Cultivating Coaching Skills in Your Sales Leaders

Successful leaders coach.

Period.

It’s a skill that is absolutely necessary to succeed in sales and sales leadership. Sellers who don’t receive coaching and feedback get off track, pursuing the wrong leads, prioritizing the wrong activities, and focusing on the wrong goals.

In contrast, sellers who receive good coaching tend to stay on track, finding and connecting with strong prospects, focusing on potential, and realized key accounts, meeting and exceeding their goals.

And leaders who receive ongoing training on improving their interpersonal, business, and leadership skills have teams everyone wants to be a part of.

Not all leaders are natural coaches, but all leaders can learn how to coach.

Know Your Team

In order to coach a team, whether they are leaders or sellers, you have to know your team. Having a certified talent assessment for each team member and receiving feedback from a talent analyst on that assessment is a great place to start, but you need to go deeper.

For each team member, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are their top 5 selling (or management) strengths?
• Do they have any weaknesses that they struggle to work around?
• How do they best like to communicate?
• What is their learning style?
• How do they like to be recognized and rewarded?

Knowing the answers to each of these questions will help you focus on how to best coach each member of your team. Create a coaching sheet for each person, and before any coaching session, review their preferences to better hear your message.

The Most Important Part: In-Field Coaching

All salespeople must have hands-on learning. Being a coach means getting in the field with your team and providing real-time help to them.

All sellers need in-field coaching. For inexperienced sellers, this coaching is vital to their success. Show them how it’s done and then coach them to be successful.

In-Field Coaching Check List:

• No sneak attacks—schedule time in advance so everyone is prepared.
• Be the coach—don’t jump in and sell for them.
• Prepare in advance with your seller.
• Take lots of notes—offer praise and feedback on the seller’s performance.
• Give immediate feedback.
• Ask for their input—what went well and what could improve?

What about the leaders on your team? If they struggle with in-field coaching, create a coaching check list to fill out on each call with important reminders on what to look for.

Each coaching call should have items like:

• What went well—there should be several of these
• What might have gone better—regardless of tenure, everyone can improve
• What I wish I had seen—what was left out of the process

Survey everyone, all members of your various teams, on what training they feel would be most relevant to them in improving their skills as sellers and leaders.

Often, leadership teams are surprised to learn that certain training is applicable across skill sets and teams. Improving in areas like PowerPoint, Excel, and Office, or improving skills in active listening, emotional intelligence, or positive thinking may have a strong impact on the entire business unit.

Practice Team Collaboration

While sales and leadership teams are not a democracy, being open to input from your team is an important part of coaching.

Encourage leaders to share the big picture with their team, discuss what’s in it for them as a team and individuals, and the overall purpose of a change, a new initiative or new goal.

Then invite questions and maybe even push back. Actively listen and acknowledge concerns and then address them. To increase communication on your sales team, practice the following:

• Be the subject matter expert—be a resource to your team and invite them to come to you.
  
  
• Improve your active listening skills—show the team that you are paying full attention to them and are interested and focused on what they are saying.  
  
  
• Pay attention to body language, yours, and theirs—what are they saying, and what are they not?
  
  
• Show empathy— sometimes people just need to be heard and understood.

“As their coach, your job is to set the bar high, inspire them to reach this bar, encourage them, and most of all, guide them in the best possible manner and in the most supportive environment.” – John Popovich