Sales coaching platforms

When it comes to evaluating sales coaching platforms, many sales managers have varying opinions as there are so many options on the market.

After all, humans are essentially what makeup salespeople. I know obvious right? But that is why salespeople get paid what they get paid. Because they can interpret the emotions of the people they’re talking to and be persuasive in a way that results in a good customer experience.

The problem with technology is that it cannot read human emotions. No matter how hard we’ve tried, this is constantly a work in progress. No company has mastered this yet.

Technology like conversational intelligence software can’t help with challenges like reading voice inflection or sounding super confident.  However, with the right mix of human coaching, salesperson intuition, and real-time sales coaching platforms, we just might be able to convince the non-believers.

Conversation intelligence software is a must-have for a modern team of salespeople. Most teams have it. But what most sales leaders don’t know is there are now REAL-TIME sales coaching platforms, like Abstrakt, that take conversational intelligence to the next level.

What Sales Teams Are Currently Doing

Many out there today in the conversational software space are doing recording and coaching after the fact. This is extremely helpful to keep the sword sharp and keep your people engaged.

This does not help with confidence on the call and engagement when the call is actually live. When salespeople have recommended talk tracks of what to say based on real-time input, their answers, and direction to call come off more confidently and can still be improved upon after the fact.  If you truly want the most confident sales team, you need to give them the tools to make the best of every call.  The next biggest concern is actually team adoption.

Let’s jump into that.

How can I get my team to adapt to real-time call coaching?

Having your team without any tool can be challenging and frankly can be very frustrating, especially if the team doesn’t feel like the tool benefits them directly and only benefits the company.

In the past sales leaders have tried to bribe and threaten to make their teams comply. When this has happened to me I’ve always wondered why the sales leaders didn’t do what they do best and sell to the team.

The long and short story here is that sales leaders need to do a good job of selling the value of the tool to both the salesperson and the sales organization. With a sales coaching platform, the sale should be relatively easy.  There are important aspects to the call that reps often miss that having a call simply transcribed can help solve.  On top of that, every rep has had a bad day.

Real-time call coaching software can help keep the team consistent even when things go wrong on the call.

Do I have to continuously improve upon real-time call coaching software or can I just set it and forget it?

In reality, markets are constantly changing and so are prospective buyers. If you don’t know the newest competitor in your space and you are a sales leader, then you may be missing the boat on a large part of your job.  Because the market, the prospect, and your offerings change constantly, you are going to want to constantly update your real-time call coaching software.

It’s not enough just to set it and forget it, you’re going to want to constantly evolve and a/b test different talk tracks and strategies so that you can have the best possible outcome for your team.

Should I script my team word-for-word?

Have you ever been called by a robot?  How about a human that sounds like a robot?

It sucks.

There is a reason we have humans call people and not conversational AI.  Although real-time call coaching software allows you to script word for word if you want to, it’s actually the worst idea in the history of every idea ever.  The reason why is because you are essentially crippling your team and their salesperson intuition.

When the team follows the script to the letter, they tend to sound very robotic and difficult to relate to. The end result is that they are treated like a robot.  So if you’re thinking you can just script away all of your problems using real-time call coaching, you are completely wrong.  The end result will be the same, where the customer hangs up on you as if you were a robot.

Best practices

Do you really care if someone says “Hello, how is your day going” a different way? (laugh now, but you might just put in this little snippet soon).

The best sales conversations are just that… conversations.  Using real-time call coaching to enforce best practices in short snippets of talk tracks is what the most successful teams are doing today. It is the best of both worlds where salespeople get a bulleted list of what to say, they don’t miss a beat, but can still be themselves on a call.

Now your salespeople can have fluid conversations that don’t sound scripted, but they also don’t forget key parts of the conversation and are never blindsided by an objection they can’t handle.