I joined People.ai earlier this year because I experienced first hand in my former job the many challenges People.ai is solving for sales management. I have a strong passion for coaching salespeople and using data to make informed decisions, and I wanted to explain how we’re bringing that to life here at People.ai. It’s truly special when you can build a company and scale for exponential growth using your very own software, and that’s exactly what we’re doing!
Accountability. A strong foundation for most jobs, but even more important in the sales world. During 1:1 sales coaching sessions with reps you should be building a game plan that makes them accountable towards their forecasts, and other metrics your team measures on a regular basis. If they can do that, then help them ensure that their prospects/customers are held equally accountable towards the final goal. Agree with your reps each week on specific, measurable goals that move the revenue needle in the right direction. Not sure it’s working as a manager? Then you might not be looking at the right metrics, or maybe they’re simply too difficult to get.
Let’s take a closer look at the image below. I’m using People.ai as it offers an easy way to surface critical sales metrics that you can layer goals on top of.
For example, People.ai produces personal and team scorecards that give you the ability to see how many attendees a rep attracts to their meetings with prospects. You can also easily see a rep’s ratio of external meetings (meetings with prospects) to internal meetings (meetings with their own team). The former is important because it measures whether a rep is able to provide value to more than one person at a prospective client, making them very influential. The latter is important because it provides a clear measure of how much time a rep is spending in internal meetings versus actually selling. Both are strong characteristics of top performing sales reps that good sales leaders often overlook or can’t track.
People.ai is special because it doesn’t rely on sales people to actually DO anything. They just have to keep selling. On average our system frees up 22% of salespeople’s time by automatically syncing sales activity back to your CRM. It’s a win-win for sales reps and sales management to be able to focus on making activity valuable, and stop wasting time making activity trackable. For example, you may have set a goal for your rep to have 10 meetings per week. With People.ai you can easily see whether or not your rep is on track to meet that goal, and only get involved when your rep either blows it out of the water, or needs help getting back on track.
Once you’ve decided on the metrics you want to focus on you can benchmark two or more reps against one another to uncover the true rockstars on your team and discover how to replicate their success.
In the comparison above you can see that there’s a huge gap between reps in both how fast they respond to prospect/customer emails and how quickly those people get back to them. Our fastest rep (Bradley Cooper) takes about fifteen hours on average to reply to an email received from his pipeline. The slowest rep (Julia Roberts) takes more than six and a half days to respond. Do your best reps make themselves accessible, and prioritize getting back to prospects/customers before anything else gets done? I think so.
Mr. Cooper is able to get customers to respond to him in less than ten hours on average. Why? Because he’s able to successfully build a relationship with his prospects and generate a sense of urgency in the emails he sends by adding value. By contrast, it takes prospects nearly 18 hours to get back to Ms. Roberts. That’s an area for concern because if prospects don’t feel any urgency to reply to Julia then she clearly hasn’t added any value to these people during the sales cycle.
These are all important metrics to keep in mind, but remember that a good sales manager will only introduce coaching at the right times. In my book, that means celebrating the good times, and coaching through the bad times. People.ai can help by automating the feedback loop on your coaching goals. By surfacing all the data the system is generating we provide not just intelligent insights, but also recommendations on how you should use this data for coaching.
For example, on one team our AI found that by making 10 calls before 10am reps dramatically increased their close rates. The AI would then automatically provide the reps with reminders if they hadn’t made the necessary number of calls, and show them how many calls they’d made compared with their colleagues. Doing so encouraged a spirit of friendly competition that improved rep performance and led to more deals won.
It’s no wonder coaching and improving sales is a hot topic right now and 250+ companies are already using People.ai. It works!
Want to find out how People.ai’s automated, AI-driven coaching helps your team win more deals? Get a demo, or read our blog to see what else we’re working on.