February 10, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Brainshark Launches Sales Coaching Solution

Today, sales enablement solutions company Brainshark launched a new video-based coaching solution, Brainshark for Coaching. The solution aims to assist sales managers in improving their reps knowledge and skills by helping them perfect their pitches, increase productivity, and close more deals. Brainshark for Coaching is available as a stand-alone solution, or as an integrated component of the company's sales enablement offerings.

Brainshark for Coaching enables managers to initiate individual or teamwide challenges for reps. These challenges, delivered via email invitation, can include delivering a presentation, showing a demo, or rehearsing sales messaging for upcoming meetings. Reps perform the challenge on video and send it to their managers through the system. Managers then review the performance and provide feedback and ratings. Both reps and managers can see the status of a challenge on their dashboards.

"[Brainshark for Coaching] is replacing a process that many folks have used, but use it manually and are dealing with in face-to-face situations. Now you've got dispersed sales organizations, you've got people all over, [and] you’ve got an application, a tool, that can manage that for you so you don’t have to worry about trying to get everybody in a room on the hour and go through the process rep by rep,” says Kristin Simonini, senior director of product management at Brainshark.

According to a survey from Brainshark and Forbes Insights, three fourths of top-performing companies report that coaching and mentoring is the most important role for managers. Nevertheless, according to a November 2015 report from the Sales Management Association, 77 percent of companies said that they are not giving enough attention to sales coaching. Furthermore, the study found that companies that do give more attention to coaching have annual revenue growth rates that are 16.7 percent greater than competitors'.

According to Simonini, Brainshark found three primary obstacles for businesses trying to improve their mentoring programs: the managers didn't have the time to coach, they didn't know how to coach, and they weren't being held accountable for coaching. Simonini says that Brainshark for Coaching aims to eliminate these obstacles by making the coaching process easy to manage and including training content designed to help managers become better coaches.

In the future, Brainshark plans to add other features to its coaching solution, including access to top-performing videos, which will assist reps in learning from their colleagues’ success; and integration with the Brainshark formal learning system, which will enable sales trainers to incorporate practice scenarios into their curricula. Brainshark for Coaching is currently accessible from within the Brainshark platform, or through seamless login from Salesforce.

"There's always been a challenge with on-boarding the right people, finding the right people, getting them up to speed quickly. There’s always a challenge in retaining the right people. And there’s a lot of solutions that have addressed those things," Simonini says. "But as far a as how to improve your team and bring them to the next level, that’s an area that hasn’t had a lot of attention paid to it. That’s why the time is right for coaching.”