Does Coaching Matter?
The late, great Pat Summit, was an other-worldly coach that led her teams to 1,098 career wins, a 0.841 winning percentage, and 8x NCAA championships. She was the common thread across nearly 4 decades of teamwork excellence in Tennessee. Coaching matters.
Even at the pro-level with once-in-a-generation talents, where would MJ be without Phil? Brady without Belichick? If you asked either one of them, their coaches mattered.
If sports aren’t your thing, think of the coaching you’ve received from mentors that have invested in you. Where would you be in your career without the guidance and mentorship you’ve received? Research conducted by the Sales Management Association in 2018 found there was a +9% difference in sales rep productivity when managers spend at least 10 hours a week coaching vs. the 7-hour industry average. Coaching absolutely matters.
But coaching cannot replace great execution, it can only reinforce it.
“Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Sales Coaching Network
In one of our recent blog posts, we shared how Salesloft envisions the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in sales as being a way to augment seller effectiveness, not replace them. That is why the Sales Coaching Network is the perfect representation for ML and other AI capabilities in the Salesloft platform. We believe we can push the platform beyond automation, informing sales reps about important customer insights, and recommending activities that are the best use of their time.
With AI as a core strategy, the Sales Coaching Network learns from the most successful sellers and then coaches those in the middle of the pack that are striving for greater success. The table below gives you a sneak preview into where the Sales Coaching Network will take us in the future, and at the end of this post we’ll share the new AI capability Salesloft has for you right now.
A Glimpse into the Sales Coaching Network
How Does This Affect Human Coaches, aka Managers?
Effective coaching should occur in both proactive and reactive situations. Even the best managers can’t be everywhere so, those one-off situations tend to surface more often than we’d like.
The Sales Coaching Network is being built to provide more coverage on these same immediate need instances so managers can focus coaching on much broader impact topics such as how to effectively run a discovery call, handle objections or sell across different industries or personas.
How is Salesloft Delivering the Sales Coaching Network?
“It is not what the coach knows; it is what his players have learned” – Anonymous
Hundreds of millions of data points, intentionally tracked and thoughtfully analyzed. Salesloft has a massive repository of anonymized and aggregated data covering both seller and buyer behavior. Without a doubt, this data drives the valuable information and recommendations we can provide. Yet from the very start, we haven’t kept these data-driven insights solely to ourselves. Quite the opposite. We’ve published best practices and data-backed recommendations to help lift up our customers and the entire sales industry.
Our Data Science team will continue to analyze and derive insight from our ever-growing sales interaction data repository and share what we are learning from measuring some of the best revenue organizations in the world. The Sales Coaching Network will take these insights and systematically provide them, at the right time, directly in our platform. It’s AI that serves your revenue organization with the coaching they need, when they need it.
Now we can’t say all that and leave without providing you with something tangible, something real, something available to Salesloft customers right now.
The Sales Coaching Network Introduces Job Seniority
What do you call the leader at a company?
CEO.
President & Chief Executive Officer.
SVP, CEO, and Chief Evangelist.
There are countless variants on job titles that our brains have been wired to decipher. It’s something we’ve trained ourselves to do. What if we trained the Salesloft platform to do this for you?
If your company is uploading 100s or 1,000s of leads at a time, having Salesloft predict their Job Seniority makes it immensely easier and faster to separate your leads into top-level leaders who are focused on strategy, from the individual contributors focused on execution.
Five categories – Individual Contributor, Manager, Director, VP, and Executive – enable you and your team to efficiently organize personas into cadences that you can customize with the right content, messaging, and touchpoints. Job Seniority is a big step beyond simple automation. This capability turns the noise of job titles into prescriptive actions to help sellers create a more tailored and fantastic buying experience.
We are grateful to have you here with us on this journey and we hope you feel the #saleslove with this post. We work hard to provide revenue-generating teams with the tools, insights, and capabilities needed to continue evolving and thriving.
If you have any questions on these features, please check out the support documentation available for Job Seniority on our Support Site, or contact [email protected].