As sales organizations and companies evolve, it’s becoming clear that one asset is becoming more precious than any other: time. With more complexity, more responsibilities, and higher expectations on modern sales teams than ever before, time is becoming a rare commodity.
This is especially true for sales managers. With so much on your plate, it’s hard to make time for the small activities that have the greatest impact on your team, like sales coaching.
In all of this bustle, it’s often easier to provide all your sales coaching from recorded calls on your own time, but the advantages of real-time coaching can’t be ignored. The most successful sales managers make time for real-time coaching each week, no matter what. How do they do it with jam-packed schedules? Here are a few easy ways to turn real-time call coaching into a consistent practice.
Prioritize the Time
When something’s on the calendar, it’s far more concrete than when it’s merely sitting on your to-do list. Productivity experts continue to find that your calendar, not your to-do list or task manager, is the best tool for helping you get important work done.
On Friday afternoons when things die down, take a few minutes to look ahead at the calls your team has scheduled for next week and pick a few to add yourself to. You can also outsource this to your team and request that they add you to a call at least once a week or once every other week if you have a large team. Simply putting this time on your calendar will make it hard to ignore and far easier for you to spend that important time with each rep.
Use the Right Tools
With the right tools, you won’t even have to prioritize time or look at calendars to provide real-time coaching. New technologies like Salesloft’s Live Call Studio allow you to view all of your team’s live calls in a single dashboard. If you have a few spare minutes between meetings, you’ll be able to jump in and provide coaching on the fly. You don’t even have to be in the office. With Live Call Studio, you have the ability to provide the same level of call coaching as you could sitting right next to a sales rep, from across the office or across the globe.
These new technologies provide you with all the tools you need for real-time sales coaching. You can simply listen in to a call, provide feedback that only the sales rep can hear, or even join a call yourself. These new technologies allow you to deliver superior coaching, while also giving you the flexibility and functionality you need to scale that same level of quality coaching to a large or distributed team.
This is also especially helpful for providing real-time coaching to sales development reps, who often don’t have the luxury of scheduling calls in advance and need to react in the moment.
Make Yourself Available
If scheduling time each week is simply out of the question and you don’t have tools like Live Call Studio at your disposal, a third option is to simply make yourself available to the team. Schedule a one to two-hour block each week where the whole team knows they can ask you to sit in on their calls and provide feedback. Some days you’ll spend this whole time jumping from call to call while others you’ll only be on one or two calls in between other work. The point is to make yourself available to the team and to be consistent.
While finding time for anything feels like a challenge these days, making time to sit with your sales reps and provide real-time feedback is an essential part of their growth and the key to maximizing positive outcomes on every call.
Learn more about Live Call Studio and it’s full suite of call coaching features, and how Salesloft can help you turn every rep into a top performer.