AI coaching is starting to make ridealongs feel outdated
Thinking about how outdated the classic sales ride along feels now. A manager can lose half a day driving between locations just to sit in on one or two conversations. And even then you're coaching based on a tiny sample of what that rep does all week. We've been piloting a few AI tools for this and I'm starting to think coaching might be one of the better uses for them. Instead of trying to catch the right conversation in person you can record actual customer conversations and have the tool surface the parts worth reviewing. Could be a rep skipped an important discovery question or they handled an objection well. Maybe another issue keeps showing up across the whole team.
The part I like is that the manager still does the coaching. AI isn't replacing the 1 on 1s or telling managers how to run their team. It just gives them more context before they sit down with a rep. You can coach from what actually happened instead of trying to remember one ride along from two weeks ago. Still early for us since we're testing a few options but I can see this being useful than the classic old ride along model. Especially if you're managing reps across a bunch of locations.