If your company is serious about developing sales talent, you should be providing sales coaching. I’m not talking about sales training, where new hires are taught the basics of their job, like how to use software, create a quote, and adhere to company policies. Training teaches tactical skills that every salesperson must learn.

I mean coaching! Coaching helps individual salespeople recognize their strengths and weaknesses based on their personalities, comfort zones, communication styles, organizational skills, and other factors. It then assists them in developing strategies to improve sales outcomes through mentorship and encouragement. It’s one of the most effective ways to help individuals overcome their most daunting hurdles and elevate their performance to the next level.

Developing mid-level talent is critical. Top sales performers know what to do and do it well. The needle-movers are the middle performers.  Helping this group to sell more at greater profitability is key to sales and business growth. Enter coaching.

Sales leaders and top sales performers can make excellent coaches, provided they have the right tools, training, and incentives to take on this role. Here’s how sales management software empowers your company’s “coaches” to provide exceptional guidance to their charges:

Reviewing Pipelines:

Sales quotas can be intimidating. When salespeople see their quotas as unattainable, motivation may be replaced by frustration or a sense of helplessness. Sales management software offers up a real-time pipeline, organized with detailed information that’s easy for salespeople to review individually and with their coach. Together, they can identify the most promising opportunities and create a plan of attack. Which should be actively pursued, and which represent a poor use of time and energy? Which will close most quickly? Which are failing to progress and why? Appreciating a pipeline’s potential clears a path to reaching quota and makes salespeople feel in control.

Learning from Wins and Losses:

We all have blind spots. We know we’re better at some things than others, but our perceptions don’t always jive with the truth. Data offers a reality check, and sales management software provides that data –wins, losses, leads that never turned into opportunities, most profitable sales, markets, and more.

Let’s start with wins. When a salesperson wins a job, they’re doing something right. Coaches can help salespeople look for commonalities among successes to identify repeatable actions. The salesperson may be exceptionally comfortable quoting certain projects or working with certain kinds of customers. Maybe they’re strong at closing on the spot, or with longer sales cycles. Whatever is working, software reporting tools can identify trends and provide a mechanism to replicate winning processes more easily.

What about losses? Coaches can help salespeople think about what factors within their control contributed to those losses. With all the data collected by the software, it’s easier to identify common threads. Then they can develop strategies to improve unproductive behaviors and call losing leads earlier on, creating more selling time dedicated to good opportunities.

Finally, there are the highly desirable leads and sales that got away. What actions could the salesperson have taken that would have made a difference in the outcome? Was communication lacking? Scope misunderstood? Follow-up slow? Sales management software provides a robust audit trail to guide coaches in their mentoring efforts.

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So far, we’ve explored two ways that software management enhances the coaching experience – for coaches and their charges. Be sure to return for part 2 of this blog, where we’ll talk about how software can help develop better customer interaction and more effective selling techniques.