Opportunity coaching for fun and profit

17th May 2018 |   Bob Apollo

You’ll notice a number of articles elsewhere in this edition on the subject of coaching. I want to use this short piece to focus on an area that has become a particular interest of mine: using coaching techniques to help our salespeople develop more effective opportunity strategies.

I’ve observed organisations that do a particularly effective job of opportunity coaching, viewed others at the opposite end of the scale that appear to ignore the topic altogether, and seen and experienced most points in between.

Success factors

There seem to be a handful of consistent success factors: first, the effective organisations set clear expectations for how opportunities are to be managed. They have defined sales frameworks that guide salespeople in what they need to know and do at each stage of the process without restricting their creativity or initiative.

Next, these best practices must be embedded into the CRM system, so that the opportunity record provides a single source of truth regarding the true nature and state of the opportunity. Rather than being an administrative burden, the CRM system must act as a first-level coaching stimulus to ensure that salespeople are thinking clearly about every opportunity.

Bob Appollo

Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners | + posts

Bob Apollo is the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B sales effectiveness experts. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now spends his time as a coach and advisor to growth-phase technology-based businesses, equipping them to adopt the principles of Outcome-Centric Selling.