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When Should You Seek Professional Sales Coaching?

Written by Mike Lieberman, CEO and Chief Revenue Scientist | Thu, Mar 22, 2018

Sales coaching ensures your business grows and achieves continued success. However, not every business takes advantage of coaching or does it properly. It’s so much more than just checking in with your sales team and seeing how everyone’s doing. It’s about being open to discussions of improvement and helping individual sales reps reach their goals. It requires a serious time commitment and dedication.

Though you know coaching is important, knowing when it’s time to seek professional assistance can be a hard call to make. If you’re not sure what to look for, these are some of the most common and easy-to-spot signs that it’s time to seek professional sales coaching for your sales team.

Communication Is Absent

Open communication is key for both sales and the overall success of the company. Because your sales team acts as the face of the company, it’s imperative your reps are able to communicate effectively with customers, other team members, and management. Without proper communication, the entire sales process, as well as employee morale, will start to fall apart.

For this reason, if you notice communication is spotty, it’s time to consider professional sales coaching. Making this investment will help your sales team learn how to use the tools they have to effectively communicate with each other, helping them reach their goals. Fostering open conversations about goals and sales tactics is one way to improve the overall sales process and ensure everyone has what they need in order to get the job done.

Goals Aren’t Being Met

When it comes to sales, everyone has goals. Whether they’re daily goals, weekly goals, or annual goals, everyone has a ballpark figure of where they want to be. Setting goals is not only important for a sales team’s morale, but it’s vital for maintaining a healthy outlook on what needs to be accomplished. Imagine it like a target—hitting the bull’s eye is reaching the team’s goal. Everyone wants to hit it!

So, if you notice goals aren’t being met, it’s a bad sign. Of course, everyone is going to have periods where they’re “off,” but if the underperformance is continuous, it might be time to consider sales coaching. It helps specific sales team members get the extra training they need.

While one member might need a bit of guidance in one area, another might need a helping hand in another. The best thing about sales coaching is everyone gets what they need in order to continuously reach their unique goals.

The Team Is Getting Frustrated

Feelings of frustration in the sales team are a bad sign. Everyone can likely remember an occasion where the customer service they received was less than enjoyable, and it was likely because the staff member was frustrated at work. Now, imagine your entire sales team being frustrated. It’s not good for office morale, your customers’ experiences, or your sales.

Using best practices, a sales coach can get to the bottom of why your team is feeling frustrated and correcting the problem before it starts to have real effects on your business. Is it because your team feels like communication isn’t open? Are they having a hard time reaching their goals? Do they not feel important? Whatever the answer may be, coaching is one sure-fire way to get it figured out quickly and effectively.

While a sales coach can’t solve every problem in your business, when it comes to your sales team, it’s the best place to start in order to get your reps on the path to success.