7 Features to Check While Selecting a Video Coaching Platform
8 minutes read
Over the past few years, the number of businesses hiring remote employees or allowing their regular employees to work remotely has increased substantially. So, it would be safe to say that we are slowly entering a new era of remote work. And, sales forces have not stayed back from adapting this trend quickly.
Also read: A guide to remote sales
You need to ensure that even when selling remotely, your sales reps are capitalizing on every buyer interaction. For that to happen, your reps should be prepared to do remote sales effectively.
How can you get your reps to be remote-sales-ready?
The answer is Video Coaching. Video coaching is a proven way to certify a sales rep’s product knowledge, messaging, objection handling and preparedness in a practical setting.
Videos have now become the new norm in learning. Video coaching provides the best way to simulate the real sales scenarios and train the reps for remote selling. In the past few years, video coaching has gained huge popularity. Companies of all sizes are increasingly turning to video coaching solutions to develop their sales force.
Forrester Research reveals the value of video coaching:
- 75% of employees were more likely to watch video lessons than read a document, email, or web article.
- 98% of organizations use video as part of their digital learning strategy.
With so much emphasis put on adopting video coaching as a part of your sales training strategy, it is equally important that you select the right video coaching platform. It is crucial to equip your sales team with the right resources to improve their potential and get better results.
We are going to look at 7 things that you need to check while choosing a video coaching platform for your sales coaching. Let’s dive in and explore:
1. Ease of use
The video coaching platform should be easy to use for both the coaches and the sales reps. If the UI of the platform is not intuitive enough for the users, then they will eventually lose interest in using it.
So, here are some fundamental features that you need to check in order to ensure that the video coaching platform is intuitive and easy to use:
- The sales reps should be able to upload, preview and review the videos without any instructions
- The coaches should be able to evaluate the video, give points, and feedback without any instruction.
2. Structured coaching approach
A good coaching platform follows a well-structured coaching approach. It’s important to make sure that this structure aligns with the coaching structure that your organization follows.
Here are a few things to consider while checking for the structured coaching approach that a platform offers:
- You need to be able to define your sales competency framework. This means that the platform should allow you to set certain competencies for video coaching assignments. Competencies like Objection Handling, Listening Skills, and more. This makes the coaches’ work easy as they can evaluate the video responses from the reps based on these KPIs.
- You need to able to assign time-bound coaching activities for your reps. Having a time-limit allows your reps to focus on only the key points while responding. As a result, they will think more, practice more, and make their messaging more succinct.
- You should be able to assign multiple coaches for a coaching assignment. This way your reps will get feedback from various coaches. It allows them to learn and observe the perspective of various experts.
3. Does it allow both quantitative and qualitative assessments?
This is a feature that you need to look for in order to provide flexibility to the coaches.
A good video coaching platform should allow the coaches to give both qualitative and quantitative assessments. While the quantitative assessment is great for giving ratings or scores to the reps, the qualitative assessment helps in giving specific and clearly defined instances.
With qualitative assessment, reps will be able to clearly understand what their shortcomings are and what they need to work on in order to improve.
4. Top Videos and Sharing
This is an important and interesting feature to have in your video coaching platform. The video coaching platform should allow the coaches to mark some excellent videos as top videos.
It should also allow them to share these videos with everyone in the team. This way all the reps will be able to learn from the best examples set by their peers. It also fosters peer-to-peer learning and improves team-wide performance.
5. Gamification
Video coaching itself is a great out-of-the-norm technique to get your sales reps excited and motivated about practicing their selling skills. But, if you pair this up with gamification, it is sure to double up the excitement levels of your reps. Gamified video coachings establish healthy competition between your employees and motivates them to improve their game.
Here is how gamified video coaching works:
- Consider that you are running a video coaching competition in your sales department. And the topic is-- Pitch the new product XYZ. For this competition, all your sales reps need to pitch the new product and whoever delivers the best pitch wins the competition.
- So, all your reps will use the video coaching platform to record a video of themselves pitching the product and submit it. These videos will then be evaluated by the coaches assigned to this coaching assignment. The coaches will evaluate the video coaching responses and provide scores and feedback according to the performance of the reps.
- All the reps who have performed exceptionally well and scored the highest will get recognized and rewarded. You can put up the names and scores of the top performers on a live leaderboard and reward them with exciting prizes.
This kind of gamified coaching environment motivates the sales reps to constantly work on improving their performance so that they can win the upcoming competitions. So, It’s a good idea to select a video coaching platform that has gamification elements in it.
6. Analytics
What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. So, it’s important that you constantly measure your coaching outcomes so that you can make improvements to your coaching efforts if needed going forward.
Hence your video coaching platform needs to have an analytics feature. Coaching analytics have to produce coaching reports which will give you clear insights into various aspects like:
The participation percentage in the coaching
Number of coachings that are reviewed and the number of coachings that are pending to be reviewed
The overall coaching performance report at individual and team level Coaching performance report based on KPIs
7. Infrastructure
What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. So, it’s important that you constantly measure your coaching outcomes so that you can make improvements to your coaching efforts if needed going forward.
This is one of the major things that needs your absolute attention while selecting your video coaching platform. If the infrastructure of a video coaching platform is bad, then it could cause various issues like:
Video upload will be very slow
When a video is played by multiple people it becomes very slow
Playing video with poor internet speed will be erratic etc.
For a smooth video coaching experience, the video needs to be encoded in streaming format. If it’s an mp4 video, the entire video needs to be downloaded, which would take time. On the other hand, a streaming format(HSL) will start playing in 10 seconds.
You also need to have Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) technology. With the ABR technology, based on the quality of the internet connection, the server in real-time will serve appropriate resolution. So if you have a great broadband connection, you’ll have HD quality playback, but if you’re in a congested 3G network, the quality might be downgraded to 240p/360p - which is still good enough, without interruption.
The platform also has to be highly scalable when it comes to the number of people using the platform. It should allow multiple users to upload a video or play a video at the same time without slowing down or getting stuck.
Below is a workable checklist that you can use to compare various tools available in the market against all the features mentioned in this blog. Hope this will help you to make the right and informed decision while investing in a video coaching platform.
More resources on Video Coaching
Best Practices to Drive Video Coaching
5 Reasons to Use Sales Coaching in your Sales Process
Scenarios where Video Coaching is used commonly
Looking for a Sales Coaching PlayBook?
Sales Coaching PlayBook Part 1 - Competency Framework
Sales Coaching PlayBook Part 2 - Training the managers to Coach
Sales Coaching PlayBook Part 3 - How to Measure the Success of coaching
SmartWinnr: The best coaching tool that you can have
SmartWinnr’s on-the-job coaching automates your sales coaching process. Plugin your own competency frameworks to measure and coach your sales teams. Managers play a crucial role in the coaching process. They do baseline assessments, set coaching goals for joint field visits, and provide crucial feedback to their sales reps.
Curious to learn more about it? Book a demo today!
Published on Sat May 9 2020