How to Measure Sales Coaching Effectiveness the Right Way

Coaching your sales team members is a great way to boost performance, build relationships, and improve retention of sales team members. While there are many natural advantages that come from sales coaching efforts, knowing how to measure sales coaching effectiveness will help coaches continuously improve their coaching competencies and be accountable for reaching coaching and sales goals.

What Is Sales Coaching Effectiveness?

Sales coaching effectiveness is the process of measuring the results of sales coaching efforts. It quantifies the impact a sales coach is able to have and indicates where they can do better.

What Are the Benefits of Successful Sales Coaching?

From both an organizational and individual perspective, sales coaching offers many benefits.

• Overall, businesses with productive sales coaching programs earn 28 percent higher win rates.
• Sales team members who receive up to 30 minutes per week of coaching earn win rates of 43 percent. This rises to 56 percent when team members receive at least two hours of sales coaching per week.
• Companies that offer quality coaching can earn a seven percent higher annual revenue growth.

How Do You Coach a Sales Representative?

When coaching a sales representative, there are two key factors to consider: when to coach and the type of sales coaching you should provide.

When to Coach

You should coach a sales representative when:

1. A sales team member approaches you with a particular roadblock on which they’d like further guidance.
2. You notice (from self, manager, peer, or customer assessments) that a team member could improve in certain areas.
3. You want to see your team member grow and develop in their role and achieve long-term results for themselves and the organization.

Type of Sales Coaching

Are you clear about what you want to coach about? Do you want to focus your coaching on behaviors, sales skills, sales techniques, or sales results? Are there any development opportunities these might present?

Understanding the coaching topics to focus on when engaging in sales coaching will help you keep coaching dialogues on track and aligned with the factors that will drive enhanced performance and results. Remember, it is best to focus on one coaching topic at a time.

5 Sales Coaching Metrics to Consider

Data is crucial for discovering whether your sales coaching efforts are successful or not. More importantly, quantifying your sales coaching can help you:

• Assess how you can improve your coaching effectiveness.
• Keep your team member/mentee informed and invested in the development journey.

Here are five main metrics to consider when measuring sales coaching effectiveness. Keep in mind that these metrics can and should be tailored to meet your sales team’s specific needs and goals.

1. Productivity

While ROI does play a valuable role in measuring sales coaching effectiveness, alone it doesn’t provide an insightful and holistic view of the entire sales coaching process.

What’s key is going deeper with productivity indicators that may show up in the bottom line. These productivity metrics can include:

Number of Conversions

Conversions can be useful indicators, particularly for coaching goals focused on performance. For example, the number of sales-qualified leads to the number of individuals who have booked an appointment.

Length of Sales Cycle

How long it takes to close a sale is another good performance indicator. For example, if you’re coaching a team member on a specific sales technique, tracking the timeframe of the sales cycle can help you evaluate:

• The success of your coaching
• Whether the sales technique is proving beneficial to your mentee’s development
• How the sales technique contributes to your revenue goals

2. Assessments

Assessments can include self, peer, manager, and/or client assessments. These evaluations provide insights about how one’s behaviors and skills affect others and how they might have changed over time.

For example, if your coaching goal is focused on behavior (e.g., to help your team member improve their amiability with prospective clients), you would consider metrics from client assessments.

You can quantify these assessments by applying numeric values to each question. Then, conduct the assessment for one year while comparing values from each quarter. You might even consider conducting self-assessments and comparing them to client assessments.

3. Absenteeism

Tracking absenteeism may be especially useful for team members who are showing signs of pressure and stress in their roles or are consistently missing target expectations.

Quality coaching may help them combat these issues and help them feel more appreciated and confident. This may improve the team member’s overall work experience, decreasing burnout and absenteeism.

4. Retention

After assessing the indicators above, you may want to evaluate retention rates with team members, as well as clients or customers.

Sales managers can evaluate whether coaching has:

• Improved retention of your top talent and/or new clients
• Decreased the number of new hires and/or new-client onboarding
• Increased the customer lifetime value (CLV) of a particular client

Sales Coaching Obstacles to Keep in Mind

As you’re tracking metrics and reworking your sales coaching strategy, be conscious of the following obstacles:

• Generic conversations. Broad, unfocused conversations won’t take you far and may even deter you from reaching coaching and sales goals. Instead, go deeper and focus on the specific coaching needs of each individual.
• Your coaching abilities. Your abilities as a coach matter. And don’t worry—not all sales managers are born great sales coaches. It takes patience, training, and practice. Sales managers can rely on research-based training tools from credible resources such as CMOE to help them stay on track.

Become a Stronger Sales Coach with CMOE

Coaching your sales team to become high performers is easier said than done. When it comes to how to measure sales coaching effectiveness, the process comes with its fair share of complexities and challenges that need to be addressed. This is where CMOE’s Sales Coaching Training Program comes in.

Our workshop focuses on helping leaders develop the skills and confidence needed to build relationships with their team members and help them enhance their sales capabilities. It takes on the Coaching TIPS²™ Model—an industry-renowned research model that has proven to be an effective tool.