This is the second post in a series on personalized, AI-powered coaching with Degreed Maestro. See the first.
Your product team spends a year developing a new platform. Extensive research reveals a solution that solves vital problems for the market. Your marketing team plans a creative launch campaign complete with strong messaging, email campaigns, digital ads, and social posts. A winning go-to-market strategy emerges, identifying key accounts and clearly defined buyer personas.
When launch day arrives, it’s time to pop the champagne, right?
Not so fast. Is the sales team enabled? Do your reps know less about the product than your prospects?
If you want a successful launch, your sales team needs to understand your product and practice the pitch. The team needs quick responses to key questions about how the product works and what it will do. It needs to articulate value in the context of specific client needs.
And your sales team needs to learn all this in fast and flexible ways that fit a busy schedule.
Customized Coaches for Your Business Needs
While out-of-the box AI coaches are powerful, the customization provided by Degreed Maestro amplifies the impact.
With Maestro, you can tailor AI coaches to reflect your company’s priorities, content, guidelines, brand-voice, and cultural style. This organizational context enables the coaches to converse with relevance, convey the right messages with specificity, and deliver impactful learning.
This means that, with Maestro, you can scale activities—like personal feedback or sales coaching—previously limited by the rigors of human interaction. The use cases are numerous, but let’s focus on one example: Creating a customized coach that enables a sales team to launch a new product.
Maestro in Action: Creating a Sales Enablement Coach
In our last blog post, Mark used the Degreed Maestro Skill Review Coach while onboarding as a Sales Director—to uncover skill gaps and create a personalized learning Pathway that filled those gaps.
Now, Mark’s employer turns to Maestro to build a customized coach that will prepare Mark and the rest of the sales team for action.
And let’s face it: Launching a new product is chaotic. Important feedback comes late. Strategies change. Features are shoved in. Messaging gets overhauled. The sales team needs collateral yesterday.
Now imagine this isn’t just any launch.
The executive team considers this product a key differentiator for the business. Everyone needs to be extra careful about who has what information when.
It’s no secret that this very scenario—a moving-target strategy combined with need-to-know-only restrictions—is a real-life conundrum of enablement. The result has always been high stress and ineffective enablement. But creating a customized coach with Maestro* is so simple and effective that the effort is massively simplified. Forget about coordinating, for example, schedules in order to host an internal webinar series. On the contrary, all the key information the sales team needs can be uploaded into the coach at any time, even the day of the launch.
And because of the personalized nature of Degreed Maestro coaches, employees each get exactly the enablement they need, when they need it.
Let’s say a Sales Director wants to practice a tailored pitch for a specific client before an important meeting. A coach can quickly provide helpful feedback based on the resources uploaded.
A Regional Vice President wants to understand the product’s ideal customer profile (ICP), to identify target accounts and forecast opportunities. It’s as simple as typing the question and getting an answer.
A member of the sales team needs a quick answer to an FAQ, but the product manager is in back to back meetings all day. Now, they can ask Maestro instead.
No more scrambling to create an enablement program with information that is quickly outdated. No more plans getting ruined by last-minute changes. No more fire drills.
And feel free to tweak the pitch deck right before launch.
Maestro can handle it.
Sales Enablement Coaching from the Sales Perspective
We’ve seen how the enablement team created a customized sales enablement coach, but what about the sales team experience? How was the coach received and used?
Let’s look at how Mark uses the coach to successfully close a deal.
When the enablement team demo’d the coach, Mark was impressed with its ability to answer questions he would usually have to send to the Product Manager who built the solution. Mark was motivated to try it out.
Because the coach was embedded into a Pathway about the new product, it’s easy for Mark to access the coach in the flow of learning.
Mark starts a conversation with the coach to work through key questions he has about the product, and he receives important advice on how to tailor his sales pitch.
Three days later, Mark runs into a client at a trade show. This person saw a press release about the new product and wants to meet later that day to discuss it. It’s quite loud at the tradeshow, so Mark kicks off a text-based conversation with the customized coach, quickly getting advice on how to tailor his pitch to the needs of that specific client. He’s even able to practice the pitch and receives constructive feedback on some key improvements.
When he meets with the client later that day, Mark applies the advice he got from Maestro, and the client becomes even more intrigued. They schedule a follow-up call with the client’s broader team, which ultimately leads to the first purchase of the product.
The Power of Scaled Personalized Coaching
For Mark, the customized coach proved essential. It provided him with the individualized support he needed to sell the new product. But the customized coach didn’t help just Mark. It helped the entire sales team.
By scaling personalized support according to the company’s unique new product, its goals, and its needs, Maestro upskilled the entire salesforce and equipped all members with what they needed to help grow the business.
The launch was a success. Time to pop the champagne!
Find out more.
Schedule a personalized one-on-one call with us today.
*The Degreed Maestro customized coach is currently in development.