Sales coaching is the cherry on top of your sales training program. When you create a personalized learning environment, every rep has a greater potential to improve their performance. In fact, investing in a coaching program typically helps organizations increase revenue by 16.7%.
While traditional sales training programs educate reps on your company’s products and its industry, a sales coaching program offers personalized development based on each rep’s strengths and weaknesses. This is shown to boost performance, but running an effective program does require time and strategic planning, which can be a challenge as your team scales.
The good news is that sales coaching software can help your organization’s learning programs improve and include personalized coaching. From assessing a seller’s pitch to providing continuous feedback, sales coaching software allows managers to upskill their teams, whether they have five reps or thirty.
Let’s look at three areas where sales software can help you coach and make your reps more successful.
Streamline your assessment process
Annual review cycles are too infrequent to provide the steady feedback and growth opportunities that a fast-moving team needs. By adding frequent assessments, you can see a huge boost in rep and team outcomes.
Research also shows that retention increases by 20% when employees receive on-the-job coaching. When your reps feel nurtured and supported, they’re more likely to stick around and grow.
Sales managers are responsible for creating these coaching and growth opportunities, but to do this well, they need a way to assess current and historical performance.
Sales coaching software can help sales managers assess sellers in a variety of ways:
- Recordings of sales calls enable managers to review calls without having to monitor each call in real-time
- Interactive sales courses that simulate real-life scenarios with role-playing
- Self-assessments for reps enable them to review their own performance and receive feedback from managers
Never stop growing.
Personalize your coaching program
Group training is useful for collaborative learning, but the real magic happens with one-on-one coaching. Sales reps experience a 76% increase in closed deals when they receive personalized coaching. When training is matched with a seller’s strengths and weaknesses, they’re better equipped to make changes that improve their performance.
With sales enablement and coaching software, managers can create custom coaching plans based on a rep’s unique style that are visible to both rep and manager, allowing performance to be tracked over time.
Keep a few things in mind when personalizing your sales coaching program:
- Benchmark performance across the whole team, as well as for individuals, so you can build coaching programs that strengthen the team as a whole.
- Create a library of sales enablement content so you can deliver tailored content at the right time. Your assessments will help you understand the biggest areas of need.
- Don’t exclude high-performing reps. It’s a common misconception that only the weakest sales members need training. In reality, it is the “middle 60%” that has the greatest potential for growth and improvement.
Track progress and improvement
As the saying goes, “What’s measured can be managed.” Without benchmarking your team’s performance, it’s hard to review them or understand whether any changes you implemented netted any value. This is where sales coaching software shines – with the ability to track skill levels and progress over time, so managers can look back at historical data and identify gaps or areas to improve.
With tracking tools, you can review completed trainings to allow easier follow-up and task management. In addition, you’ll see reports about reps’ day-to-day efforts, such as outreach sent and macro-level results, such as closed deals. Mapping these outcomes back to skillset training shines a light on how your coaching contributed to their success (or what further changes may be needed).
Improve the coaching process today
With proven positive impacts on closed deals and revenues, as well as team satisfaction and retention, the benefits of sales enablement programs can’t be ignored. And luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. Sales coaching software can be your personal assistant as you scale.
At Seismic, we work with 1000+ sales and marketing teams to help them scale their sales enablement and coaching programs. Our Learning and Coaching tool features monitoring, engagement, and reporting functionality that delivers huge gains in productivity for reps and managers alike.
To learn more about how Seismic can support your learning and coaching needs, get a demo.
