How do you train the future sales team in your company? Do you send them to seminars to absorb information rapidly over the course of a day or two? Traditional or formal sales coaching strategies are NEVER 100% EFFECTIVE. According to Gartner research, B2B sales representatives tend to forget almost 70% of the information they learn in a week of training. 87% will forget that information within a month. However, leveraging technologies such as CRM and call recording software can not only increase the effectiveness of your sales training sessions but can also increase your revenue growth. So, let’s check out the top five ways technology can take your sales coaching and management landscape to a whole new level.
1. Building practical sales coaching strategies
Earlier, sales managers had to use only sales data or results while coaching potential representatives. However, the numbers do not reveal the reasons why certain sales calls fail. That way, you can understand when your representatives do not perform well. But, you don’t understand what exactly went wrong. Sales conversations or call recording intelligence software can help you reveal actionable insights to your trainees. You can explain the rebuttals to them for a variety of situations on a sales call. You can take an effective step when some of your trainees may not be able to perform well initially.
How to define sales goals using technology?
- Evaluate your sales team– Ask each one of your sales representatives what objectives they think are achievable. Then you can motivate them to do even better by making them listen to some of the best sales pitches on your call recording software.
- Track their progress– You can use technologies to track your sales activity output, won/lost deal rations and the amount of time you spend prospecting.
- Reward your staff– You can use a sales tracking software to identify the best performers of your team so that you can reward them later.
It is difficult to identify the patterns and insights about each sales call with technologies. You can never be a good trainer if you aren’t armed with the right information you need to coach your reps effectively in the first place. You may provide Information Technology assignment help or programming assignment help. But, none of it matters if your sales teams aren’t able to visualise how they are progressing towards their goals.
2. Uncovering the reasons for poor sales performance
How often have you been on the verge of closing a call only to get a negative answer from the client in the end? Not all cold calling strategies work all the time. You have to adapt to the demands and needs of your target audience with time. One wrong word and all your hard work in making a successful sale can go down the gutter. Thus, it is better if you could use AI or Artificial Intelligence or call recording systems to understand why any of your sales calls didn’t work. It is only after you know the reasons that you can take the right steps to uncover poor sales calling habits.
Importance of tracking your team’s sales performance:
- Ability to identify patterns– Patterns are clear signs of whatever is going wrong or right in the sales process. Most organisations profit from short contracts and quick turnarounds. You can’t let anyone of your prospects go no matter what.
- Effective decision making– Decision making in sales is quite different from the decisions you may have to take before visiting a restaurant with your friends and family. You have to rely on scientific evidence instead of intuitions to make the right decision.
- Cause and effect– Tracking the sales metrics can help you understand how one of these variables affects the other in a sales conversation.
All in all, technologies can help you review sales calls and identify phrases, words and moments that alter the course of sales in a conversation. For example, you can use call recording software to review each sales call in your company. Draw out patterns that seem to work and eliminate the sale approaches that seem to disappoint or annoy the clients. You can explain the nitty-gritty of making a successful sales call to your potential team members as well.
3. Increasing employee retention and loyalty
In a sales environment, you see and you learn from your seniors. I had often seen my seniors prefer the top performers and disregard the presence of underperformed team members. Complacency among organisations is quite a common affair in most workplaces. This belief leads to a great deal of turnover for the team that deals with sales. Majority of employees end up leaving the organisation, thereby taking a toll on the organisation’s reputation. Thus, you can try using technologies and reveal examples of excellence from the top performers for the entire sales team.
How to use technology to motivate your employees?
- Unleash the full potential of your employees– Using artificial intelligence can help your employees focus on the tasks that matter instead of focusing on low priority tasks.
- Enable advanced employee training– Smart gamification or other technologies can create a better workplace environment for your employees.
- Increase employee productivity– You can get hold of an unprecedented amount of data regarding your employee performance, behavioural responses, attendance, timeliness, productivity, etc.
Letting your employees down is not a good idea if you want to make it big in the sales industry. Instead of giving up on your existing employees, try motivating them. Treat everyone equally and use your best performers to motivate others. You can even arrange training sessions with the ones that haven’t been performing well and train them with the utmost precision. It will be easier for you to integrate the qualities of your top performers into the daily workflow of your team.
Wrapping Up,
From ordering your food online to buying medicines, technology has seeped through different aspects of our life. Now it clearly plays a significant role in sales coaching and management industries as well. The right technology can increase your employee retention rate, set your sales goals clearly and motivate your employees to do better every day. However, you should also encourage one-to-one human interaction among your team members besides using technology to maximise your output.
Mary jack is a sales manager at a reputed firm in the United States. She also provides information technology assignment help to students at MyAssignmenthelp.com. Samantha loves to play video games whenever she is free.