Are you concerned that your sales staff may fall behind in the COVID-19 world? As a sales manager, you should keep track of team member engagement and encourage them to give their all. You may make the best use of your time by utilizing an automated coaching system to assist your reps in optimizing their results in today’s selling environment.

Motivating Your Sales Staff

Gallup research shows that as the COVID-19 crisis drags on, employees are becoming disengaged. This might be especially true of sales reps who thrive on personal interaction. They do engage via video conversations, but for many, work-life balance is no longer the same. You and your staff are probably operating from various remote places, which adds to the lack of engagement. Worse, pipeline traffic has decreased, and meeting sales objectives will be difficult.

Understanding coachability is critical for increasing engagement and motivation. Once you’ve determined which reps are most receptive to coaching, you can concentrate on the soft skills that will make a significant difference in our contemporary business climate. However, don’t hurry into this procedure without a solid plan. What you require is a tool that allows you to coach reps at any time and from any location.

We know your job isn’t easy. Our research shows that, even before COVID-19, 41% of managers had a harder time motivating their sales staff this year when compared to last year. One way to improve this situation is to increase sales coaching. About 34% of sales reps told us that their manager’s coaching positively impacts their win rate. If you spend more time coaching the right reps, you can improve that number.

Understanding Coachability

Because not every rep is coachable, not every rep can be driven to enhance performance. To find out where everyone on your team stands, have each person complete a sales skill assessment. These assessments are included in every excellent automated coaching system and will provide you with the knowledge you need to manage your team efficiently. Obtaining a coachability score for each rep is critical. This score is based on the rep’s mentality, as determined by the sales skill evaluation, as well as your assessment of how prepared they are for one-on-one meetings and how open they are to your suggestions.

When you understand your rep’s mentality before you begin coaching, you’ll know whether your time with them will be effectively spent. You can come into a protectionist who is unwilling to adjust their habits. Or your representative could be an ageist who believes you are too young or too old to know anything and would not listen to you. I once had an elitist on my team who, whenever I tried to coach them on anything, always pointed out how I was also doing anything incorrectly.

All of these attitudes can be harmful, but the true issue is the degree of the attitude. You can help your team’s performance by coaching the reps who don’t have major attitude problems. Spend your time and energy on these folks and you can make a difference.

Focusing on Soft Skills

The results of the sales skills evaluations will also reveal which representatives need to work on their soft skills. During the current crisis, soft skills might be especially vital when communicating with clients and prospects. 59% of sales representatives say that confidence is the most important trait required to flourish in the profession.

That is not the point of view of your customers. Prospects nowadays want to hear from agents that understand their businesses and can offer solutions to their difficulties. Making the connection between problems and solutions necessitates empathy, which just 36% of sales representatives value.

If one of your salespeople has a poor empathy score, they may not be paying close enough attention to prospects to completely comprehend their problems, especially during a video call. You can give fast assignments to develop their abilities using your coaching system. For example, you could ask them to describe three details disclosed by the prospect during their most recent conversation and how they relate to what the rep is offering. Your representative should be able to relate those details to how the prospect felt. As you are aware, in order to successfully sell, your representative must provide a solution that addresses both the prospect’s wants and needs.

When you track results from coaching assignments, along with details about a rep’s attitude, your ability to increase engagement and motivation increases.