Need higher performing sellers? Master these two types of sales coaching
The most successful leaders—in both team satisfaction and performance—prioritize coaching.
Coaching is easy to appreciate but harder to prioritize, especially towards quarter end when the pressure to close deals reaches its peak. To maximize efficiency and maintain a steady cadence of coaching opportunities, we’ve found two particular types of coaching have the most impact on sales teams' performance.
Why sales coaching is important
When sales coaching is conducted effectively, it makes a quantifiable difference to the bottom line—improving win rates by up to 29%. It’s also an investment in the company's longer-term success from an individual performance and an employee retention perspective. Coaching will help sellers develop their craft and support their sense of belonging in an organization that continually invests in them.
Two top types of sales coaching
Numentum promotes two types of sales coaching: Deal-specific sales coaching and skills coaching and mentorship.
The first focuses on leaders' opportunities to support sellers through specific moments in the deal process. This coaching is ad hoc and continuous, depending on need. The second type of coaching considers seller development with a longer-term view, focusing on the skills required to support career progression.
1. Deal-specific sales coaching
Opportunities to conduct in-the-moment sales coaching occur throughout the deal process. In an environment where everyone is pressed for time, leaders often resort to ‘jumping in’ to help a seller struggling in the moment. This denies the seller an opportunity to solve a problem on their own and gives the leader-as-coach very little material to work with.
We advise leaders to take a step back and give sellers the space to test their skills and make mistakes—provided there is space for learning and reflection afterward.
Tactically, creating this space means taking the seller for a coffee (or jumping on an informal call if working remotely) and asking probing, open-ended questions like:
Tell me what happened?
What did you see/hear?
How do you think that went?
The goal is to help sellers develop situational self-awareness. Some individuals will be hyper-aware and affected by what they perceive went wrong, whereas others will need help to see their blind spots. In either case, leaders must create an environment of psychological safety where feedback can be shared constructively. Conduct conversations through the lens of how a seller can improve their performance next time.
Timing is everything. We teach the importance of sharing feedback when learnings are fresh, rather than the next day or waiting for the 1-on-1. When deals are in process, the real-time aspect of coaching is fundamental to its success.
Technologies like Gong and Chorus can be extremely useful tools in this process. Once feedback is shared and a seller understands what to do differently next time, they can listen back to the recording to cement the learning.
Gong explains three key benefits of this data-backed approach to coaching:
Leaders can suggest changes based on actual evidence rather than second-hand reports on how the seller performs in meetings.
Knowing where a seller struggles in advance means leaders can coach them during meetings (rather than taking it over).
Call analysis and reporting enable leaders to track improvements across the team at scale.
Taking these steps will help leaders to build stronger, more empowered, and confident sellers in the long run.
2. Skill coaching and mentorship
Beyond tactical support with in-motion deals, leaders need to offer longer-term, skills-based coaching. Numentum customers initially tell us that this can be hard to prioritize. Instead, review time comes around, and there’s a scramble to identify the correct criteria for assessing performance. Was this seller meant to be finessing how they structure discovery calls this quarter, or was it their social selling strategy? Are the right benchmarks in place to measure improvement from the last review?
Without a development plan in place for each individual, reviews will be based on peer feedback and quota attainment. These are two important pieces of the puzzle, but alone they won’t develop individuals into high-performing sellers.
Leaders need to work in lockstep with their team members to agree on a set of developmental priorities—soft skills, sales skills, or a mix of the two.
For example, solution-based selling might be the focus for a seller over the course of two quarters. This would involve a sales enablement training program, role play to allow the seller to flex their new skills, and call analysis to see the skills being used.
With a skill coaching program in place, leaders can also ensure that in-the-moment coaching opportunities tie back to the seller’s overall objective.
As a prerequisite for this approach to work, leaders need to understand who their sellers are as people, what motivates them, and how they want to grow. Come back to these fundamentals regularly during 1-on-1s to keep goals front of mind and to make the path towards them attainable.
Maximize impact by coaching the right people
While everyone on a sales team will benefit from coaching, research has found an outsized boost in performance when focusing on one specific group of sellers: those right in the middle.
Your lowest performers are likely in the wrong role altogether and a career conversation, rather than coaching, might be more beneficial. At the other end of the spectrum, star performers already meet or exceed expectations. Coaching has limited results beyond what they are achieving already.
Describing the opportunity for leaders, Harvard Business Review writes:
“The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% — your core performers. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19%. In fact, even moderate improvement in coaching quality — simply from below to above average — can mean a six to eight percent increase in performance across 50% of your sales force. Often as not, that makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.”
Companies must ensure that sales leaders use their coaching time smartly by focusing on turning the majority of a team from good to great.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a buyer experience consultancy that helps B2B organizations go to market faster, bigger, and more effectively without the need for an expensive and time-consuming overhaul of existing processes and systems. We partner with CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CHROs to develop customized training programs that integrate brand, sales, and marketing to deliver accelerated revenue momentum.
By efficiently focusing on the buyer experience, we advance the skills, information, and interactions sales professionals must deploy to engage with today’s hyper-informed buyers effectively. Our approach aligns sales with marketing to maximize the utility of brand investments, content, and digital channels—dramatically improving pipelines, shortening buying cycles, and increasing conversion rates.
Learn more about our approach with this introduction to the Connected and Empowered Enterprise, and follow us on LinkedIn for more strategies and tactics that drive revenue forward.
