Are You A Good Sales Coach?

A job in sales can be very different from company to company. Just because you hired someone with 10+ years of experience selling a similar business solution as the one that your company sells doesn’t mean it’s going to be a flawless transition – at least not without some coaching.

The performance of a sales team is heavily reliant on the coaching they receive, yet, there is a disconnect between how much time sales leaders think they spend coaching, and how much time their sales team thinks they were coached. According to Scott Edinger, author of the HBR article “Sales Teams Need More (and Better) Coaching”, “Leaders reported that they spent a considerable amount of time coaching their direct reports and scored themselves high on their efforts– on average, just shy of the 80th percentile. Direct reports responded by saying that they’d received little to no coaching from their leaders and scored them low — on average around just the 38th percentile.”

So why is there such a stark contrast in responses? When we are put in the position of coach, we can forget that each member of our audience has a unique SOCIAL STYLE that might be different from one person to the next. In order to be an effective coach, we must tailor our coaching for each member of our sales team. What is perceived as coaching to an Amiable Style salesperson, could be perceived as unnecessary chit chat to a Driving Style person. Believing that the same selling advice is going to be useful for all SOCIAL STYLEs is false.

Oftentimes, those in sales management or sales leadership were once in sales themselves. They developed a strategy for selling that worked appropriately for them and they expect their staff to be similar. But just like each salesperson will have to tailor their selling Style to their audience in order to achieve the sale, your management needs to be able to tailor their sales coaching to multiple SOCIAL STYLEs in order to be best understood – it’s not a one size fits all.

When your sales staff (including those in sales leadership) is equipped with SOCIAL STYLE training, they become better suited to sell to different Styles as well as coach and be coached by different Styles. This is because SOCIAL STYLE training at TRACOM also encompasses Versatility training.

As a result of TRACOM’s SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility

  • 92% of Salespeople developed more positive customer relationships
  • 87% of Salespeople increased their ability to influence or persuade customers
  • 79% of Salespeople improved their ability to gain ongoing sales
  • 58% of Salespeople closed sales that they otherwise might not have

Learn more about SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility Training for Sales here.

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