Elevate Your Sales Strategy with AI-Powered Coaching

Consistent sales coaching is essential for developing a high-performing sales team. Yet, it’s often deprioritized because managers struggle to find time and resources to provide consistent and effective coaching. Remote work has further exacerbated this challenge, making it difficult to coach in real-time and share valuable insights. The result? Less coaching, lower performance, and increased risk to revenue. That's why we've introduced AI-powered sales coaching to the Salesloft platform. Keep reading to learn why effective (and efficient) sales coaching is critical to success and how Salesloft can help you create a high-performing team.

Coaching is critical to success

According to McKinsey, outperformers commit to 79% more sales coaching than slow growing organizations. Effective sales coaching empowers sales professionals to reach their full potential and drive better results. It helps managers identify areas for improvement, offer tailored support, and keep their teams motivated. With proper coaching, sales reps become more confident, skilled, and capable of closing deals. 

However, without dedicated time and resources, many organizations struggle to implement consistent coaching practices. In fact, a Gartner report shows sales managers only spend 21% of their time coaching. So how can sales managers coach more effectively and efficiently with limited time and resources? New advancements in AI are here to help. By automating mundane tasks, providing data-driven insights, and enabling real-time feedback, AI can transform the way sales teams are coached and developed.

AI helps sales managers coach more often, and more effectively

The power of AI lies in its ability to help us do what we do best - be human. It’s a tool that helps sales teams to collaborate better, be more strategic, and build stronger relationships. For sales coaching, a significant benefit of AI is its ability to analyze vast amounts of data quickly and accurately. With AI, managers can quickly assess detailed analytics for sales calls, identify patterns, and pinpoint areas for improvement. This allows for more targeted feedback that addresses the specific challenges faced by each sales rep, ultimately enhancing their skills and performance.

Earlier this year, Salesloft introduced AI-powered conversation scorecards to make coaching more accessible and efficient for sales managers. With AI-suggested answers and linked transcripts, managers can quickly identify improvement areas and offer actionable insights. Reps can also request manager feedback for specific calls, and the feedback request is automatically prioritized for the manager in Rhythm. 

Conversation scorecards best practices

Sales coaching should be a regular part of a manager’s day-to-day, and Salesloft’s AI-powered workflows make both in-person and async coaching easier than ever. Here’s how sales managers can use Salesloft to coach consistently and effectively:

Before 1:1s with your sales team, use Salesloft Coaching to review individual rep performance and prep for your call. In the Conversations tab, you can view the rep’s recorded conversations, provide scored feedback, and see performance trends across their calls. Score a conversation ahead of the 1:1 and use the in-person time to provide additional coaching.

Instruct your team to regularly request reviews of their conversations. When a rep requests a review, an action to score the conversation is automatically prioritized in your Rhythm workflow. By proactively requesting feedback, reps can get more targeted coaching in the areas they need support, and you can easily manage your review “backlog.”

Use Conductor AI to review conversations efficiently. When reviewing a conversation, AI analyzes the recording transcript to suggest scores with time-stamped clips to back up its reasoning and highlight the voice of the customer. You can quickly review the relevant moments in the conversation and add notes to provide more detailed feedback.

Get started with conversation scorecards

If your team isn’t already using conversation scorecards, talk to your Salesloft admin to get started! Admins can adjust which roles have access to review conversations and edit/create scorecard templates. Here are a few examples of different scorecard templates you could use:

• Sales process: cold call
• Sales process: discovery call
• Sales process: product demo
• Sales skills: objection handling
• Sales skills: budget/pricing negotiation

Note: Salesloft Conversations (including conversation scorecards) is available for Salesloft Advanced and Premier licenses

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