Sales coaching for owners who have never coached

Coaching a salesperson, for an owner who has never done it, comes down to one habit. Listen to one real call a week. Give one note about it. Write the note down. Check at the next call whether it changed. That is all of it. You do not need a course, a voice, or a theory of selling. You need ten minutes, a recording or a chat thread, and the patience to say only one thing.

Three Thursdays in Hubballi

Picture a firm in Hubballi that sells packaging machines to small food units. This case is invented to show the routine. The owner books a sales training day for the four salespeople. They enjoy it, fill a flip chart and go back to the counter. By Thursday the old habits are back, because nothing about Thursday has changed. Nobody has listened to a Thursday call.

A training day teaches in general. A salesperson's problem is seldom general. It is the second minute of a call to one buyer, where Ravi started describing the machine before asking what the buyer packs. You can only fix that by hearing it.

So the owner tried something smaller. On the first Thursday the owner played Ravi's call with a dairy unit and found the minute where the buyer stopped answering. The owner asked, "What were you trying to do here?" Ravi said he wanted to show he knew the machine. The note they agreed: ask pack size and daily volume before naming any model.

On the second Thursday the owner forgot to check it, heard a new problem with price, gave a second note, and Ravi took that as a sign the first no longer mattered. The first note quietly died.

On the third Thursday the owner added a column to the sheet, "Seen again?", and made it the first thing read each time. Ravi had asked pack size at the start of two calls. The owner said so, specifically, and only then moved on. The dairy unit still did not order, since its volumes (about 200 kg a day, in this invented case) were too small for the machine, and the owner had to accept that a better call does not always win the sale. Once a note shows "Yes" twice, it retires and the next one begins.

The ten minutes

Once a week, per person, in four steps.

1. Choose one normal call. Not the worst, not the best. If you take only disasters, people start hiding recordings.
2. Listen for one thing. Where did the buyer stop leaning in? Mark that minute.
3. Ask before you tell. Play the minute and ask what they were trying to do, then what they would say if it came up again this afternoon.
4. Write one sentence. In their words where possible, dated, in a shared sheet.

Before choosing a new call at the next session, read last week's note and listen for it. If it has changed, say so. If not, keep the same note for another call.

What the sheet looks like

Plain text in a shared document does the job:

3 Mar  Ravi    Dairy unit, quote call
  Minute 4: described machine speed before asking pack size
  Note: ask pack size and daily volume before any model name
  Seen again? Yes, 10 Mar and 17 Mar. Retired.

3 Mar  Fatima  Biscuit maker, repeat enquiry
  Ended with "I will send details"
  Note: fix the next call date before hanging up
  Seen again? Not yet.

"Be more confident" cannot go on this sheet. Nor can "needs to improve product knowledge", which names a topic and not a minute of a call. If you cannot point to a minute and a sentence, you have an opinion, not a note.

A recording is best. If calls are not recorded, ask the salesperson to put the buyer on speaker for the next call, with the buyer's agreement, or to write what was said straight after. Memory softens the awkward minute.

Giving a note without a telling-off

Start with something that worked. Make it specific: "You waited four seconds after the buyer said the price, and then the buyer talked." A vague "good call" teaches nothing, and the salesperson can tell you are warming up.

Give one note even when you heard five problems. The other four will still be there next week, and a salesperson handed five notes has little chance of fixing any of them.

Never coach in front of the team. Never coach on the day of a lost order, because a salesperson who has just lost hears every note as blame.

Where owner coaching runs out

If you sell by field visits and nothing is recorded, you will need the salesperson to write up each visit, or you ride along, which costs far more time than a call.

A team larger than six or seven is too many for one person to listen to every week and still run the business. A sales manager or an outside party has to own it.

If the trouble is process, with no follow-up and leads left unassigned, coaching a call will not mend a business where nothing is written down.

And if you are the salesperson's only source of correction and also the person they fear, someone else should listen. Coaching is a recurring job. If nobody in the business has ten minutes for it, the real choice may be an outside coach, not a better routine.

How to review a single call is in how to audit a sales call.

Begin with the salesperson you trust most

Do not announce a programme. Tell that person you are going to listen to one call a week and want to get better at helping them. Run a single cycle, write the note, check it next time. When it has worked twice, add the second person. If you would rather have someone outside read a set of calls first, sales call auditing does that as part of how you sell, and tell us what you need starts the conversation.