Leading sales coaching tools for onboarding and upskilling sales reps in 2023

by | Jan 10, 2023

Sales enablement programs with effective sales coaching tools helps unlock the potential of sales reps to sell more. They can use these tools to learn about selling proactively.

Sales reps are thankful for sales coaching tools, but why?

The following stats shed light on why adoption of sales coaching tools is beneficial:

  • According to a 2021 research from Revenue.io, increasing the scale of sales coaching was the number one priority amongst sales reps. The study further states that 45.2% of sales development reps and account executives report that they get coached to a lesser extent when they work remotely. Hence, a remote workforce calls for more involvement from the sales managers with regard to sales coaching.
  • The Sales Management Association, reveals from a survey that 73% of sales managers spend less than 5% of their time coaching. They should ideally be spending a minimum of an hour per week on sales coaching. Organizations having effective sales coaching programs, see that commonly 61.4% of the sales managers coach each rep for more than an hour per week.

See Also: Speedup Sales Onboarding

  • Effective sales coaching can increase quota attainment by 21%. Moreover, leading research studies indicate that sales reps who undergo two hours of coaching per week have a win rate of 56%
  • With respect to churn, a 2022 research exercise carried out by Conference Board, states that 58% of sales reps leave a company if they are denied career enhancing opportunities via sales coaching.
  • A 2019 research report from Gartner found that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the content consumed within a week of onboarding. This is alarming. Using technology aided sales coaching tools can help here instead of manual traditional paper and pen training. It is possible because digital devices impart continuous learning on-the-go. Thus, sales reps do not have to depend solely on their memory.
  • 26% of sales managers across various sizes of companies in a survey responded that they do not know how to measure the success of coaching. This implies that they cannot put a finger on the effectiveness of their onboarding program.

The importance of sales coaching tools in a sales enablement program

Sales coaching tools helps drive sales targets, reduce ramp-up time, grow revenue, and minimize churn within sales teams. These tools help sales reps to meet management expectations by clearly outlining work processes and milestones for them. AI enabled sales coaching tools can help to scale up the onboarding program across a vastly distributed and remote workforce. However, at the same time it should be capable of individualized coaching too. A good sales coaching software has many inbuilt features. They include behavioral, contextual and content based training modules; deep assessment capability and analysis of individual knowledge gaps.

See Also: Turn Medical Reps into High Performers with Powerful Onboarding

Sales coaching enhances each sales rep’s performance adding up to the collective success of the entire sales team. It is a continuous process on behalf of the sales managers to help the sales team reach its objectives. This exercise is ideal when it is iterative, personalized and comprehensive. A sales manager must have granular knowledge on what to coach the sales rep on.

Sales coaching helps sales managers and sales reps to grow together and take accountability for their performance. It should support sales reps in their endeavor to reach their quota as fast as possible. However, in reality sales coaching is not really at the top of mind of most sales managers. A Sales Management Association study reveals the reason. According to nearly 50% of the respondents, it is simply that they don’t know how to coach! Some sales managers reveal that they are short of the time needed to coach or don’t think coaching is valuable. This calls for a change of mindset on behalf of the sales managers.

How do you choose the best sales enablement platform offering sales coaching tools for your company in 2023?

Many onboarding sales enablement platforms offer sales coaching tools. Across various competing platforms, basically two features are a must. Firstly, it must help sales reps in guided learning. Secondly, it should empower sales managers to provide coaching, assessment and feedback to reps.

While choosing an ideal onboarding platform offering sales coaching tools, check if most of the below features are available:

  • Does the platform have the capacity to address knowledge and skill gaps to make the coaching conversation impactful?
  • Is it compatible with mobile phones as remote and distributed sales teams are the reality presently? Can it work without the Internet, that is in offline mode?
  • Is it enabled for micro-learning with bite-sized chunks of information modules? This enhances memory retention.  

See Also: The Absolute Need of Effective Onboarding for Insurance Agents

  • Does it have gamification characteristics which includes key performance indicators, scores, leaderboards, rewards, and certification for sales reps?
  • Can the progress of each sales rep be tracked using metrics provided by the tool? Is the data crunched and results displayed on the dashboard for visibility?
  • Can the tools integrate with existing training systems and possess the facility for plugging in new software later? 
  • Does the tool offer recording and analysis of the sales rep’s audio and video sales conversations?
  • Can it organize content properly, so that the sales manager can pull it out anytime for viewing?
  • Is the sales coaching tool data-driven? Can data on call time, call duration, customer feedback, quota attainment, deals closed and pipeline reviews be mined?

Now that the coveted features have been described in the above-mentioned section, the litmus test of the success of a sales coaching tool software in the market is in walking the talk. Primarily, that means in its implementation factor.  

You can find below a list of some of the leading sales enablement platforms offering sales coaching tools in the market. Our selection of these platforms and its tools is for your consideration:

Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a market-leading sales readiness platform. Its product portfolio includes software for Sales Enablement, Sales Training & Onboarding, Sales Coaching, Sales Performance Management and Conversation Intelligence. Customers who were serviced by Mindtickle reported a 50% reduction in ramp time, and 64% increase in revenue generated by reps in their first quarter. Sales reps can learn through various modes like microlearning, gamified training, AI-assisted learning and more.

See Also: Sales Readiness VS LMS; which one is better to prep your sales team?

G2, a reputed peer-to-peer platform that shares business software reviews has ranked Mindtickle at the second position on the 2022 ‘Top 50 Best Enterprise Software Products’ list. It is at the fifth place on G2’s ‘Top 50 Sales Software Products’ list for 2022. Mindtickle’s marquee clients include Snowflake, Square, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Wipro amongst others.

Streamz

With offices in Singapore and India, Streamz, an AI-based mobile sales readiness platform has come a long way after being founded in 2015. The team at Streamz is on a mission to build the world’s most engaging, impactful and scalable sales readiness platform. Presently, the platform has nearly 200,000 users across 74 countries. It is a complete sales coach in the pocket which also has provision of sales reps’ video role play recording and assessment in its arsenal. Streamz’s products come with an auto-translation feature in 34 languages making it globally user friendly and supports hundreds of devices. Its self-directed learning tools for sales reps offer great insight to sales managers of the subject matter understanding of the sales reps.

Streamz uses cutting edge AI-enabled, industry-leading technology to assess the performance of sales reps, especially distributed sales reps, in a groundbreaking manner. This directly protects the bottom line of a company as it need not keep paying unproductive sales reps. Using the Streamz Manager App dealer principals can be made aware of inefficiently performing sales reps through Skill Scores. Without this handy tool dealer principals had no idea of the quality of the sales reps. Actually dealers do not want to keep low performing sales reps on their payroll. This is one of the main value creators while using the Manager App. The dealer principals now have solid proof on the performance of sales reps which can’t be refuted. Thus, the dealers can make data driven decisions about a sales rep’s fitness for the role.

See Also: Why is Measuring ROI from Onboarding Sales Reps so Critical

Customers of Streamz are benefited from having a latest four week assessment report of their sales reps based on knowledge or participation scores. Earlier sales managers had no data on the sales reps and judged their performance by a ‘gut-feeling’ only without scientific tools. Now, they can identify poor performers easily and take requisite action.

Streamz’s service portfolio includes Sales Enablement Analytics, Mobile Sales Enablement, Sales Gamification, Sales Content Management, Automated Knowledge Checks and Sales Onboarding. The company has helped its customers get a 42% increase in revenue, and a 387% boost in premium product sales growth. The platform has completed over two million assessments. Eminent customers who trust Streamz include HMD Global (Nokia Mobiles), Castrol, KTM, Viavi Solutions and d.light amongst others.

Brainshark

More than 1000 companies including many in the Fortune 500, are on the rolls of Brainshark for sales enablement purposes. Its heavy-weight clients include CVS Health, Cisco and Lenovo amongst others.

Brainshark offers on-demand training for sales reps with speedier onboarding than most competitors in the industry. Sales reps get instant feedback through a virtual coach that has a machine learning advantage. This helps in scaling up coaching tremendously.

See Also: 5 tried and proven sales skills to help you close more deals

Second Nature

Second Nature guides sales reps to have better conversations and is the first company to have created a platform for immersive sales simulations in natural language. Thus, sales reps who practice with its AI-powered conversation partners in real time see a quick improvement in their verbal abilities on the field. 

The company has offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Its top clients include SAP, Zoom, Lookout, Check Point and Twilio.

Wingman

Conversation intelligence software provider Wingman received the ‘Cool Vendor in Conversation Intelligence for B2B Sales’ recognition from Gartner in 2021. It meant an accolade for assisting sales teams unlock actionable insights from their sales interactions across calls, video meetings, emails, CRM and notes.  

Wingman helps sales reps right when they talk to customers, with hidden AI-enabled nudges if they talk for longer than necessary by listening to their discussion. It gives a live rating of the conversation to the sales reps. The software also pops out the requisite data to the sales reps when customers ask questions. Its prominent clients include MarketMan, Chargebee, Airmeet and PartsBase amongst others.

Conclusion

In the interest of the sales reps and the company employing them it would be a winning decision to opt for an onboarding and upskilling sales enablement program powered by sales coaching tools. This was relevant before and will be more so in 2023. As sales reps become more and more remote or distributed it is wise to take up an AI-based mobile sales enablement and readiness platform. Sales reps have to constantly learn and hone their selling skills. Doing so with sales coaching tools would do wonders for your team and organization’s long-term success.

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