In our previous blog, we examined how the data captured in sales management software can chart a path to exceeding quota, while identifying sales processes and actions that lead to success.  Let’s move on to selling. Once salespeople are in front of customers, there’s a lot they can do right – and wrong – to affect the outcome. Coaching helps salespeople develop their selling, negotiation, presentation, and closing skills. Learning to leverage the information and tools available through their company’s sales management software platform is a great place to start. 

Customer Interactions: 

Coaching can vastly improve salespeople’s listening and communication skills – key to closing. Salespeople must learn to ask the right questions, listen carefully to one or multiple stakeholders, and strategically draw direct relationships between the answers and the solutions they present. Sales management software can help them customize solutions in collaboration with prospects to meet their needs.  

A site survey digital design tool provides a unique focal point for salespeople and their customers to work together on a system design. Upload a floor plan image, site, or elevation photo, and together locate parts from the sales database to the digital canvas, add notes, and create a visual and monetary representation of the proposed solution collaboratively. A sales coach can help salespeople perfect how to engage with clients as they utilize such a tool, elicit meaningful feedback, zero in on scope and budget, and ensure they have buy-in before finalizing the quote. 

Selling the Company and Its Brand: 

When security salespeople present a quote, they’re not only selling technology; they’re selling the value their company brings in delivery, services, and support. For new salespeople, understanding how to pitch their company’s unique values can be very challenging.  

Sales management software provides salespeople with templates for automated proposal creation that include all the essential elements to present the company and quoted solutions thoroughly and professionally. It ensures the proposal is brand forward, using fonts, colors, and graphics consistent with the brand. It also allows salespeople to customize the scope of work specifically for buyer’s needs – key for succeeding in solution sales. When prospects compare proposals and yours is far more professional and purpose driven, they feel confident that those qualities are inherent in the entire client experience. 

Encouraging Autonomy: 

Part of coaching is to help salespeople move outside their comfort zones. If salespeople aren’t willing to do this, their opportunities to grow professionally and close more sales, will be limited. Taking these steps often requires initial handholding but, ultimately, the hands must let go. The salesperson must be ready to test the waters on their own, whether it involves pursuing larger, more complex sales, new markets, or quoting additional types of solutions.  

Sales management software allows salespeople to do this on their own while knowing that the chances of making a major mistake are minimized. The estimating system’s automated approval rules provide adjustable parameters suitable to various salespeople and sales. Established workflows set within the software are like bowling alley bumpers. Players may score a strike, or they may not hit any pins, but no matter what, the ball will not end up in the gutter.  

As a result, salespeople feel confident their leadership and team will back their efforts. Instead of being criticized, they work cohesively with sales engineers and others prior to sending proposals. They receive validation for their sales efforts, as other team members downstream deliver on solid, accurate information from sales. 

Coaching Pays Big Dividends 

Sales leaders and top sales performers often make the best coaches, whether they’re providing guidance through structured sessions or leading by example.  

Investing in undeveloped talent to tap its potential is a surefire way to grow sales. Mid-level performers have plenty of room to improve, and with coaching, many rise to the top. Sales management software is their digital assistant, real-time source of truth, and supports their sales efforts by saving time, increasing accuracy, and helping close sales more easily and more often!