You’re holding a one-on-one coaching session with one of your salespeople. Your inspecting sales activity metrics and the sales pipeline. Based on your analysis, you and the salesperson identify a specific area of the sales process where deals are getting stalled. This analysis of numbers is called deal review and unfortunately, it’s often where sales leaders stumble because they confuse deal review with deal coaching.

Deal review analyzes sales numbers. Deal coaching positively changes the numbers.

Which leads to my next point. Deal coaching isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. It involves a variety of coaching strategies in order to work on the right end of the sales challenge. It’s important to remember that the presenting problem is usually not the real problem.

Here is an example.

Kelly is a rock star prospector. The top of her sales pipeline is always full, however, many of her first meetings never make it to a second meeting. Time for deal coaching to determine the root cause.

Coaching strategy #1:  People believe their own data; hence the reason questions are a powerful way to change behavior. Instead of telling Kelly that she is not meeting with her ideal client profile, help her discover this insight for herself. “In looking at the last three opportunities that didn’t progress, tell me how they fit our ideal client profile.” As Kelly shares her response, she’ll recognize gaps in her qualification process.

She’s trying to sell to prospects that buy on price, not value. She’s trying to sell to late adopters when your best clients are early adopters.

Role play with Kelly to ensure she knows the right questions to ask in order to better disqualify suspects. During a role play you might discover she's good at asking the first qualifying question, however, doesn’t ask follow-up, clarifying questions.  

You’ll also want to focus your coaching efforts on Kelly’s high optimism. Optimistic salespeople are an asset to a sales team. However, too much optimism leads to denial, one where the salesperson ignores the reality that the prospect isn’t a good fit. Their optimistic thinking is, “This one is different.” No, it’s not.

Coaching strategy #2: Ask a presumptive coaching question. This is a question that assumes that the salesperson is executing the right selling behavior. “When you asked the prospect to schedule a next step, what did the prospect say?”

You might be surprised to learn that Kelly didn’t ask for a clear next step, even when you know, she knows a clear next step is a critical sales step.

Focus your coaching efforts on developing Kelly’s assertiveness skills. Without this EQ skill, salespeople fall into the trap of “going along to get along.” Non-assertive salespeople have difficulty in setting mutual expectations for success.   

Assertiveness training will help Kelly stop accepting statements like, “Give me a call in the next couple of weeks.” (Translation: Ghosting.)

Put on your teaching hat and explain that prospects who are committed to solving problems or achieving goals have no problem committing to a next meeting.

Coaching strategy #3: Evaluate Kelly’s emotional expression skills. Kelly might be blowing the sales call within the first five minutes of a meeting. She talks too fast, too loud or is really intense when asking questions. She emotionally triggers prospect’s, which decreases rapport, likeability and trust.

Teach Kelly how to match and mirror a prospect’s tonality, rate of speech and intensity to avoid flaming out early in the sales meeting. 

You’ll also want to evaluate Kelly’s facial expression.

As my colleague Julie Hansen often shares, Kelly might be suffering from resting “business” face.

She is truly interested in the sales conversation, except she forgot to tell her face. As a result, she could be showing up to meetings looking bored, which does nothing to progress the sale.

Improve your teams’ sales results by understanding the difference between deal review and deal coaching.

The first analyzes sales number and metrics, the second positively changes the numbers and metrics.

Good selling and leading!

Colleen