The Playbook of Coaching Questions: Asking The Right Questions At The Right Time When Coaching. Part 1
Feb 5, 2010 Business Coaching, Executive Coaching, Sales Coaching, career coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, training for managers
The underperformer you want to turn around. The problem you need to resolve. The tension among coworkers or teammates that desperately needs to be defused. The sale that must be closed. The passion and drive within each person, especially your rookies, which are essential to uncover and leverage. The underperforming veterans who are in a slump and require additional support, gentle encouragement, and a deeper sense of accountability in order to bring out their very best. The candidate who you would love to hire but is considering a position elsewhere.
Whatever the situation, challenge, or solution, the one common denominator and the tool used consistently by the world’s best coaches when approaching any scenario are questions. Not just any questions but powerful, creative, and well-crafted questions delivered at the right time, in the right way, to the right person.
Questions are at the very core of all coaching tools and strategies. Questions are the essence of coaching. Coaches draw their power from questions and questions are where the magic of coaching originates. Questions are where great opportunities are born, new ideas are ignited, self-imposed limitations are exposed, and vast possibilities are discovered.
Paradoxically, questions can very quickly become the prime source of devastation, damage, and disappointment for the manager who misuses or abuses them. Oddly enough, questions can put people on the defensive, make them wrong, come across as accusatory, and keep people drowning in the problem rather than maintaining their focus on the solution. Any of the many barriers to effective coaching or the coaching mistakes I discuss in my book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions will prevent you from using these questions in a way that will achieve the positive impact you’re hoping for. The flagrant abuse and misuse of questions can easily create the negative outcome you were trying to avoid.
The use of questions plays a critical role throughout the entire coaching process, during every coaching session, and also throughout daily conversations between you and your staff, as well as with your customers.
In my last blog, “Coaching Questions Managers Use To Get People To Recognize The Cost of Self Sabotaging Behavior,” I received many positive comments from people, thanking them for sharing some very strategic questions that can be used in the specific situation that calls for them. Given how critical it is to use the right coaching question at the right time, I’m devoting an entire week to the Art of Coaching Questions.
Rather than put the questions into a compelling and entertaining story, the following posts will be formatted in a more tactical way so that you can use them immediately, as more of a practical hand book for you to choose the most effective questions at the appropriate times. This Playbook of Coaching Questions is meant to become your tactical reference guide to use daily, as I will be sharing some of the most powerful coaching questions, all of which are broken down by category. This way, you can easily search through and locate the right questions to use depending on the unique circumstances or situations you find yourself in throughout the course of your week.
Whether it’s during a coaching session, an enrollment conversation, or to defuse a potentially volatile issue, you will find questions that will enable you to create the breakthroughs you’re looking for in any conversation and allow you to get to the real truth behind every issue.
If you find that there are a couple of questions that you use when coaching which I haven’t included, please do let me know so that we can share those as well!
Tags: career coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Executive Coaching, management coach training
To Tweet or Not To Tweet? If That’s The Question, The Answer is – Know Your Objectives
Nov 10, 2009 American Entitlement, Business Coaching, Business Tools, Communication, Marketing, sales tools
Follow me on Twitter here.
“Should I be tweeting, Keith?” This question comes up more and more when speaking with clients. Since there are several factors to consider when answering this, my response to this question are additional exploratory questions that guide a conversation to help individuals and companies determine whether it makes sense for them to become part of the Twitter universe or, twitterverse, which according to the urban dictionary is defined as, “The cyberspace area of twitter. This naturally extends beyond twitter.com to anywhere you can twitter, which includes cell phones.” (Yes, be prepared for more jargon and a new language.) Here are a handful of those questions:
1.“What do you already know about Twitter?”
2.“Is this something you’re setting up as a personal account or for your business?” (What are you using it for? Staying in touch, for fun, to achieve a certain goal or objective, to make money, etc.”)
3.“Tell me why you feel you want to/need to be tweeting?”
4.“What are your goals and expectations?”
5.“How much time do you have to devote to this?”
6.“If this is for your business, who will be doing the tweeting?”
7.“What message are you looking to deliver?” (Around your personal brand, corporate branding, certain theme or platform, marketing messages, notifications, events, special offers, attracting prospects, nothing specific, etc.)
8.“What results are you expecting?”
9.“How many followers do you want?”
10. “Who do you want to follow you?” (“How many people, what audience, why do you want them following you,” and so on.)
11. “How will this complement your current marketing campaign and align with your social media strategy and objectives?”
Once we siphon through the answers to these questions, we can then start mapping out whether or not it makes sense for them to invest their time tweeting and a strategy to go about doing so that would achieve their objectives.
I know it’s easy to get caught up in trying to get as many people as possible following you on Twitter, and social media is all the rage. (Just Google “social media” and you’ll get 203,000,000 results. Probably even more since this blog went live.) For some people, Twitter has become a downright obsession, an ego stroke, a validation, a need to be needed, a way to feel ‘connected.’ (I’ll have to address what ‘connected’ means in another blog.)
Sure, there are those people out there that have earned the bragging rights to say they have tens of thousands of people following them on twitter, but I can tell you this with great certainty, if you’re looking at it from the perspective of what the financial benefit or monetary impact could be and how much personal income has been generated, I wouldn’t run out to swap your W2 statement with most of them. That being said, there’s always the few exceptions.
Like any new strategy you’re considering adopting, if you’re looking at Twitter as part of your overall marketing campaign in order to leverage it as a social media communications tool, there needs to be a healthy balance between the quality of your efforts and the quantity of them. There’s no, “one solution.” What’s needed is a holistic and well balanced approach to utilizing a variety of marketing vehicles that would reinforce your brand, provide further exposure and put you in touch with your target audience which, collectively, would achieve your marketing objectives.
Just think of selling; if you look at selling as a numbers game rather than a science or strategic benchmarking process, you’re in big trouble. After all, you can have thousands of prospects in your pipeline but what are those prospects worth if they’re not a fit for your product or service? The costs are significant: time and money wasted on engaging with the wrong people multiplied exponentially by the time you are not spending targeting, calling on and following up with the right prospects.
Depending upon your goals and the responses to the questions I posed earlier in this blog, Twitter may certainly prove to be one very important spoke on your marketing wheel that’s worth leveraging (it’s been worthwhile for me), that complements the other marketing platforms you utilize.
To reinforce this point, here’s a short movie aligning the values of legendary Zig Ziglar and his son, Tom Ziglar with Twitter. In this movie, you’ll find some great, classic quotes from Zig Ziglar, as well as a handful of guidelines from Tom on how to leverage and maximize Twitter to your advantage.
And yes, I do tweet as part of my overall social media strategy. So, feel free to follow me on Twitter here.
Enjoy the new Ziglar Twitter Movie. Click here to watch.
Tags: cold calling, Marketing, prospecting, selling, tweet, tweeting, twitter
Stop Focusing on Your Goals and Start Honoring Your Process
May 19, 2009 Business Advice, Business Coaching, Career Advice, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Insights in Business, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, Sales Training, coaching for managers, management tips, sales articles
The result is the process. A timely paradox and critical mind shift that every salesperson and manager must make if they want to transcend the mediocre performance they may be experiencing today.
Even before you can engage in the type of sales benchmarking activities that I wrote about the other day, (you can find that blog post here) or even take the time to refine your selling skills, you will come head to head with resistance to selling by the numbers if this change in attitude around how we approach selling is not fully embraced beforehand.
I was reminded how important this was during a seminar I delivered last week in NYC. At the end of the seminar, one manager raised his hand and posed this question to me. He said, “Our sales cycle has changed dramatically. Our salespeople can no longer make a call and take an order. Our product offering has been modified and as a result, the average cost of our product has increased, which has all contributed to a longer sales cycle. However, my salespeople are still reluctant to change. They’re still stuck in that transactional way of selling. They’re getting more frustrated and discouraged because sales aren’t happening fast enough, all because they’re unsure how to manage this longer selling cycle. I’ve told them many times over, that our sales cycle is no longer the way it used to be, and we need to be more patient with the process and more consultative with our customers. I’ve explained to them over and over again, that we need to modify and re-engineer our selling process in response to these new challenges, the changes we’re up against and how our customers make a purchasing decision and buy from us. What else can I do?”
As this sales manager was explaining his challenge, I was thinking to myself how important it is today, more than ever, to become process driven. Without this change in our thinking, salespeople will be unable to honor the process needed to convert more conversations into sales, let alone build out a more robust process and selling strategy that will enable them to do so. As such, the eternal conflict between our tactical strategy and our thinking will continue to rage on.
I have a detailed article on this very subject that you can find here. The original title of this article was WARNING! Goals May Be Hazardous To Your Success. Are They Sabotaging Your Selling Efforts?
As my colleague Dr. Tony Alessandra explains in the following statistics, “It’s amazing how many times success can be assured by attending to the basics of the job.” For example, in a study of 257 Fortune 500 companies, the following was found:
17% do not determine an approximate duration for each sales call.
23% do not use a computer to assist in time and territory management.
28% do not set profit objectives for their accounts.
37% do not use prescribed routing patterns in covering territories.
46% do not look at their use of time in any organized way.
49% do not determine the economical number of calls for each account.
49% do not use prepared sales presentations.
70% do not use call schedules.
75% do not have a system for classifying customers according to sales potential.
76% do not set sales objectives for their accounts.
81% do not use a call report system.
So, the question is: How can you assure your future success by eliminating these oversights?”
The fact is, companies will fail to invest the time in order to eliminate these process oriented oversights and embed these necessary changes into their process if the sales culture is too focused on getting to the result by forging ahead in an attempt to close more sales. Managers can continually push their people to become more mindful of these numbers, however, it’s the process driven questions managers need to be more sensitive to rather than the result driven questions that managers obsess over that continue to perpetuate this toxic way of thinking. Those questions sound like, “Are you hitting your numbers? How many follow-up calls did you make today? How much good volume did you book this month? How many leads did you run this week?” While important, these questions only focus on half of the equation. What is missing is the “How,” that is, the questions that focus on the process the salesperson needs to engage in to achieve the desired end result.
Managers need to stop coaching to the result and start coaching to the process, instead.
Become more mindful of the process that will drive the results you seek. Without the change in your result driven attitude that’s keeping you stuck in the first place, all efforts to better manage your selling strategy by a numeric formula are certain to be short lived.
For salespeople and sales leaders, the fundamental shift in our attitude that needs to occur is this; move away from being so result driven and instead, become more process driven.
We must honor this paradox and break free of the limiting thinking that confines us to the current level of performance we’re experiencing. If we truly want to excel today, realize the result is truly the process.
Tags: coaching, Executive Coaching, management training, sales benchmark, sales benchmarking, Sales Coaching, sales process, sales tips, Sales Training, successful thinking, tips for managers, training for managers
Sales Managers: Get Your Salespeople to Sell More: Listen to This Webinar Now!
May 1, 2009 Business Coaching, Career Advice, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Interviews, Leadership Academy, Sales Management, coaching for managers, management tips, training for managers, webinar
Click here to listen to and view this webinar.
If you missed last week’s blockbuster webinar, The Sales Leadership Imperative, you can now access the recording immediately and listen to this 45 minute discussion I had with Jonathan Farrington. We focused on the most pressing questions that sales managers and sales leaders are faced with today.
Here are the questions we responded to:
The burning question today is, what can managers do to get their people motivated and performing at the level they need to be at consistently while still having time to focus on their other priorities?
Why do so many potentially good sales managers fail?
Managers struggle most when dealing with an underperformer and making the determination about whether to support them, do nothing or let them go. How long should you stick with a salesperson who has potential, but doesn’t produce?
If you had to identify just six key metrics that sales managers should use to benchmark their sales team’s performance, what would they be?
If coaching is the missing discipline amongst managers and sales leaders today, then why do so many coaching initiatives fail within organizations?
What do you think, are great sales leaders born or made? What are the characteristics of the very best?
What are some of the inherent challenges/barriers for management who are looking to make the shift and truly coach their sales team?
Most sales professionals, in practically every industry sector are struggling to meet sales quotas. The reality is, there are still plenty of opportunities to better retain existing clients and acquire new ones but the rules of engagement have changed.
Sales leaders, who have recognized these changes, are re-educating themselves and their sales teams by adopting a totally new approach to selling as well as leading their team and as such, are forming a new type of sales culture. To drive positive, measurable change and keep their competitive edge, managers must learn how to quickly and effectively coach, motivate and retain their top producers while turning around the underperformers.
So, if you’re a sales manager or even if you’re not a sales manager but need to get your team producing and selling more today, you can access this recording here.
Click here to listen to and view this webinar.
Tags: Executive Coaching, management coaching, sales leadership, sales management training, training for managers, webinar, webinars
Where to Look For A New Job? Check Out These Industry Recession Winners
Apr 6, 2009 Business Coaching, Career Advice, career coaching
Top 10 Biggest Recession Winners
IBISWorld Announces Industries To Perform Best in 2009
The recession is crippling businesses across the nation, but several industries will remain unscathed by the current economic strife, according to recent Recession Updates published by industry research firm IBISWorld. As one of the nation’s most respected independent publishers of business intelligence research reports, IBISWorld today announced the top 10 industries expected to have the largest revenue growth in 2009:
INDUSTRY AND REVENUE GROWTH 2009
1. Voice Over Internet Protocol Providers (VoIP) 20.1 percent
2. ecommerce & Online Auctions 12.6 percent
3. Biotechnology 10.3 percent
4. Engine, Turbine & Power Transmission Equipment Manufacturing 10.0 percent
5. Scheduled Bus Service 9.2 percent
6. Court Reporting Services 7.7 percent
7. Community Housing Services 7.5 percent
8. Search Engines 6.5 percent
9. Family Counseling 6.1 percent
10. Video Games 5.8 percent
“Emerging industries remain well represented and continue to benefit from technological innovation and cost advantages,” explained George Van Horn, senior analyst with IBISWorld. “Unfortunately, the impact of the recession is equally pronounced among sectors directly benefitting from the social and financial stress associated with the downturn.”
While only five percent of all U.S. industries are fortunate enough to be positively impacted by the recession, IBISWorld research estimates that nearly 60 percent of all industries are negatively impacted or worse.
About Recession Updates
On January 15, 2009, IBISWorld published a set of Recession Updates on its website that includes quarterly forecasted growth, an in-depth look at the shifting business landscape and its immediate repercussions on each U.S. industry. Also published was a macroeconomic recession briefing, entitled Economic Crisis: When Will It End?, created by the company’s senior analysts and Chief Economist, Dr. Richard Buczynski.
For more information visit ibisworld.com
Tags: career advice, career coaching
Podcast: Develop Your Sales Mojo for a Unique and Winning Edge
Mar 19, 2009 American Entitlement, Business Coaching, Career Advice, Communication, Interviews, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking, Sales Coaching, Sales Training, accountability, career coaching, podcast, webinar
Listen to the podcast here
Got your mojo?
Are you born with it or can you develop it? Here’s a recent podcast I did with Salesopedia that explains what makes up your sales mojo, which defines who you are and how you come across to others.
Listen in as I describe in detail how your confidence, attitude, mindset, relationship with fear, and your ability to be engaged in the moment, all combine to determine how powerful your sales mojo can be. During these times, you need every advantage to be successful in your career, especially in sales. So make sure you tune in to get your sales mojo and develop your unique, winning edge.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Tags: career coaching, Executive Coaching, life coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Training
Be Grateful Rather Than The Consummate Complainer: How to Keep Your Job – Part 4 and 5
Mar 12, 2009 American Entitlement, Business Advice, Business Coaching, Career Advice, Executive Coaching, Hiring and recruiting, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Sales Management, accountability, career coaching, coaching for managers
Here are installments number four and five in my eight part series. These two focus on developing a deeper appreciation for your job if you’re fortunate enough to have one today, and some strategies you may want to stay away from unless you want to be known as the consummate complainer. Where do you think that’s going to get you?
Four: Be Grateful
Talk to people who used to complain about their salary, boss and work conditions. The same people who used to whine about their job are now many of the people today who are grateful to have one. And this sense of deeper appreciation for their employment and their income is echoed from the taxi driver to the cook at the local restaurant, the shop worker, the teacher, the sales associate, business owner as well as the executive.
It’s not just a right to have a job but the privilege that comes with having one today. We are finally beginning to shed the sense of American Entitlement™ that was spawned from the greed that has put us in this position we are in today.
Five: Don’t Be The Squeaky Wheel
Are You known as The Consummate Complainer? Where it used to be the squeaky wheel got the oil, now they squeaky wheel is getting the axe.
1. Be of service rather than being selfish. This is the time not to be so self centered but to also be of greater service to others. Don’t seek out greater recognition; financial or otherwise. Be more collaborative rather than being competitive. So, get involved and help out where you can; now more than ever.
2. Be fully accountable. That means no blaming or passing responsibility and no finger pointing. If you made a mistake, then be the first to own up to it and correct it. Trust me, no boss wants to be caught up in further drama, so stay away from creating any unnecessary problems and conflict with other employees that kill your time and productivity.
3. Don’t be high maintenance. Companies don’t need much of a reason today to let people go. In fact, many companies are taking advantage of this and have accelerated the dismissal process of more underperformers today than they have in decades. So, be careful if you’re the type of employee who always complains; whether it’s about the temperature in the office, the work space or the noise. If you’re known to be the person who has an air of entitlement or who is just difficult to work with, guess who is going to be the first to be let go, and in many cases, that’s regardless whether or not they are top performers.
Tags: career coaching, Executive Coaching, keep your job, layoffs, Sales Coaching
“Reduce Expenses or Increase Sales?” If You Want To Drive Growth, It’s All How You Think About It
Mar 2, 2009 All About Selling, Business Coaching, Executive Coaching, HR issues, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Management, Surveys and Polls, management tips
The San Francisco Chronicle reported the other day that if they can’t reduce expenses significantly, they will have to close or sell the business. Interesting choice of words. Why didn’t the ticker on CNN read, “The San Francisco Chronicle reported the other day that if they can’t increase sales significantly they will have to close or sell the business.”
A subtle yet critical distinction and more evidence that supports how desperately our thinking in every area needs to evolve from scarcity to abundance. Companies need to realign their focus on what really matters to drive growth and sustainability.
“Reduce Expenses or Increase Sales?” I’d go for the latter. After all, what you focus on grows. If every employee is more consumed with the survival based, scarcity and fear driven thinking that sounds like, “What can I do to cut costs?” then they are not simultaneously focusing on the more important question. That is, “What can I do to increase sales and the value delivered to our customers in order to increase retention?” Every person in your company needs to be mindful of what is needed to search out, identify and uncover new selling opportunities. But first, they need to be informed of this new line item in their job description, enrolled in it’s level of importance and then given the tools to execute on this. This is the priority today. Otherwise, the fundamental misallocation of effort which is a byproduct of this misaligned thinking within many organizations today will continue to leave more failed businesses in its wake.
Management must turn your binoculars around. Instead of looking at what you can take away to lighten your load, make each person an integral part of customer retention and acquisition. You’ll soon notice a positive change. Otherwise, the next load that is lightened can be you.
Here’s a quick survey that you can take and then check the poll results immediately. How has your company measured up? Are their efforts aligned with all of their good intentions? Are they allocating budget where it can have the greatest impact? Or, are they more caught up in searching for another place they can cut costs rather than focusing on what they need to do to boost sales? Take this poll and see how you compare against other companies. If you don’t see the poll below, go to the poll page here.
Tags: Executive Coaching, management articles, polls, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, sales tips
Get Your Free Copy of Leadership Mojo and Get Your Sales Team Selling More
Feb 18, 2009 Books by Keith Rosen, Business Coaching, Career Advice, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Management, articles on leadership, coaching for managers, management articles, management tips, training for managers
I have something timely and special I want to share with you. It’s a new guide I’ve developed entitled, Leadership Mojo. And today, I’m giving it away for free because in this economic climate, every great leader and manager needs their mojo to get their sales team selling more than ever before.
Learn what you can do to coach your team to sell more during new and more challenging times. As a complement to my award winning book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, I’ve put together Leadership Mojo; a compilation of thoughts, ideas and strategies on the new discipline of leadership and what it takes to coach your sales team into high performing sales champions.
You may be wondering why I’m giving this away for free. Well, since every competitive edge counts today, I want to do to my part in supporting you during more challenging times.
Tap into over one hundred pages filled with dozens of timely and practical tips to:
And more!
Value: $30.00
Special Offer: Download this for FREE!
Get Your free copy of Leadership Mojo
DIRECTIONS: To receive your free copy, simply send an email to mojo@profitbuilders.com with the words “Leadership Mojo” in the subject line and within minutes, you’ll receive your special download!
IMPORTANT NOTE: To ensure you receive the instructions and link to download your free copy, please make sure you have the email address mojo@profitbuilders.com in your safe sender/recipient list to avoid our email being deleted or flagged as spam. If you don’t receive our email within 24 hours, then please send a second email to the same address with the words “Second Request” in the subject line so that we can assist you.
For more information on this new eguide, click here and get your mojo.
Tags: career coaching, Executive Coaching, managent tips, Sales Coaching, save your job
CEO’s Need to Get Their Head Out Of Their Assets. Check out This Layoff Tracking Scorecard
Feb 15, 2009 American Entitlement, Business Advice, Business Coaching, Business Tools, Executive Coaching, Sales Management, Surveys and Polls, accountability, articles on leadership, coaching for managers
I want to share a conversation I had recently with a CEO of a fairly large company. He was telling me how they’ve done as much fat cutting, expense reduction, budget freezing and overhead trimming as they can.
They’re on their second rounds of layoffs and it’s still not looking good, as another layoff is lurking. With sales down and their pipeline drying up rapidly, I asked him what he’s doing to better market and sell his core product line, as well as what the company is doing to better train and develop their people, especially their salespeople. As I surmised, he responded, “Well, regarding advertising and training, those were two of the first things we cut out of our budget.”
He then continued by saying, “We’re doing everything we can to cut costs wherever possible, just doing the absolute minimum in spending to ride this storm out. We’re running pretty lean right now and really, the only things we’re spending money on today are the bare necessities to keep this ship afloat and to keep the lights on.” The tone in his voice almost suggested that he was proud of the way he’s handled this.
My response to him was simple. And it’s the same message I’d deliver to every CEO and business owner out there who thinks this is what they need to do to navigate through these challenging times and come out on top. I said, “You can continue to cut costs and do what you can to keep the lights on but keep this in mind. In the end, you’re still selling and managing in the dark.”
In today’s marketplace, you can’t incentivize a company through a recession, freeze enough spending or cut enough overhead to survive, let alone thrive. There are enough companies out there that have proven this already who are no longer here today and more that adhere to this philosophy as a survival strategy (Circuit City, Steve & Barry’s, Linens ‘n Things, Macy’s, Citibank, Sharper Image, Washington Mutual, Home Expo, Ebay, AT&T, KB Toys, Panasonic, IBM, Microsoft and the list goes on and on. Here’s one scorecard on CNET that lists the companies that fall victim to this line of thinking and how many people they’ve laid off to date).
There are dozens of case studies and statistics out there demonstrating that those companies who continually market, advertise and invest in the growth of their people during tougher times are the ones who eventually rise to the top and thrive, positioning themselves to win more business when things turn around. Those companies who are thriving today are the ones who have the most important question in focus and in their line of sight. What is top of mind for them is, “How can I make my salespeople even more valuable and effective?” These are the companies who are investing in advertising and more so in sales coaching, sales training and in further developing their core asset, the one that can make the greatest impact in their bottom line; their people.
CEO’s and leaders of these top corporations are more transparent than ever, and most of us don’t like what we see. In fact, the words “clueless,” “disconnected” and the phrase, “out of touch with reality” come to mind. Maybe it’s because they’ve been sitting in their ivory tower far too long or maybe it’s because they’re spending far too much time traveling in their private jets.
Sure, we can’t control many of the things going on in the economy. However, what these CEO’s and companies can do is realign their thinking around the things they can control and the importance of continually developing their people, which begins with how these executives develop themselves into the leaders they can be in this new age.
It’s evident that many organizations have lost sight of the primary objective of management and leadership, which is simply this: To make your people more valuable.
So until my next rant, learn something new, hone your skills and have a great selling week!
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