Build a Team of Top Sellers With the Best LMS for Sales Coaching

Hiring skilled sales personnel is only the first step in building a team of top sellers to extend the reach of your business. If you want a sales team that takes your company forward, brings in new customers, and rivals competitors in your market—you need a sales coaching program. Equipping your sales team with essential resources and information is a critical part of ramp time and should be updated regularly. Sales coaching, on the other hand, generally refers to individualized one-on-one training or coaching. A digital LMS platform makes it possible to manage both processes within a single system so that companies can rapidly and effectively build a team of top sellers using our sales enablement technology.

Here’s how to use an LMS platform for sales coaching.

What is sales coaching?

Sales managers are responsible for coaching and equipping their teams to be effective while out in the field. Sales coaching is an ongoing process in which the sales manager helps sales team members grow through one-on-one coaching sessions, course recommendations, training plans, and compliance programs. Sales coaching can happen in an office or online and can be distributed through digital LMS software.

Why is sales coaching important?

Sales coaching is the sales team equivalent of employee training, both of which are processes essential for the health of your business. Just as employee training helps companies keep team members engaged, boost effectiveness, and encourage innovative thinking and creativity, sales coaching does the same.

But sales coaching has often been neglected by companies, to their detriment. A Gartner report found that only 40% of sellers said the organization they work for has an established sales coaching culture. And only 39% say that their managers effectively use technology for coaching. This is a missed opportunity in a world with hybrid teams and digitally-driven sales cycles.

What is the most effective sales coaching strategy?

An effective sales coach looks at the whole picture of the sales team’s work experience to determine opportunities for growth and improvement. An effective sales coaching strategy should include the development of hard and soft skills. The relationship between a sales coach and a salesperson must be collaborative so that they can work together to improve overall sales performance and outcomes.

An enterprise LMS platform can help sales managers create effective sales enablement strategies by providing essential training data that connects learning to sales outcomes. With the ExpertusONE LMS platform, managers can assess the effectiveness of learning programs using training data that the platform tracks and measures. Training data is collected in two ways through the LMS platform. With the Insights feature, our LMS reporting and analytics tool, managers can generate reports in five clicks or less. All reports can be exported to Excel, and the intuitive interface design of our reporting wizard enables instant reporting. The ExpertusONE Learning Record Store captures the learning experience and shows managers where training programs can improve in real-time. Storing all training data in a single location makes it easier for managers to assess and adjust training strategies based on the reports.

To create a compelling sales coaching strategy, sales managers must first understand the baseline of sales team training. This will require acknowledging the successes and failures of the current training strategy, understanding where learners are engaged with training, and identifying room for improvement.

How to conduct sales coaching sessions online

Most modern companies will require some form of digital training program, and sales teams are not exempt from this. The flexibility of digital training can be hugely beneficial to sales teams that work in different regions or are traveling to meet clients. With a digital LMS, hosting a one-on-one coaching session online is simple and straightforward. The ExpertusONE LMS platform has an integrated live meetings feature for synchronous, one-on-one training sessions. Sales managers can meet with individual team members to practice pitches, give feedback, work through sales challenges, and assess results. One-on-one coaching sessions can be recorded within the LMS platform and later converted into video training sessions for other team members to watch. This way, managers can maximize the value of investing in one-on-one coaching and ensure that all team members have access to beneficial training resources.

How to increase sales coaching effectiveness

Sales managers can increase the effectiveness of their sales coaching programs in two ways. First, incorporating interactive training material is essential to any digital training strategy because it can encourage knowledge retention and boost engagement. A digital LMS platform makes it easy for managers to add interactive elements to existing and newly created courses. Polls, quizzes, audio, and video content provide multiple ways for learners to engage with training. Sales teams will be required to stay up-to-date with product knowledge, service offerings, and other business-critical information that can be highly technical so that they can respond correctly if prospects request more information. Sales managers must find ways to improve the learning experience, especially concerning these technical, highly detailed courses about products and services. ExpertusONE offers a rapid LMS authoring tool, Interaction Studio, so managers can quickly develop content that includes meaningful engagement opportunities. In the context of sales, this could look like a product education course with a quiz at the end to identify key elements and terms related to the product.

Second, sales managers can make sales coaching effective by personalizing the learning experience. Sales coaching is already a relationship-driven training process. Sales managers can and should be involved with their team’s learning experiences. But automation can ease the lift of personalized training so that companies can scale and grow their sales teams. With an AI-enabled LMS platform, companies can provide personalized learning experiences through tailored course recommendations, compliance and training deadline reminders, and tools for determining areas where learners can improve. The ExpertusONE LMS platform automates this personalization process so that training managers can spend more time conducting one-on-one sessions and less on administrative tasks.

How to increase sales through sales coaching

The end goal of sales coaching is to increase sales; that’s the function of the department, after all. In order to increase sales through sales coaching, managers must take a proactive approach and choose a sales training platform that supports this. Data is essential for determining where sales opportunities may be available or how to better equip the sales team. Companies can also use a Salesforce LMS app to connect learning to sales, streamline the training and sales experiences, shorten rep ramp time, build up the pipeline, and increase win rates. With our Salesforce LMS app, sales personnel can keep track of training and access information more quickly (so they can respond to prospects’ questions). Sales content is managed centrally within the platform, but the LMS integration with Salesforce makes it easier to distribute information to stakeholders.

Building a team of top sellers is possible when you equip them with effective digital training technology like the ExpertusONE LMS platform. Training managers can build stronger sales teams, increase the sales pipeline, and encourage more sales using an LMS for sales coaching. A digital LMS platform makes it easy for companies to train, upskill, and equip their sales teams with critical information and resources so that they can sell effectively.

Looking to learn more about how a digital LMS platform can improve your sales training program? Contact us today for a free demo.