Sales Professionals Are Coaches

by Ben Lai | Sep 24, 2019

Hi, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today I’m kicking off a series on “The Many Hats that Salespeople Wear.” Essentially the premise of this series is to uncover all of the different skillsets that are required of salespeople in order to do what they do. And you’d be surprised by how many subsets and how many roles that we actually play in order to be effective in sales. And no wonder salespeople are paid so well for their profession. To kick off the series, I’m going to start off with the skill of being a coach. Professional salespeople are effective coaches for their clients. What I’ll do is I’ll give you three tips on how you can be more effective in this area and explain how this actually plays into the sales process. Here’s why Sales professionals are coaches:

Sales professionals are coaches by helping clients set effective goals

The first thing that professional coaches do is that they help their clients to set effective goals. One of the best frameworks that I’ve seen to date is the SMART framework. So this is a very popular one and it’s an acronym for having specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound goals.

One of your roles as the salesperson is to help your clients to set goals. Oftentimes it’s very hard for you to sell the products in the first meeting when you see a prospect. From that point of view, certain actions will need to be taken. Your job as the professional salesperson and coach is to help to define what those steps are and guide them on setting actual deadlines and timelines for those to be accomplished.

Sales professionals are coaches by keeping clients accountable to goals

The second thing that professional coaches and salespeople do is to keep the client accountable to those goals. For example, if you say to the client that, “Okay, so now that you have this information, you need to speak to John and Mary about getting their approval for this project. When do you think you can accomplish that by?” You get the date and then you state that, “Okay. In that case, I will give you a call shortly after in order to check on your progress and to see how we are going with this project.” So keeping your clients accountable is one of the ways that professional salespeople are coaches to their clients.

Sales professionals are coaches by helping clients overcome obstacles

And finally you need to be able to coach your clients through the obstacles that they face. Most people call this handling objections, but it goes beyond that. What we’re really doing is we’re brainstorming with our clients on how to overcome the obstacles to then going ahead with this project and with this sale. So you need to be very skillful in giving suggestions on how they can overcome the obstacles that they identify that are blocking them.

Conclusion

So to summarize, professional salespeople are also professional coaches. They help their clients to set smart goals. They keep them accountable to those goals. And they also help to coach and to brainstorm ways to overcome those obstacles. I hope you enjoyed this a content. But what are your thoughts? What are the ways that you use coaching in your sales processes? I’d love to hear your comments below. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and remember that integrity plus skills equals success.

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