It’s always surprising to me how few companies do coaching well, so here are three tips that you should be employing in your organization immediately to help with coaching.
First, you need to coach your salespeople one-on-one at least once every other week. You can’t simply do coaching in sales meetings because you have to have private conversations with your sellers. The meeting needs to be at roughly the same time every time they take place. I don’t care when it is, but it needs to be scheduled in advance and needs to be done consistently. Doing this makes the coaching objective.
Finally, coaching must include next steps and accountability. This is the big one that most people get wrong. At the end of the meeting, you need to ask the seller what they plan on doing differently because coaching is all about changes in one’s behavior. Then, at the start of the next meeting, you have to check-in and ask your sellers how they did with the proposed behavior changes. If they don’t do them, then there’s an attitude problem. If they do implement the changes but are unsuccessful, then there’s a training problem. These are two very different problems to resolve, so make sure you’re not mixing anything up.
Remember, coaching should be one-on-one, done on a consistent basis, and should have next steps for accountability.
These three changes will make a world of difference and will drive performance up on your team, creating a nonstop sales boom.
