Once a manager accepts that coaching is the job, the next problem shows up immediately. What do you coach?
Here’s what is on everyone’s list: Discovery. Qualification. Objection handling. Managing the deal strategy. Pipeline hygiene. Forecast accuracy. Prospecting. Account planning. Using the methodology. Using AI. And that’s just the start. These lists never end.
Every item is a real thing a seller could be better at. The temptation of most managers is to coach all of them. In the deal review, they might focus on deal strategy, call planning, and using the methodology. In the pipeline review, pipeline quality, volume/velocity, coverage, with an added dollop of keeping CRM updated. In qualification, are they focusing on the ICP and qualification criteria and moving into discovery. On a list of topics that never ends, there is another never ending list of development areas.
The seller leaves each coaching conversation with a long list of areas they need to improve yet not knowing where to start. And in the confusion, end up doing nothing.
And then next week, the manager and seller go through the cycle again, but the list of focus areas changes and piles on top of those from the previous week.
You get the point, we are coaching on everything and improving nothing. We’ve made everything a priority and as well intended as the person might be they are overwhelmed and don’t know what to do.
It isn’t that they are uncoachable, they are just dazed.
We don’t develop our people by coaching them on everything all at once. We develop them by focusing on the one or two things that have the greatest impact on their performance. We stick with those one or two things until we see the changes we hope for, only then do we move to the next two.
Even when we do narrow our focus, we still have a tendency to coach the wrong thing. A deal is stuck, we focus on winning that deal. Our discovery for the account wasn’t deep enough, so we focus on that account. If we succeed in our coaching, they win that deal and have better discovery on that account.
But what we ended up doing is coaching the deal and the account, not the person. We will have to do this for each deal and each account.
Our problem is that we are focused on a specific situation and end result, for example winning the deal. But in doing this we aren’t focused on developing the person’s capabilities.
By now you are probably scratching your head thinking, “Dave, you always talk about coaching deals, accounts, pipelines and everything else. Are you telling me not to?”
Here’s the nuance. We do work on coaching the deal, the sales call, the account, the pipeline. But each of these is the context. They are each the raw material that we use in helping develop an individual’s capabilities. What we are really doing is looking at the behaviors underlying each of these situations. These behaviors are the target; and the deal, call, or account become the context in which we coach the individual.
Let’s imagine we have a seller whose deals are stalling, their proposals are generic, there are last minute surprise objections, and while the pipeline is passable, nothing closes. We might see these as several different problems: bad qualification, bad discovery, poor customer engagement, bad pipeline management. And our tendency is coach each of these problems.
But underlying all of these problems is a single behavior. In the example above, it might be customer centricity. If we coach the four situations or the symptoms, we don’t make progress. But if we see them for the underlying behavior, poor customer centricity, we can focus on coaching that behavior.
Each of the situations or symptoms become examples of the individual’s challenges with customer centricity. Now our coaching can be much more focused. We can look at customer centricity in the context of how deals stall, why the proposals don’t win, how that creates last minute objections, and why our pipelines don’t close. In our coaching, we show what customer centricity means and why it is needed in each of these different scenarios.
In this shift, we are focusing on the individual seller and a specific capability they need to develop, customer centricity. We are showing examples of how it shows up in various different contexts or situations. The person we are coaching begins to see the real issue and learns how to change that specific behavior. The person sees how it impacts everything she does.
This presents a couple of challenges to the manager who is coaching. Which behavior do we choose? Then how do we connect the dots of that behavior to each of the situations we seek to coach?
Let’s tackle the first, which behavior we choose. We may be tempted to choose the one that’s easiest to identify or most comfortable to discuss. For example, it might be discipline and we want to focus on time management and time blocking. While it might be a real issue, it may not be the most important one. If people lack customer centricity, driving them to be bad at deal execution, moving things through the pipeline, and differentiating our offers to the customer; managing their time more effectively won’t have a great impact.
This is the real work underlying our coaching. We have to diagnose and prioritize the behaviors that have the greatest impact on their performance. Using the previous example, addressing the customer centricity behaviors may also reduce the time management challenges. Coaching on discipline isn’t necessary right now.
The behaviors we need to focus on are finite. I’ve named eight core behaviors in Is Good Enough Good Enough. It’s easy to know and understand these behaviors. We have the greatest impact on people’s performance if we focus on the one or two highest priority behaviors. Once people master these, we can move to other behaviors.
The focus behaviors will be different for each person. For one it might be customer centricity. For another it might be accountability (think about the seller constantly making excuses for everything). Another might be discipline and another might be curiosity. As managers, our job is to figure out which one to two behaviors are critical to the current performance of each of our people.
Over time, as they master these, we will shift the focus to other behaviors, or come back and continue to build on one or two critical areas.
There’s one more piece. Behavior doesn’t exist on it’s own. It’s also integral to the ways we do the work: the processes, methodologies, metrics, programs, and tools. This is where we and our people live in our day to day execution. They are the mechanisms around which we build our GTM strategies. I discuss how behaviors and mechanisms reinforce each other in The DNA of Sales Excellence. Here’s what you need to know to integrate into your coaching.
But there’s another layer separates good coaching from complete coaching. The behavior is the through-line for all our coaching. Customer centricity runs across the stalled deal, weak pipeline, generic proposals and objections. Each of those situations is a different manifestation of the customer centricity challenge.
But within each situation, behavior is not likely to be the only challenge. In the stalled deal, for example, the seller never understood the customer well enough to build urgency. But this is compounded by something else, they are not executing the sales process well.
There are two different but interrelated gaps. If we just coach customer centricity, leaving the sales process problem untouched, we aren’t helping with the situation. If we only coach the process, which is often the default, we aren’t developing the person. The situation needs both.
This is the second strand. Alongside the behavior, each situation usually has a mechanism in play; for example, the sales process, methodology, metrics, or tools. What matters for coaching is that the behavior and the mechanism amplify each other.
In our example, customer centricity makes the sales process work the way it was designed to, because the seller is doing each step to understand the customer rather than to check a box. And the process gives customer centricity a focused place to operate. Coach them together and each makes the other stronger.
So the diagnosis has two parts. The behavior we see across different situations and the mechanism which amplifies the impact of the behavior. Diagnosing and coaching focuses on both the development of the person and the development of their ability to better manage similar situations.
As we understand the person across a number of situations, rather than reacting to each situation, we see it’s usually one to two core behaviors that need focus, and one to two key mechanisms. We keep our focus on those until we see the shifts in behavior and their ability to effectively apply the mechanism.
For the example we have used in this article, the dominant behavior need, across all the situations we described is customer centricity. As you look at these situations the dominant mechanism that crosses these is the sales process. Focusing our coaching on these two, showing how they are critical in each situation maximizes our impact in driving a performance change.
For the manager coaching: your hardest work isn’t in the conversation. It’s the diagnosis, understanding the common thread across a number of different situations; tracing them back to the core behaviors and mechanisms common to those. And in my experience, the performance issues rarely span all the behaviors and mechanisms. Look closely enough and you will almost always find the highest priority reduces to one or two.
If you can’t find the key behavior and key mechanism that are common across many of the things the seller is doing, you don’t know what to coach.
One final tip. As you learn how to do this, resist the temptation to address everything you see. Have the discipline to focus on the area you have identified, stick with it until you see the changes that were necessary, then move on to the next one.
For the seller being coached: you have the same diagnosis to do on yourself, and you’re closer to what’s happening than anyone. You can sense where things aren’t working or where you can improve.
The core issue is whether you’re honest about the cause or only focusing on the symptom. It’s easier to believe your proposals need work than to admit you are not customer centric enough to write the high impact one. It’s impossible to write the high impact one, if you haven’t executed the sales process well enough to understand what the customer really needs.
Here’s something to think about. Think about a seller you’re trying to develop, or if you are a seller, think about yourself. List the problems you keep seeing. Then ask the harder question: how many of those are actually the same problem showing up in different places?
Most of what looks like a dozen issues is one or two behaviors around a specific mechanism. And they are on constant repeat. The skill is not in addressing the dozen issues individually, it’s seeing the underlying behaviors and mechanism that matter most.
And I’ll be honest that I get this wrong as often as not. I’ve spent weeks working symptoms before I finally name the underlying cause. This is the hard part. It’s also the part that’s worth everything.
In the next post, I will continue on this topic looking at coaching as a process, not an event.
Afterword: Another wonderful AI narrated discussion of this post. They inspired the image I chose to illustrate the challenge. Finally, once again, they bring great clarity to the ideas in this article. It is particularly good in explaining the relationship of behavior and mechanisms. Be sure to take the time to listen.
