How to be a good sales coach

What is a sales coach?

You can tell who the good sales coaches are when you go into any business. When they arrive a lot of the sales people will be happy to see them, they will greet them, they will ask them about sales techniques and ask them about what they want to learn next. There will basically be that respect and rapport there.

You have met these people at some point in your career, they are the ones you have learnt the most from and had a good rapport. You think back fondly of times when you were finding a time struggling and they helped you through it, they identified what it was, and helped you find the solution to the problem and you responded well because you could see the growth.

What makes a good sales coach?

Well to start off, I think rapport building is important. If you want your colleagues to buy into your coaching philosophy you must get them on board as well as that you need to find the way they learn best. Building rapport is pretty straight forward, you want to be engaging while at the same time treating them they way you would want to be treated. I have met a few coaches in my time, that come across quite condescending, and it doesn’t go well.

When it comes to working out how people learn you need to pay attention to the language they use. I see it as people like to learn through feelings, visual or audio. Listening to someone’s language is straight forward, listen to the descriptive words they use, for example, visual words like clarity, clear, vision will identify a visual learner. Hearing, listening, sound will identify someone who responds to audio. Doing, feeling, pushing are feeling words and identify people who like to do. These are called representational systems in NLP, I will cover these in another blog as it is a large subject.

This is easy when dealing with individuals, so what do you do with groups? Well this is where things can get tricky, you need to base your coaching plans across all three so that everyone is learning.

How can you be a good sales coach?

The main thing is to keep focus on what the business wants to achieve from the sales person or people. They will have an idea of what they want to achieve from each member of the sales team in line with their growth goals. It is up to you as a sales coach or trainer to modify your coaching plan around that goal. This is where it can be complicated, but understanding the growth model of business and what metrics are involved will help to tailor your coaching.

Another fantastic caveat to coaching, is that there are always new ways to coaching and training. It really is a business that constantly evolves, it is well researched and fast paced industry. Keep learning all the time and look at new ways to incorporate it into your coaching and environment.

Conclusion

Being a good sales coach will take time and experience. Once you have experience, you will appreciate it more on how to work with different types of individuals and groups. You will enjoy it when you see the growth in the people you are working with. When you help to build a positive and competent environment. It is such a rewarding role when it comes to seeing everything coming together.

If you are interested in how we coach sales people, please get in contact. We can arrange an appointment to see how we can help you.