Working in sales requires resilience and adaptability. By embracing a coaching leadership style, you can help build these skills in your sales reps. A coaching leadership approach is all about understanding each team member’s strengths and challenges and helping bring out the best in them. It means you’re not just setting and enforcing sales targets but guiding and supporting your team to reach them.
A post on the Paperbell blog says this leadership style helps team members grow personally and professionally. Why? Because it makes each team member feel heard, seen and valued. In this issue of PromoPro Daily, we highlight a Paperbell post that covers the principles of a coaching leadership style. Let’s take a look.
1. Active listening. This means not only hearing what your sales reps are saying but asking thoughtful questions to understand their point of view. The Paperbell post says it’s important to observe nonverbal cues, like facial expressions and tone of voice. When you practice active listening, you show respect to your team and begin to build trust.
2. Taking a long-term view. When you lead from a coaching perspective, you’re invested in your team members’ long-term growth — not just their immediate performance. Consider meeting with each sales rep individually and helping them create a 3-year plan. Include improvement areas and opportunities to develop new skills, the post advises.
3. Displaying emotional intelligence. This is simply having the ability to identify, understand and manage your emotions and those of others, the Paperbell post says. It’s blending self-awareness with social skills and empathy to achieve the best outcome in every situation.
4. Giving constructive feedback. A coaching leadership style involves providing positive and supportive input along with improvement areas. Your feedback should always be balanced, according to the post, highlighting both strengths and ideas on how to improve in their role. For example, you might commend a sales rep on a recent client presentation and then switch to an area of improvement. You could say something like, “Great job on that presentation! Your enthusiasm really shone through. I noticed that while you engaged the client really well, there were a few product details you could have highlighted more effectively.”
5. Emphasizing team performance. Coaching leadership focuses on how the team functions as a group, not just as individual sales reps. According to the Paperbell post, leaders who prioritize team performance work on communication patterns, collaborative processes, team alignment and overall productivity.
When you want to create a high-performance team, consider your leadership style. A coaching approach can empower your team to embrace challenges and motivate them to go above and beyond for your organization.
Compiled by Audrey Sellers
Source: The Paperbell blog. Paperbell is a scheduling and client management tool.
