Here are 12 Sales Coaching Resources You Want to Bookmark

It's time for another edition of the Art & Science of Complex Sales! If you're new, this is where we talk about all things related to putting HOW you sell at the core of your business -- from sales process execution to best practices in sales coaching to driving winning behaviors to enabling growth in your sales organization.

Every week, I share ONE idea or strategy that sales leaders and teams can use to enable consistent growth for their organization. Whether you're a sales leader, sales consultant, sales manager, sales enablement expert or sales team member ready to accelerate your performance -- you'll find one action item that you can implement each week to get you one step closer to your goals.

My mission is to elevate the sales profession with technology and partnerships so that we can all improve our sales effectiveness and raise the bar in sales.

Now, onto this week's topic! 👇🏽

Here are 12 Sales Coaching Resources You Want to Bookmark

It’s no secret that I’ve been pushing the importance of coaching over the past several months. With the upcoming launch of our Coaching Cockpit this year, it’s definitely been top of mind for me.

Effective sales coaching is an indispensable part of an effective sales system, and it’s one we so very often get wrong. So, to help you get it right, here’s a round-up of my 9 most important sales coaching posts, a valuable coaching white paper, and 3 popular guest posts on coaching.

1) How to Use a Coaching Framework

Great coaching doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be intentional. A solid coaching framework helps your managers become more systematic and deliberate in how they approach sales coaching. And that translates directly to happier, better, more productive salespeople.

This post walks you through not only why you need a sales coaching framework, but also:

• What a sales coaching framework is

• Why you need one

• Examples of good coaching frameworks

• The elements you need to include in your coaching framework

2) Four Tips to Coach Your Coaches

Great coaching starts long before a manager sits down to help a salesperson. In fact, great coaching doesn’t start with the coach: It starts with the coach’s coach. Salespeople are made, not born, and the same is true for coaches.

Salespeople are made, not born, and the same is true for coaches.

If you’re responsible for managing sales managers, then you need to know how to coach managers to coach. This post provides the four top things you need to be focused on when you do.

3) Getting closer to the individual

One of the problems I recognized early in my sales career was that sales performance is often treated like a batch problem. Salespeople are hired in large groups, put through mass training programs, provided with precisely the same materials and software, and then set loose to sink or swim.

But the highest-performing sales organizations don’t behave this way at all. They treat each salesperson like the unique individual that they are. And when it comes to coaching, they get close to each individual salesperson to identify their needs, motivations, strengths, and skill gaps. This post explains why this works and how to do it.

4) Coaching vs. Managing

Managing and coaching are not the same thing. Getting them confused leads to all kinds of problems, yet very few managers truly understand the difference. This post explains the difference, why it matters, and how to know when to do each one.

5) Collaborative Coaching

When we think of sales coaching, most often we think about a manager taking the time to help a salesperson do better. But there’s another type of coaching that can be just as important and lead to exceptional results: Collaborative coaching.

This post talks about how to develop a culture that nurtures collaborative coaching, how to encourage it directly, and how it can help you.

6) How to Ask better coaching questions

One of the most important skills a great sales coach must have is asking the right questions in the right way at the right time. Improving your questioning skills can dramatically improve your coaching success and therefore your sales team’s success.

This post suggests a set of question categories, then provides examples and explanations of each to help you up your questioning game.

7) 63+ open-ended coaching questions

Looking for a list of questions to get your coaching conversations started? This post has you covered. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

8) Coaching Cockpit

A list of articles about coaching would not be complete without an article about the technology you need to support effective coaching. I am proud to say that Membrain is actively in development on a coaching cockpit to be launched in 2024. This post will tell you all about it.

9) The Ultimate Sales Coaching System White Paper

When you’re ready to get serious about your coaching game, you’re ready for this white paper. It shows you, step by step, how to build and customize a complete sales coaching system that will impact how you hire, train, support, and incentivize your sales managers to coach. It’s an excellent primer for sales coaching and will help you to get started.

10) I Don’t Have Time to Coach

Dave Brock is a regular contributor to the Art and Science of Coaching blog, a friend, and a Membrain ambassador. In this popular post, he addresses the common complaint of “not enough time to coach.” He talks about what stops us from coaching, the things we think are coaching but aren’t, and how to get past the “not enough time” block.

11) How to Fail at Coaching

Keith Rosen is a globally recognized authority on the topic of sales and coaching. I love this post for its unflinching look at how most companies are messing up coaching and what they need to do differently.

12) What makes a great sales coach?

Finally, I’m including this post by the late and great Jonathan Farrington, because it’s a terrific piece that really digs into what makes a great sales coach. The piece lays out, item by item, the characteristics that a manager needs in order to truly coach their team to excellence.

What do you think? Did I cover all the bases? What did I miss?

This article was first published on the Membrain blog here.