Best Practices For B2B Sales Coaching

– February 21, 2023 —

Across the entire organization, salespeople have the most interactions with potential customers. On top of that, there are evolving customer concerns, advancing product features, and changing market factors. All these necessitate regular coaching to ensure they’re on top of shifting variables and dynamics contributing to closing deals.  

This article discusses the best practices for B2B sales coaching and tools, such as a sales plan template, that can be used to get the most out of your reps.   

Conduct sales audits 

A sales audit analyzes individual representatives and the team’s performance during a specific period. This allows you to identify areas of improvement and tailor a development framework for each rep. While your CRM can provide an ocean of data referencing performance, it’s best to focus on high-value performance metrics. This can include the following: 

• Number of appointments made per month 
• Project value of pipeline opportunities 
• The volume of opportunities at different stages 
• Renewal/retention rate per rep 
• Revenue and closing rate per rep 

As you can see, the metrics above provide a more tangible picture of performance compared to low-value metrics, such as potential customers in a rep’s territory, number of prospecting calls made, and number of sales. However, these lower-value metrics can also help make better sense of sales reps’ performance when viewed in conjunction with higher-value performance indicators.  

When creating a coaching development framework, remember that the goal is to improve an individual’s performance. This could mean enhancing reps’ buyer persona knowledge so they can bring up talking points relevant to prospects’ unique pain points and buyer journeys. It could also mean improving awareness of areas they can improve and situations where they could have done better. This flexible coaching approach allows managers to focus on areas that can improve rep performance instead of stubbornly forcing a one-size-fits-all strategy.   

Employ conversation intelligence platforms 

Conversation intelligence is a type of software that uses AI technology to record, transcribe, and analyze interactions with prospects. This tool gives complete visibility and context into deals and team performance that guide sales coaching by presenting the realities of customer interactions.  

Instead of reiterating sales messaging and talking points, conversation intelligence shows how prospects respond to sales techniques and which talking points resonate. These invaluable insights help reps react better the next time they encounter similar conversational pathways. Conversation intelligence can also identify risks to a fading deal and arm reps with strategies they can use to counteract them.  

For example, conversation intelligence can flag that a deal has gone 14 days without discussing pricing. It can also point out that a deal has been single-threaded for 21 days, which means it could benefit from introducing other stakeholders and decision-makers to the thread.   

Perform regular call reviews 

Regularly analyzing sales calls helps ensure reps consistently use best sales practices. While the frequency of call reviews can vary, a good exercise is asking agents to bring two calls to the coaching session—a call they view as successful and another one that didn’t go as well. This can help show the contrast between what makes a good sales call and what’s lacking in another.  

In addition, encourage reps to analyze their calls by asking what they did well and what they could’ve done better. Open this exercise by asking them to tell you about the customer. This allows them to set a precedent for analysis.  

Then, you can integrate the insights provided by conversation intelligence into the equation. This can help reps take a step back from the deals they’ve been closely working on and give them a broader perspective of its realities.   

Focus on the middle of the pack 

It’s common to see managers spend most of their energy coaching struggling sales reps to help teams reach their quotas. However, according to Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon, who authored “The Challenger Sale, prioritizing your core performers ensures good coaching pays off. 

The book notes that top performers often don’t register an improvement after coaching, while consistently underperforming reps probably need to be replaced rather than re-trained. The middle 60% of sales teams is, often, where you can find opportunities to implement little tweaks and adjustments that can swing deals, improving overall team performance.    

Encourage top performers to share knowledge 

Make reps listen to successful sales calls, then have the agent who made the call explain their courses of action. You can also have top performers sit in during a call review and share tips on what they would’ve done differently or what approach they would’ve taken. This gives underperforming reps a concrete view of what success looks like and the actionable steps they can take to get there. The exercise promotes a culture of collaboration within the team, one where members value shared success.   

Final words 

Sales coaching is one of the most critical areas of sales management. When you’re chasing quotas and other key performance indicators, things can feel hectic. But in the noise and haze of doing business, it’s critical to remember that developing people is one of the main jobs of sales leaders. Fortunately, there are intelligent tools that can help make coaching more effective, turning insights into actionable steps.  

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