Shelley Lavery, Co-Founder of sales coaching and intelligence platform Jiminny, reveals the power of self-coaching in sales teams – and the difference between those who do and those that don’t.
The recipe
Taking a step back to look at our own strengths and weaknesses, from a professional perspective, sounds daunting and time-consuming. Why dwell when you can do? But it’s one of the single most important things we can embed early on within our teams.
There are two key reasons for that. The first is, as individuals we’re with ourselves 100% of the time. If we can self-analyse and self-improve, we can become less reliant on our leaders. And we can become more valuable to them, as they are likely to be super busy. That’s an incredibly important thing to be able to have within the culture of a team.
The second reason – and perhaps the most really important benefit of self-coaching – is that it’s been proven that sales reps who self-coach have 5.5% higher win rates.
The method
There are two simple things you need to kick start a culture of self-coaching. The first, making sure team members know what ‘good’ looks like – what do they look for? They need some kind of structure and framework. For many businesses, the first call you make to a potential customer is a discovery, or intro call. We’ve actually developed an intro call framework, which looks at the key areas of the call.
This includes from the outset to holding the business conversation, to relationship building, then delivering the product knowledge, right through to close. It labels out the key elements you want to look for within each area of the call. Once you have that, you could listen back to one call a week on your own. With a manager or mentor, you can then do the assessment so you know what to work on in future.
I train my team to be really generous with what we did well and what we want to praise ourselves for. What do we want to embed into our playbook and do again and again to build our confidence? Then we look for the one game-changing thing. The one thing we can work on come Monday is improving our ability and skill. I’ve built a lot of these frameworks, and the difference between one and another is marginal.
The second thing is you want a place where you can discuss and debrief. At Jiminny, we have something called “Personal Growth Fridays”. Right now, we have a virtual whiteboard. We each go around the room and share highlights from our performance coaching this week that we’ve run ourselves. This creates a level of accountability within your team, which is an important part of the whole process.
So give that some thought. Remember that stat – 5.5% higher win rates for those who self-coach. Pretty powerful, don’t you think?
