As you can imagine, I get to speak to a fair number of B2B-focused CEOs and sales leaders - and I can’t recall any of them ever disagreeing with the principle that effective sales coaching is an absolutely critical skill for first-line sales management.

But the latest research from CSO insights suggest that 3 out of 4 companies are taking the wrong approach to sales coaching - an approach that is clearly holding back both individual rep performance and overall revenue achievement.

Three approaches to coaching

I recently recorded an on-demand webinar with BrightTALK on the increasingly important need to connect your marketing messages with the conversations your sales people are having with prospects and customers in the field.

In most complex B2B sales environments, a proposal plays a significant part in the decision making process. But it’s not your proposal that really matters - it’s the internal proposal that the project’s sponsor submits for the approval of their colleagues.

That’s the really important proposal. Assuming that you are the recommended option, it’s confirmation that your sponsor has selected you, believes the business case is sound, and is willing to submit the formal case for change to the internal approval process.

Doing the selling internally

That’s the question implied by one of IDC’s recently published “Top 10 predictions for 2013”. Driven by a number of profound changes in both the business and marketing environments, they project that from 2013 onwards, 50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds.

They point out that the fastest growing job categories in marketing today include campaign management, marketing operations, intelligence/research, sales enablement, social media and marketing IT. Many of these categories hardly existed less than a decade or less ago.

Analytics and automation

Alec Baldwin has got a lot to answer for. And, no, I’m not talking about his appearance in “Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat”. I am, of course referring to his role as Blake, the alpha dog motivational salesman in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross”.

By the way, you can blame the IMDb website for the “alpha dog motivational salesperson” tag. It’s a laughable description. But it’s somewhat relevant, because the role he plays in that film is, by the standards of effective salesmanagership, completely barking.

Blake’s Seven becomes 3

What sets top sales people apart? What is it that they do better than the rest? There are, of course, a number of factors, but one that we frequently observe is that top sellers are great story-tellers. They put their points across not by pitching their products, but by sharing relevant, situation-specific anecdotes and stories that their prospects can relate to.