We all recognize the importance of coaching as a way of driving team performance, and that results will be inconsistent unless we take a structured and systematic approach. But as a busy sales manager, how can you make coaching a foundation of your management practice? If this challenge sounds familiar, read on.
Create and nurture a learning culture
Top-performing teams are learning teams. They share information and feedback to understand how and why successes and failures happen. They work consistently to get better at every aspect of their work. How do they achieve that? Through trust and openness.
When you’re part of a competitive team—especially if you’re new to the role or are in a slump—it’s hard to share your mistakes, acknowledge that you’re struggling, or show your vulnerabilities. But these are all essential behaviors that help your team members learn from each other’s experiences. When team members share these realities, it opens a door to getting support and advice from peers, and guidance and coaching from you.
If you create an environment in which team members freely ask advice and share their mistakes without being reprimanded, it will only encourage more requests for guidance. Your team members will seek more feedback and openly accept new ideas that improve their skills.
“You cannot overstate the value of trust... And the trust that I'm talking about is establishing very early a safe environment to work at a professional level... in the interest of helping them be a better professional.” - Graham Ruffels, Head of Sales, Taplytics
Here are some ways to encourage this environment in your workplace:
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Share what you’ve struggled with in the past and ask your team for ideas. At a team meeting, play a recorded call you led that didn’t go well. Ask for comments, tips, and advice.
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Promote self-learning. Ask your team members to critique their own calls and offer up good and bad examples they’d like to share with you or the rest of the team. Praise people when they’ve done a great job. It makes it easier for them to take criticism when it’s warranted.
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Have fun. Whether that’s in a team meeting or a one-on-one session, use humor and levity to break the ice. It reduces anxiety when constructive criticism is on the table.
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Take a back seat and let your team drive. Have them listen to calls and analyze deals together, provide feedback to each other, and share what worked for them and where they struggled in the past. If you still feel your team is not opening up, consider having them run their feedback session without you in the room, at least for a little while.
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Keep your more critical comments private so only you and individual reps see them. Leave more general comments and praise as public comments.
Incorporate coaching into your workflows
You’re busy and your reps have a lot on their plates. Adding new coaching-focused meetings and processes might not be a great idea, especially if you’re in the early stages of ramping up your coaching efforts.
Many successful teams use a different approach. They incorporate guided coaching as part of their scheduled team meetings, and one-on-one sessions.
The key here is dedicating at least 15-20 minutes of each meeting to review specific, real-life deals and calls using Gong recordings. You don’t have to call this coaching. Just make it a part of meetings you already hold on a regular basis.
For example:
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If you recently heard a call that includes important coaching moments (good or bad), open it in Gong and review it together during a meeting.
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Ask a rep or the team to share a call or deal they’ve struggled with and one that went well. Have them review the call on their own before your discussion and tag you in their comments about what went well and what didn’t.
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Search for calls with certain trackers or topics (e.g., competitors, new product names, objections) and review a few examples to see how they were handled.
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Do a post-mortem on a recently lost deal, reviewing the customer communications at key stages using the Account page in Gong.
Use a phased approach
If you don’t already have strong coaching habits ingrained into your team’s processes, we recommend phasing in their adoption. Below are two phases to ramp your use of Gong over 3-6 months:
Phase 1
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Have team members review 1-2 calls per week, both their own and their peers’.
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Have team members request feedback on one call per week.
"A lot of the coaching we’ll do is designed like, ‘Hey, we're going to do a session three days from now where we're focusing on a specific call and like a specific section of the call that you want to run through together.'" - Mike Bullard, Mid Market Sales Manager, Lever
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Use the Coaching tab to keep on top of feedback requests, and see how you’re distributing feedback across the team and make sure it’s aligned with individuals’ needs.
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Create call library folders that are topic-specific that you can use for future coaching (or work with your enablement team to put this in place).
Phase 2
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Use Stats to track your team members’ progress and identify areas for improvement.
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Set alerts for yourself to flag possible coaching opportunities, e.g. a weekly email digest of discovery calls where the rep talk time was over 65%. Customize these to the focus areas that you’ve identified for each rep.
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Use scorecards to provide more structured feedback, particularly if you want the team to apply a specific sales methodology. If you have an enablement partner, work with them to ensure your scorecard addresses the right questions.
“How did that conversation actually go when we re-listen to it as opposed to when you were on the call? I score it and I have the rep score it. So they have to score the call and they send me the call to score as well. And then we talk about it and set very clear action items of what was missed, maybe, and what could be done moving forward.” - Hannah Newberry, Sales Manager, Gusto
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Encourage team members to submit calls for team feedback. Use Gong to collaboratively review snippets of these calls at weekly or bi-weekly team meetings.
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Begin to add focus and structure by suggesting a topic or skill in advance of your meeting and have the team submit calls with that topic in mind. Make use of your team library folder to organize these calls.
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Use the Gong Deal board to identify specific deal issues that you can bring to team meetings, to promote learning through discussion and help drive deals to completion.
“The other benefit to reviewing the live call is hopefully they get something out of it that they can apply to the actual deal. Close that actual deal, make commission” - Mike Bullard, Mid Market Sales Manager, Lever