Best Practices to Drive Video Coaching

5 minutes read

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. That’s how powerful videos are. And that’s why video coaching is so important for a sales team. With its highly personal and visual nature, video coaching not just shows what reps are saying but how they’re saying it.

What is Video Coaching?

Video coaching aims to provide an easy, scalable way to validate sales reps’ messaging. Video Coaching comes with video-based activities, practice opportunities, and feedback mechanisms.

Typically, a coach (often a rep’s manager) will issue an activity: for example, “Show me your 30-second elevator pitch.” Reps record a video of themselves completing the activity and submit it through their mobile app for feedback.

Sales coaching has many documented benefits. From reinforcing training to promoting best practices, to even positively impacting the bottom line. Despite these benefits, many organizations fail to see the desired ROI from video coaching because of poor implementation and adoption.

To help you drive video coaching successfully at your organization, we have curated some best practices that you could follow:

Best Practices to Drive Video Coaching

1. Introduce Video Coaching Successfully to your team

A lot of psychological studies reveal that most people are camera conscious. The respondents in these studies have accepted that they worry about how they would look in a photo or video.

So, it’s obvious that people who try video coaching for the first time are conscious and nervous about it. How can you take this fear factor out and get your team comfortable with video coaching?

Here are certain measures that you can take to make your team comfortable to adopt video coaching:

Assure them that their videos are not going to be broadcasted to the entire organization. Give them comfort that only their coach and manager will get to see and review their videos.
Select the best video. Maybe one of your participants delivered a very creative and polished pitch. Pick that as the top video, take the consent of the video owner and share it with the entire team. Sharing the 1st best video helps to break the ice. It gets everybody excited to complete the activity.

2. Encourage creativity in the responses

Another great way to get your team on board with video coaching is by encouraging them to get creative in their coaching response. Basically, you do not want to make it all serious for them. Instead, let them have fun and enjoy the process of recording videos.

Ask them to pitch a product in a fun way. Or explain a certain feature by not directly talking about it but by explaining it metaphorically (using the elements at their disposal).
Tell them that they will receive extra points for displaying creativity and enthusiasm in their videos.

This way when the participants have to add a creative spin to their routine sales talk tracks, they would prepare their scripts in advance and practice them. Also, when the reps have fun and enjoy doing their exercises, they are likely to retain information for a long time.

3. Encourage video retakes

With increased repetition comes improved confidence and better delivery. Video coaching provides the reps with a pressure-free practice environment to sharpen their skills.

Encourage your reps to do multiple retakes of their response video until they get it right. Ask them to practice their talk and body-language until it comes out perfectly in the video. They can then submit their best video for the formal review.

This enables the reps to self-practice, self-evaluate, and improvise their knowledge and messaging. It helps to sharpen their messaging along the way and reinforces knowledge so they remember it for a long time.

4. Provide valuable coaching feedback

With constant feedback and viewing top videos, your reps will be able to effectively improve their talk tracks. Also, this feedback and top videos will be continuously available with them on their mobile devices. This helps them to easily reference it whenever and wherever they need it.

While evaluating your reps coaching videos, we suggest not to be supercritical in your grading, but make sure that you give solid feedback. By receiving valuable feedback, your reps gain the interest to try and improve their skills based on that feedback. This enables you to efficiently close the skill gaps amongst your reps.

5. Encourage coaches to train other coaches

Encourage your coaches from various regions to collaborate with each other (virtually) and share the best practices of coaching.

They can share

Best videos of their trainees
What coaching efforts have worked for them
What coaching efforts have not worked for them
Best ways to close knowledge gaps amongst reps etc

This cross-pollination of information helps coaches across regions to coach their trainees efficiently. Also, this helps to cultivate some standard coaching and messaging best practices that every coach at your organization can follow to achieve greater coaching results.

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Hear from our clients

Listen to Rebecca Meehan, APAC Regional Marketing, Training, and Development manager explain how SmartWinnr Video Coaching has improved sales call effectiveness amongst Boston Scientific sales teams