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What if your sales team could learn quicker, adapt faster, closing more deals without investing months in training?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has made it possible!
AI is transforming sales training by making it smarter, more personalized, and incredibly efficient.
Research by Gallup’s State of the Global Workspace shows that compared to typical disengaged workplaces, real-time feedback combined with ongoing AI coaching and training results in a 17% increase in productivity, a 21% increase in profitability and a 20% increase in sales.
But how exactly does it work?
This blog provides comprehensive insights to help you better understand sales coaching and increase your team’s productivity.
Sales Training v/s Sales Coaching.
Sales coaching is often confused with concepts such as mentorship or sales training. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the definitions of these terms. The most notable difference between them is instructive versus collaborative. Sales training is instructive, while sales coaching is collaborative.
We now know that sales coaching can be quite effective, but many businesses cannot afford it and find it difficult to scale.
Sales training with AI has emerged due to the increased desire for more affordable, scalable solutions that combine ongoing coaching with structured training.
Roger Fuhrman, an experienced eCommerce Sales and Marketing Consultant, says the basic distinction between sales training and coaching is that sales training teaches the basics—techniques, strategies, and best practices—in a structured way.
Sales coaching, on the other hand, is ongoing and personalized. It helps each salesperson improve based on their unique strengths and challenges.
Training gives the knowledge; coaching makes it stick.
Why is Sales Training Essential for Skill Development?
Sales training is crucial because sales generate income, which is the lifeblood of any business. A skilled sales force can outsell rivals and cultivate a network of potential customers.
If a lawyer, accountant, or tradesperson weren't trained, we wouldn't hire them. The same concept applies to sales representatives and managers. Businesses have many competitors to outperform, and sales training can help with that.
Training helps to build a strong foundation. Training provides the essential building blocks:
- product knowledge
- objection handling
- negotiation tactics
- customer psychology
Products and services often appear alike to customers, leading businesses to compete primarily on price. However, in business-to-business sales, people buy from people, so having a well-trained sales force makes more sense than constantly lowering the selling price.
Even with social media and technology advancements, B2B sales are still people-to-people connections. A skilled sales team may help you generate more leads and turn more prospects into clients.
Most businesses recoup the expense of training within a month to six months of completion. Time is mostly based on volume and profitability, which are specific to each company.
Studies show that 84% of sales training participants feel more prepared to handle customer interactions.
Image courtesy of 300 hours
Have you ever heard of the forgetting curve in sales training? According to it, almost 84% of sales training is forgotten and lost in the first few months after it. This suggests that training should be a continuous process.
Training should be an ongoing process that includes practical experience and instant feedback. Traditional training often lacks real-time feedback, making it difficult for salespeople to adjust to changing client interactions.
At this point, AI sales coaching or consulting becomes essential. It provides ongoing direction, tailored feedback, and useful adjustments to assist sales teams in refining their strategy and boosting output over time.
Why Traditional Sales Coaching is Expensive and Hard to Scale
The one-size-fits-all approach wastes valuable resources and holds back real sales success instead of helping teams reach their full potential. Here are the sales training industry’s inherent flaws and outdated methods that make traditional sales coaching less reliable.
- Lack of relevancy and real-world application
Specific sales problems require specific sales training, which textbook training doesn’t provide. Using obsolete techniques and hypothetical scenarios based on FAB models (features, advantages, and benefits) leaves your team unprepared!
The true benefit comes from a thorough diagnosis and practicing on actual sales situations rather than a once-over, superficially painted-by-numbers exercise.
For example:
A B2B SaaS rep trained on generic sales tactics tries to sell a CRM to a startup. The prospect asks how it will help their team actually use the software. The rep, stuck on features, can’t give a clear answer—so they lose the deal.
This sort of training only wastes financial resources.
- An obsession with closing
Closing matters in sales, but it’s just the final step. The keys to success are building trust, listening, and asking the right questions with a buyer-focused mindset.
Pushy closure methods taught to sales teams can backfire and are outdated. Clients need to be treated as people, not just sales targets.
For example :
A B2B SaaS rep, eager to close, pushes a prospect to sign up for a demo. However, the buyer still has concerns about integration. Instead of listening, the rep keeps pushing for a yes, making the prospect walk away.
- Misalignment with modern buyers
Like human behavior, buyer behavior is complicated! Modern clients are more informed, digitally connected, and have much higher expectations.
Most sales training does not effectively train sales teams to understand clients' pains or problems, leading to misalignment with them. Throughout the sales process, it's important to make sure your customers understand that they have been seen, listened to, and understood.
AI sales coaching is a game-changer in this regard. It provides a scalable and economical solution that offers individualized training, data-driven insights, and real-time feedback.
Use Cases for AI Sales Coaching Solutions
What if every sales call was a coaching session?
The AI software makes it possible by reviewing conversations and providing feedback on tone, objections, and closing. This isn't speculation; businesses employing real-time AI coaching see a 15% boost in deal closure rates. Your preferred AI sales software can serve one or more of the following purposes:
- AI sales role-play
- Personalized training programs
- Ongoing performance assessments
- Training gamification
- Training resource development
How does Demodesk AI coaching work?
AI-powered coaching is revolutionizing sales training. Conventional approaches require time-consuming mentorship sessions, subjective feedback, and manual call evaluation.
A top-notch AI coaching tool automates sales coaching through AI-driven call analysis, offering transcriptions, performance highlights, and recommendations for improvement.
Demodesk AI-Powered Sales Training Workflow
Meeting Transcribed:
Demodesk, an AI sales coaching tool, provides transcription features for video and audio meetings with clients. Sales reps can access the transcript of their calls in 98 languages to revisit important conversations and follow up on important points they missed.
AI Summary Generated
Demodesk also provides a summary of the call to help them better understand.
AI Coaching :
Gives personalized feedback based on industry-proven sales methodologies such as BANT, MEDDIC, and SPICED.
BANT, MEDDIC and SPICED are highly effective sales methodologies widely used by industries to boost revenue and sales. Demodesk uses these industry-proven principles to provide feedback to sales teams, enabling them to identify and refine their skills gaps.
CRM Updated
Administration tasks are daunting and time-consuming, which could be diverted to more productive tasks. To save the sales team time, Demodesk has introduced its unique feature that Automatically logs essential call details into Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive.
Provides actionable feedback :
Feedback, along with intelligent recommendations, is a savior in sales, and the demo desk is an expert at providing actionable feedback. The suggestions provided with feedback are worth implementing and tend to multiply sales.
What type of feedback does AI coaching offer?
This system, driven by AI, offers useful feedback to enhance sales performance based on critical metrics.
Average Score Feedback
The system evaluates the entire team's performance against pre-determined criteria in a scorecard. A low average score can indicate areas for improvement, such as objection handling or product knowledge.
Total Recordings & Feedback Provided
It records the recorded meetings and how many have been provided with feedback. If few recordings have been provided with feedback, it could suggest more coaching efforts to be undertaken for better improvements.
Talk Ratio Insights
If a sales representative dominates the conversation, the software may recommend offsetting it by asking open-ended questions more frequently. When they're too reserved, push harder to drive the conversation.
Question Rate Guidance
The algorithm analyzes how frequently reps ask questions. If they don't ask enough, ask more discovery questions to fully grasp the prospect's needs.
Engagement Score Analysis
If the meetings are not engaging, the system may flag trends—perhaps the rep is saying too much jargon, not telling enough stories, or not addressing the prospect's pain.
How to Implement an Effective and Scalable Approach
Through the integration of AI in sales coaching, businesses can scale and optimize their services to better serve their clients. Here's how businesses can benefit from this collaboration.
Conclusion
Classic sales training and coaching have been the norm to upskill sales forces for years but at a cost! Expensive, scalability limitations, and time-out-of-office one-size-fits-all solutions.
AI sales coaching is changing the face of the industry with customized, data-backed insights, in-the-moment feedback, and scalable training solutions.
By integrating sales training using AI, businesses can replace expensive sales consulting with a smarter, more efficient alternative.
The benefits of sales coaching are maximized when AI tailors training to individual needs. This helps teams adapt to modern buyers and close more deals.
Businesses that adopt sales training with AI will have tighter teams, better customer relationships, and increased revenue—smarter, not harder.
The future of sales training is digital and AI-powered, dont stay behind. Contact us today for a free demo.
