If you’re looking to improve your sales team’s performance, then you’re in the right place. To grow sales, you need to offer your team the resources they need to be successful. Sales teams are most effective when they’re being consistently coached.
No matter how well someone is performing, they can always use a coach to further hone their craft. It’s the most powerful way to boost your team’s confidence and performance.
What’s The Key to Coaching a Successful Sales Team?
Coaching a sales team requires a consistent approach to teaching, facilitating practice and offering constructive feedback. No matter what areas of improvement your team has, there’s a sales coaching method that can help.
Maybe your employees need help cold calling leads, or maybe they need help closing deals at the end of the pipeline.
Regardless of the situation, a sales coach can offer knowledge and help your team members implement it in real-life scenarios. When they know how to modify their behavior and responses depending on the client and conversation, they’ll be much more successful in boosting their sales figures.
How Frequent Should Sales Coaching Be?
How Frequent Should Sales Coaching Be?Sales team coaching needs to occur regularly for it to be effective. A one-and-done seminar is going to make exactly no difference. That means you’ll need to assess your budget and time to decide what frequency works for you.
Ideally, you’d be able to have at least one session with each team member a week. And you’ll also want to do larger sessions regularly on top of that.
It might sound like a lot…because it is.
The point is to make consistently small steps to grow your team’s skill over the long haul. Big changes over a short amount of time don’t stick as well.
If you need help assessing your sales coaching needs to decide where to go, we’re here to help guide you. Contact us at Selling Revolution today!
The GROW Coaching Model
The GROW coaching model was developed by a team led by Sir John Whitmore in the 1980s. Each letter represents an aspect or step of the model:
- Goal: your desired destination or result.
- Reality: your current position or state.
- Options, possible paths from your Reality to your Goal.
- Will: the path you choose to take.
Let’s go further into each step, so you can gain a full picture of this sales performance coaching model.
How to use GROW to Coach a Salesperson
Sales coaching techniques are only as effective as their implementation. So if you’re looking to try the GROW model, it’s essential for you to first fully understand its various components.
Goal
Your Goal is the end state you intend to achieve. Commonly used to define goals is the SMART model. Make your goals Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Trackable.
If you can’t design your goal around these parameters, then you might not be able to achieve it. Or, you might not even be able to know if you’ve achieved it.
Start by setting small goals with your team, and then see how they respond over time. You can adjust to make your next goal larger or smaller depending on the first goal. Also, it can be helpful to set goals for individual team members.
Reality
Your Reality is the current spot you’re in. What’s your current position?
Consider what’s going well and what you’d like to improve. Once you’ve assessed where you’re at, you can then look ahead. Identify the possible paths that lie between your present and the future you desire.
Options
You’ll have various Options for steps to take to achieve your goal. It’s important to think of as many different possible scenarios. Once you’ve gained a full picture of how you might try to move forward, you can assess which option seems most promising.
Will
The most promising option becomes your Will. It’s the decision you make–the steps you put in place–to lead your team to success based on the goal you set.
Though this is an incredibly well-liked and popularly-utilized method, it’s not the only effective one. If you’re interested in other sales strategies to boost your team’s performance, read on for more.
OSKAR Coaching Models
OSKAR stands for Outcome, Scale, Know-How, Affirm/Action and Review. It’s similar to GROW coaching, but not quite the same.
Outcome
First, you’ll set your Outcome as the result you wish to achieve. Think about what it would look like if you arrived at your end state. That’ll help you set your outcome.
Scale
On a Scale of 1-10, rate your team’s progress toward that outcome. This is an evaluation of your team’s current performance.
Know-how
Assess your team’s Know-how, meaning how much knowledge they have to get them to the outcome, and how much more knowledge they would need to have to do so. This identifies your team’s information gaps so you know what to first educate them on.
Affirm/Action
Then you can Affirm to your team the knowledge they have. You’re cuing them into your understanding of the situation before you take Action. You’ll act in whatever way you need to get your team filled in on what they’re missing. Then you can move down the path to your outcome.
Review
After some time, Review your progress. See what’s working and what’s not, and adjust accordingly!
CLEAR Coaching
Though the CLEAR coaching model isn’t as specific or structured as GROW or OSKAR, it is similar. Each letter represents a step, once again:
- Contracting
- Listening
- Exploring
- Action
- Review
This model focuses mostly on the communication aspect of sales performance coaching, so it’s often best-utilized with a team member who is really needing some space where they can express themselves and their needs to grow.
If it’s not structured enough, we recommend turning back to OSKAR or GROW.
The Group and Team Coaching Models
This model of sales coaching highlights the importance of coaching individuals to come together as a team. That works much more effectively than coaching a group of people who may or may not work well together as a team yet.
If you address everyone at once, then you will have to approach everyone the exact same way.
By coaching individuals to work together as a team, you can focus one-on-one with each member on the specific areas of improvement they need. That way, when they come together, they all understand their role and are proficient at it. This way, everyone gets to the same place, regardless of their starting point, forming a team!
Deal Coaching
Deal coaching involves coaching for a specific offer, opportunity or situation they’re going to encounter. If you’re running a promotion, you can utilize deal coaching strategy to optimize its effectiveness. That means educating your team on the language and methods to use for this specific scenario.
Or, if a deal fell flat on its face, you can coach your team after through what went wrong. That way, the next time, you’ll have better success. All in all, though, this method is built around specificity.
Pipeline Coaching
This type of sales performance coaching involves educating and training your team on the various steps of your sales funnel. Each step will involve specific language and processes aimed to boost conversions.
The training focuses on employing tactics at each step that allow the salesperson to get the outcome they desire. Think of pipeline coaching as more of a procedural study that focuses on achieving a uniform end state, rather than individual skills, growth and behavior.
This is the least-personal model on our list, but it can help you drive your results. It’s true especially if your pipeline is well-designed. If that’s the case, you really ought to put it to good use. Make sure your team understands why each step exists and how it leads to the next.
Executive and Career Coaching
Executive and Career CoachingIt’s not just your sales team who needs coaching. The executive team needs to be coached into its ideal function, too. Your executive team may be incredibly knowledgeable, but they can still benefit from personal development efforts.
A coach can help executives try out different leadership styles to see what works the best for them. They can also help set broad strategies for your sales team’s success. No one is at a point where they can’t benefit from a knowledgeable coach.
Purpose, Tonality & Content (PTC) of Sales Coaching
These are the three aspects of any sales coaching model that you should primarily focus on. Evaluate your options holistically, but when it comes down to it, these are the three questions you should ask yourself:
- What’s my purpose in hiring a sales performance coach?
- What’s the coach’s tone or attitude?
- What’s the coach’s overall content?
Purpose
Your purpose is going to be, generally, some form of improving your sales team’s performance. However, try to dig deeper than that. Do they need confidence? Do they need practice? Do they need more procedural techniques? When you have a more specific answer, you can find a more useful solution. Your coach should have the purpose of their method aligned with yours.
Tonality
If your team doesn’t connect with the attitude that the coach brings to the table, the process won’t work. The team has to buy into the process, which means they have to feel good about their coach’s tone.
Do they need gentle support? Energetic encouragement? The purpose should still be served, but it must be served in a tone that your team can accept.
Content
Your coach needs to have quality content to roll out for you. Ideas are great, but your team needs actionable information that they can study, practice with and use. The purpose and tone of their strategy should work together to generate a high-quality performance method from its content.
We’ve covered a lot of information in this article.
We know a lot of it will be new to you, and we’re hoping it will all be helpful. If you need any assistance assessing your needs and identifying your solution, though, that’s where we come in.
At Selling Revolution, we’re here to help you make the most of your sales team’s potential.
Book a free call with us today! We look forward to serving you and your team.