Coaching for senior managers & enablement

Who's this for? Manager of managers and Sales enablement

With just a little bit of set up, you can make it easy for your sales teams to integrate coaching into their established routines. In this article, we'll explore the different options available to set up coaching in Gong, foster a coaching environment at your organization, and monitor the results so that you can realize your coaching goals.

Set up a coaching program

Set up Gong so that it's easy for managers to find coachable moments and rate calls, and for everyone to dip into a library of examples of great calls.

Note: Some of these features need to be be set up by admins. Talk to your Gong admin if you need help.

Get set up for assessing performance on calls

Set up Whisper to monitor interaction stats and analyze the topics that come up on calls.

When you turn on Whisper, your reps will get coaching recommendations in the post-call email, on the call page, and you can see how reps performed on calls on the Insights > Team page, which shows rep stats and whether aspects of their behaviors lie within the recommended range.

Whisper gives automatic coaching recommendations on calls by analyzing the conversation and suggesting improvements. Whisper cracks the code on what your best reps do during customer conversations, according to measured data. It solves the oldest problem in sales: Understanding what separates your best reps from the rest. It also highlights what each "average" rep needs to start talking about to close more deals.

Learn how to set up the two areas Whisper covers:

• Set up Whisper for call interaction stats to show coaching recommendations on calls

• Set up Whisper for topics to identify topics your team should talk more - or less - about

Get set up for surfacing interesting calls

The following levers allow you to easily find calls containing particular keywords, phrases, or topics that come up and that you might want to focus your coaching on. For example, you might want to coach on a new talk track or how to negotiate pricing, and these levers make it easier for your team to find matching calls.

• Set up trackers to track keywords and phrases to surface how reps are talking

• Set up an initiatives board to follow how tracked initiatives are doing

• Set up topics to surface subjects that come up on your calls as a way of gauging where, how long, and when they come up on calls, and giving you an easy way to find common subjects across all your calls

Get set up for scoring calls

Create scorecards to give people the ability to rate calls in a structured & consistent way. By standardizing review criteria with set questions, you can better identify calls where there's room for improvement, and find coaching opportunities.

You might want to create different scorecards for different types of calls, or for places where company initiatives come up, and so on. Anyone can score a call via the tab on the call page.

Learn how to set up scorecards

Get set up for collecting examples

Use the library to set up folders and streams that show examples of successful talk tracks, elevator pitches, discovery, negotiation...or for anything and everything you want to use to coach others. Once you've identified what makes a great salesperson, you can coach your other reps and bolster their weak areas.

For more details, see:

• Intro to the libraries

• Add a call or call snippet to the library

Set up real-time alerts to monitor certain behaviors, such as interaction stats that are not within the benchmark guidelines, certain topics not raised, or calls that scored badly. Use streams on the Conversations > Library pages to set up and save searches for particular types of calls that interest you, and subscribe your team so that they can apply the winning strategies you identify. Learn more

Foster a coaching environment

Encourage your managers and teams to leverage Gong to give feedback and coach on deals in the course of their day-to-day workflow.

Here's a few ideas to share with your teams for how they can use Gong to improve themselves:

• Make sure they know what coaching levers you've set up. If you set up Whisper, trackers, topics, initiative boards, scorecards, and libraries, (as described above), make sure that your team know where to find them and how to use them.

• Asynchronous reviews are easy to do. Why not encourage everybody to listen to 1-2 calls every week, and give feedback via comments or scorecards?

• How about promoting proactiveness? Reps can ask their managers for feedback on an entire call or any particular part. We recommend that reps ask for feedback at least once a week to ensure their manager is continuously seeing areas where the rep feels they need help or advice.

• Coaching is a team sport! By critiquing calls together, whether it's a call someone on the team made or an example from the library, is a good way to discuss what worked and what didn't, identify areas where everyone is struggling, and inspire reps to hone their skills.

Tip: Check out Coaching for frontline managers to see our recommendations for how frontline managers can start coaching.

Track coaching

You've worked hard to set up ways the team can use Gong for coaching, and now it's time to monitor how coaching has been done.

• See manager coaching efforts to understand who's coached their team, and how

  Tip: Understand what counts as feedback and learn what else is shown in the coaching metrics data.

• See how everyone uses Gong for coaching, no matter who they are

• See how initiatives are improving over time in the Initiative trends chart