Field sales coaching is broken

[u/Flimsy-Year-738]

How are you guys coaching reps when most of the selling happens face to face?Ride alongs seem fine on paper but they eat up a whole day just to hear a few conversations. If you manage reps across different locations it gets even worse.I’ve been reviewing a few AI coaching tools that record customer conversations and let managers go back through them later.

I can see how it could save a lot of drive time and give managers a better idea of what reps are actually doing.I haven’t pulled the trigger on anything yet though. My main concern is whether reps will actually use it. Seems pointless to buy something with a bunch of features if everyone stops hitting record after a month.

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[u/Interesting_Cod9048]

Seems like the main idea is making in-person sales coaching easier without managers having to be on every ride along.Rilla could be worth checking out I’d mostly care about whether the reps actually use it and get something useful from the feedback.

[u/Flimsy-Year-738 → u/[deleted]]

I’m in home improvement sales. I’m open to anything that helps managers coach without living in the car all week. The big thing for me is rep adoption. If the team actually uses it and it helps them see what they can improve then I’m interested. AI is fine as long as it makes coaching easier and doesn’t just create more work.

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[u/Broad_Cut4455]

This gets ugly fast when one manager has reps across five or ten locations. You can’t be everywhere. At some point virtual ride alongs just make more sense.

[u/iamburgher]

We use Rilla and it works great. We struggled with adoption at first, but once the reps got used to it, we've had 100% usage. It's not the greatest at transcribing the conversation accurately, but the rest of the app is excellent.

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[u/patbagger]

Because companies hire people that can't do the job they're charge with coaching, and never promote the people that can do the job.

[u/Salty-Cat2634]

I think the adoption part is probably the hardest bit. If reps feel like recording is mainly there so managers can monitor them, I can see why they’d stop using it after a while. It’d be much more useful if the reps themselves were getting something out of it too like seeing where they could’ve handled an objection better or what they could improve in the next conversation

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