We’re gonna come out and just say it:

Being a sales leader is no mean feat. 

You need to juggle multiple balls without dropping any of them. You’ve got to take on the role of a super seller, lead whisperer, data analyst, decision-maker, strategist, business leader, and coach. 

With so many things going on, it’s no wonder that we often hear sales leaders saying, “I wish I had more time to train and coach my team.” 

Irrespective of whether your sales team works in B2C, B2B, or anywhere in between, it’s critical that you train and coach salespeople consistently to help them ace their selling game. 

Sales coaching is more than telling your sales team what to do. You can’t just announce, “Hello, sales team, you need to sell 200 deals this year,” and chill while your team works towards this goal. Sales training doesn’t work that way. There’s so much to it than just setting goals for your entire team. 

As a sales leader, you need to constantly motivate and train your team to reach their maximum potential. Equip them with the right tools, strategies, and knowledge to make better sales decisions, which leads to better results for the clients, the sales reps, the team, and you. 

A good sales coaching program helps you improve results, while no (or bad) coaching can negatively impact the team’s performance. Here are a few eye-opening sales statistics that highlight the importance of effective coaching:

• Sales teams that receive regular and consistent coaching closed 13% more deals than reps who received none or inconsistent coaching. 
• Formalized sales coaching (clearly defined and consistently implemented) improved win rates by 11%, and dynamic sales coaching increased win rates by 28%. 
• Sales organizations that offered real-time, deal-specific sales coaching saw year-on-year revenue growth of 8.4%. 
• 50% more sales reps achieved their quota when receiving regular feedback and coaching than teams who received no formal coaching. 
• Poor or ineffective sales coaching can cause as much as 60% of your sales team to quit. 

Now that you know the importance of effective sales coaching, the next step is to focus on how to optimize coaching to improve rep performance.

One of the most effective tools at your disposal is - call transcriptions. 

There’s a reason why the best sports teams use game replay recordings as part of their training sessions. It helps them identify critical strengths that they can capitalize on and reveal weaknesses that need to be addressed. 

By recording your team’s inbound and outbound calls, you build a valuable database that you can use to coach and train your team. Think of call transcriptions as an investment for the health and success of your business. 

What is sales call transcription? 

Call transcription converts customer conversations - both inbound and outbound phone calls - into text. It’s also known as speech-to-text transcription. Call recording software (like Wingman) uses conversation intelligence to automate call transcriptions, providing your sales reps and sales leaders with scannable records of every customer conversation. 

Benefits of using sales call transcriptions to improve sales coaching

#1: Instills the habit of active listening 

Call transcripts make it easy for sales managers to review calls one-on-one with their reps. With insight-driven call transcription, you can use sales call recordings to note the flow of the conversation:

• Do your reps sound robotic, like they’re just reading from a script? Or are they grasping easy-to-miss cues given by the prospect and tailoring the conversation accordingly? 
• Are reps allowing for natural pauses in the conversation so that the client can speak more, revealing their pain points and needs? 
• Are your reps responding appropriately to what the caller is saying? Or are they in a hurry to finish the rest of the script? 
• Do your reps tweak their responses according to the caller’s tone of voice? 

By actively listening to sales call transcripts, you can help reps understand and overcome their weaknesses, helping them create powerful sales scripts to connect with their target audience, thereby delivering an impactful customer experience.

#2: Identifies your team’s hurdles & helps overcome them 

Often, a sales rep encounters a stumbling block that prevents them from moving the deal further down the sales funnel. Maybe they are not confident highlighting the features of your product to the client. Or perhaps the prospect is asking a highly technical question that the rep is not prepared to answer.

Without recording and analyzing call transcripts, it becomes impossible to identify these stumbling blocks, and your team continues to struggle with these difficulties,  missing out on sales opportunities. 

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start reviewing call transcripts to identify difficulties like these. By sampling a wide array of inbound and outbound sales calls, you can quickly spot your team’s problems, helping them address these specific issues. This, in turn, boosts team performance, winning more leads, more conversions, and ultimately, more revenue. 

#3: Helps focus beyond the negatives 

There’s a common misconception that call transcripts are primarily to discipline sales reps by identifying and pointing out their mistakes. But the truth is that call transcripts provide an incredible opportunity to highlight and acknowledge the positive achievements of your team, as well. 

Is one of your sales reps killing it with a consistently high customer satisfaction score? Or did an agent impress you with their mastery in objection handling?

Call recordings and transcripts help you shine the spotlight on the best performers so that the rest of the team can follow their proven strategies to ramp up their sales game. 

#4: Builds a treasury of valuable training resources 

Call transcripts are excellent for onboarding new reps. You can use transcripts to build an all-in-one database of good and bad examples that can help other team members learn how to navigate a tricky scenario. Consider creating an in-house knowledge source that sales reps can look up when facing an unfamiliar issue. 

#5: Makes your Coaching Sessions Faster & More Effective

One of the main benefits of call recordings and transcriptions is that it makes it easy to pull the right insights at the right time. Speech analytical tools help to transcribe customer conversations, making it easy for you to find suitable coaching examples to share with your team members. 

On average, sales managers spend around 53% of their time handling routine admin work that could be easily automated and only 7% of their time coaching team members. That’s a massive waste of time, which could otherwise be used efficiently. 

With a conversation intelligence platform, you get access to actionable insights from customer interactions right at your fingertips. You can quickly spot which reps are doing well and who could do with a bit of extra coaching, helping you personalize your coaching sessions to match the needs of each sales agent. 

#6: Monitors customer conversations to spot red flags 

Cherry-picking random calls to review isn’t the best way to monitor your team’s performance. Doing so leaves coaching up to chance, and you’re likely to miss out on crucial red flags. With a conversation intelligence tool, you get searchable transcripts to monitor specific keywords. 

For example, you can set alerts to notify you when a prospect mentions words like “cancel” or “angry.” You can then review these interactions quickly to identify the issue and help the sales agent follow up with the customer, offering them the right solution, thereby lowering customer churn. 

#7: Improves group coaching 

Managing a large team of sales reps is extremely difficult, and it becomes next to impossible to track and monitor each sales conversation when you’ve got a dozen agents making hundreds of calls every day. 

Call transcriptions provide you with an overall view of the team’s progress. You can quickly monitor the key sales metrics and identify the areas for improvement. You can schedule weekly training sessions to go over the common issues that sales reps face during the week and provide tips and examples to better deal with challenging customers and tricky sales scenarios. 

The golden rules to maximize the benefits of sales coaching 

Now that we’ve run through the benefits of using call transcripts to improve sales coaching, here are a few rules that can help you maximize the benefits of your coaching sessions. 

• Avoid disciplinary action: Do not use coaching sessions to discipline underperforming reps. Instead, make it a safe zone where agents feel comfortable asking questions and sharing ideas, strategies, and tips. 
• Start on a positive note: Sports coaches practice getting athletes to review their strengths before moving on to the flaws. The science behind this tactic is that when you focus on the positives first, the brain releases dopamine that makes the recipient feel good. Once they are in a positive mood, you can mention the flaws and mistakes that need to be ironed out. 
• Keep it constructive and specific: Always critique the call and not the agent. Keep in mind that the best feedback is non-personal. It should be productive and thorough. Avoid vague generalizations like, “You’re always in a hurry to finish the call.” Offer specific advice like, “I noticed how you moved to the closing pitch when the customer still had queries about the product.” Next, provide the rep with concrete and actionable advice on how to handle this issue the next time. 
• Focus on just one or two skills per coaching session: One of the most significant flaws of inefficient coaching sessions is that they cram way too much. Focusing on too many areas of improvement can make the rep feel overwhelmed and cause them to zone out. Pick just one or two skills to work on, get your agents to reinforce these skills, and tackle the rest in another session. 
• Finally, let your team have fun with it: Yes, we agree that sales are a high-stakes, high-pressure arena. But, there’s no rule that you shouldn’t keep sales coaching fun and light-hearted. After all, a dash of humor is an excellent way to pick up new skills and have fun. 

If you’re ready to witness the power of call recording, transcripts, and advanced conversation analytics in action, request a free demo of Wingman. Wingman is an actionable conversation intelligence platform that helps you glean crucial insights from sales conversations, empowering your salesforce with the right data to close deals, win conversions, and grow revenues.