“Do I have the caliber to handle remote teams?”

“What if I’m not able to coach the reps effectively and it hampers my team’s KPIs?

“Will the feedback I provide to sales reps get across effectively as it used to in in-person coaching?”

Sales managers, we hear you! Your fears are valid. We know remote sales coaching can be tricky especially when along with your fears, you are also accountable for rep performance. 

But with the rise of AI coaching tools, these remote sales coaching has drastically changed—for the good. 

Now you don’t have to rely on mere 2-3 video conferencing tools to coach your remote reps. There are plenty of sales team-focused coaching tools to help you review sales calls, leverage AI-based roleplays, and provide asynchronous feedback. The possibilities with these AI-native coaching tools are endless. 

What is remote sales coaching?

In a remote sales coaching setting, sales managers provide individual support and feedback to sales reps in a remote environment, through 1-on-1 mentoring sessions and roleplays to further their skills attain their sales goals.

In a remote environment, reps either sell to prospects over phone calls or via video calls—making selling comparatively harder. In a traditional setup, reps used to sell to customers face-to-face. But with remote selling, the techniques and tools used are different and require double the efforts. This is why they need constant feedback from sales managers on improving their sales skills—objection handling and problem identification, and technical skills like pitching and using sales CRM. 

Problems managers face with remote sales coaching

Did you know that 38.7% of companies who coach reps on call performance do so at random? This means that 70% of their coaching is not driven by data—which leads to low effectiveness in coaching programs. When sales managers aren’t able to coach the reps effectively, reps may not have the skills to close deals faster, consequently leading to a surge in the cost of doing sales. 

When transitioning from in-person to remote sales coaching, tools and techniques are different and so is the coaching process. 

That’s why, sales managers must be aware of how to effectively plan remote sales coaching programs: 

Let's understand the different challenges sales managers face with remote sales coaching. 

Challenge 1: Lack of clear goals

Identify your virtual coaching needs and discover areas where your team needs improvement. If you don't have the coaching goals, it will be hard to:

• Structure your remote coaching sessions
• Align your and the reps’ expectations from the coaching program 
• Define metrics such as quota attainment, average deal size, pipeline conversion, etc.
• Assess your team’s current performance
• Plan specific outcomes

To do so, leverage sales data from your CRM, sales enablement tools, and feedback surveys. 

For example, by assessing the reps’ call recordings, you'll have data on the rep’s monologue and the conversion rate for the sales calls conducted. If the monologue is longer than a minute and the conversion rate for sales calls is lower, you can focus on helping the rep improve their overall conversion rates. 

Once you have defined your coaching needs, outline a clear agenda for the coaching session. Simply, email a general outline of what you'd like to focus on in a meeting like specific sales tactics, closed deals, deals won or lost in the past quarter, and so on.

Challenge 2: Using the age-old, traditional coaching methods

The advent of AI-native platforms like Happysales is changing how sales reps and managers participate and leverage sales coaching programs. For example, Happysales AI has a sales coaching feature where reps participate in role playing scenarios with a virtual prospect. Managers can later view the transcripts that emanate from the interaction and offer advice on a 1-1 basis later.

Instead of attempting to leverage such tools, managers try to offer and scale coaching remotely with  one-on-one calls, workshops, seminars, conferences, and roleplays are irrelevant. Here’s why this doesn’t work: 

• One-on-one calls: It would be simple to conduct coaching for a small sales team, but coaching reps 1:1 spread across various geographies and time zones is difficult.  Sales managers can find it hard to scale their coaching program using this method.
• Workshops, seminars, and conferences: These are usually done on a larger scale. Although the topics talked about in these workshops and seminars are relevant for your sales teams, they are not focused on personalized coaching.
• Roleplays: With roleplays, managers  pair with their reps, or pair two reps together and practice conversations. The drawback of this method is that the other rep may not be well-versed in practicing the conversation on a specific topic. Also, they cannot rectify their partner’s key weaknesses. In a remote setup, your reps may not have time to convene for these conversations, and may not have enough skills to analyze the other rep’s weaknesses.

Challenge 3: Sales reps not motivated and engaged in remote coaching sessions

It's easy for sales reps to feel disengaged and lack motivation in a remote coaching setup, as they feel the learning process in a remote ecosystem isn't very effective. Here are a few ways to provide more engaging sessions to your sales team. 

• Introduce polls and interactive quizzes before and after each remote coaching session to help them revisit the knowledge acquired during these sessions. 
• Leverage group discussions to encourage the sales team to discuss with each other, what's working for them, and what’s not working and learn from each other. 
• Pick a few successful case studies of high-performing reps or from your competitors, break them down for your sales team, and help them understand how they can replicate similar strategies. 

Challenge 4: Not understanding the quality of the calls

In a remote setup, you have no idea about the quality of sales calls reps are conducting. Maybe they’re not asking the reps the right questions, or emphasizing their pain points. Maybe they’re facing hurdles during the negotiation stage. Or maybe they’re spending a lot of time talking and not listening to the prospect enough. You have no control over how the reps are conducting sales calls, unlike the traditional setup where you could see how reps are conducting the calls.

Solution? Ask reps to record sales calls, and review them. Once you’ve reviewed the call, you can give them the right feedback and create a personalized coaching roadmap.

Tips for effective remote sales coaching

Now that you’re aware of the different challenges you may face with remote sales coaching, let’s understand a few remote sales coaching tips to help you make remote coaching frictionless. 

Tip 1: Dedicate time to listen to sales calls

First, encourage reps to record sales calls. Next, ask them to select 2-3 calls they’d like to get reviewed. Then, create your weekly schedule in such a way that you dedicate a few hours (in a week) to review these calls. 

One of the main challenges for reps in this process is a longer feedback-receiving period. Sales managers send feedback to reps. So, put a time cap on how long it should take to review the call—it should not be beyond a week. 

Alternatively, you can leverage AI sales tools to simplify the reviewing process:

• Leverage AI live sales coaching software to participate in team calls in real-time. You can quietly listen in on the sales calls and debrief immediately after the call to share the feedback.
• Get AI-generated summarized notes, insights into the reps’ monologues, pain points, areas they could do better, and so on. This makes analyzing the sales calls easier and speeds up your reviewing process. 

Tip 2: Set up dedicated communication channels

Are you still relying on emails to send and receive progress updates from sales reps? Or do you have a dedicated Slack channel for constant messaging? 

Having a steady communication channel is important to track your sales team’s progress. For most organizations, Slack is the primary communication channel. You can create different channels to provide feedback, share resources, share performance wins, and so on. 

For example, you can create a #feedback channel to provide feedback to reps, #coaching-progress for reps to share the progress updates, and #resources to share the relevant resources for skill improvement. 

Tip 3: Provide consistent, asynchronous feedback

Sales managers cannot offer instant feedback to reps on sales calls at any time of the hour in a remote coaching ecosystem. They cannot block video feedback calls with sales reps whenever they want. Instead, they’ll need to check with the rep before scheduling the feedback call. That's where asynchronous feedback comes in.

With an asynchronous feedback loop, reps can provide feedback to reps at their convenience. For example, if the rep has sent a sales call to get reviewed, the sales manager can send pre-recorded feedback to the rep. The rep can then view the feedback and respond to the feedback at their preferred time.

So, leverage AI video messaging tools to record, transcribe, and share asynchronous video feedback with your team. 

Tip 4: Choose an AI-powered platform that delivers interactive experiences

Use interactive AI-powered sales tools to conduct coaching calls and do AI sales roleplays. Unlike traditional video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet, these platforms are specifically developed for sales teams. With these platforms, you can: 

• Hold video coaching calls with your sales teams, get AI-generated notes for your calls, and get the calls transcribed.
• Conduct AI roleplays where the AI can create a prospect’s avatar (by analyzing the prospect’s information) for you to practice the pitch and get instant feedback from the AI. 
• Create interactive, guided product demos and impart product knowledge to reps—which is much better than video demos. 

Tip 5: Track your sales team’s progress

To track your sales team’s progress, you need to analyze individualized metrics. Some of these metrics include:

• Quota attainment: By tracking this metric, you can understand how well each sales rep is performing and how aligned the rep is to the individual and team’s goals.  
• Sales cycle length: By tracking this metric, you can know the sales efficiency for each rep. 
• YOY comparison: By tracking this metric, you’ll understand the improvement and growth patterns of the rep’s performance in the current year vs. the previous year.
• Conversions by deal stage: By tracking this metric, you’ll rectify the gaps in win and loss rate for each stage of the sales pipeline, and coach the reps accordingly.

AI redefining sales coaching

Like we shared with you earlier, AI sales coaching tools are challenging the status quo—where coaching is conducted via video conferencing platforms. You can speed up the coaching process and coach more reps in less time. . 

Here are three ways how AI sales coaching tools can empower your remote sales coaching process. 

Provide asynchronous feedback

With AI sales coaching tools,  sales managers don’t have to block time to stay present on sales calls to provide feedback. Modern day coaching software leverages Gen AI technology, to transcribe sales calls. Managers can review these transcripts to review the conversations offered by sales reps.

Or, they can leverage asynchronous video messaging tools to record their feedback and share the link to the video message with reps. Reps, at their convenience, can view the asynchronous feedback and respond to the rep by commenting on the message. 

Leverage AI roleplays

With the help of AI roleplaying, sales reps can practice their sales pitch, product explanations, and handle objections  with the AI avatar.

For example, Happysales AI emulates prospect behavior by analyzing real prospect information using LinkedIn data, internet-scale information, and DISC personality assessment. Reps can roleplay with the AI prospect and get feedback real-time. Reps can also use the “AI sales coach” feature to pause the role-play and get guidance in real-time sales.

Once the rep has completed the AI roleplay, they'll receive instant feedback on the rep's talking speed, tone of voice, pain points highlighted, and so on. This helps the rep understand the key areas they could improve on when pitching the prospect in real-time.

Get AI sales insights

With AI sales coaching software, AI can deliver insights on customer pain points, prospect’s personality traits, etc. to enhance their research and conduct high-converting sales calls. 

With Happysales AI,for example, you can gain insights into the prospect’s personality based on the DISC framework, identify their pain points by analyzing their LinkedIn profile, and evaluate the sales call based on these insights. 

Simplify remote sales coaching with Happysales AI

With Happysales AI, you can provide AI-based roleplays to sales reps. The best part? The reps can perform these roleplays without your assistance—thanks to AI that generates the prospect avatar and provides instant feedback. You can then review the call history and feedback the AI provided to the reps, and analyze the rep’s weaknesses and strengths to provide them coaching on those specific areas. And voila, remote coaching simplified!

Want to see how your reps can conduct AI roleplays with Happysales AI? Get started here. 

FAQs

Why is remote sales coaching important?

Remote sales coaching is important because it provides support and feedback to sales reps selling remotely. In this type of coaching, you have to sell to prospects remotely. This requires you to understand the different remote selling strategies and tools to get the job done and win more deals. 

How to manage a remote sales team?

To manage your remote sales team effectively, set up weekly meetings and check-ins, establish dedicated communication channels, keep reps accountable (without micro-managing them), ask your remote reps for feedback, and celebrate their wins and milestones.