Everyone talks about coaching being a critical part of management success and one of the best ways to ensure your inside sales team is engaged in becoming better at their job. Yet I wrote earlier this year asking Can managers ACTUALLY coach? which sounds counter intuitive.
As a result, today I’d like to share that as a sales manager you don’t have time NOT to master coaching techniques. WHY? well because coaching questions:
- Get your salespeople to think differently
- Are open ended, therefore translate into good sales questions, allowing you to model what a great conversation sounds like in your one-on-one meetings
- Put you in a position to understand each person on your team’s motivation, stumbling blocks, and success factors.
I was going to give you examples of coaching questions I use, then realized that Google will give you a plethora of choices when you google “questions to ask as a coach” or even more specifically “questions to ask as a sales coach.”
Which means my best practice tip today isn’t the specific questions to ask but rather to use coaching questions and techniques consistently in your conversations with salespeople individually and the team as a whole.