If you want to grow your sales team and your business, there’s no better investment than sales coaching. With a clear impact on sales reps, managers, and revenues, companies at any stage of their growth journey can benefit from it.
On the fence about including it in your sales strategy? Here’s all you need to know about the benefits of sales coaching.
1. It builds sales skills and strategic mindsets
At its core, sales coaching focuses on improving a sales professional's skills and performance by identifying their skills and exposing them to areas of growth.
Unlike sales training that focuses on the product, sales coaching is personalized, contextual, and has the potential to influence sales reps’ behaviors and mindsets. Be it prospecting, discovery calls, negotiation, or value positioning, sales coaching’s targeted support and feedback go a long way in building personal skills and long-term sales mindsets.
ValueSelling’s 2020 research on sales coaching found that 74% of survey respondents achieved individual productivity gains while 69% met expected outcomes for performance.
2. It helps sales reps understand and speak the voice of the customer
Saying what the customer wants to hear can be powerful in a sales conversation. Understanding what customers need is often left to individual sales reps to figure out.
Instead, you can use sales coaching to build an understanding of customer needs, so they know what to say, when to say it, and just how to say it. This will help them at every stage of their sales journey – from prospecting to discovery calls to handling objections to closing deals. Not only will this help build stronger connections and engagement with prospects and customers, but it will also help sales reps become better at developing new customer-handling strategies.
3. It leverages timing and context to improve win rates
In sales, timing is everything. Deal coaching, focused on specific opportunities in the sales pipeline, can help improve win rates.
When you have a formal and structured program in place, your sales are coached at key stages in the sales journey, ensuring that they are equipped to perform right when it matters.
Sales reps who receive at least 2 hours of coaching per week have a win rate of 56%, almost 13% over those who receive less than 30 minutes.
4. It helps improve sales managers’ efficiency and productivity
While most discussions focus on sales coaching’s impact on sales reps, it offers multiple benefits to sales managers as well.
Here’s how:
- It helps set a formal framework to support sales reps
- Sales coaching helps surface issues and trends from multiple customer conversations
- It simplifies goal setting for individual sales reps and the team
- It sets in place a feedback look for performance and improvement and builds ownership among sales reps.
5. It makes sales rep onboarding effective and efficient
While sales training is a key part of most sales onboarding programs, they are only one part of the solution. Typical sales training programs, that focus on the product and processes, do little to ramp up new sales reps’ skills. Sales coaching is a great opportunity to build on the learnings from sales training programs, leading to far more effective onboarding.
With formal sales coaching at a set cadence, sales reps feel supported beyond just the initial days. They receive timely inputs, feedback, and insights that help them hit the ground running, and contribute much faster.
6. It improves employee satisfaction and retention
As per a study, 65% of respondents saw retention rates reach expected outcomes with effective sales coaching.
Sales coaching and the direction, goals, and support it ensures that sales reps feel recognized and supported within the organization. By giving them a clear path ahead, sales coaching equips them to be better at their jobs – in turn improving morale and satisfaction.
Additionally, conventional sales training approaches prioritize revenue and quotas, but when you use sales coaching to help employees feel supported and invested in, it shows that you care about them and their growth. It’s not hard to imagine why this leads to happier employees and higher retention.
7. It helps build formal, consistent, and scalable sales practices
As sales teams and companies grow, there’s a lot than can get lost in translation. Sales coaching is an effective forcing function that helps teams build strong and structured systems and processes for the entire sales function.
This helps on two counts.
(a) It ensures productivity and scalability
With sales coaching and the framework it provides, you have an easy way to standardize customer interactions. This way, sales reps put their best foot forward in customer interactions – irrespective of where they are, when they joined, or who the manager is.
(b) It results in more cohesive branding for your company
When every sales rep presents the company and its offerings in a style uniquely your own, you can be sure that you’re building a brand personality that people recognize and want to engage with.
8. It encourages cross-departmental collaboration
Sales coaching can have a unifying effect on the company. It can help sales reps feel integrated into the business, make them feel heard, and empowered to contribute to the larger organization.
Sales coaching can also help glean customer insights that can help build more competent offerings.
9. It fosters a culture that encourages learning and improvement
83% of young employees in the current workforce want to learn new skills. Sales coaching is the easiest way to leverage this.
When sales coaching is well integrated into a company’s sales team, it gives sales reps and managers the insights and support they need to take ownership of the learning – often beyond just the requirements of their job.
It helps them analyze their behaviors, acquire and hone new skills, and take ownership of their learning and improvement.
Elements of sales coaching – such as goal-setting, building ownership, positive reinforcement, etc – have a strong role to play in setting and nurturing a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
10. It leads to better quota achievement and revenues
Direct impact on revenues is arguably the biggest and most tangible benefit of sales coaching.
67% of companies that invested in formal sales coaching over three years saw high revenue growth and higher quota attainment.
Companies with a formal sales coaching process achieve 91.2% of their overall quota when compared to the 84.7% achieved by those without sales coaching.
Sales Readiness Group found that sales managers at organizations where over 75% of sales reps achieve quota spend more time coaching than sales managers at average and low-performing organizations.
Over to You
It’s never too early – or too late – to start with sales coaching. Like most good things, it takes planning and patience. But given the benefits it can unlock at the individual sales rep level, and the organizational level, it’s the one investment any forward-looking organization should invest in.
Need more help implementing sales coaching for your sales team?
Check out:
What does Effective Sales Coaching Look Like?
What is the Key to Coaching a Successful Sales Team?
A Sales Coaching Guide for Growing Businesses