The Executive Sales Coach: Keith Rosen’s Sales Blog and Business Blog On Selling, Leadership, Managing Your Team, Business and Life » coaching articles

When do you know it’s time to quit your job and move on to a more promising opportunity? Here are ten signs that would suggest it’s time for you to re-examine your career path and move on.

The Top Ten Signs That Tell You It’s Time To Quit Your Job

I remember years ago when researching people’s sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in the workforce, the statistic at that time was that about 80% of the people in the work force were not happy at their job. Today, that percentage is even higher. And in my line of work, it doesn’t come as a shock to me, especially with the way I see people making career decisions and the tyrannical managers who they are unfortunate enough to have manage them. The bigger question is; “When do you know it’s time to quit your job?” Here are ten signs that would suggest that you need to move on and re-examine your career path.

1. You’ve noticed signs of selective amnesia. Your boss falls short of fulfilling promises and commitments made to you.

2. You leave the office three inches shorter than you arrived - each day. The constant belittling and negative, fear based motivational strategies can really affect you more than you think.

3. You are finding it more and more challenging to fit under that microscope in order to get your daily dose of intense scrutinizing.

4. You start bringing an oxygen tank to work just in case your boss decides to suck the life out of you that afternoon.

5. You notice more and more that it’s affecting your home life and personal relationships. Don’t yell at the kids and it’s not the dog’s fault.

6. You don’t like what you do during the hours you work. Thoughts of getting poked in the eye with a hot coal are sounding more and more enjoyable and stimulating than the daily tasks, responsibilities and activities you currently engage in. Your job is simply not exciting, rewarding (financially as well as mentally/personally), challenging or making the difference you want to make for yourself and for others.

7. It’s a culture of survival - immunity challenges daily.

8. Your manager’s definition of motivation and support; “I’ll save your !$%&# this time, but don’t screw this up again. Now, go get to work and get some sales. You’ve got to be tired of being the lowest producer on the team. And you’re welcome for my help.”

9. You look forward to sick days.

10. And finally, you’re miserable, overworked, underpaid, stressed out and, it’s painfully clear to you that you hate your BOSS!

How do we uncover internal drive? By using one of the most valuable tools as a coach - asking more and better questions. To uncover each person’s internal drive, schedule one to one meetings with each member of your team and invest the time asking questions to uncover what is important to them. Listen to their responses and ask more questions as you uncover what they most want.

Here are some suggested questions you can use during your one to one meetings in order to tap into a person’s internal drive, while uncovering exactly how you can best coach and manage them.

1. What do you want to be doing that you aren’t currently doing?
2. What areas do you want to strengthen, improve or develop?
3. What is most important to you in your life/career? (What does a successful career/life look like?)
4. What are the three most important things you would like to accomplish right now?
5. What is your action plan to achieve those goals?
6. What do you need that’s preventing you from reaching those goals?
7. How can I best support you to achieve these goals? (Uncover how each employee wants to be managed and supported.)
8. How can I best manage you and hold you accountable for the results you are looking to achieve?
9. How can I hold you accountable in a way that will sound supportive and won’t come across as negative or micro-managing?
10. How do you want me to approach you if you don’t follow through with the commitments you make? How do you want me to handle it? What would be a good way to bring this up with you so that you will be open to hearing it?

Questions will assist your employees in uncovering what internally motivates them based on their beliefs and values, so they can access their own energy to achieve it. You are also uncovering the style of management they respond to best. Moreover, you are setting up the expectations on both sides as to what to expect from one another. It certainly beats using your energy to push or stimulate interest or action based on your assumptions or beliefs based on what may work for you.

If you rely on pushing to get someone into action, they won’t move unless you’re there to push. It’s more effective to help them articulate what they want so they can begin to self-motivate.

The real benefit of getting this is that empowering people by tapping into their internal drive doesn’t drain your energy. Pushing for results is exhausting.

Get more coaching tips from Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions.

72 Hour Special Book Event April 15 - 17. Ends Tonight.

Barrier Eight: Full Accountability
If you want to become powerful, hire a powerful coach. It’s a simple, yet highly effective strategy. If you want your salespeople to be powerful, you need to be a good role model for them. As you evolve, so does your team. Consider this truth: Your team is a reflection of you. If you’re not prepared to be 100 percent accountable for the success and failure of your team, if you skirt accountability in any way, if you lack professionalism or proficiencies in certain areas, your team will reflect these weaknesses. If you choose to evolve, so will your salespeople. If you want a world-class sales team, you have to become a world-class executive sales coach.

Barrier Nine: Competitive Managers
The most effective leaders develop other leaders. They encourage their people to perform as well as they do—even better. That is the sign of a true master and the real testament of a great manager. But what if the manager perceives his coworkers and subordinates as a threat? What if the manager is driven strictly by ego, the need to prove himself and his worth? What if this manager thinks he has survived only by keeping a competitive distance from his peers and salespeople? I’ve known managers who don’t share their tools and best practices with their salespeople for fear their salespeople will outdo them. These are likely to be inferior managers who will seek to selfishly leverage the coaching relationship in a way to better themselves and their position rather than for the betterment of their sales team.

Get the book 37% off and hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials here.

72 Hour Special Book Event April 15 - 17

Great managers realize that one of their key roles is to maximize the productivity of their team and ensure they are operating at peak performance. The consequences of not having your sales team live up to their potential are severe: a decrease in sales, lower morale, higher turnover, and client attrition. Additionally, there’s the stress every manager feels from the added workload each time there’s a vacancy in a position, sales that need to be made, and territories that have to be covered.

Now, compound this challenge with the additional responsibility managers often have. Aside from being responsible for the production and development of their sales team, some managers are often responsible for hitting their own sales numbers and production goals.

With long work hours, deadlines, and personal responsibilities, something gets sacrificed. As such, managers find that developing, coaching, and retaining their staff takes a back seat to the problems and challenges that arise daily. Even with their best intentions, managers don’t often have the time and resources needed to effectively coach their staff or a strategy to identify and develop the essential skills and core characteristics needed to become a masterful coach. As a result, morale and productivity suffer.

Through the eyes of a salesperson, this lack of attention and support translates to a feeling of isolation. Quite often salespeople believe that management simply doesn’t care, won’t take the time to work with them, or simply isn’t available. This environment becomes the perfect breeding ground for high attrition and deteriorating performance.

What is management’s fundamental problem that proliferates dismal results, inefficiency, and failure? While most managers may have the theory down, they struggle to convert these leadership principles into actionable, measurable steps and a process that can be duplicated consistently. Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions cracks the code and solves the most pressing issues that plague most managers today. This book makes it possible for any manager, business owner, or executive to develop the missing discipline of leadership: coaching.

Most leadership programs train in ideology rather than in developing a core competency or skill. Nothing more gets accomplished other than identifying another great concept in leadership, an overanalyzed theory, or an attribute the greatest leaders possess. Although they are sound principles, they’re devoid of a specific, measurable process and a practical application that generates the results you seek. With a team of salespeople to manage, objectives to reach, and expectations to meet, you need measurable results fast!

Increased global competition, a rapidly changing marketplace, and less face time with customers and employees are forcing companies to reevaluate their selling and leadership strategies. With more business conducted across various communication platforms and more sales teams operating in a virtual environment, these managers question how proficient they can be at managing their team at a distance—especially since they have never been shown how to do so effectively. Managers do not always have the luxury of calling a face-to-face meeting and instead find themselves supporting, coaching, and managing their people over the telephone. Developing and strengthening your telephone coaching skills becomes essential to leveraging your competitive edge or you’re bound to get left behind.

Top leaders know that in order for their people to live their fullest potential every day, they need someone in their corner supporting them throughout the process. As such, a growing need for a proven, long-term solution that can be rapidly deployed to continually develop and retain top talent while maximizing new business opportunities has sparked the evolution of this new kind of manager: the executive sales coach.

________________

** 72 Hour Special Book Event Ends Thursday April 17

Purchase my new book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions on these specific days only, April 15, 16 and 17 and enjoy access to hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials from Dr. Tony Alessandra, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Jim Cathcart, Jill Konrath, Dave Lakhani, Bob Kantin, Dr. Rick Kirschner, CanDoGo.com, AllBusiness.com, SalesDog.com and more. Look at the resources you get here.

Remember, this time sensitive event ends April 17 at midnight.

Get the book 37% off and hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials here.

72 Hour Special Book Event April 15 - 17. Ends Tonight.

Barrier Six: Confidentiality and No Judgment? Sure, Boss!

Lets get right to what you’re thinking. Your role as supervisor or boss presents some inherent problems with coaching that need to be addressed head on.

Given the parameters, guidelines, and principles necessary to be a masterful coach, trust is critical to make the connection. After all, if your employees can’t trust you as their manager, forget even trying to coach them. Coaching requires an elevated level of trust that transcends the superficial trust between employees and management.

And what if some of your salespeople already have a problem with you as their boss and now you’re going to try and coach them? How does that get handled? Do you think any of your employees are going to just come out and say that? Think again.

As a result, this relationship could quickly turn into more of a mentoring rather than a coaching relationship. This is a major reason why companies bring in an expert coach from the outside who doesn’t have any direct ties to the company as a manager would.

Barrier Seven: Anyone Can Manage, Not Everyone Can Coach

“I’m really not cut out to be a coach.” The hard fact is there are managers who want to be coaches, managers who need to be coaches, and managers who shouldn’t be coaches, and probably shouldn’t be managers, either.

Companies that force all managers into a coaching role make a costly assumption that all of their managers would actually make great coaches, just like every college athlete should automatically make the pros. The rules work the same. Desire, attitude, ability, and skill will always be the formula for becoming a successful coach, or athlete. Then there is the mistake of pushing managers to do something they don’t want to do. Managers can easily sabotage their own coaching efforts, and in the end, corporate may learn the wrong lesson: “I guess our internal coaching program didn’t work.”

Get the book 37% off and hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials here.

72 Hour Special Book Event April 15 - 17. Ends Thursday.

Barrier Four: You’re Coaching People, not Changing People

There’s a big difference between coaching people and changing people. However, for executives or front line managers who are commissioned to hit some aggressive sales numbers, coaching is the last thing they want to talk about. The real distinction is that coaching is a process of discovery. A coach cannot push for results or attempt to change people overnight. The traditional scenario to facilitate change is typically a stressed-out manager who lays the same stress on his salespeople that his boss dumped on him. “Work harder; get focused; our jobs can be on the line; just bring in some more business.” This hollow approach seldom drives change.

Barrier Five: Connection—It Has to Be the Real Thing

In coaching it’s critical for unrestricted, honest communication in the coaching relationship. It’s extremely challenging to connect with your salespeople at a deeper level, the type of connection necessary between the coach and the person being coached. Many employees are afraid that if they disclose too much, it will be held against them in the future. So they limit their vulnerability level to what is absolutely needed to perform their job function. This restricts safe and open communication, limiting the chance to connect with your people in a way that allows coaches to get to the real issues and barriers;—barriers that are preventing improved performance.

Get the book 37% off and hundreds of dollars worth of additional materials here.

Download an Excerpt of, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

#1 - Chapter 10. The Art of Enrollment

In celebration of the release of my latest book, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions, I have some special bonuses I want to share with you today.

First, I believe loyalty in readership is worth rewarding. That’s why I have a robust book excerpt available for you to download immediately, entitled, The Art of Enrollment.

As a matter of fact, I’m going to be sharing with you five special and exclusive book excerpts over the course of the next week for you to download and enjoy immediately! It’s a PDF, so load it into your PDA and take it with you.

Here’s the PDF you can download now of Chapter Ten. The Art of Enrollment - Download the chapter excerpt here.

Synopsis:

Enrollment: An authentic, powerful way of communicating that grabs people’s attention, stimulates interest, and empowers others to embrace, support, and believe in your position, idea, or philosophy. This motivates people to want to become part of your cause (a cause that may be bigger than you and them), take ownership of it, and then act in their best interest to create the possibility that you have introduced to them and/or have taken a stand for. (For example: Creating a certain corporate culture, selling or making a purchasing decision, trying something new that hasn’t been done before, or advocating for a positive, yet difficult change, etc.)

Enrolment is the new language of leadership. It is a way to unleash each person’s purest form of open, honest, and authentic communication, using thought-provoking, curiosity-based questions that generate worthwhile results in any setting. When you uncover what you are passionate about, what you believe in, and then take a strong, unwavering stand for whatever it may be, while respecting the mutual differences of one another, only then can you start to communicate and achieve more through the enrollment process: the highest form of communicating and self-expression.

And if you like what you read, I respectfully invite you to Write a Review! I appreciate you sharing your book endorsements. Help more managers and business owners become highly effective coaches and more powerful leaders. Write a review on Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. I value your input and deeply appreciate your support.

Special Edition – Hardcover. Get Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions today at a special discount 37% off at Booksamillion and coach your salespeople into champions. Check out Amazon, Barnes and Noble, 800-CEO-READ and other trusted retailers here.

Six Days to Launch! Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

The other day, in my blog about how to coach someone, I discussed The Gap, which is where the real magic and true impact of coaching takes place. The Gap is the space that exists between where someone is today and where they want or need to be.

What I have found is that the gap represents several key indicators or areas of opportunity that you can coach someone around. The opportunities for coaching people are vast. Here is a detailed list of the top ten things you can coach someone on.

1. The Who: Values, passions, standards, boundaries, integrity and so on

2. Their Attitude: Belief, mindset, philosophy, outlook or assumptions.

3. The Lesson: What have they learned? Why are the same lessons repeating themselves? Are they getting it?

4. Ideal Characteristics: The ideal qualities you have defined that encompass, for example, a sales leader or manager. (Extroverted, actionable, honest, strong communicator, accountable, curious, organized, strong integrity and presence, comfortable disposition, smart, responsive, and so on.)

5. The Skill: Is there a missing discipline or one that needs further development?

6. The Activity: Are they engaging in the activities that support their goals?

7. The Strategy: How do they plan on achieving the intended result? What resources are needed?

8. Their Commitment: Are you noticing their energy level, enthusiasm or motivation waning?

9. Their Communication: The language, dialogue or communication regarding style, delivery, presence and disposition.

10. Their Relationships: The relationships they have with intangible concepts and feelings as well as with their stories and S.C.A.M.M.s., (I cover this in great detail in Chapter Four of, Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions.) You can even coach someone around their relationship with fear, confidence, time and self management, self worth, rejection, call reluctance, their drama, their diversionary tactics and so on.

Seven Days to Launch! Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

The most common question I hear from executive coaches, internal coaches as well as managers just starting to shift from manager to coach is, “How do I recognize where it is they need and could benefit from the coaching most?”

Actually, covering the specifics of what you can coach someone on, from a tactical perspective is actually the easier part. It’s uncovering the who or the often very elusive and limiting thinking or outlook they have which is ultimately showing up in their actions and behavior that is the tricky part. Demonstrating this ability is a true testament of a gifted, exceptional coach and I’m going to share with you how to develop it on your own.

Regardless of the topic, skill, problem or mindset you’ve identified as a possible focal point in your coaching, there is one model that’s always applicable in every coaching scenario. It also happens to be the very thing each coaching opportunity has in common. That is, The Gap. The Gap is the space that exists between where the client or coachee is today and where they want or need to be.

The Gap is the space that exists between:

• What people know (current knowledge, philosophies, assumptions, stories, outlooks, beliefs, and so on) and what they don’t know or don’t realize is possible.
• What people need to do; the activity that supports their goals yet are still not doing.
• The resources and skills they have and the ones they don’t.

Imagine a bridge for a moment. Picture yourself standing on the side of the bridge. You focus your vision on the other side of the bridge which is the location you want to get to. Think about what you need to do to get to the other side. Consider the resources needed to arrive at your desired destination in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of risk or error. Reaching the other side is your goal or your destination. Notice the Gap. What might you need to fill in this gap; this void that exists between you and your goal?

The Gap is the void between where you are now in comparison to where you want to be. This is the space where the coaching happens. What’s needed to cross the bridge? You need a car if you want to get to your destination as fast as possible. You need fuel as the resource needed to get your car moving. You need a clear path that would help you arrive at your destination with the least amount of delays, obstructions, diversions and wrong turns. Identifying these resources (which we did through the use of inquiry, just like when you’re coaching) provides definition, structure and an executable strategy which collectively, evolved into an actionable and comprehensive solution to this situation.

Instead of assuming what your staff already knows or what they need to do, start determining what they need to know or learn how to do better in order to fill in this gap and ensure clear communication and spot-on coaching. You’ll increase your awareness, become more sensitized to what the other person needs to learn and uncover greater opportunities for coaching.

Most important, stay away from doing what many managers still habitually do. That is, react and share the answer or what you perceive to be the solution to a problem before understanding the person’s specific needs or asking the right questions that create the space for the person to develop a solution on their own. Recognizing the gap in every coaching conversation or situation with your clients, staff or even with your prospects and customers will help you become more sensitive to the importance of investing the time to go deeper into their specific challenge, request or situation. Embedding this within the foundation of your thinking and approach to managing and coaching will allow for a strong coaching culture to emerge.

12 Days to Launch! Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions

Confidence. It’s one of those key ingredients that needs to be present in our formula for success. If you look at anyone at the top - in business, in politics, in entertainment, in sports, one common denominator each one of these leaders possess is an unshakeable degree of confidence in themselves, in their abilities and in their beliefs.

Confidence makes up much of the fuel that drives us, the over-achievers, the dreamers, the visionaries, the driven, the passionate and those who simply want to be the best at what they do; the entrepreneur who’s looking to build a successful business, the manager who wants to empower his team and make them winners, the salesperson who’s looking to post large monthly sales numbers, the sole practitioner seeking to build a sustainable practice or the up and comer starting a new career and is looking to make their mark in order to ascend through the ranks within their company.

The challenge for maintaining an infallible, unshakable high degree of confidence is that for most people, it seems to be conditional. Rather than being absolute, most people’s level of confidence changes based on their situation and experiences. Sometimes it’s at an all time high. Yet, other times their level of confidence is shaken or challenged based on an encounter they had, a mistake that was made, a failure, or an inability to produce a desired result.

The myth surrounding confidence is this: The overall sense of confidence you have about yourself is based upon your experiences and what you produce. As such it will continue to eternally vacillate, as most people allow their internal condition to be dictated by their external situation.

In my article, The Secret to Building the Confidence of a Champion, you’ll discover the hidden power that we, as human beings have at our disposal but rarely do we tap into its fullest potential. I’m referring to the greatest power we all possess. That is, our power of choice and out ability to choose to be confident as an absolute rather than as a condition of circumstance.

You can read the full article here.