Congratulations, your business has sales coaching software! Perhaps you’ve had such a solution for a while now, or maybe you’ve just invested in one or are planning out your strategy for acquiring a platform.
Now, the hard part begins — actually making effective use of your sales coaching software. A problem that many businesses encounter is that while they have a number of diverse and valuable technology implementations, they may not know how to make the greatest use of such solutions.
This can be the case for sales coaching software. This technology is undoubtedly nice to have, but without a strategy for maximizing its value in your sales operations, your investment may deteriorate and not provide the returns you had expected.
As sales coaching software — and so much more — Showpad can help you enable and empower your sales force. The trick is in knowing how to make use of tools, capabilities and features, and then tying them back to tangible goals or expectations.
Let’s walk through some best practices to making the most of your sales coaching software and what you can do starting today.
Use data to make decisions
Data-driven sales should be your default approach. And in most cases, that’s the track sales leaders take, especially when targeting new markets for expansion or determining quotas. However, sales coaching is often thought of as less of a formal activity, and thus less reliant on hard data.
The reality couldn’t be further from that misperception. Truly effective sales coaching is built using robust data that you collect on your sales force and their strengths and weaknesses, both individual and collective. How else would you know what to target in coaching if not in possession of data that points you toward areas of improvement?
Showpad offers a wealth of data streams that you can leverage in developing your sales coaching activities, as well as adjusting them to continually meet the needs of your sales force. For example, you can use Showpad to assess how well reps deliver a mock pitch in comparison to their peers. With this data, you can then design a sales coaching campaign that brings everybody up to a satisfactory level.
Standardize and share top practices
In the course of evaluating your reps’ skills, you may come to find that one or two salespeople are particularly proficient in a certain skill area. If you pick up on this through data, and then tie it to performance, you may be able to define top practices that drive success.
Let’s take the negotiation process as an example. Lots of salespeople are effective sellers, but many may not have as natural a talent for hard negotiating. However, without such skills, deal-making may lag in comparison and disrupt your sales cycle.
With a solution like Showpad, you can run practice sessions that gauge negotiating skills. Then, you can more easily identify top practices that you can standardize and share across the team. With that knowledge, you can create entire coaching modules built around top negotiating practices, deploy them to the team, score performance and deliver focused coaching to reps.
Repeat this process across different realms of sales and you can quickly close skills gaps between reps, fostering a sales force that is skilled across all aspects of their jobs.
Create personalized coaching experiences
Technology is a wondrous thing — that is, if you know how to use it properly. Some may think that sales coaching software is a hum-drum application, but you can use it to create rich, structured, pre-built coaching experiences for your reps.
What are we talking about? Showpad has useful features that enable you to scale your coaching program by creating coaching paths with a predetermined sequence of modules, sessions and activities to ensure smooth skills, progression and development.
Showpad users can utilize the Paths feature to organize the order of tasks and courses, structure timelines, view data and guide reps along a path to successful skills training.
So, if you need to coach reps on a new product, consider using Paths to build out an engaging experience that ensures reps retain knowledge. They can first complete courses on basic product information, then progress onto related customer personas and top practices for selling the new product.
Make coaching as interactive as possible
Coaching is not effective when delivered in a vacuum — that is, no amount of targeted coaching will be successful if essentially dropped at the feet of reps. Your managers and coaches need ways to forge personal connections with reps and deliver interactive, engaging sales experiences.
Your ability to do this depends in large part on the features of your sales enablement or sales coaching software. Showpad has a number of useful tools that liven up the coaching process and foster truly meaningful interactions.
For example, Meeting IQ can be used to record and transcribe meetings. Coaches and reps can then access the “game film” together and analyze various points of the sales meeting, specifically looking for good things to keep doing, bad practices to rectify and areas where reps can improve. Showpad users can also leverage Pitch IQ to record practice sessions and help reps visualize how they stack up against their peers.
Showpad is your one-stop sales coaching software
Coaching is a major function of overall sales enablement, and those in the market for sales coaching software can be assured the Showpad has the tools, capabilities and data they need to bring their coaching efforts to the next level.
Want to learn more about how you can use Showpad to enhance your sales coaching? Contact us today to learn more or to request a product demo.
