Quantifying Potential – How Simple Changes in Communication Behaviors Can Dramatically Improve Sales Performance

The Challenge: Quantifying What Matters Most

As a sales leader, your primary focus is ensuring your sales team closes deals. In recent pandemic times, your reps may have faced significant challenges in regard to the way they have to communicate with your customers and prospects. Having to utilize a camera and a technological interface in each conversation has tested all of our abilities as sellers. 

In spite of all these changes, our goals as sales leaders remain the same: we want to help our reps to understand their strengths and weaknesses, drive better customer conversations, and continually improve their performance to become top-performing sellers. 

No surprise here – your reps want the same things. According to Harvard Business Review, “Ambitious professionals often spend a substantial amount of time thinking about strategies that will help them achieve greater levels of success. They strive for a more impressive job title, higher compensation, and responsibility for more sizable revenues, profits, and numbers of employees. Their definitions of success are often heavily influenced by family, friends, and colleagues.”

Throughout this article, we would like to share with you a different perspective on how to help your reps achieve these career ambitions. In place of benchmarking reps against the information, you have access to such as quota attainment (with which there is a bias of availability), what if we aimed at helping reps achieve their career potential and development goals, measuring their growth and performance along the way?

Let me explain…as a sales leader, beyond hitting your performance goals – what else do you want to achieve? Be a better leader? Train and lead future leaders? Have an impact? 

Your reps are no different. Yes they want to hit their numbers, but they also want to develop and grow into their careers. 

But our training is so focused on what to say. And you, your sales managers or coaches don’t have the resources to develop such complex whole person development programs and scale them across your sales teams. Sure, you get feedback, you have metrics that measure sales performance, and hopefully, you have quantitative and qualitative analyses. But are you curating talent? Are you coaching people? Are you helping people reach their potential? 

There are now leading companies and high-performing selling teams that are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to push the boundaries of personal development. The next section explains how we now have the ability to quantify the potential of sales reps and prepare them to succed today, tomorrow, and for their entire career.

Related: What Is Conversational Intelligence for Coaches and Managers and Why It’s So Valuable

How Can Technology Help? Discovering Personalized Coaching Powered by AI

Based on Gartner’s findings, “By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ some kind of AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes (…) Creating a high-performing sales organization is difficult with traditional training and coaching technology as coaching content and recommendations are generally delivered by role to the sales organization and do not account for individuals’ learning styles.”

In the same report, the firm shows that 61% of companies that are piloting or deploying AI technologies mentioned there are benefits to their organization that were “significant” and affirmed that AI “will improve their sales organization (with) increased efficiency, cost reduction and improved revenue streams.”

There are not many objective, agile, and scalable ways in which you can quantify your sales team’s potential for success. A solution such as Quantified can help you do so with the help of AI. Our AI-based coaching platform enables reps to leverage experiential learning to reach their goals with the use of conversation intelligence and personalized coaching. 

In the following paragraphs, we are going to discuss some ways in which you can use this technology to develop your sales reps and achieve greater organizational success.

Know your reps – Get a behavioral baseline

Up until now, there has not been a standard method to assess performance baselines and progress. There is no way to manage something you can’t measure, such as nonverbal communication skills, such as trustworthiness, credibility, and empathy. Many sales organizations focus on quota attainment and other more traditional metrics that may not give reps a real shot at how they can improve their performance and be more successful.

Using an AI-based coaching platform as a part of your baseline assessment is a great way to ensure your reps’ learning and improvement goals have a solid foundation. The technology personalizes their experience, feedback, and coaching based on the objective information it pulls from the assessment of their current skills. 

Establish goals

When your reps have an unbiased assessment of their communication skills that identifies communication skills they excel at and where they need to improve, it’s so much easier and more accurate to set personalized goals. The technology does more than assess, it assembles individual development plans based on set goals to support lasting behavioral change. Communication skills gaps narrow and reps start seeing their sales performance improve.

Related: How You Can Use Data to Train Better Sales Closing Techniques?

Get an improvement action plan

The platform works differently than traditional sales methods, with reps learning 70% by experience, 20% by mentoring and coaching, and 10% by content through the platform. 

In addition to personalized feedback, guided learning journeys, progress tracking for each step, and milestone motivators for each stage of a project, reps can also take advantage of tips and best practices that will enhance their development and performance. 

By seeing what top reps achieve and using that data as a benchmark, reps can use the technology to continually reassess their skills, practice, and reassess again until they master the behavior. The coaching platform uses video to record the reps, giving them role-based scenarios or assessing live or recorded calls. These capabilities provide reps with all the support they require during their improvement process.

Track progress 

You and your reps can track their progress over time with in-depth metrics. Even better, the platform integrates with CRMs so you can see exactly how improvement efforts are impacting actual sales.

The solution evaluates sales content and visual and vocal delivery, predicts audience perception on the key metrics that engage your customers and prospects, and benchmarks performance against top performers and the industry. Scoring provides easily an understandable and standardized measurement across multiple behaviors so you, managers and coaches, and reps can see exactly how they measure up.

Assessment scores can indeed be helpful in identifying where each rep stands on their own, but when they are combined with AI-driven recommendations for improvement, they become even more powerful. A personalized action plan, one that the reps can access and engage with at their convenience, helps them focus on skills that lead to becoming better communicators.

Celebrate the growth and journey

If you have the right technology by your side, the process should be motivating and rewarding. Instead of sitting through a scheduled, generalized workshop, listening to potentially biased feedback once a year, or wasting months waiting for focus group results, reps can improve their communication impact by using efficient, completely objective analyses that will measurably change behavior. As the pressure to be high-performing sales reps increases, objectivity and efficiency become increasingly important assets. 

Your Quantified Journey Can Start Today

AI-enabled sales reps can improve human connections with prospects and customers so they can close more deals. Quantified’s AI-powered coaching platform automatically assesses live and recorded conversations, scores performance along key behavioral dimensions, and develops salespeople into top-performers with objective scores and personalized feedback and coaching.

The following are some of the benefits you can get in the short term:

• Level up your sales teams
• Improve the quality of your reps’ selling experience
• Drive higher productivity 
• Enhance organizational performance
• Increase win rates 
• Provide customers with a better service experience
• Improve Net Promoter Score
• Boost your customer acquisition and retention rates
• Shorten the sales cycle
• Decrease churn rates

For more information about what Quantified can do for you, your peers, and your entire sales team, request a demo today.