When I ask sales leaders what they do to coach their teams, I usually get answers such as:
Call reviews
Ride-alongs
Pipeline meetings
Activity reports
Um…we should do more of that
Aside from the last response, there is usually “a thing” or two that drives coaching for most teams.
Here’s the answer that I never get:
We create a prioritized backlog of coaching opportunities for each individual by identifying issues across a number of inputs such as the CRM, direct observations, calls, BI tools, and feedback from others. We then distill these to their root cause, coach the most impactful item once, and when resolved, move on to the next one.
While I never get this answer, when I bring this concept up with sales leaders it resonates and often creates an ah-ha moment. They realize that they’re coaching the play. The call. The deal. The thing right in front of them.
Let’s figure out how to zoom out from coaching the play to coaching the player.
Root Cause Analysis
One of my favorite books is The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker. In this book he covers several amazing management topics, including The Five Why’s that Toyota quality leaders used in the first half of the 20th century to find the root cause of defects. The premise is simple…you ask “why” five times and you’ll arrive at the root cause of an issue. Let’s take a look at an example in sales.
Identified Problem: Timmy is averaging 52% quota attainment over the last 3 quarters.
Why? The majority of his deals are stalling after demo.
Why? There are no clear next steps after the demo.
Why? Prospects ask to “think it over,” and Timmy allows them to do so.
Why? Timmy isn’t uncovering pain. He’s asking general open-ended questions and rushing to demo. As a result, the prospects have no pain and no urgency.
Why? Timmy started work 3 weeks after last year’s annual sales training and was never certified on asking good pain questions. The VP of Sales tried role playing pain-based discovery with him and he struggled.
See how this works? For those of you with young children, the “keep asking why” framework might give you flashbacks to annoying segments of recent roadtrips…but it works.
There is an interesting trend, or lack of one, in the example above. Is all of this information coming from the same data source? No…let’s look at the probable sources of information below that corresponds to the Why’s above.
Deals Stalled: BI tool…maybe quantitative reporting in CRM
Lack of Next Steps: CRM opportunity object report
How Prospects End Calls: Call recording
Lack of Pain Questions: Call recording
Timmy’s Training Status: LMS/HR system or general manager knowledge
OK so we have 3-4 data sources to walk us through the 5-why’s above.
A true root cause analysis can rarely be done with a single data source.
Don’t be a One-Trick-Pony
My adult slow-pitch softball team has won 27 league championships. As most of my team is pushing 40, it’s getting harder, but we’re still competing against the young bucks. One of the changes we’ve had to make was highlighted by my teammate, Angel, a few years back. “Don’t be a one-trick-pony.” I was smoking the ball to left field, teams were noticing, and as a result the 2nd baseman and right-center fielder would shift to the left side, dramatically reducing the open area I had to hit the ball. Once I learned to close my stance and wait on the ball, hitting it to a wide-open right side made getting on base much easier, and as we learned from Moneyball, baserunners win championships!
I digress…the one-trick-ponies in sales coaching rely on one source of information. They’re the people who say “for coaching, we use [name of software vendor].”
In the 5-why’s example above, the manager would not have seen points 1, 2, or 5 from the call had their coaching solely been focused on call recordings. Could they have had impact by solving for just points 3 and 4? Absolutely! But let’s look at a more nuanced example…
Wendy’s manager just reviewed one of her calls and found several areas for improvement. She’s not uncovering pain, next steps aren’t clear, the executive decision maker is unknown, and the customer story was completely irrelevant.
Wow…four items. Just from one call. If you’re familiar with my work, including my 2020 book The Five Secrets of a Sales Coach, you’ll know that coaching one item at a time is ideal. If I throw you 4 basketballs at once…how many will you catch? There are edge cases to coach more than one item at a time, but let’s set those aside and look at Wendy as a person who we need to coach one item. Which one do we pick?
Or do we pick one?
I’ll spare you the 5-why’s exercise again, but in this case the place I’d zoom out and look at the player (Wendy) instead of the several plays outlined here as problem areas. In doing so, the thing that jumps out to me is pre-meeting prep. What is Wendy doing coming in to the call? That might not be the answer every time, but when someone is making several errors on a call and they have been well-trained, pre-meeting prep can solve a lot of problems.
A one-trick pony in this example might see these four items, pick one, spend a week or two coaching it, and still have 3 items left. Coaching the Player, however, would lead us to zooming out and treating our observations as symptoms of a more serious root cause, such as pre-meeting prep.
Eliminate Recurring Problems
A common sense of frustration with managers I’ve observed is that they think a problem is solved and then it resurfaces. Using the Wendy example above, if the manager is coaching the play, the coaching pattern might look like this:
Week 1: Uncovering pain
Week 2: Setting next steps
Week 3: Getting to executive decision makers
Week 4: Telling compelling customer stories
Week 5: Whoops! Uncovering pain is still a problem
Week 6: And after 3 weeks of next steps, they’re starting to show up missing again…
See where this is going? Sound familiar?
Without finding the root cause, the manager ends up playing wack-a-mole and both the manager and the salesperson can quickly feel like they’re not making any progress. However, if the manager would have zoomed out to focus on the player instead of the play, they would have seen that all of these issues could be coached with one single topic: pre-meeting prep.
Bonus Secret: Time Management
I’ve worked with upwards of 500 managers in the last 5 years to help them coach their teams. One of the most common exchanges goes like this:
Manager: Timmy isn’t _______.
Me: Show me his calendar.
Manager (pulling up calendar): Oh…yeah…pretty empty. (sometimes the manager can’t even access it, which is insane)
Me: How do you feel about that?
Manager: Not good. This is really bad.
Me: How do you think that this impacts [problem]?
It’s INCREDIBLE how many times I’ve had this exact same conversation.
Topics that time management impacts include:
Prospecting
Pre-Meeting Prep
Pipeline Management
Self-Call Review
Continuous Learning & Development
It’s transformative (and very simple) to move someone from “not doing something” and having and empty calendar to a state where they have blocked off specific parts of their day for specific activities and are executing. Or, if they’re not executing, then that’s an opportunity to dig deeper and understand why the salesperson isn’t following their own plan that they set into motion with calendar blocking.
Next Steps
As I alluded to in the opening of this article, my favorite answer to “how do you identify coaching opportunities” is:
We create a prioritized backlog of coaching opportunities for each individual by identifying issues across a number of inputs such as the CRM, direct observations, calls, BI tools, and feedback from others. We then distill these to their root cause, coach the most impactful item once, and when resolved, move on to the next one.
If you find something to coach, assume that’s a symptom. Dig into the root cause. Zoom out. Coach the player, not the play.