What do increased opportunities, increased salesperson retention, and increased team confidence have in common? They’re all benefits you can experience when you find the right sales coaching platform.
Like most things, great sales coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all. Choosing the right sales coaching platform for your team can empower your reps by providing them with the tools they need and consistent feedback on their performance and improvement. Choosing the wrong platform wastes their time and your money.
Fortunately, there’s a tried and true method to help you choose the best platform for your organization. I’d like to take this opportunity to walk you through the four things you should consider when choosing the best sales coaching platform for your team.
How to Get the Best Sales Coaching Platform for Your Team
You (or your staff) may be wondering do we really need coaching? There are many reasons why sales teams tend to resist coaching, but those reasons fall into two main categories:
Category #1 is opposition to change.
How long has your most senior salesperson been with your organization? They likely have a set way of doing things, which in my experience means they’ll push back against anything that threatens to change those habits and patterns.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing! It can be a sign of dedication. However, for your team and company to grow and remain modern and relevant, change is necessary.
Category #2 is the fear of perceived incompetence.
Many sales professionals may see even the prospect of sales coaching as an insult to their performance. After all, why would you be exploring sales coaching unless they were underperforming? A good way to approach team members with this mindset is to point out that investing in sales coaching is evidence that you believe in the team. You wouldn’t spend time and money here if you didn’t believe they were capable of using the coaching experience to achieve great things.
The truth is that every sales team can benefit from the use of a great sales coaching platform. Our program, the Sales Accelerator, has helped hundreds of sales teams modernize their sales approach, build confidence, and improve their performance.
Let’s dive into the elements you should consider when researching the best sales coaching platform for your team.
1. Cultural Fit
Sales coaching is about more than imparting information: it only succeeds when it prompts a cultural and mindset shift in your team. Sales coaching needs to provide new beliefs and new behaviors. Improving a sales force’s results requires building a culture of consistent growth and development, along with acquiring the competencies necessary to improve their results.
There are a lot of really great coaching platforms available, but many of them just provide information without focusing on cultural fit. By cultural fit, we mean coaching that is tailored to the sales forces’ major challenges, like acquiring meetings, controlling the process, and dealing with different stakeholders and decision-makers.
Choose a tool that can foster this cultural change for your team by making certain it creates accountability for changed beliefs and behaviors. Your sales results only improve when your sales force lets go of outdated ideas and assumptions and adopts new ones in their place. Your team will only take new actions if they believe those actions will address their challenges.
2. Measures of Success
To determine whether or not the coaching is successful, you’ll need to identify measurable metrics. There are three key metrics that prove your coaching is effective.
First and most importantly, you want to measure the number of new meetings and new opportunities your team acquires. Second, a good coaching platform can help you increase the size of your deals, another metric that is easily tracked and reported. Third, you should track won deals.
There are other changes that are not so easy to capture but worth observing. You want to see greater confidence, greater competence, more effective language, and a change in your team’s understanding of how best to sell in different scenarios.
Does the coaching platform you’re considering contribute to success in the metrics that matter to your team?
3. Customizability
As we mentioned above, no successful sales coaching program will be one-size-fits-all. Different sales organizations need different coaching and training in different areas at different times. One sales force may need to improve its prospecting to create new opportunities, while another needs to boost its ability to close deals. The same logic applies to individual sales professionals.
Your coaching platform should provide the ability to customize your learning path, ensuring you can prioritize the content that is most valuable to you and your team now. It should also let you provide different content to different salespeople based on their individual needs, as some will need different coaching than others.
Choose a platform that allows your team to receive targeted coaching and training on the challenges that most affect the whole team, as well as serving the needs of each individual salesperson.
4. Long-Term Gains
Sales coaching shouldn’t be a one-time thing. In the past, we trained salespeople with what we call check-box training, the one-day training that allowed the company to say they trained their sales force. We know now that development is a process that occurs over time. A good coaching platform allows you to work on skills and competencies over time, developing each competency before moving on to the next. It also supports the constant, never-ending improvement necessary in a rapidly changing sales environment.
Your coaching platform should give you the opportunity to gain new beliefs, skills, and tools. Those beliefs and skills should come from a modern sales approach, one that addresses the challenges of selling in the 21st century.
It’s important that you move away from a transactional view of training and development and towards a transformational approach. Development is a change initiative, just like the ones you develop for your clients, so you need a platform and an approach that supports long-term development.
Making the Most of Your Sales Coaching Platform
Selecting the best sales coaching platform for your team is essential to ensure the success of not only your coaching efforts but your larger sales goals. By limiting your search to platforms that enable cultural change and offer customizable coaching paths that lead to long-term wins on the metrics that matter to your team, you’ll be able to pick the best tools for your organization.
You can get the most out of your sales coaching experience with Sales Accelerator, which offers a modern sales approach and built-in accountability, teaches salespeople new beliefs and new behaviors, and builds the skills and competencies they need to succeed in today’s complex sales environment. Schedule a meeting today to explore Sales Accelerator, so you can see if it’s right for your team.
