Sales Training vs. Sales Coaching: What’s the Difference?

The world’s best athletes train year-round to hit their numbers and reach their goals. Throughout their journey, they’re coached and given opportunities to improve their craft. The same is true for the best sellers. Sales training and coaching are key pillars of a comprehensive sales enablement solution, so it’s important to understand the difference between the two and why they work so well together.

Sales training and coaching can benefit your organization in a number of ways, most importantly: they help ensure that your sales reps hit their number.

No matter where your organization is on its enablement journey, sales training and sales coaching are a resource to continuously improve your sales activities. In this post, we’ll define sales training and coaching, as well as the how’s and why’s of implementing best practices.

Let’s get started!

What is sales training?

While related, sales training is slightly different from coaching. Sales training ensures that every seller in your sales force has the skills they need to contribute to the team and grow their career. Training educates your sellers on the techniques they need to be most successful when selling your company’s products, services, or solutions.

What is sales coaching?

Every sales organization has a goal or quota. To reach these numbers, sales leaders have the experience and knowledge to encourage, empower, and enable their teams with the practice, guidance, feedback, and tools to succeed in their engagements with buyers.

Sales coaching enables every sales rep to meet their goal, as well as those of the greater sales organization. To be effective, sales coaching needs to be continuous and customized in a way that it focuses on skills and reinforces great sales behavior.

What is the difference between sales training and sales coaching?

On the surface, sales training and coaching can sound like the same thing. They’re peas in a pod—maybe even cousins! In short, they’re related.

To differentiate, it’s most simple to view training as the foundation upon which everything is built. Your sellers can’t sell until they have the training to do so. In effect, training is the activities an organization uses to ensure that its sellers understand the basics of how to sell a product.

If you build another layer on top of training, you get coaching. Sales coaching includes continuous activities or lessons that are customized to focus on specific skills and reinforce great sales behavior.

So, to make matters simple: sales training gives sales reps a baseline understanding of how to sell a product, whereas sales coaching offers sellers an ongoing opportunity to improve their skills and reach their goals.

How do organizations use sales coaching and training?

There are a number of ways organizations can use sales training and coaching to enable their sales organization. In order to be successful, every seller needs to know industry specifics, key data, product details, value propositions, and more.

Consistent training and coaching programs ensure that sellers develop these skills before they start selling. Many organizations use their programs to develop skills across the following areas:

Sales Calls

Conversations with customers and prospects are a seller’s bread and butter. Before sellers can close a deal, they first need to be effective in their calls with buyers. Sales coaching gives sellers an environment where they can practice “mock conversations” with specific buying scenarios. This gives sellers an opportunity to explore buyer needs by use case and develop talking points to navigate real-world situations.

New product messaging

Before organizations go to market with new products, sellers need to understand what they’re selling and how to do so effectively. When combined with sales call coaching, training educates sellers on the product and allows them to test their knowledge based on what they’ve just learned. Once they’ve built confidence with a new offering, they can test it against a practice call or a simulated customer email.

Pipeline generation

Winning new business begins with identifying new opportunities. Sales training educates sellers on the market, use cases, and pain points they can research in order to find new prospects.

These are just a few ways that your organization can implement sales training and coaching programs. Successful programs identify best practices and scale what works.

What are some best practices?

How do enablement leaders know what is and isn’t working? Data is their best friend. Data tells the story of who’s completing lessons and coaching sessions, how well they performed, and whether it translates into new opportunities and new business.

If training and coaching activities aren’t contributing to a successful pursuit of business objectives, enablement leaders can identify potential gaps and optimize the program to achieve their goals.

It’s also important to understand that everyone learns differently. Data can be used to tell a story of how different people respond or perform under specific training models and coaching styles. By identifying these differences, leaders can find new and creative ways to engage and elevate performance across a diverse sales organization.

Giving your sellers a chance to practice together strengthens the whole team. Every seller has their own strengths and areas of opportunity—peer-to-peer opportunities are a transfer of best practices that help sellers develop new tools.

How do organizations use sales coaching and training?

Seismic is the global leader in sales enablement. The Seismic platform is purpose-built to support sales organizations across the full sales lifecycle.

Lessonly by Seismic ensures that sellers have access to the sales training and coaching they need to be successful in any scenario. Lessonly by Seismic customers have leveraged the solution across a variety of scenarios to much success.

Loopio deployed Lessonly to enable sellers with onboarding and ongoing training. With features like automated triggers, sellers receive ongoing notifications for learning. This frees up managers’ time so they can focus on supporting and coaching their team.

By leveraging real-time feedback in Lessonly, Loopio can also use AI to give immediate feedback and coaching on training exercises. This creates a quicker feedback loop that ramps new hires faster and more effectively.

Lessonly by Seismic is the leading sales coaching and training solution on the market. With the addition of Lessonly, Seismic is delivering the most powerful and comprehensive enablement platform on the market today.

If you’d like to learn more about sales training and sales coaching, read more here.