Rethinking How To Determine a Person’s Coachability. Is it the Person Who’s Not Coachable or Is It More About the Ability of the Coach?
Sep 1, 2009 Executive Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, accountability, articles on leadership, coaching for managers, coaching tips, podcast, training for managers
In my last blog and podcast, I need to rethink a critical caveat to the last bullet in the blog which was:
How a manager can assess whether or not a person is, in fact coachable and when their coaching simply may not work.
Ahh, the ongoing joy of lifelong learning! 
That is, the more I train and coach, the more I learn. And one powerful insight has surfaced, especially as I continue to deliver more international training. This happened about three weeks ago, when delivering a management coach training program in Dublin.
But first, a recap. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: coach the coach, coaching for managers, Executive Coaching, leadership coaching, management coach training, Sales Coaching, training for managers
PODCAST: Why Coaching Initiatives Fail Within Organizations
Jul 23, 2009 How to Manage Your Team, Sales Management, coaching for managers, coaching tips, podcast, training for managers
Listen to the podcast here.
There are several common themes I’ve noticed as to why coaching initiatives fail within organizations today. When companies attempt to upgrade their culture, generate more positive results and improve the attitude, performance and productivity of their people by launching a coaching initiative without truly recognizing the changes that must occur beforehand to ensure there’s a strong foundation that is ready to support it, their coaching efforts will be marginally successful, ineffective or short lived.
In this podcast, I highlight the top reasons why coaching initiatives fail within organizations and what needs to be present in order to ensure any coaching initiative generates the return on investment that companies are looking for.
Listen to the podcast here.
Tags: coach the coach, coach training, coaching managers, Executive Coaching, how to coach, how to coach salespeople, management tips, management training, podcast, sales management training, sales podcasts, sales tips
PODCAST: Coaching Mistakes Managers Make. What You Can Do To Improve Sales Performance and Drive Higher Sales Numbers Today
Jul 22, 2009 Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, coaching for managers, coaching tips, management tips, podcast, training for managers
Listen to the podcast here.
In this podcast interview I did with eyesonsales.com, I share some very tactical insights regarding some of the inherent challenges that managers need to overcome when coaching their salespeople and what they can do to better coach their team to sell more today.
I also address how to best handle underperforming salespeople and the power of effective observation techniques when observing your people in the field or on the phone, whether they are delivering presentations or making cold calls. You’ll also learn what the masterful coaches do when it comes to coaching the gap through the use of powerful, well crafted questions, which is where the magic of coaching happens.
Discover what you can do to make the shift from just being a regular sales manager with an average performing team to becoming an effective sales coach and leader who becomes the driving force behind developing a high performance sales team.
Listen to the podcast here.
Tags: coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Executive Coaching, how to coach salespeople, podcast, Sales Coaching, sales management coaching
PODCAST: Want Full Accountability Within Your Team? Coaching People to Become More Accountable
Jun 8, 2009 American Entitlement, Executive Coaching, Sales Management, accountability, coaching for managers, coaching tips, management articles, management tips, podcast
Listen to the full podcast here.
Sure, we can’t control many of the things going on in the economy. However, what managers and business owners can control is how they go about realigning their thinking and efforts around how they are continually developing their people, which begins with how these managers 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.
There are several issues at work that inhibit the manager’s ability to get their people to be more accountable around their goals.
Is there a consequence to their actions or non-actions? And that consequence can come from you (i.e. the affect on their salary, position, job, bonus, satisfaction, peace of mind and so on) or from a personal cost they would feel themselves by not changing.
Building off number one above, it’s all about how you position this conversation around accountability. This is always a tough job for managers, because most of the time, they get on their soapbox and preach the consequences to their team. This often sounds like: “You can be more successful if….” or “You can make more money if only you would …...” or “If you don’t turn this around you’re going to (be out of a job, get fired, fail, and so on).”
This falls on deaf ears because for someone to truly internalize this message and make it real for them, they must hear the consequence in their own words, through their own voice and arrive at the consequence on their own. They need to recognize it, say it and declare ownership around it.
And the only way to do this is by asking them better consequential questions. In this podcast, I’ll share with you the steps you can take to coach people to become more accountable around their job and their goals, and the questions you can use to achieve this critical objective. (Oh, and did I mention that by following this process, you no longer have to be positioned as the bad guy!)
Listen to the full podcast here.
Tags: conflict resolution, confrontation, deal with conflict, Executive Coaching, full accountability, management tips, Sales Coaching, sales management coaching
Demonstrate What You Want For Your Staff With This Powerful Communication Strategy
Dec 11, 2008 Communication, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Management, accountability, articles on leadership, coaching tips, management articles
Sure there are those things we want for ourselves and then there are the things we want for other people as well; our friends, our children, family and of course our co-workers and salespeople. We want them to be happy, fulfilled, successful and satisfied in their career.
The “Wanting for” statement is an independent, self containing strategy you can use at any time during normal conversation. A wanting for statement can be used in a variety of situations.
Once you start using the wanting for statement more consistently in your communication, you will notice how much more open people will be to hearing and digesting your message, especially the ones they may have a natural inclination to resist. They are the perfect precursor to softening a difficult message by first opening up the person’s listening; which starts with the authentic commitment you have to supporting them by articulating specifically what it is you want most for them. Wanting for statements are a powerful tool to reinforce the stand you have chosen to take for your salespeople, while doing so in a quick and efficient way and simultaneously challenging them to bring out their best, as well as yours.
I’ve listed several different examples below where it would be appropriate to use this coaching tool.
You need to deliver a strong message to an underperforming salesperson about their need for a turnaround. “Kelly, what I want for you is to be able to turn your performance around to where it used to be so that you can start enjoying your job the same way you did when you first started here, along with the financial rewards that follow.”
You need to prepare someone or your entire sales team for some imminent changes; whether they are changes in your sales procedures, product or service, HR or administrative. “What I want for each person on my sales team is to be able to walk into the office each day feeling confident they have all the tools and resources needed to reach your goals here, both personally and professionally. And sometimes, ensuring these resources are readily available for you requires making some changes in our approach and how we do things.”
You want to reinforce your stand and commitment to the success of each person on your sales team. “At this point, we have all been working together for some time now. And I truly hope that each of you are fully aware of my commitment to your continued success here. What I want for all of you is to be able to come to work feeling fulfilled in your career, motivated by the value you deliver to your customers and supported by your management team. That’s why I wanted to take a few minutes going around the room to identify some other areas we can improve upon, things we can be doing better, or what I can be doing for you which would further support this ultimate objective.”
You want to provide some well needed motivation by acknowledging and reigniting the personal power someone may have forgotten they have. “Nicole, I know you’ve been in sales for a while now. And I know this isn’t the first time you’ve felt a bit deflated when you saw your month end numbers, especially with your work ethic and all of the effort you’ve put forth. And sometimes with all of the things we have control over, there still exists those other market conditions which we can’t control. That’s why what I continually want for you is to be able to manage and honor the process you’ve put in place, which has always been proven to work well for you, but do so without the additional stress and pressure you seem to be piling on yourself lately. In other words, it looks like there’s an opportunity for you to shift back to being more process driven without pushing so hard for the result which, as you’ve seen, will come naturally by honoring your process.”
You would like to open up the possibility to have a conversation about coaching someone around an area they have been struggling with. “This may come as a friendly reminder to you but felt it important enough to mention. Due to the type of product we sell and the market we go after, you’re going to find that it may take a little longer for prospects to open up to you and want to foster a relationship, especially when these prospects have been working with the same vender for as long as they have been. What I want for you is to feel confident that you have the artillery and the resources you need the next time you are confronted with a hostile prospect, so that you can turn around a potentially explosive situation into a new selling opportunity; similar to the situation you found yourself in last week.”
Can A Blind Manager See? Uncover Your Blind Spots
Nov 17, 2008 Career Advice, How to Manage Your Team, Life Coaching and Career Coaching, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Sales Management, accountability, coaching for managers, coaching tips, management tips
After posting my blog the other day entitled, You Got Scammed! The Greatest Scams Salespeople Engage In That Managers Buy Into, I was hit with a few questions from readers, (which I certainly love to receive, so please keep sending them!) This particular blog must have struck a chord with many people, especially managers and executives. The question was, “Why do we continually fall into the trap of believing our own stories, fables, and illusions when we know that, from a logical perspective, they make no sense and wind up hurting us in the end?”
Here’s why. Because these S.C.A.M.M.s are blind spots. We’re just so used to them, we become blind to them. And this applies to both our S.C.A.M.M.s and the ones our salespeople run. Although we can more easily see the challenges and S.C.A.M.M.s in others, where they are stuck, what their core issues may be, and what might be an obvious solution for them, we are always the last person to be able to see them in ourselves. This is true regardless of your age, profession, wisdom, or experience.
What further drives the investment we make in our stories and the fables we create about ourselves is that we fall in love with our stories and the things we think are true. We love our stories and S.C.A.M.M.s! The more we tell them, the more engrained they become in our thinking and our being and the more we believe them. And boy, do they do a wonderful job justifying our position, experiences and performance. The problem is that we give our stories way too much power over us. The more we believe our fables, the more factual they seem to us, further adding to the challenge of distinguishing between what is reality and what is not.
Like the rest of the human race, managers need an objective person to peer inside their lives and help them identify and rewrite the stories they tell themselves, the ones that hold them back from greatness, prevent them from living life the way they want, and subsequently inhibit them from becoming a fully self-expressed, masterful executive sales coach. After all, I know many a manager who actually think they’re doing a pretty decent job coaching their team, when the harsh reality of it is, they’re not. And the evidence is in their monthly numbers and level of attrition they’re experiencing both within their sales team and with their customers.
Whether you’re an athlete, a coach, a manager, or a salesperson, you still require a coach on the sidelines to observe you and uncover the confining behavior or thinking that you cannot. There is a tremendous value to having someone on the outside looking in and pointing out the things that you are unable to recognize on your own; especially when you’re in the thick of the game.
So, You Think You’re Coaching Your People? Take This Executive Sales Coaching Assessment and See How You Measure Up Against a Master Coach
Oct 23, 2008 All About Selling, Business Coaching, Business Tools, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Leadership Academy, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, Technology and Software, coaching for managers, coaching tips, management tips
Take the Coaching Assessment Here.
The rules of business have changed overnight and the areas most impacted – sales and leadership. How do you lead your team differently today compared to the way you did just six months ago? Have you benchmarked the skills needed to lead your team through tough economic times?
After all, I hear many managers tell me how they’re coaching their people, yet in the same breath, report how they’re still experiencing the same problems they’ve always had, and worse today. Then, how effective can your coaching actually be?
If you’re still experiencing the same problems you did before you started coaching your team, then it’s time to recognize the sign; something’s not right. Is it you, the person you’re coaching or your coaching approach?
So, if you think you’re coaching your people, take this Self Awareness Assessment to gauge your coaching acumen.
How effectively are you coaching your team? Just look at the results. Here’s your chance to get real about the areas you need to firm up and develop in order to get the results my clients experience – a 30% gain in sales. This assessment will help you benchmark the areas you need to develop as well as the strategies you need to implement in order to lead your team during good and bad times and most important, get them to thrive today.
Click on this link to go to the assessment where you will find a list of 27 coaching skills, competencies and strategies that the world’s most successful sales coaches, sales leaders and sales organizations have in common.
Take The Coaching Assessment to measure your true coaching acumen. Click here.
Win $2000.00 Worth of The Master, Zig Ziglar’s Greatest Works
Sep 1, 2008 All About Selling, Career Advice, Technology and Software, coaching tips, sales tools
If you’ve been reading my blog then you’ve read about the company, CanDoGo. CanDoGo has more than 10,000 sales, management and motivational insights (in video, audio and text) from over 140 of the world’s best and brightest authors, speakers and coaches. You’ll find names like Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Denis Waitley, Tony Parinello, Jill Konrath, (yours truly) and many other experts.
I figured if you’re going to try out this service anyway, at least here’s a good bonus to take advantage of.
All of this is available to you for only $9.95 per month— and on September 15th one lucky new subscriber will receive over $2,000 worth of Zig Ziglar DVDs, CDs and books. To enter for your chance to win, subscribe now.
I wish you the best of luck in your sales career and I know you will win more opportunities with CanDoGo at your fingertips.
What Exactly Do You Coach? The Top Ten Things You Can Coach Someone On
Aug 5, 2008 Books by Keith Rosen, Business Coaching, Executive Coaching, Life Coaching and Career Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Management, accountability, coaching articles, coaching for managers, coaching tips, training for managers
What Exactly Do You Coach?
The Top Ten Things You Can Coach Someone On
I have found that the gap (the space you coach that is the area of opportunity which exists between where the person is now and where they want to be or the result they want to achieve) represents several key indicators or areas of opportunity that you can coach someone on. The opportunities for coaching someone are vast. Here is a detailed list of what you can coach.
1. The Who: Values, passions, standards, boundaries, integrity, and so on.
2. The 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. The Ideal Characteristics: The ideal qualities you have defined that encompass a sales leader or manager. (Extroverted, actionable, honest, strong communicator, process driven, accountable, curious, organized, strong integrity and presence, knowledgeable, comfortable disposition, smart, responsive, etc.)
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 to achieve the intended result? What resources are needed?
8. The Commitment: Observe their energy level, consistency, enthusiasm, and motivation.
9. The Communication: The language, dialogue, or communication regarding style, delivery, presence, and disposition.
10. The Relationships: The relationships they have with intangible concepts and feelings as well as with their stories/illusions/assumptions.
The Top Characteristics of an Effective Facilitator
Aug 4, 2008 Business Coaching, Communication, How to Manage Your Team, Sales Management, accountability, articles on leadership, coaching for managers, coaching tips, management tips, training for managers
The Top Characteristics of an Effective Facilitator
A client asked met the other day what makes a great facilitator (defined as, “someone who makes things easier”). Here’s what we came up with. I thought a list of the top characteristics of an effective facilitator would be of interest for those managers, speakers and trainers.
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