Effective B2B Sales Coaching Via Situational Fluency

In B2B sales, success hinges on more than just product knowledge and persuasive pitches; it requires the ability to adapt to dynamic sales scenarios. Gartner reports that B2B buyers might only spend 5-6% of their time with one of your sales reps, so making every minute count is vital.

Adaptability is where effective sales coaching plays a vital role, equipping sales teams with the skills they need to thrive. Situational fluency, the ability to swiftly understand and respond to diverse customer interactions with agility and precision, is vital as your team attempts to maximize sales and grow the company.

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Mastering situational fluency helps your sales team confidently navigate complex sales environments, turning challenges into opportunities. This article will explore how this dynamic approach can transform your sales strategy, leading to enhanced performance and sustained success.

Quick Takeaways

• Success in B2B sales hinges on more than just product knowledge and pitches, as adapting to various sales scenarios is crucial.

• Sales coaching involves guidance, support, and feedback to sales professionals to enhance their performance. 

• Situational fluency is the ability to swiftly understand and respond to diverse customer interactions with agility and precision. 

• Targeted coaching can improve team effectiveness, close more deals, and drive business growth.

The Basics of B2B Sales Coaching

Sales coaching is the process of providing guidance, support, and feedback to sales professionals to help them improve their performance and achieve their sales goals. It involves one-on-one sessions, team meetings, and continuous training aimed at enhancing the skills and techniques of salespeople. The primary goal is to foster a culture of constant improvement and growth.

This coaching is particularly crucial in B2B sales due to the complex and often lengthy sales cycles. B2B sales typically involve multiple stakeholders, significant investments, and detailed negotiations. Effective sales coaching helps sales teams navigate these complexities by honing their ability to build relationships, understand client needs, and tailor their approach to each unique situation.

Common challenges in B2B sales that coaching aims to address include:

• Navigating Long Sales Cycles: B2B transactions often take months or even years to complete, requiring persistence and strategic follow-ups.
• Handling Multiple Decision-Makers: Salespeople must effectively communicate with various stakeholders, each with different priorities and concerns.
• Articulating Value Propositions: Clearly demonstrating a product or service’s value and ROI can be challenging but essential for closing deals.
• Managing Rejections and Objections: Sales coaching helps professionals develop resilience and strategies to overcome objections and turn potential rejections into opportunities.

Addressing these challenges will take some work because there are so many moving parts. In many cases, targeted coaching based on individual performance can improve team effectiveness, close more deals, and drive business growth.

What Are We Coaching For?

The top-level objective of sales coaching is clear: Improve sales performance to drive better results.

But what does this really mean?

To make sales coaching effective, managers or coaches must know the specific performance elements that require coaching. They must experience how reps actually perform in the arena and in conversations with customers and prospects.

Sales coaches listen for rep knowledge and understanding, skills and techniques, and specific sales behaviors.

Important coaching behaviors on our checklist include how sales reps:

• Open a call
• Set the agenda, “set up the listening“
• Establish rapport and relatedness that open trust
• Review prior conversations, activities, and information that provides background or context for the current meeting
• Use questions effectively to guide conversations
• Listen — listen actively and without “stepping on” speakers (my personal challenge)
• Manage meeting time and flow
• Respond to buyer questions, objections, and competitor traps effectively
• Deliver key points, stories, and presentations effectively
• Uncover all information that is appropriate or required for each conversation
• Validate key information and understanding
• Gain commitment to actions, ground rules, and next steps
• Execute new sales competencies like using social media and content to sell
• Educate and facilitate consensus of buying teams (CEB, Challenger Customer)

We refer to these skills as situational competency or situational fluency because they focus on how reps perform in the heat of battle.

Training and role-playing are for sales preparation and practice. Coaching is for in-game adjustments during the sales process.

So What’s the Problem?

Under pressure, newly learned or infrequently used behaviors often break down. “Regression to the norm” is the common expression.

However, three factors really inhibit self-correction and set up the need for sales coaching as a regular practice:

We Don’t Listen Well

One of the most significant hurdles in effective B2B sales is the lack of active listening. Salespeople often fall into the trap of talking too much and not listening enough. This imbalance can hinder their ability to understand the customer’s needs and respond appropriately.

Sales interactions should be a two-way dialogue, but many salespeople dominate the conversation, focusing on delivering their pitch rather than engaging with the customer’s concerns. This approach stems from the desire to showcase their product knowledge and to persuade the customer quickly. However, this can lead to missed opportunities to uncover the deeper needs and pain points of the customer.

Active listening is essential in sales because it allows the salesperson to gather valuable information, build rapport, and tailor their approach to the customer’s specific situation. Listening more and talking less helps in understanding the customer’s perspective, which is crucial for building trust and providing relevant solutions.

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When salespeople listen attentively, they can ask better questions, clarify doubts, and address objections more effectively. This improves the quality of the interaction and demonstrates genuine interest and empathy, fostering a stronger customer relationship.

We Don’t Remember Accurately

Another challenge in effective B2B sales is the human tendency to forget the details of conversations. This memory gap can lead to miscommunication and missed opportunities in sales interactions.

Without accurate recall, salespeople might miss key customer insights, misinterpret needs, or fail to follow up appropriately. Effective sales coaching emphasizes the importance of taking detailed notes and using tools like CRM systems to capture and retain critical information, ensuring better customer engagement and more successful outcomes.

We Aren’t Self-Aware

Self-awareness is another crucial challenge in B2B sales. Many salespeople lack an accurate understanding of their own performance and behaviors during sales interactions. They might believe they are communicating effectively or addressing customer needs well, but without external feedback, they can’t see their blind spots.

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Self-evaluation alone isn’t enough. Comparing your perceptions with others’ observations is key. Effective sales coaching uses feedback and recorded interactions to help salespeople gain a true understanding of their strengths and areas for improvement, fostering continual growth and success.

Why Aren’t Salespeople Coached?

Several real challenges get in the way of regular and effective sales coaching:

• Lack of desire by some managers and reps
• Lack of coaching expertise and knowledge
• Logistics like time, the ability to get into meetings, and coordinating timing between managers and reps
• Methodology to make the experience compelling and efficient for all participants, a repeatable and consistent practice across the sales organization
• Scale (this is a killer)

When manager-to-rep ratios were 1:7 and selling was local, sales coaching was relatively easy. Managers didn’t face the significant scale challenges of 1:10-15 ratios, with sales reps situated remotely and selling nationally/globally.

No Data

During a conversation with Marc Miller, author of two excellent sales books (Selling is Dead and A Seat at the Table) and founder/CEO of SpearFysh, I was surprised to learn what is probably the most important reason salespeople don’t receive coaching.

Sales managers and their reps lack the inputs necessary to coach. They lack data.

Think about it. If the manager wasn’t in or on the call, if they didn’t experience the sales performance in action, how could they know what and how to coach?

Without the ability to “replay the sales conversation” the way sports teams do with their game tapes, everyone is relying on cryptic notes or faulty memory.

This deficiency makes sense. But I never distinguished the idea. I just assumed the manager had to be on the call in the first place.

Recording Sales Conversations

A colleague of mine was working with a mega software company and their sales training vendor. One of the principles they were working on was the importance of salespeople listening more than talking. The software sales reps had agreed on the goal of listening 80% of the time in the call.

The training vendor sent their people along to record sales calls with hundreds of sales reps. They were capturing data for an assessment of actual behavior.

They transcribed the recordings, dumping the text into a giant spreadsheet. The text was color-coded: red for salespeople talking and black for customers.

They then compressed the conversation text to image size to use the data in the most straightforward and dramatic way possible.

What percent of the image do you think was black?

The Recording Process

For 15 years at our company, I required most of our sales calls to be recorded. Customers almost always granted permission. Our team used simple recorders, first analog and then digital.

We didn’t think of it as coaching per se. We found the recordings removed in-call note-taking pressure. It allowed us to have natural conversations.

Recording also made it easier to write our customer summary letters. For major accounts, it did provide source insights for account strategy planning.

The only constraint was the linear nature of recorded audio. Even when we went digital, it was frustrating to skim the audio to find pertinent sections.

We’ve long encouraged clients to record sales calls. But remembering and working even a simple recorder was a hassle. The difficulty extracting the audio and the time required to listen were enough impediments to make it impractical. Virtually no one does it.

Surprising Discoveries

Several surprises hit us as we started using the application.

We mentioned the scale challenge of coaching. This challenge is a bigger deal than it appears. If a manager has ten reps, each rep conducts ten to 30 customer calls monthly. That’s a scale problem!

But it’s actually worse. We learned you can’t know which calls will provide the best coaching opportunities ahead of time. You can only see after they occur. I think of the number of joint calls I’ve been on that were canceled, shortened, or simply didn’t provide good coaching fodder.

A Unique Solution

A new approach creates an inventory of all sales calls. A simple criteria checklist will identify which calls are good candidates for a sales coaching session.

A mature or significant account review process might trigger it. With this approach, you conduct the coaching at a time conducive to both the coach and the rep. But now, you have the data you need.

Self-coaching is now possible, and it’s an extremely valuable capability. Like sports players reviewing game tape, professionals often know what they did poorly — when they see or hear it!

An inventory of recorded sales calls is a corporate asset. You can quickly edit audio to extract examples of good and poor practices.

This step fuels your onboarding and training programs. Sales reps learn by modeling. Comparing how an “A” player handles a particular conversation helps other reps learn and hear how they can improve.

This inventory of transcribed customer conversations enables data analytics. You can then mine data sets for customer insights, ideas, language, “voice of customer” stories, and many other possibilities.

Sales Coaching Tools And Technologies

Two technology categories that enable sales coaching have been available for decades. Modern technology, bandwidth, and delivery systems enrich the experience today.

Just-in-time learning, guided selling, and performance support systems deliver situationally relevant text, video, or content recommendations.

Video training applications are becoming especially popular and functionally rich.

Tools You Can Use

Video applications are excellent for training and getting reps to practice telling their story, presentation, or key point explanations. Reps experience feedback by viewing video role plays and receiving feedback from sales managers or coaches based on those recordings.

These systems support coaching based on simulated performance rather than on the evaluation of actual performance and situational fluency.

There is a great need to get key stories, presentations, objection handling, technical explanations, and other important “messages” delivered effectively. However, message delivery is just one aspect of professional selling that benefits from coaching.

Companies are also trying desperately to shift sales rep behavior away from traditional, product-feature-benefit pitches. They want to instill value-generating conversations based on dialogue, questioning, and active listening.

This area is where sales coaching is required.

Three Levels Of Coaching

Once you have coaching data, your coaching possibilities open.

• Sales reps can self-coach. This scenario is similar to professional athletes reviewing game tapes. Doing things this way increases coaching moments, as reps can review every important conversation. Managers/coaches must be more selective.

• Peer coaching becomes possible. I’ve long favored the principle, “We teach best what we most need to learn.” By making everyone a coach, greater learning opportunities open up. You can begin to create a culture of coaching. Reps can compare their conversations with those of the best reps for each type of conversation.
• Professional third-party coaches are an important option. You may be unable to change the reality in your organization of time availability for managers to coach. Not all managers have the skills, temperament, and freedom from organizational pressures to provide effective coaching. Third-party coaches are a great option.

Sales coaching based on actual performance is the best way to coach. Selecting the best coaches is important as well. Recording sales conversations removes the need for coaches to experience meetings to coach. Time-shifting the coaching meeting opens up possibilities for all kinds of sales improvements.

Take the Next Step

Effective B2B sales coaching, grounded in situational fluency, is pivotal for navigating the complexities of modern sales environments. By equipping sales teams with the skills to adapt to diverse scenarios, businesses can turn potential challenges into opportunities for success.

You can also generate more leads for your sales team by focusing on your website and content creation. Marketing Insider Group can help with our Content Builder Services. Contact us to learn more, or sign up for a free consultation with our marketing team.