Categories: Sales Coaching Tools
Great leaders are great leaders — no matter the court they operate in. On the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast, John Kaplan, Force Management President, had a chance to chat with Coach John Mosley Jr. from Netflix's Last Chance U and East Los Angeles College. Coaching inspiration can come from anywhere. Below are our top takeaways that you can apply to your own sales teams.
You can find the full, three-part podcast series here. Tune in, share with your teams, and find all three episodes on The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast (streaming on all the top platforms).
1. Meet team members where they are
Not all salespeople are wired the same. They have different motivations, different operating rhythms and are at different skill levels. Why would you coach them the same way?
It’s no different than Coach Mosley’s basketball players. The reason he’s so passionate about coaching the individual is because that’s the best way to see his players succeed. Think about the individuals on your team. How can you meet them where they are and coach them to success?
We teach a simple matrix called the Skill/Will Model that groups people by their skill level and their motivation. It provides an easy way for you to assess your people, understand where they’re at right now and adapt you and your manager’s leadership activities accordingly. Use this model to adjust your coaching cadence and tailor it to the individuals on your sales team in a way that drives impactful front-line results.
(We have an upcoming series on this model coming to the Audible-Ready Sales Podcast in a few weeks. Subscribe on your favorite platform to get a notification when they go live.)
2. Be a servant leader
We write often about the importance of having a buyer focus in your sales rhythm. Servant leadership demands a focus on the people you lead. If you’ve seen the Last Chance U Basketball series or listened to our podcast with Coach Mosley, you know his ultimate goal is to serve his players, to help them get to the next step.
Consider how you can shift your own leadership style to have more of a servant focus. Don’t yell at the scoreboard. Find actionable ways to serve your team that provide not just the what, but the how. Drive accountability on your team by helping your individual players know you’re there to coach and provide feedback, but they own the plan to make their plans.
3. Move away from compliance
The best sales leaders move their teams away from mere compliance exercises that incentivize reps to game the CRM in order to demonstrate sales activity. Encourage your reps to focus on customers and the right selling activities, by demonstrating the value of your asks, (E.g., Why do they need to update the CRM during discovery? So you can understand the gaps in the deal and coach them on how to fill them.) In our interview, Coach Mosley said that “rules without relationships equal rebellion”. Too many rules don’t work if your people don’t understand the why and they don’t feel that you have their best interests at heart.
4. Create a cadence
In order to execute the steps above the most effective leaders find ways to regularly check in and support their people. For sales leaders, developing a disciplined cadence around coaching and the high-value activities reps must do to succeed, can be a game changer. How often are you checking in with your reps on deals? When are you recruiting new people? What is your process for communicating to your supervisors? We call this cadence a Management Operating Rhythm (MOR).
Just like Coach Mosley had a disciplined approach to staying connected to his team, on and off the court to execute servant leadership tasks, an MOR can help you do the same. When executed correctly, the MOR enables sales leaders to make sure that their sales teams can be successful. Elite sales leaders use an MOR to drive accountability and provide the support managers and salespeople need to consistently improve front-line performance.
Implementing an MOR into your process can help you ensure internal alignment and provide ongoing value to your salespeople. Here are a few key concepts we help sales leaders incorporate into their MORs.
5. Build up your sales coaches
Make your sales coaches better and provide the resources they need to make a bigger impact on their sales team’s success. A critical element that helps sales organizations go from good to great is their ability to build managers into strong sales coaches.
No coach, whether it’s sports or sales, becomes a great coach just by being a great player of their game. Even the best coaches don’t become great on their own. Coach Mosley shared with us that some of his best coaching tactics are a combination of his experiences, mentors, and the support his organization provides him. Becoming a sales manager that drives front-line success takes practice, experience (often some failures), and support from those who’ve done it before.
Your managers may have been top performers in their position as a seller, but when they get to the next level they’re often unproven and underdeveloped at coaching the skills they're so great at. As a sales leader, you have the opportunity to build your managers into great sales coaches, because you’ve done it before.
Consider how you can help your managers go from good to great sales coaches, and how they can build their salespeople into a top-performing team. Enable them with the tools, processes and support they need to lead successful sales teams.
Coaching Takeaways for All Leaders
Learn more about our conversation with Coach Mosley. He shares actionable insights leaders can map from basketball to sales to coach a team to success. Mosley talks about how, as a leader, he meets his players where they are and coaches them to achieve critical benchmarks from there, all while balancing overall team culture.
