It is common for businesses to offer some form of training for their teams, especially sales reps. According to a report by CSO Insights, companies that offer formal training are likely to report 15% higher win rates. Sales coaching involves evaluating the knowledge, skills, and readiness of your sales reps and offering feedback to improve performance. 

Sales training software is used when onboarding new sales and offering continuous training to other reps to help them ramp and reach quota consistently. This software aids the training process in that they incorporate different features that allow you to create coaching activities, assign to team members, evaluate the response, and provide feedback. Sales training software is gaining popularity because it offers a formal approach to training.  

Investing in sales coaching software is rewarding because of the features and functionality that help you achieve your goals and more. When selecting a sales coaching software, certain features are a must-have for enhanced productivity. They include:

Text-Based Coaching 

This feature is important because it helps you to assess your sales reps’ writing skills for their communication with customers and prospects. Text-based coaching helps to prepare your reps for touchpoints outside meetings like responses, follow-ups, and written emails. 

During coaching, your teams can practice creating responses to prospects and have managers evaluate them for key pointers like proper tone, consistency, and even accurate messaging. 

Video Coaching

This feature allows you to coach your team virtually through video assessments. This means that you can get a chance to ‘see’ them executing some tasks like an elevator pitch for assessment. As a trainer, you’ll need to offer feedback via video.

Video coaching presents an opportunity for you to see and hear your teams no matter their location. The good thing about this feature is that it is flexible allowing you to pause or restart whenever necessary. 

Video coaching is invaluable when your team is scattered across different locations and you can’t do in-person training.

Screen Recording

Sometimes sales reps can feel like they did a superb job with a presentation when they left out important information. Screen recording helps to go back and see if there are topics that they may have left uncovered while evaluating the presentation. 

To make the most of this function you can begin by letting the sales reps practice with the video recording feature before evaluating their presentation skills on the screen recording. You can then suggest to them the techniques top performers are using to help them improve. 

AI Scoring

When you talk about sales coaching software, AI-powered machine scoring is valuable in providing deeper insight. Machine scoring and AI can automatically score, transcribe, and analyze key areas of conversation highlighting the emotions exhibited, topics covered, and speaking rate among others. 

This feature helps to save time while also providing a benchmark that will help in prioritizing feedback while distinguishing the reps that need the most help. Moreover, team members can also review their automated analysis thus helping them improve. 

Practice Skills

Coaching alone is not enough. It must be accompanied by practice. During coaching, teams get better with constant practice. This helps to sharpen certain areas like delivery, messaging accuracy, communication skills, and more. While the practice may seem so simple, it helps both managers and teams to identify areas of improvement, work on specific skills, and hone their performance. 

Investing in sales coaching software with practice capabilities offers a comfortable and safe environment for reps to create an easy process that they can repeat. Most importantly, it helps to sharpen areas of weaknesses before they can confidently share with their peers. 

How Do you Initiate a Sales Coaching Process?

It’s easy to assume that just because your sales reps are not coming to you with a problem then they don’t have anyway. The truth is that whether they acknowledge it or not, all sales reps require polishing and coaching. Simply reminding your sales reps that they need to sell more volume in order to reach their quota doesn’t mean you are coaching them. 

Sales coaching must be well thought out with a goal you’re hoping to achieve. This should be measurable so that you can expect specific results at the end of the coaching period. Sales coaching software is an excellent tool for managers to help sales reps develop and teach them winning sales techniques. These training tools make the coaching process virtual, scalable, and easy to manage.