5 Signs Your Sales Coaching Efforts are Highly Effective

If you are a good sales manager, it is very likely that you have put considerable time and effort into coaching your team to meet and exceed expectations.

But maybe you are having a hard time seeing whether or not your coaching efforts have had any real success in shaping the growth of your sales team. If that is the case, check out this list of the 5 signs your coaching efforts have been effective and determine which ones apply to you.

Benefits to Effective Sales Coaching

1. Productivity has increased.

As a sales manager and coach, your duty is to help your salespeople come to understand their own capabilities. When they can recognize their own developmental gaps and see areas where they could stand to improve, they will become more productive members of your team.

This increase in productivity means that your team is learning to think faster and make better decisions. They are using the skills they have gained through your coaching to score sales and perform to the best of their abilities. When your team increases their productivity, they have a greater chance of improving their sales results.

Remember, generating increased productivity is not necessarily about pushing your salespeople to work harder, it is about teaching them to work smarter and use all of their time more effectively.

While this may not happen overnight, you will see your team’s productivity increase over time if you are coaching them effectively.

Bonus: Did you know that increasing productivity is key to achieving sustainable sales growth? For more on this topic, check out this blog post.

2. Morale is high.

A successful team is a confident team. That is what makes morale so important – if your team is not confident in their ability to succeed as a whole, they may fall into a rut of poor performance.

But, when morale is up, you will see a whole host of benefits, including:

• Sparked creativity. Because of how competitive the sales world is, creativity and innovation are key to survival for most businesses.
• Better cognitive abilities. If your salespeople are happy and confident, they will be more apt to make better choices more quickly. A University of Toronto study even showed that moods actually change the way our brains process information – people in worse moods were unable to process information at the same rate as those in better moods.
• Lower turnover. The more content your employees are in their workplace and the more confident they are in their own abilities to sell, the less likely they are to jump ship. That means your company will not have to deal with the high costs of employee turnover.
• Healthier employees. A 2008 Gallup global health study showed that unhappy employees were likely to take significantly more sick days off (15 extra sick days a year).

So, if you are not already doing so, prioritize coaching your team in a positive way that improves morale. By motivating your entire team, you can play to their collective strength.

And if you see that your salespeople trust themselves, one another and you, as their manager and coach, you can be confident that your sales coaching methods have been effective.

3. Sales have improved.

One of the surest signs that your coaching methods are effective is, of course, improved sales.

Through proper sales coaching, your team can master the techniques necessary for top sales results. In fact, one study showed that salespeople who received just 3 hours of coaching a month exceeded their goals by 7 percent and boosted revenue by 25 percent!

If you have seen these improvements in your team, it means that not only are your salespeople adopting the strategies you have coached, but they are also incorporating new knowledge into their routines and using that knowledge to their advantage effectively.

4. New team members adjust quickly.

Every team goes through it – the hiring of new faces to replace the old.

And, as a sales manager, you likely already know that bringing in new salespeople to an already fundamentally sound sales team can be a difficult task. Even if the new salesperson is a perfect culture fit and has a solid grasp on how sales works, the new job environment can be an adjustment.

That is where your coaching comes into play. One of the most important things you can do to strengthen your team is to make sure that they are prepared to mentor a new team member as needed. On top of that, you must coach the new team member so she understands company policies, the sales strategies used in your department, and anything else she might need to know to succeed in her role as a salesperson.

If you notice that new hires tend to adjust quickly into their role, you can feel confident in your skills as a coach and sales leader.

Bonus: For more on bringing in new salespeople and building the perfect sales team, check out this recent blog post.

5. You can easily understand the challenges that your team faces and provide solutions.

As a sales coach, you spend a considerable amount of time listening to your salespeople. It is your job as a coach to point out the ways they can build upon the good experiences while helping them navigate through the difficult ones.

When your salespeople regularly mention specific challenges they face at work, there are a few things you can take away:

• Your team trusts you enough to point out their own flaws.
• The challenges they are facing may be affecting their quality of work, so you should address them as quickly as possible.
• You now have a clearer understanding of the wrinkles that need to be ironed out to improve your team’s morale.

It may be tempting to brush off employee complaints. But if you want to be a good sales coach, you must show genuine concern for the issues they are facing at work and find solutions to help them overcome those issues.

In Conclusion

How well did you do? Do you see any of these signs in yourself or your team?

If you have seen very few or none of these signs, you might consider identifying possible problems with your role as sales manager and learn new habits so you and your team become more effective as a whole.

If you have recognized the majority or all of these signs, you may indeed have an extremely effective sales coaching method. In that case, congratulations! Now you know that you can continue providing your team with effective coaching and feel confident as you improve upon your own abilities in the future.