Creating an Effective Sales Coaching Program

Why is sales coaching important?

You can have the best product in the world, but if your frontline sales teams do not know how to get that product from the shelf into the hands of your customers, you’re in trouble. It’s time to stop forcing your retailers, partners, and employees to fend for themselves, and start equipping them with tools that will help them sell more product. When your sales people win, your whole company wins.

Download our eBook: The Ultimate Sales Coaching Guide

How to create a training program with sales coaching:

1. Harness experience and write the sales playbook: Do a deep dive into your company’s sales history, evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and interview the sales leaders on your team to understand what their top strategies are. Then, take the time to compile all of the information you’ve found into a comprehensive sales playbook that anyone can follow.
   
2. Delegate coaching responsibilities: Effective sales coaching requires more than handing out documents for your learners to read. Coaching implies there are leaders who are sharing their valuable knowledge with their teams. Choose people who have experience, time to invest, and the personality to engage well with others. Then, give them an incentive to be a part of your program. Remember, a lot of top sales people may see this as a burden rather than an opportunity.
   
3. Create engaging and accessible content to support your coaches: As you’re writing your playbook, incorporate graphs, charts, images, and relevant articles as often as you can. Make sure all of this information is easily accessible and searchable on mobile devices. You want your people to be able to engage with content at their own convenience and recall information when they need it.
   
4. Use video content to your advantage: Training is exponentially more effective when it is interactive. Utilizing video content is one of the best ways to engage your audience. Remember, video works two ways: record training videos and send them to your sales people. Then, have your employees record themselves practicing crucial skills like sales presentations, and incentivize them to send their recording back to a sales coach for feedback.
   
5. Break training up into bite-size pieces: When you ask your learners to consume too much information at once, they don’t retain it. Create short, microlearning modules of information your sales people can digest in a few minutes at a time. Alternate between created and curated content, sales coaching sessions, and milestone assignments or quizzes they can complete to show their progress.
   
6. Keep your playbook updated and make training a habit: If you’re putting your sales people through initial training and then leaving them to their own devices, you’re doing them a major disservice. As products, technology, and processes change, utilize coaching to keep all of your people up to date, no matter how long they’ve served on your sales team.
   
7. Incorporate milestones and incentives: Motivate your sales people with meaningful rewards for completing training milestones and reaching new sales goals. Create a training program valuable enough that they will see real results by following it. If your people don’t see the point in learning and improving, your playbook will sit untouched and your sales coaching program will become obsolete.

Sales Coaching with Bigtincan

Bigtincan is a complete sales enablement platform that allows you to maximize the effectiveness of your sales teams. From our AI-powered sales enablement automation to our microlearning platform with video coaching capabilities, Bigtincan is a comprehensive solution for training your salesforce. Contact us today to set up a pressure-free demo of Bigtincan.