4 Ways Video Coaching Can Augment Your Face to Face Coaching
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Nothing beats face to face sales coaching. Effective in-person sales coaching is the single most valuable action any sales leader can take to improve the performance of their team.
Effective coaching can increase sales team attainment by 19% and done in-person, personal and timely coaching will maximise that impact. But almost every sales leader coaches less than they would like, with a whopping 73% spending less than 5% of their time coaching according to a study by the TAS Group. That’s a maximum of 2 hours based on a 40-hour working week. With an average of 7.2 reps working for a sales manager today, that works out less than 17 mins of coaching, each per week.
Given the minimal investment of time and desired impact on performance, ROI from every minute spent coaching has to count. And that’s where video coaching can be the secret weapon, to make the most of those precious face to face minutes.
Coaching Needs Analysis
Where should you invest your precious coaching minutes? Video coaching, using bitesize scenarios or real clips from sales conversations, can highlight where time has the impact. Whether corrective feedback, praise, ideas or how to make this good response great, frequent video challenges, with an investment of 60 seconds on a manager’s and rep’s part, uncover coaching needs – areas the manager can have an immediate impact on performance.
Lack of face to face opportunity
Half of all sales leaders manage geographically dispersed teams. Whether multiple offices, field sales teams or reps and managers working from home, distance coaching via video can ensure that you can still devote consistent time for coaching, whether face to face or not.
Coaching is most successful when implemented with a process with dedicated time assigned.
In this recent blog, our friends Refract documented how it’s possible to use video sales coaching to plug the coaching gap for remote teams or reps.
What does great look like?
Do your teams learn as much from their peers as you’d like? It is a rhetorical question – I know the answer is no, it is for us all.
Video coaching (and recorded calls and demos) can offer the chance to make coaching one to many rather than 1:1. Playbook answers and champagne moments can be shared – the easiest way to turn good answers (that may stay ‘good enough’ forever without coaching) into great ones.
A best practice library or archive creates a veritable treasure chest of scenarios and moments to share with colleagues and accelerate onboarding – exposing new reps to a variety of typical scenarios, objections and situations and accelerating onboarding and ramp times.
Anytime, anywhere coaching
When you get that precious face to face time, every minute can count, focussing on areas to coach that move the needle. These can be replayed, time-stamped with feedback, shared and graded. In an era of rapid digitisation, increasing importance of consultative selling and flexible working, video can be an effective tool in overcoming the time pressures of sales coaching.
By Kevin Beales, CEO of Refract.