If you really want to improve a rep’s performance, you have to invest in coaching.
When it comes to driving real changes in your reps’ productivity, no other activity or strategy comes close.
However, many sales leaders lack visibility into aspects of their team activities:
- How much time is spent coaching?
- What happens during coaching sessions?
- Which reps get coached the most?
- Are reps closing skill gaps?
- Which activities are most effective at closing skill gaps?
- Does your coaching move the needle in the right direction?
Without this information, you’ll have a hard time identifying where your reps are succeeding and failing, and how to help them get better.
The result: wasted time and energy on things that don’t matter.
That needs to change now.
Coaching Intelligence technology, like ExecVision, helps you automate, track, and measure the effectiveness of all your sales coaching efforts. Most importantly, it helps provide an explicit path to coaching reps in a way that results in real behavior change and improvement.
Before Coaching Intelligence: Define What “Good” Looks Like
As a category, Coaching Intelligence encompasses the information, insights, and framework your leaders need to manage and coach their reps. It enables consistency and accountability in their day-to-day, and allows your leaders to effectively onboard, develop, and promote reps.
However, none of that information will be useful, and certainly won’t help you drive sales results, until you establish what “good” looks like from the outset.
This obviously starts with the bottom line, but it goes much deeper than that.
Revenue generation is a lagging indicator, and you don’t want to wait six months to know whether a rep is performing well.
Plus, there are other intangibles and soft skills to keep in mind: methodology, culture, teamwork, etc.
So it’s important for your leadership to clearly define your methodology and framework. That way, you have clear standards for rep performance, which empowers transparency and accountability.
Only once you have standards for excellence can you start to compare reps to that standard, and thus gain a clear path from where they are to where they can (and should) go.
No rep is going to become excellent overnight. What’s most important to measure is how quickly they’re progressing toward that standard.
Coaching Intelligence supports you as you track those steps toward progress, so you can quantitatively measure whether a rep is improving their performance.
What Does Coaching Intelligence Technology Entail?
With Coaching Intelligence technology, you can automate, track, and measure your coaching activities. This eliminates the guesswork from your coaching analysis:
- Performance Dashboards illustrate where reps are struggling
- Coaching Plans help you address those areas in a targeted way
- Sales Enablement Scorecards help you track reps’ progress toward improvement
The tools in a Coaching Intelligence platform should reinforce your organization’s guided selling motion, sales process steps, critical topics, and coaching principles.
Here are some key examples, drawn from the ExecVision platform.
Pre-Built Sales Coaching Frameworks
Users can immediately get to work with an out-of-the-box analysis engine that addresses top sales & coaching methodologies.
With ExecVision, our team collaborates with you during onboarding to operationalize your sales methodology, coaching models, keywords, and topics. The platform then uses these as guiderails to analyze and assess rep performance.
Capture Insights for Various Meeting Types
Whether you coach synchronously or asynchronously, engage in live listening or recorded calls, or are focused more tactically or strategically, our platform allows you to input those insights to and aggregate all feedback within a development plan.
Smart Alerts & Topic Identification
When you input data on conversations and meetings, our platform can auto-surface coachable moments and areas for rep development.
Coaching Plans
Develop personalized plans for each rep, based on behavioral science principles and the insights drawn from their conversations, to improve each rep’s individual performance.
ExecVision specifically leverages those areas of weakness to recommend recurring, targeted Coaching Plans to focus on a given skill in order to drive behavior change. To hold reps and managers accountable, coaching session pre-work reminders are sent days before the scheduled event to ensure sessions are as productive as possible.
Performance Dashboards
Use dashboards to aggregate and analyze performance data so you can understand comprehensive individual and team performance, as well as your leaders’ coaching effectiveness.
Skill/Will Matrix
Map individuals according to their abilities and motivation levels to inform performance management decisions (more information on the Skill/Will Matrix here).
How Coaching Intelligence Closes the Insights-to-Performance Gap
Surfacing insights is one thing. Acting on those insights is another.
And this is where the rubber truly meets the road.
Coaching Intelligence technology can help you close that Insights-to-Performance Gap. In essence, the technology helps you take what you’ve learned and use it to tailor your coaching activities to each rep:
- Roleplays
- Pipeline reviews
- Soft skills training
- 1:1 sessions
When you combine powerful insights with top-tier coaching programs, you can achieve some powerful results for your sales team.
Pushing Performance Data to All Levels of the Organization
Data should never be confined to the top of the organization. The more your reps know about how they’re performing, the better prepared they’ll be to make improvements over time.
That’s why Performance Dashboards are important for pushing performance data to all levels of the organization:
- Executives can see how much coaching is happening, if it’s targeted to the right reps, and if it’s generating performance gains
- Managers can zero in on the skills reps need help with and build tailored Coaching Plans to close those gaps
- Reps get an X-ray view of how they stack up against their peers, inspiring self-led coaching and friendly competition
This, in turn, generates a feedback loop of critical intelligence around coaching activity, rep skill gaps and business Impact.
The Next Level: Auto-Surfacing Skill Gaps & Coachable Moments
Finally, we should take a moment to talk about the next level of Coaching Intelligence technology.
While everything we discussed above involves direct input of conversation insights, our Coaching Intelligence Connected plan adds an even further layer of automation and insights.
If you leverage call recordings or recording screenshares, ExecVision’s AI engine scans your recordings and compares them against your sales process and coaching methodology to highlight key gaps.
From there, the platform can automatically alert your sales managers to specific areas of opportunity for immediate coaching.
How to Get Started
If you aren’t coaching already, there’s really no nice way to say this: you’re already behind the 8-ball.
The best way to get started is to have actionable insights at your disposal that can help you drive rep performance forward. Coaching Intelligence software can help you do just that.