Brainshark Announces Enhancements to Its Coaching Platform

Brainshark recently announced enhancements to its sales coaching platform that aim to provide a more intuitive user experience as well as give both managers and peers more flexibility with evaluating and delivering feedback to colleagues.

The new interface offers streamlined access to relevant data and information as well as new graphical components that instantly provide managers with information such as how many coaching activities they need to review as well as the overall progress and scores of their team. In addition, reps can see how many coaching activities they need to complete, what they’ve finished to date, and their average scores across all activities. The goal overall is to provide a more visual, responsive, and fluid user experience.

And in terms of assessment options, the enhancements provide sales leaders with more ways to rate the video responses for the rep-coaching activities, including a customizable 2- to 10-star scale as well as pass/fail and no-ratings options. Additionally, leaders can evaluate reps on a wider range of skills. Overall, the increase in assessment options aims to provide more granular evaluations, more differentiated and nuanced feedback, and a more flexible review environment.

“We’ve redesigned the dashboards [to be] much more visual and really allow what I think are the three primary personas to interact with coaching in a slightly different way,” says Mark Yacovone, senior product manager at Brainshark. The first of these personas, the head coach, can more quickly and easily navigate to leaderboards for the activities she’s managing. The second persona, the activity creator who’s putting coaching activities together, can more easily check and review those activities for overall progress indicators. The third persona, the rep being coached, will find it easier to see what activity he has to complete and his own activity progress so far. “[It’s] bringing [all] that to light in a new way, a new visual way, so that when you come to coaching and Brainshark there’s really no question as to what you need to do next and how to get that done,” Yacovone says.

The increase in assessment options is meant to address a number of use cases in which Brainshark found its clients were interested, Yacovone says. “It breaks down into what I think of as four buckets. The first part is really for a customer who wants to have a coaching challenge as part of a formal curriculum; we have the ability to do that. The second piece is really using coaching as a stand-alone assessment. The third one is more of a sales use case where folks want to have more of a friendly competition and generate some competitive vibe among their sales reps. The fourth is…the idea of using our coaching platform really more for practice and for feedback, peer sharing, peer review, versus having any sort of competitive element to it and in essence excluding the whole concept of a score from the activity.

“So in each one of those categories—the formal learning, stand-alone assessment, competitive activity, and this practice model—those are the four things that we’re starting to add features in,” Yacovone says.

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