When sales is compared to sports, the focus is typically on the competitive nature of salespeople, how they work tirelessly to hone their craft and their ultimate focus on the team. What is noted less often is the importance of good coaching to both a championship team and a sales team that exceeds expectations.
While athletes spend hours upon hours working with coaches, it doesn’t take much for salespeople to up their game. According to sales execution platform Revegy, reps who receive 30 minutes or less of sales coaching per week record a win rate of 43% while those who have two hours or more of coaching have a win rate of 56%.
Sales coaching is so successful because it is individualized and designed to help reps discover and leverage their unique strengths. As Samuel Mulkey, U.S. sales manager at heavy equipment marketplace Machinio put it, the goal is to be innovative, not imitative.
Mulkey has honed his skills as a sales coach over the past eight years at Machinio and shared his expertise on how to successfully coach salespeople with Built In.
Machinio is a global search engine for buying and selling new and used industrial equipment and machinery.
Describe your role as a sales coach. How did your career journey lead you to that position?
My role as a sales coach is to help each member of my team cultivate and learn to become the best version of themselves possible. Over my eight-year career at Machinio, I have had almost everything imaginable thrown at me and have tried many different paths to success. Some have worked and many have failed. Luckily, I now get to share my vast wisdom and teach others how to avoid my mistakes!
What separates a good sales coach from a great one, and are there certain skills all great sales coaches have?
What separates a good sales coach from a great one is the ability to build a strategy or a foundation around your rep’s strengths, not your own. It is important to encourage each rep to develop and bring their own ideas and personality into the sales process. From day one, I like to make it very clear that each rep needs to find their own way, and from there, I provide guidance and ideas to help them reach their goals.
It is important to encourage each rep to develop and bring their own ideas and personality into the sales process.”
Describe a time when sales coaching made all the difference in a rep’s performance.
When I first moved into a management role, I inherited three reps from a previous manager. Two of them were on the right track — closing deals and moving mountains, everything I could ask for. The third wasn’t quite catching on. It got to the point where we had no choice but to put him on a performance plan.
Our first month together was getting back to the basics: I retrained him on the pitch, the product, the best way to deliver the info and what questions to ask. Since he was so timid on the phone, I spent a lot of time building his confidence back up. After one month of hard work with him, the difference was night and day. The following month, he had the biggest sales month of his career and got through the performance plan.
Seeing the direct impact I could have on someone struggling gave me the confidence to trust the direction I was going in my coaching. It helped me redesign our new hire training program, which led to a significantly faster ramp-up time and new reps performing and reaching goals faster, which directly impacted our revenue goals.
