Coaching is the most important factor impacting sales performance. Using analytics, sales leaders can improve sales coaching and gain transparent visibility into the performance of their reps. It is the most accurate way to identify the behaviors of top performers and coach to a standard, bridging the gap between your best and your average reps. No longer based on manually-entered, skewed data, information provided by sales intelligence is completely transparent, objective, and accurate.

The data provided by sales intelligence is a sales manger’s best asset. It takes an average $30,000 and seven months to find and onboard a new salesperson. So, instead improve the performance of your current reps by coaching them towards success. Using analytics can even reduce training time by 30%. The successful sales manager will use this data to not only coach but establish best practice standards across their team and for individual reps.

Here are 3 Ways Analytics Improve Sales Coaching:

1. Coach to a Standard by Applying the Right Metrics

When incorporating data into your coaching methods, find the best recipe for success. Sometimes reps make too many calls, and other times they aren’t making enough. Consider metrics ranging from the length of the conversation, number of calls made, and calls made to specific areas or time zones. Analyze speech analytics, look at conversion rates and average ramp-up time, and tag specific lines and share with your team.

To truly find coaching success with data, teach your reps X amount of info and see how they succeed. Then, introduce X amount of more info. This will allow you to measure KPIs of success based on the coaching you’ve made and see the influence of any increase or change in product, pitch, or time, for good or for bad. It will be clear whether to continue, revert, or make new changes—all based on the numbers.

A/B testing methods is an effective way to look at effectiveness based on the raw data, not opinion. Use the behavior of successful reps to show others what works, and how they can make specific adjustments to improve. Identify the behaviors that work for each individual rep and those that do not.

2. Apply the Insights Provided by Sales Data

With data, there is no need to argue my way is better—you just need to look at the numbers. Data makes coaching easier, as it is much easier to convince people they aren’t doing things right when you can simply show them.

However, managers need to also adopt a pattern of regular coaching with maintenance and repetition over time. According to Xerox, 87% of new skills are lost within a month of training. Keeping regular tabs on the performance of your team will ensure they continue to perform to a standard. The goal here is coaching to mastery; fine-tuning every aspect of a pitch, even the smallest details.

3. Coach by Listening

Call recordings allow reps to hear their own pitch and make the necessary adjustments. Patterns will begin to appear as reps start to identify what works best, and what does not work.

By using data provided by call recordings, managers can share these recordings of their best reps with others, opening the gate to peer-to-peer coaching. Since reps can see this data themselves, they can ask how they can improve, make their own adjustments to their approach, and adapt to the model of looking at what success sounds like for their peers.

Getting Results

The goal of coaching through analytics is not to reinvent the wheel, but to make the wheel that you have shinier. When done correctly, employee retention is higher because people are happier when they are performing better and when they aren’t told what to do, because instead they are shown what works best. With analytics, managers not only waste fewer resources on coaching, as the quality of approach results in lesser quantity due to increased, data-based effectiveness.

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