Sales coaching is one of the most impactful training techniques to help your sales team capitalize on every buyer interaction. An effective sales coaching strategy should incorporate a systematic coaching approach for continuous improvement.

Managers providing one-on-one development support to their sales team significantly improves performance. In-person coaching is the best way to develop a sales person’s sales and behavioral skills like objection handling, listening skills, opening, closing and more. In most cases, such coaching takes place during joint field visits or scheduled one on one sessions. But with the pressure to close more deals and their daily schedule, it gets difficult for the managers to carve out time for coaching. The problem becomes more acute for managers with large and/or geographically distributed teams.

So, what is the best way to ensure continuous development of your sales team given these challenges?

The answer lies in video coaching. Video coaching uses technology to facilitate one-on-one interaction between the sales reps and the managers. With video coaching, managers can review the performance of each sales rep, give feedback and promote the best sales practices across the team.

75% of organizations who have implemented video coaching as a part of their training program, have seen a significant improvement in the sales performance and productivity of their employees.

Below are the 5 reasons to use video coaching in your sales process:

1. Ensures Uniform Messaging

One of our customers - business head of a global conglomerate - once went on joint field visits with 5 of his sales reps. He was surprised at the difference between the 5 pitches. It appeared as if they were selling products from 5 different companies.

Sales leaders often face this challenge - how to ensure that all salespeople deliver a uniform and consistent message to all customers? Video coaching can come to rescue. By assigning the same pitch as challenge to the entire team and evaluating them on a common standard, you can drive uniform messaging. For better results, share the top 3 videos with the team to give a sense of how messaging can be uniform while delivery style can be unique.

2. Bridging the knowing-doing gap

A sales rep might be knowledgeable about all aspects of the products she sells, but how will you ensure that she articulates that knowledge properly while talking to the customer? Proper articulation includes attributes like clarity, voice modulation, audience awareness and presence. These skills need regular practice to be perfected. Video coaching provides a platform where your sales team can practice till they are confident in their articulation.

When product knowledge transforms into seamless delivery, convincing customers become much easier.

We find scenario-based video coaching challenges help teams in articulating their value proposition. A client recently created a video coaching challenge requesting every team member talk about 1 single value proposition of a specific product under 1 minute. The results were fascinating - the sales leadership team came to know a great deal about what individuals think as top value proposition and how are those articulated.

3. Incentivize reps to practice

Practice makes perfect. This is especially true for salespeople, who need to have complete command of product knowledge, competitor information, value proposition and objection handling to convince customers. It is extremely important that they practice their sales pitch well before presenting it in front of a buyer.

Video coaching is an effective way to motivate sales reps to practice their message multiple times and make it perfect. Knowing that their manager will review their video, they’ll practice it until they get it right. We often find sales reps recording videos several times before finally uploading it.

4. Evaluate and Drive Sales Onboarding Training

When new hires join an organization significant resources are spent on training them and getting them ready to work independently. Even experienced sales rep needs time to understand your company, products, customers, and competitors.

While knowledge on product is important, you have to also help them in nailing the sales messaging. Use video coaching to assess new sales reps on how they represent your product and follow your sales methodology. This will help you to reduce training cost and crash time to productivity of your new sales recruits.

5. Reduces training cost

In traditional face-to-face training, the entire sales team has to be in the same location. Given the pressure on cost of organizing such training and also opportunity cost of sales team, such training can only be organized infrequently. Video coaching can replace such face-to-face coaching and the reps can choose to learn when it suits their schedule. Moreover, coaches can evaluate a participant’s field performance at their convenience. Thus sales teams can be coached more frequently at a lesser cost through video coaching, thus improving performance.

Over the past few years, video coaching is steadily replacing face-to-face coaching for large distributed sales teams. It is helping sales reps in building their confidence and aiding sales leaders in getting a clear insight into their team’s capabilities. This will, in turn, fuel revenue pipeline and organizational growth.

Looking for more on Sales Coaching PlayBooks?

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

Looking for Best Practices in Video Coaching?

Best Practices to drive Video Coaching

Scenarios where Video Coaching is used commonly

More resources on Video Coaching

Best Practices to drive Video Coaching

Scenarios where Video Coaching is used commonly

Want to know how to select the best Video Coaching Tool?

7 Features to Check While Selecting a Video Coaching Platform

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!