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Boost Agent Sales Productivity with Real-Time Contextual Coaching

Industry data is compelling- however, it’s not clear enough to only prove the impact of sales coaching. Managers need to understand why coaching has such a high ROI.

As a starting point, let’s define sales coaching clearly – Sales coaching focuses on helping reps develop the skills, knowledge, and use of strategies that improve a rep’s overall performance. Coaching empowers sales reps to improve selling skills and close more business – period.

How can you empower your frontline managers to improve key metrics such as –

  • Increasing branch coverage
  • Number of policies sold
  • Total revenue generated
  • Increase in renewal %

The traditional way of working had managers spend a bulk of their time multitasking above and beyond (e.g., selling, preparing forecasts, attending meetings) and neglect the importance of developing the one skill with the biggest impact on sales – Coaching.

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56% of our attendees found Agency & Branch activation to be the major challenge area around policy distribution amongst agents. Following that, 33% found the end-to-end process digitization to be the next big milestone to cross. And 11% find manager visibility, control, and support to be an area that could be looked at improving.

There are multiple ways insurance agents and teams can approach the development and growth of their practice. Most practitioners agree with the 5 step model:

  • Lead your practice – Set clear goals, develop advisor-wise plans and monitor practice structure to lead your team
  • Manage your clients – Be responsive and deliver consistent engagement to stand apart from your competition
  • Acquire more clients – Nurture prospects systematically and manage leads diligently to drive conversions
  • Coach your advisors – Identify behavior and/ or skill gaps and invest in proactive coaching
  • Enable “one pane of glass” for all of your agent’s needs – Surface learning tools, content sharing, compensation views etc. in the context of daily planning and activities

“Top Quartile Reps are way more effective. In a Bancassurance use case, managers need to know when to intervene, and push the team in the right direction. 60% of our audience think the biggest challenge to success is the lack of interventions of managers at the right time. In competitive market spaces – it becomes even more essential for managers to have that visibility. Through our deployments, we saw a lot of activity happening with low outcomes.
How do you balance that and fix the gap? Are your RM’s doing the right thing? It’s best to learn from the best, build playbooks for the rest of the teams and branches to follow – and there’s always scope for improvement.” – Varun Ravichandran – Head of Industry Solutions, Vymo

But it’s not really a who’s to blame – game. Being a manager is no walk in the park either.

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60% of our attendees say they struggle with initiating interventions by managers at the right time to drive success. 20% could use a more unified view into their teams’ performance and 20% need more data to understand what the next best areas for improvement should be.

Managers could face 4 challenges behind why they’re struggling to invest more time in sales coaching:

Managers don’t completely understand the benefits of sales coaching

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The war cry for sales coaching only continues to grow. Learning & Development professionals and senior sales leaders identify Sales Coaching as a top priority for their frontline sales managers.

Getting a view of the challenges reps face on a daily basis allows the management team to implement a need-based approach and training process for reps to address problems outside of the sales teams control, and in general to have a good grasp of trends in the industry and market regions.

Dealing with overwhelming time constraints

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If you were to take into consideration business travel, preparing forecasts, and attending internal meetings – managers work really long hours! Your time isn’t really yours – not all the time 🙂

In reality, a chunk of their time is spent on their role as chief problem solver as opposed to a sales enabler. This has amazing short-term benefit in terms of generating additional revenue but it weakens the long-term focus areas – help their sales reps learn to solve many of these problems on their own.

How to not hurt a sales rep’s confidence

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Telling a colleague or your team off on purpose is – not the right approach,really. But not hurting or making your team feel undervalued/motivated is an important part of being able to effectively embibe a healthy coaching culture.

Coaching, just like say – education, needs to be seen as genuinely helpful and focused on developing the skills and knowledge of the sales rep.

Coaching is about focusing on improving the bottom and enabling the top but keeping the middle funnel moving! Ultimately, the goal of sales coaching is to improve sale rep performance and increase confidence levels as they develop even better selling skills.

Not sure how to coach?

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Some folks are blessed with natural coaching instincts – some are not just like every skill you’re naturally good at vs. the ones you learn, practice and master 🙂

Being a manager and a coach requires time, passion, and dedication. It is, however, not only worthwhile in terms of business impact but also the satisfaction the sales coach experiences as they see their reps selling skills & confidence grow, and revenue of course!

Vymo Coach empowers managers to intervene in-the-moment, interact with their teams proactively, and understand which reps need your immediate attention.

We ran a pilot program with some of our larger deployments to gauge the effectiveness of manager coaching interventions. As a result, managers who responded to nudges on a timely basis saw 4x improvement in the total teams’ daily activities with a 75% reduction in the TAT.

The team is solution-focused and has invested time in helping us with adoption. Vymo’s features are great but the ownership, flexibility, and agility of the customer teams is even better. Also, we really liked the emphasis on Performance and KPI management. Vymo is enabling me to manage my team’s productivity better and turnaround the WFH challenges positively. Through its features that help in managing their daily routines well, the team has become more disciplined and able to focus on their most important customer/sales priorities.” Sandeep Mishra, SVP & Head, HDFC Bank Relationship, ABSLI

Vymo’s ‘Work From Home’ solution is being offered as an upgrade on existing versions of the application and is designed to help clients go-live in less than 72 hours.

Connect with our solution expert to understand more how Vymo Coach can drive your sales conversations effectively!

Schedule a Demo to know about Vymo Coach. Click Here

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