How to boost revenue with data-driven sales coaching
Sales coaching is a proven revenue booster for businesses. According to one study, companies with a successful coaching program reported a 25% to 40% increase in sales activity, leads generated, average deal size, and close ratio. An annual CSO Insights Sales Enablement Report revealed, year after year, that sales coaching had the greatest impact on win rates and quota attainment.
But many businesses still need to prioritise sales coaching in their revenue strategies. Though training is offered, many take an informal or ad hoc approach to coaching, which prevents them from leveraging its full effects. Why?
Addressing the sales-HR disconnect
Motivating sales representatives and helping them to meet their targets are essential roles of the sales manager. Sales coaching can help, yet research suggests that 73% of sales managers spend less than 5% of their time on it – and only 7% of all sales managers are effective at coaching salespeople when they do.
That’s because many sales managers are not receiving coaching of their own. One study shows that 59% of managers overseeing one to two people receive no managerial coaching at all. And of those who manage three to five team members, 41% received zero coaching.
One misconception is that sales onboarding and consequent coaching is the role of Human Resources. But HR intervention tends to focus on the legalities – helping sales managers address specific issues and challenges correctly. They might deliver sales training in this regard, but this is different from sales coaching.
While training from HR is required to bring sales teams up to speed with requirements and expectations, coaching is about continual and proactive improvements. Research from Gartner found that B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information provided during training within a week, and up to 87% of information is forgotten within a month.
If businesses are to grow their revenue, this needs to change. Sales managers must feel empowered to take charge of sales coaching, but doing so requires access to the right tools and sales insight.
Empowering sales managers to deliver
Sales coaching today can be elevated by the CRM software already used by the business to join up its revenue cycle. Within the CRM lies a wealth of data that sales managers can access to deliver valuable sales coaching that will help the team to:
- Better understand opportunities in the pipeline – Good reps won’t want to see an opportunity lost, but working every one of them can spread time too thin and impact the customer experience. Equipped with insight from the CRM, sales managers can identify key opportunities and coach sales reps to focus their efforts on high-value deals and those most likely to close.
- Improve deal conversion – Insight from your business’s CRM can help identify deals most likely to close and the steps most likely to close them. Providing coaching based on the successful actions taken by others to close deals will instil best practices and constant improvement to workflows and playbooks.
- Drive adoption of new processes – Revenue and, therefore, sales strategies must constantly evolve in line with changing demand. Data-driven sales coaching delivered by the sales manager can help demonstrate the benefits that will encourage quick adoption of new processes, sales software, or value massaging – namely getting reps to quota quickly.
Unlocking CRM insight for sales coaching success
All the sales coaching data your sales managers need is already available via the CRM. The challenge is turning that data into accessible and actionable insight.
Cloudapps Revenue Intelligence platform can help. Using a combination of next-generation technology and the latest developments in AI, Cloudapps unlocks, synthesises, and learns from the real-time sales intelligence hidden in your CRM and other tools used daily in the business.
In doing so, it can deliver sales managers:
- A probability of closure for each deal, plus the reasons why, to identify key opportunities.
- A proven sales process to inform coaching – ensuring the optimum customer experience every time.
- Guided selling via the CRM system to encourage the right activities to close the right deals.
To discover more ways Cloudapps can support your revenue teams, contact us.
