Recipe: Coach reps for maximum deal performance

Who’s this for? Frontline managers

Outcome: This recipe helps you provide regular coaching for each of your reps based on real scenarios coming up across their deals

Timing: At least once a week, and before 1:1s or team meetings

Step 1: Go to the deal board and filter to view the opportunities for the relevant rep and time period. If your sales cycle is long enough, you can look for coaching opportunities on deals that are still in play, filtering for open deals with different timing (e.g. closing in current quarter and closing next quarter). For short sales cycles or to focus on lessons learned, filter to see recently closed deals, both wins and losses.

Tip

When coaching on open opportunities, you’ll be trying to keep the deals on track at the same time. Check out this recipe for focusing on the right deals.

Step 2: Quickly look for patterns of customer and rep activity across a set of recent opportunities on the deal board. Then study the interactions in more detail by clicking to see the Account page for each deal. Open the engagement map from the account timeline for deeper insight into exactly which contacts are participating in the conversation and how engaged are they. You can quickly answer some key questions for the deals you’re investigating:

• Does the rep have a timely next step set for every open opportunity?

• Are they responding promptly to customer emails?

• Are they engaging enough contacts on each account to create broad influence and reduce risk?

• Do they consistently bring in the right titles for the deal size, stage, and segment, and do they keep them engaged throughout the process?

• How have they handled the most recent email sequence or call? Would you have handled it differently?

Step 3: If you’re focused on a particular development area for your team or an individual rep, pay more attention to activities related to that area. For example, if you want to reinforce the use of upfront contracts, check how the rep is setting the agenda and purpose of next steps.

Tip

Calls shown on the account page include a list of topics discussed, allowing you to jump straight to the topic of interest.

Step 4: Tag the rep in comments on the account to provide immediate tactical guidance. For coaching on broader behaviors, collect a few examples to discuss in your next 1:1. Use comments to add reminders of what you want to cover in the discussion. Make the comments visible only to the rep if the topic is sensitive, or private if you’d rather address the issue face-to-face. Ask the rep to come to the 1:1 prepared to reflect on and discuss the focus area. In addition, encourage them to choose their own focus area to bring to the meeting. Have them share the real customer examples they’d like to work through by tagging you in comments, so that you can prepare ahead of time.

Tip

Ask your reps to tag you using a comment attached to an account or call for at least one challenging interaction per week.

Step 5: Use team meetings to share lessons learned. Select areas where you want to provide positive reinforcement and ask a rep to share with their peers how they successfully navigated a challenging situation. Have them refer to the customer interaction and how they applied their process. If it helps, have them show the team the specific interaction on the Account Page.

Step 6: Continue to reinforce identified areas for development by repeating the prior steps regularly to check whether rep behavior is changing. Celebrate the improvements!