You’re Good. Get Better.
When I work with sales leaders to help unlock the true potential of their sales teams, I use the ACE Sales Coaching Framework.
This framework is ultimately designed to create a winning culture by grading your team as below average, average, or above average – because nobody wants to be average.
What is the ACE Sales Coaching Framework?
ACE is a sales coaching framework designed to benchmark, coach and evaluate the performance of your team and measure the return on investment in sales coaching.
It’s normally difficult to measure the impact of sales training and sales coaching because there are so many areas that impact sales results.
I could be the best sales coach in the business, but if your company are struggling to find a product-market fit, it will impact your sales results.
But with the ACE sales coaching framework, you can benchmark your team on a much more detailed level beyond just sales results.
By measuring multiple metrics, this framework also helps companies highlight issues such as pricing, competitors and other product-related challenges earlier.
The 3 Stages of the ACE Sales Coaching Framework
Stage One: Analyze
To measure the progress of your sales team and your return on investment in sales coaching, we need to analyse where you are today.
Using a comprehensive scoring matrix, I benchmark your entire team on various attributes such as sales and organization skills, attitude and behaviour.
Your feedback as a sales leader, along with the historical performance metrics, is also important to factor in at this stage, so we have a complete picture of the status quo.
This stage typically requires group and individual coaching sessions and feedback from the team, which helps to get buy-in on the project.
I will also run a personality test to assess each individual’s sales type, which will give us a picture of whether they are the right fit for the role they are doing.
By the end of the analysis, we will have a solid benchmark for each individual in your team and an average across the team we can work from.
Stage Two: Coach
In stage two, we start to take action and deliver the coaching sessions.
We will already have a good idea of what area each individual wants to work on, so we can start goal-setting, coaching and measuring progress.
Throughout the coaching phase, we will keep analyzing and scoring the team to measure progress and help them keep moving towards their goals.
The coaching phase will include a range of individual and group sessions and may include sales coach training for some of your leaders if you have a large team.
Stage Three: Evaluate
After an agreed period, we will sit down and evaluate the progress of the entire team and how sales coaching has impacted performance.
The evaluation is my favourite part of the coaching framework because it gives you a raw and transparent overview of your sales team.
And it enables you to make difficult decisions with confidence.
All being well, we roll back into the coaching stage and continue unlocking the true potential of your sales team and improving your sales results.
How Long Does This Take?
Sales coaching is a culture, not a project, so you shouldn’t put a timeline on it.
If you successfully integrate sales coaching into your sales team and switch it off, the impact will diminish within weeks.
The time required to execute the ACE sales coaching framework and reach the evaluation stage for the first time depends on the size of your sales team and resources.
To benchmark, coach and evaluate a single salesperson would usually take a minimum of ten hours, spread over several weeks.
The benchmarking can usually be done relatively quickly, as can the evaluation.
But the coaching stage needs to be spread over a minimum of 12 to 24 weeks to allow your team to apply their learnings and for you to see the impact.
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