Can Every Rep Be Coached?

It’s a universal truth of sales: the sales rep’s job is difficult, and at some point they will require coaching. Businesses in this field are faced with a challenge: How does our coaching work? How should coaching work?

These bigger questions invite smaller, more specific ones: Are coaching resources saved for the best reps? Do only the best managers participate in the coaching? Is there an effort made to get some form of coaching to all of your reps? Or is it ad hoc, done case-by-case, one at a time? Answers to these questions don’t always come easy.

Luckily, ConveYour is here to help you take your entire onboarding process to the next level. Let’s start by looking at a PROVEN model and applying it to your coaching experience.

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The answers to big challenges in business have often already been laid out for us. The G.R.O.W. Model was first outlined by John Whitmore in his 1992 book Coaching for Performance. Here’s how the model breaks down:

G - Goal. What are you hoping to accomplish? How can you measure progress towards that goal? What is your timeline for achieving it?

R - Reality. What is the current reality for your reps? What do their sales look like? How is their closing percentage? It’s important to be realistic about where your team currently stands.

O - Obstacles/Options. What are the obstacles that could block your reps’ progress? What are their options for moving past these obstacles?

W - Way Forward. How does your rep move forward? This isn’t something you can impose on your rep. You need to instead come to agreement with rep and align on the best way to move forward together.

While this model is PROVEN (it has been around for thirty years now), it is not a magic bullet for fixing your training.

We’re talking about it here because we want you to think about the ergonomics around how your coaching is done. When you are able to lay everything out in a model like G.R.O.W., you have the opportunity to fine-tune different aspects on how your reps are coached. For example:

Take a look at the first step - Goal. Are you making it easy for your reps input and track goals? Are your prompting your team to identify goals? Can managers see reps’ goals?

Next up is Reality. It’s hard to track reality without metrics. Do you keep KPIs for your team? Are you showing them to the rep and your managers? This figures should be readily available so that your team is aligned with the current reality at all times.

Obstacles/Options. Another advantage of KPIs is that they can highlight where your reps are struggling. You should also give your reps an opportunity express what they think their obstacles are. Is there any way to have your reps log and track this information? What can you in management do to help reps with the obstacles that are identified?

Way Forward. There are two ways to think about moving forward. You can take a qualitative approach where you work with your reps’ logged obstacles and goals to work with them one-to-one. You could also additionally identify and segment reps, and then make training available to all reps who fulfill a certain requirement or have identified a certain need. This is especially powerful because it is a coaching process that you can automate.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a total replacement for physical one-on-one sales coaching with your team. However, you still want to have some systems in place to supplement this coaching by keeping track of your teams’ goals, engaging with their current reality, prompting your team for obstacles while suggesting options to overcome them, and developing a way forward with your team.

Of course, ConveYour’s software is designed with the rep experience in mind, and our team is here to work directly with you on taking your training and onboarding experience to the next level, at scale. Click here to set up a demo and see why ConveYour is the premier system for recruiting, training, and retaining your sales reps.

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The content from this article was derived from Stephen Rhyne's video, Can Every Rep Be Coached? It was compiled and re-worded by Andrew Baldis.