Sales coaching can feel like searching for clarity in a sea of conversation details. Managers need a way to guide reps toward repeatable success, yet identifying coachable moments often requires hours spent sifting through call recordings.
In this blog, we'll explore the common challenges sales managers face and how AI can improve your coaching efforts across both call quality and call process adherence.
What Are The Problems Sales Managers Face
1. Lack of an Effective Talk Track to Follow For Reps
An effective cold call typically involves 8-10 structured elements, yet many SDRs lack a consistent framework. Without a defined talk track, reps are left to ‘wing it’ on each call. This lack of structure leads to inconsistencies, making it difficult for reps to achieve repeatable success or learn what’s working.
2. Difficulty in Viewing Call Data in a Standardized Format
Cold calls live in volumes of unstructured data, making it difficult for managers to capture coachable insights. Manually reviewing entire call recordings requires hours of effort that pulls managers away from actual coaching. As a result, the process becomes fragmented, leaving gaps in feedback.
3. Fragmented Feedback Sessions
During synchronous coaching sessions, sales managers often focus on listening to calls and reviewing what was done, rather than discussing how to improve. This piecemeal approach reduces the time available for targeted coaching, making it harder for reps to apply actionable guidance. Without a comprehensive view of both individual call quality and the calling process, feedback often misses critical areas for improvement, limiting its impact on rep performance.
4. Inconsistent Calling Cadence Among Reps
Many reps struggle to maintain a steady call rhythm, leading to spikes in activity that make pipeline generation unpredictable. Without structured call routines, managers find it hard to ensure reps meet daily targets without sacrificing call quality.
5. Lapses in CRM Accuracy and Follow-Up Completion
High call volumes make it difficult for reps to keep up with accurate data entry and follow-up tasks. This often leaves managers with incomplete records, complicating the ability to track performance and identify improvement areas.
Ultimately, sales managers need a
- Structured talk track that would need to continuously evolve to address new prospect objections, pain points, winning ways to deliver openers and value propositions as they emerge.
- Clear framework that ensures consistent dialing routines, timely follow-ups, and disciplined execution.
The main problem with most sales dialing tools is that they do not offer you a structured way to coach your calls and their processes. But Dial IQ does.
How Dial IQ’s AI-Based Cold Call Coaching Helps You
Dial IQ is a parallel and power dialing sales platform that helps you improve your sales performance with AI-driven coaching and detailed call reviews. Dial IQ tackles two key coaching needs in an SDR’s call cycle: coaching the calls and coaching the calling process.
Coach the Cold Call with Talk Track Tables
Talk Track Tables offers a clear, structured breakdown of call data, giving you an eagle-eye view of your reps’ performance.
By transcribing and scoring calls based on clarity, engagement, persuasiveness, and data collection, Talk Track Tables turns unstructured data into actionable insights, allowing managers to instantly pinpoint strengths and improvement areas against an ideal standard.
Think of Talk Track Tables as an AI-powered SDR Analyst:
- Listening to hundreds of calls over time
- Jotting down call details, breaking down calls into steps
- Comparing what was done to what should have been done
- Telling you where your reps need retraining or improvement
With Talk Track Tables, sales managers can:
- Identify patterns that make great or bad cold calls
- Identify skill gaps across reps based on consistent areas of weakness.
- See which openers, calls to action, and value prop delivery techniques yield the best results for converting calls to meetings.
- Ensure adherence to sales methodology and frameworks built into the AI (use our default frameworks or custom-build your own)
Coach the Calling Process Adherence
While mastering the conversation is crucial, the overall calling process determines repeatable success. To ensure their reps are hitting quota, sales managers must turn raw dial targets into consistent pipeline generation by coaching reps on daily execution.
For an SDR targeting 8-10 meetings booked monthly, with a 6% connect rate, aiming for around 3-5 meaningful conversations per day would require approximately 100-150 dials per day to reach the goal.
But here's where process coaching becomes critical: without proper structure, these targets often lead to call sandbagging – the practice of cramming required dials into desperate end-of-day or end-of-week sprints.
The solution lies in focused call blocks. By coaching reps to dedicate specific 2-3 hour periods solely to dialing, managers create sustainable rhythms that prevent last-minute activity spikes. These structured blocks eliminate the scattered approach that kills productivity and allows managers to actively coach both high-velocity SDRs (150-200 daily dials) and strategic account SDRs (30-40 highly researched calls) according to their unique needs.
If connect rates are low despite the right call volume, managers need to identify potential blockers beyond just dial volume. They need to analyze whether it's an issue with the dialing list, phone deliverability, or even poor phone hygiene - like outdated or invalid contacts.
Process coaching all these possibilities becomes exponentially easier with AI.
Dial IQ enables this depth of coaching through:
- Automatic Field Capture: Automatically capturing crucial details like the prospect's title, pain points, and mentions of budget.
- Outcome Detection: Automatically categorizing calls as positive, neutral, or needing follow-up—according to criteria set by managers.
- Next Step Detection: Determining whether appropriate follow-up actions were discussed, also suggesting additional steps based on the conversation's context, helping reps stay on course.
- Follow-up Tasks: Ensuring post-call activities are completed and documented, and CRM hygiene is maintained.
The result is a calling operation built on reliable processes rather than individual heroics. By combining structured calling blocks with AI, managers can build a repeatable system that turns daily activities into predictable pipeline generation.
Want to Leverage AI to Help You Coach Your Reps?
Your team's daily conversations with prospects contain valuable coaching opportunities across both call quality and process adherence. By integrating AI into your sales coaching mix, you can address these two critical areas simultaneously.
Dial IQ leverages AI to:
- Coach the call: Using Talk Track Tables to analyze and improve conversation quality
- Coach the calling process: Tracking volume, outcomes, and follow-up actions to ensure consistent process adherence
If you’re curious about how AI can take your sales coaching to the next level, book a demo with us. We're here to help your reps master both the art of conversation and the discipline of consistent execution.
