What information and/or tools should one base sales coaching on?

Coaching uses a number of tools and processes to enable an individual to achieve their potential and best performance. A simple method is questions guiding through GROW - Goals, Reality, Options and Will to act. The coach helps the person find their own answers. However, many confuse it with mentoring - where a more experienced expert may provide advice, guidance and ideas.

You are correct. Sales coaching is the most important thing that never happens. Sales coaching is really, really hard. You have to get the data, ask the right questions, and understand the individuality of the rep. We work with companies who prioritize coaching...bottom line its hard. Best, Jon Birdsong CEO | Rivalry

As mentioned by Jim King, I too believe in asking the right kind of questions in order to make the sales reps find the answer and solutions themselves. As a sales coach, you also need to be skilled in identifying what kind of different persons you are dealing with, to be able to coach them based on their individual needs and motivation factors. I practice a combination of NLP coaching techniques (asking questions and never give answers or point directions) and DISC profiles in my leadership. With 9 years of experience from sales coaching, I believe that this mix works absolutely the best in order to make my team members grow. However, I've had the privilege to attend several trainings from my employers over the years in order to get these tools. Very few sales organisations invest in giving these tools to their leaders. A light version of NLP coaching (or at least the power of asking questions and how to use questions as a tool in your coaching) combined with the knowledge of how to use DISC profiles in order to coach individuals and communicate with them in a way that makes them understand and develop would be the "golden way" in my opinion.

Sales coaching, we have found, is one of those things that people are more than willing to acknowledge doesn't happen enough, but it is nearly always the first thing that is sacrificed in favour of putting out unexpected fires etc.A coach needs to be able to bring out the best in people by helping them to overcome their own deficiencies by pointing them in the right direction and getting them to recognise what the best practice is.  Many see a coach as being someone who just dictates to people, but this is not going to get their buy-in.These days, there are many tools at people's disposal that can help with their sales coaching difficulties.  At the risk of self-plugging, an example is http://enable.refract.tv, which allows the user to upload footage of a sales demo, call or meeting, pick out and skip between individual moments for deeper reflection and feedback and share best practice moments among staff.There are plenty of other tools that help with different parts of the sales process that may well prove useful, and you can develop a stack of tools that will help your sales operation from top to bottom.

Hi, my experience is people, sales people especially - holding back or being stuck in past negative believes, patterns.  Most of them have the tools, they just don't use them - they don't pitch up to go and take it... they step back. For me, coaching at it's best is one on one, authenticity I celebrate!