Defined: Sales coaching is the act of enhancing seller quality, knowledge, and skills to drive extraordinary sales performance and maximize sales revenue. To be truly effective, sales coaching must be seen, implemented, and delivered as a comprehensive change management initiative. The term “sales coaching” describes an approach that enhances one or more dimensions of seller performance – development, culture, process, or people. In business, this approach is used to help organizations achieve their sales and customer success goals through the following five main areas:
Training and Sales Coaching: For any sales training program to be truly effective, it must be matched to the sales process. Effective training and sales coaching will address both individual requirements and the existing sales process. Effective trainers will consider each of these processes individually and design training programs and activities that address each requirement. These requirements may be in the areas of objections, prospecting, closing, follow-up, and analysis.
Sales Coaching Organization Development: Developing an effective and fully integrated sales training program is an ongoing process. Over time, sales professionals become somewhat “immune” to changes in the business environment, and sales training program effectiveness may suffer. This is when the formation of a sales team becomes essential. However, developing and maintaining the right sales training program requires constant review and evaluation of the organization’s current systems and sales professionals’ skills.
Good Sales Training: A good sales training program facilitates and empowers salespeople to make informed sales decisions. Salespeople know they must provide a quality product or service to meet their client’s needs before earning anything else. Consequently, the first part of any sales training curriculum is preparing and understanding the sales process. The second part of the curriculum deals with identifying the product or service in fashion and what questions salespeople should ask clients before asking those questions. When a salesperson understands these two important ingredients in the sales process, they have established themselves and their role in the sales process.
In-person/In-Service Training: Just as in-person trainers and instructors play an important role in an organization’s development, sales training instructors play an equally important role in a company’s sales growth. In-person and in-service training programs are necessary for developing a strong salesperson, but how do they differ? There are several differences between the two training models.
In-person training programs provide a much more immediate feedback mechanism with which to measure sales progress than do in-service training programs. Salespeople can see and measure their own performance immediately at the end of a sales training session. Also, they can see if the training program was effective or not by seeing their own performance. However, in-service training programs allow salespeople to develop self-reflection, a much more valuable resource than self-evaluation from an in-person session.
The second difference between effective sales skills and sales training is the speed at which the learning occurs. Effective sales training provides information on product features, reasons for buying a product, how customers perceive those features, why they make a purchase, how to design a product to meet the customer’s needs, etc. Simultaneously, a salesperson must explain those concepts in an easy-to-understand manner so that salespeople can understand them and apply them to their own situation. Effective sales training programs move quickly through the material to the next lesson, providing maximum reinforcement to sales skills and providing salespeople with the opportunity to practice their new skills.
The third difference between effective sales training that just about every salesperson will have to deal with is getting new salespeople interested in learning the material. When a salesperson has good sales training, he will easily explain the material to newcomers, helping them pick up the ideas and concepts. However, many salespeople get wrapped up in the mechanics of their sales skills and find it difficult to explain complex concepts. The challenge here is to keep the newcomer’s interest while explaining the concepts and helping the salesperson retain the new people as regular clients. eCom Elites sales training programs will help the salesperson to develop a mechanism for ensuring that clients are kept current on sales strategies and that new prospects keep learning.