Sales Coaching as a category is broken. How do you approach sales coaching? Sales Performance Management, Call Recording, Learning Management Systems, Conversational Intelligence - all can lead to Sales Coaching.
Sales Coaching involves skill building, best practices adoption, behavioral coaching, contextual coaching, content based coaching to name a few. Organizations need scale in sales coaching especially when there is a large, distributed and remote workforce, at the same time it has to be personalized. Some organizations rely more on human involvement in coaching than others - they use sales performance management and call recording to coach their sales reps. AI is becoming increasingly pervasive in sales coaching with the adoption of conversational intelligence. Company’s needs are very varied and no one software fits all. We have vendor offerings that specialize in various dimensions of sales coaching and more are emerging.
At Cuspera, our research team has picked top 220+ products which support sales coaching use cases and our AI engine has curated insights from peers and experts to showcase their unique capabilities. Learn how Sales Coaching Software helps your business and how to choose the right software.
What is the right solution for you depends on your business context and needs. Let us help you firm up your needs and find you the right-fit solutions. Get your personalized assessment report now!
Read more about how companies in different industries are using Sales Coaching software to drive results.
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Updated By Cuspera
Last updated: Aug 16, 2023
Sales coaching is an integral part of Sales Managers’ activity to develop winning sales teams. and it directly contributes to meeting targets and growing revenue. Sales coaching is key to accelerate sales readiness, reduce ramp time and improve sales performance using a data driven approach. Revenue leaders adopt different techniques and tools to drive coaching. Sales leaders who have used effective tools have seen 50% reduction in ramp up time and more than 2X increase in engagement with their sales reps.
Some of the common techniques used by sales leaders include reviewing sales call recording, video recording, role plays, coaching driven from sales activities like pipeline review, deal based coaching, micro learning to name a few. The tools also employ a variety of techniques from call recording to video recording. Coaching and learning go hand in hand, so several LMS based platforms also extend to sales coaching. Gong, Chorus are Conversational Intelligence platforms that specialize in coaching based on call recording, Lessonly, BrainShark are more learning and knowledge centric platforms. ExecVision focuses on coaching to drive human behavior change. Worxogo provides AI based highly personalized digital coach to sales team members to nudge them for behavioral change and is driven by business KPI and organizational structure to drive the sales performance. Post pandemic situation has seen increased interest in remote coaching by the businesses.
Our Buyer’s Guide provides you detailed guidelines to select the best sales coaching platform that best suits your business. We bring you a selection of such platforms and tools for your consideration.
Revenue Intelligence Platform to coach sales reps
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that sales managers use to coach their sales reps.
It gives sales managers direct visibility into sales conversations to help them get direct feedback on pricing, messaging, product rollouts etc. Insights into sales conversations help to identify best practices, scale them across sales teams and thus reduce ramp up times for new hires. They also help to improve quota attainment and thus directly contribute to topline.
Gong has integrations with all major web / video conferencing software. It can directly join your meetings and record your conversations. It uses AI to transcribe your calls and identifies coachable moments for upsell, cross-sell etc.
Deal Intelligence is fantastic. It provides me with a very easy resource to get accurate and data-driven insights. And more importantly, it serves as a second layer for me to ensure that every one of my reps' forecasting is indeed accurate, based on the data. Above and beyond all of that, Deal Inte...lligence is able to provide me with a quick way to understand how we're managing our sales cycles and what has the highest likelihood to close.
Kara Martin
Mid-Market Sales Manager
Zenefits
Vendor: Gong.io Inc
Founded: 2015
Company Size: 101-250
HQ Location: 814 Mission St, Floor 4 San Francisco, CA 94103
Financials: SERIES E
Conversation Intelligence Platform for Sales to drive team performance
Chorus by ZoomInfo is the leading Conversation Intelligence platform for sales teams (reps and managers both use Chorus).
Organizations can unlock the insights that help your team close more deals, conduct sales performance reviews and ramp reps faster. Top benefits include cloning your best sales reps and coaching to win more deals.
Chorus joins the online calls and records them. It uses AI to transcribe the calls and point out key moments for upsell, and cross-sell. It also allows you to search by keywords like pricing, competitor names, etc.
Chorus has helped our sales organization go from good, to great, to excellent in a very short amount of time.BROOKS PETTUS
COO
Housecall Pro
Vendor: ZoomInfo Technologies LLC
Founded: 2000
Company Size: 1001-5000
HQ Location: Vancouver, WA
Financials: PRIVATE
Sales Training Software to accelerate ramp time and improve performance using data-driven readiness
MindTickle is a sales coaching and training software that helps in sales-readiness.
MindTickle accelerates onboarding with microlearning, social and gamified training, equips managers to do data-driven coaching, enables channel partners to enable their teams for sales-readiness. MindTickle's AI-enabled platform provides automated workflows to tailor learning paths for its users based on their profile and performance. It supports user management to manage user-specific profiles that help in personalizing content and training and coaching based on their needs.
MindTickle platform and the associated applications support coaching course content creation, learning program tracking, and management. It provides various templates, checklists, and assessments to help in training and coaching. MindTickle is enterprise-ready with features such as data security and industry-standard certifications.
Quickly transitioning to a virtual event wouldn't have been possible without MindTickle! Assigning learning content at scale and driving interaction was key to the success of our event!Carolyn Montgomery
Director of Sales
Nextep
Vendor: Mindtickle Inc
Founded: 2011
Company Size: 101-250
HQ Location: 115 Sansome St. Suite 700 San Francisco, CA 94104
Financials: SERIES E
In this section, you will find
What is Sales Coaching?
Types of Sales Coaching Tools
Why is Sales Coaching Important?
Benefits of Sales Coaching
How is AI used in Sales Coaching Software?
Uniqueness in Sales Coaching Software
How to Choose Right Sales Coaching Software
Challenges in Adopting Sales Coaching Software
Simply put, sales coaching is a process that helps sales reps achieve a higher degree of performance. Sales Coaching is -
It involves having one to one sessions helping the rep discover himself, what his strengths are, the gaps in his thinking, his weaknesses, his motivations and enable him to build and grow his relationships, etc.
It is not a one-time activity but when sustained over a period of time, it can truly transform the rep's performance.
Coaching focuses on replicable customer winning behavior, versus only closing single deals.
As a Manager, telling the sales rep what to do and how to do is NOT coaching. This only ensures you have solved their problem once. Because in this model, the sales reps keep coming back for hiccups, doubts, and glitches faced. Now the manager becomes a blocker for the Sales rep to grow. Sales coaching, on the other hand, aims to help sales reps achieve their goals by helping them figure out ways to move past the hiccups, doubts, and glitches by themselves, and not by trying to solve their every problem; in essence teaching the man how to fish independently.
Sales Coaching tools help managers to dive deeper into sales conversations and activities to identify coaching moments and improve sales performance.
Sales coaching tools broadly fit into 3 types
Sales coaching software records your sales calls and transcribes them. They also analyze the calls and score it on the desired parameters like tone, speed of talking, etc. Peers/managers can listen to the call recordings and give feedback on what worked and what needs improvement. They can also identify pivotal moments and upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
Sales coaching software analyzes your video recordings, role plays and scores them with respect to predefined parameters. They also allow your peers/managers to give feedback on these recordings. They can be used to create libraries of best practices of recordings from top reps that help ramp up sales reps faster. Added benefits include consistent messaging and sales processes across the team.
Some coaching tools track sales team activities across the pipeline. They are helpful to identify which deals to prioritize, what's working or not working, what engagement activities to increase etc.
Sales Coaching software is mainly used by sales teams. The following stakeholders use this software for different applications.
Sales leaders are mainly concerned with their sales team performance and win rates. Coaching software gives them good visibility into deals related activities and sales conversations. This helps them identify winning behavior and practices and they can make them repeatable across the sales team. Having consistent messaging, how the product is spoken about or positioned is critical to leaders. These software help review the sales calls and can help establish standardized sales processes and messaging across teams.
Depending on the software, sales reps can focus on conversations and the software transcribes meetings for them and prompts them on the next steps. These tools also allow managers to review and give feedback to peer calls and videos which help them improve their performance.
Sales coaching tools are internal-facing tools (except the ones which record customer conversations). Hence they can be used across sales channels (phone, video, email, SMS, etc) reps use to reach the customer.
Some coaching software is primarily designed to record the customer conversations, take notes and transcribe them. Some even give live coaching tips during the calls.
Some coaching software allows for recording videos of sales employees to practice sales situations and role-plays (This software is not customer-facing). Both software allows for sales reps and managers to give feedback to sales reps on calls and videos.
Email and text are also used.
Research suggests that quality coaching can improve long term sales performance by over 19%. Furthermore, companies that have implemented a formalized coaching program saw an increase in win rate by 12% in just 6 months.
Sales coaching software arms sales managers with recordings of sales conversations with customers or role-play - practice videos that they can use to coach reps. The software can analyze these calls/videos and score them on desired parameters. Based on these scores, managers can directly look at the ones in which reps need the most help. They can evaluate reps on multiple parameters beyond what software does and identify their improvement areas and train them to get better. Thus training can be personalized and helps improve the performance of each sales rep which ultimately translates to high quota attainment. Some sales software understand your sales conversation with your customers and suggest the next steps to be taken to improve the closing rate for the deal.
Study shows that sales reps who get at least 3 hours of good sales coaching per month exceed goals by 7%, increase revenue by 7% and increase close rates by 70%.
Coaching software can identify high-risk deals looking at sales calls or videos of the sales rep. Getting early signals into this information really gives leverage to the sales manager to take corrective action. Coaching software mainly targets the middle 60% of the sales guys and helps them improve their performance. The software helps to identify best practices of A sales guys and help replicate them to other members of the sales team (middle 60%). Once these middle 60% gets trained and regularly coached, the performance of the entire sales team goes and it directly translates to increased revenue.
Xactly Insights data shows that rep performance peaks between 2-3 years in a role.
This software helps create a library of best practices that your best sales reps use to close their deals. These practices then can be used to train and onboard new reps (effectively cloning your A players) thus reducing their ramp-up times. Thus coaching software can help your sales reps to peak earlier.
We also love the Library feature where we can store calls in the library to improve and speed up ramp time for team members.
Managers have direct visibility in sales conversations and activities. They can understand how the product is being spoken about and positioned to the customer. This helps them set standard sales processes and deliver consistent messages to their customers, across the sales teams and geographies.
According to HubSpot, one of the top reasons sales reps leave their job is a lack of career development and education opportunities. In fact, OMG's data consistently shows that sales managers aren't spending enough time coaching their salespeople and when they do, the coaching is weak.
Sales coaching is the process by which the sales managers give actionable feedback to sales reps to meet quota. Coaching helps in continuous improvement in the performance of the workforce. This software enables recording customer calls, video role plays, tests and assessments or pipeline performance. The software auto scores these calls/videos on various dimensions and prioritizes them. Listening to these calls/videos enable sales managers to give coaching inputs to sales reps on dimensions they need to improve.
Sales managers believe they are not the best coaches and do not have the necessary data to coach the sales employees. This software overcomes the data barrier and gives managers all data and tools to help coach sales reps.
I use Zoom so it's important that the person I'm meeting with sees that I'm engaged and not busy looking away, taking notes and half-heartedly paying attention to what they're saying. As a newer rep, I'm also able to send links to my manager so if he's not available to join my meetings, I can still get coaching AND I can also self-coach
Having recordings of customer call conversations is extremely insightful as it provides direct insights into what happened in the sales call. This can be used to identify winning behaviors, learn about why deals are won/lost, etc. All these set the basis for having reviews based on data that were previously done based on outcomes without any details of conversations. Identifying coaching and improvement areas becomes incredibly easy with these tools. Sales reviews can now be more structured, data-backed and actionable. All conversations can be reviewed by managers and peers. Each salesperson has a unique style, and these software help managers to give personalized feedback to each one of them.
I also like that I can leave feedback on different areas of the call because that has helped my skills improve and improved the quality of my call reviews with my manager
Sales coaching tools help managers create a library of best practices calls and videos that are used by the best sales reps to close deals faster. These past conversations/videos can be used for learning about the product, client, customer, and sales situations. This helps new reps ramp up faster and hit the ground as soon as possible. They can also have the best responses for objection handling and exception cases which can be used to train reps for such cases.
Sales Managers usually complain that they don't have the necessary skills or the data to coach the sales reps. This software gives them all the data they need about the sales rep, his activities, his call, his clients and their preferences, etc. The software scores calls and videos and identifies improvement areas. Thus it removes major hurdles that prevent managers from being good coaches.
Conversation Intelligence software uses machine learning capabilities to analyze sales calls and give insights that help close deals faster. This software has capabilities such as call recording, call transcription, keyword searching in calls, call analytics, etc. Some of them use AI for live coaching i.e. to give live tips to reps based on what is being spoken about in the calls. AI can identify who is talking (rep or customer) when competitors are being mentioned, and cross-sell up-sell opportunities. These capabilities allow the sales guy to focus on the customer and they handle the chores of taking meeting notes, sending follow up emails, etc.
You can also train the tool to listen for certain words or phrases and then surface them (i.e. competitors)
This software has unique capabilities that allow sales managers to give role-play assignments and tasks to sales reps, sales reps to record their videos and share it with their manager, and peers to review/give feedback to videos. Some of them also have conversation intelligence capabilities on top of audio of these videos. AI can score these videos based on predefined parameters which have the sales manager to give personalized feedback to each rep.
Sharing feedback and comments is also super easy and I love that you can comment right at a specific time on a video rather than having to wait till the end of the recording.
Some coaching software uses AI to record auto-capture sales activities and auto-update them into the CRM. They help visualize sales activities at the deal level and help prioritize deals to improve close rates.
Sometimes some software is designed for a particular vertical. For example, Allego is mainly meant for financial, life sciences and high tech industries; Voiceops for lending, insurance, travel, etc
A larger team size or enterprise-level deployment asks for very different capabilities of the software as opposed to SME ones. One key difference is enterprise software needs to have low security and privacy risks, clear data ownership and transfer and high uptime.
Also, any sales team which has very few top performers and a large middle (average skill, average motivation) is ideally suited for sales coaching software. Sales Coaching software is particularly useful when the company is mid-market/enterprise and has a big sales team (>10 members) where the manager is not able to give individual attention to sales reps.
Your coaching software depends heavily on the way you reach your customers. If your sales process depends heavily on inside sales, call recording solutions will suit you the best whereas if you do a lot of face to face selling, video solutions would be better. Some solutions train you to train on writing emails, texts, etc.
Sales coaching software can be used by any industry and evidence suggests that it is primarily used by the technology industry. It can be used by companies of all sizes (small to enterprise). Some software is specifically designed to meet the specific needs of users in certain industries and that means that the software already understands the industry/role specific jargon of the user. For example - Voiceops is customized for travel, insurance, and lending industries. It can identify specific terminologies and competitors particular to those industries like loans, debt, equity, auto insurance, etc
Pointed solutions include software that is meant/designed for sales coaching like Chorus, Gong, Allego ,Balto, etc. However, horizontal solutions offer sales coaching as an additional feature. For example - outbound call dialers like SalesLoft are mainly meant for sales engagement over phone and email, but they can record the phone conversations and these recordings can be used for coaching as well. Pipeline analytics solutions like topopps are mainly used for forecasting, pipeline visibility. They can also be used for coaching reps to prioritize deals, refine deal engagement strategy, etc.
Although every coaching solution boosts sales performance, and ultimately revenue, only a few of them help improve messaging and sales pitches of your products. For example, coaching tools based on sales activity don’t help, you improve messaging while call recording and video recording ones do.
Integrations with other tools increase the value that you can derive from these coaching tools.
This software has to integrate with your web conferencing solution to record sales conversations and also with your CRM to get their contacts so that it can auto-follow up with customers.
For AI to auto-update your CRM with all your sales activity, these solutions will need integration with your email, calendar, phone, SMS etc so that it can scan all your touchpoints and keep your CRM up to date.
The biggest issues that users face while using some of the sales coaching software (the ones which record conversations) are privacy concerns from clients. Clients have reported discomfort over some bot listening to the sales call (especially early in the sales cycle) as sometimes company level-sensitive details are discussed over these calls.
While sales managers agree with the importance of coaching, one of the common complaints of sales managers is that they do not have time or the data to coach their reps. Thes software helps with the data part but does very little to help sales managers free up their schedule to coach reps.
It does not take much effort to set it up and start using this software unless there are a lot of customizations and integrations needed. Organizations start seeing time to value as early as one month and for enterprises, it can go up to 2-3 months as well.
Get AI-generated right fit software based on peer experience in just a minute.
Sales Coaching Software for All Business Coaching Styles to deliver customized content and unique coaching programs to the sales and business clients
Coach Simple is a coaching software offers customized content and unique coaching programs that encourages coaches, managers and executives to promote a coaching culture and also guide professionals. It supports custom coaching programs to match needs of one-on-one, team, group and enterprises.
Vendor: Coach Simple LLC
Company Size: NA
Financials: NA
Data-driven deal coaching and digital deal rooms for strategic deal execution
DealCoachPro is a Digital Deal coaching and Deal rooms software for enterprises, for driving deal execution through structured conversations based on sales structure framework. Virtual Deal rooms help sales teams to meet and get information and updates on deal health in real-time.
Vendor: Deal Coach Pro, Inc.
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: 901 NW 35th St, Boca Raton, Florida 33431, US
Financials: PRIVATE
Manage a business, how to improve conversion rates, increase sales
Vendor: Buzzy Sales
Company Size: 2-10
HQ Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7W 0H1, CA
Financials: PRIVATE
Technology Platform with Management skills to engage market growth with proven B2B techniques
SmartFunnel is a Sales Collaboration App that helps the sales team achieve their targets through collaboration selling. It helps to increase sales and revenue.
Vendor: SmartFunnel
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: 77 Mattawa Crescent, Ottawa, K2M 2E7, CA
Financials: PRIVATE
Accelerate Growth and Reduce Turnover
Vendor: BrainX
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 86 Cloverwood Ave, Thousand Oaks, California, US
Financials: NA
Agent Performance Enhancer For CX Workforce
Vendor: InProd Solutions
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: Level 1, 520 Bourke street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, AU
Financials: PRIVATE
Find where sellers win to scale up success and revenue.
Allego Conversation Intelligence is an AI-powered sales coaching software designed to help both sales representatives and sales managers improve performance and revenue. The tool records all the calls, supports playback, and transcriptions, and scores the performance against the best practices in the organization.
Vendor: Allego, Inc.
Founded: 2013
Company Size: 51-100
HQ Location: 117 Kendrick Street Suite 80 Needham, MA 02494 USA
Financials: PRIVATE
can sync your sales teams’ email inboxes directly to Salesforce.
Zoominfo InboxAI is a Sales Engagement Software. It can capture contact and activity data buried deep in the email inboxes and calendars of sales representatives. That data is then populated within the CRM system of record -- triggering alerts and generating analytics essential to supporting renewals, managing new business pipelines, and giving every organization a 360-degree view of customers, prospects, and partners.
Vendor: ZoomInfo Technologies LLC
Founded: 2000
Company Size: 1001-5000
HQ Location: Vancouver, WA
Financials: PRIVATE
Fully Integrate Your Sales Process in Saleforce
Strategy Mapper is a Sale Intelligence Software. It provides sales leadership unparalleled visibility and access on the progress of accounts and opportunities, to ensure revenue goals are met and exceeded. It is used by Account Executives and Sales Engineers, Sales Leadership, CEO - COO - CMO - CRO.
Vendor: Point N Time
Company Size: 1-10
HQ Location: Wolverley Ln, Allen, Texas 75002, US
Financials: PRIVATE
Increase Sales Performance with SuMo Motivate from CloudApps
CloudApps is a sales effectiveness and accuracy platform designed for sales managers to help predict and enhance sales. It takes a data driven approach to close on the deals and add to the win rate.
Vendor: CloudApps
Company Size: 11-50
HQ Location: 2 Winnersh Fields, Gazelle Close, Winnersh, Berkshire RG41 5QS United Kingdom
Financials: PRIVATE
CX quality assurance platform that empowers QA leaders
Intuitive CX quality assurance standardization platform to empower QA leaders and build trust across your entire organization.
Vendor: Leaptree Ltd
HQ Location: 2nd Floor, Castleforbes House, Castleforbes Rd, North Wall, Dublin 1, D01 A8N0
Sales Enablement Solution for digital conversation support for your sales success
bao solutions a Sales Enablement platform is a conversation intelligence solution that helps to improve the way to speak to the customers, enable internal team best practice sharing and systematically increase closings. It helps to improve sales and revenue and scale best practices.
Vendor: bao solutions
HQ Location: Innere Wiener Straße 5, München, Bayern 81667, DE
