Individual sales coaching: Turn your challenges into opportunities!

Within a company, the effectiveness of each sales team can be decisively improved by a personalized approach: individual sales coaching.

Jean-Charles Spanelis, CEO of Finelis and an expert in this field, shares his experiences and illustrates how this type of coaching can transform individual challenges into significant growth opportunities.

From individual sessions to strategic advice, discover how tailor-made support can not only solve specific problems, but also maximize your overall business potential.

Business coaching, a service that helps and supports professionals  

Finelis Coaching offers sales coaching for any manager or member of a sales team, to help them develop sales and achieve their objectives. Jean-Charles explains in more detail:

• How he sees coaching.
• What sales coaching means to him.
• How he deploys it with his customers.

Sales training to identify business needs and act accordingly

A year and a half ago, I launched fineliscoaching.com with various sales training modules for sales teams. And I’m very happy with it. The website is regularly updated with articles; we keep it alive.

But the reality is that I have been very surprised by the coaching I’ve done and am still doing. It’s really during one-to-one meetings that customers’ real needs emerge, whether they’re managers or their salespeople.

Importance for companies and sales teams

If I take a generic case, a project starts when a customer has found topics on the website that deal with sales strategy, for example. We then start with a module. Then, a month later, we talk about something completely different, because the customer’s priorities are completely different.

Practical example of improving sales performance

To illustrate this way of working, I’ll take the case of a customer who has a lead generation problem but is very strong in web marketing. He is having difficulties with a member of his team who works in the old-fashioned way, and is not very comfortable with technological and digital tools such as LinkedIn, CRM…

The main areas of impact of sales coaching

Then there are customers who fail to close deals. Their sales reps know the product inside out, but they don’t know how to follow up with prospects to find buyers, and so on. And yet, these sales reps know LinkedIn inside out.

Prospecting and closing sales

For my part, I don’t necessarily have the time to deal with LinkedIn. And this is a new need that I hadn’t necessarily identified: managers know how to use this professional network, but they don’t have the time to do it. 

They don’t necessarily have a sales manager in charge of this area. In fact, there are sales managers who are also very much in the field, working on strategy, and who don’t have the time to take care, on an individual level, of their whole “sales” side.

Objection management and ongoing support

I recently had a prospect explain to me that he had a real problem motivating his sales team. In sectors that are flourishing, he told me that his real problem was motivation. That’s a problem we’re encountering more and more.

We have an entry point for a given problem. But it evolves as we go along. And in the end, it’s not necessarily the same entry point that was initially identified. So, we’re flexible enough to adapt to the current situation of the people we coach.

Innovative coaching strategies

Then, to come back to coaching, you either do group sessions with all the salespeople, or with each member individually, or with the manager, especially if he or she has an operational foot in the door. As a result, I imagine that you’ll be able to give him feedback on what’s going on within his team too.

Individual versus collective approach  

Yes, you’ve described it all very well. We give feedback on individual coaching sessions to the manager. But we also pass on messages from the manager to the salespeople on an individual level.

And very often, when we do this in both directions, the manager often says to us: “Next month, can you help me organize a group session on this subject? Because right now, I don’t have the time to do it”.

Here are several examples of topics that come up:

• How can I be sure that a prospect has been properly qualified beforehand?
• The meeting has been scheduled, but I want to make sure that all my salespeople follow the same process.

So, we schedule a one-hour session on this. This helps them because they don’t have time to deal with it, they have other priorities.

Active listening to the customer 

As we can see, coaching is not only useful for acquiring a skill internally, but also for making up for a lack of time or availability on the part of the person who has the skill, to be able to deploy it within the company.

It’s a real team effort, a human effort. Over and above everything we learn, everything we share about the business, it’s above all important that it goes well with the manager and the sales teams. It’s important that these people already want to work with me.

The importance of motivation and messages during sales coaching  

These messages must get through, and everyone must be motivated by these projects too, otherwise they won’t work. Very often, the manager knows what to do. But he says to me: “Jean-Charles, could you pass on this message to this person? Right now, I don’t feel comfortable talking about it”. 

And for example, salespeople who are fed up with working with their CRM say to me: “Jean-Charles, we’ve been working on this for three months. Could you pass on a message to our manager explaining that we could still save time, in his interest?”

In the end, there are lots of important little messages to pass on. They’re all communicating vessels.

To sum up, coaching by Finelis would be:

• A contribution of skills when skills are lacking.
• Or an additional skill when there’s a lack of availability, with great flexibility and several targets, individual and collective.

Adaptability to changing needs 

And then there are two important roles to emphasize:

• The role of facilitator in the business, bringing people together.
• A role, in a way, of trusted third party, i.e., one who will be able to receive a message and deliver it in a less involved way than the people concerned who deliver it.

It’s important to look at things from the outside, in a completely honest way. Very often, I tell them: “Wait a minute, I’m not necessarily legitimate on this. I’m giving you an opinion. I’m giving you my opinion”.

At Finelis Coaching, we learn every day, because new needs arise all the time. What I’m also trying to do more and more is to stick to my strategy of staying a little bit out of the product side. 

Indeed, I think that most companies today have made a lot of progress on the product side. However, their managers, sales directors or salespeople are still overwhelmed, and they need an outside eye to tell them: “Your customers and partners are happy to hear things that are different from the product”.

The impact of digital technology on modern business coaching

I think we’re inundated with news every day, and people are getting tired of hearing about products. They want to talk to people, to humans. So, I think it’s important to say again to these teams: “Talk about yourself, about your projects, and you’ll see that selling will be much easier”.

Summary of the benefits of one-to-one sales coaching

Individual sales coaching offers a tailored approach that transforms challenges into significant growth opportunities for sales teams. 

By working on an individual basis with each team member, this type of support enables specific problems to be identified and effectively resolved, while maximizing overall sales potential. 

From managing objections and prospecting to improving performance and motivating teams, individual sales coaching addresses a multitude of areas of impact that are essential to business success.

Individual sales coaching is much more than simply acquiring in-house skills. It’s a dynamic partnership that bridges gaps in time and availability, offering flexible, targeted solutions for each individual and team. 

With Finelis Coaching, every session is an opportunity to learn and grow, guided by human expertise and an innovative approach. 

If you aspire to transform your business challenges into tangible successes, make the decision today to consult our experts during a free session. Remember, without motivation, there can be no sales.

Contact us to find out more about sales coaching!