The Sales Manager Ride-Along: Faster, Cheaper, and More Effective

User-generated video offers breakthrough in sales coaching productivity

The ride-along is one of a sales manager’s main tools for monitoring a salesperson’s skill at presenting to customers. While ride-alongs offer an unmatched view of the employee in action, they also have shortcomings. They can be costly if travel is required and consume a tremendous amount of the manager’s time. Additionally, the sales rep may arrange appointments only with “friendlies,” giving the manager a narrow and potentially skewed view of the rep’s skill set.

Setting the bar high – and achieving it

Allego customer Bullhorn developed an effective alternative to the traditional ride-along by leveraging user-generated video to ensure mastery of skills among all its reps. When rolling out new positioning for its cloud-based CRM and staffing solution, Bullhorn faced the challenge of training more than 100 reps located around the globe. It was crucial that any Bullhorn rep, anywhere in the world, could deliver the company’s message consistently and professionally to any customer. Auditing their sales reps’ skill at mastering and articulating the new messaging in front of actual customers was not practical, cost-effective, or timely.

Instead, Bullhorn COO Justin Teague and his team used Allego to create a series of short videos articulating each of the three prongs of their new messaging. Bullhorn reps were tasked with viewing the first video and then recording their own presentation of its content using Allego. Managers reviewed the videos and used Allego’s in-line feedback functionality to grade each rep’s performance on seven criteria, ranging from command of the material to presentation style and alignment with corporate strategy.

Each sales rep used the feedback to record and submit an improved performance of the pitch. When the rep was deemed to have achieved mastery of the first phase of the messaging, they were certified. The process was repeated with each of the remaining two prongs of the messaging.

Achieving plan – plus additional benefits

The final results were exactly what Bullhorn had hoped for. Their entire sales team was trained effectively and efficiently on the new marketing messages, without incurring major travel expenses. Because participants—both reps and managers—could work with the video sales coaching as their schedules allowed, the time to achieve full competence was compressed to just a few weeks.

Unlike training methods used in the past, which had resulted in 30-40% effectiveness at delivering the message, in this case the reps modeled and exhibited mastery of best practices based directly on the company’s research and strategy. Professional presentation coaches were also used during the video review process to improve each presenter’s skills and persuasiveness.

Achieving consistency of messaging gave Bullhorn an unexpected advantage: it reduced their uncertainty, giving them the basis to better evaluate their results and make strategic adjustments to the messaging. For more details on Bullhorn’s experience, see the case study on Allego’s website.