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Coaching is something that aligns with me personally and professionally. Managers from my past who embodied a coaching-first mindset made all the difference in my life and career.
At Ambition, my team and I are committed to defining sales readiness and ensuring every employee gets the coaching, training, and support they need to excel and achieve their full potential. Our product vision is grounded in the idea that sustained revenue growth comes from dynamic coaching and effective management.
Coaching is a crucial part of a sales manager's role. Management is not just about assigning KPIs and tasks—or getting deals over the line. It's about helping individuals develop skills, resilience, and grow holistically. However, managers have a lot of responsibilities competing for their time, making it challenging to know where to focus.
Discipline and consistency are required to ensure that your team hits goals, but far too often crucial coaching moments get missed. That's why I'm excited to announce the launch of Coaching Cadences™ as part of the Ambition Sales Coaching Platform.
What are Coaching Cadences™?
Coaching Cadences are a structured approach to sales coaching that guides managers and reps through a series of coaching interactions aimed at improving behavior, knowledge, and performance.
Cadences can be used to automate onboarding and coaching programs, scale enablement initiatives, and deliver coaching insights along a predetermined structure and timeline. Sales coaching cadences provide a framework for consistent and effective coaching that supports the growth and development of your sales team.
Our goal is for Coaching Cadences™ to work seamlessly with every part of the sales tech stack, and serve as a means to deploy coaching initiatives at scale, perfect for step-based coaching campaigns where each step brings information and data into one holistic view.
Here are some example cadences that came up in early access:
Cadences for skill development
If a salesperson's numbers begin to drop, a "back to basics" coaching approach can often address the issue. Skill development cadences eliminate the need to find time to coach them by scheduling a series of simple coaching opportunities focused on reinforcing key revenue fundamentals such as Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) review, objection handling, and selling to key personas. This avoids overwhelming the salesperson with too much information at once and allows for methodical improvement over time.
Cadences for New Employee Onboarding
Effective onboarding programs have scheduled checkpoints for new employees to meet. Falling behind may require additional coaching. Ambition Coaching Cadences can automate additional coaching checkpoints, monitor KPIs, and provide additional 1:1 coaching steps along the way, reducing mistakes in the crucial first 90 days.
Cadences to Support Learning and Development
Enablement teams generate a lot of content and training, but reinforcement and support can be lacking. This leaves both managers and enablement leaders unsure of what works to achieve top performance.
Using Ambition Coaching Cadences for enablement initiatives drives accountability through the manager and makes the impact of these efforts more visible throughout the organization. This allows enablement to deploy more programs that work for their teams.
How Cadences Fit into Sales Management Strategy
Sales coaching is a critical investment for any business that wants to improve sales performance, increase productivity, and stay competitive in their industry. Here is a prescriptive outline for applying cadences as part of a coaching playbook.
Identify Areas for Development and Improvement
Not every seller will need to improve on the same skills at the same time throughout their tenure. It is up to the manager to review and identify areas of development or improvement for every rep. Whether coaching to skill or will, it is important to find where the rep stands amongst peers and also in relation to their own historical performance.
Increase Productivity
Consistent coaching establishes positive accountability and drives productivity. Salespeople will not only feel empowered to put new skills and techniques into practice; they will also feel motivated to complete action items and scorecards, thus increasing productivity. There needs to be clear benchmarks around the quality of activity, but also the quantity. Create personalized scorecards for your reps in activity-driven roles and recognize reps with leaderboards or celebration alerts when they hit big productivity milestones.
Improve Efficiency and Performance with Coaching Cadences
Once you identify the individual areas each rep needs to work on, you can enroll them in a stepwise cadence to allow for synchronous and asynchronous touch points to help the rep upskill, retain trainings, or reinforce some behaviors that need polishing. It is common practice for enablement leaders to build cadences that managers can enroll reps into, but there may also be scenarios where managers build their own cadences. When individuals are coached regularly in personalized ways that cadences allow for, quota attainment has been shown to be 91% vs 85% where formal strategies don’t exist. It isn’t enough to simply throw managers’ Salesforce reports and show them who is struggling, they need the improvement mechanism to run their reps through. We believe Coaching Cadences is that perfect behavior-change solution.
But not everyone will need the same coaching at the same time based on performance or productivity areas that are identified as needing improvement. This is where cadences come in.
Programmatic Measurable Coaching is the Future
Ambition's Sales Coaching platform is revolutionizing the future of sales coaching in the enterprise. Our platform standardizes and documents essential coaching moments, such as recurring 1-on-1s and team meetings, tracks follow-up action items and progress against metrics. With the introduction of Coaching Cadences, our platform makes it easier for sales managers, operations, and enablement to work together at scale to achieve revenue goals.
Coaching is both an art and a science. While humans are needed to bring the nuance and empathy required to navigate conversations and encourage employees, our platform can capture those coaching moments, correlate them to success, and learn from them.
Companies invest heavily in sales enablement efforts and sales trainings, but it's difficult to determine their effectiveness.
By fully implementing Ambition, companies can begin to answer fundamental questions such as, "Are their managers consistently coaching employees in the way they expect?" and "Are the coaching, training, and enablement programs working?"
Ambition helps answer those questions by building features like Coaching Cadences that empower coaches with structure, accountability, and insights to tailor their coaching strategies and drive results.
In the words of one customer, “I see, you are bringing the scientific method to the art of sales coaching?”
Yes.
