I attended an interesting event in London a few weeks ago, a Chalk and Talk on the topic of coaching with Tony Cross of Growth Matters International. Growth Matters International is a Membrain partner, and I liked the event even more than I initially expected.
Instead of a series of lectures, the event is organized as a highly engaging conversation with the audience. Instead of a thought leader standing at a podium, everyone in the room enters into an interactive experience, facilitated by Tony.
I loved how this format picked a lot of people’s brains and exposed us all to many different perspectives. It became a collaborative problem-solving exercise that delivered deep and timely insight to us all. This format was especially appropriate given the topic of deal coaching, and it got me thinking that it also demonstrated a lot of the reasons why sales managers need to become masterful coaches if they want to lead excellent sales teams.
Sales managers need to become masterful coaches to lead excellent sales teams.
Here are 8 reasons why sales managers need to become masterful coaches:
- Coaching Drives Salespeople to Think, Not Just Do
Sales managers often feel that their job is to get their people to do the right things. But their job is bigger than that. In complex sales, salespeople need to be able to think clearly and in a structured way in order to help buyers create effective solutions to their problems. In the Chalk and Talk sessions, we didn’t just listen to experts, we discussed problems, offered insights, listened to multiple perspectives, and drew our own conclusions through thoughtful interaction. Great sales coaches create a similar effect when they engage their team members in thoughtful questioning and guided thought processes.
- Coaching Demands Active Engagement
If you know someone’s going to be talking at you for two hours, you can zone out. That’s often what happens at events where there are a series of speakers. But at the Chalk and Talk, we couldn’t get away with zoning out even if we’d wanted to. The same goes for coaching. If your salespeople know they’re in for a lecture on what they should be doing, they don’t have to stay mentally present. But when they know they’ll be skillfully invited to participate, engage, and problem solve, they’ll pay attention, and retain more.
- Coaching Helps Salespeople Get Their Questions Answered
When sales managers engage salespeople in coaching instead of just handing out answers, salespeople are encouraged to ask questions and dig deeper to understand better. Exploring questions together also often exposes questions salespeople didn’t even know they had, and enables them to access answers they didn’t know they needed.
- Role Play Becomes Part of the Natural Flow
Role play exercises are a critical tool for helping salespeople become comfortable with new skills and approaches, but they are often presented by managers in a forced way that makes them feel awkward and uncomfortable. On the contrary, a skilled coach can incorporate role play into the flow of conversation rather than forcing a set scenario, much the way Tony did at the Chalk and Talk. This enables role play that is both directly relevant to the salesperson’s needs and much more natural and comfortable to engage in.
- The Setting Can Be Dynamic and Interactive
A great coach doesn’t just sit across a desk and grill you with questions. A great coaching session becomes dynamic and interactive and can involve not just questions and answers, but role play, white board brainstorming, and practical, real-time application of new skills or activities such as picking up the phone and actually calling a prospect or thinking through and then sending an engaging email to a stakeholder.
- Managers Who Coach Skillfully Earn More Respect from Their Team
An expert who stands on a stage and speaks competently about their field earns respect from the audience. An expert like Tony who can get off the stage and engage directly and meaningfully with participants gains even more. It takes a lot of courage, skill, and expertise to hold a session like this. Likewise, salespeople may or may not respect their managers for their knowledge and insight, but they will certainly respect them when they are able to facilitate conversations that help them more deeply understand and learn what they can do to be better at their job.
- The Coach Learns from Coaching
It’s often said that the best way to learn something deeply is to teach it. But if you really want to learn something deeply, try coaching. By engaging directly with the front-line people who are executing in your organization, asking them questions, listening, and adapting based on their responses, you get real-time feedback on what’s happening on the frontlines. This helps the coach improve as a manager and coach, and helps the entire team, including leadership, respond to real conditions in the field.
- Salespeople Learn Better
When people are enabled to come to their own conclusions and connect the dots for themselves, they learn more deeply and retain more of what they’ve learned. That’s documented fact and it’s as true for salespeople as it is for anyone else.
I left the Chalk and Talk feeling inspired, but also having learned a great deal from the insights of my fellow participants, and from the format itself. I’m impressed by Tony’s skill and approach and looking forward to everything that our partnership will yield. I strongly believe that when we teach and coach our sales managers to teach and coach our salespeople effectively, then we build teams that simply can’t be beat.
What do you think? Did I miss any reasons why sales managers need to learn to coach?
