No More One-Size-Fits-All Coaching: How to Create an AI-driven Sales Coaching Program

As a front-line manager, it’s difficult to find the time to effectively coach reps on both specific deals and overall skill development. But that doesn’t mean coaching should be excluded from your list of priorities. Dynamic sales coaching is proven to improve both quota attainment and win rates.

How can you optimize your time while ensuring your reps are getting the support they need to progress? A data-driven sales coaching strategy is the key to coaching success.

Set sales coaching goals and expectations with key stakeholders

Before you can introduce a solution, you need to establish the key goals and expectations of implementing a new coaching strategy. Evaluate what isn’t working currently, what needs to change, and what success will look like. Talk to your front-line managers, enablement team, and sales reps. Involve key sales stakeholders early in the process to get their buy-in to establish a coaching culture and make sure you set goals by defining what a successful coaching strategy would result in.

Select a sales coaching technology

Coaching technology is designed to support your coaching initiative not add more work. So, when assessing your options, consider how each solution will fit into your existing tech stack. If a platform creates a clunky experience with other solutions you’re already using, it will likely be more work than it’s worth. You need a tool that is fully integrated and makes life easier for managers and reps alike.

All-in-one sales readiness platform

The ideal solution for any sales organization is an all-in-one platform that doesn’t just aid in coaching activities, but also includes content, enablement, and conversation intelligence. With everything in one place, completing daily tasks is seamless, information doesn’t get lost in translation, and you can make more educated decisions when it comes to how you coach your team.

Start at the top: “coach the coach”

Sales enablement focuses on the performance of reps—but what about the managers tasked with coaching and leading them? Many front-line sales managers got their positions through being reps themselves, so it’s not fair to expect them to be experts on effective sales coaching from the jump.

Train managers on your new coaching processes, including how to use the technology to be more efficient. And, just like with reps, provide reinforced learning and measure managers’ coaching performance over time to get the most out of the program.

Prioritize sales coaching with conversation intelligence

Coaching and call AI

Managers cannot be on every call with every rep and, as a result, have very little visibility into sellers’ skills in the field. Most likely you are tracking how many calls each seller is making and the length of those calls, but this information doesn’t enable you to make informed decisions on how you can help reps improve performance.

Conversation intelligence records, transcribes, and scores calls so reps don’t need to take notes or update the CRM and managers can unlock opportunities for skill coaching. With conversation intelligence, managers can sort calls by score to focus on reps who may need additional guidance, and filter calls by themes to highlight specific skills like negotiation or objection handling.

Self coaching and peer coaching are also effective in getting a new perspective and collaborating as a team within conversation intelligence:

  • Self coaching: Enabling reps to evaluate their own call performance allows them to be proactive in their coaching process and come more prepared to one-on-one sessions.
  • Peer-to-peer coaching: Using tags and comments on call transcriptions allows reps to share best practices and work together to solve problems and handle common objections.

self coaching vs. peer-to-peer coaching

Personalize sales coaching with AI-powered insights

Sales coaching report card

Along with the insights gleaned from conversation intelligence, gather data from your training and enablement platform, as well as your CRM, to understand where reps are excelling and lagging—and determine the best path for coaching them. Every seller has their own strengths and weaknesses, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps to automate data processing and give smart suggestions based on that data.

Use this information to focus on unique skills and behaviors individual reps are struggling with in one-on-one coaching sessions, and follow up with enablement content to reinforce what was learned.

Go beyond technology

It’s easy to lean heavily on technology to help sellers do their jobs. But the purpose of a sales readiness platform is to supplement—not replace—the authentic relationships managers build with reps. If you truly want to alter performance, you need reps to trust you and take your guidance seriously. You aren’t just a manager; you’re also a mentor.

Beyond data points, the only real way to know what your sellers need is to ask them. Ask them about their career goals and how you can help them achieve these. Together, you can create a plan of action using the methodologies above.

Measure success and refine sales coaching processes

Never assume your strategy is working because you are doing all the “right” things; coaching shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it” program. Periodically revisit the goals you have determined for your sales readiness program — these will change over time as your business evolves and new sellers come onboard. Collect feedback from reps to get their perspective and find ways to refine your program for the greatest impact.

And actually act upon analytics and the feedback you receive. Just like you use performance metrics to improve sales skills, use this information about your coaching approach to pivot and get the best results possible. Your sellers will feel more valued, be happier and more productive employees, and, ultimately, close more deals.

Be ready

Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Platform takes your sales training, coaching, enablement, and analytics to the next level with automated solutions for sales leaders, sales ops, front-line managers, and more. Unlock powerful insights into rep and team performance and translate those insights into successful coaching across your team.

Get started today by requesting a demo.

Mindtickle Spring 2022 Announcement: Introducing Sales Coaching Rooms, Role-based Benchmarks, and More

Front-line sales managers are some of the most underutilized weapons in sales.

Why is that?

Managers have the ability to transform rep performance through sales coaching. The problem? Managers are busy. Really busy. And traditionally, the tools created for front-line managers are focused on updating CRMs and forecasting, creating more busy work.

Until now.

As part of our 2022 Spring Announcement, we are launching Sales Coaching Rooms, the only sales coaching product specifically created for the front-line manager.

We know seller transformation cannot occur through enablement and content alone. Reps are building knowledge through enablement and showing they know their stuff with training and practice. But, when it comes to executing, you need to make sure your reps are getting better deal after deal. Coaching is the only true way to change their behaviors in the field.

Now, front-line managers can focus on seller transformation by becoming better managers and mentors — and find themselves on a fast track to the CRO seat!

Introducing Mindtickle Sales Coaching Rooms

Mindtickle Sales Coaching Rooms are dedicated one-to-one spaces to have revenue-boosting discussions. Coaching Rooms provide:

  • A single location to move deals forward and build the long-term skills reps need to succeed in the field
  • Coaching within conversation intelligence (Call AI) to support learning in the context of real selling situations
  • Coaching integrated with enablement content to drive long-term skill development through practice and reinforcement
  • Self-coaching so reps can evaluate their own performance compared with manager feedback and better prepare for one-on-one sessions
  • Coaching outcomes factored into the Mindtickle Readiness Index, showing leadership a full-picture view of the readiness of their teams and individuals
  • Actionable insights for front-line managers into the lagging skills of individuals to facilitate the delivery of personalized coaching

In addition to Sales Coaching Rooms, Mindtickle is announcing features for better deal collaboration and detailed analytics to benchmark and track readiness.

Deal collaboration tools that meet sellers in the flow of work

Mindtickle Slack integration

Deals and open opportunities are constantly evolving and sellers need to be able to work quickly to prepare for meetings, provide relevant content, and collaborate with teammates to make sure nothing stalls or falls through the cracks. To help sellers better collaborate on deals, we are announcing:

  • Email and Slack notifications in Call AI for meeting preparation, action items, and recording metrics
  • Asset sharing, tracking, and analytics for content engagement insights

Detailed analytics for deeper readiness insights

Mindtickle Readiness Index

Your sellers are not the only ones interacting with prospects and customers. You have specialized teams, like business development representatives, account executives, solutions consultants, customer service managers, and more! Each of these roles requires a different set of skills to succeed. That’s why, as part of our Spring Announcement we’re releasing benchmarking and tracking with:

  • Role-based ideal rep profiles to define and track the key skills that lead to success for different sales positions
  • Role-based winning behavior in Call AI to benchmark call metrics by customer-facing teams
  • Readiness Index insights for managers to track the progress of their team

These features help your teams be ready and achieve continued sales success. To learn more about the newly announced Sales Coaching Rooms, deal collaboration tools, and readiness analytics, save your seat for our LIVE demo webinar on March 30.

4 Reasons Why Sales Coaching Fails (and What to Do Instead)

Sales coaching is key for revenue organizations to continue to hit quota quarter after quarter but, unfortunately, teams continue to consistently miss their numbers. It’s true that there is no magic one-size-fits-all coaching approach that works for every team. But there are commonalities in why some sales coaching programs fail.

Learn what pitfalls to avoid when evaluating your existing sales coaching approach or when starting a more formal process for the first time.

Focusing on quantity of sales coaching sessions

Often we see statistics about the amount of time spent coaching by sales managers per month or week.

  • Sales reps with 30 minutes or fewer of sales coaching per week receive win rates of 43%, and those who receive at least two hours of coaching per week have a win rate of 56%.
  •  23% of sales managers spend less than 30 minutes individually coaching their direct reports each week.
  • A good rule of thumb is to spend 25-40% of your time coaching your sales team.

While these metrics help set a baseline of coaching frequency for managers, they can put too much emphasis on recurring sessions and too little emphasis on what will actually be covered in the sessions to help level up your reps.

Instead, focus on the quality of your sales coaching sessions

A little prep work can go a long way, and your preparation does not have to be exhaustive. After all, as a sales manager, you’re also juggling your own quota attainment, forecasting, and the ever-looming end of quarter. Setting agendas for coaching sessions, outlining action items, and reviewing your reps’ past achievements can help keep your sessions helpful and productive.

If you start to notice that some reps are not showing progress or improvements, it may mean you need to dedicate more time to coaching these individuals.

Alternatively, sessions with your best performers may be needed less frequently. If you find your one-on-ones with these people are repetitive and it’s a struggle to find topics to cover, try reducing the number of times you meet.

Sales coaching that is only top-down

Most of us have experienced a less-than-ideal manager at some point in our careers. Sometimes in sales, the highest performing reps become managers—but that doesn’t always mean they have the formal training on how to manage and coach reps. With a large revenue organization, it can be hard to track the effectiveness of your coaches. When your sales coaching process doesn’t incorporate the feedback of reps, you could be missing the true root of performance issues.

Instead, implement a coaching feedback system

There are two key components of a coaching feedback system. The first is giving reps the ability to easily provide feedback. If you’re using a sales coaching tool, this is a critical feature that makes it easy for reps to have their voices heard. In Mindtickle sales coaching, reps can approve or disapprove coaching sessions.

In addition to providing a feedback method, make sure you are tracking this feedback. If you start to notice patterns such as negative feedback from sessions for the same manager, this manager may need more training on how to coach their team. This is a good opportunity to “coach the coach.”

Sales coaching timeline

Only deal coaching your reps

Deal coaching will always be a critical part of sales coaching. Reps need to know how to move forward deals that they have right in front of them. It becomes easy to focus only on these deals during coaching sessions.

Instead, spend the majority of your time on skill coaching

A proactive approach to bettering your sales team, skill coaching works to improve upon the individual skills that reps are lagging behind in. Skill coaching ensures your sessions are relevant and reinforce long-term development to improve rep performance over time.  (Here’s more on deal vs. skill coaching.)

Blanket skill coaching

All of your reps possess different skill sets. They excel in different areas, have been at the company for different times, and consume training and enablement in different ways. While it saves time to focus on one skill for coaching each week or month, in the long run, this will not benefit your reps and improve their performance.

Instead, focus on the individual skills each rep needs to improve upon

Skill coaching is most effective when it is individualized. Take the time to assess the skills of your reps. View enablement and training performance, review recorded calls, and ask your reps what areas they can improve upon. A sales readiness platform can help aggregate this data and track the readiness of your reps over time.

After skill gaps are identified, work with your reps to coach them on these skills. Then, reinforce your coaching efforts with training and enablement content.

Sales coaching report card

Coach your reps to success with Mindtickle

The Mindtickle Sales Readiness Platform gives you the tools and data you need to coach your reps to continued sales success. Integrating enablement and training, call recording, coaching, and content all in one platform enables revenue organizations to make data-driven decisions that win more deals. Want to learn more about how to become a sales mentor? Save your seat for our LIVE product announcement on March 22.

What is Sales Everboarding? It’s More Than Ramp Times

You’ve gotten the green light to hire more sales reps to support your organization’s growth goals. Now, the pressure’s on to get those reps ready to sell.

And for many businesses, it’s easier said than done. According to a report from Sales Enablement PRO, nearly a quarter of organizations say onboarding new hires is one of their top three sales challenges.

Orgs that say onboarding is a top challenge
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Of course, the VP of sales wants new reps ramped ASAP. But those sellers also need to retain what they learn – and gain a solid mastery of the skills that matter most in the field – if they’re expected to succeed. It can be challenging to strike the right balance.

The frustrating reality is that most sales onboarding programs fail to prepare sellers adequately with the skills and competencies they need to be successful.

One reason is that onboarding is often a “one-and-done” activity that doesn’t include ongoing exercises to ensure that knowledge and skills are applied in the field. It’s time for revenue leaders to focus on dynamic sales “everboarding” for their sellers. But what does sales everboarding mean?

Traditional sales onboarding isn’t enough

Let’s take a step back and talk about why traditional sales onboarding is not enough. There’s no doubt that onboarding is necessary to welcome new hires and get them familiar with your organization and their roles within it. And when it’s done right, onboarding can have an impact on an organization’s ability to meet its sales goals. In fact, research tells us that effective onboarding services that meet or exceed sales reps’ expectations can improve quota attainment by 16.2%.

So it’s probably not surprising that many sales enablement teams are laser-focused on creating sales onboarding programs that include some combination of bootcamps, instructor-led training, self-paced learning, on-the-job learning, and one-on-one coaching, among other elements.

All too often, though, organizations consider their reps to be ramped once they’ve completed their onboarding program. In fact, “onboarded” and “ramped” are often used interchangeably. What’s more, some organizations go so far as to financially reward reps for completing onboarding tasks as quickly as possible – without regard for how much of what’s learned in onboarding actually sticks in the field.

Improvement in quota attainment with effective onboarding
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So it’s probably not surprising that many sales enablement teams are laser-focused on creating sales onboarding programs that include some combination of bootcamps, instructor-led training, self-paced learning, on-the-job learning, and one-on-one coaching, among other elements.

All too often, though, organizations consider their reps to be ramped once they’ve completed their onboarding program. In fact, “onboarded” and “ramped” are often used interchangeably. What’s more, some organizations go so far as to financially reward reps for completing onboarding tasks as quickly as possible – without regard for how much of what’s learned in onboarding actually sticks in the field.

And the unfortunate truth is that no matter how great your onboarding program, sales reps are bound to forget most of what they learn. Not convinced? According to Gartner, sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training. And 87% forget it within a month.

Sellers who forget training within a month
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To further complicate matters, most organizations’ products and solutions, markets, and selling landscapes are constantly evolving. So even though a rep has ticked off all of the boxes on the onboarding list, it’s very likely that whatever knowledge they gained initially will become stale in short order.

The bottom line is that even the best onboarding program isn’t enough to ensure your sellers have what they need to be successful in the field — and drive revenue for your organization.

It’s time to transition from static sales onboarding to sales everboarding
Of course, onboarding as we know it still has a role to play. But skill improvement shouldn’t stop when onboarding ends. Instead, organizations must build a culture of ongoing learning to ensure that reps – from recent college grads to veteran sellers – always have the skills they need to be effective and win deals. Yet according to Aberdeen Research, just over a third of companies extend their training programs beyond the first month of employment.

New reps (especially those new to selling) need constant reinforcement of key skills, and opportunities to practice what they’ve learned before money is on the line. And even the most seasoned reps require help getting up to speed on new product offerings, markets, and methodologies.

 

We want to challenge organizations to completely rethink their onboarding programs and move towards a more dynamic sales everboarding approach.

Here at Mindtickle, sales everboarding is a term we use to describe the continuous learning that helps ensure reps are always ready to sell. Everboarding strategies can include a number of different learning formats (instructor-led training, video-based micro-learning, curated content, quizzes and assessments, and more) that are individualized based on skills and needs, along with reinforcement exercises, role-play practice, and guided coaching opportunities, to name a few. The combination of activities really depends on the goals of the training – as well as both individual and team needs.

Copilot - Assessment

 

All sales reps benefit from sales everboarding. But it’s important to remember that a one-size-fits-all approach to ongoing learning simply isn’t effective. Each seller has different strengths and weaknesses – and learns in different ways.

As such, sales leaders must make it a priority to deliver ongoing learning opportunities that address each seller’s knowledge gaps in a way that works for that seller. To do that, sales leaders must have access to data that allows them to identify and address issues early on.

Make the transition to sales everboarding

Viewing sales onboarding and ramping as one and the same is a big misstep that can leave your reps ill-equipped to sell. Now’s the time to move toward a dynamic sales everboarding approach that blends traditional onboarding with continuous, individualized training and reinforcement. Doing so will better equip your sellers with the skills they need to succeed in the field — and drive more revenue for your organization.

Ready to see everboarding in action?

See how Mindtickle helps winning orgs scale their onboarding programs and get reps productive faster. 

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