Professional Sales Coaching™ provides your sales managers and coaches with the framework, communication skills, and planning tools they need to build and maintain a superior sales team—one that generates mutually beneficial, long-term business relationships. During the workshop, sales managers and coaches master a proven process for using collaborative coaching conversations to build a development culture that creates a high-performance sales team. They learn how:

• To describe the characteristics of a high-performance sales climate
• To demonstrate The Basic Principles to increase coaching effectiveness with their sales teams
• To evaluate sales performance using the Coaching Issues Diagram
• To apply a set of Skill Steps for Providing Constructive Feedback, Developing Others, and Giving Recognition to increase salesperson performance and drive results
• To successfully handle difficult coaching conversations
• To use phone, voice mail, e-mail, and real-time messaging to coach salespeople effectively from a distance
• To implement a coaching process with the sales team

With Professional Sales Coaching™, your sales managers will not only create a more positive, motivational work environment, they’ll build a stronger, more profitable sales organization—one that wins new customers and keeps them.

The workshop consists of four units, each geared toward building a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to be successful as a sales coach. 

Why Coach
Participants explore what coaching means, why it’s important and what makes coaching challenging. Specifically, participants explore:

• The challenges and rewards of improving business results by changing others’ behavior
• Three aspects for creating a high-performance sales climate in their teams
• Advantages and disadvantages of directive and collaborative approaches to coaching

What to Coach
This unit focuses on the issues and competencies that outline superior sales performance and can be used in observing and evaluating sales team performance. Participants learn:

• To utilize three areas of sales call competence—product knowledge, customer knowledge, and selling skills/ sales process—to evaluate individual and team behaviors
• To focus their efforts on common performance improvement issues
• To utilize a manager’s Resource Guide to identify positive and negative cues associated with keys to selling success

How to Coach
In this unit, sales managers acquire, develop, and apply the skill steps for conducting coaching conversations in a variety of situations. For example, participants learn:

• To set the stage for the coaching conversation and action planning process
• To conduct three kinds of coaching conversations: constructive feedback, development, and recognition
• To handle difficult coaching conversations in which the salesperson is resistant

When to Coach
The final unit within the program revolves around actionable coaching. Coaches review steps for coaching observations, implementing a broad-scale coaching process with their team and are provided experience with tools for reinforcing sales skills. Specifically, participants learn:

• To conduct a coaching kick-off in order to institute formal coaching as an ongoing process
• To build long-term developmental action plans for each individual on their sales teams
• To set action plans in motion and track their people’s progress