Apr 07, 2015 By Peri Shawn

5 Habits of Highly Profitable Sales Coaches

in Leadership, Sales

Sales managers, who are looking to take their team’s sales results to the next level, would be wise to look more closely at their sales coaching.

Effective sales coaching is one of the most impactful ways to increase sales. Thus the reason it’s so valuable for sales managers to develop excellent sales coaching skills, and, of course, profitable sales coaching habits.

There are 5 sales coaching habits that have positive impact on your sales coaching and your team’s sales results.

Sales Coaching Habit #1: Ask Sales Coaching Questions about Specifics

Experience has proven that sales managers, who spend time coaching their salespeople on sales theory only, generally do not see a significant increase in sales.

Yet sales managers, who use sales coaching to get into the specifics of their salespeople’s sales conversations, do experience an uptake in sales. The more you know about the specifics of what happened during your salespeople’s conversations, the more helpful you can be.

With this in mind, build your sales coaching questions from general to more specific as you proceed through your sales coaching conversations.

Sales Coaching Habit #2: Coach Social Media Relationship Management on a Regular Basis

A Forbes headline provides a convincing argument about the value of salespeople using social media. “Study: 78% of Salespeople Using Social Media Outsell Their Peers.”

Be sure to determine and focus on the social media platforms that best meet the needs of your team’s prospects.

I find LinkedIn is the most effective for business relationship management. If this is the case for your team and your industry, you’ll find my article about 4 ways your team can better manage their relationships with LinkedIn helpful.

Sales Coaching Habit #3: Monitor the Numbers

Some sales managers mistakenly only coach their team on their sales numbers. This typically does not result in much sales improvement.

Instead, profitable sales managers monitor the numbers as a measurement of the value of their salespeople’s new sales approaches.

This way, the numbers become a measurement of the effectiveness of their salespeople’s new approaches. The numbers also become a tool for salespeople to truly understand whether to continue with their new approach (and move to the next thing to improve) or to look for an alternative approach.

When you use the numbers as a guide to measure the level of success of your team’s new approaches, you keep focused on making your sales coaching and your team more profitable.

Sales Coaching Habit #4: Make Coaching a Priority

It’s all too easy to not coach. With this in mind, make it a sales coaching habit to not cancel coaching but rather reschedule it.

Also to let your salespeople know how important sales coaching is, schedule coaching into your calendar as far out as you can. I have some clients who have it built into their calendar a year in advance.

This provides your salespeople with the structure to know when they have you to help them do better. And it ensures that you coach on a regular basis. By making coaching a priority with your salespeople, you ensure you are all set on a path for sales improvement, which will result in greater profitability.

Sales Coaching Habit #5: Build Trust

My primary research studies indicate that when team members trust their manager, they treat clients better. As you know, when clients are treated better, they are more likely to buy additional products and to give referrals.

With this in mind, improve your trust-building strategy with your salespeople. I often hear sales managers say, “My team trusts me.” This may be true in some instances but I’ve yet to find one. My experience has been that trust is a scale and trust is individual.

What do I mean by that?

Trust is a scale since trust can either be increased or decreased with a simple statement or action. Trust is not a permanent. Trust is scalar. Each interaction with someone helps us determine whether we trust someone more or less than the last interaction.

Trust is individual because not every salesperson on a team will have the same level of trust with the sales manager. For this reason, the habit of earning trust is one to keep top of mind during every sales coaching conversation.

To learn more about my trust study, read my post “Leader Trust Causes Team to Treat Clients Better.”

Use these sales coaching habits to help you and your team become more profitable. If you aren’t engaged in all the habits, choose one that you will focus on for the coming weeks. And if you want serious sales improvement from your team, ask the person you report to to coach you on your sales coaching habit.