Brainshark Updates Sales Coaching Software, Integrates With Outlook

Software-as-a-service-based sales enablement solutions specialist Brainshark announced enhancements to its Brainshark for Coaching offering to help improve sales coaching and prospecting effectiveness.

Enhancements include peer collaboration and leaderboard capabilities as well as integration with Microsoft Outlook.

Brainshark for Coaching supports anytime, anywhere coaching, according to the company. It enables managers to issue challenges through the system—for example, to deliver a presentation, show a demo or rehearse sales messaging—and reps respond via video.

The company also provides best practices guidance for both managers, on how to coach, and reps, on how to complete challenges and sell effectively. The guidance is offered through optionally integrated eLearning content from CloudCoaching International.

“Sales teams need to take advantage of every resource available to beat the competition,” Rachel Goldberg, Brainshark’s senior director of product marketing and program management, told eWEEK. “Every team has successful reps with great approaches to deals—approaches that can make the difference between won or lost sales—but it’s often really tough to expose those best practices because of time and geographical restraints. As a result, it’s never been more important to figure out how to bring reps together to share their ideas, suggestions and support.”

In addition, challenge attachments allow managers to attach any type of document to assist sales reps in completing their challenges. Reps can view and download the materials from their coaching dashboards on any device, so they can respond to challenges in a more informed way.

“Convenience is key to both salespeople and sales managers. If it’s complicated, they won’t do it and your investment will go for naught,” Goldberg explained. “[With Brainshark for Coaching] coaches can create challenges, determine the criteria, attach content and even determine who sees and reviews the challenge response with just a few clicks. And reps can issue their challenge responses just as easily. Even better, all functionality available on the desktop also works on mobile devices, so coaching challenges can be initiated or responded to from virtually any location.”

With Brainshark’s integration with Microsoft Outlook, reps can find and send sales content within their Outlook email environment, whether on the desktop or the Office 365 web portal.

“Salespeople have a lot of priorities in their daily mix, so it’s critical to make their job—and the systems they use to get it done—as seamless as possible,” Goldberg said. “By integrating the ability to easily find and send content with an email environment that many reps use to communicate with prospects and customers, there is an added layer of accessibility that saves them time and effort and increases their level of productivity.”