Sales Coaching Explained: Everything You Need to Know

If you’re looking to take your team to the next level and increase revenue growth, sales coaching is the way to do it. It can revolutionize a team and boost morale.

Our thorough guide will outline what this type of coaching is, why it’s important, how to implement regular sales coaching for your company, and the benefits of implementing it for your team.

What Is Sales Coaching? 

Sales coaching includes the knowledge, skills, training, and sales enablement tools provided to reps to improve performance. This type of coaching helps teams meet their revenue goals and build on their existing skills.

Some companies offer in-house sales coaching while others prefer to hire outside resources to train their teams. 

What’s a sales coach?

A sales coach is the person who does the sales coaching. This person will work with reps either in-house or externally to get the team up to speed.

A sales coach can also help with GTM alignment for go-to-market teams. They’ll work directly with the team to ensure everyone uses the right methodology and consistent brand language.  

Although team coaching is a popular choice for companies, some coaches offer one-on-one training for individual reps, too.

Regardless of the setting, a sales coach will empower reps and give them the tools they need to succeed.

Sales coaching process

The sales coaching process can differ company to company (and from coach to coach), but the overall process usually involves: 

• An assessment of the team’s (or individual rep’s) current strengths and weaknesses
• Laying out clearly defined performance goals
• Building personalized coaching plans for each rep or team
• Implementing regular coaching sessions 
• Offering actionable feedback for improvement
• Tracking performance metrics to measure coaching effectiveness (and adjusting coaching plans as needed to address any discrepancies)

Why is sales coaching important?

Sales coaching is important because it increases performance through win rates.  This kind of coaching keeps sellers’ skills sharp and boosts morale and confidence for teams. Many of the best sales training companies use sessions as a foundation to empower their team members and elevate their individual performance. 

Brands should aim to continue optimizing their sales processes and regular coaching only benefits reps and their teams. 

How to Use AI for Sales Coaching

Although companies can hire in-house or external coaches, many brands run into the difficulty of coaching at scale for large organizations. Enter, Yoodli.

Yoodli is a virtual sales coach powered by generative AI that takes your team to the next level through training and data-backed, actionable feedback. Any company (no matter its size) can use Yoodli to implement personalized sales coaching for their reps at scale. 

For example, reps can put their skills to the test via realistic sales roleplays. Sellers can select a pre-existing scenario — like inbound customer discovery or cold sales calls — and tackle it head-on like any other client. Yoodli will then provide performance-based metrics and insights, as well as valuable sales coaching feedback, to pinpoint exactly where reps need to improve.

Using an at-scale tool like Yoodli lets sales leaders skip the guesswork of where exactly their team needs to improve so they can identify exactly what areas need work.

Because the roleplays are completely customizable, reps can put their skills to the test with a new scenario each time. Not only that, but they can also receive training in specific settings with different customer personalities to get experience in a risk-free setting.

Check out more of what Yoodli has to offer for sales coaching at https://yoodli.ai/. 

Best Practices and Tips for Sales Coaching

If you’re thinking about investing in this type of coaching, you’re in the right place. When implementing sales coaching for your team, here are some best practices, tips, and other considerations to keep in mind. 

Set clearly defined goals for the team

One of the most important aspects of sales coaching is clearly defining the team and individual rep goals. These should be “SMART” goals that are measurable. It’s essential to include performance metrics right from the get-go when creating these goals.

Make sure these goals are clear for the team, too. The expectations for sales reps should be spelled out so everyone is on the same page. This type of coaching is much more beneficial when there’s a solid foundation.

Get into a regular coaching schedule 

If you plan to reap the benefits of sales coaching, make sure you get into a regular schedule. Consistency is key. 

With inconsistent coaching, reps are more likely to forget skills and knowledge, and as a result, are more likely to lose confidence. 

It can also help to keep the format fresh. In other words, try to include a mix of one-on-one sessions and larger group trainings.

Give actionable feedback (not personal criticism)

One of the pitfalls of someone who’s new to sales coaching is slipping into the habit of offering personal criticism instead of actionable feedback. For example, instead of personal criticism, make sure your feedback is related to their performance with data-backed metrics to inform the feedback. 

You can also use the “sandwich” method by sandwiching your constructive criticism between two positive pieces of feedback. This also helps build rapport and trust with the team. 

4 Benefits of Sales Coaching

As you can guess, there are tons of advantages to investing in a bit of coaching for your team. No matter how experienced a sales rep, they can always stand to gain from some dedicated, personalized training. 

Here are the top four benefits of sales coaching, from revenue growth to boosted team morale and client satisfaction.

1. Sales coaching can improve ramp time (and boost quota + revenue).

The most obvious advantage of implementing sales coaching for your team is that it can help boost revenue growth. For example, when a sales coach pinpoints the strengths and weaknesses of your team, that team can then begin to work on the areas that need improvement. 

This, in turn, leads to increased win rates and of course, boosted revenue. 

But what’s more, investing in this kind of coaching can directly decrease ramp. One of the most common problems leaders in sales face is that their reps aren’t ramping up fast enough. For example, it could take a new sales reps months to get up to speed. But what if we could shorten that ramp time from months to just a few weeks? Trainings and coaching can do that. 

Similarly, this kind of coaching also addresses another type of pain point: quota attainment. It can help reps reach their quota and empowers them to succeed. Increasing attainment is another significant reason why coaching can increase a company’s overall revenue. 

2. It’s a great way to build confidence, boost morale, and increase objection handling skills.

Providing your teams with customized sales coaching can build their confidence and boost team morale, too. Implementing regular coaching sessions helps foster a positive work environment where reps feel at home enough to ask questions and improve their skills for the good of the overall team.

On top of that, reps can share knowledge with each other to establish more consistent best practices, methodology, and brand language during sales pitches, for example. 

Sales coaching can increase objection handling skills across teams, too, allowing reps to pick up and put into practice new strategies and approaches for handling those tough questions.

3. It increases customer satisfaction. 

Not surprisingly, coaching has a positive effect on customer satisfaction. Client satisfaction is more likely to increase when companies invest in their reps with coaching. When a sales team is confident in themselves and their skills, that confidence spills over into customer interactions. 

Sales coaching yields more positive customer interactions which helps reps develop stronger relationships with clients. 

4. Sales coaching allows for an investment in your team’s reps.

Leaders can use trainings and coaching as an investment in their team reps in a few different ways. For new hires, for example, having a sales coach provides a quicker process for onboarding. The personalized coaching can get the newest team members up to speed in no time. 

Plus, for existing, experienced reps, coaching can increase employee retention rates. That can lead to reduced sales turnover thanks to a more welcoming, positive work environment where investing in employees isn’t a rarity.

Challenges of Sales Coaching

Even though there are tons of benefits, that’s not to say there aren’t challenges associated with sales coaching. 

One of the most common challenges folks often run into is resistance from reps. Many people struggle with change, and some sales teams struggle more than others. Overcoming resistance from sellers who aren’t interested in coaching (or who think they don’t need it) can be tricky. Identifying and recognizing a rep’s wins can be a good way to chip away at that resistance. 

Another issue that often crops up in coaching is budget constraints. Sometimes, companies don’t have a pre-existing budget for investments like trainings and coaching, so that presents a challenge. However, more affordable, at-scale options like Yoodli can cut costs where it matters.

The Bottom Line

Sales coaching is a valuable tool companies should plan to invest in, one way or another. No sales rep is perfect and everyone, regardless of experience, can brush up on and improve their skills. 

A coaching tool like Yoodli can make a difference in teams, from boosted confidence to increased revenue growth.  

Sources

• Salesforce: “Sales Coaching: 10 Straightforward Tips That Work.”
• Zendesk: “Sales coaching: How to coach reps to succeed in 2023.”