourages action, and leaves your prospects smiling.

Tip 5:  Blend Qualitative & Quantitative Coaching Feedback

While close rate is one of the most important metrics, it’s not the only KPI to consider. Emotions play a critical role in sales.

Keep in mind the softer side of the sale, too, by blending in qualitative feedback with the quantitive aspects.

Examples of qualitative feedback include:

• Cheeriness and positivity
• Ability to engage prospects in conversation
• Skill when dealing with conflict, stress, or confrontation
• Use of quality investigative questions to understand the prospect's needs

For example, a customer might have a great shopping experience, but the product they want may not be available. In that case, the sales experience still has the potential to generate referrals

Looking at both your KPIs and quality of sales conversations will ensure a positive experience for your business, and your prospects.

Calldrip blends technology with human review of calls to provide qualitative and quantitative coaching tools.

Tip 6: Make Sure Managers Receive Coaching, Too

Even an all-star sales team and a world-class coaching program may flounder with poor management.

Sales managers may be skilled sales people themselves, but that doesn't always mean that they're naturally good coaches. That's why it's important that sales managers get coaching, too.

Coaching for sales managers should help them become better at guiding performance improvement efforts, motivating sales representatives, building team culture, and prioritizing individual and shared goals.

With coaching that supports the entire team, you'll be well-positioned to succeed.

More than 60% of salespeople are more likely to leave their role if their sales manager is a poor coach.

How Calldrip's Coaching Works

1.  AUTOMATIC CALL TRACKING

All customer and prospect conversations are tracked and recorded. This provides ample opportunity to improve staff performance

2.  AI-POWERED CONVERSATIONAL MONITORING

AI-powered call monitoring reveals actionable insights into customer engagement, customer sentiment, and sales team performance.

3.  BUILT-IN SCORING TOOLS

Calldrip allows you to set customizable KPIs for your business. Easy to use scoring tools let you score every customer engagement internally, or Calldrip's team of professionals can do this scoring on your behalf

4.  BUILT-IN SCORING TOOLS

Calldrip's comprehensive built-in coaching tools provide detailed coaching audio and notes. This enables you to implement continuous coaching. With these easy-to-use tools, you can do it yourself or leverage our team of professional trainers who have coached thousands of calls.

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