The Challenges
If you look at sales performance across your entire team, you’ll see a bell curve. You have some star performers who always hit it out of the park, some poor performers on their way out, and the 80 to 90 percent of reps who fall in the middle of the curve. Whether you call them the “herd” or the “B players”, we all wish we could magically transform them into stars.

Some of these folks have the attitude and raw talent to potentially become “A players”; they just need more knowledge and experience. Others will always be average performers. So the challenge for you is to provide sales coaching that gets those with high potential to be stars, and allows the sales people in the herd to win a few more deals each year.

The Solution: Sales Coaching
All sales people are just-in-time, opportunity-specific learners, so you need to give them just-in-time, opportunity-specific knowledge and sales coaching. With Kadient, you can track and analyze what your best sales reps are doing to advance prospects in particular selling situations to the next stage of their buying process, and capture it as sales playbooks that can be rolled out to all reps.

For example, you can create a playbook for how to sell to an IT executive in a financial services company who’s worried about network security. The playbook contains the right content, messages, and activities that are proven to work in that situation. Now when “Joe Average Performer” is working an opportunity that fits this profile, he sees this playbook. Because the buyer is at the information-gathering stage, it provides him the opportunity-specific sales coaching he needs; right at the time he needs it. It gives him the dialog starters to engage the buyer in conversation, the questions to ask to uncover the buyer’s pain, the information about how his company has solved this pain for other customers, the insight to compose a solution just for this customers, and the intelligence to differentiate from the competition. It focuses his attention on the most important knowledge, messages, and tasks that he needs right now

The Benefits
By giving sales people just-in-time, opportunity-specific sales coaching, you can better meet the needs that each of your buyers has, because the messages and information is tailored to them. By taking this approach, you can help every rep win a few more deals a year working the same number of opportunities, and shift that sales performance curve to the right. For most companies, this results in a big increase in revenue.

You gain more consistency and repeatability in your sales process, because you are being more prescriptive in how you want your reps to sell. This reinforces that winning behavior across your sales team.

Sales coaching can also help in merger & acquisition scenarios, by giving sales people the just-in-time coaching they need to cross-sell newly acquired products. It also reduces the ramp-up time of new reps, because they are following the playbooks that are proven to work, eliminating months of trial and error.

And because your reps feel better supported, you take away the frustration they feel and reduce turnover.