By Robert Beattie
4 min read
I recently took on one of the greatest coaching challenges of my life. It was a team almost entirely of novices. I think one had a year’s experience under his belt, but beyond that – nothing. They had the enthusiasm to be sure but lacked any knowledge of what they were supposed to do. I quickly realized this was going to take all my skills honed from what has now become 20 years of leading successful teams. It was going to be tough.
The first thing I did was breathe deep and make a plan. After all, the only way to drive cattle fast is slow.
I wrote down the important skills I wanted them to have. I knew they needed foundational stuff, and if I was too advanced too quickly, they might get by for a little bit but eventually lacking those core habits and techniques would hurt them when it mattered most. On a sales team those essential skills, to me, are the ability and willingness to ask questions, the understanding of why effort matters and knowledge of how your product/service solves your target customer’s problems. Simple. Three things. Okay, from there it is now HOW do you impart that?
First, this is the time when the Leader is the Teacher. I think Leaders have multiple roles they play – Coach, Manager, Teacher, Strategist, and Inspirer. You may have different words to describe those roles, but those are the ones I use. So why Teacher and not Coach, you may ask? Well quickly, they are very similar, but I believe the Teacher is the role you play when you are helping someone gain knowledge for the first time. The Coach role is once that is in there, enhancing it through repetition and feedback. My first job was to teach this team the basics. I use this 4-step process:
I think there are two main areas Sales Leaders falter in this process. 1st is at the Feedback Stage. So often the temptation is to correct EVERYTHING at once. Forgetting that someone is learning something new. They shouldn’t get it exactly right, and since we often know the end game, it is hard for us to back and be in their novice shoes. We want to hurry them through by telling them all the mistakes they made and try and give them all our knowledge right away. We’d never do that to a prospect in the sales process! Instead, we need to create buy-in. The way that works is simple. Use the following formula, and you will never fail. Any exercise – be it a role play or a live call make this your feedback loop by asking the participant the following questions:
That’s it. That’s the feedback. If you explained the concept well, the person doing the action will know what they did and didn’t do. They will not need you (or god forbid a room full of peers) to tell them all the ways they suck. We all know when we screw up. If for some reason they can’t find one for themselves, you can point something out but keep it to one thing and start to question how much that person is going to be able to learn anything (that’s another story). There are times if I see a terrible fatal flaw in someone I will point that out because my goal is to get them to be able to display the behavior the job demands but the less I can say in feedback the more likely the person is to absorb the lesson and improve the skill. (Think about it – how often has someone pointed out something you could be doing better or differently and your first reaction was to take a defensive posture and think or speak “I don’t do that”).
I want these people open and learning, not closed and defensive. It may take a little bit of time, but this is the fastest path to success. As I said, the only way to drive cattle fast is slow.
The second area in which leaders fall down in this process is step 4 – do it again – immediately if you can. The person has just told you what they need to work on. It is fresh. Do it again and when they get it right – celebrate it.
But how long does this process go on? You have a repeat step and no end step. Great point and now you’re thinking. I usually say an individual can work on a skill for about 6-12 minutes. After that, attention wanes. I do think you should practice the same foundational skills multiple times over time, however. If you have ever seen a sports team practice, they will always start with fundamentals before they put in more advanced techniques…just like this.
So how did it go with this challenge I had taken on? I had my plan, I had my process, and I taught the foundational skills and by the time the season was over the Ann Arbor Rec & Ed Kindergarten/1st Grade Patriots Flag Football Team was an unstoppable machine.
Sales Teams? YouTube addled Six-Year-olds? If 20 years of doing this have taught me anything, it’s that they are basically the same. If you can help someone see and personally buy-in to what they are trying to improve your job leading them becomes so much easier.
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Robert Beattie is a 20+ year veteran of Inside Sales and is currently a Sr. Director for Sales for Thomson Reuters Tax and Accounting. Rob leads a team of over 150 reps and has maintained double-digit growth in a single-digit growth market. Rob’s emphasis is developing an environment where the motivated can be wildly successful. So many of his team have tasted this success that Rob was recently awarded the prestigious AA-ISP Executive of the Year Award at their 2018 Leadership Conference.
You can read more from Robert in the Secrets of High-Growth Sales Leadership ebook and hear his podcast here.