When you invest time and effort in coaching a sales team, you can boost seller performance by up to 19%.
There are reports that effective sales coaching has a high impact on performance and revenue. Despite this, many in sales management and even industry coaches may not know where to begin.
It’s a necessary step to level up your sales team and reach ever-increasing goals. So, how can you balance other obligations and deadlines while ensuring that your sales representatives have everything they need to constantly execute at the best level?
How Sales Coaching Gives Mileage to Sales Teams
Sales coaching teaches your sales teams to consistently meet their targets. The coaching must occur regularly rather than simply during onboarding.
Coaching combines technology-based training, skills-based training, traditional support, and encouragement. The proportion of the combination depends on each sales representative getting coaching.
Benefits include:
1. More closed deals – Good sales coaching must help your sales representatives improve their skills and book more meetings, close deals successfully, and generate revenue growth.
According to a report, companies that implemented a formal sales coaching program over the last three years witnessed significant revenue growth and achieved higher quota attainment, with a notable 67% experiencing these positive outcomes.
2. Enhanced employee engagement – While sales teams witness high employee turnover due to demanding quotas and processes, sales coaching culture nurtures employee growth, engagement, and retention.
Employee disengagement is not economically sound. This overlooked yet crucial factor underscores the significance of integrating an effective sales coaching strategy.
3. Longer-term customer relationships – Coaching considers the long-term perspective which is the customer’s Life-Time Value (LTV).
Effective sales coaching guides sales teams toward cultivating a customer-centric mindset.
This shift results in heightened customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and the development of robust, enduring relationships.
Role of AI in Sales Coaching
AI-driven tools and techniques are gradually replacing traditional sales coaching approaches.
1. AI can help sellers improve presentation skills
In the realm of professional sales, it is a challenge for managers to provide consistent and personalized feedback to distributed sales teams. AI coaches can offer valuable support and guidance.
AI coaches can be present on every call and offer real-time nudges, reminding sellers to adjust behaviors such as excessive talking or maintaining eye contact.
After the seller adjusts their behavior, the AI coach provides subtle and positive reinforcement.
Crucially, this helps the seller regain the client’s attention, making them feel like the primary and intended audience.
2. AI can help uncover opportunities in sales conversations
Utilizing AI to deliver a thorough and consistent analysis of our performance, spanning emails, phone calls, and video calls, can illuminate blind spots and reveal opportunities that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Numerous conversational AI tools can identify keywords or phrases signaling progress in a deal. These tools can offer real-time suggestions, such as competitive insights crafted by sales enablement, during the call.
Sales executives can access insights to address any customer questions on the spot. Later, your sales team can review these insights, learn from them, and refine demos and conversations based on trends identified by the AI.
3. AI can deliver feedback without judgment
AI can act as an objective intermediary between the seller receiving feedback and the manager.
Feedback on facial expressions, a highly personal aspect, can be challenging to receive or provide.
It’s common to unintentionally convey boredom, anger, or disengagement when one is deep in thought or focused.
An AI coach can detect such behaviors and offer reflections neutrally.
Capitalizing Sales Opportunities with AI-based Sales Intelligence
While AI-based tools can coach sales teams in real-time, AI-based sales intelligence platforms based can arm sales teams with data and more.
Abandoning the practice of opening numerous tabs and recording data, companies are turning to advanced sales intelligence tools like Draup for Sales.
This shift aims to overcome challenges in building enduring relationships caused by assumptions and inaccurate data.
Draup’s sales intelligence empowers teams to identify better-fitting prospects and tailor their outreach with comprehensive contextual data.
Leveraging intelligence-based insights, sales teams can:
- Shortlist prospects based on deal size influence, budget control, personality characteristics, sales engagement guidelines, and personality inference.
- Refine searches by filtering criteria such as location, funding status, company size, and leadership changes.
- Monitor key buying signals of target companies with alerts to create a clearer profile for pitching purposes.
- Generate B2B sales leads using a machine-learning-based recommendation engine.
- Qualify new accounts, personalize outreach efforts, and nurture existing customer relationships.
Draup’s Buyer Intelligence, particularly, excels in this by delivering industry-standard data directly to your dashboard, along with the opportunity propensity of each company.
Buyer intelligence goes beyond surface-level understanding—it dives deep into an individual’s personality.
Leveraging AI capabilities, it provides specific insights into profiles, empowering sales teams to approach prospects with confidence. This data includes details about the personality traits, roles, drives, interests, and motivations of executives.
Buyer intelligence has transformed personalized engagement through data-driven strategies. By analyzing extensive customer data, AI enables hyper-personalization in content creation and delivery.
