There are many skills a sales manager must be equipped with. These are essential for their careers as well as the smooth functioning of their own department. While intending to conduct sales training for your subordinates, there are some important skills that they must employ in planning the training chart.

Whichever rank or position you hold in the management, to be a successful sales trainer, the most important skills stand out as communication and motivational skills. These skills may specifically be applied for training, coaching and counselling but there is a contradiction too.

Sometimes, circumstances and the person you are dealing with might force you to engage in a separate set of skills. This is where we will come to the differences between training, coaching, and counselling −

Training                                       

This is the first level of information sharing, where managers share a set of instructions that their salespeople are expected to follow while going for the sales. This method involves an active participation from the trainer, as he is expected to train them on all important factors.

This method of communicating details about the product and process is generally followed with first-time salespeople, for whom this job is their first job. The trainer creates scenarios and preps them for possible situations.

Coaching

Sometimes, your team will have a mixture of inexperienced and experienced people. While the inexperienced people might appreciate all your inputs, the experienced ones might feel a little underwhelmed. This happens as the experienced people have already learnt all these stuff from previous employers or even through exposure to different scenarios in real life.

With such employees, the managers don’t interfere with their working style and just provide them with the product knowledge and monitor their progress and working style. The managers only come into the picture when assistance is needed in a real-life scenario.

Counselling

Counselling is an everlasting process and continues throughout an employees’ employment with the company. This includes a periodic discussion of performance, sharing areas of improvements, and giving updates on future of business.

Some topics related to special conditions, circumstances, legal issues and feedback on performance are typically reserved to be discussed in counselling sessions.