4 Must-Know Coaching Hacks for Leaders Using Salesforce

As regular readers of our blog know, Salesforce is more than just a CRM. From marketing to sales to customer

3 min. read

As regular readers of our blog know, Salesforce is more than just a CRM. From marketing to sales to customer service, it’s a way to run the entirety of your business. With the right know-how, really, it can be used for most anything, including seemingly abstract activities like coaching and training.

On that note, we recently gathered a team of experts to share their best hacks for leaders using Salesforce on a live webinar (get the recording here). Here’s some of their top coaching advice:

Coaching Hack #1: Add coachee profiles to Salesforce.

“We build out records in Salesforce for each individual team member. Then, we create fields and sections that correspond with [our] questionnaires and assessments."

- Kristy Sharrow, Marketing Director, Torrent Consulting

By the time a new employee is fully onboarded at Torrent, they’ve taken a number of assessments: StrengthsFinder, which identifies their top five strengths; Competing Values, which identifies their leadership framework; plus a questionnaire that helps them figure out their appreciation language. The results are certainly helpful for employees — but also for their coaches. By having easy access to so much information about their coachees, coaches at Torrent can easily personalize the ways they help others grow.

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Coaching Hack #2: Create a culture of peer-based coaching.

“We have a lot of people that are on the phones every day here at MapAnything, following up on trade show leads, calling inbound leads… One of the things we do is create call recordings… [and] about twice a month we actually contribute good calls and bad calls and we sit down as a team and we listen, we coach one another, we give each other feedback, we encourage people…”

- Brian Bachofner, CMO, MapAnything

The marketing team at MapAnything uses a software platform called ExecVision to record and share calls — some that went well, some that didn’t. ExecVision allows them to annotate calls and listen in for specific words and phrases, making it easier to offer valuable feedback to teammates. What’s more, ExecVision integrates easily with Salesforce.

Coaching Hack #3: Manage behavior, not results.

“Managing sales results from the last period — month, quarter or year — is really like looking in the rearview mirror. Nothing we can do about it.”

- Joe Marr, President, Sandler Training - Ann Arbor

Joe Marr of Sandler Training - Ann Arbor coaches sales reps on establishing daily behavioral standards based on their yield for each activity. How many attempts do they need to make in order to make one contact? How many contacts do they need to make in order to set up a meeting? How meetings do they need in order to qualify a prospect? Etc., etc. By managing in a way that focuses on the future, Marr says, “it’s really a self-fulfilling prophecy for them to hit their numbers.” Sales leaders would be wise to coach their reps in the same way — and to use Salesforce to easily track and review all these metrics.

Coaching Hack #4: When you set up Salesforce, keep it simple.

“If [Salesforce] has not been set up in the right way and it’s been overcomplicated, you’re not going to get the buy-in from your sales team, your marketing organization or your services team and then there’s going to be a lack of adoption.”

- Jonathan Corrie, CEO, Precursive

Using Salesforce to manage your business processes in itself is a great way to coach employees on following those processes. However, there’s a caveat: If you set up Salesforce in a way that makes it difficult or time-consuming to use, it probably won’t get used — at least to its fullest potential. For instance, if a process would normally take five steps, it shouldn’t take ten steps in Salesforce. Therefore, it’s worth making sure your org is set up in a user-friendly way.

Looking for more Salesforce coaching hacks? Check out the on-demand version of our webinar to get the rest: 

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Danielle Sutton