How to Accelerate Sales: 5 Sales Coaching Tips

Before Learning How to Accelerate Sales, What Is Sales Acceleration?

The business landscape is changing, perhaps faster than ever before. But sales organizations still need to close deals more quickly and increase productivity. At the same time, buyers demand compelling interactions with salespeople who have empathy and can help them solve their main problems. Companies must learn how to accelerate sales and deliver on customer expectations, using specific coaching and technology to enhance salespeople’s performance and efficiency by giving them advanced tools and resources.

What exactly is sales acceleration? Dun & Bradstreet defines sales acceleration as “Strategies that help businesses move prospects through the sales pipeline with greater efficiency. Effective sales acceleration software provides sales and marketing teams with timely data and insights designed to increase the velocity and relevance of customer conversions.”

 Adobe adds a few key facts worth mentioning: 

• “If you work on a go-to-market (GTM) team, sales acceleration is one of the most meaningful ways to increase buyer engagement and the rate of sales. Simply put, sales acceleration means gearing up your team to sell at a faster rate.”
• Now, sales teams are less likely to use in-person meetings, cold calling, and other methods to generate revenue. Managing teams and individuals in a digital world where face-to-face interaction is rare is challenging. Many sales teams no longer hold meetings in person. 
• By providing meaningful and personalized content, a successful sales acceleration plan builds relationships with customers. To implement the approach, three tools are standard: lead databases, email tracking, and predictive analytics.

Traditional sales settings have been interrupted by digital-first interactions. Many meetings are now through a screen, which can impact the ever-important ability to connect with the buyer. But if organizations want to shorten the sales cycle, sales reps must develop highly relevant and personalized conversations and content for their audience, no matter whether they’re in person or interacting virtually. Sales acceleration-focused coaching is crucial for dealing with increasingly complex negotiations.

How do you accelerate sales through coaching? Keep reading to learn in the following sections.

Related: Leveraging AI for Better Sales Conversation coaching & Coaching

Sales Coaching Tips to Accelerate Sales

A simple Google search can point you in many different directions: From coaching programs to specialized hiring processes. A sales acceleration strategy can take numerous approaches. One of them is personalized, accurately measured, and technology-backed coaching to enable effective virtual sales. 

Gartner validates the transition to a more permanent digital sales environment is imminent:

• 60% of the sales force will operate virtually, according to CSOs. 
• CSOs report that 74% recently updated their seller skills profile for virtual selling or are currently doing so.
• A majority of CSOs (61%)  are investing in new technologies to enable virtual selling.

The right pitch content and conversation skills at the right time for the right buyer can help sellers take advantage of these digital interaction opportunities. Creating connections based on trust and empathy will accelerate the deal-making process. Identifying content that will address buyers’ concerns is key to building this trust.

With a cutting-edge solution that replicates real conversations, tracks subtle but essential communication variables and quantifies them, so they’re measurable, all the skills that matter can be coached automatically, accurately, and at scale.

Take a close look at the following tips:

Tip #1: Leverage e-learning

One of the benefits of choosing an online sales coaching platform is that sales reps can access the convenient, interactive platform at any time, getting a personalized assessment, feedback, and coaching to reinforce the skills they need. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a key feature of a comprehensive solution that enables personalization at scale to optimize productivity and answer how to accelerate sales through coaching.

Tip #2: Create concise coaching sessions

A sales coaching session must be straightforward and personalized. With the aid of a leading sales coaching platform, you should provide engaging and clear programs. Make your coaching plan more memorable and repeatable by efficiently designing it to be custom-fit and realistic.

Test your sales strategy and messaging before it is tested. Simulating real-world scenarios can help provide individualized coaching and prepare teams for real-life conditions. With technology-supported coaching, managers can give immediate, data-driven feedback to mentor employees by fostering open communication.

Tip #3: Include data

Every organization must continually evaluate its sales achievement in an unbiased way. If you want to know how objectively sales calls or meetings went, you need software that objectively measures performance using behavioral science, for example. It removes subjectivity and gives employees data-backed results, and allows them to reflect on how they can improve specific behaviors. 

One benefit of a sales coaching platform that focuses on how to accelerate sales through coaching is that it provides all relevant performance data in an easy-to-understand format, benchmarking progress against peers and the industry. 

Tip #4: Assess clients’ needs and worries

A focused coaching session significantly increases sales representatives’ ability to diagnose and solve their customers’ issues. A behavioral science engine can provide insights you can’t get from any other source, like predictive analytics on the most likely customer response. The system evaluates the way in which a representative speaks and behaves in real conversations and how those behaviors are likely to be perceived, validating the prediction against a massive behavioral database human-scored for impact.

Tip #5: Coach on critical conversation skills

There is not just one secret to improving virtual interactions and accelerating sales. But telling a powerful story, establishing a positive connection, and projecting engagement and clarity are critical to achieving sales goals. Soft skills are potentially more important than content mastery. 

Make sure you choose the right solution that enables you to detect, track, and coach on the following essential skills:

Presence

Making an impression during a video and in-person calls is influenced by how a person comes across in general. Sales reps must be knowledgeable and deliver well-researched material, but they must also be and are open and friendly in their approach. They must exude confidence in their product knowledge while also being relatable and likable.

Engagement

In order to build strong relationships, sales representatives should engage prospects and encourage their interest. Sales reps need to be energetic and motivated, so they sustain customers’ attention. Prospects and customers are more likely to remember the conversation and take action.

Conversation skills, such as asking light personal questions and telling a short story about weekend plans, go a long way. Still, the right type of eye contact and body language has nuances depending on whether the conversation is in person or via videoconferencing.

Related: How to Include Soft Skills in Sales Performance Coaching

Authenticity

Whether a client perceives a salesperson as genuine is what determines if they are authentic. By treating their clients as friends and demonstrating consistency between what they say and what they do, authentic sales representatives create a personal connection with their clients. In addition to using natural accents and inflections, they also use conversational language when delivering their message.

Trustworthiness

If a rep earns a client’s trust, they will very likely take action towards the sell. Credible salespeople appear to align themselves with their customers’ interests. Their delivery is consistent in tone, body language, and message. Content presented in a transparent way takes prospects’ perspectives into account.

Credibility

Credible people have authority and are an accurate source of information. A credible sales representative has a better chance of connecting with prospects and clients. Rather than simply providing information from external sources, they combine it with their own experience and knowledge and can explain their products or services in detail.

As a result of the above, you might be wondering if all of these skills could be measured and quantified without spending hours watching videos and evaluating calls. And most sales coaches are not behavioral science experts. This is where manual sales coaching tools fall short. By automating and objectively evaluating these variables, technology allows for successful individualized coaching programs that accelerate sales.

Boost Sales Acceleration Through Better Coaching Capabilities

You can boost sales in a variety of ways by combining conversation analytics, behavioral science, and AI. A robust technology platform will allow you to provide all of these capabilities. 

A professional tool can automatically and rapidly assess and measure individual sales performance on video and provide unbiased feedback and development plans. Your team members turn into high-performers as a result of using this powerful platform.

Most AI providers don’t develop their algorithms based on human-scored databases of communication data. By combining behavioral science, big data, and algorithmic strategies, Quantified created a unique approach for improving the human connection. You can identify interpersonal factors that facilitate achieving individual and team goals by combining behavioral and social science with human communication. Better conversations. Better outcomes. Request a demo today.