SalesTechStar Interview with Brian Trautschold, COO and Co-founder of Ambition

Why should sales coaching be as data driven as possible today? Brian Trautschold, COO and Co-founder of Ambition shares some thoughts in this chat:

_____

Hi Brian…tell us more about the Ambition platform and its growth story through the years?

Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every sales department, data source, and performance metric on one easy system. Ambition clarifies and publicizes real-time performance analytics for your entire sales organization. Ambition has been built for non-technical sales leaders can build custom scorecards, contests, reports, and TVs. Endorsed by the Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Allen Pogorzelski, Vice President, Marketing At Openprise

Can you talk about the growing importance for sales gamification in today’s marketplace and how you feel these tools will evolve in future to meet business needs?

Gamification has been around for decades, in one form or another. Sales teams have found value in creating incentives and encouraging competition amongst their team to create higher engagement and motivation levels. Sales managers and leaders need to get the right signals and insights about what is happening in the right place, at the right time so they can celebrate or course-correct their teams. Additionally, sales leaders are facing evolving challenges such as maximizing employee performance with feedback and accountability while managing a distributed workforce.

How according to you should sales leaders be using better technologies to train (and maybe even hire) sales people that can create business impact faster?

One thing that is clear is setting metric-based guidelines for employee onboarding and ‘ramp-up’ is key. By having clear metrics for success, you create an environment where your new teammates know how to be successful and what areas to focus their efforts on.

How can sales teams today have a more data driven approach to coaching?

The best sales coaching is data-driven. Yet a challenge we hear often is that before a check-in with a sales rep, a manager has to download a few custom reports from Excel or open multiple tabs to find the information that will help them effectively coach their people. Through data and analytics, sales leaders can effectively track and monitor sales reps’ activities while keeping an eye on how they are measuring against their KPIs. In addition, access to real-time data during check-in meetings and coaching sessions through simple, one-click links to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) records results in more transparent, data-driven sales coaching.

Can you talk about some innovative ways in which you’ve seen leading sales teams train and lift their teams, especially during the pandemic?

Recognition, team alignment, and building energy and pace are key for successful sales teams. Even at Ambition, where we were effectively distributed before COVID – it’s still critical that everyone in our company can see the success we’re having (via real-time alerts in Slack) and where we are toward our goals (via intelligent updates sent to group emails).

A lot of the rituals around managing salespeople have to evolve for the future of work. I say rituals because before COVID, most of the way we managed and coached our teams was built on physically being in the same room. Oftentimes, those meetings relied more on gut and subjective feelings versus being data-driven or informed by real progress to goals. By being more data-driven and consistent with coaching programs, we believe revenue leaders will have a huge impact not just on their reps’ performance but also their employee retention. 

Ambition sits in this unique position because of the insights we can gather and contextualize about rep performance. We’re already delivering projections, pacing, and forecast insights about that to leaders and expect to offer more products to help managers and even individual sellers see around corners (so to speak) to have higher likelihood of success.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview With Dan Fleetwood, President, Research & Insights Platform At…