Sales Microcoaching: How to Improve Your Salespeople in 2 Minutes a Day | C. Lee Smith - 1468

The Sales Evangelist

The life of a sales manager is tough, and juggling your own obligations often means you don’t have time to coach your team as often as you’d like. Microcoaching might just be the solution for you. In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by President and CEO of Salesfuel C. Lee Smith to explain his process and platform for microcoaching to improve his salespeople.

Three problems with coaching today:

• Coaches aren’t being held accountable. Sales managers get busy meeting a short-term quota and don’t have time for long-term staff development.
• Some sales managers are uncomfortable coaching. They think they don’t know how to do it or get pushback from team members.
• Finally, there are managers who want to put time into coaching, but there are only so many hours in the day and find it challenging to maintain momentum.

Microcoaching is the solution.

• Short, frequent bursts of 2-6 minute coaching give sales managers the flexibility to maintain coaching momentum between one-on-one meetings through tweeting, text, or slack.
• The same principles of coaching apply. Ask questions, don’t just give advice, and supply encouragement and motivation.
• But instead of focusing on one big issue, focus on small tactics to provide clear questions for the team member. These “reflect and respond” questions are a significant part of microcoaching.

How do you know if your microcoaching is effective?

• There will still be the same issues in regular coaching: both parties must have a positive attitude about the coaching process for it to be successful.
• However, microcoaching through a platform like Coachfeed removes some awkward conversations that arise throughout the process.
• Lead by example and show them how coaching is supposed to be done.

AI drives effective microcoaching

• With Coachfeed’s microcoaching platform, they offer different assessments to help shape the team member’s best results through microcoaching.
• These assessments reveal infromation about the salesperson, help dictate the coaching structure, and drive the AI engine to identify who needs coaching, what they need coaching on, and how they respond to different communication tactics.
• Using these creates a personalized coaching playbook for managers to use for follow-up conversations.
• Everybody's journey is different because every salesperson is different. And that's a defining part of the Coachfeed mentality.

1. Lee’s final piece of advice? Coaching is a long-term play. You might not see the benefits initially, but you’ll be improving your salespeople and your sales process. To get in contact with C.Lee, visit his company website salesfuel.com, coaching platform coachfeed.com, or his personal website cleesmith.com

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Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.