Quick Take: The AI Advantage in Sales Coaching

In this Quick Take episode, we’re exploring the undeniable power of sales coaching, the challenges of traditional approaches, and how AI-powered solutions, like CSS' Practice Coach AI, are setting a new standard for skill development. 

On the other side of this brief episode, you’ll see how AI sales coaching truly can elevate the game of your sellers.

Practice Coach AI Video

Matt Sunshine

The Center for Sales Strategy

Transcript

Matt Sunshine: 0:05

Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. Today, in this Quick Take episode, we're exploring the undeniable power of sales coaching, the challenges of traditional approaches and how AI-powered solutions are setting a new standard for skill development. On the other side of this brief episode, you'll see how AI sales coaching truly can elevate the game of your sellers. With that, let's get started. Today, we're tackling the topic that's crucial for sales success. Of course, I'm talking about sales coaching. We're going to explore why frequent sales coaching really is the game changer from boosting performance and confidence to strengthening customer relationships. Competence to strengthening customer relationships. But let's be honest about this topic. Traditional coaching isn't always easy and there's lots of reasons, whether it's the time constraints, the limited resources, the access to experienced coaches. There are challenges around coaching all over the place. But in sales, we know that there's sales training, there's sales practice and there's sales coaching and sales management, and what we want to focus on is that practice and that coaching. So that's why, at CSS, we've created the CSS Practice Coach. They all kind of come together. It's an AI-powered solution. Again, it's the Practice Coach. And imagine having a coach available for you 24-7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You have your own coach that's ready to guide you through any number of diverse scenarios, whether it's a sales call or a presentation, or handling a tough negotiation, with personalized feedback, real time performance analysis and the ability to adapt, to adapt to your unique needs and style. Ai in this case the practice coach. Ai is really revolutionizing, changing, improving the way salespeople can hone their skills, can really refine their skills.

Matt Sunshine: 3:06

But let's dive into this just a little bit. Let's talk about the importance of sales coaching. So why is sales coaching so important? Well, there's all sorts of data out there and all sorts of statistics out there that will point to. Training will give you a 20 to 30 percent bump in in production. But training followed up by practice and coaching will four times that 80 percent improvement in in production. And and if what you're focused on is getting training done well, then who cares? But if what you're focused on is getting training done well then, who cares? But if what you're focused on is getting revenue production accomplished, improving your sales performance, then training plus practicing plus coaching is the ideal scenario. That's why this is so important.

Matt Sunshine: 4:02

The challenge I mean the challenge of this is that no one has time to do it and no one does it often enough for it to start to build new habits. You know, practicing golf once a year or twice a year is not going to make you a better golfer. Practicing every day is going to make you a better golfer, and practicing with a coach to give you input on what you're doing well in those areas that you can improve will make you even better. But the challenge is finding the time to do it, finding the time to get a coach to do it, and we all know those reasons. Everyone is busy. That's the reason why having an AI-powered coach, like the practice coach, is so important. So let's talk about this coaching. What is it? How does it happen? When is it really available? And yes, I said 24-7, and I mean that it's available 24-7. Whenever you can get on your computer or get on your phone, you have access to your AI coach, and what makes it so incredible is that you are practicing in an environment where there's where, where where there's no judgment from your peers and no judgment from your from your management. You just get to practice one-on-one with your coach, allowing you to be as open and honest and try new things as you possibly can, knowing that your coach is going to give you feedback on what you did really well and the areas that you can improve.

Matt Sunshine: 5:40

The other thing that is remarkable about this new resource that salespeople and sales managers have available to them is the different types of role-play scenarios that you can do. You can do a sales call, a presentation, a negotiation, overcoming objections. You can practice cold calling and getting appointments. You can practice your elevator pitch, your capabilities presentation anything that you want. A scenario can be built and the people, the AI that you role play with, can be changed. You can decide do I want to role play with someone who is going to be assertive or aggressive, or egotistical, or curious, or empathetic, or honest or friendly? You can kind of choose, because in real life, in real life, when you go out and you make these calls, you do run into people that sometimes have a big ego or very assertive, very aggressive, don't have a lot of time want you to get to the facts right away, but you also meet with people that are very friendly and happy and optimistic and curious and pretty much trust everything that you're going to say to be true, and knowing how to work with and sell to and respond to each type of personality is super important.

Matt Sunshine: 7:16

The ability to role play the right scenario with the right buyer persona or customer persona is what really makes this coaching just so spot on, and it really is. Once you go through and you do a demo of this, you walk away going. I cannot believe how valuable that was. I want to do it again and again and again, and the feedback that you get is personalized, it's not generic. The feedback that the AI in this scenario is able to give is very specific to how you did and what words you used and how often did you use some of those words and how was your eye contact and you know how was your speed at which you spoke and did you take time to listen and were you specific enough in your responses? The type of feedback that top salespeople want to receive, need to receive and, quite frankly, crave to receive, I would say that and any salesperson who is out there doing their job without getting that sort of coaching and feedback is really limiting their true potential. I think getting good coaching, getting good feedback think you use any sports knowledge you want, think of any great athlete that you want they all had a coach, they all had a commitment to practice and they all had a commitment to having the very best coach coach them.

Matt Sunshine: 8:42

So let me just dive into one quick scenario just, and then we'll dive in. You know there will be more and more discussion about this. But let's say you want to practice getting an appointment and let's say the type of people that you're generally calling on, the category of business that you typically call on. Let's say the person that you're talking to is generally skeptical. You have to be specific in your. When they ask you questions, you better be specific and not vague on how you're going to respond, and they usually don't have a lot of time to waste right?

Matt Sunshine: 9:17

So if that's the category that you're calling on, if that's the persona of the person that you typically call, then that's what you should role play with. And so you, you know, you get into the role play and it's like hi, my name is and I'm reaching out to you today because and you have to have a really solid valid business reason and you have to overcome the really solid valid business reason and you have to overcome the standard objections that they're going to throw at you. But you do that and you do it again and again and again. And I will tell you from my own experience that when you practice three, four, five times in a row over a period 30 minutes, let's say, you get really good. You look at the video playback of your first role play versus your fourth or fifth role play and you go, wow, I can really see the improvement. Imagine if you had that ability to do that practice every day for 10 or 15 minutes. Every morning, before you got sat down to do your outbound cold calling or before you had that big discovery meeting with that really important prospect, you took the time to do a practice session. How much better would the real session be?

Matt Sunshine: 10:35

I'm a big believer in practice. I know that all the top performers in every business that I know of all the top performers have some sort of practice ritual and they have some sort of coaching that they're getting. The CSS practice coach is exactly that and I look forward to you exploring it boring. This has been Improving Sales Performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button For more on the topics covered in the show. Visit our website, thecenterforsalesstrategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance.