I recently wrote an updated version of “What Is Coaching?” In it, I focused on how leaders coach and develop their people. At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article.
Rather than repeat all the things about what coaching is and isn’t, how we effectively coach, I’ll summarize three key areas here, but for the details go back to the What is Coaching article:
- Bad coaching is directive, telling people what they need to do.
- We sometimes think “coaching” is giving people the answers, feeding them data and information. While these can be helpful, they aren’t coaching.
- High impact coaching is collaborative, learning conversations. Helping the person being coached more deeply understand the problems, opportunities, and issues, help them think about what they might do about these, helping them discover things they might change, helping them develop and execute a plan of action addressing these.
- Building their confidence in their abilities to figure things out, develop an action plan, and execute. This also builds higher levels of buy in?
When we look at our approaches to selling, we can recognize too much of what we do and how we engage customers are represented by the first two points.
While we may disguise these in our questioning and discovery techniques, most of the time we are asking questions with an agenda, hoping to get the answers that drive people to buying our products/solutions. Many of our engagement techniques become very directive, focusing on, “Here is the answer……”
Yet too many of our customers haven’t even figured out the problem, the need to change, the opportunity to improve.
Applying the same methods that we do in high impact coaching within our organizations (summarized by last two points above), can help more effectively build trust with our customers. We help them think about their business differently, we help them/coach them in how they might look to address the issues. Through the process, we build their confidence as the move forward in making and implementing a decision.
How do we develop these skills in our people?
First, if we aren’t modeling the right behaviors in how we coach and develop them, then nothing will work!
Once we are setting great examples, we can begin training them in skills we use as great managers–but focus the training on how we engage and work with the customer. Collaborative conversations, critical thinking, problem solving, project management, the ability to leverage tools/data effectively. These are all skills great managers use in developing their people. These same skills, directed to customers is how we start coaching our customers.
One thing we see in great leaders, coaching their people, is they deeply understand the roles they are coaching, they understand how the work gets done, they understand who in the organization depends on their people, and who they depend on. They understand the metrics most critical to understanding performance.
We do the same in understanding our customers through tools like the Customer Focused Brock Questionert. (Ask me if you want a copy of this.)
Great managers have a deep understanding of the problems their people face. They understand root causes, they understand alternative solutions, they understand risks, and more.
We do the same in understanding our customers problems deeply engaging customer in helping them better understand those problems. We leverage tools like the Problem Focused Brock Questionert (Ask me if you want a copy of this.)
Coaching is the highest leverage opportunity we have in driving the performance of our people.
Likewise, coaching our customers represents the highest leverage opportunity for us to drive our performance with the customers.
Afterword: Once again, the AI discussion of this post is a home run! They approached it in the opposite way I approached it in this article. They focused, first, on how to engage and coach customers effectively building to the “How do we do this?” Then they leveraged the high impact coaching principles we use with our people.
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