Sales coaching is one of the many key responsibilities of a sales leader and is one of the most effective ways to increase sales performance across your team. In fact, 65% of high-impact sales organisations (75% or more of reps achieving quota) report that sales managers spend 20% or more time coaching.
However, many leaders feel it isn’t always possible to get it all done as they lack the time, resources, or know-how to coach, so it’s seen as an afterthought.
According to Salesforce, just 26% of sales professionals receive 1:1 coaching once a week, highlighting an important gap in many sales organisations. Sales coaching is not to be overlooked and the data shows it. Organisations that implement successful sales coaching programmes increased average deal size, sales activity, win rates, and new leads by 25%-40%.
Traditional sales coaching focuses on tactical issues and deal reviews – leaving little time for the kind of coaching that actually gets the desired results. Traditional coaching tends to take a one-size fits all approach that doesn’t fit the needs of each individual rep. Everyone has different learning styles, is at different stages in their career, and even different motivations.
When sales managers don’t have the bandwidth to set up personalised coaching sessions for each rep on their team, it may be time to use AI sales coaching – your always-on coaching assistant.
From generative AI to conversational intelligence, AI is reshaping how sales managers provide coaching to improve sales performance and increase win rates.
What is AI Sales Coaching?
AI sales coaching uses generative AI to provide real-time, personalised guidance for sales reps and equip managers with the tools and data to coach effectively. With generative AI, you can provide AI-driven content recommendations, meeting insights, and a consistent assessment framework to deliver just-in-time coaching. It ensures reps get relevant feedback when they need it, supporting their skill development and preparing them for customer conversations while allowing managers to conduct more focused and impactful coaching sessions.
To sum up the importance of generative AI on sales coaching, CEO of Highspot, Robert Wahbe notes that:
“The bad news is today’s sales professionals face arguably the hardest selling environment in a decade. The good news is that in just the next year, generative AI is poised to unlock new levels of efficiency, knowledge, and agility for customer-facing teams everywhere.
AI turbocharges marketing and sales leaders’ ability to identify the behaviours of successful sellers and replicate those behaviours across your entire team, taking the guesswork out of excellence. And the best part? It takes a fraction of the time that it used to.”
Robert Wahbe, CEO, Highspot
Key Benefits of Using AI-Powered Sales Coaching
Artificial intelligence is critical to your sales enablement strategy and has significantly transformed various industries, and the field of sales coaching is no exception. A Gartner study reveals that 77% of sales organisations use digital tools to boost performance, with 66% using AI for personalised coaching.
Why is AI being so rapidly adopted across sales organisations? It’s because teams who invest in sales coaching and development technology significantly outperform their peers, seeing a 57% higher success rate.
But what role does AI really play in coaching? Here’s the breakdown:
Data Analysis and Insights
Performance Analytics: AI coaching tools can analyse vast amounts of sales data to identify patterns, trends, and insights related to sales team performance. This helps sales managers understand which strategies are most effective and where improvements are needed.
Additionally, AI sales coaching will automatically generate performance scorecards that show rep performance so that sales leaders can quickly identify where reps need additional coaching, whether it be on their delivery, meeting prep, follow-up, or another area. This scorecard or dashboard gives managers a view of all team members so they can see who is excelling and who is behind the curve on executing critical go-to-market initiatives.
Predictive Analytics: By leveraging historical data and machine learning algorithms, AI can predict future sales trends, customer behaviour, and potential churn. This enables your salesforce to proactively address issues and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Personalised Coaching and Development
Adaptive Coaching Platforms: No rep is created equal, and AI-powered coaching software can personalise training content based on individual sales reps’ strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles. Create video challenges, facilitate role-playing, and share best-in-class sales calls to help sales reps practice newly acquired skills and achieve mastery before deals are on the line.
Virtual Sales Assistants: AI virtual assistants can provide real-time feedback and coaching to salespeople during customer interactions. These assistants can analyse the conversation, offer suggestions for improvement, and provide relevant information or resources to help reps close deals. They essentially speed up the coaching process by reviewing sales reps’ pitches and meeting recordings, grading them, and delivering instant feedback.
Skill Development and Coaching
Sales Simulation and Role-Playing: AI tools can simulate real-world sales scenarios and role-playing exercises to help reps practice and improve their sales skills. AI acts as a customer or prospect, providing feedback and coaching based on the rep’s performance.
Speech and Sentiment Analysis: AI can analyse call recordings and meetings to evaluate rep’s communication skills, tone, and effectiveness in building rapport with customers. These metrics can then be fed into scorecards where managers can provide targeted coaching and training feedback.
Continuous Learning and Feedback
Automated Performance Reviews: AI uses automation to streamline the process of evaluating and reviewing sales reps’ performance and KPIs, providing objective feedback and recommendations for improvement. This helps managers conduct more consistent and data-driven performance reviews.
Feedback Loops: AI-assisted tools can create continuous feedback loops by collecting and analysing feedback from customers, peers, and managers. This gives team members timely and actionable feedback to improve their performance.
Content and Resource Optimisation
Content Recommendation Engines: AI can analyse the performance and effectiveness of sales training programmes, use cases, and resources, recommending the most relevant and impactful materials for each rep.
Sales Playbook Optimisation: AI can help organisations optimise their sales playbooks by identifying best practices, top-performing sales strategies, and areas for improvement. This ensures that reps have access to the most effective and up-to-date sales strategies and techniques.
Scalability Across the Organisation
With sales leaders typically having 5-10 direct reports, it can be time-consuming to monitor the performance of each sales rep. AI fills in the gap by analysing key data points and providing automated feedback and skill assessments which managers can then use and provide input on.
Better Meeting Prep and Follow-Up
By utilising AI sales coaching software, you can arm your sales reps with recommended content, meeting topics, and key insights from previous meetings, saving your reps time and increasing their productivity.
AI streamlines the content creation (personalised messages, digital sales rooms, templates) and recommendation process by collecting and analysing data to understand which content and conversation topics perform best at any stage of the buying process. Now you can evaluate skills, optimise follow-ups, and be prepared for any sales conversation.
The Best AI Sales Coaching Features
When looking into AI sales coaching platforms, enablement leaders and sales managers should focus on these key features that allow them to:
- Analyse call recordings to validate rep skills in customer interactions
- Receive instant feedback on sales rep’s skill level and pitch delivery
- Dig into scorecards to compare performance and prioritise coaching tasks
- Integrate with intelligence platforms, methodologies, CRMs, and more
- Track real-time KPI measurement with scorecards and leaderboards
- Customise sales coaching plays and templates
- Easily build rubrics, skills assessments, and certifications
- Quickly see into sales activity and engagements
Using Conversation Intelligence to Improve Sales Skills and Increase Sales Productivity
Conversation Intelligence (or conversational AI) is becoming an indispensable tool in the sales coaching arsenal. This tool acts as a virtual assistant that provides real-time guidance during sales calls, offering suggestions for objection handling, tailoring pitches, and delivering compelling messages. By acting as a virtual co-pilot, AI virtual assistants help sales representatives navigate complex customer calls with confidence and finesse.
Additionally, conversation intelligence can help reps get immediate insights on their meetings with buyers and feedback on where to improve, turning everyday tasks into learning opportunities. Here are some ways conversational AI can revolutionise your sales training and coaching initiatives:
- Tailored messaging: Conversational AI enables sales teams to deliver personalised and relevant messages to prospects and customers based on their preferences, behaviours, and purchase history.
- Improved sales productivity: Sales professionals can focus on building relationships and closing deals, while conversational AI handles routine inquiries and tasks in the sales process, increasing productivity and efficiency.
- Automated support: Conversational AI chatbots and virtual assistants provide real-time assistance to sales reps during customer interactions, offering suggestions, answering questions, and providing relevant information.
- Interactive learning: Conversational AI virtual sales assistants can simulate sales scenarios and provide interactive training to sales reps, helping them improve their sales skills, techniques, and strategies.
- Continuous Improvement: Sales reps can practice and refine their sales skills receiving instant feedback and guidance leading to continuous improvement and mastery of sales skills.
- Integrations with other sales tools: Combine rich conversation analytics with CRM integrations, email, content, and digital sales rooms to give your sales teams more visibility into sales pipelines.
By leveraging the capabilities of conversational AI, sales teams can enable what once felt impossible and improve their sales skills, optimise sales performance, and achieve better sales outcomes, driving revenue growth and business success.
Highspot Sales Coaching Software: Your Always-on Coaching Assistant
Make sales coaching faster and more effective with Highspot’s AI-powered sales coach. Highspot Copilot equips sales leaders with advanced generative AI and conversation intelligence tools that remove admin work, so you can dedicate time to providing high-value feedback–transforming struggling sellers into top performers. See how Highspot can help you better enable your sales team and consistently hit quota. Book a demo today!
