Coaching for frontline managers

Who's this for: Frontline managers

You're responsible for getting the most out of your reps, and you don't need us to tell you that coaching is a big part of that. Whether you have new people, seasoned reps, or are rolling out new products, coaching is key to getting your team where you need them.

Read on for our guide on how to coach your sales team, and see our recommendations on how to leverage Gong for your coaching.

Getting started

If you're new to coaching or don't yet have coaching practices built-in to your regular workflow, here's a few ways you can get started.

Listen to calls

Our recommendation: Listen to one call per direct report once a week.

Tip: Increase playback speed to save yourself time.

While playing back calls, you can:

• Listen for any critical details that will help unlock the deal.

• Identify places in the talk track where the rep did a good job or could have discussed better.

Give feedback

Our recommendation: Give each of your direct reports feedback once a month.

Here are 4 ways you can give your reps feedback with Gong:

• Add a comment to one of your rep's calls

• Reply to a comment they tagged you in

• Fill out a scorecard

• If you give feedback in another way, such as during a 1:1 meeting, mark the call as feedback given

Encourage self and peer reviews

Replaying pivotal moments of their games allows sports teams to analyze what happened, without the adrenaline rush of the moment. Similarly, getting your team to play back their calls helps them analyze what happened with their prospect.

Our recommendations:

• Have team members request feedback on one call a week to begin with.

• Have team members review their calls and those of their peers 1-2 times a week.

Coach according to need

Make sure your coaching is aligned with the needs of your individual reps by focussing on new hires and people who are actively asking for help.

Use the Coaching Inbox to find out how much coaching you've done, and who has requested feedback from you.

Our recommendation: Review the Coaching Inbox once a week.

• Go to Coaching > Coaching Inbox to see a list of your direct reports and their coaching status, including any open requests for feedback, and a list of their calls. Learn more

Coach on pipeline during 1:1s

One-on-one call reviews get reps thinking critically about how their calls could be improved. Be sure to conduct a weekly review of at least one or two calls for each sales team member. This should be an ongoing and consistent activity on your team. It’s one of the best ways you can give each of your reps tailored feedback.

“ The other benefit to reviewing the live call is hopefully they get something out of it that they can apply to the actual deal. Close that actual deal, make commission”

Mike Bullard, Mid Market Sales Manager, Lever

The pipeline is a great place to start coaching in order to shape the outcome of open deals.

Our recommendations:

• Ahead of your 1:1 meetings, use the deal board Warnings column to identify a specific deal with issues. Find the places in recent calls that you can listen back to together with your rep, address those issues, and help drive deals to closed-won.

• During the 1:1, give your feedback and discuss the calls on certain deals to help your rep course-correct.

Here are some more tips for coaching on calls:

• Review calls beforehand, so you can form your own view on how they went.

  “ The prep is almost more important than the actual one-on-one, because if we're spending all of our time listening to a call, I could have done that whenever it was convenient for me and then come prepared for that meeting, and I want them to do the same.”

  Hannah Newberry, Sales Manager, Gusto

• Have the rep request feedback on their best and worst call of the week before the meeting. Or have them pick a single call and comment on three things that went well and three things that were challenging.

• Start the discussion by letting your rep give their take on the call, and ask questions to guide them to reflect on what happened and why. Don’t be too quick to jump in with advice.

  " The first thing I always try to do is allow the rep to give their read on the conversation... getting their read and understanding why they took the approach they did, seeing if they're going to be self reflective and understand that, ‘Yes, maybe I missed here’. That can immediately tell you how you need to be coaching in that moment."

  Greg Allen, Commercial Sales Manager, Log Rocket

• Focus on the data at hand, so that no one has to rely on opinions or personal anecdotes about the calls.

Identify coaching priorities

Gong makes it easy to find coachable moments.

Our recommendation: Use Gong to find out what your reps need coaching on once a month per rep.

Check the following places in Gong to see who on your team needs coaching and in what area:

• Coaching > Coaching Inbox (as described above).

• Deals > Drivers: Gauge how your team handles open deals in your pipeline and uncover trends in risk. Analyze: Understand what drives deals.

• Insights> Team: Get the overall picture of how your reps are doing on their calls in terms of activity, interaction, topics, trackers, past scorecards, and coaching. This view enables you to get an understanding of how your reps are doing, who's doing well, and what areas need work. Use team stats.

• Use the weekly coaching digest that's dispatched every Wednesday to stay on top your coaching with a quick summary of the week, any pending feedback requests, and a list of 5 coaching moments based on your reps last call with their biggest deals (based on ARR).

  Note: Your org must have a CRM integration in order to receive this mail.

  Tip: You can manage the coaching digest in your notification settings.

Give your reps automatic recommendations

Pinpoint your team’s areas of improvement by benchmarking their behaviors against key best practices. Your reps improve even when you don’t have time to coach by receiving automatic course-corrections and coaching tips.

Our recommendation: Talk to your Gong business admin about getting up Whisper in Gong to make sure your reps get coaching on calls.

Set up a stream for weekly coaching inspiration

Streams capture calls that match certain filters, which you can use to find coachable areas. For example, calls where the rep talked for over 65% or for more than five minutes without pausing for the customer to speak, discovery and demo calls in which next steps weren’t discussed, and so on.

Our recommendation: Set up a stream

Ongoing coaching practices

Once you've started coaching regularly, take it up a notch by increasing frequency and introducing new practices such as coaching in team meetings.

Listen to calls (more!)

Our recommendation: Listen to two calls per direct report once a week.

• Spot check for keywords you expect to hear by searching for anything said on the call.

• Review the talk track critically to spot places your rep can improve their pitch.

  • Find points of interest

  • Quickly locate the topics discussed

Give feedback (more!)

Stay involved on critical deals and let your rep know you've got their back.

Our recommendation: Give feedback to each of your direct reports once a week.

Give structured feedback with scorecards

Use scorecards as a more formalized way to provide feedback, particularly if you want the team to apply a specific sales methodology.

Our recommendation: Score one call per rep once a week.

“ How did that conversation actually go when we re-listen to it as opposed to when you were on the call? I score it and I have the rep score it. So they have to score the call and they send me the call to score as well. And then we talk about it and set very clear action items of what was missed, maybe, and what could be done moving forward.”

Hannah Newberry, Sales Manager, Gusto

Our recommendation: Ensure your scorecard questions are framed in a way that allows you to accurately assess your reps' performance. Scorecards are typically managed by Gong business admins - talk to yours to find out more.

Review the Coaching Inbox (more often!)

Our recommendation: Increase the velocity of your targeted coaching by checking your Inbox for coaching opportunities twice a week.

Coach in team meetings

Our recommendation: Involve everyone in the team to encourage a strong coaching culture. Here are some ideas for how to run coaching sessions:

Create a safe space

Top-performing teams are learning teams. They share information and feedback to understand how and why successes and failures happen. They work consistently to get better at every aspect of their work. How do they achieve that? Through trust and openness.

“ You cannot overstate the value of trust... And the trust that I'm talking about is establishing very early a safe environment to work at a professional level... in the interest of helping them be a better professional.”

Graham Ruffels, Head of Sales, Taplytics

When you’re part of a competitive team—especially if you’re new to the role or are in a slump—it’s hard to share your mistakes, acknowledge that you’re struggling, or show your vulnerabilities. But these are all essential behaviors that help your team members learn from each other’s experiences. When team members share these realities, it opens a door to getting support and advice from peers, and guidance and coaching from you.

If you create an environment in which team members freely ask advice and share their mistakes without being reprimanded, it will only encourage more requests for guidance. Your team members will seek more feedback and openly accept new ideas that improve their skills.

Make it routine

Bring coaching into scheduled team meetings to have your team learn collectively through open discussions. If you recently heard a call that includes important coaching moments (good or bad), review it together during a meeting.

Our recommendation: Dedicate at least 15-20 minutes in your team meetings to reviewing specific, real-life deals and calls to incorporate guided coaching as part of your weekly agenda. Listen to calls.

Share experiences

Given that no one has time to listen to every call or review every deal, it’s crucial to encourage your team to share their experiences. It’s the best way for them to learn on a consistent basis without getting overwhelmed.

Share what you’ve struggled with in the past and ask your team for ideas. At a team meeting, play a recorded call you led that didn’t go well. Ask for comments, tips, and advice.

Promote self-learning

Ask your team members to critique their own calls and offer up good and bad examples they’d like to share with you or the rest of the team. Praise people when they’ve done a great job. It makes it easier for them to take criticism when it’s warranted.

Have fun

Whether that’s in a team meeting or a one-on-one session, use humor and levity to break the ice. It reduces anxiety when constructive criticism is on the table.

Let your team drive

Have them listen to calls and analyze deals together, provide feedback to each other, and share what worked for them and where they struggled in the past. If you still feel your team is not opening up, consider having them run their feedback session without you in the room, at least for a little while.

Be discreet

People usually respond better to positive reinforcement over public shaming.

Our recommendation: Keep your more critical comments private so only you and individual reps see them. Leave more general comments and praise as public.

Encourage team reviews

Encourage team members to submit calls (either their own or of others) for team feedback.

Our recommendation: Use Gong to collaboratively review snippets of these calls at your weekly or bi-weekly team meetings.

Focus the conversation

Introduce focus and structure to your discussions by suggesting a topic or skill in advance of your meeting and have the team submit calls with that topic in mind.

" A lot of the coaching we’ll do is designed like, ‘Hey, we're going to do a session three days from now where we're focusing on a specific call and like a specific section of the call that you want to run through together.'"

Mike Bullard, Mid Market Sales Manager, Lever

Our recommendation: Locate calls that demonstrate a particular skill, talk track, or challenge, and talk through how they were handled on the call(s) you shared.

Identify coaching priorities (more often!)

Our recommendation: Find out what coaching areas each rep on your team needs twice a month.

Here are some ways you can discover where to prioritize what you need to coach on:

Coach on talk tracks

Locate calls with certain trackers or topics (e.g., competitors, new product names, objections, etc) and review a few examples to see how they were handled. Bring them up either individually or in a team meeting.

Our recommendation: Search for calls based on particular keywords, phrases, or topics.

Coach on trouble spots

Identify areas that are challenge your reps on an ongoing basis, and coach them through to reduce the impact those have on the final outcome.

Our recommendation: Visit the Deals > Drivers tab and filter for your teams' deals for deals showing risk at the present moment.

Look at the chart to understand who has a pattern on a particular type of risk, and walk them out of that. Learn more.

Coach on skills

Leverage quantitive data to understand where your reps can improve their conversational skills. Do they dominate the conversation? Do they allow prospects to talk without cutting them off? Do they ask too many questions or not enough?

Our recommendation: Use Stats to track your team members’ progress and identify areas for improvement once a month.

Coach on losses

Sports teams regularly analyze the game tape and use it to improve their play. Similarly, you can work with your rep to do a post-mortem on a recently-lost deal, reviewing the interaction and conversation between them and the customer.

Our recommendation: Use the Account page in Gong to find closed-lost deals.

Take your coaching to the next level

When you feel confident that your coaching is baked in to your day-to-day, compare yourself to other managers, and give back to your team and other sales teams.

Review coaching metrics 1x a month

Go to Coaching > Coaching Metrics to see how your coaching efforts compares to other sales managers in your org, and discover whether you have any areas you could be doing more in.

Our recommendation: Review coaching metrics once a month.

Subscribe to streams

Seek out or create your own streams for a range of topics you're watching or that you want to coach on.

Our recommendation: Check with your manager, peers, or sales enablement to see if anyone has set up a stream that can be useful to you for surfacing coaching moments in calls.

Curate examples for future coaching

Collect calls that are topic-specific that you can use for future coaching (or work with your enablement team to put this in place).

Create a call library folder of team-reviewed calls. Capture everyone on your team's observations as Gong comments, and refer to the calls in that library folder in future coaching and onboarding sessions.

Our recommendation: Add calls to the library on a regular basis.

• Set up library folders to save examples of good calls to go through with your team, or to send them to watch asynchronously.