Why Sales Coaching Is Critical in Today’s Selling Environment with Nicholas Gregory, #184

The Modern Selling Podcast

Sales coaching is critical to your organization’s success.

These days, businesses are focused more and more on learning and developing frameworks for sales enablement to support coaching. So, what’s all the hype about sales coaching anyway – and why is it getting so much attention?

I asked Nicholas Gregory, a seasoned, globally recognized sales enablement leader with 13 years of sales and sales enablement strategy development experience, about his thoughts.

Nick is currently the Vice President of Global Sales Enablement at Korbyt, a workplace experience technology company. He has held global and regional sales enablement roles at technology organizations such as Veritas, Symantec, Sabre, and Automation Anywhere.

Check out today’s show, where Nicholas gives his unique perspective, drawing from years of deploying enablement on an international scale to help you coach your sellers to the next level.

More Organizations Are Giving Attention to Sales Coaching

My success in sales is directly attributed to coaching that I received when starting in the position of what we now call a sales development representative (formerly known as Telemarketer). As a result of a dedicated coaching plan I earned the opportunity to move to an account executive role in just 1.5 years.

I asked Nicholas why he thinks sales coaching is necessary and why more organizations are giving it more attention these days.

The first is data, which highlights the “why” behind the importance of coaching. With so much information available at our sellers fingertips and the proliferation of sales tools, a huge spotlight has been put on gaps in the coaching process, to help sellers weed through both data and tech.

Nicholas stresses one point in particular, “One data point highlights why we should coach, and it shows that implementing a consistent coaching framework can increase rates on the sales forecast opportunities by nearly 13%.”

Secondly, sales is an ever-changing profession. With the rapid change in the B2B sales environment (almost daily), expectations for sales professionals are continually changing. There are more distractions now and the pandemic has exposed those gaps.

Nick states, “We concentrate investment on the sales side, not on the leader side.”

What is Sales Coaching?

What hasn’t changed is the fact that we still buy and sell. Prospecting has, however, changed quite a bit in recent years.

Ask any sales leader over 45, and their knowledge on how to engage the modern buyer through modern selling techniques is lacking. The problem here isn’t that they aren’t doing it so much that they didn’t know how - they weren’t trained or retrained to address modern-day prospecting.

“Coaching improves both sales behaviors and results through constructive feedback and recognition,” Nicholas says.

“One of the key objectives,” he explains, “is to improve morale and sales skills rather than behaviors, and to build sales rep trust.”

The Barriers to Sales Coaching

One of the most significant barriers we face in the pandemic is that our people are still remote.

Nicholas agrees that the current remote office atmosphere is the tip of the spear when it comes to barriers in coaching.

“If you weren’t successful in leading into the pandemic, it’s going to be hard to fill that gap and advance quickly,” he says. “It’s about adapting to and setting the expectations for coaching via the current remote sales tools available to coach in the remote environment.”

Coaching is not about “calling people out.” It’s about having good intentions and empathy.

Technology and Methodology that Supports Healthy Coaching

It’s essential to provide a platform and methodology to allow coaching to permeate across the organization.

He specifies that it’s still crucial to establish coaching methodology as part of your sales culture in the virtual environment. The coaching sales methodology of choice for Nick? Miller Heiman's professional sales coaching.

My personal choice for sales coaching technology? Gong.io is the one we know, love, and trust!

Tune in to the show and hear how I put myself on the hot seat when it comes to creating a sales coaching culture with Nicholas.

How To Deploy a Sales Coaching Strategy

Nicholas gives me two ways of how an organization can bring coaching into their organizations.

“One is if your organization and your team are fortunate enough to have the budget and time to go out and purchase coaching framework, IP, training, and consulting… then that would be the ideal state,” Nick explains.

Conversely, Nick says that you can start small. You can use tried and trustworthy consulting firms that bring proven methodologies and focus on the imperative and build the framework up, then continue to build out from your small pilot group.

Be sure to listen to the entire episode of Nick’s tips on deploying coaching in an organization successfully and how critical it is to succeed in the modern sales world.