What is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching is essential to help sales teams navigate a complex B2B sales cycle confidently and consistently. An Enterprise Sales cycle involves 4 to 11 decision-makers, technical evaluations, and extensive research by the buyer before they even engage with a sales rep. In fact, studies show that B2B buyers are often 70% of the way through the buying process before they first contact a company.

Unlike traditional sales training, which focuses on delivering knowledge, sales coaching involves personalized, ongoing support that helps sales reps adapt to real-world situations and build sustainable growth in their performance.

Sales Enablement leaders are increasingly prioritizing sales capability building as a critical pillar for driving top-line growth against multitude challenges in a B2B sales process:

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• 84% of B2B buyers want their sellers to act as trusted advisors, but only 25% of sellers succeed in doing so.
• This gap in trust-building results in over 80% of sellers not meeting their sales quota
• The outcome of missing quotas or lacking capability to sell, manifests in close to 70% experiencing stress at work.
• The financial costs of 1 and companies exceed $1.5M per rep, per year.

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How do you calculate ROI of Sales Coaching?

Investing in sales coaching for teams is a strategic decision that demands clear, measurable outcomes. Most often, sales enablement leaders are asked to showcase Coaching ROI. Skwill AI recommends a robust framework that tracks both leading and lagging metrics, ensuring that you can observe and quantify the coaching's impact from the start and throughout its progression.

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What is the difference between Leading and Lagging Metrics?

Leading metrics help to measure immediate impact. They provide real-time feedback during the coaching process. Consider these metrics as early indicators of how well individual sales professionals are improving and adapting through the sales coaching process.

Lagging Metrics are metrics which measure Long-Term Impact, often post facto. They offer a broader view of the sustained impact sales coaching has on your team and overall business performance. These are typically reviewed quarterly or annually to assess long-term gains and strategic alignment.

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Here are the Leading Metrics to measure Sales Coaching ROI:

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Here are the Lagging Metrics to measure Sales Coaching ROI

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Lead and Lag metrics can be measured only when input metrics move. One of the critical components of Sales Coaching is to track such input metrics, which act as guardrails for ensuring that the process of coaching is well adopted to reach the lead and lag metrics. Here are a set of metrics you could incorporate in your sales coaching program.

How can an AI Sales Coach help?

In many companies, sales coaching is often initiated by HR teams, and offered to top performing sales reps. This outdated approach to coaching is fast being replaced by AI Sales coaching, where Sales reps needn’t depend on company sponsored coaching. Instead, cost effective impactful coaching available as an on demand, ‘Coach in your Pocket’ empowers sellers with buyer insights and tailored to seller performance.

Here’s what an AI Sales coach like Skwill AI can do:

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1. Minimize the risk of losing prospects after the first meeting.

One of the biggest challenges faced by sellers is securing a follow-up meeting, often due to not effectively communicating a tailored value proposition to the buyer. An AI Sales coach solves this problem by helping sales professionals create personalized icebreakers, scripts, negotiation strategies and sales pitches for each prospect.

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2. Superior pre-meeting prep:

Poor preparation can cost Sales professionals the deal. Before getting into a demo, an AI Sales coach can be a pitch practice ground. Sellers can refine pitches for each meeting type—whether it's a discovery, pricing, negotiation, or product demo, using detailed buyer insights and personalized role-play with a prospect or customer’s 'Avatar'. Here is Skwill's guide on how DISC forms the foundation on revolutionizing how sellers understand buyers deeply.

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3. Create personalized scripts & emails:

An AI Sales coach can create tailored follow-up scripts and emails, leveraging prospect / customer persona insights to increase engagement and follow-up success.

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4. Personalize sales pitches & demos:

B2B buyers are mature and well-informed. This also requires sellers to be one up to engage prospects in conversations.

An AI Sales coach can help sellers Deliver personalized demos that are adapted to a prospect’s style and preferences. Insights on potential areas of conflict and collaboration, and How-To's are a gold mine of insights which the AI Sales coach can generate to make the demo experienced hyper personalized, differentiating from competition.

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5. Automate mundane tasks:

An AI Sales coach can automate many repetitive tasks which require a seller’s time and effort. This also increases seller’s ability to spend time on customer facing activities and building relationships. Account planning for instance, can be created in seconds prompting the AI Sales coach with the right prompts.

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How can Sales Enablement introduce coaching to Enterprise Sales teams?

Skwill’s expert coaches recommend a three-step approach to incorporate Sales coaching in the Sales enablement agenda. An AI Sales coach, augmented by human coaches helps build a coaching culture, ensuring commitment and alignment to business objectives.

Here’s how to introduce and embed effective sales coaching:

Phase 1: Launch

The Launch phase establishes the foundation for the coaching program. This phase includes understanding the current state of an organization’s sales team, setting up the necessary systems, and preparing the team with essential knowledge and strategies for the journey ahead. At this stage Skwill AI’s expert coaches also recommend baselining:

• Preliminary data and sales metrics at individual seller and team level to serve as a reference point for measuring progress.
• Gathering Voice of Seller (VoS), in-depth insights from the sales team on their experiences, challenges, and aspirations through surveys and/or structured interviews.

This foundational work sets the stage for identifying the individual coaching needs for a targeted and effective coaching intervention.

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When coaching is relevant and delivers quick results, sellers are more likely to adopt and use our solution. Anisha Gopal, Head of Coaching and Customer Success, Skwill AI.

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Phase 2: Adoption

The Adoption phase starts with preparing the team with essential knowledge, skills and strategies and applying and integrating the learnings with continuous support and coaching to ensure sustained performance improvement. Skwill recommends an AI Sales Coach alongside human coaches to strengthen adoption of sales coaching.

An intensive Skwill bootcamp is designed using inputs from the Voice of the Seller (VOS) developed during the launch phase. Skwill’s coaching catalogue has over 15 core Seller skills, each of these align to seller interactions with mature B2B buyers.

B2B sellers experience interactive sessions, and practical exercises focusing on critical sales skills and strategies (scope for bootcamp is developed based on the VoS: Voice of Seller gained in Launch phase).

Scaling sales coaching is a key reason why AI Sales coaching is gaining prominence. For instance, Sellers can pitch practice or role play with Skwill’s AI Sales coach and receive insights on how precisely to pitch to a buyer persona. Weekly learning nudges from Skwill’s AI Sales coach enable incremental adoption of the skills and strategies to cultivate new and effective ways of selling.

Additionally, Sellers can book a live meeting, with a human sales coach, to be dip into experiential knowledge beyond AI assistance.

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Phase 3: Sustenance:

During this phase, Skwill recommends the introduction of Program governance. Reports tracking key metrics, including usage, adoption rates, and overall progress against the coaching goals offering actionable insights for continuous improvement. Additionally, Skwill’s customers have a Customer success manager (CSM) responsible for driving user adoption, maintaining high engagement levels, and ensuring the consistent use of the AI Sales coaching and methodologies

Comprehensive assessments and feedback are collected at both the seller and team levels, with a particular focus on reviewing progress against the baseline survey conducted during the Launch phase to measure effectiveness and impact from the program.

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Conclusion:

Sales coaching, when implemented effectively, can lead to measurable improvements in sales performance, team alignment, and even seller motivation. By understanding the role of AI in enhancing sales coaching, calculating ROI, and fostering a coaching culture, sales enablement leaders can set their teams up for sustained success.

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About the Author:

Anisha is a mindset transformation coach specializing in helping leaders and professionals boost resilience and achieve their best. With a blend of empathy, neuroscience, tech, and practical strategies, she empowers individuals to achieve excellence and long-term success. Passionate about mentoring young adults and women-in-tech and entrepreneurship; she dedicates time offering guidance and support to unlock their potential. Her vibrancy extends to movement on the dance floor and the tranquility of her yoga mat, mirroring the dynamic balance she cultivates in professionals.