13 Field Sales Coaching Tips to Set Your Reps Up for Success

The goal of successful sales coaching isn’t just to meet quotas and boost your bottom line — it’s also to continuously improve one's processes. And in the field of HVAC, windows, and other home services and remodeling sales, it’s important to really hone one’s home services field sales skills.

From setting SMART goals to leveraging technology, both managers and reps alike can dive into these 13 field sales coaching tips to get their wheels turning while they’re on the road.

1. Set SMART Goals and Develop Action Plans

Field sales managers should help their reps set SMART goals, which means each goal should be: 

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound 

This method of goal-setting ensures that each objective is well-defined and aligns with your sales organization’s overall targets. Once set, managers should help reps develop step-by-step plans, including deadlines and metrics to evaluate success.

2. Work on Good Sales Skills Regularly

Reps can’t be successful in their positions unless they practice. To foster a culture of continuous improvement that helps reps boost performance, managers can:

• Establish a rep development plan: Identify key skills and competencies that each salesperson needs to improve, including negotiation, strategic planning, product knowledge, and customer engagement. Create a plan that details reps’ current proficiency levels, then outline the target areas reps need to improve.
• Help reps form beneficial habits: Work with reps to establish disciplined routines, practice, and provide feedback that helps them adjust any necessary behaviors. For example, if reps tend to rush through sales pitches, coach them to adopt a more deliberate pace and thorough messaging.
• Encourage personal responsibility: Motivate your sales professionals to take ownership of their own growth and self-improvement. People (including sales reps) are more likely to engage with processes they help design, so get them involved with the creation of their action plans.

3. Provide Consistent Sales Coaching and Feedback

Training and sales coaching are an investment in your business. And like any investment, it requires time and attention to yield positive results. 

Studies like the Ebbinghaus “curve of forgetting” suggest that people forget approximately 75% of information a day or two after learning it. People need to hear and read material several times before they can recall it. 

Without consistent check-ins, reinforcement, and real-world applications, reps may never fully cement the skills you’re imparting on them.

4. Practice Role-Playing Sales Training Scenarios

Role-playing in field sales training scenarios helps reps master their sales pitches, navigate customer objections, and handle difficult conversations. When managers work with reps to simulate real-world selling scenarios, it enhances the team’s practical applications of the lessons they’re learning.

Say, for example, a rep just dealt with a challenging sales conversation. As a manager, you can set up a live role-playing coaching session to go over the exact script the rep just used in the conversation and the issues the customer raised.

5. Use Metrics and Data to Your Advantage

Field sales needs to be a measurable process that has explicit steps and a repeatable approach. Only then your reps measure their successes and progress. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Define what success looks like: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) like number of sales, average ticket or deal size, and revenue generated.
• Monitor team performance and adjust as needed: Metrics like conversion rates, customer engagement, and sales cycle length provide comprehensive insights that show managers the areas where reps are excelling — and where they need more support.
• Evaluate the effect of coaching: Look at pre- and post-coaching performance metrics to assess the impact of your support. If your reps aren’t improving over time, this indicates that your coaching plan needs to be tweaked.

Integrating data-driven performance metrics into your coaching strategy helps to ensure your efforts are grounded in real-world applications. 

6. Encourage Sales Teams to Learn Continuously

The world of field sales moves quickly — so if you want to stay ahead, you need to encourage and promote continuous learning among your reps. Consider the following:

• Create a learning culture: Make it public knowledge that your business values ongoing education as much as it values hitting sales targets. This means more than just providing onboarding and one-time training — it means offering development opportunities like workshops, seminars, and webinars. It also means leading by example.
• Lean on your team: Leverage the knowledge and skills of top sales performers within your team. During regular meetings or through scheduled presentations, ask these top performers to share their strategies for success.

7. Adapt to Sales Reps’ Specific Needs

When it comes to effective field sales coaching, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It’s important for managers to tailor coaching to reps’ individual needs, strengths, and challenges.

It all starts with personalized assessments of your reps using the previously listed metrics and your own observations. Once you understand their specific performance nuances, you can create a focused plan that targets their growth opportunities. For example, if a rep struggles to close deals despite a healthy pipeline, you may discover you need to work with them on their negotiation skills.

8. Foster Salespeople’s Autonomy

One critical component of effective sales coaching is instilling autonomy in reps — particularly in the field. Your team members need to have the confidence in themselves to make good decisions and manage their processes without hand-holding. Set clear expectations, give reps the sales enablement tools they need — then get out of the way. Give them the flexibility to decide how they approach sales conversations with clients.

When reps have the go-ahead to solve their own problems, make decisions, and take the initiative, they’re much more likely to develop the confidence they need to succeed in the field.

9. Focus on the Customer-Centric Benefits of Sales

At the end of the day, field sales is about meeting customer needs. So, your sales coaching process should focus on providing them with the solutions they desire. The most important aspect of customer retention and customer-centric sales is really understanding their needs. Train your reps to identify these by:

• Implementing a variety of coaching techniques (i.e., hard and soft skills) that cover the multifaceted nature of customer requirements.
• Using all data resources to their advantage — this includes customer relationship management (CRM) software — to identify unique customer needs and opportunities.
• Encouraging collaborative planning by getting customers involved in their process from the start.

As with most things in life, customer-centricity comes down to relationship-building and follow-up. And when reps demonstrate that they have their customers’ best interest in mind, they’re more likely to foster long-term connections.

10. Motivate Your Team with Recognition and Incentives

Once you understand what drives each member of your salesforce to excel, you can leverage that to boost their performance. For example, some of your reps may only strive for financial success. For them, using a monetary bonus will likely be the most motivating. Other reps may prefer public praise. So, for them, you can set aside a minute or two to speak to their achievements and win rates at your next organization-wide meeting. 

It’s important to design your incentives strategically. This means not only rewarding final “sales” results, but also rewarding the behaviors that led to these results.

11. Aim for Continuous Improvement in Sales Coaching Techniques

A player is only as good as their coach. Managers, like field sales reps, also need to strive for continuous improvement in their own techniques and skill sets. 

Managers provide reps with constructive feedback to make them better at their jobs — but reps can do the same for their bosses. Managers should regularly review and adjust their techniques based on reps’ insights and performance metrics. 

Soft skills are one area in which managers can consistently learn and grow alongside their teams. Factors like empathy, adaptability, and active listening are just as important for coaching effectiveness as they are for reps to demonstrate with customers.

12. Make Sales Coaching Tools Part of Your Team

Modern field sales teams will find it hard to succeed without technology on their side. And with tools like Rilla, managers can not only onboard reps with ease, but also provide ongoing training and performance assessments.

Rilla’s virtual ride-along capabilities allow managers to monitor sales interactions and provide instant feedback for field sales reps. Through AI analytics, Rilla tracks specific language and data so managers can discover exactly what reps discussed with in-home customers and how it impacted their performance.

Consider Rilla your assistant coach. You can have your reps review field sales conversations and engage with training program content and data that was captured on the platform.

13. Look to Future Initiatives (and Prepare!)

The field best sales leaders see AI and tech (tools like Rilla) becoming even more ubiquitous in their processes. 

Sales managers everywhere will soon be able to run reps through a variety of real-world in-home sales scenarios that help them sharpen their skills — resulting in better conversion rates and fewer missed opportunities.

If managers want to make sure their teams are at the forefront of their field, they need to make AI adoption a priority.

Coach Your Field Sales Reps Efficiently With Rilla

For field sales coaching programs, Rilla provides managers with data they can really use to teach reps the ropes and boost their confidence in the field. With AI conversation tracking between customers and reps, you can explain to your team exactly what they’re saying and doing that’s adding to your company’s bottom line — and things they could potentially improve.

And equipped with Rilla and these 13 tips, it’s easier than ever for managers to coach their reps to success in the field. Contact us today to book a demo.