Why Is Coaching Vital To Sales Performance?

Sales organizations everywhere find themselves in a state of flux. Even before the abrupt fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, sales teams had been facing growing expectations from customers that they often found hard to meet. Thanks to technological innovation and an explosion in digital content, traditional sales processes that focused on product features and price margins to win customers no longer work. Instead, the ability to deliver a superior customer experience focused on resolving the customer’s unique pain points and a commitment to the customer’s success are the requisites of a successful sales team today. SalesForce’s ‘State of Sales’ survey, for instance, found that 73% of business buyers have set standards that are higher than ever for how companies should interact with them. They expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors and vendors to offer highly personalized engagement to address their needs. What’s more, 79% of the surveyed buyers also said that it’s easier than ever for them to take their business elsewhere (Figure 1).

The onset of the pandemic has only complicated the situation for sales organizations, as LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2020 observes. The report shows that 44% of sellers anticipate longer sales cycles and a fall in buyers’ response to outreach, and 60% anticipate a decrease in hitting quotas and wins, with 18% expecting the decrease to be significant. With rapid shifts in tools and technologies, sales processes and messaging, it’s more urgent than ever that sales teams receive insightful and effective training that powers change in the way sales gets done. Yet, the news on this front has not been encouraging. Studies find, for instance, that only 41% of sales professionals rate the training they have received as always or almost always effective, while a significant 26% rated their sales training as not effective or only sometimes effective.

Why Is Sales Training Important?

While sales environments have changed drastically, sales teams have been slow in catching up. Indeed, one sales survey found that 59% of salespeople don’t change their process once they figure out what works for them. It’s no surprise, then, that as many as 57% of sales reps in a study said they expect to miss their quotas for the year, thanks largely to shortfalls in their approach to customer engagement and in meeting rising customer expectations. Sales training is one of the key differentiators that can help organizations arrest this downslide. It offers myriad benefits such as helping reps grow their skillsets and technical competencies, boosting innovation, increasing motivation and retention, improving efficiency and decreasing costs and increasing alignment with organizational goals, to name just a few.

At the fundamental level, effective sales training correlates strongly with better win rates. Research by the RAIN Group, for instance, found that organizations with the highest sales training ratings reported an average win rate of 58%, as against an average of 47% for the others. The study also found that effective training is linked to the development of several skills that are integral to customer-centric selling and that stronger sales training correlated to stronger sales capabilities across skill areas (Figure 2).

While building key skills and capabilities is an important factor in improving the performance of sales teams, increasing reps’ motivation levels and holding on to strong performers ensures that such gains are sustained over time. Sales training plays an important role here too, as empowered sales reps feel more confident and capable in their jobs and are more likely to experience greater job satisfaction, thereby exhibiting higher levels of motivation and retention. Not surprisingly, studies have found that significantly higher percentages of sales reps report being satisfied with their jobs when they rate the training they receive as highly effective. Nearly 50% of such sales reps report high job satisfaction, while the number falls to just 14% among those who rate their training as ineffective.

Why Sales Training Often Fails

According to the Harvard Business Review “U.S. companies spend over $70 billion annually on training and an average of $1,459 per salesperson — almost 20% more than they spend on workers in all other functions.” Yet, for all that spending, studies have repeatedly found that the ROI on training has been poor for most companies, with training offering only temporary performance boosts and failing to produce lasting change. A 2018 study, for instance, revealed that just over half (53%) of all sales organizations hit their target number, and this figure has been on a decline over the past five years.

Sales training can fail for a number of different reasons:

Not assessing business and training needs:
For a lot of senior managers, the goals of sales training seem simple — to get sales reps to become more effective and make more sales. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to design and implement training around goals such as “close more deals.” Giving sales teams the best possible training begins with knowing three things: where sales teams currently stand in terms of skills and capabilities, what goals and outcomes are desired and what it would take for sales teams to reach there. Without such clarity, training can end up being irrelevant, confusing, or redundant. The more accurate the assessment of business and training needs and the more specific the training goals, the more effective training will be.
Imagining training as a once-and-done exercise:
Most traditional sales training exercises are conducted much like family vacations: Everyone is brought to one place once a year (or sometimes, once a quarter), a list of the must-see sights (or latest sales skills) drawn up, three or four days spent hectically rushing through them and then everyone sent back to their regular sales lives with only vague memories to carry back with them. Such event-based training, however, involves two major difficulties.
First, in an attempt to pack in sufficient new learning, such sessions overwhelm reps with new information and concepts, often resulting in cognitive overload.
Second, even if well-structured and well-taught, such information fades from memory unless sales reps are given opportunities in their daily activities to practice and integrate the concepts and skills introduced to them. Studies of learning and retention tell us that we begin to forget the things we learn almost as soon as we’ve learned them. And it takes just 90 days to forget a majority of what was learned (Figure 3).

Not tailoring training to individual needs:
One of the major difficulties of inperson training is the need for it to be conducted in a group format in order to offer returns at scale. However, this means that they cannot be sufficiently tailored to each sales rep’s skill level and preferences. So, while star performers, newbie, middle-of-the-road and lagging sellers may all need different types of training with emphases on different kinds of knowledge and skills, traditional sales training cannot provide such differentiation.
What often happens instead is that sales training ends up targeting the lowest common denominator, speaking to what is perceived to be the average level of a training cohort. This translates to not being able to provide impactful experiences for those who fall far below or far above that average and hence failing to power strong learning improvements in them.
Not balancing between product knowledge, strategies, selling skills and tools:
Companies often err by focusing excessively on one type of sales training and failing to take account of others. The most common imbalance occurs between product training and sales training. Sellers require the former to be able to knowledgeably, fluently and efficiently interact during the sales conversation. However, they also require the latter to be able to build the trust and confidence that drives conversation toward a decision. Focusing on one dimension at the expense of others can leave skill or knowledge gaps that detract from high sales performance.
Not delivering engaging training:
Anyone who’s ever belonged to a corporate sales environment would have sat through at least one interminable training session consisting of dry, hours-long lectures with an endless sequence of PowerPoint slides in the background. Without superior engagement – achieved through the use of diverse content styles and formats and participative learning – sales training becomes boring and ineffective. This is particularly problematic when sales reps already spend only 34% of their time actually selling.
Not measuring and assessing training impact:
The final step to making training effective is to see how much sales reps integrate new knowledge, skills and behavior into their work. Without such information, sales reps cannot be held accountable for learning from training and optimizing their sales activities. Few organizations, however, evaluate training effectiveness. As a result, they are unable to prove the effectiveness of sales training because they lack the proper metrics to accurately measure change. Without this understanding, organizations are also unable to modify their training modules to deliver optimal results.
Not leveraging peer learning and best practices sharing:
Research has found that best practice sharing among salespeople is not only the most utilized but also considered the most effective of any practice or tool in salesperson development, as can be seen in the matrix in Figure 5.

Peer learning encourages knowledge transfer from top performers to laggard members of sales teams. Peer learning also helps sales teams conserve knowledge across generations, as veterans are able to pass on their learnings and experiences to younger members of sales teams. However, most such peer learning happens on an informal basis, and organizations fail to sufficiently formalize such learning and bring it within the ambit of formal sales training.

The Importance of Coaching

When it comes to building on the foundations laid by training and integrating skills and concepts into the workflow, few activities have as much impact as effective sales coaching.

As successful coaches, sales managers perform several vital functions:

They help sales reps develop a clear sense of purpose by defining appropriate and actionable goals and objectives.
They help reps become more efficient by prioritizing sales activities based on a success orientation.
They help reps assess and optimize their processes and activities, helping them develop high-performance sales habits.
They help sales reps overcome obstacles that threaten to shut down a deal, by stepping in with advice and strategies that can provide a win.
They help orient sales reps toward knowledge and skill development by facilitating self-discovery and evaluation.

The vital role that coaching plays in sales performance can be seen in the difference in win rates and quota attainment for different coaching approaches (Figure 6).

In Figure 6, random approaches to coaching refer to organizations where coaching decisions are left entirely to individual managers. Informal approaches are those in which guidelines for coaching exist but are not extensively implemented. Formal approaches refer to developed coaching frameworks that are comprehensively implemented. Finally, dynamic approaches involve formal implementation and alignment with enablement services. As can be seen, dynamic coaching showed a 32.1% improvement in win rates over random coaching and a 19% improvement over the study’s average. Similar strong results have also been found for quota attainment.

Yet, coaching in most organizations still lacks the structure and discipline required for high sales performance. As Survey found, 62.9% of organizations still follow random or informal approaches to coaching.

How Coaching Can Become a Vital Contributor to Sales Performance

Coaching efforts often fail in organizations for a number of common reasons:

Sales managers feel they don’t have enough time to coach sales reps adequately.
Sales managers don’t know how to coach sales reps.
Sales managers don’t have adequate information on sales reps’ performance and areas of improvement.
Sales managers don’t understand the benefits of coaching.

Overcoming these obstacles requires significant investment in enabling sales managers and building a strong coaching culture within the organization.

Here’s how to do it:

Build a formal coaching methodology with clear definitions and guidelines: One of the major reasons sales managers feel that they do not have sufficient time for coaching is that they are often drawn into troubleshooting roles rather than enabling roles. That is, managers are often called upon to “fix” the problem when sales reps have lost deals or are stalled somewhere in the sales pipeline. But pulling reps out of situations of adversity is much harder than establishing a formal coaching process that can help keep them out of such situations in the first place.
When a formal coaching framework with regular cadence and clear guidelines is established, the coaching process is far less time- and resource-consuming for sales managers. What’s important to note about a coaching framework is that it’s not an off-the-shelf formula that is applied blindly to all sales reps. Instead, it has to be a contextual structure that takes account of knowledge, skill, tools and processes suited to the requirements of a company’s specific sales culture and business needs.
Provide managers with sufficient training on effective coaching practices: The best sales reps do not automatically become great coaches. When sales reps enter into managerial positions and are not given training on how to manage and coach others, they are likely to try to replicate the techniques and strategies that made them successful at selling.
Successful coaching requires managers to know how to diagnose performance problems in sales reps, which problems to prioritize for coaching, and how to motivate reps and induce behavior change. Indeed, one study found that nearly half of surveyed sales managers wanted more training in the first of these skills (Figure 7).

Provide sales managers with the right reporting, metrics and analytics: Sales managers can’t effectively coach sales reps if they don’t have clear visibility into sales processes and sales reps’ activities. This cannot be achieved with only lagging indicators such as wins and losses, quota attainment or pipeline conversion. Instead, managers require more comprehensive and granular data on aspects such as pitch activity, content asset use and the like. Such data allows managers to form a picture of how sales reps are proceeding through sales conversations and where they require support. It’s not surprising that, in the study cited above, 37% of managers sought better dashboards for information on where coaching support was required.
Leverage the right technologies for coaching: Coaching is traditionally seen as an in-person activity driven by the human capabilities of managers. Hence, sales managers have often tended to shy away from the use of technologies for coaching. However, high-performance companies have begun to recognize the value of virtual coaching tools such as playbooks and assessment tools, which can help managers re-prioritize their time for situations where their interventions are most necessary, such as helping high-performing reps raise their selling skills to new levels of excellence or give struggling reps additional support to reach necessary competence levels.
Provide support and feedback to sales managers: Sales managers can’t produce miracles if they are abandoned in their coaching responsibilities. Rather, a coaching culture has to be built right through the entire organization. This includes providing sales managers with mentorship and feedback from executives on their performances as managers and coaches. Providing managers with incentives to improve their coaching performance will also go a long way in securing and optimizing the organization’s coaching culture.

How Sales Enablement Can Help Build High-Performance Training and Coaching

Effective training and coaching are key pillars of sales enablement, and modern integrated sales enablement platforms support training and learning for high sales performance in several ways:

Multi-modal content creation and distribution:
Sales enablement platforms allow for the creation of content in a variety of media, support highly searchable libraries of training assets and provide customized learning paths that serve up different content assets based on each sales rep’s specific role and needs. Using machine-learning algorithms, modern enablement solutions can provide just-in-time content with the right cadence to ensure proper spacing and reinforcement of training material, leading to maximum retention.
Effective learning environment:
Sales enablement platforms can provide a customized blend of instructor-led and self-directed courses, incorporating peer and social learning through virtual classrooms, breakout rooms, discussion forums, recorded demos and other sharing tools. They support programs that let learners explore, find and access solutions on their own, as and when they require them, instead of having reams of training material thrust upon them at one go. This allows learners to customize their own learning experiences
Comprehensive activity tracking and evaluation:
Sales enablement tools can provide an accurate picture of how sales reps consume training content and allow for testing of content absorption and retention, giving trainers and managers a clear sense of how training should be modified and optimized. Armed with insights into the training program’s effectiveness, organizations can define individual elements of the program to ensure optimal learning.
Leveraging artificial intelligence for data-driven coaching:
Next-generation sales enablement and training platforms leverage the power of AI and machine learning to provide managers with insights into the various dimensions of a pitch performance, such as topic coverage, delivery speed and use of keywords, which can then be used to provide a highly relevant and impactful coaching experience. In fact, AI algorithms can ensure that the entire coaching program — from identifying topics to making recommendations — is customized to individual learner needs. This kind of customization can significantly improve performance, as learning materials can be personalized for each rep in the learning style that they are most comfortable with.

To achieve higher sales effectiveness in the current environment requires being able to build trust-based relationships. It also requires confidence among buyers that sales reps are focused on knowing what their expectations of success are and offering solutions that ensure those expectations are met. Doing so makes sellers more capable of delivering value and being in a better position to fill pipelines, win opportunities and grow accounts. Training and coaching that combine macro- and micro-learning strategies provide sales reps with the knowledge and skills required to deliver value.

By tailoring training to suit the individual needs of reps and by instilling a culture of learning within its people, organizations can look forward to reaping the significant benefits that training and coaching offer. A good sales enablement and training platform can provide organizations with the technology and framework required for implementing such a program. Check it out how MBS Program can help you and your organization.