Sales training and coaching · Coaching the sales team
Rate each rep on five skills and watch them sell to a pretend buyer.
A mastery ladder is a grid that rates every salesperson from one to five on the handful of skills your sales actually need. A role-play assessment checks those ratings against a live performance. This page ends with a skill grid, a scoring sheet for a ten-minute demo and a mentor pairing list.
Scope, fee, reporting and term are agreed in writing after we have read your brief and spoken to you.
In one paragraph
A mastery ladder is a grid that rates every salesperson from one to five on the handful of skills your sales actually need. A role-play assessment checks those ratings against a live performance. This page ends with a skill grid, a scoring sheet for a ten-minute demo and a mentor pairing list.
The owner of a two-branch tile showroom in Hubballi asks the senior salesman to train the new joiner. The senior salesman is the best closer in the shop, but when asked what the senior salesman does differently the answer is, "You just talk to the customer." The senior salesman cannot teach it because nobody has ever written down which skills make up the talking, or which of them the senior salesman is actually good at.
A mastery ladder fixes that by picking five to eight skills from your own sales process, such as discovery questions, quoting, handling the price objection, follow-up and WhatsApp replies. Each rep gets a level from one (does not know what they do not know) to five (could teach it). Level five people become mentors for level one and two people on the same skill.
The ratings come from two places. The rep rates themselves, the manager rates them from calls and deals they have seen, and the gap between the two is the interesting part. A role-play then settles the argument: the rep explains your product on a whiteboard, or a sheet of paper, to someone playing the buyer.
The owner or sales head runs this. It sits after the team skills baseline, which tells you where the team is weakest, and before the single behaviour training plan, which picks one skill to teach.
Where this sits
Topic 6 of 8 in sales training and coaching: coaching the sales team. Coaching routines a manager runs weekly and monthly.
- The topic before
- Team foundations
- The topic after
- Hiring and onboarding sellers
If you want this done for you
My salespeople do not follow up, do not handle objections and do not close.
The work
What this is actually like.
“The best closer is a poor teacher until the skill is named”
Skill at selling and skill at explaining it are different. A grid with named skills gives the strong rep something specific to demonstrate, such as how they open a price conversation, and gives the weak rep one thing to copy instead of a general instruction to be more confident.
“Self-ratings in a hierarchical team are polite fiction”
Juniors rate themselves high to avoid looking weak, or low to look humble in front of the owner. Say plainly that the ratings are for deciding who learns what, not for appraisal or pay. Never pin the grid on the notice board.
“Product knowledge is not selling skill”
A rep can recite every specification and still lose the sale, because they explain in your terms. The whiteboard demo tests whether they can draw the product in the buyer's terms: the problem it removes, the saving, the risk. Score that, not the number of features mentioned.
“Five skills fit on one page and eight is the limit”
A twenty-skill grid gets filled in once and never reopened. Choose skills that cost you orders, and drop any skill nobody can describe at level one and level five.
What we do
What you end up with.
The documents this topic produces, what each one is for, and how you know it is finished.
The skill ladder sheet
Skills down the side, reps across the top, a level from one to five in each cell, with two lines per skill describing what level one and level five look like in your shop or office. The manager and each rep fill their own copy.
Result: Finished when two people reading the level five description for the same skill would pick the same rep.
The scenario card
One buyer taken from a real deal, written on a card: who they are, what they asked, the price they were quoted, the objection they raised. Keep three so a rep cannot memorise one.
Result: Finished when someone outside the team can play the buyer from the card without a briefing.
The demo scoring sheet
Four rows scored one to five: relevance to this buyer, a story or example from a real customer, clarity of the explanation, and handling of the questions. Add a line for one improvement to practise before the next round.
Result: Finished when the rep can say aloud what they will change next time.
The mentor pairing list
Each level one or two skill matched to a level five rep, with a start date and a standing check-in slot. Pairs are on a skill, not on a person, so a rep can be mentor in one row and learner in another.
Result: Finished when every weak cell on the grid has a named mentor beside it.
A photo library of good demos
The best whiteboard drawings from each round, photographed into a shared folder for new hires to read before their first demo.
Result: Finished when a new joiner has seen a good demo before giving a bad one.
Why us
Why owners pick GullySales over an agency.
Marketing and sales, as one job
Most agencies stop at the enquiry. We also fix what happens after it: the reply, the follow-up, the quote and the CRM.
The person on the first call does the work
No account managers in between. You are never handed to someone you have not met.
A baseline before anything starts
Your numbers are written down on day one, so every later report compares against something honest.
The fee in writing, split three ways
Our time, your media spend and production on separate lines. You always see what goes to us.
No guarantees we cannot keep
The term is agreed in writing and never a default twelve months. We never promise a ranking or a lead count, because nobody controls those.
One office, and we say so
Nagarbhavi, Bengaluru. We work across India by call and WhatsApp and travel when a session needs to be in person.
#257, 3rd floor, Sri Nanjundeshwara Complex, Nagarbhavi 8th Block, Outer Ring Road. How we work.
Your brief
Tell us what you need, and we will read it before we call.
Eight short steps about your business, what you want and who decides. Most questions are a tap, and you can skip any you would rather answer on the call.
FAQ
Questions owners ask before they call.
Not here? More answers, or ask on WhatsApp.
Should the ratings be shown to the whole team?
Who plays the buyer in the role-play?
How often should we re-rate?
We have only three salespeople. Is this too much?
How much does it cost?
How long is the contract?
How soon will we see results?
Who will actually do the work?
What do you need from us?
What if we are not happy with the work?
Where to go next
The work that carries this topic further.
The rest of coaching the sales team
Or read all of sales training and coaching.
Your next practical step
Tell us what you are trying to grow, and we will read it before we call.
Eight short steps, mostly taps. Skip anything you would rather answer on the call.