How to Automate Sales Coaching w/ Cory Bray [Episode 476]

Today’s episode unveils valuable advice on sales coaching, and how to do more with less.

Cory Bray, CEO of ClozeLoop, formerly known as CareerSofia, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Cory distinguishes training from coaching. Coaching is a component of management. It enables employees to use the available tools to their best potential.

Cory cites Bill Belichick as a great coach who established a system that works, and staffed it with raw talent he could help to become great. The system sets them up for success, and coaches help them continuously to improve.

Cory went through Sandler sales coaching, and got a vision of what coaching can be. He went into business with a Sandler associate, to form CareerSofia. Sofia is from Sophia, wisdom, in Greek. Their focus is on sales.

Cory discusses the vision of CareerSofia. They set out to make a software product inside Salesforce to deliver the minimum effective dose of coaching for the deal at hand.

CareerSofia helps strategize against the competition, with the tactics a coach would suggest for moving a sale forward. Top sales reps and management curate content.

CareerSofia supplies salespeople with tools they need to do the job from ‘Day 2.’ No long onboarding is required.

The underlying principle is a knowledge base, structured so that relevant sales information surfaces as it is needed.

Cory explains why testing is not a part of the CareerSofia platform. They started to include testing, and users didn’t want it. They just wanted coaching on time.

Managers retain coaching authority. They coach one-on-one, and they supply CareerSofia with what works best in certain situations. Outside coaching is also encouraged. CareerSofia sells through sales consultant channel partners.

The ideal end user has a a growing inside sales team of 5-100 reps, using Salesforce.com to sell one or two products. The ideal channel partner is a seller-doer sales consultant who wants to scale, without adding an associate.

Cory sees three buckets in coaching: teaching the tools; teaching how to use them well; and teaching how to use them well under duress. CareerSofia helps the coach. Their future is in adding items to make the product more robust.

CareerSofia has some secret sauce coaching tools coming up that Cory will announce at a future date.

The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul was formerly Accelerate! with Andy Paul.