How Often Should You Coach Your Salespeople?

Eighty percent of sales managers say they coach their teams. Yet only 48% of salespeople say that they receive coaching, and only 13% find it helpful.^* One reason sales teams have such a chaotic and disconnected view of whether coaching is confusion about what sales coaching is, and what it is not. Another reason is a lack of structured cadence or rhythms for coaching.

When sales managers know when to coach and about what, they can communicate and coach more productively, and salespeople can understand and receive that coaching more effectively.

While every sales team’s coaching cadence will be structured differently, here are some different types and times for coaching:

• Onboarding coaching
• Weekly (coaching
• Pipeline and opportunity-based coaching
• Skills and abilities-based coaching
• Pop-up coaching
• Annual coaching

Onboarding Sales Coaching

Onboarding new salespeople is a big task and an important one. How you handle onboarding can determine the success of the hire and the success of the sales team. Great coaching systems include a coaching component to ensure that every new team member is individually oriented, understood, and motivated.

Onboarding coaching can include helping the salesperson to understand and identify their own goals in the role, as well as what motivates them and how they like to be coached, managed, and engaged with.

Structured coaching leads to self-leadership

By tapping into their internal drivers and priorities early, sales managers set the salesperson and themselves up for a productive long-term relationship. What happens in these coaching conversations can be referred to throughout the salesperson’s career with the company to support their internal motivation to grow.

Weekly Sales Coaching

Our sales leaders meet with salespeople twice weekly for coaching calls. While this might sound excessive to sales leaders accustomed to less-frequent one-on-ones, it provides substantial benefits.

Regular, frequent, scheduled coaching helps salespeople align their high-level goals with their weekly activities and stay accountable to them. Our leaders meet with salespeople on Monday to go over what they’re working on that week, identify any challenges or problems, work through them, and set targets to achieve by the end of the week.

A second weekly coaching conversation occurs on Friday to review how they did in reference to those targets and activities. This keeps salespeople motivated to provide a positive activity report and provides an opportunity to catch any issues, obstacles, or problems early and correct them immediately instead of waiting for performance reports at the end of the month or quarter.

Pipeline and Opportunity-Based Sales Coaching

Perhaps the most common sales coaching conversation is a reality check of their pipeline and coaching around specific opportunities. These conversations center around the overall health of their pipeline, deep dive into specific sales opportunities, and focus on specific aspects of winning the deal.

For instance, the coaching session may focus on identifying key stakeholders, asking the right discovery questions, or focusing on the right messaging and planning for a particular opportunity. Unhealthy sales projects will be questioned and disqualified out of the pipeline.  These sessions may be one-on-one or, in the case of collaborative selling, group coaching.

Skills and Abilities Coaching

In the course of scheduled coaching conversations and performance reviews, individuals and their managers may identify specific skills and abilities for improvement. Training can be a necessary and important component of upskilling. Then, targeted coaching can help develop and solidify those new skills through role play, practice, and questioning.

Pop-Up Coaching

Sometimes, a salesperson just needs a little help to find their way. Other times, it’s important to check in for no reason but to let people know you’ve got their back and they can come to you with anything.

Regular but unscheduled “pop-up” coaching is an important tool for managers to catch things that might otherwise fly under the radar. This can take the form of water cooler conversations where you check in informally, drop-in call recording followed by a conversation on strengths and weaknesses, or salesperson-directed coaching where they pop into your office by their own choice.

Annual Sales Coaching

Annual sales coaching can help salespeople review the primary goals and motivators originally identified during onboarding, and fine tune them to match where they are personally at this point. It’s also important for coaches to sit down with them and help them identify their personal goals for the year, and a strategy and tactics for achieving that goal.

The insights from these coaching sessions should be retained for review during quarterly coaching as well as at other times as necessary.

Structured Coaching Leads to Self-Leadership

Having a structured approach to sales coaching helps managers ensure that the salespeople receive their coaching and that it accomplishes what it intends to. It prevents things from falling through cracks, and represents valuable investment in your most valuable asset: Your people.

It also helps to establish a self-leadership and coaching culture that will benefit everyone on the team.

In order to manage a full sales coaching system, it’s important to have tools that can track not only performance against quotas, but also progress against personal goals, motivators, and other targets that are set together. Our upcoming product Membrain Elevate provides this and much more, which is one of the major reasons we built it. We’d love to show you more.