Coaching Ops

Anyone who has read Hugh Lofting’s popular Doctor Doolittle books, a children’s series about a naturalist who can talk to animals, may remember a funny creature called the pushmi-pullyu. Pronounced “push-me, pull-you,” it’s a gazelle-unicorn cross with heads on opposite ends of its body. This means that every time it wants to move, its heads try to go in opposite directions. Working against itself this way, the animal makes little progress.

The conflicting demands between sales manager and coach may leave sales managers feeling much like that pushmi-pullyu, with those two roles, the executive and the coach, causing them to move in opposite directions, resulting in little progress being made either way.

It is this “pushmi-pullyu phenomenon” that makes it so difficult for many managers to coach well – or even coach at all. They know they should be coaching, as it is repeatedly shown to be the single most impactful action they can take to move their team toward performance excellence; however, finding the time to do it, learning to do it right, and achieving a mind-set centered on long-term performance rather than short-term numbers is extremely challenging.

“Sales managers have a tremendous amount of demands on them,” acknowledges Anthony Iannarino, managing director of B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy (www.thesalesblog.com), a boutique sales coaching and consulting organization that helps salespeople reach their full potential. “They are asked to serve the organization before they serve the sales team. But coaching flips that on its head and says that the primary goal is developing people and stealing back the time to do that.”

One way to get there is to make coaching part of your everyday conversations with reps. Sure, there is a formal component to coaching that requires creation of a coaching document, a preparatory checklist for the coaching conversation, and scheduled meetings to review progress on commitments, etc. Sometimes, however, progress can be made by seizing everyday opportunities to develop team members.

This requires a complete shift in mind-set from a directive, efficient “management” approach to a developmental “coaching” approach, in which sales managers view every interaction as an opportunity to help their people grow into the best performers they can be. “It is so much easier and faster for me to say, ‘Here’s the solution. Do this.’ It is much harder to help the salesperson think through the challenge and wrestle with it and come up with his or her own solutions,” says Iannarino.

The directive approach is most common – and most tempting – because an interaction can be completed quickly: a salesperson comes in with an issue, the manager tells him or her how to overcome it, and within a few minutes, the rep knows how to solve the problem and the manager can get back to the piles of paper clamoring for attention. A coaching interaction requires a longer time investment and skill in asking effective questions, but it creates higher performing, more confident reps in the long run, ultimately making the manager’s job easier.

Here’s the difference: Say a rep is frustrated because a contract is stuck in the prospect’s legal department. He or she then approaches the sales manager for advice. A directive management response would be to simply say, “Ask your contact for his legal department’s number and call to find out the status.”

A coaching response, on the other hand might start like this:
Manager: What options do you think are available to get that contract out of legal?
Rep: I’m not sure.
Manager: What have other people done? Who else might be able to help you do this?
Rep: Maybe I should call my contact.
Manager: OK, what do you think that conversation should sound like?

As reps work through various ideas, managers must resist the urge to tell them what to do, unless the reps struggle to come up with good answers, says Iannarino. The managers might respond in this way: “Those all sound like good options. Can I share some other ideas that I have seen work well?” When the rep says yes, you have both permission to give and receptivity to your recommendations.

“We tend not to take best advantage of moments when a rep comes to us with a problem,” says Iannarino. “It is hard, especially if you have trained your people to be dependent. But those are great opportunities to coach instead of just pass off information.”

Iannarino remembers working with one sales manager who inherited a team that consistently ranked in the bottom quartile of about 100 sales teams at this manager’s company. This team had never been coached, but the manager came from an organization with a strong coaching culture. He began using his everyday interactions with reps as coaching opportunities, helping reps think about the value they could create in every one of their sales interactions. Within 18 months of the manager’s arrival, his group shot into the top 10 percent of the company’s sales teams.

“When you take someone from where they are and make them a better performer, and you do that with everyone on your team, your performance will increase,” says Iannarino.

The Model

Anthony Iannarino uses a three-pronged approach when coaching sales managers and reps to reach their full potential:

1. Mind-set. What is the sales rep’s underlying belief system? Does he or she believe that sales are lost because the price is too high? That there are too few qualified leads coming from marketing? That buyers don’t understand the value proposition? Iannarino starts every coaching relationship by seeking a deep understanding of the salesperson’s point of view. He then leads the salesperson through a series of questions that enables that salesperson to understand that he or she is actually the obstacle.

“Some reps may believe they are losing because their prices are higher, but they can’t lower their price, and they can’t get their competitors to lower their prices,” Iannarino explains. “If a buyer values price, the only thing the rep can do is help the buyer perceive more value in the offering.” Once salespeople understand that they are the only factor that can be changed, they will be in a position of resourcefulness and ready to move forward.

2. Skill set. Once the rep’s mind-set is toward personal change, the next step is to help identify the skills or training he or she needs to close performance gaps. For instance, if helping buyers perceive greater value is a primary goal, Iannarino might ask, “What would help you do that?” The answer might be, “It would help to see someone else do it,” or, “If I had a tool that would enable me to see our competitors’ prices versus ours, I could help prospects better understand the comparisons.”

Coaches can also bring in any ideas that are outside the rep’s view. For instance, you might know of relevant training being conducted elsewhere in the company and say, “There is training on this topic going on next week for another group, but if I could get you in, would you be interested?”

3. Tool kit. If your reps work without dialogues or scripts or case studies, are there some tools you can give them to help them be more effective? Your conversations should help them reveal what they need. From there, your role as coach is to help them figure out how to be resourceful and find it for themselves or remove the obstacles within the company that are keeping them from getting the tools they need for success.

Common Challenge: Letting Go

Many managers began their career in a culture in which coaching – if there was any at all – was directive. They had a directive boss who told them what to do, so now they operate in the same way. Asking them to stop being directive can feel to them a little like asking a mountain lion to become a house cat.

Letting go of the need to tell reps what to do and instead allowing them to discover their own insight in their own time is one of the toughest but most important shifts a sales manager can make. Doing so will ultimately yield a resourceful, problem-solving, high-performing salesperson.

“One of the many paradoxes and subtleties in coaching is that, although they are responsible for managing a session and ensuring value and tangible outcomes, coaches must not impose too much control over their coachees or on the sessions,” warn Graham Alexander and Ben Renshaw in their book, SuperCoaching: The Missing Ingredient for High Performance (Random House, 2005). Alexander founded the Alexander Corporation in 1986, an organization that grew to be Europe’s largest corporate coaching company.

Alexander and Renshaw liken the skill necessary to allow a coaching conversation to unfold to the game of tennis. In tennis, they point out, there are precisely defined rules, scoring, and areas of play. Within those rules, however, each match unfolds in its own way depending on the strengths, weaknesses, and strategy of each player. Similarly, in coaching, there are good methodologies and questioning skills, but an effective coach allows each conversation to unfold in its own way within that framework. They offer the following advice:

Don’t rush it. Allow “coachees” (reps) to be themselves and progress in their own time, and let outcomes emerge in their appropriate form. “If coaches exert too much control, they risk alienating their coachees, which can result in [the coachees’] failing to involve themselves fully in the process or feeling manipulated, causing the interaction to be stilted and mechanistic,” say Alexander and Renshaw.

Let the rep be the guide. Reps will be most motivated to grow when they identify what they want to work on. Even if you think the rep should have chosen a different area for improvement, don’t impose that on him or her. “It is not up to a coach to tell the coachees what they ought to be coached on, force a predetermined agenda on the direction of the coaching, or insist on action steps that he or she thinks are right,” warn the authors.

Allow the journey to unfold. Some reps will be quicker than others to travel from problem to insight; the key is to allow each rep’s natural coaching journey to unfold in its own way. Doing so enables reps to gain their own insight and make their own commitments to moving forward. “This validates the coachee’s inherent ability,” say Alexander and Renshaw, “and demonstrates that considerable wisdom resides within.”