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Sales Coaching for Business Growth

Guest post by: Shirley Mckinnon

Article Overview: Good coaching changes behaviour. But how do you generate awareness, get them to take responsibility for their actions or lack of action, and lead the person to motivate themselves and want to change? The coaching session should be a monthly session unless they require more support, and each session should have homework allocated. Once the person demonstrates they are taking action in the form of their homework, you know the coaching is effective.

Sales Coaching for Business Growth

The Coach’s Guide to the One-on-one Session

A one-on-one coaching session has one objective, changing behaviour. A coach wants to generate awareness, get them to take ownership of the problem and lead the person to motivate themselves to want to change. This session should be followed by action known as homework.

The session should always start with:

What’s changed since our last session?

This forces the person to assess their behaviour and identify any changes. We often make a change but don’t recognise it, therefore have a low awareness of our actions. Or we do change but don’t appreciate the impact of that change. If they say nothing’s changed, what they are really saying is that they are not trying to change anything. And obviously, you wouldn’t be having these sessions if you weren’t trying to help them change for the better.

Have they achieved what they wanted to since the last session? If not, why not?

What you are wanting to do with this question, is to help them identify what excuses they are using to justify why they haven’t been able to do what they were supposed to. For example:

“I’ve been too busy.”

This means that they’ve put everything else as a priority over what they were supposed to do. Follow a questioning process about how important it is to them to improve their results. Then revisit their priorities.

“The market is quiet” type of excuse

Does this mean that they only do well when the market is busy? Focus on what they need to do in the months when the market “seems” quieter. A question such as, “Smart, focused people do well in any market, what do you think they might be doing which you are not?” will get them stepping back and assessing what they are not doing.

Focus on the behaviour, not the excuses.

Do not answer any excuses, always follow with a question. The key to a good coaching session is that they do all the talking, you do all the asking.

The answers sought are descriptive of behaviour not judgmental.

“I did good or bad” is judgement without specifics.

“Specifically what did you do that you think was good or bad?’ will get you feedback so you are able to verify the accuracy of their answer and again focus on the behaviour rather than the excuse.

Awareness and responsibility are better raised by asking than by telling.

Open questions such as:

Tell me about….

Explain….

Describe …..

are more effective for generating awareness and responsibility in the coaching process.

For example:

“ I haven’t been able to get to what I was meant to do because I was too busy.”

Coach, “Tell me what is making you so busy.”

Once you have identified some behaviour which they are or are not doing, get them to tell you how they are going to do things differently.

“So, you haven’t been able to do your paperwork well, because you don’t have the time during the day. So, how are you going to fix this?”

Give them back the problem. If we tell ourselves we can’t do something, we don’t take responsibility for fixing it. If we ask ourselves, how can we fix this, we assume there is a way to do it, we just haven’t found it yet. And in the act of searching for solutions, we find them.

Get them to pick one thing which they are going to work on. Get them to commit to doing this. Get them to describe specifically what they are going to do and how they are going to make it happen.

Make notes so you can be specific in your next session.

Tell them their homework is to do the thing they have committed to. This really locks in the commitment.

The session should not go longer than one hour or both people can become drained. A professional coach does sessions of two hours but they are looking for specific barriers and have specific approaches to address them.

One-on-one coaching sessions should be conducted monthly. This keeps the focus on the results and leaves the sales person with the knowledge that you are going to follow-up. Putting this expectation on them, with the knowledge that they are going to have to be accountable for their results, can have a significant impact on how seriously they take their own development. This is positive pressure which increases productivity, and increased productivity is what increases motivation.

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Article Tags: business growth, coaching, coaching changes, coaching for results, effective sales, increase sales



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