Sales coaching is essential to developing high-performing sales teams, but frontline sales managers often struggle to find the time for coaching.
Theresa Smith, CRO at Level Data, perspective is that “front-line managers need to own the coaching plan, but peer learning is key to any successful skills coaching program.”
She has used peer learning and peer coaching to drive higher levels of sales teams performance across a variety of revenue leadership roles. Here are her three key strategies to help front-line managers maximize coaching leverage.
▶️ 1. Peer-to-Peer Learning Meetings
Let peers learn directly from each other in your team meetings. “Peers learn best from those in the trenches,” Theresa explains. By leveraging the expertise of top performers, teams gain real-world strategies that directly address their challenges.
Theresa advocates using part of each weekly team meeting to share and socialize best practices. Individual team members can lead the learning part of these sessions on a rotating basis to share and dialogue on best practices around strong discovery, objection handling, storytelling, or deal qualification.
The sessions create practical insights that build relatability and trust among team members.
▶️ 2. Sales Leads Acting as Coaches
Theresa also highlights the importance of involving sales leads as coaches. Your sales managers cannot be everywhere at once. “Incorporating team leads allows reps to learn directly from experienced colleagues,” she notes.
Your top performers can act as sales leads who help bring other team members along. By actively participating in sales call, demos or call prep sessions, team leads can offer actionable feedback and model successful techniques for other team members.
This approach not only enhances the learning experience but also creates opportunities to recognize and incentivize team leads for their contributions.
▶️ 3. Technology to Automate Coaching Repetition
Technology is another critical tool for automating and enhancing coaching practices. AI is transforming how sales teams analyze performance by automating tasks such as call transcript evaluation, email engagement analysis, and identifying patterns in buyer behavior.
“AI can help assess messaging consistency and its impact on buyers,” Theresa shares, “We are actively exploring how leveraging AI-driven insights, coaching becomes more targeted and efficient.” AI she notes has to automate call analysis and highlight individual areas for improvement, which means scaling personalized coaching across teams effectively.
Theresa concludes that “coaching is a shared responsibility, not something frontline managers need to carry on their own.” Her approach shows how peer learning, leadership involvement, and technology can make targeted, personalized sales coaching at scale a reality.
