Your A Players are clearly more effective communicators than your C Players. So if selling is a language, why aren’t we coaching our salespeople’s language and message?
Get notified each time a new 60-Second Sales Coach video is released.
Complete transcript taken from a live Q & A session in Phoenix.
Would anyone here disagree that selling is a language? In other words, your A players are clearly more effective communicators than your C players. Is there anyone here who would disagree with that? So selling is a language, right? Then why aren’t we coaching their language?
We’re coaching the metrics. They know their goals! They’re not stupid. They know what they have to do. And what we need to do to deliver value is uncover the coaching moment or the gap. The “why.”
For example, when speaking with one of your salespeople, “What did that last conversation with that customer sound like? and “When you heard them say, “Listen, we’re not moving forward because of price or timing or we’re going with one of your competitors,” how did you respond? How did you conduct a post-mortem analysis? How did you uncover the root cause of their objection? And, what did it sound like when you had that conversation? Walk me through that conversation.”
The real value of a manager is not handing out your quota every month or every quarter. It’s upskilling and continually developing them to live their potential. Your value as a manager is making your people more valuable. And you do that through coaching.
Hi Keith really like the short pieces. Coaching the language is a great way of articulating one of the roles of the manager. Would you agree taking that stepping back, listening (i mean really listening) and givng the reps the time and space to think through how they might do things differently is one of the challenges managers who are under pressure to deliver results sometimes struggle with?
Great to hear the video format is working for you, John. You’ve encapsulated exactly what the #1 perceived challenge is with the majority, if not all managers in any sales driven organization and paradoxically, every manager’s defining moment when it comes to authentically transforming into an effective coach in order to generate the very breakthrough results they’re looking for. “Sometimes” they struggle with this? I’d go so far as to say most of the time. This is truly a global epidemic. And when I’m working with them for two days when delivering my management coach training, all of the managers learn what they need to do, how to coach well and why coaching is their top priority. Many of them, given the right environment, such as a classroom/learning environment, where they are temporarily detached from their day to day, can coach very well. However, what happens when the manager is back in the real world when they’re getting bombarded with problems, requests for help, emails and meetings, while simultaneously trying to hit what is quite often a moving target? They go into reaction and self preservation mode and do what is fastest/easiest, which is being directive with the solution they want their people to execute. Paradoxically, managers continually create what they want to avoid. This costs the manager more time when they continue to make their people dependent on them while robbing their team of the accountability they look to instill. And you can’t scale dependency! These now become the all too common moments (the norm?) and the viscous cycle managers continue to perpetrate. It’s only when the manager puts their faith and trust into the coaching process, takes that step back, creates the space for their people to process by asking precision crafted questions that allow them to actually think through their challenges and ideas when the truly unprecedented breakthroughs occur.