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Sales Management - RainGroup - Sales Coaching A Practical Guide For Sales Managers
Sales Management - RainGroup - Sales Coaching A Practical Guide For Sales Managers
SALES COACHING:
A PRACTICAL GUIDE
FOR SALES MANAGERS
Who Needs Sales Coaching?
Think for a minute about your sales team. Is everyone doing everything they possibly can right
now to succeed at their maximum potential?
Is everyone on the team completely dialed in, doing everything they should and nothing they
shouldn’t? Do they have all the right skills across the sales cycle? Have they completely taken
the lead on their own development?
Chances are even the best sellers on your team have some opportunity for improvement
and greater success. And for those sellers who aren’t currently among the best, there are
things they should be doing differently to improve and become a Top Performer:
Manage their time and days differently
Lead sales conversations differently
Pursue major sales opportunities differently
Manage their territory, pipelines, and prospecting differently
Negotiate agreements differently
Sort through problems and address issues differently
If you can think of any areas where the sellers on your team need to do
something differently, then you, as a sales coach, are in a prime position
to help.
63%
57%
STRONGLY AGREE/AGREE
STRONGLY AGREE/AGREE
43% 42%
SELLER PERFORMANCE
39%
Sellers are 63%
29% 28% more likely to be
24% a Top Performer
1 RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, The Top-Performing Sales Organization Benchmark Report.
2 ibid.
3 RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, The Top-Performing Sales Manager Benchmark Report.
They try to help by pointing out the problem areas and simply telling sellers Consider this: if you were selling to a buyer and saw they needed something
what they should do. you could provide, and your primary communication and persuasion process
was to simply tell them, “You’re not really getting the performance you
As shared in an article about performance feedback and coaching in the should. To solve your problem and get better performance, buy this.”
Harvard Business Review, when thousands of managers were asked to coach
someone, they “simply provided the other person with advice or a solution. We How well do you think that would work?
regularly heard comments like ‘First you do this’ or ‘Why don’t you do this?’”4
Probably not so well.
The question is: is this helpful or not?
Just like with selling, the more experience you have with coaching, the more
Other research tells us, “Telling people what we think of their performance you see all the pieces that need to come together to be great at it.
doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they
should improve actually hinders learning.”5
4 Harvard Business Review, “Most Managers Don’t Know How to Coach People. But They Can Learn.”
5 Harvard Business Review, “The Feedback Fallacy.”
bring forth at different times, to suit the situation and drive success.
ROLES
This is, in fact, how we built the RAIN Sales Coaching method to bring it Performance Talent
Management Management
all together. MA
NA GE
While there are several areas to master to be great at sales coaching, there
aren’t that many areas. You can learn them one by one to become a master at Pipeline and Territory
Forecasting Planning
sales coaching. Meeting
Leadership
As an overview, let’s take a look at RAIN Group’s Top-Performing Sales
ManagerSM model, which has everything you need to become a Top-
Performing Sales Manager and coach.
If you want your sellers to perform at the peak of their potential, it’s essential to know the
specific objectives you need to help your team achieve, and to map out the road that will help
them achieve those objectives.
This is the purpose of RAIN Group’s My Coaching Plan: to allow you to very quickly map out
what you want to do to unleash your sales team’s potential and build a specific action plan.
On the pages that follow we break them down and provide examples of each so
you can build your own coaching plan.
The impact of this will be for her to go from setting two meetings per Sandra Jones Prospecting Prospect in <1 meetings
week to five, so in about three months she’ll have doubled her weighted intermittently, focused sprints set per week
3-5 hours for a minimum to 2 or more;
average pipeline.
a week of 8 hours pipeline
Sandra also isn’t laser focused on her top three accounts, but if she had plans Lacking a week doubled in
to grow them, and she executed against those plans, she would likely grow proactive 3 solid account 4 months
those accounts from $500,000 per year to $1.2 million per year. focus on top 3 plans, executed $500,000 across
accounts proactively these accounts
to $1.2 million
in 1 year
10-minute check in specifically on accountabilities for the week Sales meeting (team): 1 per week / 60 minutes
Approx.
Average time in meetings per week per seller
5 hours
You’ll want to capture areas for development OVERALL AREAS FOR DEVELOPMENT FOCUS
focus in a Skill Development Plan. Again, this
is done by individual seller and will help guide Develop plan for more strategic relationship building (online and off)
your conversations with that individual to help
them develop their skills. Action and accountability training and coaching; get in the zone more often
2 Win Labs per week plus training on opportunity management to drive new sales winning skills and habits
SKILLS, PROFICIENCY
Skills
Influencing 3 4 Advanced Consultative Selling Call reviews
buyer agenda skills training
Knowledge
Insight about financial 3 5 Weekly reading and discussion of Discussions during coaching;
services industry industry news; get subscription to 2 knowledge share to team at
leading magazines monthly meetings
Attributes
Motivated 2 4 Attends 9 Habits of Extreme Weekly action plans and reviews;
and proactive Productivity program calendaring investment time
SUCCESS METRICS
How I will measure progress and know I'm successful.
Best IP: We study buying and selling relentlessly through the RAIN Group Center for Sales
Research. Our research and field work allows us to create industry-leading intellectual property to
help our clients achieve the greatest success.
Best Education System: We use the best education approaches, methods, and technologies to
make training work, stick, and transfer to the job.
Best Results: We make it our mission to drive value and achieve the highest client satisfaction
through excellence in quality and producing transformational results for our clients. 2021
Inc.
SALES TRAINING
PRACTICE OF THE YEAR
5000Honoree
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SALES COACHING: A PRACTICAL GUIDE| FOR
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