Written by Jonnie Anderson, Marketing Manager at Primary Intelligence

As sales leaders, we want our reps to feel empowered and confident on the sales floor. This confidence directly impacts revenue, win rates, and employee satisfaction. To build sales confidence and help each rep succeed, an impactful sales coaching strategy must be implemented and optimized. However, sales coaches often struggle to identify where to spend their time and energy when coaching to create the greatest ROI for their coaching efforts. Sales leaders and coaches may not have the bandwidth to shadow each call and spend quality time with each rep to identify rep-level strengths and weaknesses. 

And, unfortunately, sales coaching is often influenced by interpersonal relationships, which can impact the quality of coaching given to a rep. These interpersonal dynamics can create or affirm biases around why reps win and lose deals – so the truth behind why a deal results in a particular outcome can be unclear.  

As sales leaders, we must ensure that we eliminate any bias within sales coaching to help each rep uncover their unique path to winning more.  

Here are some ways you can eliminate bias in sales coaching:  

  1. Lean into Sales Intelligence
    Sales intelligence feels like a buzz word in 2022, but when used correctly, it can empower your sales team with the information they need to better demonstrate value, differentiate your solution from your competitors, and build trust with buyers. As a sales leader, utilize sales intelligence to get as close to the truth as possible to understand what’s really going on with your opportunities. Leveraging conversational intelligence can help you understand what is happening within sales rep activities while insights from Win-Loss Analysis can help you understand your buyer’s perception of the customer journey and sales process. When you’re able to reference the quantitative and qualitative data that comes from sales intelligence, you can dissolve biases within sales coaching and make your coaching more relevant. 
  1. Tap into Buyer Feedback
    You can’t argue with buyer feedback. When you’re able to pull real-life data and quotes from each rep’s deals, you can personalize coaching based on your buyer’s opinions to understand how you can increase win rates. Unfortunately, your reps don’t always know why they really win or lose deals, and you can’t depend on gut feelings to predict pipeline. Your buyer feedback gives clear insight into how reps can improve on an individual level, and as a sales leader or coach, you can utilize these insights from buyer feedback to make coaching, training, and sales enablement relevant and impactful. Buyer feedback helps your reps internalize coaching. 
  1. Utilize Peer-to-Peer Coaching
    Once you’ve leveraged Win-Loss Analysis and other forms of sales intelligence, you’re able to understand the specifics around why your reps win and lose and uncover strengths and weaknesses for each rep. By pairing reps up based on strengths and weaknesses, your team can learn from each other and break out of the biases around why a rep thinks they win and lose. Peer-to-peer coaching also helps to eliminate biases that may come from interpersonal dynamics between sales leaders and sales reps.  

 

By eliminating biases in sales coaching, you’ll be able to help your reps uncover their unique path to winning more.  

Helpful Resources: