This fantastic representation of 'Revenue Orchestration' and the convergence of sales tech by the brilliant team at Forrester deserves profiling.
It’s an accurate and current depiction of how categories such as Sales Enablement, Conversation Intelligence, Sales Engagement and Digital Deal Rooms have come together in either rich suite solutions or great point solutions depending on your requirements, infused with AI.
But it was also a stark reminder why we started MySalesCoach.
All this technology is available to today’s sellers to make them more effective. The advent of AI is only accelerating further the technology tools to support sellers.
But yet despite this, more sellers than ever are missing quota. 75% by the most recent reports. Tenure of managers and reps are shortening. Frankly, sellers are becoming less effective - even if more productive, focussed and efficient?
All this technology to help sellers achieve more revenue (that’s always the promise) and yet more sellers are failing? Where’s the positive impact on revenue these tools promise?
The benefits are real and compelling. Spending more time selling and less time on non-selling activity that technology can automate, support and focus time on right deals is all super-valuable.
But take another look at the image. Despite all these features and tools, are we actually helping to improve the skills of sellers?
“Did you not spot ‘Coaching’ in the top left hand corner? You bang on about how sellers don’t get the coaching they need or deserve, all the time. These tools have this covered” I hear you say.
Hmmmm.
- Role play with an AI robot?
- Recorded calls that never get listened to, let alone expertly coached. (I founded a Conversation Intelligence platform, I’ve seen the figures)
- Automated call scoring on your calls. With bullet point feedback!
I’m not going to argue over whether these things help - I know they can and dedicated years of my life to build and grow these tools. But the investment in helping sellers actually improve skills and grow, is woefully minimal - and more crucially support - sellers are just left to benefit and learn from such tools on their own too frequently by ‘time-poor’ managers.
“Yeah but we do training too. And we have an enablement team dedicated to it?”
Training is a critical investment. But training alone is shown in countless studies to underwhelm in impact on skills and growth - without the investment in implementing and reinforcing learnings.
And training invariably is an infrequent targeted intervention. Our days are filled with learning and coachable moments and as valuable as training can be, training alone is unlikely to propel your team to quota success.
“Our managers coach their teams. We don’t need tech solutions to do this.”
If they do, and by coaching you mean frequently developing skills and growth of each seller, not 1:1’s and pipeline reviews, then congratulations - you are in the tiny minority, and I’m sure have the success to prove this.
Our recent sales coaching survey - we believe the biggest to ever be conducted, was conclusive. 38% of sellers rarely get coached with over a third of those, saying they get no coaching whatsoever.
Everyone agrees - sellers 99% and leaders 96%, that coaching impacts revenue success.
Yet, managers by their own admittance spend 5% of their time coaching, challenged by the long tail of more ‘time-critical’ tasks. And even that coaching time is focussed towards pipeline and current quarter targets not skills development and personal growth.
We let our sellers down by prioritising investment in productivity tools and underinvesting time and budget in their skills development and mastery.
The irony is we are collectively fixated on technology for teams that lack the skills to be successful and underperform - to just be more productive and efficient! And data is proving our results are going backwards despite our every growing war chest of sales tech stack functionality.
If you're interested in learning more about unlocking the potential of your sales team, book a call here to find out how we can support you.
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