The sales process is very impressionable, and anything a business does can have a huge impact on productivity and workflow. Something as major as a shift in managerial staff or as minor as a change in the script can completely transform the sales process for better or worse.
There are some specific strategies that organizations can utilize to revolutionize their sales processes for the better. Business 2 Community offers suggestions such as defining the sales process and methodology, committing to incremental improvement, establishing ownership objectives and leveraging learning tools. However, perhaps the single best way to bolster operations is through sales coaching.
"Sales coaching is the single most effective way to improve a sales team," the news source adds. "In fact, research conducted by SEC Solutions, a leading NASDAQ sales research best practice firm, found that sales teams receiving high quality coaching could improve their performance by up to 20 percent."
Coaches and trainers, regardless of whether they are specific to the sales industry, can improve behaviors and performance through five specific actions: setting goals, uncovering gaps that prevent these tasks from being accomplished, identifying why these gaps exist, defining a corrective action and then evaluating performance.
In the sales sector, coaches can help solve a number of problems, regardless of the level of the person being coached. Sales is a dynamic field and leads can go sour for a number of reasons, all of which may not be clear to the agent in question. With proper one-on-one and group coaching, salespeople will be in better positions to understand where they are going wrong.
By effectively going over the five specific coaching actions, sales coaches can help their teams on both individual and group-wide levels to identify the cause of setbacks and set a course of correction that will enable them improve their standings.
As companies consider their sales coaching initiatives, it's important to consider relevancy. Even within a single sales team, people will have different ways of selling products and many personal styles. Similarly, coaching efforts need to be relevant to these individuals – one employee may learn one way, but a different co-worker may respond completely differently to the same approach.
