By equipping managers with Generative AI sales coaching tools, organizations can overcome traditional challenges, such as subjective feedback, inconsistent coaching opportunities, and limited resources for personalized coaching, paving the way for improved sales team agility, resilience, and success.
Growing revenue starts with empowering sellers to build high-performing teams. Empowering sellers means equipping reps to effectively sell not just a product but the value it will drive through personalized coaching tailored to each sales rep’s skillset and background. In fact, according to the Sales Management Association, companies providing optimal sales coaching realize annual revenue growth rates 16.7% greater than those that provide no coaching. Increasingly, businesses are looking to Generative AI to help.
Why? Despite the known importance of coaching, Gartner finds that only 40% of sellers report working within a well-established coaching culture at their organization.
As with many business challenges, the industry is wisely looking to generative AI to see whether the technology can improve sales coaching. Some sellers even worry that the technology might replace their jobs. However, generative AI is creating a generation of even better sellers—here’s how.
How Does Generative AI in Sales Coaching Work?
Generative AI has many uses in sales, including qualifying leads, creating personalized outreach, generating summaries, completing competitive analysis, and more. The most effective generative AI models may be those designed specifically for the sales industry and extensively trained on billions of real customer interactions to build this understanding.
Unlike general-purpose AI models designed for everyday consumer use, those deeply trained on sales interactions possess a data-informed understanding of the sales industry’s unique nuances. The platform then compiles this data and delivers feedback to reps and managers, providing a comprehensive and credible look into salespeople’s performance and deal activity.
Sales Coaching Before the Age of Generative AI
Before exploring the benefits of generative AI in sales coaching, it’s critical to understand what coaching has traditionally looked like. While sales coaching may differ between companies and industries, the fundamentals are similar. Typically, each salesperson has a manager who monitors each representative’s performance to gauge their strengths and areas for improvement, with the ultimate goal of driving more deals.
Monitoring may include one-on-one meetings between a manager and rep after a call to explore what went well and areas for improvement, having a sales coach shadow a rep during a call with a prospect, or having the coach review email correspondence between a rep and a prospect. Coaching and feedback were typically subjective, and documentation was lacking. As a result, feedback could be biased, inconsistent, and impersonal.
Barriers to Effective Sales Coaching
Sales reps thrive on feedback to grow their careers and strengthen their skills. However, only 38% of sellers report that their manager helps build the skills for their current role, and only 34% say their manager prepares them for future roles. Consequently, reps who feel feedback does not support their career progression and skill-building are more likely to disengage and leave the company.
In addition to feedback, inconsistent sales coaching opportunities can impact sales reps’ development. Research shows that the average sales manager has seven direct reports but devotes just 9% of their time to coaching them. Bandwidth and resource constraints faced by many sales organizations mean that managers responsible for coaching their reps may be unable to gauge performance sufficiently. These factors can limit the frequency and quality of coaching and, in turn, limit the sales team’s future success.
However, sales managers and their reps are on the brink of a revolution in evaluating performance and delivering and processing feedback, thanks to generative AI.
See also: Another Willy Loman Moment Looms: Automating Sales Via Generative AI
Transforming Sales Coaching with Generative AI
There are many ways generative AI can help bolster sales coaching, but we’ll focus on data-driven feedback and real-time and personalized coaching.
Whereas traditional sales coaching requires managers to listen in on sales calls and read through emails to gauge a rep’s performance, generative AI offers to streamline this process by identifying and surfacing coaching insights from recorded sales interactions. For example, if a rep focused on product feature comparison in a call with a prospect, a generative AI solution could flag this discussion and suggest an alternative talking point, such as talking instead about the product’s value as it relates to the prospect’s business challenge. The suggestions are based on insights from analyzing billions of past customer interactions that indicate whether a deal is at risk or likely to close and coaching the next best step to take.
Generative AI can also track other habits, such as how fast or slow a sales rep speaks during a call or how often they allow the prospect to respond or ask questions. This feedback is grounded in data and offers straightforward suggestions on areas of success and improvement.
Consistency is critical when delivering feedback. Scorecards are powerful tools for providing coaching and feedback to sales reps, but scoring calls is time-consuming. As a result, many managers cannot invest the time to reinforce best practices. With generative AI, managers can streamline sales rep coaching and reinforce best practices using generative AI to help automate scorecard suggestions based on what was said during actual interactions the rep had.
See also: Data-Driven Conversation Analytics Key to B2B Digital Sales
Generative AI and Human Expertise
Although generative AI can be an excellent sales coaching tool, its use should be additive rather than attempting to replace human conversation between coaches and reps. Data-driven feedback from generative AI brings consistency and rigor to sales coaching; however, it does not create robotic, scripted, flawless reps.
Managers should consider weaving in learnings and expertise from their own sales experiences to help strengthen reps’ skills. By balancing generative AI-driven insights and human experiences, organizations deliver teams a comprehensive, compassionate, and consistent coaching experience.
Moving Forward
As the landscape of sales coaching continues to evolve, it’s evident that generative AI holds tremendous potential to revolutionize how sales teams are coached and developed. By equipping managers with AI sales coaching tools, organizations can overcome traditional challenges such as subjective feedback, inconsistent coaching opportunities, and limited resources for personalized coaching — paving the way for improved sales team agility, resilience, and success.
