Sales Coaching Essentials: How to transform your sales team

By Mark Garrett Hayes

** Business Book Awards 2023 Finalist **

Need your new sales hires to get up to speed faster?
Want your salespeople to stop depending on you? Like to get the very best from your sales team?

“This is the book you keep on your shelf and ‘dog-ear’ as a new or seasoned manager with tips you can action immediately. A rare find among sales books today.”
Ashton Williams – Senior Manager Revenue Enablement ADA

“A masterpiece in sales coaching. Your salespeople will become autonomous in their thinking, discovering their own answers, mastering their own objections, and you will be the guide to their success.”
Caroline McCrystal – Senior Account Manager UK&I GTM Banking Experian

“Mark does a phenomenal job demystifying sales coaching and making it actionable for frontline managers. A must-read for any sales leader unlocking the performance of their team.”
Matthew Dixon – Co-author of The Challenger Sale and Jolt

More than ever you need to coach your team so they can think for themselves, take responsibility for their performance and do what you hired them to do. If you want to turn your team into top sales performers, sales coaching must be your focus. Let this practical and easy-to-read book show you how.

Mark Garrett Hayes is an accredited coach and trainer, and is passionate about helping sales leaders to dramatically boost sales performance and accountability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Release date: May 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788603324

Mark Garrett Hayes

Mark Garrett Hayes is a Sales Enablement Expert, Accredited Coach and Certified Trainer who helps sales leaders and managers learn how to coach their salespeople and dramatically boost performance and revenue. Working both in-house and remotely with sales teams internationally, Mark has developed powerful tools to help sales leaders to get the very best from their teams. He has helped leaders reduce A-Player churn, drive greater accountability among their reps and revolutionize how they get the best from their sales people. Mark is the host of the popular weekly The Sales Coach podcast where he interviews sales leaders and thought leaders at SaaS and tech companies worldwide each week.

Book preview

As a coach, you believe that the salesperson in front of you is a resourceful professional with the ability to uncover, understand and unlock.

In this first part of the book, we are going to give you the skills to get to grips with coaching so you can accelerate the impact of your sales leadership.

What is coaching?

Let’s say that you are hiring ten new sales reps. Your people will need to go through formal onboarding to familiarize themselves with your products and services, your brand, your HR policies, etc. To these people, all this information is new. You might test or assess your SDRs’ knowledge to ensure that transfer of information has taken place. This is training.

Then, at some point, you are going to sit down with these people and get them to reflect on how they’re doing and how the information they have just received can be applied by them. You might ask them how they could better prepare for the next call. You might ask how they think they are currently performing in relation to their goals. You might ask them what they can do to move a deal forward. This is coaching.

You need both

At the beginning of this year, I had a brief conversation with the Sales Director of an Enterprise software business, and she told me that they were looking for ‘training’. Naturally, I asked which training the team had received before. It turns out they had received training each year.

Different providers and different content from each but there were:

•No new results.

•No improvement.

•No accountability.

This is of course a very expensive problem. You can keep training people, but training does not transform people.

On the other hand, coaching by its very nature ensures that people are held accountable for your investment in their new training knowledge and skill.

Salespeople need both training and coaching

What do your people think?

Some people view training as an interruption or necessary HR procedure to go through so they can go back to work. It’s very worrying from your point of view when your people view a training program costing thousands of dollars as something that they have to do, rather than want to do. But people almost never tire of coaching when you coach the right people in the right way.

I had a chat with some frontline sales reps recently and I asked them what they thought training is and what coaching is and how each helps them. Here is a synopsis of what they said:

"Coaching is what I get when I am stuck on a deal and my boss fills in the blanks for me. He knows stuff I don’t know. He doesn’t always have the