How to Improve Sales Performance with Web-Based and AI Tools
Sales tactics are radically different today than they used to be. Businesses must stay ahead of the competition by training their team to sell effectively using proven techniques. Unfortunately, sales managers and coaches of large and dispersed sales teams cannot easily evaluate, give personal guidance, and coach each sales rep. Instead, sales teams usually get generic, theory-based sales training once or twice a year – barely over one-fifth of companies believe they have an effective program. Even when it’s pretty good, it isn’t personalized, leaving reps unsure how to hone their interpersonal skills for maximum impact.
Salespeople need a full suite of fully customizable and tailor-made virtual coaching services to their needs. For maximum skill retention, it also must be accessible whenever they want and wherever they are. It sounds like something out of science fiction, but believe it or not, it’s here. Advanced data science and behavioral analysis have merged to create self-contained and highly personalized digital sales training platforms to help sales teams learn how to improve sales performance without guesswork.
How To Improve Sales Performance Objectively and Accurately
Sales is a primarily personal and subjective field – but subjectivity doesn’t require abandoning accuracy. Behavioral analysis is predicated on discovering the precise reasons people do what they do, and while perfect answers may be out of reach, practically useful or even superb solutions aren’t.
The efforts of behavioral scientists throughout the 20th century have culminated in a vast and insightful body of data. Cutting-edge training programs have distilled this massive data into actionable benchmarks and quantifiable performance indicators. As a result, sales teams and coaches work more cohesively, reps close faster, and companies experience more significant revenue gains.
It’s all made possible through synthesizing behavioral science with advanced analytics. Together, these two fields bring massive volumes of data into a cohesive and meaningful behavioral analysis, interpretation, and feedback process within seconds. In real-time, sales reps can rely on advanced data analytics algorithms to interpret an extensive range of communications signals and statistically correlate them with historical outcomes.
Web-based coaching tools built on the most advanced algorithms are available anytime, and sales reps can train in an immersive environment without needing a training partner present. The program gives feedback specific to the trainee, helping them see which qualities and skills they need to work on the most: no more guesswork and assumptions.
How Web-Based Virtual Coaching Platforms Work
A web-based virtual coaching platform enables every individual sales rep to access personalized training from anywhere and anytime. Automated data analysis will objectively evaluate their performance, measuring it against its entire communication and behavioral input database. That data is the culmination of countless hours of real-world sales performance that reveals the precise effect different communications techniques and qualities had on the sales lead.
Even training data gleaned from mock scenarios are helpful in this capacity because the program continually measures participants’ genuine expressions and reactions. The analytical predictions become more accurate as more data is fed to the system. When a sales rep commits to a training session, these analytical predictions are made according to the sales rep’s unique communication patterns, and the virtual coach can be particular about the rep’s strengths and weaknesses.
Related: How to Approach Evaluating Sales Training Programs
Customized Feedback
Objective feedback helps them know – not estimate – which communication skills they need more practice and experience with. The platform can then provide a comprehensive range of training protocols and tests designed to most efficiently help the trainee strengthen them and improve at their own pace. Because salespeople can access the platform anywhere with an internet connection, the trainee is in charge of their success.
This stands in stark contrast to the in-person training of the past, which sales reps have traditionally struggled through on faith that it would help them, however general and vague they may have sensed the training regimen indeed was by the end of it. Instead, web-based training programs based on decades of behavioral science allow (and require) continual engagement to create as close to a live-sales scenario as possible.
Actual sales recordings can even be uploaded into the system, allowing the analytics program to analyze the communications and behavioral content and synthesize it into a new training module. Virtual though it is, the trainee can receive accurate feedback on their performance as close to real-time as possible. Rather than wait for a traditional group training session to end, the user gets statistical feedback after each performance.
The next most helpful performance scenario is then automatically determined based on the outcome of the previous session, creating an exceptionally contextually relevant flow from session to session. Those communications skills that require strengthening become the basis for the sessions, and the automated feedback gives straightforward advice on how to pursue their next training according to exactly quantified measures.
For many, it becomes a game, ensuring higher engagement while strengthening the desire to improve.
Live Session Integration
While these advanced sales coaching platforms are superb for their customization, they also set the stage for greater group involvement, as sales reps compare notes and assist each other in their mutual challenges. The platform can even incorporate live one-on-one sessions between sales reps, offering anything but a simulation.
The behavior analysis can gauge genuine expressions in live video sessions and fine-tune its algorithm for future live and stock-footage training sessions. With continual improvements, the training platform improves over time – and when the system is a SaaS-based web platform, it is effortless for the system administrator to scale up as the sales team grows.
For individual and collaborative learning experiences, it leads to sustainable and consistent growth because it adapts to the users. The users enjoy seeing tangible improvements, particularly when the “high score” correlates to higher earnings and greater job satisfaction. By virtue of its automation, the rep has all the tools needed at their fingertips.
Training your sales reps in a broad range of skills will prepare them for a wide range of sales situations. According to research from Florida State University’s Sales Institute professor Leff Bonny, top-performing sales reps are “incredibly agile” and can easily shift between sales methods. You virtually guarantee their success by equipping your sales reps with an equivalently broad and adaptable sales training regimen.
Related: Quantifying Potential – How Simple Changes in Communication Behaviors Can Dramatically Improve Sales Performance
Identifying Opportunities in Real Time
Amazingly, algorithm-powered sales platforms are not only useful for training purposes. As sales conversions became a more prevalent use of videos than uploading to YouTube in 2021, video chat has become the new medium for modern sales teams. To be precise, 76% now consider video data important for qualifying leads and engaging prospects.
Consider how much analytical data was gathered and scrutinized throughout the early 2000s, with little more than web traffic, email, and scant little else to go by. Nevertheless, these early internet digital mediums were enough to drive previously unheard-of companies into multi-billion industry leaders in little more than a decade.
Now, consider how much sales-driven communications data is contained in video recordings, revealing some of the most subtle nuances of human expression, social dynamics, and motivation. Suppose sales leaders in the 2000s and 2010s were willing to stake entire careers off of comparatively 2-dimensional factors such as email click-through rates, web traffic engagement, and SERPs. In that case, there’s no telling how common such scrutiny will be as video-based behavioral analytics hits the mainstream.
As your sales team practices within a simulated video sales training environment, they are simultaneously becoming extraordinarily comfortable with the one-to-one sales medium of the future. Moreover, the tools that enable them to obtain crucial training feedback during training will also be available during actual, live sales calls.
These tools can include:
- Real-time performance scoring that only they can see
- Immediate contextual notifications signaling the customer’s sales readiness
- Automated prompts suggest the most effective responses to accelerate the sales process
- Generate and correlate behavioral baselines of new contacts and their sales reps
This is no wish list for future sales teams – it’s a reality coming true today. The future of video-chat sales will be shaped by video-based sales training, and those that prepare now will be far ahead of the curve when the efficacy of these techniques breaks through into widespread awareness.
Just as personalized marketing techniques such as Customer Relationship Management went from being a niche technology to a mainstay for any digital marketer, the methods revealed here are sure to follow a similar trajectory.
Unbiased Reflections on Human Bias
Undoubtedly, traditional marketing analytics has been enormously helpful, proving its efficacy through demonstrable boosts in ROI. It’s even been demonstrated that you can dramatically boost lead qualifications by up to 21 times by dropping your lead response time to five minutes (compared to about 30) – and that’s using nothing but traditional web-based marketing tools.
Suppose prompt and thoughtful human interaction is a powerful determinant of sales motivation. In that case, when this is applied to video, the level of positive engagement becomes almost devoid of time delays altogether. Of course, that’s only true because your sales reps learn how to most effectively and genuinely meet their leads with outstanding social finesse.
While the exact definition of “non-verbal communication” continues to raise debate, even the lowest estimate puts the figure at 55%. That’s well over half of all communication revealed through anything but web activity, textual communication, and every other traditional measurement of human activity through the web. Rather than a mere glimpse into the communication patterns that drive human interaction, video-based analytics reveals those patterns at the vastest possible level (up to 90%, according to the highest estimates).
Why Wait To Train at the Leading Edge?
This is all possible now for those who take advantage of web-based sales training platforms built on advanced behavioral analytics. It’s the only way to provide your reps with 100% unbiased performance feedback on dozens of measured behaviors to help them compare their performance against peers and benchmarks in practical, helpful ways.
For the most adaptive growth plans, virtual sales coaching platforms provide a self-driven training protocol that helps reps boost the soft skills that matter most in sales training and have previously been considered almost impossible to measure truly. That’s not true, and Quantified is proving it with our standardized scoring algorithm and the world’s most advanced coaching platform.
To learn more and learn how to improve sales performance with the world’s most advanced virtual coaching platform, contact us – and start training in the sales medium of the future with Quantified.