Leveraging Technology to Coach Your Inside Sales Team
5 Takeaways We've Learned with the Power of AI for Sales Coaching
Picture this: You regularly records calls for your inside sales team. Your team has 7 reps. There are a few who are doing extremely well while a couple of others are struggling to reach their new account goals. You’ve decided to listen to a sampling of calls to capture trends for training and compare the differences in calls between your two top-performing reps and your lowest-performing reps. How long would that typically take you?
Consistently listening to calls is a huge but worthwhile time commitment.
It is also a purely manual process.
I did this for years when I got my start at Sunbelt Office Products in Atlanta, GA. I have learned over the years what a difference technology can make in adding quality to coaching and training.
Today, the availability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has forever changed how an Inside Sales Manager can coach to calls.
With the power of AI, we can gather call intel even before hitting ‘play.’ For example, we can already assess that this representative in the image has said “you know” about 23 times in one conversation. We can also see a segment in the call where the representative talked for 3 minutes and 15 seconds without ever engaging the prospect.
Here are five quick takeaways I have learned with the power of AI for coaching:
1. Leverage the right technology.
Whether you are a Sales Professional or a Sales Leader, leveraging the right technology will catapult your results forward by being able to pinpoint improvement opportunities much quicker. In the image above without ever listening to the call, we can see that the Representative has a 3 minute 18 second monologue without ever engaging the prospect. Yikes!
2. On-Demand “Self-Coaching.”
For Sales Professionals, using AI technology with conversation intelligence allows an easy way to self-critique your own calls and quickly catch pace of speech, filler words, questions asked and more.
3. Good managers become better.
My longtime friend and business coach, Brian Rossi (COO of BELLCORNERSTONE), has seen first-hand the power A.I. gives to managers as they use it to become better managers and coaches. Brian said, “Using A.I., a manager gains clear and immediate insight about the patterns of their team; things unlikely to be sniffed out when just listening to a few random calls. Smart data points like words-per-minute, call transitions, and use of keywords are identified, organized, and compared across multiple reps.” For Sales Leaders and Managers, seeing these trends across your entire team is crucial for understanding areas to focus on for further training and coaching.
4. Using data removes opinion as the only form of evaluation.
We will always need dynamic salespeople and dynamic trainers to coach, develop, and bring the data to life. Because data is just that; data. Facts. Numbers. With technology, qualitative improvement becomes much easier to identify. Brian Rossi also shared: “As a Coach, it is our job to be an encourager and to catch people “doing it right.” The use of AI allows us to sift through large data sets to find the instances where we did it well. Those positive examples and references to successful behavior patterns create the “high-five” moments for the team, and provide a positive example to replicate moving forward.” It is the combination of great coaching and data that packs a powerful punch.
5. Continue to make use of commute and drive time.
Technology has introduced the ability to work anytime, anywhere. This means you don’t have to be in front of your computer to work with your team or listen to recorded calls. Using an app on my phone, I can now be listening to a Representative’s call opening and then fast-forward to hear if the representative secured a next step, asked for a commitment, asked for an order, etc.
Do you want to hear call insights for someone on your team? Feel free to reach out to me and send two recorded calls for one person on your team. For the first 5 people that take us up on this, we’ll send you the insights for the recorded calls you’ve shared.
Email audio recordings to Marisa@methodsnmotion.com.
Sales is a series of successful conversations. Let’s all work to create more great conversations and keep the competition away.
Look forward to hearing from you!
