Sales Coaching and Benchmarking Give Sales the Edge They Need

For the last several months, Avitage has helped
launch a new company and product called PrivateSalesCoach. Through this process, we’ve developed a profound appreciation for the potential
for sales coaching and benchmarking to improve a rep’s—and an organization's—odds of winning in competitive deals.

In this newsletter, we'll share some of our insights and introduce you to this company and the new service they offer.

Sales Coaching

While sales reps might not be fond of training, most welcome insightful coaching that helps them win more business faster.

We all see coaching as standard practice for professionals in sports, the performing arts, politics and even executive coaching. What is sales coaching?

We learned that coaching doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Coaching covers such a broad landscape that conversations about it can be either confusing or ethereal, unless we have a simple framework to lend clarity and substance to the discussion. We used the following multimedia vignette to clarify coaching distinctions and the potential for Winning through Coaching (click the link to view).

This got us wondering:

• What is the quality and consistency of the coaching our sales-team members receive?
• How many opportunities actually receive coaching assistance? How timely?
• How often are the treasures of our organizations’ selling wisdom locked in the heads of sales managers and executives who are caught up in the frenzy of day-to-day deal management?
• How much time is wasted gathering data to diagnose the deal? How can we shrink the diagnosis time and transform it into a strategy and execution discussion?

Sales Benchmarking

When reviewing sales opportunities, most reps focus on the tasks they've completed—on what they've done. Sales benchmarking compares those actions to a standard of what is possible, or optimal, to improve the odds of winning.

PrivateSalesCoach introduces the idea of a sales opportunity "flight check," a checklist that quickly guides reps through an evaluation of key selling activities.

The multimedia vignette Sales Coaching: Give Your Team an Edge (click the link to view) explains these ideas in greater detail.

This got us wondering:

• Do we have a practical and consistent benchmark for how sales opportunities are handled before we post them to our forecast? – Benchmark - a calibrated measurement of our comparative strength and vulnerability on the deal.
• In what ways can we reduce our opportunity portfolio risk?
• How consistently are we working the right opportunities with our limited coaching time and attention?
• How well do we assess individual rep’s need for sales coaching?
• What impact would benchmarking have on our win rates, our overall sales numbers?

Introducing PrivateSalesCoach
Instant, non-invasive, opportunity-specific sales coaching

PrivateSalesCoach (www.privatesalescoach.com) is a sales-coaching program with a unique self-service web diagnostic application.

The Edge – Insights and Benchmarks
For the first time, sales organizations can instantly benchmark where they are strong and where they are weak on specific selling opportunities and, at the same time, provide sales professionals with insights that lower deal risk and increase their odds of winning.

Ten Minutes to Takeoff
In less than 10 minutes, a sales professional conducts an opportunity “flight check” using the PrivateSalesCoach web diagnostic application. Reps receive a visual snapshot of where they are strong and vulnerable in the opportunity. They also receive strategies and specific recommendations for next steps in five common selling dimensions.

For sales managers, the diagnostic application is similar to lab work that is completed before seeing a physician. X-rays and lab tests assist the diagnosis and provide critical input to recommended treatments. In the same way, the "flight check" saves time and helps the manager assess the status of deals, so they can focus on strategy and execution.

For a brief introduction to PrivateSalesCoach, please view this multimedia vignette: What Is PrivateSalesCoach? (click the link to view).

This got us wondering:

• How often do we have the opportunity to employ a high-impact selling approach which is practical, affordable and uncommon—unused by our competitors—at least at this time?
• What market share might we gain if we had a "weapon" our competitors do not have?

To learn more about improving your sales coaching and benchmarking and how PrivateSalesCoach might give your team an edge, join our webinar with Dave Stein of ES Research on Weds, Sept 17 at 8am, 11am or 1pm ET.

To request a conversation or a demonstration of PrivateSalesCoach, please click here.

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About Avitage
Avitage (name derived from audio-video montage) is a business communications services company. We help companies enable users to communicate internally, with sales channels and customers using tailored, dynamic, multimedia communications to capture attention and motivate behavior change. Through unique ways to create, manage, deploy and deliver custom multimedia communications, our customers produce high volumes of professional quality, reusable, modular, multimedia assets, with development times measured in minutes, hours or days at costs well below traditional production methods.

We are unique in the way we enable the business front line to instantly assemble and deliver custom multimedia shows that are tailored to the specific interests of each audience. This creates a competitive advantage that increases win rates, reduces sales cycles, increases selling time—all while lowering selling costs. Learn more at www.avitage.com or call us at 781.522.8000.

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TM PrivateSalesCoach is a pending trademark of PrivateSalesCoach LLC.