14 Sales Coaching Tricks to Get the Results You Want

Sales coaching can be a valuable tool for helping salespeople improve their skills and increase their success rate. In fact, a recent study found that sales coaching can lead to an average increase of 88% in sales performance.

But with so many sales books, coaching techniques and strategies out there, it can be hard to know where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of some of the most effective sales coaching tricks and techniques, backed by data and analysis.

One key strategy is to focus on helping salespeople develop the right mindset. A positive, growth-oriented mindset can make a big difference in a salesperson’s ability to overcome obstacles and close deals. In fact, research has shown that salespeople with a growth mindset are more likely to achieve their goals and outperform their peers.

Another effective sales coaching trick is to provide salespeople with regular feedback and support. This can help them to identify areas for improvement and develop the skills they need to succeed. In addition, providing regular coaching and support can help to boost morale and keep salespeople motivated.

One tool that can be particularly useful for sales coaching is a writing assistant that allows salespeople to access canned messages and responses quickly and easily. This can be especially helpful when dealing with common objections or questions from potential customers. By providing salespeople with access to a library of pre-written responses, you can help them to save time and increase their effectiveness.

What’s best is that you and your team can start using FlyMSG for free and evaluate our solution during your coaching process to see if it fits your needs.

Overall, sales coaching can be a powerful tool for improving sales performance and driving results. By implementing the strategies and techniques outlined in this article, you can help your sales team improve their prospecting in order to become more successful and achieve their goals.

What is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching guides sales representatives to improve individual performance and results in any B2B sales or any other type of sales organization.

Effective sales coaching includes:

• Regular one-on-one meetings with reps
• Regular team meetings
• Performance metrics analysis
• Motivational speech and empowerment
• Sales coaching programs and training for reps

Managers use sales coaching to get the best out of each sales representative. How? By practicing positive reinforcement and giving their team the sales prospecting tools and resources they need to achieve business goals.

3 reasons why sales coaching is vital for your sales team

Sales coaching is an important tool for helping sales teams improve their performance and achieve their goals. Here are three reasons why sales coaching is vital for your sales team:

1. Improved sales performance: Sales coaching can lead to an average increase of 29% in sales wins, according to a recent study. By providing salespeople with the skills and support they need to succeed, you can help them to improve their performance and close more deals.
2. Increased morale and motivation: Providing regular coaching and support can help to boost morale and keep salespeople motivated. This can lead to a more positive work environment and help salespeople to stay engaged and focused on achieving their goals.
3. Better customer relationships: Sales coaching can also help salespeople to develop better relationships with customers. By providing them with the skills and tools they need to communicate with customers and address their needs effectively, you can help them to build trust and foster long-term relationships.

Since we explained what sales coaching is and its importance, let’s mention some helpful stats to assess sales coaching further.

What Can We Learn From The Stats About Sales Coaching?

Data and statistics are crucial to understanding how sales coaching helps sales teams to improve individual and overall performance.

Let’s share some key stats and conclusions from the 2021 Sales Coaching Survey conducted by Second Nature:

1. 96% of respondents agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘the right sales coaching can make a significant difference in performance.’
2. 64% of respondents feel that salespeople need more coaching time than they receive today.
3. The two biggest challenges in coaching salespeople are managers lacking sales coaching skills (51%) and the lack of effective sales coaching tools (39%).
4. 27% of respondents say sales professionals receive training 2-4 times per month. Almost the same number (25%) admit they conduct pieces of training only up to 6 times per year or every other month.
5. 37% of respondents say the typical length of a sales coaching session in their company lasts around 15-30 minutes. Only 13% say their sessions are more than 60 minutes long.
6. 41% of salespeople and sales managers/leaders say a sales coaching program increased sales measurably.

The results from this study show how vital sales coaching is for any business, regardless of its size and industry. Sales leaders and enablement teams agree that their companies should invest more in sales coaching.

What Is The Role Of A Sales Manager During Sales Coaching?

Most sales managers do what their job titles say: lead and set sales quotas and goals for their team.

However, a sales manager involved in their reps’ growth develops habits and skills more attributed to sales coaches, such as:

• Empathy
• Self-management
• Active listening
• Storytelling
• Strong communication skills
• Adaptability

As a manager, your role during sales coaching is to be a confident leader. You must help and understand every team member’s needs to fulfill business goals. Offering support and motivation are critical to becoming a great sales leader.

3 Biggest Challenges Sales Managers Face During Sales Coaching

These are the three biggest challenges you might face during sales coaching:

1. Lack of coaching abilities: the best leaders aren’t always good at coaching. Start training if you struggle to deliver helpful advice and unlock reps’ untapped potential. The more you practice, the better coach you’ll become.
2. Lack of time: spending enough time with reps during meetings and engaging in productive coaching conversations is the only way to deliver excellent sales coaching. Time constraints may be an issue if you manage a team of 10+ people, but you should make an effort and organize weekly one on ones with team members.
3. Lack of structure: if your rep feels you’re not putting enough effort into preparing coaching sessions, they’ll lose motivation. Before starting a training program, you can use FlyMSG to write down and structure the key points you want to discuss. After every session, follow up to keep track of progress. Reps must understand the goals and expected results of sales training.

Let’s share 14 tips from sales pros that will help you overcome these challenges and many more.

14 Sales Coaching Tricks To Achieve Success With Your Sales Team

Successful sales coaching takes time and effort. Follow these 14 sales coaching tips and tricks to train reps and achieve goals in no time.

1. Create a sales coaching plan template

A sales coaching template for sales managers helps you deliver a practical sales coaching experience to reps. Even if you need to modify the structure, having a template will speed up the preparation for individual meetings.

You can create this template with FlyMSG and adjust it to your needs. It makes the sales coaching process more efficient, as you will not need to write from scratch each time.

What should you include in your sales coaching template? Consider these sections:

• The name of the employee
• The goals or objectives: e.g., increase profit margins/units sold by 10% for next month.
• The key sales metrics or measurements: e.g., total revenue, revenue by product or service, percentage of income from new business, or percentage of revenue from existing customers.
• Questions: e.g., What are your most significant accomplishments from last week?
• Follow-up notes: e.g., in the next session, talk about improving the sales process to achieve your KPIs.

Either way, creating sales coach templates saves you a lot of time and energy in the long run.

2. Set clear goals, expectations, and desired outcomes

Each team member should clearly understand how you measure their performance and how their work affects your company.

As a sales leader, you should set up sales goals at the beginning of the process and ensure your team knows what you expect from them regarding time commitment, quality, and quantity of their work.

Once you establish clear objectives, measure your team’s results. Assign points or grades for each metric and compare scores at the end of each quarter.

While there will always be trade-offs between quality and deadlines. If reps know what to do and how to do it, everyone should be able to work in the same direction.

3. Establish a regular cadence for coaching

Establishing a regular cadence for coaching is paramount to success. To prepare a more effective sales training, set the timing, stick to it and monitor progress over time.

When establishing a cadence, there are many different options:

1. Weekly coaching sessions
2. Bi-weekly coaching sessions
3. Monthly coaching sessions
4. 1-on-1 coaching sessions
5. Small group sessions

A regular coaching schedule can set you apart as a leader.

This way, reps can plan their week around sales coaching sessions, prepare questions and seek clarification during your meetings. They’ll make the most of their time with you.

Another benefit of a regular cadence is that it creates consistency in your leadership style, which increases the trust of your team members and their sales effectiveness.

4. Create a personalized coaching plan for each sales rep

Coaching is vital to a rep’s success. Not only does it help develop skills, but it also helps them understand their customers better and how to speak their language to close more deals.

A personalized coaching plan for each sales rep is vital. It should include:

• Projected goals and KPIs
• Communication and relationship management
• Training and development
• Client engagement and follow-up
• Sales skills and techniques
• Product knowledge and expertise
• Account management and closing skills

Once you create a personalized sales coaching plan, regularly monitor progress to ensure that the reps move in the right direction.

5. Continuously train and onboard sales reps

Sales reps are the first point of contact customers have with your company. Reps can be responsible for everything from answering customer questions to making sales presentations.

You must provide a great onboarding process to your new team members. If they’re well trained, they’ll be able to deliver a successful sales pitch and close deals effectively.

How can you onboard new sales reps and train your current team in the latest industry trends? Working with a sales training and consulting company like Vengreso is all you need.

What is Vengreso?

Vengreso is a well-known sales training company that transformed into a productivity management software company in 2022. You can learn more about this historic pivot in this FlyMSG podcast.

Our team provides effective sales training programs and FlyMSG, a free digital writing assistant and text expander. It helps sellers, marketers, HR professionals, recruiters, customer service and support reps, and all knowledge workers become more productive in their daily work and improve their personal writing habits.

Let’s briefly discuss our sales training programs that help your team prospect better and sell more.

Modern Sales Mastery For Individuals

Modern Sales Mastery for Individuals is our training for success in modern sales that helps business owners, sales managers, and small sales teams to connect better with buyers. After completing the training, you’ll be able to:

• Book more meetings
• Grow your sales pipeline
• Close more deals

Start your membership for $397/year and access 13 on-demand courses, such as the LinkedIn Sales Mastery and Sales Navigator Mastery. Unlock modern sales mastery bonus items and save $2,297.

6. Help reps identify their top sales opportunities

Give reps access to the financial reports and competitor analyses to identify top sales opportunities.

Reps should pay attention to trends in product usage, customer acquisition costs, and the timing of new product launches. By doing this research, agents can identify their top sales opportunities early on and lay the groundwork for possible cross selling and a successful sales campaign.

Another way reps can find top sales opportunities is by creating a list of target customers. Motivate your employees to review a company’s files, read competitors’ marketing materials, and use different survey types to explore your customers to identify prospects with similar needs.

Once reps identify their top sales opportunities, they should focus on those prospects to maximize the chances of closing deals.

7. Communicate simply and directly

To boost sales effectiveness, keep communications short and straightforward.

Effective communication is essential for good coaching. Be clear and concise with your messages, follow up on your commitments and establish a non-judgmental environment.

Successful coaches are clear communicators who can listen to their reps and address their needs in a way that resonates.

8. Ask lots of questions and listen carefully

To provide constructive and positive reinforcement, you must listen first what are rep’s concerns. During your meetings, let them talk more and practice active listening.

What should you do to encourage employees to open up in one-on-one sessions? Introduce the meeting goals, sit back, listen and ask only relevant questions.

Remember this: sales coaching sessions are about them, not you.

9. Use data to build trust and find issues

Data is key to creating trust and credibility in any organization.

When you share information about your company’s goals and outcomes with employees, they can feel more invested in the organization and its success.

It can lead to more significant employee commitment and better overall sales performance.

10. Use recognition to build confidence and momentum

An employee that receives recognition is happy and productive.

According to a recent study, 70%+ of employees with good recognition experiences at work rate their lives more positively and are more likely to thrive than those whose efforts are not fully acknowledged.

To become a great sales coach, you must regularly give positive feedback to your team. When an employee feels valued, good performance and strong results come alone. Utilizing employee recognition software can facilitate this process for you.

11. Don’t be afraid to let go of underperformers

One of the most challenging decisions you can make as a sales manager is creating redundant roles within your team.

The reality is that when you have great employees in your sales teams, it’s easier to identify who’s underperforming. While your best sales reps deserve recognition, underperformers must understand they’re harming the team’s reputation.

Let go of underperformers before their conduct and attitude represent a considerable cost for the company. Let them know it’s the best decision for both parties and express gratitude for their work.

12. Don’t micromanage and know when to let go

Micromanaging bring sales reps’ confidence down and negatively affects their performance.

When does sales coaching become micromanaging? When sales managers don’t provide clear guidance to their team and don’t give them the necessary tools to succeed.

You’re close to micromanaging if you’re scared of delegating tasks and focus more on team performance than individual reps’ improvements.

To avoid this situation, consider applying these practices:

1. Set clear and realistic expectations
2. Prepare easy-to-follow guides to complete complex processes
3. Give your team access to data and technology to reach objectives
4. Conceive meetings as an open conversation, not as a monologue
5. Provide honest and constructive feedback

Sometimes, a salesperson doesn’t perform up to par, and no amount of coaching or feedback will help them improve. In this case, it’s best to let them go and hire someone who is a better fit for the team. This might be the hardest job for a sales coach – but in the end it’s better for them and the company and you.

13. Implement sales productivity tools

A sales productivity tool can help you achieve your sales goals faster. These tools allow employees to do more in less time.

Quick productivity hack: If you use sales productivity software to help your sales reps get more free time to close more deals, you’ll see an instant performance improvement.

If you want to automate repetitive tasks and let your sales reps focus on more critical aspects of your business, try FlyMSG. Read on to discover how it works and how it can help your team.

What Is FlyMSG And How Does It Work?

FlyMSG is a freemium sales productivity tool that helps sales teams save 20+ hours each month they spend on writing tasks. Our cloud-based personal writing assistant and auto text expander help your team eliminate repetitive tasks forever.

Instead of searching, copying, pasting, or writing sales messages from scratch, your team can store and organize their best-performing content in one place and save it under shortcodes or FlyCuts. While writing online, they can automatically expand, enhance, or replace text with these previously saved sales messages.

If they get stuck and lack inspiration, they can use our premium content templates, known as FlyPlates, created by sales industry professionals. They can borrow over 50 templates from our template library.

These templates help them maintain brand consistency and tonal uniformity, increase engagement, streamline personal productivity, communicate more effectively, create video for sales messaging, and drive better outcomes.

How To Use FlyMSG In Your Sales Process?

FlyMSG has many sales use cases. We have divided our sales templates into six crucial categories. Here are some examples.

Connection Requests

Prospecting Messages

Trigger Events

Upselling

Welcome Messages

General Admin

Cold Outreach

As you can see, whatever the need you might have, we got you covered.

How To Sign Up For FlyMSG

You can start with our free plan or upgrade to FlyMSG premium plans:

• Starter at $3.97/mo – up to 50 FlyPlates
• Growth at $9.97/mo – unlimited FlyPlates
• Sales Pro Plan at $24.97/mo

Sales Pro Plan includes:

1. The professional sales license
2. FlyMSG Growth plan
3. Modern Sales Mastery for Individuals training
4. Unlimited FlyPlates

For more information, visit our pricing page. You can create your free account and download our Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge extensions.

14. Celebrate wins — no matter how small

Express gratitude to your sales team when hitting a milestone or achieving new targets.

Did you meet sales quotas this month? Are you getting higher ratings from customers lately? If so, it’s time to celebrate success.

A great sales coaching culture in your company is not only about growth and performance; praising every day wins improves employee wellbeing and overall satisfaction.

Sales Coaching: The Bottom Line

Sales coaching helps sales teams learn effective selling techniques and get better at selling. Sales coaches work one-on-one with sales reps to help them develop their skills and build confidence. They can guide topics like pitching, closing, and negotiation and help sellers feel more comfortable in the sales role.

A key benefit of coaching is that it can improve sales results. By providing reps with feedback and encouragement, coaches can help salespeople build intuition, decision-making skills, and confidence.

They can also help reps focus on what they’re good at while minimizing their weaknesses. All these factors can help sales teams close more deals, leading to higher revenue and profit.

Besides effective sales coaching, you must provide your team with the proper tools to boost their productivity. FlyMSG helps you create sales content in minutes and achieve more in less time. It leads to healthy work culture and increases results in a shorter period.

To boost your team’s efficiency, start using FlyMSG for free.

Send DataSend Data

Send DataSend Data