Becoming a coach

A main review of a coaching book plus a good one on objections. By MARC BEISHON

Aweakness 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 into Sales Champions. With our usual health warning back in 2007, which developed mainly strategic that Rosen is American, he has taken his model to issues and was featured in Winning Edge. many countries and seems to have found much

One crucial aspect of sales management is success. His insights into sales coaching do look to development of salespeople, and in particular be powerful in this later book, which refines his coaching them, rather than training. It’ s one of model. Setting out a key question early, he says: the skills likely to be missing in many a new sales “The key to being a great leader is understanding manager, especially those focused on process and what your people want and expect from you, but spreadsheets. It’ s why there is much current more important, why they want it.” interest in sales enablement tools that support Rosen ’s view is that coaching is an integral part salespeople with content and playbooks. Keith of company culture, or it should be – and that it Rosen ’s book, Sales Leadership: The essential leadership applies also to the ways that salespeople interact framework to coach sales champions, inspire excellence and with customers as consultative sellers as much as exceed your business goals, is a playbook style volume coaching internally. It’s about putting “people based on a coaching model he developed and first before results”, and if you can ’t change the introduced in a previous book, Coaching Salespeople company as a whole you can develop a coaching “subculture” in your own team. A coaching framework “consists of well‐crafted, precision‐COACHING SHORTCOMINGS based questions to facilitate the conversation, which empowers people to self‐reflect and arrive

Rosen sets out reasons why n They had awful training. at a solution or new insight on their own”. An managers don’t coach: Sometimes managers go through abbreviated definition of coaching is simplyn 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, terrible coaching training n There is no company wide alignment on what coaching is and how to do it “the art of creating new possibilities”. Rosen puts forward a simple coaching framework – there are three questions, including

“Coaching doesn’t work”, n There is no plan or process to “why” that need answering in every interaction:

“Sometimes you have to just tell ensure consistent, effective l What? What’s going on? What’s the topic of this them what to do, which is much coaching conversation? What’s the objective? What help is easier”, or, his favourite, “Coaching n They’re not being effectively the coachee looking for? Gather the facts by asking just takes too long” coached themselves. questions to accurately assess the situation.

l Why? Why is this happening? Why is the coachee in this situation? Uncover the gap or the root cause. Is this a training (mindset and skill set), coaching, advising, or observation‐sharing moment? l How? Tactical action‐oriented: How are you going to move forward and create a new outcome, possibility, or healthier way of thinking?

What usually happens though is that sales managers just ask what’s going on and then say here’s what you need to do, missing the “why” (and also often “who”, “how” and “when”). This is the build-up to his LEADS coaching model, which stands for Learn (to set objectives), Enrol (to set the environment and expectations for coaching), Assess (to uncover “what” and “how”), Define (to uncover “why”), and Support (to uncover who”, “how” and “when”). This is the essence – and Rosen also sets out types of questions to ask in these stages, and there are lots here – core, assumptive, learning, expansion, messaging... the idea is that you “coach the gap”, but there are only three main types of response you get: l The coachee provides a fully developed solution and/or possesses a high level of self‐awareness. They recognised the gap... l The coachee provides a partial solution and/or an average degree of self‐awareness l You know for a fact that the solution or approach the coachee provided is inaccurate, would be ineffective, extremely risky, resource prohibitive, or achieve a low success rate, and/or the coachee has a very low degree of self‐awareness... Rosen considers that you can do this type of coaching in a 10 minute session and he asks you to think about using this approach in a typical phone call with your reports and not necessarily in a formal coaching session. In the bulk of the book he gives a lot of examples of how to turn conversations into coaching ones in various situations, such as deal and pipeline reviews, and along the way he spells out differences between training and coaching, the differences between impromptu and scheduled coaching, and how to turn team meetings into team coaching.

On scheduled coaching, he says: “One non‐negotiable is for every coachee to come prepared to a one‐to‐one coaching session with a clear agenda. An unprepared coachee leads to coaching failure.” Performance reviews are given short shrift – you should be coaching all the time so that such reviews are essentially redundant. (And they often turn into results review.)

There ’ s much more in the book – on building trust and buy-in, on various conversations, and common mistakes. It’s a down-to-earth book that can help fill a big gap and is not an overly pushy sell for Rosen ’ s method. FOUR TYPES OF DEAL OBJECTIONS

There are essentially four types of objections you encounter in the sales process: Prospecting – simple reflex responses during prospecting calls owing to people being too busy and seeing little value Red herrings – irrelevant issues introduced by buyers that divert attention that cause you to lose control of the conversation Micro-commitments – request brush-offs for your attempts to move to the next steps in the deal that stall pipeline velocity Buying commitments – objections that shut down your deal. They can be many – price and budget objections, timing objections, status-quo objections, need to talk it over with my boss or committee objections, and many more...

Sales Leadership by Keith Rosen is published by Wiley and is available on Amazon

Objections by Jeb Blount is published by Wiley and available on Amazon SELLING BOLDLY The second book is by Jeb Blount, whose book on emotional intelligence we thought highly of. Last year he brought out Objections: The ultimate guide for mastering the art of science of getting past no, which we now have a copy of. It isn’t a book he was intending to write – he was focusing on negotiations and thought at first that there wasn ’t too much to say on objections, which tend to be covered in one section in most sales books and courses. He changed his mind because a lot of questions he got asked at a session where sales pros hurl questions at him were on objections.

In a foreword, another expert, Mark Hunter, makes an interesting point – in sales, context matters in almost everything you do, as “every prospect, sales conversation, territory, company, and product are different”. The one exception is objections, as “you face objections and the potential for objections, no matter your unique situation”. Objections are a shared reality for all salespeople, he notes.

Blount writes that “asking” is the most important discipline in sales, and “asking with confidence is one of the most difficult things for humans to do”. He takes you through how to be assumptive and confident in asking (“the reason I’m calling is...”) but then your ability to handle and get past objections “is where the rubber meets the road in sales”. There are four types of objections in the sales process, he says (see panel above), and you need to use what he calls “objection turnaround frameworks” – and Blount warns that he’s not giving you scripts – and books that do are mostly a waste of money, he adds.

Instead, he continues with some good psychology about the “science of resistance”; why objections are not rejections (but can feel like them) and not something to be “overcome” (but you need to handle your own emotions about rejection); and trying to avoid objections is “stupid” and you need to “prospect” them. Then Blount takes you through the four objection types in detail.

This is a well written book that should get you thinking more clearly about how you handle objections – and emotions – in the sales cycle.