A Blueprint for Creating a Sales Dynasty

By Steve Jensen

10 min read

A sales leader needs to create an expectancy of continuous improvement. This creates “new normals” for each rep. As they develop their new baseline, the entire performance curve shifts and companies experience true transformation.

This transformation comes as salespeople and sales leaders realize that coaching is not about fixing something that is broken. Coaching is not about avoidance of problems. Instead, 1:1 coaching that shifts a curve comes when leaders and salespeople seek an abundance of progress. This “Abundant” or progress-driven mindset creates an environment where individual success happens consistently. As each salesperson has small improvements and the combined improvements over time create massive success.

Here is a simple blueprint to create curve-shifting transformation in your organization.

Process

A 1:1 process creates expectancy around how the leader will engage with the salesperson to help drive continuous improvement. A coaching process is simple. You can develop process by making sure these three building blocks are in place:

Frequency: 1:1 Coaching needs to be something that leaders either do or choose not to do. Don’t conduct 1:1’s with some and not others. If coaching is a primary role of your leaders, then this is a non-negotiable that leaders don’t miss. These MUST be calendar items and not something that is done if the leader or rep has time, or is skipped if the rep is “doing great.” Remember, 1:1’s are not about fixing problems. This is the only meeting a salesperson has that is 100% about their development. This meeting is likely the only thing a salesperson does that is 100% about them.

A common question is “How frequently should we conduct 1:1s?” This answer is different for every team. There are two variables to drive how you structure the frequency. The first is the length of the sales cycle. Highly transactional teams need to have more frequent 1:1s. Weekly or every two weeks is appropriate in these cases. More complex sales teams with longer sales cycles should have 1:1s less frequently. These may have 1:1’s on a monthly basis or possibly as often as every two weeks. The second consideration is the frequency a salesperson conducts the key sales activities. The more common or more opportunity a rep has to conduct the key activities, the more often the leader should have 1:1 coaching sessions. A good rule of thumb is to not have 1:1s more frequently than weekly and not to wait longer than monthly.

Be sure every member of your sales team knows the 1:1 is a strategic planning opportunity and one you will be prepared to help accelerate their progress. You expect them to come prepared to have specific conversations around where they think they can improve or use your help. Once a salesperson believes you’ll be consistent in holding these, they will change how they prepare for the 1:1.

Focus: Here are some best practices in creating a consistent focus to a 1:1 that leads to strategic adoption by both leaders and salespeople:
Agenda: The agenda for the 1:1 should be clearly understood by the salesperson and sales leader. The agenda should be something consistent, and the salesperson needs to have the ability to contribute to the agenda each time. This way, the salesperson is never taken by surprise by the topics of discussion, and the leader is never caught off-guard with the items the salesperson wants to discuss. Each person can come prepared to have a relevant conversation 100% focused on the future success of the salesperson. To create powerful 1:1s be sure to avoid the “7 Deadly Sins” of 1:1 coaching. To learn more about these traps most sales leaders fall into, refer to this guide.
Use of Data: All data used in the 1:1 discussion must be available to the sales leader AND the salesperson at any time. No “manager only” reports, dashboard, or magic spreadsheets allowed. Ambushing with Data creates disfunction in the 1:1. Be sure the 1:1 is about context (where the salesperson is going) not content (where they are.) Your ability to provide context is one of the key drivers between a 1:1 being highly effective or becoming “micromanagement.”
Use of Time: Here’s an important rule of thumb: Only 10% of the time spent in the 1:1 should be about the past performance of the salesperson. This leaves 90% of the time to be about the future. If you have 30-minute 1:1s, you have 3 minutes to talk about the past, so you can spend the next 27 in a relevant, contextual conversation about what is going to happen next. The past has already happened. Focus forward and make the time you spend with each salesperson about how they can write the story they want in their short, medium and long term futures.
Blend Performance and Aspirations: Make sure your 1:1s aren’t only about hitting quota. Learn their individual performance aspirations and long term career goals. Work these into the agenda and address them in every 1:1. These are great things to build Individual Development Plans (IDP) around. Showing your teammates you are committed to their ultimate growth and success and not just “hitting the number” will add fuel to their development fire.
Goals: Part of every 1:1 should be the setting of coaching goals. Coaching goals are not to be confused with sales goals or quotas. A coaching goal is a goal a salesperson and a rep sets together to do more of something or to do something differently as a result of the 1:1. The salesperson makes a commitment to change. It may be more sales activities, it may be using training resources, it may be attending specific events. But the salesperson must make a commitment as a result of the 1:1 that ties to their development. This is what transforms the 1:1 from a conversation to a catalyst: the creation of commitment. If a 1:1 does not include a coaching goal, the leader has let the salesperson down. Don’t confuse conversations with coaching. Create commitment in each 1:1 and salespeople will create new normals that shift the curve.

Process creates expectancy. Our job as leaders is to help salespeople accomplish more and develop competencies they otherwise wouldn’t have. We are helping them find a unique pathway to the top of the mountain they are climbing.

Climbers of Mt. Everest have learned to rely on Sherpas to help them achieve the summit. As sales leaders, we are the Sherpas for each member of our team. Adopting “Sherpa Mentality” will help you create process that builds expectancy of continuous improvement and that each member of the team will find their way to the summit.

Measuring Willingness to Change

Every 1:1 needs to create a coaching goal. A coaching goal should never be confused with a sales goal. Sales goals require a customer to say yes. A coaching goal only requires the salesperson to say yes. A coaching goal can be to change activities or develop skills. Activity Goals are focused on doing more specific activities or doing different specific activities. These help salespeople work harder and/or smarter depending on the current state of the salesperson. Skill Goals help salespeople complete these activities more effectively. Skill Goals utilize Company Resources to help them develop these skills.

An example of an Activity Goal might be to make a specific number of calls. A Skill Goal might be to get better at asking key questions. The resource might be the conversation intelligence tool and listen to specific calls where they need to improve and several other calls where colleagues provide an example of getting it right.
When setting this goal, a few key elements must be present to make the Coaching Goal effective:

Goal Description
Success Criteria
How the Goal will be Measured
Completion Date

A best practice is to have all the coaching goals and coaching histories stored in the Sales System of Record (for example, Salesforce.) Having separate spreadsheets or systems creates resistance and new potential failure points. Utilizing the system of record helps reduce the administrative requirements and increase success rates.

Once a Coaching Goal is set, measure the salesperson’s success in achieving this goal. Either they make the calls or they don’t. Either they break down the calls or they don’t. It is really this simple. Those that keep the commitments they make when setting coaching goals are more coachable than those that don’t.
You can combine the coachability scores with the performance data of each rep to understand what kind of salesperson each member of the team is:

Outcomes Weak, Coachability Strong: FUTURE: These reps are missing their goal, but respond well to coaching goals. They represent strong opportunities for growth.

Outcomes Strong, Coachability Strong: STAR: These salespeople are beating their goal and still actively respond to coaching goals. Keep coaching them. Small improvements = big financial gains. If you don’t coach they likely will quit.

Outcomes Strong, Coachability Weak: INDEPENDENT: These team members are hitting their goal and prefer to be left alone. Recognize their accomplishments and work to remove roadblocks with these reps. Very specific blueprints for these team members are required.

Outcomes Weak, Coachability Weak: TOXIC: These people are not hitting their goal and they choose not to keep their coaching commitments. This creates a negative effect on the people they interact with. Allowing the toxic attitude towards performance and improvement will threaten your ability to be a high-impact leader.

Measuring coachability is generally a new concept for most leaders and salespeople. This adds new depth to the 1:1 and a different kind of urgency. Salespeople take an active role in developing coaching goals and the buy-in changes almost immediately.

This helps create a “Right vs. Left” mentality instead of an “Up vs. Down” mentality. Instead of “Hitting Goal or Not Hitting Goal,” leaders and salespeople seek for “Willing to Change or Not Willing to Change” insights. Hitting Goal (Up) vs. Not Hitting Goal (Down) is a lagging indicator. Coachable (Right) vs Not Coachable (Left) is highly predictive.

Once a salesperson understands the importance of willingness to change, coaching goals become an important part of the 1:1 and their ongoing development.

Create a Process and Become a Sherpa

Individualization

The modern sales environment has led to more sales data than ever before. Volume data, conversion data, and productivity data is available by the pound. More Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are available than ever before. Sometimes the sheer number of metrics, stack rankings, dashboards, and reports seem overwhelming. As a result, it is not unusual for a sales leader to create their personal spreadsheet with the metrics they run their team with.

An End of “Spreadsheet Leadership”

Here’s a fact every sales leader needs to be aware of: comparing salespeople to company averages is not coaching. Challenging salespeople to “work their way up the leaderboard” is not coaching. Coaching is never about motivating. Coaching is about reinforcing roles and developing key skills. A leader’s job is to create an environment where the motivated succeed.

The best way to do this is to individualize the conversation about how a salesperson moves from the current state to a future state…no matter their performance level. This is why allocating coaching time based on performance is an antiquated way of approaching coaching. Rather than simply challenging reps to grow by pressing the “MORE” button, discover ways to progress by benchmarking differently and pressing the “HOW” button instead.

Insightful Ways to Benchmark

Most salespeople are used to benchmarking based on activities and performance. By segmenting your team into multiple categories (for example Poor, Low Core, Core, High Core, Star) and understanding the activities conducted by each of these performers and by identifying the output of each piston driving the engine (opportunity starts, revenue per customer, win rate, speed) for someone in each category, instead of appealing to a sense of competitiveness and beating their teammates, you can tie into the target activity or skill level required to achieve next-level performance.

In a 1:1, let’s pretend you have a core performer that wants to be a star by year-end and win President’s Club. Instead of saying “You can do it…just work harder” now you can identify the activities performed by an average performer in the star category and see if the core performer has the same work ethic as the star performer. If there are obvious areas where the core performer could work harder or change the activity mix to work smarter, these are obvious coaching goals to set as part of the 1:1. However, if there are no obvious activity differences, then the engine analysis will show how the starts, revenue per customer, win rate, or speed for the core performer will be different than that of the star performers. With this clearly identified, the 1:1 can dig into the activities and skills unique to the piston that matters most to the future development of the salesperson.

Using benchmarks this way creates context out of content. This is a fast way for the 1:1 to become a strategic planning session and creating commitment out of conversation becomes a natural event.

Three Conversations to Individualize Your 1:1s

Once your salespeople believe the 1:1 is 100% about their development, it is easy to boil 1:1s down to three conversations. These conversations provide a way to guarantee that every 1:1 is unique to the needs of every single rep:

How Good Can You Get?: Some of your salespeople will be at or past the performance goal set for them by the company. The biggest mistake leaders make with star performers is to leave them alone. A 5% improvement in a star performer is often bigger than a 15% improvement in a core performer. More importantly, the primary driver of “Intent to Stay with the Company” is the quality of coaching and development they are receiving from their leader. This is an opportunity to have the most enjoyable 1:1 a leader can have: How good can you get? Explore the value of even small improvements to the personal production engine and identify strategic “Must Win” opportunities to chase. As you tune both the engine and the deals in this way, you can identify places that lead to uncommon success. You’ll find the most successful salespeople appreciate this opportunity to identify new “Everests” to climb…not because they are mandated, but because together you identify what it would mean to the career of the salesperson if they were able to do this. Be their Sherpa and set activity or skill-related goals or IDPs to drive their careers to places they are excited about.
Tune the Deals: For people with strong process but for reasons unique to reach rep are short of their goals, help them advance opportunities and win the business that will take them where they want to go. Stalled Deals, Must Win Deals, and Misaligned Deals usually will show you where you can provide context and set Activity or Skill related goals to create the verifiers that move deals from stage to stage and across the finish line. This kind of individualization will lead to goals in a formal setting that will drive meaningful follow-up conversations in your non-formal interactions that happen on a daily basis. This makes you relevant in ways salespeople value…you’re helping them win deals.
Tune the Engine: For salespeople with weak process, you can help them create more horsepower in their sales engine. In order to achieve their target destination, the combined effect of their four pistons has to be creating the pipeline vitality and effectiveness to have confidence they will arrive to their goal as planned. Benchmark the activities and output from each piston vs. that of those in the target performance area. Use this conversation to find the ways each rep can make changes to their activities and/or skills to predictably improve.

Each of these conversations creates a relevant context for the individual salesperson. The conversation must always end with a coaching goal that is based on doing more or different activities, developing new skills, or utilizing company resources differently. By overlaying this structure to your sales playbook, you can operationalize your playbook so each 1:1 brings your playbook to life and ties to other enablement resources. As a result, resources are used “On Demand” rather than “When Demanded.”

Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant