Did you know, for companies, the median ROI of sales coaching programs is 7 times the initial investment?
There’s a reason why leading brands invest extensively in coaching their sales teams, providing the latter with the best sales coaching software, trainers, and consultants. The ROI is well worth the effort!
So, if you’re looking to level up the performance of your salespeople, having a defined coaching program promises the desired results. But to set up an effective program, you need the right sales coaching software to set you up for success. This post will help you make up your mind on how to set up your sales coaching stack from scratch.
Here’s a quick rundown of everything this blog will help you learn:
- What are Sales Coaching Tools?
- How do these Tools Help?
- Key Metrics to Track in Sales Coaching
- Why Invest In Sales Coaching?
- 5 Must Have Sales Coaching Tools
What are Sales Coaching Tools?
Sales coaching tools are tools that sales managers can use to maximize the sales team’s performance, enabling them to meet their sales goals by making strides in specific areas like proactive listening, negotiation, rapport building, communication, confidence, prospecting, storytelling, and presentation.
How do these Tools Help?
There are many different types of sales coaching software or tools. They have their own list of features that are aimed at their respective objectives. For instance, while a conversation intelligence solution can provide insights from conversations between the reps and customers, other tools can leverage data to build rep profiles for assessment and personalized training.
In general, good tools add value to your coaching, providing insights that can be leveraged to tailor the training and feedback sessions. They can help identify the gaps in your team’s approach, highlight behavioral aspects impacting cold calls, and pinpoint better tactics that drive better conversion.
With a good sales coaching software, you can accelerate learning, impart actionable insights to your reps, improve their performance, and achieve defined organizational goals.
Key Metrics to Track in Sales Coaching
Is the coaching working? Are those sales coaching tools delivering good ROI? Is your sales team getting better?
Having answers to these questions is important to your business’s bottom line. Answering these, however, is only possible when you’re tracking the right metrics.
Listed below are some metrics that you can use as a benchmark.
- Sales lead conversion rates:
The sales lead conversion rate is a great indicator to track the effectiveness of your sales training program. As part of a metrics dashboard, this number should be tracked regularly for the entire sales force. By comparing historical results to current data you can track trends and help determine if sales coaching needs to be redefined or another training initiative is required.
- Sales quota attainment:
This is one of the simplest ways to measure the effectiveness of your sales training. Calculate how many quota-attainment opportunities (sales presentations, demos, etc.) were closed by each rep in a given period. The more this number is, the more revenue generated for the company, thus, implying better sales training.
- Length of Sales Cycle:
By tracking this metric, you can get an accurate picture of how long it takes your salespeople to close a deal. Your team should be able to convert the prospect into a paying customer in the shortest amount of time. A strong sales team has short sales cycles with high-quality leads and quick turnarounds on sales. Combined with other metrics like win rate and conversion rate, the length of the sales cycle can provide critical insights into a number of different performance factors.
There are several other performance, activity, and engagement metrics that sales managers should look at, including velocity, average deal size, revenue, customer feedback, prospects in the pipeline, and win rate.
5 Must Have Coaching Tools
There are many sales coaching tools out there. However, there are a select few that truly stand out from the crowd and are loved by sales leaders. Here are five sales coaching tools for managers:
- Dialworks
Dialworks is a modern sales readiness platform that eliminates guess work in the process and arms the sales team with reliable insights from real customers. Dialworks scales your existing training program and improves its effectiveness.
The sales coaching software gets you connected to an ideal target audience and provides pitch breakdown, AI-driven call scores, analytics, and more to understand how your trainees are faring with their pitch. With Dialworks, get connected to real customers and you can ramp your sales training cycle faster.
- JustCall IQ
JustCall IQ is an innovative conversation intelligence tool that helps you capture every conversation, understand what’s affecting your performance. This empowers trainers to teach and teammates to sell smarter, and close more deals. JustCall IQ lets you track your calls better and make smarter decisions to ensure that your reps make the perfect pitch on every call.
- Gong
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that captures and understands interactions across an entire customer base and provides actionable insights anyone can act on. Gong’s technology discovers, measures, and unlocks customer data from all touchpoints, in all mediums to unlock your customer reality.
- Clearslide
ClearSlide is a platform that brings together sales, marketing, and services content with intuitive sales engagement management tools that help organizations correctly prioritize the right accounts, notes, communications, and actions to ensure leads and opportunities are better managed. From tracking progress and forecasting deals to providing customized content or actions, ClearSlide enables sales and marketing teams to drive revenue growth.
- Ambition
Ambition helps sales teams’ win by empowering managers to coach and train in a whole new way, by getting very focused on specific criteria or behaviors. Ambition provides sales teams with the tools to hold their reps accountable to goals. Sales leaders are able to see their team’s performance in relation to the company’s goals and lead better.
Build your stack
Which sales coaching platform or software you should choose largely depends on your distinct needs and requirements. To understand your needs better and tailor a sales stack for your team, it’s best to learn from an expert who’s helped sales teams structure similar programs to what you’re looking for.
For more guidance on structuring your Sales Training program, book a free consultation with our Sales Training Expert!
