Even with all the technology that has rolled out in the past few years, coaching is still the critical multiplier in complex sales. It’s still the hinge point on which your sales team grows or stagnates. And the good news is: AI can help your coaches do a better job of it. Let’s look at how.
Sales coaches who leverage AI today will easily outperform coaches who avoid it. As in so many other things, effective AI use can be a power multiplier. For coaching, you can use it to:
In Membrain’s upcoming Insight Engine, we’ve built a tool that lives inside the structured context of your Way of Selling and enables you to do all that and more. We’re pretty proud of it.
But there’s one thing even our AI tool can’t do for you: Be human.
There are a lot of things AI can’t do (yet?) that humans can. And one of the things it’s not good at (yet?) is holding people accountable.
In fact, many AI engines are actively trained and built to focus on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses. You’ve had plenty of experience with these. You ask them what they think of something you’ve done, and they tell you it’s the most brilliant, most pivotal, most extraordinarily outstanding thing you could have done and only because you yourself are the most outstanding example of humankind.
These tools can be fun and efficient, but they are an obvious bad fit for holding someone accountable. Helping a salesperson to see their own strengths is good. Helping them understand why a good decision was beneficial, also good. However, failing to see the context or call a salesperson on a mistake or problem is not good. Telling them that even their worst behaviors are the best is… a problem.
Fortunately, it is possible to build an AI tool that doesn’t constantly slide into sycophantic behavior. One would hope that most coaching applications will take this direction.
However, even when the tools are built and trained in such a way that they provide guardrails around bad behavior, and point out mistakes when you make them, they still can’t provide the level of accountability that a human can.
If you’re a sales manager, have you ever noticed how some salespeople will suddenly be very busy logging activity and contacting new prospects the day before your meeting with them? This is amusing, sometimes frustrating, and very human.
Humans are wired to care what other humans think about us. When you have a meeting with your human coach, you know it. The social pressure acts as a lever to propel you to action. You quite simply don’t want to disappoint your fellow human, especially one you respect.
Humans are wired to care what other humans think about us.
Additionally, even well-trained AI is still not as good at asking the right probing questions as a good coach can be. You know your human coach is going to ask if you practiced that skill you talked about last time. You know they’re going to want to know how that conversation with an important stakeholder went. You know they’re going to check in on that challenge you were facing to see if you tackled it effectively.
And you’re going to care. You’re going to cringe at the idea of telling them that actually you sat on your hands all week. Or that you rubber banded back into old habits. Or that you were too anxious to call that stakeholder at all. You don’t want to let them down.
You want to impress them. You want them to say, “Good job.”
On the contrary, when you talk to a computer, your system generally recognizes that interaction as socially neutral. You show up to a coaching appointment with your AI coach, and you can tell them you did nothing all week and they might tell you why that was the best possible strategic move you could have made.
But even if they’re trained to push back on ill-adapted behavior, you’re not likely to feel the same level of embarrassment as you would saying the same thing to your human coach. If you feel any embarrassment at all, it’s likely to be because you know a human might be overseeing your interactions with the AI.
You need good AI tools. In the hands of good humans. Inside a structured Way of Selling. Organizations who get all three right, will grow, and faster than the competition.
What are you doing to get the right AI tools into the right hands at your company?
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn
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