Sales Coaching Questions to Increase Your Results

Increase your results with Sales Coaching Questions that pinpoint the areas of your selling process that you need to focus on.

You may not always get the support you need from your managers or directors.

So take responsibility for your own success by self-coaching using the ideas you’ll find here.

Many sales managers and directors don’t have coaching skills.

You may be self employed so there is no one above you to offer support.

Managers may not have the time to support sales people as they should.

Sales teams receive no training or development.

I’ve seen all the above happen in many different organisations plus many more reasons why sales people, like you, need to self coach themselves if they want to be successful. So here’s a starting point on the sales questions to ask yourself to start the process.

I’ve used the prospecting stage of the sales process as an example but the same process works for any part of selling.

Self Coaching on the
Sales Prospecting Stage

If you make your own sales appointments have you always got a stack of cold leads waiting to be called?

If not, look at why not.

Remember you will probably only convert a percentage of between 3% and 7% depending upon how warm the leads are and whether they are from door knocking, cold calling, or incoming enquiries.

A quick calculation example:

If on average you need 12 sales a month to hit target, and you convert 3 new sales appointments out of every 10 to a sale, then you need 40 sales appointments per month.

If you convert 5 appointment making calls out of every 10 cold prospects you contact into a meeting then you need to contact 80 sales prospects a month. So the sales coaching question I would ask you is: Have you got a list of prospects to call that’s big enough to supply 80 contacts?

If after doing the calculation with your own numbers you find that you don’t have enough leads to contact to make sales appointments, what are you going to do about it?

There are only 2 answers to this question:

1. Get more leads
2. Convert more of your leads to appointments.

If you decide that getting more leads is the answer you have 2 options.

1. Do more of what you’re currently doing to acquire sales leads.
2. Take some new actions to increase the numbers on your prospect list.

If you decide to do more of what you’re doing now will you have the time or will this impact on other areas of your role.

If you decide to take some new actions then you need to look for new resources.

Invest in training to add to your sales skill sets.

And develop your techniques in specific areas.

Now you get the idea of sales questions and how to self coach?

It’s an honest conversation with yourself where you make decisions based on the evidence available.

You don’t hide behind vague promises of how you will do better.

And you don't give excuses of how things outside of your control have impacted your sales.

Be firm with yourself and don’t accept anything short of clearly defined actions with logical reasons why they will work.

More Sales Coaching Questions

View these questions as starting points leading to conversations with yourself about where the problems are and the solutions.

If your current list is big enough will it continue to provide the number of prospects you need?

Could you improve the quality of the leads you collect?

How many of the prospects you currently contact do you get to agree to sales appointments with you?

The above can be measured as the average of appointments made to every 10 prospects contacted.

Or, as a percentage of the ones contacted that agree to an appointment.

You can use this measure to check increases in conversion rates as you take action to increase the quality of the prospect leads you gather.

If your self-coaching analysis of results highlights a low number of leads being converted to appointments then by investing in actions to develop your appointment making skills you will need to make less calls to achieve the appointment numbers you need. That can mean less time on the phone and more time selling and earning money.

Your Next Actions

To improve your telephone and cold calling skills when making sales appointments we have a full sales training section on the website at Appointment Setting
To see ideas on prospecting and acquiring new leads take a look at this section of our sales training website at Sales Prospecting

The Sales Buzz is published by the website www.provensalestraining.com.

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I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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