What Makes a Great Sales Coach?

For managers, developing others' abilities is indeed critical - it's the emotional competence most frequently found among those at the top of their game. This is a person-to-person art and the effectiveness of counseling hinges on empathy, as well as the ability to focus on our own feelings and share them.

Research suggests the best 'coaches' show a genuine personal interest in those they guide. Trust is also crucial – because when there is little trust in the coach, advice is likely to go unheeded. This also happens when the coach is impersonal and cold, or the relationship seems too one-sided or self-serving. Therefore, coaches who show respect, trustworthiness and empathy are the best.

One way to encourage people to perform better is to let them take the lead in setting their own goals, rather than dictating the terms and manner of their development. This communicates the belief that employees have the capacity to be the pilot of their own destiny.

Another technique is to point to the problems without offering a solution - this implies the employees can find the solution themselves. People hunger for feedback, yet too many managers, supervisors, and executives are inept at giving it or are simply disinclined to provide any.

Virtually everyone who has a superior is part of at least one vertical 'couple' in the workplace - every boss forms such a bond with each subordinate. Such vertical couples are a basic unit of organizational life.

Therein lays the blessing or the curse. This interdependence ties a subordinate and superior together in a way that can become highly charged. If both do well emotionally - if they form a relationship of trust and rapport, understanding and inspired effort - their performance will shine. But if things go emotionally awry, the relationship can become a nightmare, and their performance a series of minor and major disasters.

While vertical couples have the entire emotional overlay that power and compliance bring to a relationship, peer couples - our relationships with co-workers - have a parallel emotional component, something akin to the pleasures, jealousies, and rivalries of siblings.

If there is anywhere emotional intelligence needs to enter an organization, it is at this most basic level. Building collaborative and fruitful relationships begins with the couples we are a part of at work.

Bringing emotional intelligence to a working relationship can pitch it towards the evolving, creative, mutually engaging end of the continuum. Failing to do so heightens the risk of a downward drift towards rigidity, stalemate, and failure.

Our role as a coach is to aim for optimum performance levels that can be maintained to ensure consistent success – we must try to avoid the “peak and trough” syndrome. But equally, we must also maintain the challenge to see just how far we can take each of our employees/students.

I am the CEO of Top Sales World and the editor of Top Sales Magazine. TSW is a unique, international online community dedicated exclusively to the profession of sales, bringing together the industry’s best-known sales experts to provide information in the form of how-to-guides, articles, webinars, podcasts and so much more. 

I have also just launched a new initiative over on Top Sales World – The JF Interview Series

My principle objective is to enjoy dialogue with genuine sales & marketing thought leaders. In particular, I am always keen to debate the future of professional selling because we have witnessed more advances in the past 5 years than in the previous fifty and we have no reason to suspect that the current rate of change will lose any of its momentum. We are all faced with new ways of thinking, many of which directly challenge what we have been taught and believe.

Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman, didn’t become a bad salesman overnight – he just refused to change…

My guest this week is Tim Riesterer, co-author of The Three Value Conversations and Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, and Chief Strategy  and Research Officer for  Corporate Visions.

If you would like to listen to this short (15 minutes) conversation, please Listen Here