It can be tricky to provide sales coaching when you also play the role of sales manager. For real high-quality coaching, you will want a real open line of communication between the coach and the person being coached. This will allow the salesperson to be very open with sharing what is going on.

A salesperson may be more reserved in sharing all the details around what they are thinking and going through with their manager than they might be if they are sharing information with someone that is only playing the role of a sales coach.

But even with that challenge being there, there is still a role that a sales manager can play when it comes to sales coaching. Here are some things to try to think about and incorporate.

Have a Weekly Structure
Having a weekly structure in terms of what the sales resource should be doing throughout the week and also scheduled time for when the coaching will take place.

Focus on How to do Something Correctly
It can be easy as a manager to notice and identify what an employee does incorrectly. Then it is our natural reaction to structure sales coaching around discussing what is being done incorrectly.

This is a very negative way to approach trying to motivate or educate someone. A more positive way to go is to become alerted to something by noticing when something is done incorrectly, but then communicate that to the salesperson more around what the correct way is to do it.

In other words, instead of saying “Don’t do it this way”, focus more on saying “This is the best way to do it”.

Identify What to Work on Next
Provide clarity in the sales coaching sessions around for what the salesperson needs to work on next. What is the key activity that they need to work on? What is the key step that they need to take?

Build out a clear action or development plan.

Monitor Calls Where Possible
If you have the capability to record calls, try to record and incorporate call samples into your sales coaching. This will provide great examples to look at and should establish key things to work on and improve.

Provide a Weekly Scorecard
Try to provide a weekly scorecard to the salesperson as part of the sales coaching. This should provide feedback in certain areas. You could build the scorecard to measure different things like dealing with objections, tonality, knowing the pitch, closing, asking the right questions, etc.

This will help provide the salesperson with clarity around what they are doing well and also the key areas that they need to improve.

SalesScripter provides sales coaching services that will help your salespeople to get to the next level!