Does Your Coaching SaaS Platform Have What You Need?

BY Tim Londergan
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Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools!” – Marshall McLuhan

You ask a lot from your sales managers. Beyond meeting quotas, hiring strong talent and retaining customers, you require them to coach their team to sell in what’s becoming an increasingly virtual environment. Consequently, sales professionals are handling the challenges of a completely new buying context. A lack of coaching dedicated to virtual selling compounds this struggle. According to Gartner’s Seller Skill Assessment, only 23% of sales reps believe they are equally effective selling virtually as they are in a live, onsite setting. They are unsure of what they need to be doing differently. Luckily, there are coaching SaaS tools specifically designed to meet this challenge.

Use coaching SaaS to support effective virtual selling

Gartner’s director of research, Danielle McKinley, says 93% of sales reps are experiencing significant challenges with virtual selling. McKinley points to the sales manager’s role in implementing an effective program. She states, “The success of a virtual selling engine depends on the manager’s ability to coach to the right skills and in the right way.” To meet this end, you can employ software to automate communication and deliver consistent, timely information to establish an effective coaching platform.

Establish a consistent coaching culture

The Gartner study shows that only 40% of sellers work within a well-​established coaching culture. Furthermore, only 42% of sales reps say managers at their organization are held accountable for providing good coaching. Managers can do better if given the right tools. Likewise, McKinley emphasizes the need for a clear vision for coaching and “aligning processes and tools to reinforce and support the coaching culture.” Communicating, operationalizing and demonstrating expectations throughout the enterprise can yield tremendous returns on investment. In addition, an effective coaching SaaS tool serves as a foundation for a consistent coaching culture.

Maximize impact with coaching SaaS tools

Gartner’s Selling Skill assessment goes on to show that only 39% of sales reps report their managers effectively use technology to coach. Busy sales managers deserve a coaching SaaS tool that boosts sales skills effectively in minutes, not hours. And learning a new software system should be intuitive and stress-​free. Doug Bushee, Gartner’s senior director analyst, concurs, adding, “The three root causes for sales managers’ struggles coaching on virtual selling include an inconsistent coaching culture, inexperience with virtual selling and coaching skills, and a lack of investment in coaching technology…Coaching technologies should both decrease the effort to make coaching happen and maximize the impact of manager-​seller coaching interactions,” said Mr. Bushée.

A dynamically tailored coaching tool

Personalized, automated sales coaching from SalesFuel combines your CRM data with behavioral science and account-​based coaching. Your sales managers can measure the direct impact of virtual sales coaching for high-​priority sales targets. In addition, managers can focus on middle performers to lift their contributions up to 28% with skillset and mindset guidance. Communication is simplified as individualized bite-​sized content is delivered each business day via email or Slack. As a result, sales managers have more time to concentrate on the day-​to-​day issues that require their attention. Consistent technology-​enabled sales coaching will meet the demands of today’s virtual environment and give your managers the ability to succeed. Coachfeed is the newest AI driven solution for sales micro-​coaching that provides your managers with a playbook for each team member.

Photo by Hung Do on Unsplash


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