Why and how can you personalize your sales coaching?

As a salesperson, you have no choice but to deliver so that your company achieves its objectives, and you're constantly under pressure!

The crucial question that managers and sales support teams need to ask themselves is: how can we help salespeople improve their performance?

The answer: personalized sales coaching.

We explain why personalized coaching transforms your sales teams and how to implement methodologies and best practices for successful sales coaching.

Boost your performance with sales coaching

Companies are aiming for the moon, and rightly so! Every year, the targets to be reached become more and more ambitious. But logically, our sales performance must constantly improve. How can we do this when we're struggling to accelerate?

The solution: personalized sales coaching.

What is sales coaching?

Sales coaching is a set of practices that help salespeople improve their skills. By developing effective follow-up methods, you can measure the progress of your sales teams.

In the long term, sales coaching motivates salespeople and helps us achieve our sales targets. This tool enables managers and sales support teams to effectively support us on our journey towards achieving our sales targets.

Note: Sales coaching is not a form of teaching. It is a form of support designed to develop or reinforce skills. It's not just about passing on knowledge! Of course, there's nothing wrong with sharing past experiences, especially if the context of the exchange lends itself to it.

Sales coaching is a positive step. The aim? To help sales teams become excellent. And to support sales effectively, discover a powerful tool: personalized coaching.

Why personalize your coaching?

Each salesperson's background is unique. We don't all have the same experience, and we didn't all join the company at the same time. And it's precisely this diversity that makes the sales team and your company so rich. Use it to your advantage!

Team coaching and general guidelines are necessary, but not sufficient.

Our best advice: personalize your sales coaching. Tailor your sales force support to our individual problems, to provide precise and regular coaching. That's how we can make rapid and continuous progress.

Personalized coaching should be provided at various stages of a salesperson's career within the company:

• During the integration of new sales staff, so that they can quickly rise to your challenges.
• During the sales process, to help us achieve better results.
• During a difficult sale, to provide us with tools we can use immediately.

With personalized sales coaching, you continuously train your teams, using the best form of learning: learning by doing. Yet 73% of managers say they spend less than 5% of their time coaching their sales staff.

How to succeed in sales coaching?

A common misconception to combat is that coaching during a sale is effective. While this type of coaching can help move a sale forward, it doesn't help your salesperson improve his or her skills in general!

To succeed in sales coaching, you need to be at the heart of the interaction by asking yourself the right questions:

• What are the key skills that the salesperson is struggling with?
• How can coaching help?
• What content can you offer to help them?

Here are a few key points to work on to help your sales team improve performance.

Identifying salespeople's needs and coaching objectives is essential

No more one-size-fits-all coaching techniques! What you want is to target your sales team's needs precisely, so as to encourage their progress. And with personalized techniques, you could increase your win rate by 28%. So why miss out on this opportunity?

It's essential to adapt your approach to the needs of your sales team. Make an appointment with the salesperson you are going to coach and ask yourself a few questions:

• How does the salesperson behave during a call?
• What is their general attitude to lead management?
• What are their strengths?
• What weaknesses have you identified?

Refine these questions as much as possible to ensure an effective meeting. And to clearly define the coaching objectives, your salesperson should also carry out a self-assessment.

Asking the Right Questions

The art of asking the right questions is crucial. It enables the coached salesperson to analyze their own way of working and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

The beauty of this technique? Your salespeople will improve faster if the answers come from within. This gives them the opportunity to study their own working methods and make the process their own. We're better when we're in control of ourselves.

Start by asking a simple question: where did you get stuck this week? As a manager, your main duty during coaching is to listen. Our advice: active listening is the key to asking the right questions!

Then dig deeper. Are there any other sticking points? Identify the points you need to address, then ask another simple question: "How would you have done it?"

At Modjo, we recommend Michael Bungay Stanier's excellent book, The Coaching Habit. Get inspired by his methods to coach your sales team to perfection.

Provide methodology and best practices

Personalized coaching is a structured, intentional process. Your objective is to develop the knowledge and behaviors essential to the success of your sales people (and therefore your company).

To help salespeople improve their skills, rely on our qualities. Listen to calls again to identify best practices: for example, the tone is right, the first questions are relevant and quickly qualify the prospect.

Then identify areas for improvement... Your advice must be precise and applicable to all sales. The aim is to enable your sales person to perform better, thanks to relevant feedback.

Opportunities for improvement are sometimes subtle. In complex sales, it's not always the pitch, the closing or the announcement of next steps that need to be worked on, but more informal elements:

• Participants' commitment during the call
• The salesperson's body posture during a video call
• Live analysis of weak signals
• The personalization of follow-ups

Follow up regularly

By listening to and analyzing calls, you can collect data for your one-to-one sessions. But outside these appointments, reinforce your sales staff's skills by regularly reviewing calls. You can track improvements and offer the right content at the right time.

‍WithModjo's review function, provide precise feedback on each call. Key points from the call are highlighted, with the option of adding a rating out of 5 and leaving comments.

Evaluations limit repetition, as you give information directly in context. You promote message adoption and encourage good sales behavior. That's how you help your sales teams achieve maximum productivity and boost your revenues!

Ensure consistency of best practices across the team

Coaching is a collaborative and participative effort. Your sales team shares best practices and methodologies to improve productivity as a team. That's why the elements of your coaching must be shareable, to ensure reproducibility of best practices and improve performance.

Empower your sales team with the right tools such as cold call playback, access to reviews and analytics to be proactive in the following areas:

• Integration: new members of your sales team can replay calls, segment and analyze them by managers, and gather a wealth of best practices to quickly reach their full potential.
• Track account history: retrieve information to launch, search for the account, improve its closure rate and guide the account to its next steps.
• Manage their skills: assessments enable them to see their areas for improvement more easily and visually. No need to share impressions: rely on concrete data.

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In short, identify your team's areas for improvement and highlight them for successful sales coaching.

We discussed personalized sales coaching with Aircall. Check out the webinar replay and find all the information you need to personalize coaching for your sales team. Coach them to improve their skills and perform at their best.

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