BOOK REVIEWS
BECOMING A COACH A main review of a coaching book plus a good one on objections. By MARC BEISHON
A
weakness of British salesforces is sometimes said to be the quality of sales managers. While frontline salespeople are among the best in the world, especially in complex B2B selling, the transition to moving up to sales management is often not so successful, partly because there can be little training and systematic processes to ease people into what is a highly challenging role with much at stake. This contrasts with the US, where selling is approached more consistently as a science and as a management discipline that requires training and development. The ISM’s qualifications – at diploma levels 4 to 6 – have been helping to fill this sales management gap of course, and there are numerous commercial courses. But there are still few university sales courses, and the ones in place were no doubt encouraged by the admirable Beth Rogers, who ran the pioneering sales management MA at the University of Portsmouth, and who also wrote the book, Rethinking Sales Management, way back in 2007, which developed mainly strategic issues and was featured in Winning Edge. One crucial aspect of sales management is development of salespeople, and in particular coaching them, rather than training. It’s one of the skills likely to be missing in many a new sales manager, especially those focused on process and spreadsheets. It’s why there is much current interest in sales enablement tools that support salespeople with content and playbooks. Keith Rosen’s book, Sales Leadership: The essential leadership framework to coach sales champions, inspire excellence and exceed your business goals, is a playbook style volume based on a coaching model he developed and first introduced in a previous book, Coaching Salespeople
COACHIN G SHORTCOMIN G S Rosen sets out reasons why managers don’t coach: n They think they’re coaching but they’re not, and inevitably learn the wrong lessons. A telltale sign is a manager who says things like, “Coaching doesn’t work”, “Sometimes you have to just tell them what to do, which is much easier”, or, his favourite, “Coaching just takes too long”
46 WINNING EDGE
n They had awful training. Sometimes managers go through terrible coaching training n There is no company wide alignment on what coaching is and how to do it n There is no plan or process to ensure consistent, effective coaching n They’re not being effectively coached themselves.
into Sales Champions. With our usual health warning that Rosen is American, he has taken his model to many countries and seems to have found much success. His insights into sales coaching do look to be powerful in this later book, which refines his model. Setting out a key question early, he says: “The key to being a great leader is understanding what your people want and expect from you, but more important, why they want it.” Rosen’s view is that coaching is an integral part of company culture, or it should be – and that it applies also to the ways that salespeople interact with customers as consultative sellers as much as coaching internally. It’s about putting “people before results”, and if you can’t change the company as a whole you can develop a coaching “subculture” in your own team. A coaching framework “consists of well‐crafted, precision‐ based questions to facilitate the conversation, which empowers people to self‐reflect and arrive at a solution or new insight on their own”. An abbreviated definition of coaching is simply “the art of creating new possibilities”. Rosen puts forward a simple coaching framework – there are three questions, including “why” that need answering in every interaction: l What? What’s going on? What’s the topic of this conversation? What’s the objective? What help is the coachee looking for? Gather the facts by asking questions to accurately assess the situation. ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
