As a sales manager, you are in charge of the skills, abilities, and satisfaction of your reps. It’s your job to empower them to perform better and close more deals, working alongside them to build skills and pinpoint specific areas of improvement.
You’re their manager, but you’re also their friend, their confidant, and (most importantly) their sales coach.
What does it take to coach effectively? Besides having a good basis of trust and mutual respect, you need to have:
- The right data for sales activity and performance
- A clear view of what’s working (and what’s not)
- The right platform to coach effectively with a clear structure
So, how do you find the right platform to coach your team?
Coaching a sales team encompasses a wide range of tools, but we’re going to focus on three specific areas where sales coaching software is most helpful to you as a sales manager:
- Top 5 sales coaching platforms for live & on-demand call coaching
- Best 6 sales coaching software tools for conversation intelligence
- Top 4 coaching strategy tools to build a better structure for your coaching efforts
In total, we’re giving you the scoop on the best 15 sales coaching platforms on the market today. Let’s find the right platform for your team.
Top 5 sales coaching platforms for live & on-demand call coaching
Your reps probably spend the majority of their day hitting the phones and speaking directly to prospects and leads.
So, what are the best tools to help them improve their skills on the call and save the deal? And what tools can you use to analyze and give feedback post-call?
1. Close: Call Coaching
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Cost: $145 per user, per month (Close Business Plan)—See all pricing plans here
Best Feature: Live call coaching inside a robust CRM
Close is a full-service CRM with calling, email, and SMS options alongside deep reporting, activity tracking, and customization features that your team needs. But it’s recently become your team’s all-in-one coaching tool with live call coaching features.
Close gives you 3 options for live call coaching:
- Listen: You can hear the rep and the prospect, but neither one can hear you.
- Whisper: You can hear the rep and the prospect, but only the rep can hear you.
- Barge: You can hear the rep and the prospect, and both can hear you.
You can jump into live calls as your reps are on the phone without leaving your CRM, and you’ll never barge a call blindly. Close gives you full deal context in the Lead view as you hop into live calls.
Check out what this powerhouse tool can do for your team.
2. Outreach.io
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Engagement and deal tracking alongside call coaching
Outreach is designed to help remote teams connect better with their leads, and their outreach tools do just that. Their call coaching features also include Listen, Whisper, and Barge, as well as call recording.
3. RingDNA
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: AI surfaces important calls for managers to listen to and coach
While RingDNA does include live call coaching features, it excels in its ability to use AI to analyze conversations and performance metrics for your team. RingDNA automatically transcribes your calls, so you can keyword search inside a call (instead of listening to the whole thing to find one important moment). You can also annotate specific moments, have reps flag calls they want you to listen to, or let the AI flag the calls using the metrics you tell it are important.
4. Brainshark
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Customized sales call practice sessions on-demand
When coaching new hires or building skills for the middle of the pack, Brainshark is a useful option to consider. It allows you to create teachable moments that reps can review and use on-demand. Plus, you can build custom coaching activities for reps to practice with, then assess their skills and give them personalized feedback.
5. Dialpad Sell
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Managers can create specific coaching groups to see live and recorded calls only for the reps they’re coaching
Dialpad Sell’s coaching features are an interesting option for large businesses looking to coach across different inside sales teams with multiple managers. The ability to create coaching groups under different managers, as well as live call analysis with AI, helps scale coaching efforts with large sales teams.
In the list of in-progress calls, managers can see call sentiment and can click to see a real-time transcript of the call (all powered by AI). This allows managers to pinpoint in-progress calls that might need help, and get a sense of what’s being said before they jump in.
Best 6 sales coaching software tools for conversation intelligence
Your reps are having constant conversations with prospects—it’s your job to make sure those conversations are moving deals towards a closed-won.
That said, it’s impossible to monitor your reps’ calls, emails, and messages constantly. That’s where conversation intelligence comes in—this type of software allows you to scale your coaching efforts by using AI to analyze conversations for you, delivering insights that tell you who needs what type of coaching.
Here are 6 conversation intelligence tools you might consider:
6. Gong.io
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Conversation recommendations based on top-performing calls
Gong is an intelligence software that uses AI to analyze your reps’ calls and give you real data on the actions and activities that make those calls work. You’ll see the talk rate of both parties, topics discussed, and how different topics affected the results of the call.
7. ExecVision
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Conversation intelligence based on all interactions reps have with prospects—via calls, emails, SMS, or chat messages
Another top conversation intelligence tool, ExecVision gives sales managers an easy view into the day-to-day performance of reps, alongside real-time and asynchronous coaching features. Call data includes the normal metrics, including talk rate, transcription, topics, call anatomy, but also includes silence and IVR recognition, annotation features, and matches with CRM data.
For busy sales managers trying to coach large teams, ExecVision provides customizable Smart Alerts. Managers set specific conversation activities, phrases, or accounts they’re interested in and get real-time alerts for in-progress conversations that relate to their needs. ExecVision also includes an Inbox to keep these alerts in one place, alongside flagged conversations and coaching reminders.
8. Chorus.ai
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Top-tier integrations with communication tools to pul l conversation data from everywhere your reps work, and deliver it to where your team already is
Conversations happen everywhere, which is why Chorus draws information from all the places your reps are communicating with prospects. From there, you’ll see deep insights into what works and what does, which topics result in better responses, competitors that frequently come up in deals, as well as AI-powered recommendations for the skills individual reps need more coaching on.
9. VoiceVibes
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Uses AI to predict human perception of voice
Built by speech and linguistic experts, VoiceVibes uses AI to tell you how prospects will react to the way your reps speak (not just the words they say). VoiceVibes looks for positive indicators of speech, such as being clear, confident, authentic, and persuasive. It also detects negative vibes such as being belligerent, nervous, condescending, or boring. The program then gives personalized recommendations to reps based on the ‘vibe’ they project.
10. Showpad Coach
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Coaching, conversation intelligence, and sales enablement in one platform
Showpad is known best as a sales enablement platform, with top-tier sales content features that help managers enable, train, coach, and analyze their reps. Their conversation intelligence features allow managers to see top keywords in calls and meetings, topics discussion, and a full transcript of the call. Managers can also coach reps using Showpad Coach’s Pitch IQ feature, which takes each rep’s recorded sales pitch and ranks them based on key sales performance and AI.
11. Convin.ai
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Behavioral analysis that pinpoints specific actions top performers take during calls
Convin pulls conversation data from phone and video calls, then analyzes to see the top strategies and behaviors that your reps use to close deals. Topics and structure are placed against market sentiment and analysis to churn out performance tips for your whole team.
Top 4 coaching strategy tools to build a better structure for your coaching efforts
Coaching is important—but coaching with a goal and a clear plan to reach it is essential to long-lasting success.
Here are four tools that you can use to build a clear structure for your coaching efforts based on real-time data.
12. Ambition
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Cost: Starting at $750 per month for coaching features
Best Feature: Coaching dashboards for managers to get a quick view of important metrics
Planning and executing a coaching plan isn’t easy, especially when you’re managing a lot of reps. Ambition helps sales managers set clear plans for coaching individuals as well as groups of reps. The platform allows you to set up recurring 1:1s with reminders, record conversations, get insights into rep activity, and automatically share feedback and questions before meetings. Plus, managers can set up Action Plans to track how their coaching sessions translate into results over time.
All these notes, questions, goals, and feedback are stored inside Ambition, so you can refer back to previous conversations with reps.
13. MindTickle
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Sales performance, skill tests, and coaching session templates all together
MindTickle gives managers a clean coaching dashboard where they can see rep capability and skills, ongoing coaching sessions, assigned ‘missions’, and competency scores. Managers can set up specific coaching activities, such as video missions, demo missions, or email missions, and then get AI-based insights on rep performance. MindTickle also gives managers coaching session templates they can use to save time and build a better structure for 1:1s.
14. Bigtincan
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Cost: No pricing publicly available
Best Feature: Individual sales coaching integrated with your entire sales enablement strategy
While Bigtincan is known as a sales enablement tool, Bigtincan Learning is a standalone product that you can use to create coaching plans, build microlessons, create and review assignments, and deliver useful feedback. All of this can be done on-demand using video, plus it can be integrated with Bigtincan Hub to connect all of your sales enablement content for the entire team.
15. Close CRM
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Cost: Starting at $25 per user, per month—See all pricing plans here
Best Feature: Activity Overview and Activity Comparison reports, plus a team leaderboard
To coach effectively, you need to have the right data at hand. Close CRM provides activity and performance data for all of your reps together, as well as side-by-side comparisons against each other.
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You know which performance metrics matter most to your business, so you can customize these reports to see only what you want to see, instead of getting bogged down with ALL the activity metrics for the whole team.
This kind of in-depth performance reporting gives sales managers the right data to structure their coaching efforts based on specific performance goals. Best of all, it’s integrated directly inside your CRM, meaning you don’t need to switch to another window to get all the data you need.
Coach for long-term results with the right sales coaching software
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It’s not enough to give your reps some tips to improve—you need to build a structured sales coaching program that will give your reps goals to work towards and the motivation to reach those goals.
That’s why it’s so important to have the right software by your side. A good sales coaching platform gives you the right data to analyze performance, tools to coach more effectively, and space to build structure and goals into your 1:1s.
If you’re especially interested in live call coaching features, give Close a spin for 14 days without cost. You’ll see how combining a powerhouse CRM with built-in outreach, reporting, and coaching features can supercharge your coaching plan and help turn your middle-of-the-pack into your best performers.
