Why and how to personalize your sales coaching?

As a salesperson, you have no choice but to deliver if your company is to reach its objectives, and you are constantly under pressure!

The critical question that managers and sales enablement teams need to ask themselves is: how do we help salespeople perform better?

The answer: through 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

Businesses aim for the moon and they are right to do so! Every year, the goals to achieve become more and more ambitious. But logically, our sales performance must constantly improve. How can we do it when we struggle to accelerate?

The solution: focus on personalized sales coaching.

What is sales coaching?

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

In the long run, sales coaching motivates salespeople and helps us reach our sales goals. This tool allows managers and sales enablement teams to effectively support us throughout our journey towards our sales objectives.

Note: sales coaching is not a form of teaching . It is an accompaniment aimed at developing or strengthening skills. It's not just about transmitting knowledge! But of course, there is nothing wrong with sharing past experiences, especially if the context of the exchange lends itself to it.

Implementing commercial coaching is a positive step. Its goal? To help sales teams become excellent. And to effectively support sales, discover a powerful tool: personalized coaching.

Why personalize your coaching?

Each salesperson's background is unique. We don't have the same experience and we didn't 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!

Even though team coaching and general guidelines are necessary, they're not sufficient.

Our best advice: personalize your sales coaching. Adapt the support of your sales force to our individual issues, in order to provide precise and regular coaching. It's thanks to this that we can progress quickly and continuously.

Personalized coaching should occur at different stages of a salesperson's journey within the company:

• During the onboarding of new salespeople, so that they can quickly take on your challenges.
• During sales processes, to help us achieve better results.
• During a difficult sale, to give us actionable tools 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 salespeople.

How to succeed in your sales coaching?

One common misconception to tackle 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 their skills in general!

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

• What key skills is the salesperson struggling with?
• How can coaching help them?
• What content can you provide to support them?

Here are some key points to work on to help your sales team improve their performance.

Identifying the needs of salespeople and the objectives of coaching is key

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

It's crucial to adapt your approach to the needs of your sales team. Schedule a meeting with the salesperson you'll be coaching and ask yourself some questions:

• What's the salesperson's behavior during a call?
• What's their overall attitude in managing prospects?
• What are their strengths?
• What weaknesses have you identified?

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

Asking the Right Questions

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

The beauty of this technique? Your salesperson will improve more quickly if the answers come from within. It gives them the opportunity to study their own work methods and takes ownership of the process. We are better when we are in control of ourselves.

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

Then, dig deeper. Are there any other sticking points? Identify the points to coach, then ask another simple question: "how would you have done that?"

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

Delivering a methodology and best practices

Personalized coaching is a structured and intentional process. Your goal is to develop the essential knowledge and behaviors for the success of salespeople (and therefore the company).

To help salespeople improve their skills, rely on our qualities. Listen again to the calls to pinpoint best practices: for example, the tone is good, the first questions are relevant, and allow for quick qualification of the prospect.

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

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

• The engagement of the participants during the call
• The salesperson's body posture during a video call
• The live analysis of weak signals
• The personalization of follow-ups

Perform regular follow-up

Thanks to call listening and analysis, gather data for your individual sessions. But outside of these appointments, boost your sales reps’ skills by regularly reviewing calls. You can track improvements and deliver the right content at the right time.

‍WithModjo's review feature, provide precise feedback on each call. The call's key points are highlighted, with the option to add a rating out of 5 and leave feedback.

Reviews limit repetitions, as you give information directly in context. You promote the adoption of messages and cultivate good sales reps' behavior. This is how you help your sales teams reach their peak productivity and grow your revenue!

Ensuring uniformity of best practices within the team

Coaching is a collaborative and participatory effort. Your sales team shares best practices and methodologies to improve their productivity as a team. This is why your coaching elements must be shareable to ensure replicability of best practices and improve performance.

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

• Onboarding: your new sales team members can replay calls, segmented and analyzed by managers, and gather a wealth of best practices to quickly reach their full potential.
• Following the account history: retrieve information to pitch, hunt the account, improve their closing rate, and guide the account on next steps.
• Managing their skills: reviews allow them to see their areas for improvement more easily and visually. No more sharing impressions: rely on concrete data.

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In short, make your team's areas for improvement objective and highlight them to succeed in your commercial coaching.

We discussed personalized commercial coaching with Aircall. Check out the replay of the webinar and find all the relevant information to individualize coaching for your sales team. Mentor them to help them improve their skills and perform at their best.

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