Shelley Lavery has been coaching B2B sales teams for over ten years and in this video she shares her tried and tested method to running a great call or meeting review session with your sales reps.
Ownership is your number one goal in sales coaching
Shelley believes that your sales rep having a strong sense of ownership over their performance should be the goal for any review session. There are two benefits to ownership with. Firstly, ownership has a positive impact on our self-motivation, and who doesn’t want self-motivated sales reps! Secondly, ownership makes us feel more attached to the outcome, so we’re more likely to pursue it with energy and passion.
But a strong send of ownership can have its negatives.
As sales leaders, you have a strong sense of ownership, you’ve got big targets over your head.
It can cause us to firstly act in a territorial way, and secondly stop us from delegating. It’s important to be mindful that those behaviours don’t get in the way of your sales coaching efforts.
Top 5 sales coaching mistakes:
Your sales coaching can take a wrong turn with these five sentences.
- Don’t dictate the meeting - “I think it would be helpful if we dedicate time to…”
- Don't solve any issues for them by saying something like “In my experience I think you should…”
- Don’t make judgments on what they say by commenting with “I really think you should have…”
- Don’t put expectations on what they need to do by saying “In 2 weeks I’d expect you to improve significantly.”
- Don’t make it a ‘deal focused’ session by saying “How do we turn this deal around?”
The 3-part structure to a sales coaching session
We use a simple and easy to follow structure when running a sales performance coaching session. With the primary goal of ownership being a major part of our strategy, we focus on the positives and let the rep find their journey in self-analysis by delving deeper into the review and asking open questions.
We suggest structuring your meetings by using three areas:
. Introduction - where we set expectations.
. Explore - the bulk of the session where you spend time listening to the reps feedback.
. Path - looking for a commitment from the rep in making changes and how they are going to implement them.
Check out the video for examples of great coaching questions to use at each stage of the session
Assessing your own performance as a coach
Finally, if you want to find out how well you did as a coach during your meeting and call reviews. Shelley looks at the following three considerations in her self-analysis and reflection:
. How much did you talk versus listen?
. How much did you direct versus ask questions?
. How much time and energy did you give to the session (with no distractions)?
If you’ve enjoyed this blog and want to get more from your sales coaching, check out our fundamental guide here
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