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Coaching is responsible for a 17% performance increase for sales reps, 161% more sales wins, 26% more pipeline, 19% few loses. The list goes on and on – the benefits of sales coaching are indisputable.

With the release of Winter ’14, Work.com coaching is now seamlessly integrated into the Salesforce platform, allowing you to boost your reps performance with ease. Learn three ways coaching in Work.com can dramatically increase the performance and productivity of your reps.

1. Coaching to Metrics

Now that Work.com is fully integrated into Salesforce, not only is everything a single sign on, but now all the metrics you love in Salesforce can be harnessed to boost employee performance as well. Number of outgoing calls, pipeline generated, quota achieved to date— all these metrics give you breathtaking new insight into employees’ work. This allows you to spot and fix employees shortcomings early before they become a problem. All the data also lives in the cloud, so when performance reviews rumble around, you’ll know exactly where to look.

Tip: Many companies set 30/60/90 day goals for new employees, such as learning the product or finding a mentor, and have achieved tremendous reduction in onboarding times.

2. Give and Ask for Feedback

Coaching is not always about the manager; sometimes the best coaching can come from the peers around you. That’s why all employees in Work.com can give or ask for feedback. Employees no longer need to wait until the end of the year to find out how they can improve. They can do it now, and do it continously. 

Making the feedback private or public is completely up to you. Coaching doesn’t have to be hooked up between manager and staff only. Feel free to get coached by a mentor or executive.

Tip: Often employees are hesitant to give unsolicited feedback to managers or executives. Here at Salesforce many of them send out a feedback request every couple of weeks asking about their performance and what they can do to improve.

3. Private Notes and 1:1 Feed

77% of coaching effectiveness can be attributed to 10 manager actions. Found here, that’s plenty of information. Luckily, Work.com on Salesforce offers a private 1:1 feed for each of your coaching relationships. Record notes that only you can see in that same feed. This allows you to return to the feed at a later date and be immediately informed from previous coaching sessions.

Tip: Employees are automatically emailed when they get coaching, feedback and more in Work.com. Granting you the ability to say “au contraire, it’s all in the cloud” to those tricky employees who say they never got notified.

While coaching in Work.com on Salesforce shouldn't replace in-person 1-to-1’s; it makes them that much more meaningful. Just three hours of coaching a month is able to boost revenue by 25% and increase average close rates by 70%. With Work.com that task can be easily achieved, and offers a brilliant reference points for in-field coaching and those hated performance reviews.