Sales Management Coaching
Get the best out of your sales team
Sales management coaching is an underrated growth lever in young organizations. Young organizations often expect too much of Sales team leaders. In our conversation with over 100+ founders, we asked them to list down their expectations from the sales leaders. Here’s what we heard from them
Hiring quality talent, including help with sourcing
Deliver on (challenging) sales targets
Set up processes for effective lead management
Forecast revenue
Explore new channels
Managing the sales team
Escalation management
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As one sales leader put it quite aptly
We are expected to repair the car, even upgrade it without either stopping it or losing speed.
Sales leadership in startups is two jobs in one
Sales management in an early-stage company consists of two broad work areas.
Strong execution: As you set up your sales organization, you need to ensure that the system is running smoothly. This part deals with ensuring that your existing plans are being executed as desired. Here are some of the activities one needs to undertake to ensure plans are implemented.
- Ensure Sales team leader assigns targets to the team, input KPIs
- Ensure value proposition is well defined with requisite collateral
- Ensure understood and communicated consistently across the team
- Leads are sourced, qualified & nurtured correctly
- New sales hires as well as existing teams are being trained
- Ensure the post-sales process is running smoothly
Sales strategy consists of continuously adapting and evolving your sales organization, improving sales performance, and managing the sales team. In early-stage companies, quantum growth comes from a change in approach and new sales methods along with
- Identifying new sales channels
- Iterating and refining the sales process
- Understanding key drop off points in the funnel
- Iterating and refining the sales conversation
- Tweaking offering or value proposition based on buyer feedback
- Design & roll out and ensure adoption of sales reporting tools
- Review success rates across channels & reallocate resources
- Identifying new associate product offerings
Supporting Sales leaders in the form of sales leadership coaching can help them navigate through both these important parts of their job. These challenges are faced by sales leaders in established organizations too. However, they often have better support structures in the form of support teams such as sales analytics, marketing, L&D, HR, team leaders, to name a few to support them. In spite of these support systems, established organizations frequently engage sales management coaching as a development tool for young leaders.
Sales coaching can help by bridging the gap in execution and strategy
B2B Sales/Business coaches act as a sounding board for your sales leaders as they navigate through these two important work areas.
On sales execution, sales coaching helps sales leaders set up strong sales processes quickly by using proven templates so that the sales engine runs smoothly from day one. Sales leadership coaching also provides existing templates based on industry best practices which are easier and faster to adopt. B2B sales coaching can broadly help in the following areas of sales execution
- Lead management
- Sales Funnel Management
- CRM selection & setup
- Compensations, benefits & rewards
- Team management
- Revenue Forecasting
- Escalation management
- Training & Onboarding
On sales strategy, sales management coaching can help discover actionable insights for continuous improvement. These can be key changes in organization, process or approach that can lead to quantum improvements in rate & time of conversion, reduction in sales effort or open up new avenues of growth.
- Time study of sales reps
- Conversion across sales channels
- Conversion across sales stages
- Time taken for conversion
- Effectiveness of sales communication
- Market segmentation and approach
- Lost client analysis
Our hands-on sales/business coaching process ensures a balance between short
term fixes and long term improvements
We follow a three-step process that allows organizations to reap benefits of low hanging fruits while working towards long term sales process improvement.
01.
We conduct a Sales Diagnostic to help us familiarise ourselves with the existing sales process and identify key gaps in the sales system. We do this by benchmarking your sales system on 5 key sales parameters
- Organization Design
- Sales process
- Conversation Design
- Training & Onboarding
- Automation & Enablement
02.
Identify the missing pieces in sales basics, fast track building missing pieces using proven templates based on industry best practices.
- Identify & prioritize missing components in the sales system
- Modify and adapt standard templates for organization
- Roll out, monitor, and ensure early adoption
- Handover to internal teams once the system is stable
03.
Identify structural changes in the sales process to significantly improve top of the funnel conversion
- Identify structural changes in the sales process for a quantum improvement in the sales funnel
- Design pilot to validate hypothesis with measurable metrics
- Socialize new process with the pilot team, create trackers and communicate success parameters
- Objectively monitor performance, plan interventions and capture improvements
- If successful, prepare an organization-wide roll-out plan with collateral and handover to internal team
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does good sales coaching look like?
Sales coaches work closely with your sales leaders. A good sales management coaching engagement usually starts off with a diagnostic to understand the current process, goals, responsibilities & tasks performed by the sales leader. A b2b sales coach then helps the sales leader identify the key needle movers, prioritize her tasks and come up with a 3month/6 month plan to achieve their goals. This plan is then broken down into individual tasks and is monitored with the sales coach. Very often these plans, which are an integral part of b2b sales coaching, need interventions & course corrections which the sales leader arrives at with the help of the sales coach.
2. What should one expect from sales coaching?
Sales leadership coaching should not be looked at as a magic wand to solve all sales problems. However, with sales management coaching your sales leaders and the team should be able to build clear frameworks to identify what is working in the sales process, what is not and be able to identify the critical changes that need to be made to improve key parameters like conversion, closure time or average revenue per client. Sales leadership coaching will arm you with the insight needed to thrive. How you use this insight to improve sales will depend on you. When you assign b2b demand generation companies, all the extensive methods towards driving traffic to your sales is taken care of.
3. What kind of training would you provide to new sales managers?
New sales managers who are transitioning from individual contributor roles need b2b coaching in two areas primarily: lead management and team management. Lead management involves distribution, shuffling and managing of leads across team members to get the best collective outcome. Team management involves the ability to drive productivity in the team by clear goal communication, evaluation and training of team members and providing them with the skills to plan and do better. Apart from this, b2b coaching will also involve new sales managers being trained in reporting, giving & receiving feedback, escalation management etc. It should also include training the managers to handle LinkedIn b2b lead generation as it is the most popular b2b platform. It is important to always be updated of new trends and tools.
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