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Sales Performance Coaching - The Fundamental Guide

  • Sep 23, 2023
  • 2 minutes

What is Sales Performance Coaching?

In sales performance coaching, sales leaders mentor their teams with questions and advice to improve understanding, autonomy and performance. Often supported by conversation intelligence platforms, the process should identify areas for improvement including the number of questions asked to prospects, adherence to frameworks, the speed at which reps talked and their talk/listen ratio.  

Both new and experienced sales professionals can benefit from coaching, just like the world's most elite athletes have coaches. While leaders can and do play an important role, coaching can take a variety of formats.

 

What are the Benefits of Sales Performance Coaching?

Sales performance coaching offers both business and individual benefits. Organizations see improved win rates, improved employee motivation and heightened market understanding, while individuals experience greater job satisfaction and engagement.  The results have been seen in businesses across industries, geographies and markets.

 

Sales Coaching Types & Techniques 

There are three main formats of sales performance coaching; self-coaching, peer coaching and manager-led coaching. Conversation intelligence (CI) has an important role to play in all three types, as it provides a platform that transcribes and analyzes sales calls, highlighting data on what has gone well and what hasn’t at specific points in sales calls. This helps pinpoint areas that need coaching, where you can leave comments and qualitative remarks to learn from.

 

Self-coaching

Self-coaching involves a team member listening back to their call recordings, identifying their areas for improvement and creating an improvement plan for themselves.

The key to self-coaching is to approach it objectively, with an open mind and balance. Individual sales reps who spend just 3-4 hours per month listening back to sales calls tend to improve their win rate by 5.5%, so self-coaching alone is a great coaching technique to start with.

 

Peer Coaching

This technique involves coming together within a team to discuss sales calls and highlight areas for improvement. It’s a collaborative effort, all done in the spirit of helping each other. 

There are many ways to go about this. Some teams will share call recordings with each other for review, while in others, individual reps will share specific points in a call and ask peers for feedback.  

 

Manager-led Coaching

Manager-led coaching is often a one-to-one or small group session between a leader and their team members. 

The coaching is interactive, with both the leader and individuals reviewing what went well and what needs improvement and should focus on a limited number of topics or criteria.

 

Let's take it up a notch. Check out our Fundamental Guide to being a great sales coach here. 

 

Shelley Lavery is the COO and Co-Founder of Jiminny, the leading conversation intelligence and sales coaching platform that helps companies maximize their revenue. With over a decade of experience in coaching B2B sales teams, Shelley was previously Group SVP of Sales at Reward Gateway now leading the conversation intelligence discussion with expertise and insight.

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