Episode 32: My Go To Coaching Model and Why I Love It

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. So today's episode is by request. It's the first time I have put a buy request episode up, so I'm hoping that everyone enjoys it. And it's come from three or four requests now that I've had from sales leaders both from Australia and across in the US and it's all about what is my coaching model? So what's the go to coaching model that I use for the people that I coach? I actually have quite a pool now of individuals, individuals both from a leadership, their own personal leadership point of view, but a business organization point of view who I coach now. So they've asked me what's my go to model and I'm more than happy to share it because I think having a good coaching model is really important. But I also think there's only a handful out there that most people will traditionally choose. And for me there's some really clear requirements, if you like, that I had when picking the model that I'm going to use. So such a great question. There isn't one answer. And I definitely don't profess to have the only coaching model or the perfect model out there, but it's one that works really well for me and I'm going to go through and explain that now as a sneak peek for next week. I'm actually having the tables turned on me. I'm being interviewed for this podcast about what my go to priorities and methodologies and models were when I ran my previous business. I think it's another great topic to be able to put me on the other side so that will actually flow on from this. So there'll be two quite nice topics that will go one after the other. But for today, for just now, I'm going to focus on an individual podcast where I talk about my coaching model and how it works. Okay, so what's important in a coaching model? To me, there's some really, really clear things. And most people who know me know that I like practical, real world, simple things. We can execute far more than a perfect model. I will far sooner take something that isn't quite Perfect or get 80 to 90% of the job done than something that's perfect but difficult to roll out. So simplicity, practicality, real world, chunky type of projects or type of models for me work perfectly. So when I'm looking for a coaching model, I'm looking for simplicity. So I need to be able to roll it out well and others need to be able to understand it. If others can't understand it, then really the model isn't going to work. It needs to be proven. So I need to have seen others have used it previously. It needs to be practical, one that I can roll out immediately, compact enough to have action items that come out at the end and can be repeated back to me so that I really understand exactly what the outcome from the coaching session is and relatable, right? If people don't like it, if people find it too difficult, then it's gone. Right. Too hard to use. So for me, this model we're talking about today, this is in preference to coaching styles, right? Where we have pa, pace setting, we have inclusive styles, autocratic styles, right? Which are a great podcast topic on their own. But today we're talking about my coaching model rather than coaching style. And again, if by request someone would like to hear, or plenty of you would like to hear about coaching styles, no problem. More than happy to get into them. Okay, so my model that I use today, and I'm going to thank John Whitmore. So John Whitmore invented the grow model. I'm guessing that a good part of the people on this call have heard about the grow model. I'm going to take a second stab that says the majority of people won't have used a coaching model formally, with their teams, or even informally. So I'm hopeful that whilst it's a very simple and common model, you'll be able to hear today, in the next 20 minutes or so exactly how we go about making a grow model, a coaching model, work really easily, right? So then we have that in our toolkit of things that we can roll out. So John Whitmore, this model was actually created back in the 1970s and he was really seen as a pioneer of the executive coaching industry. It's amazing, right? What are we, 1970s? We're 50 years later and that model still holds, Right? So before that, John was a racing car driver. He did the 24 hour of Le Mans race. He used to roll around in Volkswagens and he did some cool stuff with racing. Right. But he's really well known for his executive coaching. But I love again that 50 years later we've seen that despite significant changes in the business world, that human behavior is actually reasonably similar. Right. So a model from back then can still hold as really relevant today. If you want to read a book on this, and everyone again who knows me knows I don't do a lot of reading. I tend to take more of my learning from podcasts, from online publications, from trusted sources, from smaller snippets rather than big single junky books. But this one I certainly have read a book on and it's called Coaching by Performance. And I can thank my coach over the past, Josie Thompson, for someone that's really helped open my eyes up to having a formal coaching model because I think it's really added another string, another level of diversity to how I can work with people. So if you'd like to go and get that book, it's called Coaching for Performance by John Whitmore. Okay, so the grow model. Let me quickly talk about what the G, R, O and W stand for, then we'll jump into them in more detail. And then I'm going to give you an example of how I use this in the last seven days. Completely confidential, but with a real life coaching client that I have. So the grow model change. G. G stands for goals. So goals are all about what are you trying to achieve, what are you trying to get done? Are they sales results? Are they new customers? Is it behavioral changes? It opportunities? Right. And these really need to be the goals of the coachee, not the goals of the coach. So when you've got your coaching hat on, whoever you are working with, it's their goals, right? What are they trying to achieve? The reality is, where are they at at the moment? Right? So what's the prevailing pattern? What's the realities? What's happening in their life at the moment? If they're trying to hit a million dollars of sales, what are they out of that $600,000 at the moment, for example. So, you know, there's a $400,000 gap. Options. So O, G for goals, R for reality, O for options. Options is all about what's available, right? What can they do about it? What are the easy options? What are the alternative options? What are the strategies? Right, this one really comes down to a brainstorming piece and I'll talk about how we can do that to get the most out of that brainstorming. So we've got goals, reality, options and the will, right, Which I often call the what next, right? What will you do next? What is it? Who's going to do it? When are they going to do it by? Right? This is actually the steps that you get to after you've brainstormed the options, right, about how you're going to get there. So I'll say it again. The goals, what do you want to achieve? The reality, where are you at now? The options, what are the different alternatives you have available to you? And will, what will you do? What are you actually going to do from those options to make it happen? So there's two real key parts about this grow model, right? The first one, and of course that's outside actually running the process. But the first key part outside of this is awareness and the second is responsibility. And John Whitmore talks about this in detail in his book. But the aim with the grow model is to ensure that we have a coachee or someone that's on the other side that is aware of their situation. Whilst your goal could be to get to a million dollars of sales in the next 12 months, but the reality is you're at $0. You might argue that the awareness of that situation isn't quite right because that's a big jump. That said, depends on your industry. You might be able to get there really easily and I've seen plenty of people do it, but making sure people are aware of this situation, aware of what's possible and realities around them. The second one is responsibility and this one's definitely worth considering as you're writing your notes around the grow model and that's that people have a responsibility and an accountability to be achieving these results. So when we're working through this grow model, we, we first, before we get into anything, really want to be understanding that our co chair or person on the other side has a general awareness around what's happening in their world and their lives, right? So their goals are relevant and realistic and at the same time that there's a level of responsibility and accountability that they have to be wanting to hit these goals because without an awareness, without a level of responsibility and accountability, this generally won't work, right? So it's a really good byproduct of the Grow model is that we have an aware and an accountable person that we're working with. Okay. So, and DM me if you'd like to know more about that. There is a little bit to the grow model, but for me, I actually picked it because it's probably the simplest for me to execute repeatedly. Right, Remembering the word grow, goal, reality options, what are you going to do next? Right. That's really easy to remember and I find it quite practical to get out there and be able to work with people, you know, regularly on it. Okay, so let's deep dive into what each of these areas are. So let's first of all have a look at goal, right? And often goal will actually come after reality. I should say that as we're getting into it, that sometimes the reality will drive our goal. At other times the goal will be one that is completely irrelevant around the reality of the situation we are now, but still with an element of awareness in terms of what we need to achieve. So when we're looking at goals, it's all about setting end goals. It's all about where people want to get to, where the coachee needs to head and what they want to see happen. So when we're setting performance goals, particularly in this instance, we need to be making sure that that end goal is very specific, right? It should have smart principles applied. I'm going to assume everyone knows what smart principles are. If you don't, please get in touch with me. But the goal needs to be not just based on smart principles. It needs to be challenging, it needs to be realistic and it needs to have buy in from the coach and the coachee. You both need to be ready to embark on targeting that goal and trying to get to that goal, because otherwise you simply won't get there. So once you've set that goal, the next aim, right, is to build a process around it to make sure that we can achieve it. Right? Which is that the what will you do next? And that that comes down under the options and picking what we'll do. Very, very important with this goal, that there are performance goals along the journey or performance targets along the journey to help us be able to hit that. Okay, so that's the goal. Pretty straightforward, right? Next, one reality. Where are things at? Now? This one here needs lots and lots of questions, right? And particularly questions without judgment. So where we can be diving deeper into the reality and asking questions that will really have the coachee think, think about what the reality is that will actually help us then work out goals and options as to what's going to work really well down the track? Right. So the opening question. And let's talk. Let's stay on that example of sales numbers. The goal might be a million dollars in sales. And the reality says the question might be, okay, so where are your sales numbers at now? They're at $400,000. Fantastic. And what's the baseline that's come behind this $400,000? It's actually one big sale that I got. Fantastic. And was that sale one that you worked over a long period of time from, did it come from the network? Is it one that you really were lucky and you came across quite easily? Actually, you know what? It was from a friend, and it was something I had working before I came to the business. Right, okay. So fantastic. So let's look at that. So what's your pipeline looking like at the moment? Well, I have about $200,000 in my pipeline. So what we're doing is we're digging deeper and deeper and deeper into these questions. And what we're finding is that whilst the gap there is 600,000, it's actually far more significant because it was a sale bought into the business. Pipeline's low. Right. And we're starting to uncover the gap between the reality and the goal is really significant. Right. So this is why it's really important with our questions during the reality stage, that we're diving deeper so that we can truly uncover where we're at in this situation. Right. But also doing it without judgment. So for each of those questions, there was no judgment around. You haven't worked hard enough, no tone, questioning what the strategies were. It was very much about trying to dig a little bit deeper into where they're at with their current reality. Okay, so we've worked out goals, a million dollars of sales. Reality is we're sitting at $400,000, but really it's a lot smaller in the pipeline. So what are our options? All right, what are we going to do to work together to try and determine what we can do next? For me, we really want to throw this over to the coachee straight away. So, hey, you're sitting at $400,000 in sales. We need to get to a million dollars. There's $200,000 in pipeline. What do we need to do next? Coachee will talk about, I need to meet more people, I need to quote more, I need to increase my quotes, I need to close, I need to start learning more. Right. And we let the coachee go through each of their examples that they have, and the Aim is to let them go through all of theirs before we add any of our value. Sure, we can add influence. So when the coachee says, okay, I need to increase my pipeline, we can say, great, well, let's talk about how we go about increasing your pipeline. So it might be through meeting new people, it might be through going to past people that we've worked with, it might be asking for referrals, it might be using social media. Right? So we can continue to encourage, to flow, flesh out the options. But the aim here really is to get a long list of possible options that we can look at to take us from our current reality through to our goal. And by the end of this, we may be checking back on the goal quite regularly and saying, actually, you know what, that goal's not relevant, we maybe can't get there and you reassess that goal so that we have a mini goal along the journey or the goal might remain as it is, but it's certainly okay to be moving your goal as you go through this process because we want to make sure that it's really, really relevant and achievable at the end. Okay, so once the coachee has gone through all of their options, right, and got to the bottom, that's the time for you to add yours. So it might be something along the lines of another way to generate new business, it might be some learnings, it might be something that they haven't thought of. But you are absolutely entitled to add your opinion in here. But I find for me it's most effective when you can do so at the end, once the coachee has done their thinking. Okay, so we've done the goal, the reality and the options of what we can do the next one here, and this is really important, right? This is where the rubber hits the road, is what are we going to do next? What will we implement individually and together? So what are we going to do? When's it going to get done by? Is it going to make us meet our goals by getting this done? What's going to get in the way? Who do we need help from? Who do we need to let know what we're doing? What other support do you need? Right. All of these questions that really start to talk about how we're going to do it next. So a million dollar Target for sales, $200,000 pipeline and $400,000 of existing sales. Right. Let's say that coming out of that, the option is, you know what, I need to get to a hundred more people, quote 50 of them, and close 20 of them and each of those 20 deals need to be an average of $50,000 each. Right. So then we can look at that and say, right, you've got to get really busy getting out and meeting people. So who do we need to help? Well, perhaps it's the marketing team, perhaps it's someone who's fantastic in social media, in the business. When are we going to do it by? Right, well, I've got to meet 100 people. I want to get to a million dollars in 12 months time. I've got an average cycle rate of six months to get all those deals closed. I've got to get out to those hundred people within the next four to six months. Fantastic. And then we can work back from that and say I've got to get out and meet five people a week. Right. So we work together to be very specific in what we want to do next. Right. And here the answer would be my goal. My W here is to get out and meet five people weekly for the next five months, which gets me up to my 100 people that I've met. That's that first part of what are we going to do next? It's very specific. It's got a time around it and it's measurable. Right. We can look at that and say, great, five people a week, we can report on it and work together. So what you're going to do next really needs to make sure that it's coming from the options. And by the way, it's okay if a new option comes in. Right? We're working through what we're going to do next and suddenly the coachee says, actually do you know what, I'm going to get some new business by going back to my old business because where I used to work is not a competitor. And I think we might be able to closely align and cooperate and work together. Right, fantastic. We've got some new ideas coming, but we just make sure we put that into our options, into our O and then bring that down into the W and what we're going to do next. So we've gone into a bit of depth there around really working the G, the R, the O and the W. And hopefully you can see there that it's actually really easy to get some good questions going and you can have some terrific ideas when you take this approach for me and I'll talk at the end about how we can make this work really effectively. But it's really important when you're doing this that you have an uninterrupted approach to it, right? So you can actually talk through the process without phones ringing, without social media pinging, without people getting distracted, right? But generally this type of process, for Most problems, about 15 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes, you should be able to work through it really well. Simple problem, you know, someone's getting in the way to get something done. Five minutes, really complex, you might strategize it out. And maybe it's a half an hour to an hour type of commitment. But what I'd like to do is just give you an example, one that I did from last week. This one was bang on about 15 minutes. Really good example as well, I think one that leaders come across a lot. And for me, this leader was really open about wanting to work on it. So this leader, their goal was that they wanted the leaders of their business. So this person I was working with was the top of their business, the managing director of this business. He wanted the leaders of their business to be more enabled, right? To deliver more and lead the business, but be enabled and empowered to make the decisions themselves, right? So it was seven or eight people in the business unit and the goal here is, how do we get these seven or eight people working better to be empowered and enabled to deliver results. So the reality, this was a really easy reality, the leaders weren't empowered. And that was from a management point of view that this particular leader didn't think his team felt empowered, so they weren't delivering results. And it was causing significant stress, not just amongst the team, but also amongst the leader. So we said, okay, goals in reality, they're lined up, they're pretty reasonable, right? They're not something that seemed too far apart, right? Team's not empowered, team's not enabled to make decisions. How do we get them there? So the options we went through, and this was very much a top line first approach of this was, okay, we could rehire, we could remove the team and rehire, right? That's very much a non responsible type of decision, but it's certainly an option. No option's a bad option. In this instance, we could train the current team to get up to standard, right? We could remove some leaders and train other leaders. So it's a part clean out, part increase of training to the people. We could define the parameters around what the team need to do. So this one we really fleshed out around saying the teams, do the individuals actually know what they need to do? Do we need to better define it for them and give them options as to how they can do it? We could use Some different measurement or monitoring approaches for each leader. Right. So we could customise slightly what each leader needed to be able to have them focus more on the empowerment and enablement needed to be able to make decisions. We could help them improve their relationships with their teams. Right. So what was thrown out was, well, perhaps the reason they're not delivering is because they're not managing their teams well enough so they don't have time to be able to do a lot of the strategic requirements that we, that we're doing. So how can I, as the leader, help them have greater scope to do this? By improving their relationships and their management styles with their teams. An option was an incentive program to be able to get them to have a reward from key outputs happening across an empowerment level. We spoke about the leader, the md, about surveying his team and asking them what he could do better. Right. Was he contributing? And no doubt, right. Leaders, we always contribute in these type of instances to be able to improve it. We could fly them into HQ to work together. Right. And we went on and on and on. There was about another 10 examples here. Weekly meetings, individual one to ones. Right. But it's a really good brainstorming session to talk about what we could do next. So what came out of it was this particular person was going to start to look at redoing pds. He really felt that what the team was actually working on was no longer aligned with their pd, so he needed to reset the expectations and work with teams so that they could all be clear on what needed to happen. There was then going to be a big focus on weekly team meetings and individual one to ones and using the business as project software to be able to manage it. So not only were we resetting expectations, but the leader was going to work much more closely with his leaders on this specific area. He was going to apply slightly different measurement approaches for each leader. And then really the other big one that came out of it was helping improve their relationships with their teams. Right. So we had three key things come out of it. We set some dates around what was going to happen next. The idea was to test these three initiatives with one person within the team and see how they worked. A survey was going to go out to the team just to make sure we could see how the leader could help a little bit better. And that was an independent survey. And then there was a couple of other action points around, particularly time driven around meeting times and one to ones and even an approach around praising really specifically improvements as they made little steps forward to be able to Increase the empowerment and enablement of the team. Right. So this is a really good session. They all had action points. And then this week my job is to start to follow these up and see how that test process with one of the leaders went. Right? So really powerful, really easy. The coaching on the other end was completely open to it. Didn't need to explain what the grow model was. I just stepped them through that one by one. So before we finish up, I love all of my podcast episodes to have something chunky at the end in action item. As leaders, how can we roll the grow model into something that we do right? How can we give it a try? Well, for me it's all about practicing it right on small opportunities first. The best one I would try as a sales leader is workshopping a deal. Use the grow model for a single deal. That's not working. If you're not a sales leader. Use the grow model for a single use minor initiative that you think you can improve. Make sure you're asking open ended questions, right? There's a very logical flow when you start to just ask one open ended and follow through. Very much in the wheelhouse of most salespeople. So if you can start by asking lots of questions, then the process generally tends to follow. Right? Don't be too afraid if you provide options to give answers to the open ended questions just to help the conversation flow. But the really important part is avoid being vague and avoid judgment. Judgment's the single biggest tone that can kill the grow model. So if you can make sure that you're really focusing on a neutral tone, no judgment and asking questions, that's fantastic. Next one, ask your leader to give it a go with you in reverse. Right? It's fantastic to be on the other end. Or DM me. I've mentioned previously that I'm happy to have 30 minute calls or one 30 minute call with anyone who's part of the network. So if you'd like to make that call about the grow model or having an example of me using it with you in reverse, more than happy to do so. Right? Sometimes to see your leader or others that you work with use it can be really impactful to helping you make it happen. Okay, so final word on this, the grow model goal reality options. What are you going to do next? Right. Really, really great model. But my final word is, and I said it at the start, is this is not the only model out there, right? By all means, get out and research other models. Get out and research the solution focused model or the clear model. Is another one out there, right? Get out and have a look if there's something that works better for you. But if you do like what you've heard today, the grow model I think is a fantastic one to try yourself. So next week I did mention that there's going to be a turning of the tables for one podcast episode where I'm actually going to be interviewed. I'll be the interviewee for that week. And in that episode I'm talking a lot more about how my go tos or my go tos as a leader were in the prior business. And this was a business that was twice a finalist in the fastest national growth company awards in the country. Right. So it was a very fast growing company, a very successful company. But I'm going to be talking about the grow model will certainly come up, but also to my broader leadership style. So one you might be able to sink into and it might help you do the grow model combined right with these two episodes. But please tune in. So that's it for today. If you weren't able to capture everything, please make sure you jump onto the show notes in your own time there on the website strongishalesteams.com you're welcome to contact me if you need a little bit of extra help. I love doing it otherwise social media, Instagram, but in particular LinkedIn. You'll find lots and lots of information coming out, lots of quotes being posted, lots of ideas, lots of stuff, thoughts. We're really active on LinkedIn and I certainly get across every connection made into the business. So likely you'll hear back from me in return. But before we finish, today's health and wellbeing tip, I like doing these. I want to keep these going as long as we can. It's always hard to think of tips in the moment, but this one here is really relevant. So over the weekend, as I'm recording this, just prior, I actually did a race up in Townsville. It was a national championship for an event. I was doing really good race, had a great time, had a great result. But one of my friends after the event said, hey, how did you get your running to come down so quickly? I took about a minute and a half off my five kilometer time in about 10 weeks. And my key tip for this is actually balancing avoiding injury with being able to have your whatever your exercise activity is, running, swimming, cycling, right, anything you can be doing gym work is to increase your volume reasonably quickly. I have a golden rule that I learned from my coach in the very early days and that was to make sure each week you don't up any more than one of speed, volume or distance. Right? So if you're gonna go faster in a week, don't add volume and don't add frequency. If you're gonna add more volume, do it over your current number of sessions without adding more sessions. But don't add speed. Right? So increase one of the three speed, volume or distance each week and then you alternate them as you grow. Right. For me, it worked really well and one that I've used consistently over the last 15 years or so of my sporting life. Okay, I hope that one works. Give it a go. That's it for today. Until next time. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales teams.