Sales managers have a plethora of responsibilities, especially with the new year on our heels. Not only do they have to meet new targets, but they also have to deliver better results than last year and show progress. New standards for the company have to be set and they have to outdo their performance from the previous year.

To ensure that your sales operations are proceeding smoothly towards accomplishing your targets, you should opt for sales coaching. It will help your sales executives evaluate their performance and organize better processes and outcomes.

Managers need to ditch generic sales coachingand focus on energizing their teams with new strategies. It could be personal growth or professional development — in any case, the ultimate win is for the business. Creating and nurturing relationships will benefit employees both with their internal teams as well as clients.

Fostering a culture of support and enhanced performance while helping your team can help unlock its potential. It will help you generate optimized leads and conversions in 2023 while moving towards empathy and good coaching.

Why invest in personalized sales coaching?

Coaching your team can help them enhance their performance and analyze their abilities. They can use constructive and timely feedback to improve their response to deliverables. They can achieve their goals and bring success to the company while creating an environment of continuous growth and learning.

A good sales mentorcan help improve the team in several ways. Employees will be willing to make mistakes fearlessly and learn from them, let alone share them with their peers. Your sales executives will feel more secure and confident about themselves as they keep leveling up.

The best part is how the sales process starts seeming powerful and inclusive for the whole team as they prosper and learn from each other. Every single team member would be impacted and by permitting them to share their journey, you can make growth a two-way road. The team will kickstart the new year with motivation and confidence.

Here’s the story of Amrit, a sales manager, who managed to bring success to his team using his coaching sessions. His coach was focused on skills and enhanced techniques rather than just basic coaching and data.

Amrit’s winning journey

Amrit is a focused manager with over six years of experience as a sales executive. During his tenure, he had been managing a sales teamand handled various national and local clients for his company. It was a business that provided SaaS products and Amrit had used his skills to bring the company success.

However, when his manager introduced coaching sessions to enhance performance, he was surprised. He didn’t find anything wrong with his selling skills and found no need to invest in his growth. “I felt I was doing a good job and a recent promotion was proof of it. I was confused as to why I had to improve myself when things were already going well,” he said.

Only after his first session with his sales mentordid he realize where he was lagging. While his approach was great at a professional level, his complexes often made him settle for less. There was an underlying reason why he had never opted for international clients — he was unsure of his worth and abilities.

He was dealing with imposter syndrome and kept thinking his successes were because of mere luck. He was not confident in his selling skills, no matter how good they were, and felt international clients would see right through him. At the end of the day, he felt he wasn’t good enough to grow further and test new boundaries.

In such a case, the coach cannot help Amrit with basic coaching tips and performance enhancers. They must turn empathetic and employ personalized solutions to push Amrit to explore further. He had to test himself and analyze if his wins were because of luck or due to his talent.

How did coaching help?

Amrit’s coach focused on skills rather than data. She realized that Amrit’s growth had to be accelerated at a personal level as his professional stances were good. A generic talk on improving sales performance would lead nowhere as Amrit already knew everything he needed. Hence, she began to engage with Amrit using the following steps:

1. Recording his client calls

Amrit began to record his calls and played them back during his coaching hours. “I had to note down moments when I was spontaneous and used my industry knowledge to solve an issue. The number of instances was quite high. I was further gratified of my skills when I was able to resolve a client’s problem using my prior experience with other clients,” he said.

It made Amrit differentiate luck from his talent. There were some instances where the client’s good mood and lack of further questioning aided him. Had the client asked certain follow-up questions, he might have been tongue-tied. The coach ensured Amrit notes down these moments of luck and sheer good fortune as well. When the cases of luck and talent were tallied, it was obvious that Amrit had won the deal through his skills alone.

2. Analysing how he won and why he lost

Amrit had to focus not just on his losses, but also on his wins. His wins were equal learning experiences as compared to his losses. The coach helped him reflect on why the sale was successful. It didn’t work to just celebrate and move on to the next task — he had to understand why he had won if he wished to consistently achieve it.

Amrit began to discuss his calls in-depth with his coach. They tried playing the scenario in alternative ways and gauged how he would have handled it. The more combinations Amrit was able to handle smoothly, the more his confidence was boosted. It made him realize that his success wasn’t just situational, he would have achieved it no matter how the situation had played out!

3. Analyzing mistakes

The coach asked Amrit to detail his losses next. Why had he failed and what had he done to prevent it from recurring? Amrit admitted that his losses had made him switch off for days and repent his approach. He took things personally and didn’t constructively plan on how to avoid his mistakes.

The coach helped him see his wins and understand what he was capable of. She then made him see where he had gone wrong and which mistakes had caused the deal to fail. It was often the most basic errors that caused Amrit’s deals to fail. It didn’t always reflect on his sales skills which made him more confident.

“There was one instance where I had a bad cold while attending a client call. I had performed well, but the client had been reluctant to partner with me as I didn’t have a mask on. The failure wasn’t even due to my skills or abilities. It was a lack of presence of mind and failure to follow basic COVID precautions, although I was negative,” he said.

What was the result?

The coaching helped Amrit regain his confidence as he began to self-evaluate after calls. He began to notice his drawbacks and corrected them at once to prevent them from recurring. It also helped him step up and ask his team lead for international clients and better opportunities.

His sales skills were still intact. But his lack of confidence and imposter syndrome was out of the window. This helped him close more deals and believe in himself — it brought success for the whole company at large. This skill and mindset shift also helped Amrit perform better in his personal life and future jobs.

The coach had equipped him with a mindset change and it was helping him in more ways than one. He realized the power of coaching and decided to recommend it to other friends and sales executives.

What we witnessed in this story was not a typical coaching session. It didn’t involve basic coaching sessions and activities to engage the sales professionals. But the result was enhanced performance and better personal growth for the employee.

This is where personalized coaching comes into play and a good coach can help your team grow manifold. It will also help your business skyrocket owing to its confident and driven employees. This is why it is mandatory to use coaching while managing a sales team no matter what your niche is.

This year, make it a point to invest in a quality coach for your team and help them transition into the culture smoothly. Create an environment of learning and mutual growth for all parties involved. Trust us, it will go a long way and benefit your company and all its departments in unimaginable ways.