Having a strong leader can make all the difference when it comes to creating a stellar workforce. Sales coaching needs to remain an ongoing process from the moment onboarding begins until the employee ends the relationship with the business. This allows organizations to always maintain a top-trained workforce with the knowledge and motivation to beat the competition. However, obtaining such a mentality needs to begin with the manager. Not every company has a training staff that keeps working on education and motivation, and in these cases, corporations may note that they aren't getting the best return on investment for their training initiatives.
Better use of training time
CSO Insights recently released its 5th annual Sales Management Optimization study, which highlights the best and worst practices, challenges and improvements to the sales environment over the last year. Findings showed that balancing the time spent between coaching and selling was the approach most favored by best-in-class organizations across all industries, allocating at least one-fourth of regular work periods to each of these activities. The rest of a manager's time in optimal environments should be split between marketing and forecasting, with miscellaneous tasks left for last.
"The data clearly support the value of investing in your sales managers and the return paid when they effectively coach their reps," said Jim Dickie of CSO Insights. "We see companies developing their people, implementing higher levels of sales process, and leveraging technology…are outdistancing firms that ignore or half-heartedly include these in their day-to-day selling and managing activities."
A never-ending story
Using this sort of balanced strategy toward sales coaching and actual pitching helps companies maintain an ever-growing talent pool and improves workforce comprehension of tools, trends and important techniques used for connecting with clients. Business 2 Community wrote that this is the ideal method for promoting sales coaching in the workplace. At no time is the training period actually over, the source stated, since there are always new technologies and information emerging. In any industry, keeping up with modern forecasts and moving with the market is the only way to ensure that products and services are still desirable to target audiences. The same principle applies to internal processes like hiring, retention and sales.
Encouraging leaders to focus more on training and balancing their schedules helps provide more support to front-line sales personnel. This will create better relationships within a team and promote better understanding of corporate products, culture and technology practices. Such a balanced approach is favored by many leading organizations.
