You may not feel like you’ve got time in your busy schedule to regularly coach every individual sales rep, but in reality, those who make the time to coach will reap the rewards in the form of improved performance, more closed deals, and greater generated revenue.

Plus, good coaching isn’t about spending more time doing it — it’s about doing it right.

If you need some sales coaching ideas to kickstart a lucrative program, we’ve got the tips you need for successful sales coaching below.

Best sales coaching techniques to optimize your time

Establish a formal process and cadence

Any good business initiative starts with a plan — not just a rough, spoken plan, but an organized documented one. Three-quarters of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching processes. Formalizing your sales coaching strategies means you’ve got a blueprint to follow and you’re more likely to stick to it, effectively and incrementally improving performance across your team.

Devote time and focus to coaching sessions

Being distracted while sitting down with a rep is not effective. If you can’t listen and provide relevant and impactful feedback, you’re not properly serving the members of your team. Put other tasks and stress aside to not only deliver more thoughtful and significant guidance but to also make the seller feel valued. When you know you’ve got a block of coaching sessions approaching, wrap up any outstanding work and close out any unrelated programs and windows to prevent your mind from wandering.

Cater to performance and preferences

Ahead of a coaching session with one of your reps, take a few minutes to look through performance metrics — like training completion, content usage, and insights from real buyer interactions — so you’ve got visibility into where that seller is succeeding and where they could use further support. This way, no time is wasted during the session trying to pinpoint areas to work on; you’re already up to speed and can offer more meaningful guidance during your one-on-one.

Aside from utilizing performance insights to drive coaching sessions, managers should also consider reps’ unique learning styles and motivations. Structure and tailor your conversations accordingly for each seller so your feedback lands and has a greater impact.

Build relationships and trust

None of the above is possible if you don’t take the care to establish a relationship built on trust with your sellers. Get to know them and allow them to get to know you; this will open the door for reps to share achievements as well as concerns and struggles — helping you get to the heart of the matter and enabling you to provide higher-quality coaching that makes a real difference.

As a front-line manager, it’s difficult to find the time to effectively coach reps on both specific deals and overall skill development. But that doesn’t mean coaching should be excluded from your list of priorities. Dynamic sales coaching is proven to improve both quota attainment and win rates.

How can you optimize your time while ensuring your reps are getting the support they need to progress? A data-driven sales coaching strategy is the key to coaching success.

Set sales coaching goals and expectations with key stakeholders

Before you can introduce a solution, you need to establish the key goals and expectations of implementing a new coaching strategy. Evaluate what isn’t working currently, what needs to change, and what success will look like. Talk to your front-line managers, enablement team, and sales reps. Involve key sales stakeholders early in the process to get their buy-in to establish a coaching culture and make sure you set goals by defining what a successful coaching strategy would result in.

Select a sales coaching technology

Coaching technology is designed to support your coaching initiative not add more work. So, when assessing your options, consider how each solution will fit into your existing tech stack. If a platform creates a clunky experience with other solutions you’re already using, it will likely be more work than it’s worth. You need a tool that is fully integrated and makes life easier for managers and reps alike.

The ideal solution for any sales organization is an all-in-one platform that doesn’t just aid in coaching activities, but also includes content, enablement, and conversation intelligence. With everything in one place, completing daily tasks is seamless, information doesn’t get lost in translation, and you can make more educated decisions when it comes to how you coach your team.

Start at the top: “coach the coach”

Sales enablement focuses on the performance of reps—but what about the managers tasked with coaching and leading them? Many front-line sales managers got their positions through being reps themselves, so it’s not fair to expect them to be experts on effective sales coaching from the jump.

Train managers on your new coaching processes, including how to use the technology to be more efficient. And, just like with reps, provide reinforced learning and measure managers’ coaching performance over time to get the most out of the program.

Prioritize sales coaching with conversation intelligence

Managers cannot be on every call with every rep and, as a result, have very little visibility into sellers’ skills in the field. Most likely you are tracking how many calls each seller is making and the length of those calls, but this information doesn’t enable you to make informed decisions on how you can help reps improve performance.

Conversation intelligence records, transcribes, and scores calls so reps don’t need to take notes or update the CRM and managers can unlock opportunities for skill coaching. With conversation intelligence, managers can sort calls by score to focus on reps who may need additional guidance, and filter calls by themes to highlight specific skills like negotiation or objection handling.

Self coaching and peer coaching are also effective in getting a new perspective and collaborating as a team within conversation intelligence:

• Self coaching: Enabling reps to evaluate their own call performance allows them to be proactive in their coaching process and come more prepared to one-on-one sessions.
• Peer-to-peer coaching: Using tags and comments on call transcriptions allows reps to share best practices and work together to solve problems and handle common objections.

Personalize sales coaching with AI-powered insights

Along with the insights gleaned from conversation intelligence, gather data from your training and enablement platform, as well as your CRM, to understand where reps are excelling and lagging—and determine the best path for coaching them. Every seller has their own strengths and weaknesses, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps to automate data processing and give smart suggestions based on that data.

Use this information to focus on unique skills and behaviors individual reps are struggling with in one-on-one coaching sessions, and follow up with enablement content to reinforce what was learned.

Go beyond technology

It’s easy to lean heavily on technology to help sellers do their jobs. But the purpose of a sales readiness platform is to supplement—not replace—the authentic relationships managers build with reps. If you truly want to alter performance, you need reps to trust you and take your guidance seriously. You aren’t just a manager; you’re also a mentor.

Beyond data points, the only real way to know what your sellers need is to ask them. Ask them about their career goals and how you can help them achieve these. Together, you can create a plan of action using the methodologies above.

Measure success and refine sales coaching processes

Never assume your strategy is working because you are doing all the “right” things; coaching shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” program. Periodically revisit the goals you have determined for your sales readiness program — these will change over time as your business evolves and new sellers come onboard. Collect feedback from reps to get their perspective and find ways to refine your program for the greatest impact.

And actually act upon analytics and the feedback you receive. Just like you use performance metrics to improve sales skills, use this information about your coaching approach to pivot and get the best results possible. Your sellers will feel more valued, be happier and more productive employees, and, ultimately, close more deals.

Be ready

Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Platform takes your sales training, coaching, enablement, and analytics to the next level with automated solutions for sales leaders, sales ops, front-line managers, and more. Unlock powerful insights into rep and team performance and translate those insights into successful coaching across your team.

Get started today by requesting a demo.

Front-line sales managers are some of the most underutilized weapons in sales.

Why is that?

Managers have the ability to transform rep performance through sales coaching. The problem? Managers are busy. Really busy. And traditionally, the tools created for front-line managers are focused on updating CRMs and forecasting, creating more busy work.

Until now.

As part of our 2022 Spring Announcement, we are launching Sales Coaching Rooms, the only sales coaching product specifically created for the front-line manager.

We know seller transformation cannot occur through enablement and content alone. Reps are building knowledge through enablement and showing they know their stuff with training and practice. But, when it comes to executing, you need to make sure your reps are getting better deal after deal. Coaching is the only true way to change their behaviors in the field.

Now, front-line managers can focus on seller transformation by becoming better managers and mentors — and find themselves on a fast track to the CRO seat!

Introducing Mindtickle Sales Coaching Rooms

Mindtickle Sales Coaching Rooms are dedicated one-to-one spaces to have revenue-boosting discussions. Coaching Rooms provide:

• A single location to move deals forward and build the long-term skills reps need to succeed in the field
• Coaching within conversation intelligence (Call AI) to support learning in the context of real selling situations
• Coaching integrated with enablement content to drive long-term skill development through practice and reinforcement
• Self-coaching so reps can evaluate their own performance compared with manager feedback and better prepare for one-on-one sessions
• Coaching outcomes factored into the Mindtickle Readiness Index, showing leadership a full-picture view of the readiness of their teams and individuals
• Actionable insights for front-line managers into the lagging skills of individuals to facilitate the delivery of personalized coaching

In addition to Sales Coaching Rooms, Mindtickle is announcing features for better deal collaboration and detailed analytics to benchmark and track readiness.

Deal collaboration tools that meet sellers in the flow of work

Deals and open opportunities are constantly evolving and sellers need to be able to work quickly to prepare for meetings, provide relevant content, and collaborate with teammates to make sure nothing stalls or falls through the cracks. To help sellers better collaborate on deals, we are announcing:

• Email and Slack notifications in Call AI for meeting preparation, action items, and recording metrics
• Asset sharing, tracking, and analytics for content engagement insights

Detailed analytics for deeper readiness insights

Your sellers are not the only ones interacting with prospects and customers. You have specialized teams, like business development representatives, account executives, solutions consultants, customer service managers, and more! Each of these roles requires a different set of skills to succeed. That’s why, as part of our Spring Announcement we’re releasing benchmarking and tracking with:

• Role-based ideal rep profiles to define and track the key skills that lead to success for different sales positions
• Role-based winning behavior in Call AI to benchmark call metrics by customer-facing teams
• Readiness Index insights for managers to track the progress of their team

These features help your teams be ready and achieve continued sales success. To learn more about the newly announced Sales Coaching Rooms, deal collaboration tools, and readiness analytics, save your seat for our LIVE demo webinar on March 30.

Sales coaching is key for revenue organizations to continue to hit quota quarter after quarter but, unfortunately, teams continue to consistently miss their numbers. It’s true that there is no magic one-size-fits-all coaching approach that works for every team. But there are commonalities in why some sales coaching programs fail.

Learn what pitfalls to avoid when evaluating your existing sales coaching approach or when starting a more formal process for the first time.

Focusing on quantity of sales coaching sessions

Often we see statistics about the amount of time spent coaching by sales managers per month or week.

• Sales reps with 30 minutes or fewer of sales coaching per week receive win rates of 43%, and those who receive at least two hours of coaching per week have a win rate of 56%.
•  23% of sales managers spend less than 30 minutes individually coaching their direct reports each week.
• A good rule of thumb is to spend 25-40% of your time coaching your sales team.

While these metrics help set a baseline of coaching frequency for managers, they can put too much emphasis on recurring sessions and too little emphasis on what will actually be covered in the sessions to help level up your reps.

Instead, focus on the quality of your sales coaching sessions

A little prep work can go a long way, and your preparation does not have to be exhaustive. After all, as a sales manager, you’re also juggling your own quota attainment, forecasting, and the ever-looming end of quarter. Setting agendas for coaching sessions, outlining action items, and reviewing your reps’ past achievements can help keep your sessions helpful and productive.

If you start to notice that some reps are not showing progress or improvements, it may mean you need to dedicate more time to coaching these individuals.

Alternatively, sessions with your best performers may be needed less frequently. If you find your one-on-ones with these people are repetitive and it’s a struggle to find topics to cover, try reducing the number of times you meet.

Sales coaching that is only top-down

Most of us have experienced a less-than-ideal manager at some point in our careers. Sometimes in sales, the highest performing reps become managers—but that doesn’t always mean they have the formal training on how to manage and coach reps. With a large revenue organization, it can be hard to track the effectiveness of your coaches. When your sales coaching process doesn’t incorporate the feedback of reps, you could be missing the true root of performance issues.

Instead, implement a coaching feedback system

There are two key components of a coaching feedback system. The first is giving reps the ability to easily provide feedback. If you’re using a sales coaching tool, this is a critical feature that makes it easy for reps to have their voices heard. In Mindtickle sales coaching, reps can approve or disapprove coaching sessions.

In addition to providing a feedback method, make sure you are tracking this feedback. If you start to notice patterns such as negative feedback from sessions for the same manager, this manager may need more training on how to coach their team. This is a good opportunity to “coach the coach.”

Only deal coaching your reps

Deal coaching will always be a critical part of sales coaching. Reps need to know how to move forward deals that they have right in front of them. It becomes easy to focus only on these deals during coaching sessions.

Instead, spend the majority of your time on skill coaching

A proactive approach to bettering your sales team, skill coaching works to improve upon the individual skills that reps are lagging behind in. Skill coaching ensures your sessions are relevant and reinforce long-term development to improve rep performance over time.  (Here’s more on deal vs. skill coaching.)

Blanket skill coaching

All of your reps possess different skill sets. They excel in different areas, have been at the company for different times, and consume training and enablement in different ways. While it saves time to focus on one skill for coaching each week or month, in the long run, this will not benefit your reps and improve their performance.

Instead, focus on the individual skills each rep needs to improve upon

Skill coaching is most effective when it is individualized. Take the time to assess the skills of your reps. View enablement and training performance, review recorded calls, and ask your reps what areas they can improve upon. A sales readiness platform can help aggregate this data and track the readiness of your reps over time.

After skill gaps are identified, work with your reps to coach them on these skills. Then, reinforce your coaching efforts with training and enablement content.

Coach your reps to success with Mindtickle

The Mindtickle Sales Readiness Platform gives you the tools and data you need to coach your reps to continued sales success. Integrating enablement and training, call recording, coaching, and content all in one platform enables revenue organizations to make data-driven decisions that win more deals. Want to learn more about how to become a sales mentor? Save your seat for our LIVE product announcement on March 22.