Is sales coaching dead?
One of the qualifying questions we ask on introductory discovery calls is “How are you currently handling sales coaching today?” This is regardless of if it’s inbound or outbound sourced.
The typical answer is usually one of three things:
- I maybe listen to one or two calls a week
- I will be honest, I don’t listen to any calls (don’t tell my reps)
- My team listens to their own calls, and tells me what I should review
- Awkward silence followed by… We stopped recording calls a while ago, it was useless
Here is the problem, seven years ago the concept of a sales coaching tool that recorded and analyzed calls was foreign. Maybe only a handful of sales leaders were recording calls or demos through WebEx or GoToMeeting. For all you Zoomies, Zoom wasn’t a thing yet.
Then going back to listen to them. The popular tools at the time were systems that allowed sales leaders to whisper or barge into calls when things were going off the rails.
The solution that created a bigger problem
Enter Conversational Intelligence software. Which is now known today more often as Revenue Intelligence software. Eight years later, the gaps that were filled by those tools have now created new problems.
- Way too many calls to review. This leads to Deal Views inside of these tools which look to replicate or provide copies of information that should be in your CRM.
- Hundreds of email notifications that are now automatically routed to a special folder that you swear “you will review later”.
- Countless Slack notifications for competitive or product mentions that get muted.
- Ultimately, sales coaching tools today have largely become overpriced call recording and sharing tools. That “sometimes” gets used in coaching scenarios.
Revenue Intelligence software providers today know this problem has been a direct result of their own doing. They are now doing everything they can to bring users into their product by integrating into CRM applications and exposing different insights. Those are only possible through pairing CRM data with their call insights. As a sales leader, the question becomes “Should I let my team manage their pipeline in the CRM or our Revenue Intelligence software?”
The sales coaching problem
So, let’s tie these above points together.
Sales leaders are not doing call review sessions with their teams and companies are not going to be moving away from their CRM as their source of truth anytime soon. Conversational Intelligence software platforms have become glorified recording and sharing tools that are now dismissed because they cannot prove ROI.
Why are we still thinking about sales coaching the same way? 2020 called, they want their sales coaching strategies and tactics back.
Ask any rep on our team here at Abstrakt can tell you how many call review sessions we do a week and the answer will always be the same.
Zero.
We don’t do sales coaching that way because it would mean that we left something to chance. Why take a chance when you know the answer is right there? Or in other words, why would we want to dive into the black box to find out why the plane crashed? When instead you could have real-time call coaching software we can help it avoid coming down all together.
Objections will come up, as they always do. But we can confidently say we handle them correctly 100% of the time. When opportunities move through our pipeline, we know without a doubt which qualifications questions have been asked (or not), 100% of the time.
How we approach overall team improvement
Our call review sessions now focus on what new objections we are facing. Are our tactics still working for known objections? Is the structure of the call flow still the same?
We are able to focus on improving the strategies and tactics we deploy to success as opposed to trying to pinpoint missed opportunities in the first place.
This is what sales coaching should look like in 2022.
Real-time call coaching software = sales coaching
Most people don’t believe us when we say “real-time”. But once they see how Abstrakt really works, they understand how we are able to accomplish this new way of sales coaching.
Technology is changing at a rapid pace and so should our strategies and tactics. Sales leaders need to evolve. No more sales coaching like it’s 2020. Take a look at real-time call coaching software instead of your traditional conversational intelligence software.