As the lead manager of a sales team, you want to ensure that your team members perform optimally and meet their regular goals. To do this, it’s imperative to have established metrics and objectives.
You should also set up a one on one coaching plan template that you can use when meeting with your reps. A template can ensure that your meeting has intentionality and your team leaves with a sense of purpose for their next steps.
Elements of a Coaching Plan
A beneficial sales coaching template establishes specific objectives, metrics, and goals that you would like to see your team meet. Time is not wasted, and sales reps leave the meeting with direction.
Set an Objective
The objectives that you set should be driven by the needs of the company. Obviously, there will always be a drive toward generating more revenue. However, there may be a need to develop more sales in a specific region or for a particular product or service.
Make sure that you align your team’s goals with the company’s targets.
FREE SALES COACHING TEMPLATE #1
Establish Key Metrics
Along with an objective should be a set of metrics designed to measure the success of your sales rep. There are many software tools designed to provide meaningful KPI’s that can be useful in sales coaching. Sales metrics measure actual results as a result of sales activity. Several appear below:
- Total revenue
- Revenue by product or service
- Percentage of revenue from new business
- Percentage of revenue from existing customers
- Number of deals closed during the week
- Number of deals lost during the week
FREE SALES COACHING TEMPLATE #2
Other metrics to be tracked relate to sales activity. These types of metrics indicate how much communication your sales rep engages in to attract potential customers. Common measures include:
- Number of calls made
- Meetings held
- Emails sent
- Demos or presentations
These goals may vary depending on the type of product or service that the company offers. Once goals are created, you can guide your sales reps to brainstorm action steps that they can take to attain those goals.
By working on measurable goals and action steps, you can guide your sales reps to create positive habits that produce real results.
Ask with Intent
Your weekly one on one coaching plan template should include specific questions designed to encourage your sales rep to think about their performance and how to improve it. It’s not enough to go over the day-to-day results; instead, structure your questions in a way designed to inspire your rep.
A skillful method of asking with intent starts with identifying any significant sales that didn’t work out. Your sales rep can tell you about deals that didn’t close. You don’t need to review each one in detail, but you can pick the most consequential experience and talk through it.
Effective questions to include are:
- Do you understand the product or service you’re trying to sell? Explain it to me.
- How would the product or service have helped the customer? Did it fit any of their needs?
- Was there a connection between you and the customer, or did you stick to a script?
- Where do you think you lost the interest of the customer?
Each of these questions is designed to help the sales rep think through their conversation with the customer and identify where it went wrong.
By asking the sales rep to explain the company’s product or service, you can gauge the level of understanding they have of what they’re trying to sell. If they don’t understand it, or can’t explain how it’s beneficial, the customer won’t be interested. This is a problem that is easily fixed.
You can have the sales rep sit in on a demo or walk through the features with them. The better they understand the product, the more successful they will be in identifying ways that a customer could use it.
FREE SALES COACHING TEMPLATE #3
Sales Data For The Sales Coaching Template
As the sales leader, you should know what customers your team has been visiting, what’s new in the pipeline, and how many deals they won.
Tools like Map My Customers is a sales tool that simplifies the day-to-day processes of a rep, such as sales activity cadence, route planning and CRM account updates. The Weekly Scorecard feature delivers a weekly update to leaders detailing specific leaderboard data to check progress again the sales coaching plan.
Once you know what sales activities your reps are completing each week, you can brainstorm ideas to help them close more deals and optimize their schedules.
Sales Templates for One on One Coaching Improve Results
Setting up a one on one coaching plan template can bolster the success of your sales team and your company. Use the templates to design your regular meetings so they’re as effective and helpful as possible for everyone involved.
