I appreciate the opportunity to be featured on the cover, along with a great interview with Jonathan Farrington discussing my new book, Sales Leadership in the latest issue of Top Sales Magazine. I’m excited to get this book into your hands, so that all managers and salespeople can become exemplary sales leaders and trailblazing coaches who have a proven strategy to create top-performing coaching cultures and sales champions!
JF: Congratulations on the ten-year anniversary of your award-winning, Coaching Salespeople Into Sales Champions (CSSC)! Why so long to write a follow-up?
KR: Since writing CSSC, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of sales leaders on five continents; in over 75 countries. They’ve inspired me to improve my coaching methodology, while ensuring it’s relevant for leaders worldwide. Sales Leadership is the result of my 10-year global quest to ignite unprecedented human achievement, develop leadership titans and transform the workplace into a nourishing place of learning, innovation and personal evolution.
JF: I was surprised this is the first book entitled, Sales Leadership! What can readers expect?
KR: Most management books don’t apply to sales leadership, and focus more on what (scorecards, KPI’s, processes), where Sales Leadership focuses on who – people. Both are essential. However, salespeople are unique, indispensable and need to be coached in alignment with their role and individuality. When you unite business and personal goals, engagement is inevitable. CSSC was the first book that poured the foundation for coaching mastery. Sales Leadership continues the journey to become an elite sales leader and trailblazing coach. My L.E.A.D.S. Coaching Framework enables busy, caring managers to coach in 10 minutes or less!
JF: What’s the current state of coaching?
KR: It’s gotten worse! While essential, sales training doesn’t develop champions. Leaders do. Since most managers don’t know how to coach, they remain part of the non-stop, problem-solving legion of frustrated Chief Problem Solvers who habitually do other’s work, create dependency and nourish seeds of mediocrity. You can’t scale dependency.
JF: What studies support this?
KR: According to Gallup, 70% of employees are disengaged, and managers don’t know what motivates people.
Since 2008, my ebooks were downloaded approximately 350,000 times. In the download form, I ask, “Do you consistently use a coaching framework that creates a healthy, top-performing culture and wins sales?” 88% of respondents said, “No.”
JF: What measurable results can be expected when implementing your strategies?
KR: Changing people’s mindset about work immediately improves economic prosperity and organizational health. Remember, every manager’s real boss is their team. If 80% of team engagement depends on management, the manager IS the culture! Studies by Gallup and Gartner found companies with engaged, happy employees generate 2.5X more revenue than companies with disengaged employees.
Sales Leadership provides the tactical path and coaching vernacular to become an epic sales leader who develops sales champions. If the language of leadership, selling, and across every department is coaching, then the language of your company is coaching. This creates a united coaching culture of collaboration, compassion, accountability, purpose and innovation.
JF: Have you cracked the code to promoting salespeople into successful managers?
KR: I’m consistently coaching salespeople to adopt the mindset, “The Salesperson Who Doesn’t Sell Will Always Sell.” That means the days of, “I promoted my top rep and they’re struggling,” are over when your salespeople become coaches. Your customers’ buying process continually evolves. When salespeople transform into consultative coaches, they coach customers to succeed, while companies simultaneously develop a strong bench of future leaders.
JF: Managers who resist coaching say, “Coaching takes too long?”
KR: What if you can successfully coach anyone in 15, 5, or 60 seconds using one question? Sales Leadership makes coaching easy. For busy, caring managers, this removes the pressure and misconception that, “Coaching is difficult, doesn’t work, and I don’t have time to coach.”
KR: Implementing my coaching model, talk tracks for critical conversations, and Enrollment strategy to create accountability and buy-in around business objectives will spark immediate, positive change. When coaching is woven into daily conversations, you’ll shift from doing people’s job to developing them.
JF: What prevents companies from developing extraordinary coaching cultures?
KR: Companies focus on the importance of critical thinking, when they need to focus on critical questioning. Questions create critical thinkers! And the fear-based obsession over results forces companies to focus more on goals than people.
Managers are conflicted between what’s expected, and honoring who they are.
Most managers want their role to honor their values and priorities, including:
- Developing people to succeed and advance in a career they love.
- Family, making an impact, life balance, happiness, health.
When asked what’s compromised most due to pressure to perform?
Developing people to succeed and advance in a career they love.
- Family, making an impact, life balance, happiness, health.
Companies mistakenly collapse great cultures with great results. While results are critical, you have a healthy culture when your work complements your lifestyle, makes a positive impact, and you feel a personal connection with your company vision and co-workers, while enjoying the process.
What people create, they own. What they don’t, they resist. Your company ecosystem is a manifestation of people’s values. Instead of having your culture define people, have your people define your culture – and your vision.
JF: Sales Leadership has accolades from over 25 thought leaders from the world’s most successful companies. Anything else you care to share?
KR: In thriving cultures, everyone’s a coach AND coachee. So, you don’t have to be a great at coaching to start, but you must start to become a great coach. Coaching is simply a habit that begins with upgrading your mental operating system to make coaching your #1 priority.
Being a great leader takes much more than leveraging a coaching framework and developing your coaching acumen. It’s the inner game of leadership, the mindset and way of being that needs to change first. It’s realizing that your team doesn’t work for you. You work for them. The byproduct of evolving your thinking is a positive behavioral change that creates the exceptional results you never thought possible.
For example, rather than asking yourself every morning, “What do I need to do to achieve my business objectives?”
Here’s your opportunity to change this question and instead, ask yourself, “What can I do to make my people more valuable than they were yesterday?” This is the fundamental shift managers need to make to demonstrate that coaching, and your people, are your number one priority. The byproduct is, you achieve business objectives.
So, where do you begin to transform a culture? One person at a time. One conversation at a time. Remember the ABC’s of leadership. Always Be Coaching!
JF: Thanks, Keith! Where can people get the book?
KR: Visit KeithRosen.com to get preferred pricing AND free bonus materials!
JF: Any final wisdom?
People create the mindset, mindset shapes behavior, behavior defines culture, and ultimately, culture determines success. That’s why the primary business objective is: To Make Your People More Valuable.
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