Modern sales coaching & teams

Both have evolved over the last 50 years at a rate that has never been experienced before in the history of sales.

Why is that?

Well, think about the advancements in technology. For example the telephone, internet, and memes (yes, I put memes up there with telephones and the internet… sue me).

However, salespeople and sales managers have been a little resistant to change when it comes to managing the process of sales.

Another interesting question as to why.

It used to be that sales managers pushed a number, gave tools, and relied on the team to perform. After the advent of the telephone and the “Y-Connect”, managers realized that they could coach teams to perform better, faster, and with much greater results.

The problem?

Companies can’t hire a manager for every salesperson, that is not how any business can scale.

Here are 3 Ways Technology is Changing Modern Sales Coaching:

1) No Standard Call Process

When fast-food became a thing, they were really able to standardize the process of making quality food quickly. Why is your sales team not standardizing their process?

Seriously, look at your team and the varying performance levels that they are capable of. Do you think they are all having the same conversation?

In fairness, they probably shouldn’t be, but are they at least following the same framework of questioning? How consistent are their demos?

If you are being honest, I think you will admit that today’s modern sales team really resembles independent mavericks. They are shooting from the hip, with the best mavericks coming out on top when it comes to performance. Most successful sales teams are just lucky to have enough mavericks around to drive the number up.

But wouldn’t you rather be good than lucky?

Todays call coaching tech (*cough* Abstrakt), can literally standardize the critical points of the call.

This leaves their personality intact while allowing the right questions to be asked and the right points to be made.

Effectively, sales coaching software (*cough* Abstrakt) can take what is working (or not working) for your mavericks and build a repeatable process that will drive consistent results.

2) Inability to be on every call

We mentioned this a little bit already, but managers simply cannot be on every sales call.

Managers today might do a call review a week – and that is a BIG “might”. So sales coaching is relatively non-existent or it just happens when things “aren’t good”. Where it should happen all the time, praise is just as important as criticism.

According to research, most sales managers are doing less than one call review a quarter. Yikes. The numbers get much worse if the salespeople have the option to not record their meetings.

So why are those numbers so low?

Well, it’s because of the task that managers must take on from hiring, interviewing, training, and iterating processes. There are simply higher priorities. This means that reps’ performance isn’t being optimized, because managers are forced to be too reactive.

Technology is helping to change this, though. Real-time call prompts and the use of NLP (Natural Language Processing), are now allowing managers to have a 2nd set of ears on every call. Plus it gives the ability to automate key conversation driving points using machine learning and algorithms.

3) Manual Call Reviews

Most of the time, every call is recorded nowadays. BUT not every call is reviewed. That would be ridiculously time-consuming. As we mentioned, sales managers and even sales reps don’t have that kind of time.

The goal remains the same though. We expect salespeople to level up and get better at closing deals so that the company can grow and progress in competitive markets.

Sales managers don’t have the time for call coaching so how can you expect their team to keep improving without any guidance?

Do you see how this can become a never-ending cycle with the same problem occurring – leading sales teams to be reactive?

How can you solve this problem?

Great question.

There is call coaching software that exists to help teams, but not become overbearing to the sales reps (*cough* Abstrakt). Having real-time call prompts that help reps overcome objections will guide your reps to success.

Plus we’ve gotten even better feedback from sales reps that they can immediately see the call insights after it’s over to quickly improve for their next opportunity.

Just about any software can literally help record every call, transcribe every call – that’s just technology-table-stakes. But most sales teams need more.

If you think this sales coaching software is too good to be true – believe me we thought the same when we were in your shoes. This is why we’ve spent years developing this technology, being told many times that it wasn’t possible.

Real-time call prompts and call coaching are the future. You can either jump on board and start to see how real-time works or you can remain reactive and wait hours or days to receive your call insights.

It’s an easy choice for us, but ultimately you have to make the decision.