The presence of sales coaching and training in the enterprise landscape has been a staple of onboarding, retention and investment strategies for years. While these assets remain critical aspects of cultivating the best sales teams, the ways in which such resources are being used and the skills these options target are rapidly changing.

Promoting personal training
This shift in how, when and why sales coaching is deployed is having an increasing connection with modern technology and expanding business environments, as Smart Company's Sue Barrett stated. She wrote that the traditional methods of delivering selling insights, talent refinement and pitching strategies is seeing significant overhauls by corporate leaders, as the ways in which marketing initiatives are delivered and mediated by enterprise options continues to change.

Barrett pointed out that onboarding and entry level personnel are increasingly expensive to train. That's because these employees are unaware of many of the types of technology and infrastructure that businesses use for engaging consumers and creating connected internal landscapes. Such financial liabilities are driving more companies to change their sales coaching strategies to include more intuitive, IT-based training and cultivation techniques, providing more virtualization in exchange for better onboarding practices that cut costs while also promoting the greatest level of skills advancement.

What's more, expanding the availability of specialized workforce training options online and in-house could help companies increase many essential factors tied to enterprise sales coaching and business presence. These elements include:

  • Uniform education
  • University-grade training resources
  • Always-on teaching tools
  • Dedicated corporate education platform
  • E-learning ease of access and employee tracking
  • Expedited training times
  • Reduced downtime for workforce during skill building
  • Integrated sales coaching experiences

By offering employees the ability to train, learn and refine talents while remaining on the job allows personnel to put their new insights to work almost immediately. Such high-impact, hands-on sales coaching reduces the space between learning and doing, which in turn can help reinforce lessons and make sales professionals that much more effective.

Managing implementation
Simply putting tools into play in the sales coaching environment isn't enough to verify their success. As Business 2 Community stated, while it's helpful to provide personnel with digital learning opportunities and online training resources, there's also a need for face-to-face interactions and regular review periods so that leaders can be assured that the return on investment they expect from these enhanced sales coaching modules is actually realized.

Overcoming these concerns requires that corporate management is aware of how these problems occur and sets up solutions in advance that can mitigate the chance of a sales coaching SNAFU. According to the source, it's best for businesses to create a prioritized list of modules, schedule training in a logical order and review individual progress on a regular basis. This helps reduce the potential for failure by ensuring that employees understand what they're learning and are putting it into play in their pitching and consumer interactions in ways that actually work.

Targeting outcomes
Once leaders know what they want, driving success in that direction requires more than just preliminary oversight. A hands-off approach to sales coaching won't work, as Business 2 Community stated. What's necessary in these instances is a means of sales incentive compensation integration, sales coaching review and best practices implementation that promotes a total approach to learning that enhances overall success for the firm and all members of workforce.

Over the next few years, business leaders will need to look more closely at how they're deploying and managing their sales coaching solutions. The new focus on proactive rather than responsive education, coupled with modern technology like integrated IT solutions and mobile deployments, can help corporations grow and support their workforce in dynamic ways.