Why More Sales Leaders Are Focusing on Sales Coaching

The American job market is tighter than it’s been in years, and the sales industry is no exception. Great sales reps are at a premium -- especially those with experience. As a result, sales managers have been turning to reps with far less experience. According to research from The BridgeGroup, even a requirement of 1-2 years of experience is giving way to hiring reps straight out of college. This utter lack of expertise in early-career sales roles, and the need for rapid improvement after initial training, has put sales coaching is on the tip of nearly every sales leader’s tongue as they look for new ways to help inexperienced reps outperform competitors.

Silicon Valley has responded accordingly with a slew of sales coaching technologies. Due to strong demand, I expect such solutions to become a staple in sales technology stacks for businesses of all sizes in the coming years.

Sales coaching vs. sales training

One question I often hear asked is, “What’s the difference between sales training and sales coaching?” Sales training refers to an event or a series of events that occur as baseline education. Sales coaching, on the other hand, implies an ongoing relationship between reps and managers, with continued optimization and improvement. The scope of coaching ranges from process enforcement to the improvement of the sales conversation itself.

Why coaching?

Sales training programs often assume that reps can undergo some boot camp that lasts weeks or even months before reps are up and running. But the reality is that most companies don’t want to wait that long to see if reps have what it takes to be successful. Coaching focuses on building incremental improvements over time rather than trying to cram a bunch of knowledge in at once, which will usually be quickly forgotten.

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Author: Howard Brown