Sales coaching is a collaborative process which aims to improve a persons’ capability to set and achieve sales goals, make good decisions, horn their natural skills and generally improve their work. It involves helping salespersons and institutions develop faster and meet desired goals. Sales coaching can also be defined as an act of challenging, supporting and nurturing people to perform better and bring out the best in them.
A sales coach conglomerates the roles of a tutor, a monitor and a counselor as well as a facilitator. In order to be effective, a sales coach is required to identify an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and motives and use that information to inspire them to perform better. The emphasis is on the employee’s strengths, not weaknesses.
Roles of sales coaches
There are five main roles of a sales coach:
Define – it is with the help of sales coaches that a salesperson can better define their goals and review their strategies so as to increase sales unit. Having defined goals and strategies is a crucial part of successful sellers.
Execute – to achieve defined goals, then the sellers need to develop habits that mirror their desires. It is the work of a sales coach to help the seller to execute defined strategies to achieve a higher sales record. They can accomplish this by helping the salespersons see the consequences of their actions using focused action plans. They help the sellers know what should be done and what shouldn’t, and hence the seller’s time is spent effectively.
Advise – a sales coach has to guide and offer advice to a salesperson. There are two ways to accomplish this: a direct approach where the coach tells the seller to “do this” and the facilitative way where the coach invites the seller to do something together. The former method works best with novice sellers with little or no experience while the facilitative approach works well with more experienced sellers.
Develop – a sales coach has to make a seller see his/her own potential and help him/her develop according to the strengths exhibited. This begins by understanding the current state of ability and seeing where it is possible to reach full potential.
Motivate – each salesperson has a motive which drives them in their daily work. A sales coach has to identify what drives a seller and use it to make him/her even better. Money is a great motivator but people will always have something else spurring them on.