Onboarding new sales hires and coaching them well is crucial to ensuring future sales output and business success. The B2B sales market is constantly evolving, changing customer patterns and the need for customer facing teams and salespeople to meet customer’s where they are at requires a strong sales coaching methodology that is not essentially a one-time program, but one that can keep being revisited to rejig sales methods within the team throughout the year.
An effective sales coaching program that helps new hires drive better business output a lot faster in the journey while also helping them to constantly revisit their challenges and retraining them to grow better through their journey on a team can benefit the entire sales team and eventual ROI.
Here are a few factors that can help smaller / leaner teams create a more effective sales coaching program:
The Power of 1:1 Coaching is Often Underestimated
Even if sales leaders hire new sales reps from the same industry, it still takes some time for them to fully absorb and learn about the salestech tools and sales processes as well as customer/prospect journey that the existing company has. For new sales rep hires who do not necessarily belong to the same market or industry, this might take a little longer.
For either situation, creating a 1:1 coaching program that can allow new hires to:
-interact with top notch sellers with the team
-learn from existing customer cycles and prospect conversations (by participating as silent listeners on demos and calls)
-understand more about usual prospect differences or challenges faced by sellers when trying to close a deal
will be more impactful in the long-run.
One of the company’s top notch sellers can be assigned to every new hire as an onboarding and coaching mentor for the initial stages to drive this process more proactively. Sales leaders sitting at the helm of the team can then use feedback and input from both, the new hires and their respective coaches to understand where doubts still persist and what needs to be done to strengthen the whole process to get them to work better.
Personalized Coaching Programs Are More Useful
Every new sales hire will boast of a certain set of strong and weak points. This is where sales leaders and mid-level managers need to understand more about their members so that they can dovetail sales coaching programs that can suit each new hires’ strong point and weak areas.
For instance, new hires with a proven track record who have naturally good persuasion skills may need a program that gets them to adapt to the new company’s processes and salestech without focusing on other aspects as much while a new hire who has a little difficulty in usually taking new prospects through the entire prospect lifecycle might need a coaching plan that emphasizes more on how they can create demand across various stages of the buying journey…
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Using your Data
Salestech tools, CRMs and integrated sales processes allow sales leaders to have a more unified overview into sales and prospecting efforts as well as the status of cold calls. For sales leaders who prefer having new reps start their prospecting work earlier on in the role, using this accumulated data to understand what is going wrong or what needs improvement in real-time can help them drive better output while also ensuring a more real-time based coaching method.
Having an Action Plan
Based on who is being hired when and what their past role/profile has been about, sales leaders need to build sales coaching frameworks and plan in advance, to ensure better effectiveness. If a sales team is bringing in 03 new hires from a competitor for instance, the coaching program would demand different steps as opposed to when the team is hiring 02 new people from a different industry and geography all together.
Focusing on Developing Soft Skills
Having soft skills in sales and any customer facing role is actually a very fruitful benefit. The power of strong soft skills is actually largely underestimated in today’s marketplace. Ensuring that your B2B sales coaching program has enough place for sessions that can allow new hires to develop existing skills and hone better soft skills can in the long run help achieve better customer satisfaction and brand growth.
End Note – a Well Laid Out Sales Coaching Program Serves Long Term Business Benefits
A good sales coaching program is beneficial to both, the salesperson and the brand. Not only does it help drive sales retention rates, it can also boost long term customer retention numbers. When a company works harder at the initial stages of a new hire’s journey, it can drive overall performance and win rates.
There are a ton of sales coaching software for sales teams and sales leaders to consider using here as well, to drive a more data driven sales coaching process. Combining a good sales coaching plan with a good internal process is crucial to overall brand growth in a competitive market.
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