As a sales manager, call coaching is one of the most effective tools you have for improving an Account Executive’s performance and the buyer’s purchase experience. Few training methods allow you to move out of the hypothetical realm and apply learning to real world conversations. And it’s this real world training that has the biggest impact on your team.
Real conversations are unpredictable, difficult, and can go off the rails quickly. Proactive Sales Managers see these situations as coaching opportunities. You can review a recorded call later and do a postmortem on where to improve. This is the brand of call coaching most of us are familiar with. But what if it’s a truly important call that can’t wait until later? You can also use a feature like Salesloft’s Live Call Studio to provide feedback in real-time, as the call is happening. Regardless of how it happens, working directly with your rep will teach them to have applicable phone calls and drive their success.
That’s why we invited Sales Director Kyle Martin to offer his tips for real time call coaching with Account Executives.
Transcript
Hi everyone, Kyle Martin here with Salesloft. Today I’m going to talk to you about how to effectively coach your account executive team. To begin, let’s talk about real time call coaching. An analogy that I’ll often use is the NFL, where the manager is playing the role of coach who can objectively look at the entire field of play, whereas the rep is playing the role of a quarterback who may only see what’s directly in front of them.
So here’s an example. You’re on a customer discovery call where the customer describes a problem and the rep’s knee jerk reaction is to show a feature. Real time coaching can help steer the conversation back to what’s important, why the customer is experiencing this problem, how long it’s been a problem, and why it’s important. This allows you to have a much more meaningful conversation. So one way to accomplish this is our Live Call Studio, where you can join a call with an AE or simply whisper directly into their ear and coach them in real time. Another aspect of coaching is pre and post call. So pre-call, you might discuss how to approach the customer, objections that might surface, and what you hope to accomplish. Post-call coaching, you might listen to a recording of the conversation and talk about things that really went well and things you’d like to improve on. Thanks so much for watching. Good selling and happy coaching.