Leveraging AI to coach your salespeople
There is no doubt that AI is going to play an increasingly important role in facilitating complex B2B sales. Here are a few ways in which sales managers can harness AI to coach their salespeople more effectively:
- Implement ai-enabled call transcription software – AI-enabled call transcription solutions have evolved significantly over the past few years. They are now not only able to accurately capture the conversation, but also to highlight key decisions and agreed next steps as well as assessing the sentiment of the call. If your organisation has not yet invested in one of the many available state-of-the-art solutions, you must convince them to do so.
- Encourage salespeople to coach themselves – today’s AI-enabled call transcription solutions provide a wealth of insight into how the call went, what was discussed and agreed, and what the salesperson could have done better (and/or what they need to do in the next call). Help your salespeople to recognise how these systems can improve their own self-awareness and encourage them to use the insights to aid their own development.
- Look for patterns – review the call analysis for patterns: Look for individual repeating habits that provide personal coaching opportunities, and for common sales organisation-wide habits that may indicate the need for better sales tools or training.
- Identify missed signals – sometimes salespeople are so focused on where they want the conversation to go next that they miss obvious clues in what their prospect has just said – these are often easy to spot in retrospect. Use these as learning opportunities to coach the salesperson to be a better active listener.
- Help salespeople to follow your sales methodology – today’s more advanced call transcription systems allow you to embed your chosen sales methodology in the analysis – for example, how well the opportunity was qualified by the salesperson, what information was gathered, what tactics were used. If your current transcription solution does not offer this level of analysis, and if their roadmap is unconvincing, you may want to consider upgrading.
