Sales Coaching

What is Sales Coaching?

“74% of leading companies cite coaching and mentoring of sales reps as the most important role for sales managers” - Forbes and Brainshark.

Sales coaching is a set of processes and tools set up to train sellers at various levels. And it is primarily the role of sales leaders to train new reps and old ones directly or indirectly.

An effective sales coaching program entails self-diagnose of deficiencies and enabling ownership of performance and outcomes. Sales coaching was traditionally being done personally, but with digital catalysis, the mode of sales coaching has also evolved. Rather than wasting other resources, time, and money in training, the business now prefers automating the onboarding process of coaching with the help of AI-based solutions. But one can not deny the outcomes of personal training; that is why they prefer hybridizing the process to stay ahead of the herd.

As we discussed, sales leaders are responsible for this role, but now they prefer hybridizing the process to decrease the ramp-up time and improve the seller’s performance.

Now that we know what sales coaching is and who is responsible for it. Let us tell you why it is so important.
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Why is Sales Coaching Important?

“Successful sales coaching programs increased average deal size, sales activity, win rates, and new leads by 25%-40%” -RAIN Group.

Let me paint a scenario to answer this question: A new sales representative is hired. Let us call him Henry. Henry, on arriving, meets his reporting manager; let’s call him Alex. Alex introduces him to the team and his assigned work buddy Ted. Ted gives him the hey and where of the office and other colleagues, but he gets on with his work as he is busy.

Meanwhile, Alex has already sent the onboarding training mails. A tedious amount of documents about the company, etc. He has to go through that and then attend mock call by taking his buddy’s help, Henry cannot keep asking Ted while he is on a call, but he ends up asking whenever he can. And Ted helps him out. Doesn’t this sound like a usual onboarding scenario, but what is the issue? Henry did receive partial training but did not receive any proper coaching, which would eventually delay his ramp-up time. Sales coaching solutions and process gives a seller:‍

• A complete overview of company functioning.
• The information he needs for working efficiently and effectively.
• Training Progress tracking
• Performance tracking, etc.

‍Along with the company documents, a session, previous call recordings, or benchmarking tools set up are some of the additional tools used in sales training. Enabling this would help Henry learn granularly about the company in much less time and start performing.

In the above scenario, we get why it is important for sales reps and teams. Let me show you why it is crucial for the overall business with the real story of American express.

American Express SELL to the toughest 100 CUSTOMERS by enabling SALES COACHING.

American Express had challenged their sales team to sign the top 100 companies that were NOT currently accepting their card as payment by customers. These big-name brands had declined several attempts Amex had already made to sign them up. Jim Berrien, then the head of New Business Partnerships at American Express, enabled a sales coaching program for his sales team by calling in a sales coach Steve Giglio.

Steve analyzed the team and the current process and set up personalized coaching based on his realization that most reps did not know how to sell the product as they were new hires. And it worked; after finishing the coaching, the team was able to sign all 100 clients.

It is the power of effective sales coaching, you might not have the wavelength to hire a coach, but you can use tools that would enable this granular assessment of reps; tools like conversation intelligence. More about conversation intelligence later, let us first look at some coaching techniques to get us started.

Top Sales Coaching Techniques

There are many ad-hoc sales coaching activities that will indeed happen. In this scenario, a structured program and using automation tools will come in handy. Provide top-level guidance along with providing tools and content to help them scale with a plan. Divide the coaching activities as per daily-weekly-monthly goals to help better evaluate the progress.
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In the above scenario, we get why it is important for sales reps and teams. Let me show you why it is crucial for the overall business with the real story of American express.

Here are a few techniques you can use:

◼️ Self Assessment

Before you can even enable a sales coaching program, you need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current team. Without actually doing that, how can you hope to have an effective sales coaching program?

Using Sales call recording and analyzing to find:

• what went right with the call?
• What went wrong?
• Talk ratio
• Soft skills
• Actionable items
• Query resolution satisfaction, etc

Even it would help your sales reps to assess what they could have done differently to win that deal.  And even track their progress.

◼️ Planning

Only having one successful call is not enough. Help sales reps in making them things clearer for them like the actionable item for follow-up calls and provide assistance where required. You can assist them with data, content, case studies, or other lead warming activities for the follow-up calls.

And plan out the activities that they need to learn for every new activity the seller undertakes. And the actionable items associated with it.

◼️ Regular Coaching

You are just providing coaching once is not enough. As you plan your team’s activities, quotas, and revenue targets, you need to plan coaching activities. And this is only possible with regular auditing. Regular auditing and sales training keep the seller’s growth graph growing and the business’s revenue graph.

◼️ Support

Once you are done planning and setting up targets, take a step back to listen to what your team has to say about your plan and if they are comfortable with it. And then just provide support where your team needs it, keep a regular check-in to see if you need to clarify any point, help with a call, any additional training required, or any topics they need to discuss.

◼️ Follow Up

In the follow-up coaching sessions, use your data points from the actionable plan you made for their progress and any additional training if since under gone. To ensure effective training, even include their daily sales activities analyze reports in the follow-up sales coaching programs.

◼️ Sales Coaching Tools

Not using the AI-based sales coaching solutions, at least at this age, can throw your company’s growth curve for a toss compared to other businesses. Tools like conversation intelligence can record, transcribe and analyze the daily sales activities and even dissipate the reports to sales leaders for daily call reviews. And sales coaches don’t have to waste hours and hours reviewing the call. They can just review the call in minutes as all the insights are pre-highlighted.

Before we talk more about conversation intelligence, let us see how you can measure sales coaching effectively.
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How to measure Sales Coaching?

The simple answer is metrics. But what metrics must you be thinking? Here are three metrics you can use to measure sales coaching:

1. Daily Activity Analytics

These analytics give you an overview of:

• Number of calls the sellers make in a day,
• What is the drop rate?
• Talk ratio
• Successful calls
• Number of reach-outs
• Customer satisfaction
• Total contacts, etc.
  

2. Performance Analytics

These analytics give you an overview of:

• Conversion rate
• Opportunities scored
• Quota attainment
• Incentives, etc.
  

3. Growth Analytics

These analytics mainly covers:

• Promotion
• Total opportunities
• Retention
• Forecasted deals, etc
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Conversation Intelligence AI-powered Sales Coaching Solution

Conversation intelligence enables self-assessment, and an automated sales call review process for sellers. How does it do that?

Simple by; recording, transcribing, and analyzing your daily sales calls. It integrates seamlessly with your sales calls and starts analyzing the users calls for the call insights:

• Soft skills
• Topics discussed
• Actionable items
• Talk ratio
• Actionable items
• Questions asked

Post assessment scores the call and sends the report to the team and the call recording and script.  The sales leader can review an hour-long in just a few minutes and provide additional assistance if needed.

Conversation Intelligence even tracks the sales reps’ performance to know if the sales coaching is working or not. Conversation Intelligence provides a granular view of the seller’s daily activities. Many times there are things human eyes or ears might miss out on, but AI won’t. It pinpoints the weak area to help sales leaders provide personalized training in the area the sales reps need helps.

One of the significant ad-hoc in sales coaching is providing the live call demos or using other sellers’ time to demonstrate calls when this can be easily be automated with the help of conversation Intelligence. With Conversation Intelligence, you can even create sales call playbooks. You can develop playbooks of all your best sales calls and give them to new sales reps. They can learn from the live calls; what works and what does not, how to answer different questions, product details, etc. It would also decrease the ramp-up time and help them start performing within a month.