Sales Coaching to Empower Your Heroes and Lose Your Zeros

Introduction

On your sales team, who are your Heroes✔️, and who are your Zeros❌?   

Sales coaching is about letting your heroes, your best salespeople, get on with it. And join the leadership in coaching the rest of the team, as well.  

Just as important, sales leadership needs to know who is struggling, and why. Does an individual just need more practice? Or is there someone on the team who is just not cut out for sales – particularly B2B remote selling?  

The only way to know is through data📊. How many outbound sales calls📞 are your individual team members making? How many of those are connecting? How many of those are turning into 30-Second+ conversations? How many of those are leading to discovery calls, set meetings, demos arranged? Conversely, if a salesperson is making tons of connected calls, but showing almost no positive dispositions, do you even know?  

It's Not Just Data – It’s Actionable Data 

The single best way to help improve a sales teams’ performance is through measuring what they are doing – and frankly, a simple CRM report of activity just can’t do that. Sure, salespeople are tasked with typing into the CRM all kinds of information about their contacts with prospects X, Y, and Z. Mostly, they’ll get some notes in: “call made to X” and nothing more (better not be misspelled, though, because that will open up another account in the CRM and confuse everybody)… “that Y call said ‘not this year.’ So never mind, I closed the prospect account” …. Or, “that Z call went great and we agreed to speak again next week.” Often, the notes made in the CRM are not even useful.   

To make matters worse, according to RollWorks, 63% percent of a B2B salesperson’s time is spent in manual tasks such as this, rather than the actual sales process of talking to prospects. 

Seem familiar?👀

Two weeks later you have a one-on-one with the sales rep and ask about the follow up call they mentioned in the CRM notes. “Oh yeah! I need to do that. I forgot.”  

So, you’ve just identified one of your zeros, but it took a while to get there, and meanwhile that prospect has decided your company is unreliable and moved on to speak to a competitor.  

Reports and Dashboards – What You Really Need 

You can run report after report in a CRM and still not have the right data to coach your sales team. 

Here at Koncert, we’ve discovered over our 12+ years in the business of B2B sales enablement technology that there are a lot of sales managers who do not know how many sales calls their reps make per week, when they are taking place, or what resulted from them. They may know nothing more than a bottom-line metric: how much business closed in a month or a quarter.  

This… is so last century.

Let us help you.👍  

Koncert’s best-in-class reporting and dashboards provide sales leaders with instant, accurate data on exactly what their sales reps are doing in terms of outbound sales activity. How many calls made, how many connections, how long answered calls lasted, what the dispositions were (examples: “not interested” “set a meeting” “not qualified” “use competitor” – among others). This is powerful data all by itself.  

Calls are recorded and saved into the CRM for later coaching and learning. In particular, listen to those “not interested” calls. Maybe you need a new opener or introductory line. Recordings can also be fantastic tools for the sales reps to use themselves: they can hear whether they are sounding wooden or desperate, vs. excited to meet this new prospect and learn about their business needs.  

BTW, the automatic bi-directional sync between the Koncert dialer and the CRM means typos or forgotten details are a thing of the past.  

Find Those Heroes and Zeros in Real Time 

Using Koncert’s Remote Coach® - which is a standard feature in all four of Koncert’s Dialer products – sales leaders see all the above data and more. In fact, our users who take advantage of the full feature set of Remote Coach report that it is crazy powerful in terms of accountability and transparency. Koncert’s Remote Coach also offers a Whisper Mode – allowing a sales coach to be on a live call with a sales rep and prospect, with the prospect not being aware of any coaching going on in the background. It’s really a three-way conversation for the sales rep, who can be reminded to ask for a referral or be advised to slow down.  

Recorded and Whisper Mode calls also allow the sales leader, as well as the rep, to hear the voice of the customer. Is there a message-to-market match? What happens if not? 

The best sales reps will be flexible, listen to the customer and go where the conversation leads them to find the connection between the prospect’s needs and the solution you sell. Struggling sales reps will try to stick to the script.

Heroes will make more calls and get more out of them. Using a dialer to stop the wasted time of looking up and manually punching in each number and reminding themselves of the research on this particular lead can exponentially increase a sales rep’s productivity. The dialer will go through the phone numbers quickly, and when a prospect answers, pause while the CRM information about the person associated with that phone number pops up on the sales rep’s screen, for instant access to information that has been pre-researched. Koncert’s AI Parallel Dialer can even be set to bring up the person’s LinkedIn profile. As soon as the call is finished, the AI dialer kicks in again, going through numbers until the next live person answers and it pauses again.  

The best salespeople will find this fun. No wasted time, prospect after prospect. It will be obvious in their reporting numbers.  

Build Your Data Set and Use It for Sales Optimization 

Now that you know who on your team are your Heroes, coach them for optimization. Ask them to step up to become in-team coaches themselves. Have them share their own best practices with their teammates. This can be a powerful motivator and recognition tool that your best reps will appreciate.  

Remote Coach lets you see quickly who the problem reps are, too. In today’s competitive B2B marketplace, fewer companies will be tolerant of a long ramp-up time. If your salesperson just isn’t going to “get it” even with the individualized coaching that Koncert software can provide, then it’s easier to let them go, even as you keep the rock stars.  

Try this exercise: Do a 2-hour call blitz with your multi-line AI power dialer twice a week. Team members all know that’s when the call time is happening, and it’s a set aside time for the manager to know to listen in on calls. This helps the sales reps execute and work to get those sales conversations. Everyone on the team is in alignment, doing it together, going in the right direction. Being a Team. 

This is data-validation as well as sales coaching. This level of outbound calls can tell you a lot about your company, the products you sell and how well you are recognized in the marketplace.  

For instance, you can learn about why people are saying no. Using Cadence workflow automation software, you can see where and when in a sales campaign you are getting the replies you want vs. the replies you don’t. When are your prospects accessing the emails that come after specific calls? This is a perfect place to work to align marketing and sales messaging.  

Koncert for Sales Enablement

Successful sales teams need successful coaches to be their best. Tools for Sales Engagement include consideration of this, and Koncert is here to support our clients’ sales leadership.  

We offer dedicated Customer Success teams and full Support for every customer, through the lifetime of our relationships. Check out Koncert's suite of Dialers and ask for a demo👇. Koncert also offers free trials for eligible customers. Our success is your success!