If your business is a vehicle and the sales manager is the steering wheel, your sales team is the rearview mirror. It gets you to see bystanders and the road behind to ease your ride. Do you want to create a sales team that exceeds your expectations? The following are ten sales coaching techniques you can’t ignore.
Use Assessment-Based Learning
Make your sales team an exact reflection of your company or brand. You can do so by preparing them for the job by ensuring they practice what they learn. Instead of focusing on sales training and readiness programs, use an assessment-based learning approach.
Assess the sales executives from time to time. When they know they will be evaluated after the training, they commit more time and energy to the training.
Train Your Sales Executives to Be Problem Solvers
With the proper advertising channels, thousands of would-be buyers will be channeled to your business. However, the percentage of the audience converted to buyers would depend on the sales team you have.
If you’ve trained your sales executives to be problem solvers, they’ll have more convincing power and will likely get you more sales. It will be easier for the representatives to help buyers understand how the products will solve their problems.
In-Person Workshops
Attending sales seminars and workshops featuring experienced sales leaders gives the sales team a break from daily work while enabling them to learn a few steps on how to up their sales game. The only trick is to hire a qualified workshop provider with experience and knowledge.
You may want to provide the trainer with the areas of sales growth you want to address for them to create powerful training messages around those topics.
Video Role Plays
Get your sales executives to perform video sales roles. As they watch themselves in a video addressing specific sales topics or goals, they can never forget the subject of interest.
According to sales leaders, no method of training sales representatives work more powerfully than video sales roles. You can also ask your salespeople to take videos of themselves practicing certain sales roles to boost their sales game.
Constructive Criticism
A Zenger/Folkman survey confirmed that most managers hate giving negative feedback. In fact, 40% of the involved managers said they have never given negative feedback.
However, that shouldn’t be the case, considering that sales executives perform differently, and unless you tell them when they underperform, you will be preparing them to make the same mistakes in the future. Positive criticism prepares them to learn from their mistakes and keep growing.
Get Your Sales Team Understand your Products
Incompetent sales executives tend to cram the sales message as you present it to them. With that kind of mindset, they will go blank when a customer asks questions about the products or services you provide.
Train your sales team to understand what they are doing for them to give a better version of the message you present to them during training sessions.
Put more Emphasis on Coaching the Team
When you focus on training your salespeople, they will master what you teach, but they may never practice it appropriately. When you coach them, they get every detail of the message and always have an open mind to implement what they learned.
That way, they are more likely to sell your products to target clients with confidence.
Get Salespeople to Use the Products
Your sales executives can never understand the products they sell unless they approach them from the client’s pain point.
Yes, unless your sales team uses or implements the product you’re offering, they can never understand its cons and pros. Once they have used the product, the sales team will be better positioned to present the product to the clients the way it is.
Common Sense
The sales team will be dealing with multiple clients daily. Each of these clients will have unique and different needs. They can’t address the needs of each of these clients from their point of view.
Your sales executives must get to the client to understand their unique needs and put themselves in the client’s current shoes to provide the right solution to their needs.
Train Your Team to be Confident
As they present your products for sale to clients, the sales team will be met by different challenges. One of the biggest challenges is to answer client questions they know nothing about.
Get your sales team to learn the basics of being confident no matter the situation and challenges. That way, they will always have an easy time dealing with different clients.
Building a strong sales team is an essential step towards creating a successful business. Luckily the above powerful techniques will aid you in creating the best sales team.
