Benefits of sales coaching software for retail teams

7 Dec

If you’ve been in the market for sales coaching software you’ll be eager to know what the benefits are. Of course, it won’t be news to you that they increase sales, but the amount of increase in sales will depend on the strength of your coaching software. Does it encompass all the features you need to get the best benefits for your business?

Having access to solid sales coaching software will not only improve your conversions, but it will also increase various other areas in your business too. If you’re not sure what those benefits are, make sure you carry on reading below:

1. Improves employee engagement

Providing your sales associates with the development support they need to improve is vital for employee engagement.

In fact, 56 per cent of workers would leave their current role if their employers stopped providing coaching, and nearly one-third (31%) have previously left a position because of this issue.

Whilst this is a huge concern for employees, it seems that employers still aren’t providing the coaching that their staff needs, with 74% of surveyed employees feeling they aren't reaching their full potential at work due to a lack of development opportunities.

When you use sales coaching software to coach your employees regularly, it gives your staff a structured working environment where they’re clear on what they need to do to improve.

This transparency improves their morale, giving them a clear path to success. When your employees come to work with a purpose, their engagement levels rise sharply, and this is more so if you provide a career development plan which ties in with your sales coaching programme.

2. Improves consistency among management

Consistency is key to delivering great customer service. It’s no good if one of your stores is great at serving customers, but another is poor.

Customers remember bad experiences more than good, so any negative interactions will tarnish your brand name.

The reason for inconsistencies in your business can be because of varying management styles. One manager in a particular location might use a fantastic coaching method, whilst another doesn’t bother to coach.

When you use sales coaching software, it ensures that all your managers follow the same structure. They will all answer the same questions, carry them out at the same frequency and provide the same feedback format.

This ensures all sales associates are getting the same level of coaching which is required to improve their performance.

3. It’s easy to see progression

Sales coaching software will generate reports with automatic scoring. These make it easy to see how your sales associates progress as the months go on.

Perhaps they only scored 30% on their customer interaction question, but they moved up to 60% by the time they had their next coaching review.

Because the scores are all digitally stored, it makes it easy for anyone to dip in and out of the insights; perfect when you have a regional manager visiting your store who wants to quickly find out how everyone is getting on.

Showing the employees their scores each time makes it clearer for them to know what they need to do to improve. For example, if your manager said to you, “you need to do better,” but you had no benchmark or information about what better meant, the chances of you doing better would be very slim. However, you're much more likely to improve if you can see how you can do better and benchmark your scores.

4. Improves consistency in customer service

If you’re not coaching your retail team, it’s likely that your sales associates are all using their own style of service.

One might chat with customers for too long, wasting valuable sales opportunities, another might look grumpy and not chat enough, or one could not take advantage of valuable upselling opportunities.

Whatever the issues are, they can all be ironed out with good sales coaching software because they will clearly reflect your ideal customer journey.

When you consistently coach your retail team on how to best serve your customers, their performance will become consistent. This means your customers will always receive great service no matter which store they visit or who serves them.

5. Informs your training materials

When you create your training material, you don’t want to be guessing what your employees really need.

Too many businesses assume the needs of their employees or worse, provide training regardless of what the needs of their employees are.

When you use sales coaching software, you can clearly see what training your employees require. For example, if the data shows that none of your employees are offering complimentary products, it could be because they don’t know the right products to offer. You can then use this information to support the content in your training materials.

6. Measure the success of training

Rather than just training your sales associates and hoping for the best.

You can use your sales coaching software to measure the effectiveness of your training.

For example, if you published upselling training in June and then carried out coaching reviews from June up until August, you could see if the number of upsells has increased due to the training.

One of our clients resolved a key challenge by doing this. She temporarily stepped into the primary leadership & development (L&D) role at Victoria’s Secret, she knew she wanted to make a real impact. The challenge she faced was picking the right priorities that would result in real, demonstrable, and positive change. She used our sales coaching software to develop effective training and measure its effectiveness. Read the full case study here.

7. Increase sales

Improving sales numbers is the ultimate goal of sales training software, but how exactly does it improve conversions?

Well, first of all, you can measure behaviours to assess what works to increase sales. For example, if you did coaching reviews throughout the entire year, you could look at the coaching review statistics and correlate it with your sales numbers.

You may notice that more employees offered upsells in the summer months and your sales numbers increased during this time. This means you’d want to let employees know how important it is to upsell and coach them on how to improve their upselling skills.

When you know what works to increase sales, it’s important to enforce these behaviours across your team.

You can use this insight as a question in your coaching review ‘did the sales associates upsell the correct products’ to enforce this behaviour across all of your stores. The more sales associates that do this, the more likely you are to increase sales.

8. Do you want all of these benefits for your business?

Of course you do, but we understand it can be daunting purchasing sales coaching software for your business. That’s why we offer free demos where you can see the sales coaching software in action.

We’ll walk you through how it works, and you can ask any questions as we go.

Don’t worry, there’s no hard sell at the end, it’s just a chance for you to see if Ocasta Review could work for your business.

Here’s how the demo works:

1. A personalised, demo so you can see the platform in action and assess if its a good fit for your business.

2. If that goes well, and you’re interested in trying the platform, gain access to a 60-day pilot where your sales team can trial it for themselves.

3. If you’re happy with the pilot you can launch across your entire sales team.

Join the likes of Next, Virgin Media O2 and Victoria’s Secret, who all use our sales performance coaching platform to improve customer service and increase sales.

Book a Demo