Coaching in the Cloud Leverages Social, Mobile and Open Models to Create Exceptional Success

We are truly living in a watershed moment in the history of sales enablement and performance improvement. The social media revolution has spawned an amazing set of innovative and intuitive tools that enable sales managers and sales makers to collaborate more effectively, address performance gaps, and close new business faster and with higher margins.

As we have discussed earlier in this series, this revolution in sales enablement has three key components:

1. Social – This is clearly a critical component, drawing, as it does, on the technology and the energy of the social networking culture. Businesses are now finding ways to tap this technology and energy in ways that enable their teams to collaborate more effectively and easily in real time and across geographical barriers. Using virtual platforms and new software applications, teams can now share ideas, conduct research, and plan/implement new programs. Sales managers are now able to more quickly track and coach performance to drive behavior change. Executives can now have the latest metrics at their fingertips in real time as they are being generated by salesmakers.

2. Mobile – The social networking revolution was born on the PC/Laptop platform, but in recent years it has grown wings and migrated to handheld devices, beginning with smartphones (think iPhone and similar devices) and, just within the past year, to tablets (like the iPad.) These handheld devices make it possible for the tools and platforms referenced above to be accessed by team members anywhere, anytime. This next generation of social collaboration creates incredible boosts in productivity by enabling teams to share vital information more quickly and adjust critical activities in the need of the moment, eliminating delays that can lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue.

3. Open – This final component may be the most important one, because it is the primary driver of success in this brave new business world where rapid access to accurate, important information drives your competitive edge. These new social, mobile technologies make critical content immediately accessible to everyone on the team regardless of time zone or geo, which in turn generates valuable feedback and intel across the entire organization. Training, coaching, planning, data harvesting, assessment, and redeployment of important assessments and activities become simple and seamless.

Over the past few weeks we have paid special attention to the unique features and functions available through Salesforce CRM that can help sales teams take advantage of this revolution. With this powerful set of tools at their fingertips, the only thing lacking for sales teams is a comprehensive deployment strategy to help them leverage all the possibilities. This is where Baker Communication‘s ground-breaking Coaching in the Cloud™ program takes center stage.

Coaching in the Cloud™ is a performance improvement framework that harnesses the power of the cloud to ignite individual, team and organizational growth. Coaching in the Cloud™ delivers enduring performance improvement and transformation staged and delivered completely in the cloud, relying heavily on the capabilities of Salesforce CRM to power the solution.

Coaching in the Cloud™ delivers a comprehensive performance experience including:

1. A Business Optimization Team that will ensure systems are optimized for peak performance
2. An Expert Sales Coach that works directly with sales teams each week to increase sales throughput
3. Disciplined coaching delivered weekly in 60 to 120 minute burst sessions designed to transfer knowledge required to sustain sales performance and growth

Coaching in the Cloud™ clients achieve an ROI of at least 20:1, and usually much higher. The high-touch, very focused, accelerated and fully accountable nature of Coaching in the Cloud™ enables sales teams to quickly ignite their growth, and do it again and again, achieving sustainable, measurable growth time after time.

Simply put, Coaching in the Cloud™ delivers advance sales and service excellence by combining salesforce.com functionality, advanced sales and services processes, custom tools and client interaction skills into one comprehensive go-to-market strategy. Leveraging Baker‘s first-to-market and best-in-class Coaching in the Cloud™ products and services helps sales teams unlock their investment in salesforce.com while increasing sales, marketing and service effectiveness. Coaching in the Cloud™ is 100% staged in the Cloud, with offerings that are rapidly delivered, massively scalable, and highly customizable.
 

Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.

Re-Print Permission

This article may be reprinted in its entirety if the following conditions are met:

1. The complete tag with the author's name and contact information is included immediately after the article.
2. A copy of the printed article is mailed to the author at 10101 SW Freeway Suite 630. Houston, Texas, 77074, USA within 30 days of publication.
3. The article is presented in a positive light as part of an appropriate business related publication.