We've been thinking about coaching a lot lately. Your sales teams are constantly reinventing themselves to align with their customer’s environment. When they are at their best, they are in sync with the customer’s tactical and strategic initiatives. But the best actions to take are sometimes not clear. This is when coaching skills are critical to help your teams gain their bearings.

In a recent First Thursday interview, CPS managing partner Ken Evans offered up these four critical coaching habits:

1. Establish high-value coaching relationships - Whether the coaching relationship is requested by a sales team member or by the potential coach, it's important that this relationship (and the act of coaching itself) be clearly separated from any other pre-existing relationship. If it isn't different, the conversations will quickly revert back to the previous relationship. Also, it should be a cardinal rule of every coach to ask permission to give coaching, every time. The team member who has given permission will always be more receptive.

2. Identify coachable moments - How can a coach tell when a coachable moment is at hand? You may hear these signals from your sales team members.

• Do you have a minute?
• There’s something I’d like to run by you.
• What would you do in a situation like this?
• I’m stuck.

A key to discovering coachable moments is being centered on your team member, not on yourself as coach. We have found that many coachable moments occur before or after operations reviews and at critical stages of the sales process. A best practice for finding coachable moments is to look for instances when your salespeople are planning an important and tough customer call.

3. Help your teams develop extraordinary goals - Nothing inhibits right actions by your sales team members more than not having a defined goal and a target date for completion. Without a goal, your teams are destined to spend most of their time focused on the urgent rather than on the important. We recommend that you always ask your team or team member to state clearly and openly the goals to be achieved. The next great question is to ask your team to articulate the benefit to the customer, should the goal be realized.

4. Get commitment to actions - Because how best to achieve the goal is frequently a little foggy, you should seek commitment to the goal and some agreed-to milestones along the way. Crisply executed short-term best next actions related to the milestones help gain momentum and build enthusiasm toward reaching the goal. The following best practices gain commitment to action and transfer from you to the team members:

• Frequent crisp conversations about status and what each team member will do next
• Commit time to accomplish best next actions
• Communicate results of actions

So what’s the coaching payoff?  Many of the best selling organizations we have observed have good sales and support people.  But they also have great sales coaches who help guide the sales strategies and who help the selling teams execute the work plans as projects. Effective coaching builds competency from the ground up, and transfers peak performance throughout the organization.