Coaching Must Focus On “What’s Next….”

We have endless tools to help us analyze sales performance. Whether it’s performance dashboards, looking at performance to date, or conversational intelligence tools that help us understand what happened. We know the gap, and our coaching focuses on, “You have to make the number, go do more!”

There are a number of variations of this, but most of it is retrospective. All performance data is retrospective. It tells us what has happened. But it doesn’t necessarily inform us about why it’s happened. And it does nothing to tell us what we must do in going forward.

But too often, our coaching, if we are doing any, misses this. We look at the most current numbers, assess the difference between where they are and where they need to be. For those exceeding their goals, we “High Five,” and say “Way to go!” For those not meeting their goals, “You gotta do more! You’re behind on your numbers!” And then there is a random series of meaningless insights like, “You need more pipeline, You need more top of funnel, You need to get your meetings/demos/calls up, You need to do more prospecting….” My reaction is, “Weelll, that might work, fingers crossed…..”

This isn’t coaching! This isn’t helpful to our people! This is highly unlikely to help our teams achieve their goals! They and we fail!

High impact coaching means understanding the current performance–not just the numbers but what is driving the numbers:

• If there are pipeline problems, what’s causing them? Are we chasing the right opportunities? Are we helping the customer move through their buying process?
• If there are win rate problems, what’s causing them? How do we improve our win rates, what do we have to change?
• If there are top of funnel/prospecting problem, how do we change our engagement strategies to drive higher levels of response and engagement?
• There are so many other things” Are we accomplishing as much in each interaction as we should? How might we increase average deal values, reduce buying/selling cycles, more effectively engage our customers? Are we structuring our days/weeks in ways that enable us to be most productive? Are we we leveraging tools/technology/content as effectively as possible?

Once we have insight into the key issues underlying the performance challenges, we have to focus on helping our people plan “what’s next? What are we going to do to achieve our goals?” We need to drill down with our people, helping them identify the 2-3 key things that will help them close the gap. What deals might we focus on? What might we change about our deal strategies? Are we wasting our time on things that aren’t realistic? What might they change to drive their engagement strategies?

We focus our coaching, helping our people discover what’s next, what/where they need to focus, how they might get their performance back on target, or how they continue to perform as well as they are. And finally, we ask, “What help and support do you need?”

Our jobs, as leaders, is to help maximize the performance of each person on our team. We are most impactful when we engage them thinking, “What should we change, Is there a more effective way to achieve our goal in this deal, what should be doing next?”