Although sales training and sales coaching both aim to improve a sales team’s performance, each process follows a unique approach.

Sales training equips reps with the tools they need to get started, but sales coaching is what allows for an individual’s continued growth over time. To ensure success, it’s important to understand how these two pieces work together, and when each should be used in your organization.

Your sales team is the backbone of your business. I can imagine that you’d like to increase their sales revenue consistently month by month. With sales coaching you can tangibly improve your sales team’s output with focused goals you’d like to achieve. At Predictable Revenue, we believe it’s one of the most valuable investments you can make in your business.

One of the biggest challenges for a sales organization is moving upmarket. For example, if an organization targets the small- and medium-sized business market (SMB) and now want to target enterprise customers — that’s where the money is — they need to rethink how their representatives sell.

Effective coaching sometimes requires us to shift our focus to igniting a coachee’s intrinsic motivation to change, as I mentioned in a previous blog post. This is not always easy to do, and some say it borders on the impossible. The good news is, there is an incredibly powerful tool one can use that has been proven by years of rigorous scientific study.