Why Winning Teams are Great at Sales Coaching

It’s an understatement to say sales training and coaching is a trending topic. It’s trending for good reason. As a manager, coaching is the single most impactful thing you can do to improve sales across your team. According to the Sales Executive Council, on average, sales performance is 19% higher for teams that implement effective sales coaching versus those with ineffective practices.

That’s not all that surprising. There’s a mature industry made up of corporate trainers, coaching consultants, and educational material solely devoted to developing sales skills.

For brevity, I’m just going to focus on what makes the difference between mediocre coaching efforts and those that set up teams for success.

Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.

Based on data from the American Society for Training & Development, US companies invest twenty billion a year on sales training. Compare that with the ES Research Group study that showed 90% of all sales coaching programs saw only a three to four month bump in sales effectiveness before it dropping back to pre-training levels.

This is due, almost entirely, to a broken process. Bringing in a professional trainer once a year to run group exercises and organize mock calls can be helpful, but only if those lessons persist.

You wouldn’t bring in a baseball coach to run batting practice once a year and then expect to be World Champions.

Learned behavior doesn’t change quickly — a single training session is not sufficient to learn new skills and rewrite muscle memory. And when you recognize that ~90% of training exercises are forgotten in a few short months, creating consistency in training becomes paramount.

As a manager or team lead, coaching sessions should be a regular part of your daily and weekly workflow.

Research published by The Corporate Executive Board shows that sales reps who receive as little as three hours of coaching per month exceed quota by 7%, increasing revenue by 25% and average close rates by 70%.

Three hours per rep, per month. Make this your new benchmark. Aim to exceed it.

Arguably the easiest way to maintain consistency is with structure. There’s a significant difference between ad-hoc coaching and scheduled coaching, and it’s in the preparation and intention.

Think back to how you studied effectively for exams. Sales training isn’t all that different, the fundamentals of learning apply to both. One hour of highly effective coaching per month will return better outcomes than three times that amount of time in ad-hoc conversations had in 15-minute chunks.

Focus and preparation are key.

And to be clear, the value in consistent coaching isn’t just about optimizing for performance.

“Beyond the Quota: Best-in-Class Deployments of Sales Performance Management” by the Aberdeen Group cites that it takes seven months and roughly $29,000 to recruit and fully onboard a new sales rep. Now consider that the cost of churning talent can range from 1.5–2x an employee’s annual compensation. Employee turnover is expensive. Which makes retention a valuable effort worth investing in.

Professional development programs are a clear and visible signal of a company’s interest in furthering an employee’s skills and career, directly impacting and strengthening morale. According to Sales Performance International, retention goes up as much as 63% when managers focus on regularly reinforcing sales training.

Invest in Better Data

How would Oakland’s own Billy Beane moneyball a sales team? It’s not a trick question. He would focus on following the data, and nothing else.

Imagine trying to optimize your outbound email campaigns with zero data. No concept of open rates, deliverability, or click-through percentages. No ability to A/B test different subject lines, and no insight into why some emails work and others don’t.

This is how many sales teams today look at their calls.

It’s a black box. Even with calls being the most coached sales skill, there’s no coachable data behind these efforts. Sentiment analysis isn’t all that impactful to close rates, and metadata (call length, time of day, etc.) isn’t actionable.

The goal for unlocking valuable call data should be to understand exactly why a call is successful. Find out why one behavior is more effective than another. Are the highest performing reps asking five probing questions instead of just one? Are they offering discounts, or do they avoid pricing altogether?

These insights are unique to each team and each organization, but once you have them, you have a roadmap to improving close rates.

Believe it or not, your reps are thirsty for data that can help them improve — their financial success is directly tied to their call success. By moving beyond the scorecard and mining valuable data-driven behavioral trends, you can empower your sales team’s ability to succeed.

Do this, and watch your talent retention go up right alongside your win rate.