Pull the Rope

“It’s easier to pull a rope than push it” - Anonymous

It’s not enough to set your expectations and walk away. In order to be a successful Sales Leader you must coach your team on how to accomplish those expectations successfully. The above quote about pulling ropes is a common reminder to leaders in the Marine Corps when they find themselves at an impasse or see a dip in the performance of their team. The point is to lead from the front as a means of demonstrating to your team how to accomplish the expectations you’ve set, thus living them yourself.

Let’s address the 🐘 in the room.

For some reason this 3rd pillar, show your team “how” to accomplish your expectations, is often the one where I get the most pushback when discussing the 4 Pillars of Sales Leadership. Not pushback to the pillar itself, but pushback on doing the work of your individual team members (say making a Cold Call) now that you’re in a leadership position.

I’ll hear things like, “my job is to empower my team to do great work, not do it for them” (true, see Pillar #1). Or “I’m hear to coach my team on how to win, not close deals for them” (true, keep reading). Or, my least favorite, “When was the last time you saw a football coach make a tackle?”

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” - Yogi Berra

Playing the game vs. practicing it

When I see Sales Leaders who hesitate to work deals with their team, avoid making Cold Calls alongside them, or don’t understand the basics of how to navigate a CRM in order to accomplish daily tasks they’ll often tell me they’re working to empower their team to have success while they act as a “coach”.

Of course your job as a leader is to scale your impact through your team. That said, any great coach I’ve played for or leader I’ve worked for was always proficient in the tasks their team needed to do on a daily basis. They use this proficiency as the foundation upon which they coach their team to get better by setting an example for their team to emulate. Never use your position of authority as an excuse to avoid doing work.

Often when people use the coach example they fail to realize how hands on a coach is during practice. Take a look at this clip of Bill Belichick at an Ohio State Pro Day back in 2018. I’m no Boston sports fan, but there are 2 important items we, as Sales Leaders, can learn from his example:

1. The fact that Belichick is at the Pro Day, at all, when he could easily have sent someone from his staff is a perfect example of pulling the rope

2. Despite being a few decades their senior, Belichick is at eye level with the athletes demonstrating how to successfully accomplish the drill

Think about point #2 for a moment. Does Belichick have the physical ability of a Division 1 athlete in their early 20’s? Of course not. But it doesn’t matter. He’s willing to get in the arena with his team in order to show them how to accomplish his expectations. As a Sales Leader, you need to do the same.

Demonstrate, Practice, Apply, Refine

My favorite Sales Coaching framework for showing your team how to accomplish the expectations you set is a loop based upon the PDCA framework common in iterative design and continual improvement management:

• Demonstrate

• Practice

• Apply

• Refine

It’s important to note these activities take place in an ongoing loop such that it’s the repetition of the apply and refine phase that bring continued growth.

Demonstrate

This is where we’re pulling that rope. As a Sales Leader there are 2 main ways to demonstrate your expected behavior to a member of your team:

1. Through a mock call where the team member you’re coaching plays the hypothetical client and you play the sales person

2. In a live customer meeting where you take the lead and your team member observes

Each of the above points has their advantages. Use your judgement as to which best fits your leadership style and which is the most appropriate based on the skill you’re teaching.

For example, if you’re coaching a team member on the best way to open a Cold Call demonstrating live with customers works great given it is a high volume exercise with minimal time commitment per Cold Call. On the other hand, if you’re teaching them an entire framework for a discovery call the mock call format is probably more appropriate.

Don’t hesitate to set your example live with customers though. This is a great way to build credibility with your team while also pressure testing your own way of thinking while actually in the arena. Think about Yogi Berra’s quote from earlier, if you haven’t spoken to a customer in a while it’s a good idea to test the theory you’re teaching your team on an actual customer to ensure what you’re demonstrating to them is still valid.

Practice

In the practice step, flip the script with your team member. Take the above 2 points and reverse roles, your team member as the sales person while you play the customer. Call coaching from call recordings is great, but use mock calls here as a means of deliberate practice.

In the same way that sports teams don’t only play games and review game tape, be sure that you have deliberate practice sessions for the specific skills you’re trying to teach.

A note on these practice sessions, make them as realistic as possible. If you’re practicing Cold Calling be sure your team uses your outbound software to call your cell phone, don’t just sit in a room together and have them say, “ring, ring” (this looks silly when you write it, but used to be the way I facilitated mock calls).

I once worked with a new team member on Cold Call openers for a week and was feeling pretty proud of the coaching I’d given only to assign them their book of business and have them stare at me blankly because I’d never actually taught them how to use our web based phone system 🤦‍♂️ Part of deliberate practice is making the scenario as realistic as possible so when it comes time for the real thing there is no resistance.

Apply

Time to play the game! This is where things get exciting and I always remind my team that action and consistency are where learning really occurs.

You can practice all day, but at some point it’s time to pick up the ☎️ and start speaking to customers. In order to successfully lower the barrier to entry for applying whatever skill you’ve been practicing with your team member cultivate a culture where your team feels comfortable failing by sharing with them a story of mistakes you made while learning the skill they’re still trying to master.

Create space in team meetings for, “failure of the week” where each team member shares a mistake they made. Be sure to lead the sessions yourself with a mistake you made and try to inject a bit of humor into the session (remember humor = leadership superpower 🦸‍♂️). It’s amazing how effective sessions like these are at creating an environment which takes the pressure off being in front of customers.

Ultimately, no one gets better at a skill unless they take action and apply that skill consistently. Action begets action. Once your team member takes that first step, the next one is significantly easier.

Refine

After your team member is consistently taking action on the skill find a structured way to give them feedback based on what you observed. Whenever you kick off one of these sessions have the team member start giving themselves feedback first.

When you let the team member grade themselves be sure to provide a loose structure for the way they’re giving their own feedback which includes what they thought went well, where they can improve, and specifically what they are going to change next time. Then give your own points and ask them when they believe they’ll have the opportunity to apply the skill next. If it isn’t within 48 hours, make sure they create an opportunity to do so. If there are more than 48 hours between a refinement session and the next opportunity for application, it’s likely the team member will forget the feedback they gave themselves.

Beware of this trap!

Okay there are actually 2 common traps that I see Sales Leaders (and certainly I myself) fall into.

First, they give their team too many items to focus on at a time. When you’re demonstrating to your team how to accomplish a new skill try to pick a single skill and work that skill consistently. It takes repetition to make a new skill automatic, make sure you give your team member space to get the repetitions in by focusing on just 1 thing at a time.

Second, Sales Leaders move on too quickly. If your team member knocked it out of the park the first time they applied the skill you taught them, that’s great! Be sure you ask them to do it again. Don’t move on to a new skill until you’ve seen them knock it out of the park 5+ times with consistency.

Okay! Only 1 more pillar to go, see ya’ll next week to talk about all things accountability.