[Ambition Customer Summit] Live from the stage!

If you couldn't make it to Music City for our inaugural Customer Summit, we'll keep you up to speed with some hot takes and highlights throughout the day and later this week, so stay tuned! (And be sure to follow along with our event hashtag #AmbitionCS2019 on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!)

How a Coaching Approach to Leadership is Changing the Game: Brian Trautschold, co-founder, Ambition

• "There's a massive shift happening. Performance is not just about one number. It's a series of KPIs."  How do we keep up with the crazy-fast evolution of the sales world? One word: automation. We need to remove as much of the manual labor and rigmarole as possible. If we've got the right tools in place, that allows sales managers to be in the trenches with the reps, coaching at the exact minute they need help and recognizing wins, big or small, as soon as they happen.

• "30% of reps say they don't have visibility into numbers." It's incredibly demotivating when you go home at night, you didn't hit your numbers, and you don't know why. If your reps don't know exactly where they stand and how they're tracking against their benchmarks, we — as sales coaches — need to change something.

• "Sales management is becoming sales coaching." It's true: what we do as sales managers is so much more than...managing. We're motivating, inspiring, course correcting — in real time — and using data to bring visibility and accountability to the sales floor. 

Create Better Scorecards For Your Reps: Mary Foster, Ambition Customer & Product Marketing Manager 

• "Work backward."  Showcase more than results, and more than lagging metrics. Work your way backward to see which early, top-of-funnel sales activities are really driving conversations — then align your scorecards and leaderboards around those.
• "The power of the scorecard: weighting." All activities are not created equal — and if you work your way back (see above), you'll know exactly which of those early sales touches you want your reps to focus on. f you want more calls, weight them heavier than, say, emails. 

5 Tips To Make Call Coaching More Successful: Lauren Bailey, Factor8 and #GirlsClub

• "Really great reps can be really sh*tty coaches." Harsh, but true.
• "Call coaching is skill coaching." It's not sending an instant message or a note in Slack. Yeah, it's tough to show up to 1:1s, it's tough to break away. But reps are CRAVING that development.
• "When millennials are searching for a job, the #1 thing they're looking for is development." It's what brings millennials to a job, and if they don't get it, that can be the reason your top talent leaves.
• "The best coaches in the world engage reps in conversation." Managers need a model for each meeting. Clarify expectations, observe behavior, ask questions (that's key!) and then, commit to action items.
• "Can you use your A-players to coach your other reps? ABSOLUTELY." Using your A players for group sessions with your Cs and Ds can be incredibly effective. It reinforces positive behaviors with your As while teaching your average and below-average perfomers what behaviors really work.

How to Personalize Emails & Calls at Scale: Becc Holland, Chorus.ai

• "Personalizing is no long an option. It's a necessity of you want to drive quota attainment." Unpersonalized messaging doesn't work anymore. Period.
• "The problem with prospects: they're smart." Hey, if you're calling on the right people, then they're not new to your sales game. Of course, it's not about outsmarting your prospects; it's about connecting with them on a personal level. Hot tip: Becc has found that referencing a piece of content your prospect has written gets a 90-95% conversion rate. (No, that's not a typo.)

Stay tuned for more recaps and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn!