Episode summary

In this video, Helen Waite, Principal, Product Marketing at Mindtickle, gives you her top three tips for improving sales skill coaching at your organization. She outlines why it’s an important part of your sales enablement approach and how front-line managers are a critical part of improving rep performance. This quick video will give you three actionable tips you can use today to start building a sales coaching strategy that makes reps more productive.

Key highlights

• Front-line managers know best. Make sure your front-line managers are engaged and dedicated to coaching reps. They know their teams better than anyone else and are key to helping reps close deals and drive revenue.
• Don’t do everything at once. While there might be many skills reps need to develop, it can’t (and shouldn’t) be done all at once. Focus your time with each rep and develop their skills over time.
• Get out of the clouds. For sales coaching to be successful, your reps need real-world examples of what actually works in the field. Whenever possible, show them what top performers are doing.
• Follow-up is critical. After the session, make sure reps have the content and training related to what they just learned. They need to practice in order to develop the skills they need to be successful.

In case you’d like to read these tips rather than watch the video, we’ve included the transcription below.

Video transcription

Hey there. This is Helen from the Product Marketing team at Mindtickle. Today I’m going to share my top three tips for improving skill coaching. Skill coaching needs to be a critical factor in your sales coaching framework, and that’s because it really focuses on improving and developing the skills that will help your reps in the long term win more deals and your frontline managers are key to this strategy. They’re the ones who can truly move the needle when it comes to rep performance. They’re working with them day in and day out, and so one key way that they can improve their rep’s performance is through really effective skill coaching.

So I’m not sure where to start. Let’s dive into my top three tips to improve your skill. My first tip is don’t boil the ocean. There are a ton of different skills that you can cover with your reps, but developing these skills takes time. So focus on one skill per session or one skill per quarter with your team members in order to give them that time to work on the skills and develop them with practice.

My second tip is to give real-world examples, especially if you’re using conversation intelligence. Take advantage of the recorded calls that you have, giving your reps real-world examples of not only where they may have been lagging in a skill, but also examples of what good looks like for this skill or top call moments from top performers will really help them give the context to see how they can improve these.

And finally, my third tip is follow up your skill coaching. With training and enablement, you likely have a ton of training and enablement content, and a lot of it should be focused on some of the skills that you’re looking to improve for your reps. So use that training, use that content, assign reps specific tasks after your skill coaching sessions, and then follow up the next session.

Check in on how they did on that training. See if it requires more. That way you can continually reinforce your skill coaching sessions. Thanks so much for listening. Stay tuned for more tips and best practices from our team.

Ready to take your sales coaching to the next level? Download our Guide to Sales Coaching with Sandler.