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How Much Time Should You Spend Coaching Your Sales Team?
IN SALES MANAGEMENT, EVERY CHANCE, EVERY OPPORTUNITY, EVERY MOMENT IS A COACHING OPPORTUNITY.
The reality is there’s no one size fits all approach to this answer. It’s like asking how long is a piece of string.
So, how much time should you spend coaching your sales team? It depends. You spend all the time coaching your sales team until they are self-sufficient without you. Every chance, moment, and mistake is a coaching opportunity.
Remember: sales coaching is constant. It is your job as a sales leader, and the same is said for any leader on any high-performing team.
Do you see professional NBA coaches coaching their team only during timeouts? No.
Pro-team coaches constantly yell, call plays and correct things on the floor.
They run the plays, drills, and practice during the designated time. They give one-on-one feedback, and they course correct constantly and consistently. That is the reality of coaching efforts.
What is sales coaching?
Sales coaching is developing individual salespeople by identifying areas for improvement and reinforcing behaviors to improve performance. Sales coaching time incorporates a whole host of things, including:
- Designated training and practice for sales skill
- Sales huddles and daily stand-up meetings
- Reinforcing behaviors that lead to success
- Asking questions to discover
- Refraining from giving them answers
- Course corrections that impact negatively on the team
- Allowing them to experience failure
- Setting clear expectations and holding the entire sales team accountable
- Tracking towards their sales goals and quota
In some teams, sales coaching falls to sales leaders, sales managers, and other high performers.
But let me be clear, the sales leader or Vice President of Sales is the visionary that guides the sales reps toward meeting or exceeding their sales goals by demanding excellence and inspiring the team.
Sales leaders have uncanny intuition when to intervene with course correction conversations versus implementing forcing functions to keep the team in line – all while refraining from constant hand-holding.
Get a Team Assessment
Optimize your sales team with Kolbe and PRINT® assessments to identify team-member strengths and motivators and illuminate bad-fit placements.
Weekly sales training
Many factors will determine your time coaching and training schedule, such as the team’s maturity, bandwidth, capacity, and more.
So, what is the minimum time spent on dedicated sales training? You should spend at least one hour per week of your coaching time on dedicated sales training and development. The training is grounded in a specified topic, and your training illustrates what “great” looks like to sales managers and sales reps alike.
You explain it to them fully, followed by cases, scenarios, situations, and examples. You also include the impact or pitfalls of not following the training you’re providing.
And finally, you have role-playing. Role-playing is the most effective coaching tool for all salespeople because it increases intensity, reduces roadblocks, and provides concrete solutions to your sales reps.
Role play ensures every sales rep can get their mouths moving –warming them up.
Giving and rehearsing the talk track with your reps, including top salespeople, is more productive and keeps it fresh in mind on sales calls and client meetings.
VP of Sales is the visionary that guides the sales reps toward meeting or exceeding their sales goals by demanding excellence and inspiring the team.
Daily Huddles
You should have daily check-ins. This could be a 5-10-minute informal conversation, a 15-minute huddle, or a stand-up meeting.
Daily check-in requires more triaging and coaching on daily activities to ensure maximum output and maximum results.
What is this not? Ensuring your sales reps are making their calls or sending emails. That is, sadly, how most sales managers spend their check-ins.
Instead, ask your salespeople:
- What deals are you working on?
- What’s happening today?
- Who’s supposed to get back to you today?
- What are you going to say to the prospects?
- Why would this person say no?
- Why would this deal die?
These check-ins are less about time coaching and more about prepping them for the tasks at hand today.
You need to prepare them to be quick on their toes. And help them track towards their goal and reinforce behaviors that continue their success – including top performers.
Correcting behaviors
Coaching is constant.
You shouldn’t wait exclusively for set meetings or designated training.
If you see someone doing something wrong, quickly pull them aside, give them some feedback, and let them go.
You need to course correct. Sales leaders and the best sales managers will implement intervention methods before a sales representative’s performance review.
However, coaching time also includes sitting down with negative or disruptive salespeople and having candid conversations. Many times, this will include the use of performance improvement plans.
Get a Team Assessment
Optimize your sales team with Kolbe and PRINT® assessments to identify team-member strengths and motivators and illuminate bad-fit placements.
Coaching New Sales Reps
What about coaching new salespeople? New salespeople are different from the rest of your team. These individuals, on average, take 3-6 months to ramp up to complete productivity. Skill set and knowledge may be underdeveloped at first.
New reps need a significant amount of attention during their ramp-up period. You must optimize your onboarding processes and systems to optimize your coaching time.
Whether you’re welcoming a sales manager, rep, or SDR, the onboarding process must be tight, and this will also ensure you’re attracting top talent.
Consider new salespeople “experienced” after six months to optimize your coaching time.
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Let’s be clear; there are charlatans everywhere.
Rose Garden Consulting is a world-class sales management consulting firm that redefines your process into a quality sales experience. We ignite revenue growth with transformative solutions based on behavioral economics.
We help close more deals faster and at a higher potential return. Rose Garden uses a combination of assessments to identify sales team members’ strengths and motivators, providing you with lousy cultural fits and recommendations. We present our Team Member Assessment findings in a one-day workshop.
We also recommend our sales accelerator assessment that provides you with an in-hand diagnostic and sales experience road map for quick results.
New businesses must stay up-to-date and ahead of the competition in today’s ever-evolving sales landscape. We provide Founders and CEOs with hands-on coaching to create systems & strategies to scale their sales team. You can’t afford to leave anything up to chance.
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About the author:
Ali Mirza is the Founder & CEO of Rose Garden, a national sales consulting organization, and featured in Forbes, Inc, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Business Rockstars, and The Wall Street Journal.
Ali is a highly sought-after public speaker presenting at multiple national conferences on innovative ways to accomplish transformational growth on your sales team.
Rose Garden provides unparalleled support and guidance to growth-minded founders via sales strategy differentiation, world-class sales culture creation, and exclusive playbooks, processes, and scripts to position them for limitless growth.
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