Measuring success with Conversational Intelligence

“What gets measured gets improved” – How many times have you said this as a coach, manager, trainer, or even just to yourself?

If you are anything like me, probably a bunch.

I have said it a bunch of times because it is true.

What gets measured, does, in fact, get improved.

But, there is not always a way to intelligently measure every aspect of coaching. Frankly, there are several variables that can make this measurement difficult as well.

Conversational Intelligence for coaches can play a big role in measuring coaching, but there is more to a successful coaching program than that.  Below are some common and uncommon ways that the best sales organizations are measuring the success of their sales coaches.

Rep Performance

This is the first and probably the most obvious thing that you can do to track your coaching performance is to track a direct result in your sales rep’s performance.

Most conversational intelligence software focuses on doing this after the fact and even helping you with where to coach your specific rep.

But even without conversational intelligence for coaches, you can still up your sales coaching game by finding specific pieces for your rep to work on, giving them a strategy and talk tracks around their focus area, and then tracking the improved data and anecdotal evidence in their calls.

One uncommon tactic here is to have a culture of collaboration with your team and then ask for honest feedback on if what you are saying to do actually worked. Before it comes up in any data, your reps will know if it’s working or not.

They will be able to tell you that their conversations are more positive and that they feel better about them, or that they think there is no change.

Sales Cycle Time

One piece of evidence that your sales coaching is really effective will be that the sales cycle time on average for the team will decrease.

It is relatively easy to track this if you are already tracking your reps cycled individually and have a good understanding of how long it takes to close a deal in your industry.

The only challenge with this measurement is that it sometimes takes months or even multiple quarters to truly see the outcome.

By then you could have been coaching in the wrong areas for far too long, and missing far too many opportunities.

There are solutions to this that involve real-time conversational intelligence tools to get the right coaching in place and be able to measure deal progression as a microcosm of sales cycle time.

ARR

Another obvious, or at least seemingly obvious, measurement to gauge your sales coaching impact is going to be the annual recurring revenue of your pipeline and of your salespeople’s pipeline.

As your coaching gets better, and as your salespeople improve, you will see that your average annual recurring revenue per rep will start to take upward on the graph.

This will happen because your buyer will be more engaged, more bought in, and more likely to close at a higher dollar value.  If you are coaching specific items like upsells and additional products, you will be able to directly track the additional products being added to your opportunities.

Call coaching software can help with this sort of measurement by putting specific bullet points in front of reps that they can hit on periodically throughout their calls.

Employee retention

This is not an obvious measurement of how all your coaching is going, but it is a good measurement for an executive team to be able to identify how good of a coach each manager is.

Employee retention, especially in sales, is an extremely important mechanism that naturally measures how happy your salespeople are.  I was asked in an interview once why was leaving my company, and I made up a bunch of things about how I didn’t align with their vision, and how I felt like I would be a good fit in a different industry.

I ended up landing the job, but the real reason why I left was that I didn’t feel like I was being successful in making progress in my deals, and thereby felt like my potential commission was lacking.

In other words, I have literally left a job early in my career because the coaching was not on point.

Career Advancement

There is a story for many salespeople, including people on our founding team, where they start off as an SDR and then progress quickly in sales.

I wonder what percentage of CROs and VPs of Sales began their careers as some type of door knocker or cold caller?

My guess would be that a fair amount started in some sort of role where they had to bust into accounts somehow.

After all, prospecting is a cornerstone of a good salesperson, and those who can prospect amazingly tend to advance quite quickly.

The same can be said for account executives.

Account executives who can close and hold their own in any conversation by challenging the status quo will naturally advance quickly to coaches and managers.

Coaches and managers that do a great job with their account executives will eventually rise to manage coaches and managers, and so on.

My point here is that if there is good coaching in the organization, career advancement will naturally be an outcome for many of your employees.

That doesn’t always mean that they will advance their career in your organization, but you should see consistent growth for everyone you hire at every level if coaching is a priority.

Conversational intelligence for coaches probably doesn’t help when it comes to the manager level, but it certainly can help boost your career advancement opportunities for reps that embrace real-time coaching and a company that embraces real-time conversational intelligence.