The 20+ Sales Coaching Metrics You Should Measure for Effective Skill Coaching

Helen Waite

September 13, 2023

The reality is, deal coaching is probably happening pretty regularly at your organization. Managers are meeting with their teams as a whole, and individually to discuss open opportunities in flight, how they are progressing, and how they can help get them to closed-won.

But, the same can’t typically be said for skill coaching across the board. That’s because skill coaching traditionally takes more prep, data, and tracking to be effective. Since it is more of a time commitment for managers, it gets pushed to the back burner, with other pressing tasks taking precedence over it.

With a bit of guidance, you can ensure skill coaching is consistent across your organization and impacting rep performance quarter after quarter.

What is skill coaching?

First, let’s start with a quick overview of what skill coaching is. And how it’s different from deal coaching.

Deal coaching

Focuses on the deals in front of a seller, and the open opportunities they have and are actively working. This type of coaching typically takes place between a manager and a rep weekly, discussing the details of each deal, any blockers, the next steps, and the probability of closing.

Skill coaching

Focuses on the seller themselves, and more specifically the key skills they need to be successful at their job. Skill coaching sessions typically happen on a monthly or quarterly basis, as it takes time to show improvement.

Improvement in win rate

0 %

Deal coaching and skill coaching are both strategic techniques for guiding sellers on how they can be more effective. Paired together, they can result in an improvement of win rates by 27% or more.

Why do skill coaching metrics matter?

Now that you know the why of skill coaching – what is the point of measuring and tracking performance related to skill coaching?

Metrics matter because they are the driving force behind delivering effective skill coaching.

If you have a team of reps and want to start focusing on delivering skill coaching, without any data, you may just result to picking one skill to coach your team on each month.

For example, you choose discovery and focus on assessing and building this skill for each rep. If one member is already very strong in his or her discovery skills, this could be a waste of time for this person. While another member may have a larger gap in discovery skills and needs more than a month for developing this skill.

Without metrics, you can’t deliver tailored skill coaching that focuses on the individual skill gaps of each of your team members.

20+ coaching metrics for effective skill coaching

In order to start tracking skill coaching metrics, you must first know exactly what skills make up a top performer in your organization. And this varies by role, industry, and product/service offering.

For example, a Sales Development Representative at a tech company may need strong skills in:

Active listening
Market research
Written communication
Self-motivation

While a seasoned Account Executive at a manufacturing company needs really strong:

Discovery
Problem-solving
Negotiation
Presentation

Now using these competency frameworks, you can start to measure the critical metrics that will drive your skill coaching efforts for each of your customer-facing roles.

Let’s break down the metrics by commonly used skills for go-to-market roles.

Product/service knowledge	Product/service program scores
	New product/service release update scores
	Correct answers on assessments and quizzes
	Certification completions
Active listening	Conversation intelligence call scores
	Talk time % on calls vs attendees
	Conversion rate of calls to meetings booked
Written communication	# of emails sent
	Sentiment score on emails
	# of responses to emails vs emails sent
Building rapport	Conversion rate of calls to meetings booked
Building rapport	Conversion rate of emails to meetings booked
Presentation	Video role-play scores
	Conversion by deal stage
	Talk time % on calls vs attendees
	Filler words used
	Sentiment on calls
	Questions asked by prospect in calls
	Questions asked by presenter
	Monologue length
Multi-threading	# of contacts engaged per opportunity
	# of contacts accepted/attending meetings
	# of c-level contacts engaged per opportunity
Objection handling	Sentiment on calls
	Questions asked by prospect in calls
	Questions asked by presenter
	Competitor mentions

Measuring the impact of your skill coaching

Seeing all of these metrics in one list can be a bit overwhelming. We recommend starting small. Focus on 2-3 top skills for your direct reports and start tracking a handful of metrics for each of these skills to gauge where individuals are excelling or where they may need some focused skill coaching. Then, you can continue tracking these metrics over time to determine the effectiveness of your coaching and add additional metrics to track. All of these skills should be measured against larger KPIs and business goals of your reports, like:

Revenue generation
Quota attainment
Pipeline conversion
Average deal size
Conversion by deal stage

There are many solutions out there that can help track these metrics, which may result in jumping back and forth between systems to gather all of this data. If you’re interested in a coaching solution that consolidates your sales enablement and ops data for actionable coaching insights, reach out to a Mindtickle expert.