“We need to find a way to make our sales coaching more personalized and data-driven.”

“Managing the sales team’s performance is becoming hard to crack day by day.”

“What if we could identify the sales reps’ specific needs and challenges more easily?”

Sales managers, if any of these statements resonated with you — you might want to stick around and learn about AI sales coaching. 

What is AI sales coaching?

AI sales coaching refers to coaching sales reps using artificial intelligence capabilities to analyze and improve their sales performance.

By leveraging AI sales coaching initiatives, sales reps, and sales managers can optimize their processes better.

Sales reps can:

• Strengthen their selling skills
• Get real-time feedback for improvement
• Help them rehearse soft skills like objection handling and active listening

Sales managers can: 

• Provide coaching to reps on scale
• Get data-driven insights on individual sales rep’s performance
• Identify and understand each rep’s strengths and weaknesses
• Create personalized training programs tailored to each rep’s skills and capabilities

Among many examples of use cases for Gen AI, is Happysales. Happysales AI uses GPT & machine learning capabilities to identify buyer personality, generate call scripts, enact AI-driven roleplays, and provide real-time feedback to reps.

What promise does AI-driven sales coaching hold for sales managers and leaders?

According to Spekit’s State of Sales Training and Onboarding Report, 17% of sales leaders lack insights into sales rep training engagement. That’s what happens within the traditional sales coaching process. 

There has been a disconnect between how sales managers think about coaching and how they *actually* coach the reps.

Some of these misalignments and challenges that sales managers face include: 

• Struggling with 1:1 sales coaching
• Tracking the progress of reps’ performance and their coaching initiatives
• Providing personalized coaching to each rep with limited time and resources. 

With AI into the sales coaching landscape, sales managers can fix these challenges. In fact, 35% of salespeople are using AI to automate manual tasks and 34% of them are using it to gain data-driven insights. 

By using AI sales coaching tools, sales managers can:

• Provide real-time feedback (without sales managers) to sales reps on the key improvement areas.
• Get data-driven insights from past sales interactions to understand the rep’s performance and provide personalized training.
• Enact AI-driven roleplays without the need for another rep or sales manager

How can AI be used in sales coaching?

Whether you want your sales team to do roleplays, score their sales calls, or provide them with real-time feedback, AI sales coaching tools come with plenty of intelligent capabilities to enhance your overall sales enablement strategy.

Let's discover how AI sales coaching tools can be effective for sales managers and reps.

1. Roleplaying sales calls

To practice pitching to prospects, roleplaying is a mandatory skill improvement exercise. With the help of AI roleplaying capabilities, sales reps can execute the roleplay with the AI avatar.

For example, Happysales AI integrates with LinkedIn and provides the rep with the prospect's information — from prospect details to their personality. The AI Coach will then feed the prospect's information and generate an AI prospect avatar so the rep can make the sales call.

2. Real-time recommendations

AI can analyze sales conversations and provide real-time feedback to the rep based on their tone, speed, wording, and active listening skills.

For example, Happysales AI Coach analyzes the call based on the prospect's overall details from LinkedIn and provides real-time feedback to the rep on the things they need to improve in their sales pitch.

3. Scoring the sales conversations 

The traditional sales coaching process can be vague, especially when you have to identify the level of proficiency the prospect has in terms of specific skills such as negotiation, active listening, etc. 

With AI scoring capabilities, sales managers can give a score to the sales interactions based on a set of criteria. Based on the score, sales managers can identify the key skills the sales rep must improve on and provide them with targeted coaching accordingly.

3 best AI sales coaching software for 2024

 Not sure which AI coaching tool to go ahead with? Here are 3 AI sales coaching tools with tremendous AI capabilities we found the best based on their G2 and Capterra reviews. 

1. Happysales AI

Happysales AI is an AI sales coaching software that lets sales reps understand buyer personalities, generates call scripts, assists with sales pitches, enacts AI-driven roleplays, and provides real-time feedback to reps for skill improvement. 

Key features

• AI-based prospect roleplays to practice based on prospect role’s and challenges
• AI sales coach feature that offers recommendations to handle objections, improve pitches, etc.
• Conversation starters to break the ice
• Role-specific AI messaging for prospects
• DISC profiles to customize communications
• AI-generated prospect and account intelligence
• Accurate AI recommendations on approach, messaging, and persona

Pros

• The only product that offers AI prospect roleplay based on real prospect profiles
• Instant call summaries and feedback (based on the 4 P framework) for your sales rep to identify and work on improvement areas
• A forever-free starter plan that provides access to 5 LinkedIn profiles a week

Cons

• Lacks AI scoring capabilities

Pricing

Starts at $25 per user per month

2. Dialpad AI Sales Coach

Dialpad AI Sales Coach provides real-time sales recommendations, creates coaching groups to listen in on calls, and provides an automated live coach with built-in speech coaching for sales reps to improve their sales pitches. 

Key features

• AI Scorecards. Score sales conversations against quality metrics such as quality of interactions, average handle time, first call resolution rate, and so on. 
• AI Playbook. Let sales managers understand the sales reps' performance and identify the areas where they need coaching. 
• Dialscore. Get comprehensive insights on the rep’s performance and simplify grading to provide more targeted coaching. 
• AI CSAT. Automatically collect CSAT scores on every call and refine the reps’ skills by taking action with real-time customer intelligence and insights.
• Custom moments. Track specific items during the call that the rep can review later to refine their sales calls.
• Real-time sentiment analysis. Analyze customer conversations for specific keywords or phrases that suggest positive or negative sentiments.
• Call monitoring. Monitor sales calls in different ways — listening, barging, whispering, and taking over the sales call.

Pros

• Integrates with major CRMs
• Responsive customer support
• Easy setup and implementation 
• Provides multiple tools for different functions in one place

Cons

• Learning curve due to several features the product offers

Pricing

Starts at $60 per user per month

3. Avoma Coaching Assistant

Avoma Coaching Assistant uses AI-powered call scoring and performance insights for sales managers to monitor sales performance and provide personalized coaching. 

Key features

• Monologue identification. Get insights into the reps’ longest monologues and improve your active listening skills.
• Conversation timestamps. Get AI-generated transcripts with timestamps and linked meeting recordings so that the sales managers and reps can listen to the entire conversation in less time and better find the gaps for coaching.
• Playlists. Create a playlist of the best conversations, such as objection handling, negotiation, and so on, and share it with your sales team so they can learn asynchronously.
• Auto scoring. Automatically score every sales conversation based on the context and set criteria to provide call coverage and reps’ performance insights to sales managers.
• Feedback. Provide feedback to sales reps asynchronously without scheduling meetings.

Pros

• Easy to use and setup
• Integrates with 20+ apps and CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce

Cons

• Slight learning curve

Pricing

Starts at $79 per user per month

Key features to look for in an AI sales coaching software

Before you opt for an AI sales coaching tool, make sure to validate the following key features:

• AI capabilities. Check how comprehensive the AI capabilities of the coaching tool are. Some of the AI capabilities you must look for include AI-drive roleplays, automated sales pitches and call scripts, automated buyer personalities, and AI scorecards. 
• Feedback analysis: Make sure the sales coaching tool has a feedback loop feature that either uses conversation intelligence to provide you feedback or offers a collaborative environment to send and receive feedback asynchronously.
• Analytics: Check the different performance metrics you can monitor with the tool and see how advanced they are.  
• Integration: Find out the different CRMs and apps the AI coaching tool integrates with.
• Customer support: Make sure customer support is quick to respond to and easy to reach.

How can you measure the effectiveness of AI sales coaching?

To monitor the progress of your AI sales coaching initiatives, you must track the following metrics:

• Average deal size. You can analyze the sales team’s performance and forecast future revenue by tracking the average deal size.
• Individual retention rate and service renewal rate. By tracking this metric, you'll understand how well each sales rep is satisfying the customers and identifying potential areas for improvement.
• Sales cycle length. By tracking how long it takes to get prospects into your sales pipeline, you can increase the ability of reps to reach their target sales quota.  
• Quota attainment. By tracking this metric, you can identify top-performing sales reps, which helps sales managers understand the strategies they’re using and double down on them for other sales reps.  
• Win/ loss by reason. By tracking the win rate of a sales rep against another based on the deals won and lost, you can identify the key areas where the sales rep lags or performs well and coach them.

Refine your selling skills with Happysales AI

Let's be honest.

Selling is harder. And for sales managers, it's even harder to do the handholding—enact role-plays with the reps and provide feedback after every call the rep conducts. 

With Happysales AI, artificial intelligence takes on the role of the coach and helps reps practice pitches, enact roleplays, provide feedback, and provide the reps’ performance insights to sales managers. 

Try Happysales AI yourself and see how our AI Coach can streamline the sales team’s coaching needs.