Driving the use of the sales process can lead to greater productivity,selling consistency, and ultimately bottom line results. But, often sales people do not follow the process and are more prone to "shoot from the hip" when doing things. Continually demanding this can exhaust both the sales manager and sales people, so the question is, what are we to do? If sales managers schedule and integrate coaching, it will yield a non-threatening approach to gain greater traction when coaching your sales people.

Sales Coaching is about asking questions at key moments. A typical example is when a sales person asks their manager what to do when a customer asks if they can get a lower price for their customer or prospect. The manager MUST realize this is a key moment. If they start dealing with the price objection by asking "How much do they want off the price" a key issues has been created. Actually two key issues have been created. One, the rep and manager are now dealing with only price and have conditioned the rep to lower the price again and again when similar requests are made. Second, the manager cut themselves off from even knowing if their rep knew what to do or better yet what their thoughts are on how to handle the situation. A coaching approach would have the manager asking the rep "what do you feel we should do" or "what are the top 2 reasons they like our product void  of price"? These questions really teach us a lot about what the rep knew or what they asked the prospect or client.

Coaching is about defining moment's and having questions ready to ascertain what the rep would do on their own, gaining a greater perspective of what they know or can do! This is huge in developing sales people!

Here are two presentations that will hopefully fuel your desire to start sales coaching:

1) Coaching in the funnel:

2) Coaching in the sales process:

Free Whitepaper: Why Sales Managers Fail :