Learning a new skill––whether it’s playing an instrument or handling buyer objections––takes time and practice.
Memory is fickle; without reinforcement, information easily fades away. B2B sales reps forget 87% of what they learn within 30 days of training. No matter how solid your sales training program is, it won’t make a lasting impact without coaching. The problem is, many organizations still don’t know what good sales coaching looks like. So, how can you build an effective coaching program that drives consistent sales execution?
Formal, ongoing sales coaching reinforces learned behaviors and drives accountability by powering consistent development for reps. With a coaching strategy that incorporates practice opportunities, data-driven insights, and real-world buyer conversations, you can continuously coach reps to adopt winning behaviors. Here are a few tips to drive consistent execution through sales coaching.
Weave Coaching Into Sales Training Through Practice
Many organizations don’t coach reps on an ongoing basis – as our recent survey found that 48% struggle with consistent coaching. Managers’ time is also a major roadblock to consistency, as 30% of teams lack the bandwidth to coach. When developing your coaching program, create opportunities for reps to continuously practice new skills in training and receive feedback in the moment of learning. Practice coaching enables managers to assess seller competencies during training and validate readiness faster. With the help of AI, you can deliver coaching feedback on rep training even more efficiently.
TIP: When embedding coaching into your sales training, accelerate the process with AI. Video Practice Questions in Highspot Lessons prompt sellers to record a video using their new skills for managers to evaluate. With AI, sellers can receive instant feedback, enabling them to refine their skills in the moment. Managers can let AI take a first pass at writing feedback, helping to accelerate the coaching process. Highspot managers using AI to scale their coaching provide 6 times more feedback in lessons, making AI a valuable addition to your coaching arsenal.
Empower Managers With Data to Coach With Precision
One of the hardest parts of sales coaching is knowing what reps should do differently to improve their performance. Without data, managers struggle to understand gap areas and validate rep behavior change – as 35% of teams struggle with accountability and only 13% use data for coaching. By leveraging data to gather insights on rep activities, managers can identify performance gaps and provide personalized, targeted coaching that helps reps adopt the right actions to engage buyers.
TIP: Empower frontline managers with data to coach reps’ needs. Scorecards, which 50% of enablement teams plan to incorporate into their coaching strategy, can be leveraged to quickly surface data on sales performance and determine where to coach next. Rep Scorecards in Highspot provide insights into reps’ content usage, engagement activity, sales play adoption, and training performance. These insights enable managers to validate rep progress and alter their coaching based on where reps need the most support. The impact is clear: Highspot customers who use the Rep Scorecard to coach their sellers experience 20% higher buyer engagement.
Upskill Sellers With Real-world Coaching
A lack of visibility into what works for reps is a major roadblock to coaching – as 53% of customers struggled to know where to focus improvement before using Highspot. Limited insight into what rep behaviors drive buyer engagement leads to ambiguous feedback that isn’t effective in helping reps improve. By coaching real-world conversations, managers can identify what’s working in reps’ meetings with buyers and target their feedback more accurately. Using conversation intelligence capabilities, you can streamline this process and drive effective real-world coaching for your team.
TIP: Leverage conversation intelligence capabilities to validate and reinforce critical selling skills in buyer engagements. The potential to scale coaching is largely untapped, as only 24% of organizations use conversation intelligence tools for coaching. With Meeting Intelligence, you can evaluate sales meetings to surface insights on delivery skills, identify improvement areas, and scale best practices. When sellers understand the winning behaviors to improve their performance, they are 74% more likely to replicate them in their own meetings with buyers.
Ensure Consistent Performance With Ongoing Coaching
Consistent execution thrives with consistent reinforcement – and driving repeatable action within your sales team requires an ongoing, innovative coaching approach. By leveraging practice opportunities, data-driven insights, and real-world conversation trends, you can coach sellers more easily and accurately. Insightful, ongoing coaching is the key to empowering your sales team to consistently demonstrate winning behaviors and reach their goals.
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This blog post is part of Highspot’s new research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
