3 Smart Ways Busy Sales Leaders Coach Teams

Great sales leaders are not always great sales performers. But they are always great people developers. Unfortunately, most sales leaders never have enough time to regularly coach their sales team. If you’re one of those unlucky ones, you are not alone! Incredibly, 47% of sales leaders admit they invest less than 30 minutes coaching each sales rep per week. 

This number is staggering, considering that coaching should be an integral part of your sales process if you want to get the desired results out of your team. Coaching helps sales teams to consistently improve performance, while simultaneously helping sales managers improve sales processes and training techniques, and pinpoint progress and areas of improvement for their sales team. Above all, coaching has a huge impact on sales numbers. In fact, companies who invest in sales coaching drive 16.7% more sales. 

Whether it’s missed quotas, inconsistent messaging or lack of sales readiness, there are challenges your sales team faces that can be improved with effective sales coaching. It is a given though that you, as a sales leader, have an extremely busy schedule. Therefore, it is important for you to identify loopholes quickly. 

How to Identify LoopHoles Quickly

It is difficult to ask your individual performers to share their challenges and analyze the performance of each individual to identify loopholes when you cannot spend much of your time coaching. Using a performance tracking tool that allows you to analyze the productivity and activities of your sales team is the best way to get things started. You can identify their strengths and weaknesses so that you can coach them where they lack. The tool also helps you decide who should be given coaching and who are the top performers.  

Prodoscore helps you track every activity of an individual sales rep at a micro-level, calculate their performance and productivity, and view a report in the simplest actionable format that helps find opportunities for improvements. 

3 Ways To Coach Your Team During a Tight Schedule

Once you have identified the loopholes, here’s how you can ensure a consistent performance improvement coaching when you are running on a tight schedule:

1. Peer-to-Peer Coaching Structure

You don’t have to be the only one coaching your team. You can simply set up a peer-to-peer coaching structure. Prodoscore’s performance tracking tool will measure different performance parameters of each individual to help you identify the best performer or their area of expertise within the sales cycle. You can ask them to deliver coaching sessions to the other sales reps on that topic.  

For instance, one rep might excel at lead generation, while the other might master the proposal submission stage. You can then have a plan in place to spend a little time to create relevant coaching materials and exercises (such as a playbook or playlist of video call recordings) that other reps can listen to. This way, the respective sales rep can become the “go to person” who helps out when other reps are struggling when you are not around. 

2. Outsource Coaching

Outsourcing sales coaching is a great strategy if you have a lot on your plate. You can bring in a sales consultant or a subject matter expert who can coach for 1-3 days a week supplementing your coaching inputs. 

For instance, you may bring in someone who is an expert selling into the same industry who can come share tips with the team and answer questions.

Some coaches may prefer taking the sales reps out of their day-to-day to get them more engaged and therefore get the most out of the coaching sessions. Of course, there are companies that prefer to do it inhouse due to budget constraints, but outsourcing does have more pros than cons. 

3. Plan an Offsite or Summit

While you can identify and have each individual’s coaching needs using the performance tracking tool, you can also have a common set of challenges that your team is facing. For instance, the team might be facing difficulties with closing big accounts, landing deals from a specific region or drafting conversion-driven emails. Hosting a quarterly offsite or summit can be a great way to divide and conquer topics that the team needs more in-depth coaching on collectively. This will ensure that you address the common challenges at once, saving your time in addressing the individuals. 

Remember, not addressing the challenges of your sales team in time is one of the reasons why sales reps quit and look for opportunities elsewhere.

Getting Things Started

Now that you know a few ways to ramp coaching even when you’re strapped for time, it’s time to get your plan into motion. Prodoscore automatically captures thousands of data points across your cloud tools and gives you actionable data in quick time. 

Get sales coaching rolling. Bring visibility and a score to the performance of each individual sales rep today. Get a FREE demo!