Sales training is an important component of employee training for many businesses. Companies often hire trainers to work with their sales staff to get them motivated, inspired, and ready to get their sales message out to potential customers.

Who Needs Sales Training?

Everyone needs some type of sales training. It’s not just for large corporation or those involved with direct sales. It’s for everyone!

Sole proprietors and individuals who work for themselves also need to know how to sell.

Not only that, most people must use some sort of sales techniques to get the things they want in life. For example, most people have a job interview at some point in their lives – even this is a form of selling as you are promoting your skills and personality.

Can a Life Coach Help You Sell?

Life coaches offer a wide variety of services and help with most aspects of life. They tend to be generalists and they touch on many areas of life, including:

• Goal creation and achievement
• Stress management
• Life balance between work and leisure
• Finances and budgeting
• Personal growth
• Behavior modification
• Health and lifestyle changes
• Relationships and intimacy
• Parenting and family
• Career development
• Creativity pursuits for writers, artists, musicians

Can you add sales training to that list?

It depends on your definition of sales training. If it is strictly limited to techniques about how to sell and promote products, life coach are probably not the best choice for this type of training. However, if the concept is broadly defined, then life coaches are a great choice to help you with your ability to sell. Life is selling, and coaches know life!

Succeeding in Life is all About Sales

Here are three examples of how a life coach is really a sales coach in disguise:

1. To get anywhere in life, you must first make a sale. You must sell yourself on the idea and the goal. No matter what you want to achieve, it will usually take work, and sometime money, to reach the goal. To make the effort, time, and money worthwhile, you must sell yourself on the benefit of the goal – just like a salesperson must sell a potential customer on the benefit of a product or service.
2. Let’s say you are just entering a new career or thinking about switching gears and jumping to a new career. You will need to interview for jobs. The interview process is like any other sales job, except you are selling yourself – your skills, your personality, your experience, and your work ethic. A life coach can help you identify and clarify your goals, help you organize your skill set so you can easily promote what you have to offer, and help you work on ways to clearly and concisely relay this information to the interviewer.
3. Let’s say that one part of your life is a mess – your finances, your health, you organizational skills – some area of your life that actually negatively influences other areas. However, you truly don’t see how this one area makes a difference in other areas. A good life coach must help you sell yourself on the idea that all areas are interconnected and one disruptive area many keep you from achieving goals.

So… can a life coach offer sales training?

No one should hire a life coach to get specialized sales and marketing training – they are just not trained to do that. However, since life can be thought of as one continual sales job and everyone needs to be a sales-trained individual to make the most out of life, life coaches must also be sales coaches

From jobs to relationships to creative endeavors to enjoying the life you dream of – you must sell to yourself and to others. If coaches are worth the money they charge, then they are also sales coaches.

To answer the question in the title: Yes – life coaches offer sales training, whether they know it or not!

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When would be a better time to visit a doctor: after you are sick or before you get sick? Though many choose to see their doctor only after symptoms create enough of a demand for them to seek help, a more logical approach is to see your doctor for preventive care to ward off illness.

The same is true for your career. Why wait until your career is in jeopardy, your income falling and your stress level climbing before hiring a tenured, skilled and professional sales coach?

Day One or Day 1,000

While some coaches, eager to build their business will suggest that everyone in sales should hire them on the first day of their career, it may make more sense to delay even beginning to select a coach.

Why wait?

Actually, there are a couple of reasons why a rookie sales professional should consider waiting a while before hiring a coach. The first is the fact that many are in a sales position only because they are unable to find a job in a career or industry that really interests them. Sales has been called the “default occupation” for this very reason.

Hiring a sales coach on day 1 of your sales career may be money ill spent. A good coach will be focused on helping your increase your sales and may not be driven to help you decide if sales is really right for you.

Another reason to hold off hiring a professional coach is that your company will (should) have plenty of sales training for you to go through and master. Adding sales models and techniques on top of the training you are already receiving may be overwhelming. Beyond being potentially overwhelmed, you may not devote the time and attention to fully learning the training your company is giving you which probably wouldn’t impress your sales manager.

When the Student is Ready…

There’s an old expression that says when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. As long as your search for a coach begins before “crisis mode,” the time you begin searching for a coach is the right time for you.

Very few sales professionals who hire a sales coach would say that they were 100% certain of their decision to hire a coach. In fact, if you wait until you are absolutely certain that hiring a sales coach is the perfect way to advance your career, you’ll probably not hire a coach until it’s either too late or when your sales are so bad that you feel you have to do something.

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People who are knowledgeable and experienced in sales excellence know sales coaching is worthwhile; it can make a difference; and it needs to be a priority. Sales pros agree coaching is a necessity if you want a world-class sales team.

While most sales leaders agree about the importance of sales coaching, most also admit “the job isn’t getting done.” Many great companies start coaching initiatives with tremendous energy and commitment. Far fewer exit the other end of the tunnel.

Two developments increase the urgency for a renewed dialogue about getting coaching to happen:

· Sales force performance is a bigger piece of the competitive advantage puzzle. Presently, it is extremely difficult to sustain a competitive advantage by product alone. Even if you have a winning product, the competition is likely to get a product to market that is just as good, at half the price… in half the time it took several years ago. Although a superior sales force is extremely difficult to assemble and train, once you have one, it is of the few sustainable advantages left.

· Sales excellence is more difficult to achieve. Not only is superior sales performance more important than ever; it’s harder to get there. Today, sales people must develop their knowledge and skills to an unprecedented level. Now top performers have to know more and know it at a higher level of competency than ever before. In many companies, a substantial number of the top performers 15 years ago would not make the first cut for this year’s President’s Club.

One step for making it happen is addressing a critical stumbling block for achieving sales excellence – why more companies don’t get serious about sustaining a coaching effort? In that regard it’s not that folks don’t think it’s important; they do – also is not primarily a lack of skill. Sure some front-line sales managers need to improve their coaching but even when they do, coaching often still does not occur.

We would submit the fundamental culprit is lack of commitment and discipline. Consequently another high priority coaching initiative or a new coaching training program, by themselves, are unlikely to fix the problem.

Enter Trigger Event Coaching. In organizations certain events occur that create an enormous amount of organic energy and focus. This is due to the strategic importance of these events and the time, effort, and financial resources the organization has committed to making them happen. Let’s call these occurrences – Trigger Events.

Launching an important new product, initiating a rebranding effort, implementing a merger/acquisition, and instituting a strategic sales shift like moving from selling individual products to selling an integrated solution are all examples of Trigger Events.

When it comes to coaching, Trigger Events are important because if you initiate a targeted coaching effort to making them successful, the importance of the Trigger Event will provide the focus and commitment necessary to make sure the coaching happens. All Trigger Events represent some type of strategic shift so the sales team will indeed need to adjust and adapt their selling skills to the new reality. So coaching is clearly needed and warranted.

Example – New Product Launches. Let’s take the example of a new product launch. In this case let’s assume the new product is a potential game changer. In such a case the company would have committed substantial R&D and Marketing dollars and lots of people would be interested in creating a success story.

In is also true if the product is a game changer, then the sales team will likely face new sales challenges and a need to upgrade their selling skills. So it will be easier than normal to get everyone behind the idea of implementing a six-month targeted coaching effort for helping the sales team get smart about selling the new product. And if needed, it will also be easier to get the budget to implement manager coaching training or purchase a coaching software package customized for the new product.

Summary

When it comes to sales coaching our observation is the problem is not so much about bad sales coaching but the fact that sales coaching does not systematically occur. When it does occur, it works.

So one answer to the dilemma is connecting the sales coaching effort to a high priority organizational Trigger Event that has everyone’s attention and focus. Our bet is under these conditions the right people will actually get serious about coaching, its merits will be demonstrated, and perhaps coaching will become institutionalized. And if the latter thing happens – that’s a good thing.

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If you are working in sales, you realize just how gratifying and financially rewarding it can be. Yet, to fail to achieve your full potential in this cut throat business can also find you caught up in one of the most frustrating, stressful and completely wretched ways of trying to make a living.

There are two schools of thought that emerge when it comes to selecting the ideal salesperson. One states the individual has to be a special type to thrive in the sales world; the other believes anyone who has learned the right techniques can perform this job. The truth lies somewhere between. Being an excellent salesperson requires a certain amount of specific skills, personal characteristics and knowledge. You can work your way through every book on sales and still not be a top salesperson. In fact the different and often outdated approaches in some of these books may result in confusion rather than a clear success. The same is applicable to relying solely on innate personal traits. If you do not have the knowledge to reinforce them, you are not going to make Salesperson of the Year.

If you want to be at the top of the sales ladder, you have to combine a wide variety of talents, skills and innate personal characteristics. You must be able to recognize the key-decision makers, develop a solid relationship with them and know just what to hone in to and how hard to press home your point. You must be compelling in your arguments, deal with a massive amount of diverse figures including costs and calculate correctly. It also means you need the perseverance to stick with the sales pitch and close the deal at the right time for the right price.

Many individuals have a few of these characteristics. They have the ability to persevere or are mathematic whiz kids. Yet, only the very best can combine all the ingredients. They are the few who can deliver on every single account. If, however, you turn to online sales coaching, you can work on and improve your sales capabilities on all counts.

Online sales coaching is not to be confused with those generic types offered through various books, videos and training courses. Online sales coaching is a personalized one-on-one approach. It allows individuals to discover and learn how to utilize their natural and learned abilities to achieve the best results possible.

When it comes to selecting a sales coach be cautious. The task requires more than knowledge of sales and sales techniques. It also needs the individual to pass on that knowledge in a positive manner. To teach someone how to be successful in the field of sales, you need to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the student and know how to support them towards their goal.

Another issue to consider is the relevancy of the knowledge. Sales techniques have changed over the years. Today’s approaches are not consistent with those of the past. You need to take care the sales coach you choose has completely accurate and current understanding of what has now become a global market. Today, technological advances dash in and affect the way you can sell products and services. Moreover, the aggressive sales techniques of past years are no longer in vogue. They have been replaced with more sophisticated means – the result of research into human behavior and other aspects involving sales. As a result, you need to be very careful, selecting only a sales coach who is aware of the latest methods and can introduce them into his or her teaching techniques.

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Kathy has just been promoted as Sales Manager of her team, and she just found that being a Sales Manager is quite different from being a Sales Person. More importantly, there seems to be tons of people issues that she would have to help resolve through coaching.

For instance, there’s Sam, who’s a new sales person and showed a lot of promise during his initial training with the company. When he went on his work, he also put in lots of effort. Still, after 3 months, there wasn’t any results generated.

Then there’s Susan, who’s one of the better sales persons in the team. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been producing much results lately. When asked about her performance, she replied that the customers just need a little longer time to make the decision this year..

And there’s Simon, whom had been in touch with a prospect for quite some time. He had seen their decision makers, technical buyers and even end-users. While responses were positive, there was no further progress in the customer’s buying process.

To make things worse, Kathy hadn’t even received much coaching from her former manager when she was a Sales Person, and hence don’t even have a role model to emulate when she needed to coach her team. The good news for Kathy is that coaching for Sales People is not as difficult or as daunting for newly on-boarded Sales Managers. The concepts are simple and easy to master, although it will require some practice to get the best results!

Where You Are, and Where You Want Your Team to Be

The approach that most Sales Managers take when coaching team members is that they tend to look at low-performance incidents sporadically and just give advice on how their team member needs to do to correct that behaviour. This action is what is known as “Corrective Feedback”, which could be part of coaching, but is inadequate to equate it with coaching.

To make coaching really deliver desired results, we can borrow concepts from the Six Thinking Hats to formulate an effective coaching strategy. Here are the first steps:

1. Blue Hat – What do you want your team member to become, and how you want to go about achieving this.

2. White Hat – What current information (e.g. sales results, prospecting effectiveness, selling prices etc.) do you have about your team member? What other information do you need so as to really understand where he/ she stands right now?

Conveying Your Coaching Message

Although coaching your sales team is really about what you want your team member to become, you will need that team member to agree to your goals and objectives for him or her. Coaching is a 2-way street, and hence if your “coachee” does not agree or buy-in to your goals, the coaching will fail.

As such you will need to communicate your Blue Hat with your team member clearly, and be open to feedback if there are any disagreements or modifications to your original plan.

During your coaching session, you will need to communicate the following:

1. Yellow Hat – Give affirmation on the strengths and positive contributions of the team member. Coaching is as much about helping team members to correct mistakes, as it is about helping them to strengthen or improve on their existing strengths. In any case, team members ALWAYS feel good when their bosses tell them something nice about them.

2. Black Hat – Let your team members understand which are the areas that need correction or improvement. One thing to be clear in such communication is to make sure the team member understand that you are not picking on their mistakes. Instead, they have to be clear that you are helping them achieve better results.

3. Green Hat – Instead of telling them what they need to do to get better results, invite and engage them to suggest creative suggestions to help improve their own performances. You will be surprised by the ingenuity of the suggested solutions, and best of all, since your team member suggested the solution, you will get the full commitment of that team member to implement the solution that he or she suggested!

4. Red Hat – At suitable intervals, find out how your team member feels whether he or she is OK to continue with the coaching, or if he or she is comfortable with the conversation between the two of you. If at any point of time your team member feels uncomfortable, that could be a sign that the coaching is moving in the wrong direction. You may then want to stop, and re-strategise for a different coaching session the next time.

Despite your best efforts, not all coaching will turn out in the way you envision it to be. But that’s OK. What is more important is that you adapt different coaching strategies to different team members based on their:

* Desired behaviours and performance;
* Current behaviours, traits and performance metrics; and
* Temperaments and communication styles of each individual.

Achieving Sustainable Results

While MOST sales managers agree and believe that training and coaching team members is very important for boosting the team’s performances, FEW actually took systematic steps to train or coach their team members.

The key word here is “systematic”. Coaching your team members, while very important, is usually NOT urgent. That is, if you don’t coach your team members today, nothing catastrophic is going to happen tomorrow. Hence, with the heavy workload and the number of more urgent matters to attend to, most sales managers keep on postponing the required coaching for their team members until it’s way too late.

Hence, to achieve sustainable results with your coaching, you will have to:

* Schedule the appointment with your team members and everybody will have to treat it as important and urgent as a key customer meeting;

* Put on your White Hat prior to the coaching session to gather as much information of your “coachee”, and also make a list of questions for the information that you would like to know;

* Put on your Blue Hat at the end of each coaching session to set mutually-agreed action plans on what behavioural changes that your “coachee” needs to make; and

* Listen to the feedback given by your “coachee” and determine what changes that you need to make too!

The steps to being an effective sales coach are simple. The difference between a good sales coach and a mediocre one boils down to: practice. Just like any new skill, the initial practice is going to be awkward. However, with more practice, you can be an expert sales coach real soon.

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If you sell value-add or business critical solutions or services B2B, these top sales strategy tips could be the catalyst to help improve sales performance. Find out how a coach that constructively challenges your strategy and approach could be a key factor for success.

Sales Coach Tip #1

Eliminate Comfort Zone Selling to Improve Sales Performance

Many salespeople and often the companies they work for are slaves of comfort zone selling. They go through the same old “hit and hope” sales routine, hoping for the best but winning too little profitable business. This is the best place to start looking when considering ways to improve sales performance.

A prospective customer requests a presentation, proposal, demonstration or trial and most salespeople are keen to oblige. That’s a lot of commitment from a supplier. Effective salespeople qualify well and work to ensure they gain enough commitment in return, before they agree to dedicate time and effort.

Few companies stop to calculate the cost of each failed sales attempt, whether a formal tender or a less formal proposal. Consider the total hours lost in meetings and response preparation for a bid that fails. A skilled sales coach will ensure valuable time is spent wisely and only on winnable opportunities.

Sales Coach Tip #2

Profit is Sanity So Keep the Focus on a Margin Rich Sales Strategy

Now think how many of the bids you win are “margin compromised” as opposed to margin rich? Being the price leader in an attempt to improve sales performance may work for the budget shop, but it’s a very poor sales strategy if you sell value-add or critical solutions or services business to business.

Business critical purchases tend to be far less price sensitive than prospective customers would ever like to admit. The risk of a poor buying decision is too high for false economies. Yet supplier nerves often trigger unnecessary discount just to get the deal done and thus the margin is often compromised.

Before you weigh up the merits of using an external coach, think just how much you might be losing by pandering to false price pressures. A good sales coach is a catalyst for the behaviour changes needed to improve margin rich sales performance and any investment here should produce healthy returns.

Sales Coach Tip #3

Why Let Purchasing Departments Determine Your Sales Strategy?

The market too often expects suppliers to jump at any opportunity to bid. Many suppliers conform without really considering how well positioned they are to win or the business viability if they did. Suppliers that professionally hold their ground can gain significant credibility with prospective customers.

Too many salespeople just look for a solution match. Ticking the boxes against a specification, RFP or ITT is only one aspect to consider. Any good sales coach will ensure that the primary focus is on access to the key influencers and decision makers – the people who can make things happen.

Assuming the project is real and they will actually spend money with someone soon, there is always a danger you may only be making up the numbers. A smarter B2B sales strategy helps you weed out the false opportunities from the real ones to avoid situations where the odds are stacked against you.

Left to their own devices, most salespeople can become habitual and even if they work hard, they may not work smart. A skilled external sales coach will help them identify and avoid the false opportunities they might otherwise chase, whilst honing their ability to qualify, develop and win the true ones.

Sales Coach Tip #4

Serious Buying Decisions Demand Deep Consideration

Imagine your career relied on selecting the right supplier of a business critical service. How much would you be influenced by a likable salesperson and how much by their ability to correctly set and meet your expectations? Suppliers failing to grasp this will find it hard to improve sales performance.

We often hear that “people buy from people they like.” This is just too simplistic when it comes to value-add or business critical solutions or services. In such situations people will buy from people they hold credible to deliver to expectations. Anything else would put their careers seriously at risk.

And if people make serious buying decisions based on how confident they feel in a company’s ability to meet expectations, then why do so many suppliers waste time pitching their solutions instead of asking constructive questions and listening well in order to build strong relationships with the key players?

If you lack confidence it’s often tempting to slip into pitching mode rather than really engage your prospective customer. You may feel on safe ground talking about the features and benefits of a solution you know like the back of your hand. Your prospective customer may well be more bored than engaged.

If you can convince a genuine prospect they are in safe hands with your company, that you clearly understand their requirements and will deliver to the expectations that you set, then why would they not select you? Ironically, many salespeople only scrape the surface of sales opportunities and thus fail.

Sales Coach Tip #5

Specialist Niche Player Supplier or Large Generalist Supplier?

Small companies often have an inferiority complex, however with the right B2B sales strategy, a specialist niche player can often beat larger well known bidders. The key is to determine early on whether a prospect is prepared to break from the herd to go with a lesser known company with a better offering.

Prospective customers may operate within their own comfort zones and some will turn away from the better solution in order to ensure the safety of their own derriere. A good sales coach will help you separate prospects that will only ever play safe from those that are prepared to back the best solution.

And Finally, Back to Sales Coach Tip #1

When you think about it, comfort zone selling is in many ways at the root of all of the above issues. It is habitual, even self-satisfying in the short-term to be working so hard on so many opportunities. However it is far less rewarding in the medium to long-term when too little of any real value comes to fruit.

To eradicate comfort zone selling means raising the bar across the board. A business to business sales strategy evolution is more viable than a potentially disruptive revolution. It can be a mistake to try to change too much too soon. An experienced sales coach can help you move towards your goal step by step.

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