“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” —Zig Ziglar
All sellers in your organization—from the top to the bottom of the pile—benefit from coaching and count on you to deliver it. But for each individual case, you must you have a deliberate, strategic goal in mind. Consistently low performers need to be coached out of the organization. Middle-of-the-road sellers need to be taught to hone best practices and adopt disciplined practices and techniques. Top performers need tougher goals and new tools to consistently achieve and exceed their sales targets.
Learning in sales, therefore, makes sense only when it’s fueled by a sense of purpose at an individual level first. Without that in place, you’re at risk of having a team of really frustrated sellers wondering why you’ve wasted their time. Getting it right, however, is how you create what I call unstoppable coaching: a repeatable process capable of identifying sales performers and nurturing them to greatness.
To explore this, I recently spent time on LinkedIn talking with my friend James Vincent, the leader of ActionCOACH in the UK. Together we talked about the mission-critical first steps that all leaders like you must take to create this kind of culture within your organization and make people thrive.
Unstoppable coaching starts by following the Rule of 3s: three action points, each with important variables.
HARNESS THREE THINGS IN YOUR HEAD
“The voice in your head is your biggest performance-enhancing drug.” That’s how James aptly describes what everyone in sales—including you—must wrangle with. That voice means you must contend with three competing mental forces: ego, confidence and humility. With respect to ego, I don’t mean being egotistical (although that’s in rich supply in the sales business). Rather it’s about defining and nurturing a healthy sense of self worth and knowing your limitations. Next, there’s confidence, in which you leverage your well-managed ego to set realistic goals for yourself and for your sales performers. Lastly, there’s humility, which is about recognizing that there’s more you can learn no matter how long your list of accomplishments are. But that means first being able to situate where you and your team are on the performance curve and being capable of defining your process as a seller (or a leader of sellers). As James points out: “humility comes from understanding your own philosophy.” Unstoppable coaching is about defining the right balance of each of these forces for each seller. It applies as much to you as it does to those you’re coaching.
UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF THE THREE-TO-ONE RATIO
Drawing on the lessons he’s learned and applied from world-leading athletic coaches, James says: “resilience is born at the power of three-to-one.” There’s a powerful insight in there and it starts by recognizing and accepting the natural occurrence of what lies at the opposite pole of resiliency: negative thinking. Stop pretending it’s not there. “It’s what you do with it next that matters the most,” he says, adding that it takes three positive thoughts to countervail against one negative thought for every performer. Unstoppable coaching is about consistently harnessing this at the correct ratio. Getting it right means your seller gains mastery in handling what James describes as “situational pressure.” That consists of having a correct understanding of risk, the ability to summon mental endurance, the capacity for toughness in battle, and the ability to peak perform at critical moments. More than a mindset, James adds, “this is what I call mind power.”
MAKE A THREE-HOUR COMMITMENT FOR THREE KINDS OF PERFORMERS
Unstoppable coaching involves a reciprocal commitment. Not only must your sellers commit to learning and honing their skills, you as the team leader must also do the same. Each and every member of your sales team is owed a three-hour per month commitment from you in which you will coach and mentor them for greater success. The amount of time doesn’t decrease for the top sellers. No one can be over-coached. Unstoppable coaching also means finding the right tools and methods address the needs of three kinds of performers in your organization. Each one is vital, but their needs are different from one another. As James describes it, you must balance out the needs of those who excel at strategy, execution and details. [Case study here?]
As sales leader our job above all else is to coach.
I’ve spent countless hours coaching sales coaches and the first thing that always needs to be corrected is the time on task, Simply put, not enough coaches are spending enough time understand their team members and learning how to help them. In the last year I’ve seen coaches embrace my unstoppable coaching mentality and produce 10% more than their quota. On the other hand, I had a coach (in the same industry, and in the same year) refuse to dedicate the time recommended to coach his team, claiming it would be micromanagement. As a result, he finished his year (again) behind target and was ultimately fired.