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6 Principles to Design a Sales Coaching Curriculum from Scratch:Plan, Design, and Implement an End-to-End Curriculum for Sales Enablement

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But first, why is sales coaching and curriculum development important?

• How to build an intentional sales curriculum

• Tips to align internal stakeholders and sellers

• Best practices to build effective and engaging content

• Flexible formats for delivering sales curriculum

• How to measure the impact of your sales curriculum and each rep’s performance

In here you’ll learn:

2

Without a formal sales curriculum, many sales leaders neglect sales

coaching altogether. The stats are telling:

50%

38.4%

32.5%

27%

60%

If you’re currently building a sales curriculum from scratch or trying to update an existing curriculum, this guide is for you!

Nearly half of sales managers spend just 30 minutes coaching each rep each week

34.8% of sales leaders say they have little to no formal training for new hires

32.5% say their teams are being inconsistently trained

Reps who are not formally coached are 27% more likely to miss quota

More than 60% of reps state they’ll leave an organization if their manager is not a good coach.

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A good curriculum is made up of the following components:

For better or worse, sales coaching is often

neglected due to prioritization and bandwidth.

Formal curriculum development generally only

happens when organizations scale, bringing on

roles like Sales Enablement.

Yet no matter where you are in your sales

coaching evolution, failing to develop a formal

curriculum is a mistake.

Without a curriculum, if sales coaching even

happens, it is haphazard and ineffective. It takes

place in one-off formats and reps aren’t pushed

to practice over time. With little to no way to

measure effectiveness or certify reps, reps begin

using different processes and talk tracks.

This results in just a few reps succeeding, while

many struggle to attain quota.

We’re here to help you avoid these problems

by building a sales coaching curriculum that

leverages simple principles any leader can deploy.

So, what makes a good sales coaching curriculum?

INTENTION

ALIGNMENT

CONTENT

DELIVERY

MEASUREMENT & EVALUATION

It’s important to outline the goals of your overall curriculum. Determine the standards necessary to complete each lesson

Multiple stakeholders will need to get aligned on the curriculum you create and their role in the process. Include enablement, the sales leader, any frontline sales managers, and those who will complete the curriculum

You will need to build a library of content and keep it fresh over time

Curriculum must be deployed digitally or in-person in a variety of formats. Consider classroom, peer-to-peer, 1:1, via an LMS or GoogleDrive, and more

There must be a certification or measurement plan in place for each lesson. This should include a way to evaluate the overall effectiveness of your sales coaching efforts

Read on to understand each of these areas in depth.

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6 Principles of Sales Coaching Curriculum Development

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Building a good curriculum takes time. It must be thoughtful and prescriptive. Before you even begin to outline your curriculum, it’s important to

get access to the field to listen to reps and customers firsthand. You’ll also need allies on the sales team who are bought in, as well as executive

buy-in and sponsorship. All of this is dependent on a strong listening tour that effectively never ends.

Do these three things right away when you’re preparing to build a new curriculum:

1 Go on a listening tour

ACCESS THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER — Listen to a wide variety of calls to understand how calls differ across various stages in the sales process, as well as by vertical and persona.

By leveraging Conversation Intelligence technologies to record calls, sales enablement can keep a constant pulse on the voice of the customer, including the language customers use and objections that come up across calls.

We suggest listening to a minimum of 15 calls at the onset and a minimum of two per week as you scale

GET REP FEEDBACK — Regularly ask reps about the calls that go well or do not progress, including the specific objections, competitor mentions, and FAQs they face.

Source real stories from the field that you can build into case studies and curriculum. Corroborate what reps say by listening to actual

calls with prospects so you don’t fall into the trap of relying on hearsay.

GAIN A DETAILED UNDERSTANDING OF THE END-TO-END SALES PROCESS — Work with sales leadership to identify how each part of the sales process is run. Include:

• Questions to ask the prospects during various stages • FAQs and objections• Content to give the prospect

By building a robust understanding of each stage, you can begin building better curriculum around areas like discovery, demos, proposal development, negotiation, procurement and more.

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Rolling out a sales curriculum provides a big opportunity to get the entire team energized around the company vision and major objectives.

It also forces the sales leadership team to get aligned on the details of the talk track, process, and sales methodology. It should be rolled out

with a vision and intention in mind.

Some common reasons to roll out a new curriculum or update an existing one include:

2 Jointly determine a vision and intention

IMPROVE ONBOARDING PROCESSES TO RAMP NEW REPS QUICKLY AND CONSISTENTLY — reduce the time it

takes to onboard new reps by re-envisioning on-boarding. Consider new ways to give hungry reps access to playlists and practice

so they aren’t sitting around waiting for ride-along calls

BOOST QUOTA ATTAINMENT — your market is always changing. As new competitors enter the market, or your team refines

the product and messaging, it’s critical to provide ongoing training and certify reps

OPTIMIZE YOUR PROCESS TO DECREASE FUNNEL LEAKAGE — even when the team’s performing fine, there are

always opportunities to refine processes. An ongoing curriculum, including new content and talk tracks, can help the team improve

the effectiveness of their sales funnel

When you roll out the curriculum, share why so the team knows that the curriculum was developed with their needs and the organization’s

needs in mind. This provides transparency and motivates reps who might otherwise believe they’re being given “homework,” or are being

punished for poor performance. As much as possible, use data points, insights, or anecdotal stories to back up the curriculum you create.

Likewise, it’s important to get all of the stakeholders involved in curriculum development aligned. If stakeholders disagree about the details

of the curriculum, such as the talk track or process, the sales team won’t trust the curriculum and adopt it at scale. Down to the minute details,

stakeholders should be bought in on all of the standards and approaches that will be taught.

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There are many ways to structure the sales curriculum, but some common topics include:3 Brainstorm prescriptive content topics

Sales Processes

Objections

Sales Methodologies

Competitors

Sales Stages

FAQs

Customer Stories

New Products or Solutions

Persona Based Vertical Based

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Within each topic, be very prescriptive about what you want reps to do. Provide a good balance of activities, such as classroom style learning,

reading or video, listening to existing playlists, self or peer assessments, and certifications on a live customer call.

Directly link to content and provide access to rubrics. Before certifying reps, provide a safe space for reps to record themselves practicing.

Classroom Style

Certification on Live Customer Call

Reading or Video

Listen to Playlists

Sales Curriculum Formats:

Self or Peer Assessment via

Film Review

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Once you’ve outlined the topics you’ll need to develop curriculum around, go a layer deeper by outlining exactly what standards reps must

demonstrate to be proficient within each topic. At Chorus we enable this through scorecards. Scorecards are pre-built rubrics that you can use

to score reps and teams. Sales enablement can use them off-the-shelf or customize them to their specific curriculum.

Here’s an example of a discovery call rubric:

Learn more about Chorus scorecards here.

4 Outline standards within each topic

• Begin with a strong opener. Set the tone of the call and frame the goal of the meeting

• Set a clear agenda. Get confirmation from the prospect on any other topics they want to cover.

• Uncover the prospect’s pain points and guide the conversation using active listening

• Connect the prospect’s pain point to the product’s value

• Tell a customer story to prove how other users solved their problems with your product

• Manage questions about competitive products or alternative solutions with fact-based differentiation points

• Ask engaging questions that get the prospect talking throughout

• Establish clear and scheduled next steps

DISCOVERY CALL RUBRIC:

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When you roll out your curriculum, test early and often. Don’t teach

something for three weeks and wait to see if reps grasp the content.

Start experimenting right away so that you can get any potential

blockers out of the way.

There are several ways to assess whether your curriculum is working

or not:

FRICTIONLESS ADOPTION — Look to see that reps are moving

through the curriculum as you expect.

Are they completing all of the activities in the order and timeframe you

laid out? Verify that they can access all of the content and rubrics they

need to be successful. If you notice friction, address it immediately.

Uncover things outside of the curriculum that might be standing in

the way, such as other priorities or a lack of adoption at the manager

level, to address it.

DIRECT FEEDBACK — Often if the curriculum is working or not,

you’ll hear it directly from reps, frontline managers, and customers.

5 Commit to measuring effectiveness

Ask the team how it’s going and listen to call recordings to corroborate

the feedback. Listen to customer calls to see if the team is adopting

the right talk tracks and methodologies.

RAMP TIME & RESULTS — While improving sales metrics will take

time, the quickest way to understand if the curriculum is working or

not is to look at how new reps are ramping.

How quickly and efficiently do they ramp compared to previous

classes? If you’re running certifications, are reps’ scores increasing

over time? Depending on your sales process you’ll want to give

yourself a long enough timeframe to measure results in other areas.

Progress in the following areas is a sign that your curriculum is working:

• Overall quota attainment

• Improvements in productivity

• Decreases in the time it takes to close a deal

• Competitive win rates

• Increases in Average Contract Value

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The curriculum will evolve just as your market evolves. As you

refine it, be transparent about what you heard from the team. If

something wasn’t working well, or the team didn’t feel they were

equipped with the right resources, address the concern head on.

Say, “We heard customers weren’t responding well to this particular

talk track, so here’s how we changed it.”

If things are working highlight successes on the team to drive

further adoption. For instance, if one particular rep is doing a

great job adopting the curriculum and has positively impacted

her metrics, share that story with the team.

You can also use spiffs and competitions to drive ongoing adoption

and incentivize the team to practice. At many organizations

Chorus customers ask reps to submit recorded calls to a playlist

each week and run ongoing film reviews.

6 Refine over time & drive ongoing adoption

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Here are some of the most creative playlist topics we see on Chorus to drive ongoing practice:

Minutes Your opener sets the tone for your call. Run an internal contest to see who

gets the most out of the first three minutes of their sales call

Learn how to pick up clues that demonstrate whether a buyer

intends to purchase or not

It’s critical that reps set the agenda for their calls and

control them. Share best-in-class ways to set agendas

throughout the entire sales process

Listen to how top reps handle objections about

kick-off an implementation

“Best of” playlists feature highlights of top sales calls. Budget qualification is one of the most difficult things reps do, so learn from top

sellers firsthand

CS calls with live clients provide great snapshots of how to identify an upsell

opportunity and bring new ideas to customers

Listen to the talk tracks from deals that closed

incredibly quickly

“Story Time” playlists are all about helping reps bring

customer stories to life

Hear how top reps explain pricing to customers

Learn how to address calls where a competitor

is mentioned

Contest: First Three Minutes

Best of: Buyer Intent

Setting the Agenda

Roadmap Concerns

Best Of: Budget Qualifier

Up-selling 101

One Call Close

Delivering Pricing

Customer Story Time

Competitor Smackdown

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Create Your Coaching Curriculum With Chorus

KNOW WHERE ENABLEMENT CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

Now that you’re developing sales coaching curriculums, one of the most important things to do is to create a high-impact coaching curriculum. If you’re a Chorus customer, your sales team is recording and analyzing all

their calls in Chorus’s conversation intelligence platform.

But how do you use that data to inform your coaching agenda?

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One of the first things you can do is to look for the top talk

tracks that appear in the deals that you lost and build some

coaching ideas around them.

Jump into Talk Track Analytics in Chorus and in the “Outcomes”

tab, select your final deal stage to see what talk tracks appear

more frequently in closed lost deals. You might need to train

the team on reducing time spent on these talk tracks and focus

on the ones that seem to impact win rates.

To further understand what is said in these talk tracks, click on

the talk track name to see trends over time or to identify reps

who use them the most.

Click on the “View Moments” button to listen to all the

moments across your sales calls that include those mentions.

Step 1: Identify pain areas that require coaching

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In your 1-on-1s with reps, front line managers, and leadership, ask them 2 questions:

• Where do you see the biggest skill gaps in the team/yourself? (coaching for the team)

• What are top reps doing better than others/you? (coaching for subsets)

You can then jump into Chorus to search for these keywords, listen to specific moments across reps’ meetings, and identify if these problems

actually exist e.g. “reps don’t know how to explain our pricing”.

Chorus.ai shows you a correlation between the mentions of specific keywords and win / loss rates so you can identify where you actually have

a problem and need to prioritize a coaching topic on your curriculum.

Step 2: Determining coaching needs from 1-on-1s

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Here is where you identify which team and individuals

need focused training sessions on your calendar. There

are multiple ways to approach this in Chorus.

1. Common themes that cause problems: Search for top

problem areas e.g. objections, competitors, pricing and

look at the people who use these talk tracks the most.

2. People who do not follow the sales process: Set

up trackers for all your key sales process words and

create a custom view of these trackers across your

sales conversations. Filter for a team and sort by each

of the sales process columns to identify who has most

or least mentions.

Step 3: Find out who needs more coaching sessions

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As you get started with your enablement program, how do you ensure you are constantly aware of what’s next big thing you need to tackle.

Set up Chorus’ AI-based Smart Playlists that automatically scan conversations for what’s important for you.

Once you’ve heard some of the new calls or moments that Chorus highlighted for you, you can choose to build them into your curriculum for

the next month or publish them to reps for self-coaching. Alternately you can also play them during team meetings to demonstrate the right

and wrong behaviors or talk tracks.

Step 4: Keep your curriculum updated

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Matt Payne, a sales enablement leader, understands the importance of using the customer’s voice to

simplify the sales narrative. When he first joined Jama Software he set out on a mission to understand

where reps were with the sales methodology and to put greater rigor around sales decision-making.

Matt wanted to move away from a world where decisions were based on guessing and extrapolation

to one where reps deeply understood the customer’s world.

After evaluating all of the solutions available in the category, Matt implemented Chorus.

“In the first 3MO of having Chorus, I listened in to a lot of calls and learned a ton. I’ve given new hires

several hours of content to listen to and that alone speeds up ramp time,” Matt said.

“So much of the industry knowledge is hard to get in a whitepaper. It’s so much better to get it directly

from customers. Chorus is helping tremendously,” he continued.

“We also wanted our reps to use certain keywords,” he said, such as “required capability.” Chorus

helped Matt monitor the words customers and reps use.

“We also looked at how things like pricing come up in the conversation. When we started to dig into

it, we saw that it was confusing and were able to help reps simplify their talk track.”

For Matt, implementing Conversation Intelligence is part of a larger mission to re-imagine sales

curriculum at Jama.

Matt is now using Chorus to identify new topics for his training calendar, and to re-evaluate where

the existing material he has fits. He is also expanding team-based and peer-to-peer training through

Chorus to bring in engaging new formats.

Jama Software is a leading product

development software Platform for

requirements and risk management

testing. With more than $300M in

funding and 223+ employees, Jama

Software is entering a new phase of

rapid growth.

Matt Payne, a Senior Sales Enablement

leader at Jama Software, spoke

about how he used voice of customer

insights to build a more effective sales

curriculum for on-boarding and beyond.

Learn how Jama Software Overhauled its Onboarding with a New Sales Enablement Curriculum

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About Chorus.ai

Chorus.ai is a Conversation Intelligence Platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes business conversations in real-time to coach

reps on how to become top performers. With Chorus.ai more reps meet quota, you ramp new hires faster, coach the existing team

effectively, and everyone in the organization can collaborate over the actual voice of the customer.

Chorus.ai is funded by Georgian Partners, Emergence Capital and Redpoint Ventures and is headquartered in San Francisco, US.

Learn More at www.chorus.ai