S2E61 - LIVE Bonfire Session - Mistakes to Avoid When Building A Coaching Culture

Hey everybody, it is Richard Harris and our good friend Scott Lease will be joining us shortly. He's allegedly closing a deal, so we'll see how he does and maybe see if he needs any coaching after when we find out what happened. But Scott will be joining us. Thank you so much for joining the surf and sales bonfire session today as we are talking about building a coaching culture which I think we all are aware of as sales leaders. And I certainly believe it can go beyond the sales team in terms of building strong culture and a coaching culture. Before we jump in, I want to give a quick shout out and thanks to our sponsors of Gong IO, Vidyard and Salesforce Sales Cloud for helping us. Got two people in the forefront and background. We've got Tim Clark actually from Salesforce joining us. He'll be helping to monitor the chat, although we've heard that the Zoom chat is a little wonky today. So please put your questions in into the chat. Tim will be making sure that we get to those. As Scott joins us, he'll also be checking that out. And so I want to go ahead and do a quick intro of our people, of our panelists and we will go from there. By the way, yes, it's gonna be recorded. Does anybody not record these things? By the way, Like I hear this all the time, so I'm always wondering if people are not recording and releasing these. First, I wanna introduce Galen Gourmet who's a sales executive at Go Contractor. She's also one of the co founders of Revgenius, which is an amazing sales community that's out there. And podcast host of what's yous Legacy? Which at some point I'm gonna get on. I keep rescheduling on her and previously worked in fintech and sales, so. So Galen, thanks for joining us. Dialing in all the way from London, if I am not mistaken. Correct. Awesome. We have Neeraj Kapoor. Neeraj is a trusted sales Coach. He's a LinkedIn trainer and author of two Amazon bestselling books and a Salesforce influencer from 2021. So Neeraj, thank you. You are dialing in from Dublin, from Belfast. Belfast, sorry. And then we also have Ashley Zax. Ashley, I hope I said that right. I've known you for years now and I should.

No, that's nailed it. Correct.

Who recently got promoted to an account executive over at Chili Piper and she's got some amazing content on coaching, being coached as well as being a good coach. If you haven't checked out the blog that we have on our on The Harris Consulting Group website that she wrote about creating a safe space. Ashley is a.

Professional ballet dancer. Is that right? She's really gone through a lot of coaching ever since she was, you know, a few years younger. So really interesting perspective on this topic. So with that being said, I'm super excited. It looks like Scott has finally joined us. Scott, welcome, my brother.

Every. Everybody's wondering, did you close the deal Tomorrow?

Tomorrow.

Oh, that's the. One of the best tomorrow. We always get that.

I feel pretty good about it, though.

That's good. Let us know if you need some coaching on this one, Scott. We're all happy to help you out.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So if everybody. One of my favorite things to do when we start one of these sessions is have everybody just go into the chat and quickly tell us where you're dialing in from. By all means, we want to utilize the chat in multiple ways. One certainly put your questions in there to make sure that we get to them. Also, you know, I love it when the sidebar chat goes on. So as you hear a question and you've got an interesting perspective, feel free to put yours in there. It's always really fun and cool to do that.

So.

Wow, someone dialing all the way in from Syria. Serbia, Sorry, not Syria. So that's awesome. All right, let's go ahead and get started. You know, three mistakes when building a coaching culture, right. And first part we're going to really talk about is sort of this tactical building of the culture. Right. And so, you know, as we want to turn it over to the panelists and say, what are the things that you're looking for when you're building it from a tactical perspective? What are the blocking and tackling elements? And I know that, Neeraj, you had a really unique perspective on this.

Well, yeah. When you do any kind of coaching, there's a human and there's a basic side of things and with the basic tactics, I'll always talk about things like doing one to one coaching. When I first became a manager, I had no idea how to coach and I was genuinely awful. And I said, guys, just do what I do, which is the worst way to manage anybody. And luckily, after a while, my boss realized I had potential even though I couldn't coach. And he started coaching me himself. And he says, look, every Monday morning, do one to ones with your team. It's the most important thing you will ever do. And I said, look, that's going to take up my entire day. He goes, I know it will, but that's how I'm going to hit target end of the year. And I did that. I mean you do one to ones I've actually seen managers because now on the other side of it. So I spent 23 years in corporate London working in sales and I'm a coach going into businesses, seeing how sales managers and sales directors operate. And so many people on the Monday morning, just start off, okay, tell me your figures, tell me your pipeline. What will you close? That's not how you coach people. Everybody. You got to spend at least a few minutes saying what was the most exciting thing that happened to you over the weekend and just listen and genuinely care about the person. I truly believe that the majority of salespeople, the more you care about them, the better they will perform. That's just sales in general. And so that's really important on a Monday morning. And the second thing is midweek, do telephone or some kind of sales coaching with them. That can be LinkedIn training, it can be call coaching. And these things are absolutely vital. When you do call coaching again, you don't do call coaching and say do this, do this, do this. That's dictating. It's not coaching. What you got to do is say, okay, tell me what went well, fantastic. Now tell me what you can improve. That is how you coach people and it's how people perform better. It's through positive affirmations, it's through positive coaching and it's through genuinely caring about your staff.

So Neeraj, I want to repeat a couple of things I heard. So one is a one on one is not a pipeline review, correct?

Yes, 100% right.

And the way I've interpreted is, you know, the coaching aspect is about professional development, not necessarily about the pipeline and revenue. That doesn't mean that that coaching couldn't become, you know, what are you struggling with in sales or even the. Your point, the personal side of life. But are you saying that that one on one should only be personal or should it also.

Possibly include some coaching around those things? Like how do you define it?

It should be a bit of both. I always start off with the personal first because that's important. You know, as much as you care about your job, your staff care more about their personal lives. That's just the way it is and it's really important. Again, I'm a big believer in testing and I've learned a lot over the years. I started off as a bad manager, then became a good manager, then became a very good manager and I started seeing people I work with achieve different levels of success. When I started caring about people and knowing more about their personal lives, you don't know every intimate detail because some people are introvert and naturally don't want to share that. It's very important to respect that. At the same time, I will always talk about them. I will always talk about their lives first. I will then talk about business and say, okay, what are you challenging? What are the biggest struggles you're having right now? How can I support you at work better? And that's a very different question to saying you're meant to do eight demos. Last week you did seven. Why didn't you do eight? Four, you know, so there's very different ways of coaching people. It was done through a very supportive way, Richard. I just find it so much more effective.

Great. I want to jump in before Galem and Ashley jump in on this. I want to show the folks.

To.

A quick asset we have for you. If you go to the link that I put into the chat, go to the bottom under the registration portion and we actually have a my action plan so that you can actually take a listen to what we're doing and decide, you know, what your action plan is. And it looks a bit like this. Assuming I've shown you the right thing.

In the action plan and you can go fill it in. It's a digital document, so feel free to use that as you see best. All right, so Ashley and Galen jump in. What do you think we should around this coaching and the tactical side of things? Where's your feedback on this?

I'll go first, Ashley, if that's okay. From the tactical standpoint of being an individual contributor, I think there are two things that has been helpful for me and that I think others can take away from this. One thing is, and I wrote about this as well in the blog post for Richard Harris Consulting Group, which is having an accountability buddy. So you'll find someone on your team that you can work closely with and meet them at least once a month, if not every two weeks. And you practice conversations, you coach each other. You have a conversation about what is happening in your territory, what's happening with your deals, how are you handling your cold calls, all of it. Everything you do, every day, you speak with this person about that at least once a month, every two weeks. And you create this relationship and bond with them. And you can have more than one accountability buddy. You can have multiple ones. If you can't find someone who you really vibe with on your team, you can go outside of that and practice with People from other places, other companies. You can find them through communities. You can find them on LinkedIn. You can find them here on the webinar. Like, there are tons of resources to. To find people who are at that same level as you, because not everyone's going to have the same reasons to why they want to be successful in their roles. So you got to find your people and stay really close to them. So that's the one thing.

Again, what's an example of the things you do with your accountability buddy?

Right.

How do you leverage that?

Yeah, what I used to do in the past in a previous organization I worked for was we would come up with and we would alternate every two weeks. So one week I would come up with three different scenarios that I wanted to talk through. Maybe it was challenging objections that I had the previous week. And then we would also document these. We would record every conversation that we had with each other as accountability buddies. We would then bring forward like three different scenarios. It can be an objection. It can be a conversation that was really interesting and wasn't sure how to really handle it in a previous meeting or a demo. It could also be internal things like, how would you do with this particular scenario? Like, we're challenged right now with getting certain resources into our group to be more successful and just, it's. It's just finding other people to talk through different scenarios with. So we would do that and alternate every two weeks with each other and just keep that kind of cadence going to coach each other. And then outside of that, obviously, like, to Narash's point, you have to have weekly one to ones with your manager as well. And that's another good opportunity to bring some other things up that you might not have uncovered or they might have a different perspective on it, but at least you're showing and you are being proactive. Because at the end of the day when we talk about accountability, you are responsible for your job, you're responsible for your success, you're responsible for your failures. So that's what. What this is all about. How do you take accountability for what you're supposed to do?

Ashley, how about you?

What do you. I know you've got some specific thoughts around this too.

Yeah.

So I agree. Like, I love the idea of having an accountability accountability buddy. Almost said accountability buddy and make it a new word. And we actually just started something that here at Chili Piper that I'm really excited about. We're calling it Open Gym and this was something I was inspired by. So along with dancing, I also do some Circus stuff. And I had open gym for trapeze a couple weeks ago. And I, you know, I was there, there was a coach there. They provided the equipment we needed, the space we needed, all of that. But they weren't there to like, teach us new skills. It was really just an open space, a safe space for us to practice the skills we already know. And the key word there being practice. And it just was this aha moment of like, I have spent so much of my life, whether it's in dance or sports or circus or whatever it is, practicing to get better at said thing. And why wouldn't I do that in my sales role? There's so many skills involved in this role and I'm still relatively new to it. Um, and I'm learning every single day. And one of the reasons I decided to take the role at Chili Piper is because of the coaching culture that exists here. And so this. Yeah, it just dawned on me. I was like, what if we could get, you know, whoever wants to in a Zoom room, you know, and then once we're in there, we determine, like, who wants to work on like cold call openers. Great. You're gonna go in this Zoom realm. Okay, who wants to work on like X? Objection.

Great.

You're going to go over there and practice that together. So like, same idea galem. Except that it's like we're going to have this available space once a week that, you know, anyone and everyone can come to decide what skills they're trying to work on that week. Get together, work with your peers. There's no managers in there. Nobody's teaching you a new skill. You're just honing the ones you already have. And so that's something that's super exciting that we just started. And I'll report back on how that's going the other piece, sort of more to the human side of things.

Having weekly one on ones is great. Having an accountability again, I can't speak accountability buddy. Is great.

I think before you even get to that is like communicating how you like to receive, give and receive feedback is incredibly important. Neeraj brought it up that like, some people are introverts and they're not going to share as much. Some people are extroverts. They want to tell you everything. Some people like direct feedback. Some people, you know, everyone's different, everyone communicates differently, everybody learns differently. So if there can be some self reflection and self awareness and like you take ownership of you and go to your manager and say like, I love our one on ones. Here's what I want to get out of it. And here's how I like to communicate or like to receive feedback, like, that's only gonna help them help you.

And I found that to be super helpful for me.

So, yeah, Cool.

Scott.

I know having worked for Scott and worked with Scott, this is one of his greatest assets. And as I know he works with other his clients on this kind of stuff. Scott, jump in and share some of what you've done to build those coaching cultures along the way.

Yeah, I love that Ashley called out the open gym aspect. I used to do the same thing called a batting cage.

So I'm glad Chili Piper is doing that. But one of the things that you really have to do is you have to figure out a way to do this in a sustainable, scalable kind of manner. If you really want to have a coaching culture, it's got to start from the top, and you've got to allow people the time and space and opportunity to get coached the way that they want to get coached, when they want to get coached. So there's a few things that you can do to implement.

Exactly that. One of the things that I did was I found that there are some people on my team who like to work early in the morning, some people who like to use their lunch to work, and there are some people who like to stay late to do some work. So every single day, I had three optional trainings. A 7am, a 12 noon, and a 5pm every single day. You didn't have to come if you didn't want to, but you had the opportunity. That's three hours a day, 15 hours a week, 60 hours a month of sales training on various topics. Could be cold calling, could be closing, could be prospecting, could be CRM work, could be leadership, anything social, selling, you name it.

And you'd get 25 to 50% attendance of your sales floor to any one of those things. And rather than just doing it ad hoc and having people just randomly show up, I created a whole calendar. So I'd move into a month of August, for example, and every single day on the calendar, you'd see, here's the three optional trainings, here's the topics, here's who's hosting it, from me to Richard to Niraj to Galen to Ashley, all the sales managers, sometimes even individual contributors. So you could plan it all out right? And then I'd restart and refresh that every single month, depending on the needs of the business and things that I know that we're struggling with. So that's One idea that you can take and steal and you got to have a cadence to all these one on ones. I mean, Niraj is talking about every single day. You know, Galen's talking about the importance of that.

I think that that cadence needs to come from the team, not from you. And this is a disputed philosophy of mine. I was never the VP of sales who was like, okay, Ashley, our one on one is every Tuesday at such and such time. Okay, Galem, we're talking every day at 9am I didn't do that. I didn't have preset, planned one on ones. What I did was I said to my team, here's my calendar. I will never say no to you asking me for a one on one, but the onus is on you if you want that particular amount of time. That way I didn't force one on ones on people who didn't need them. And that way people who needed more, who were proactive, got more than just once a week, because sometimes they need that. So whatever that rhythm and routine is, I think it's really important that it's communicated clearly to your sales reps so they know how to interact with you. Second thing or third thing, Excuse me, with coaching culture is hopefully everybody has the ability to listen in and record calls here. If you don't, you're missing out big time. Having that tool means absolutely nothing if your team doesn't use it and if you as a leader, don't use it. So I had to have my SDRs, if I had them, and my reps send me a couple calls every single day. That was just part of your everyday homework. I expect Richard to send me two calls today that I can listen to and I could jump in five, 10 minutes max, get one or two bullet points to send out to people. But that was the rhythm of it all. And my team therefore got used to using the tool and communicating and sharing right these calls and expecting feedback. And it was a way to hold myself accountable and my sales managers accountable to providing feedback every single day. So three, three things that you can use and steal right there.

This is the point of the webinar where Richard keeps himself on mute. If you listen to the podcast, you know, this always happens. Well done, Richard.

Dude, I want to be consistent. Like, you know, like there's. There's nothing wrong with that.

Kathleen, someone who we've worked with before wants to send Scott a recording. So yes, Kathleen, please feel free. Everybody, send Scott a recording, since he likes to, you know, bust me on my mute. My muteness.

Mubarak why don't you go ahead and come off mute? I know. Got a question for the group.

Yeah.

Good evening, Ananda.

I'm Mubarakali from India.

Thanks for the. Thanks for the.

Are you hearing my voice clearly, sir?

Go ahead, Mubarak. Are you hearing my voice clearly? We hear you.

Thanks a lot, sir.

Thanks for the insightful session.

My question to all the respected dignitaries in the dais. When was the last time you did something for the first time? And thanks for the opportunity.

Sure. Are you saying for a rep perspective or the management in terms of first.

Time talking about both professional and personally answers?

Both things.

Anybody want to jump in and answer that one?

I mean, I'm pretty new to the role so I'm doing a lot of things for the first time right now. I closed my first deal like less than a month ago. So.

Yeah, congrats.

Scott may need your help tomorrow.

Sounds like I got you, Scott.

I could use it.

I'll never say no.

All right, I'm gonna unmute Derek in a second. And Derek, come on off mute and ask your question because I really, I really like what, what you were saying to the. In the chat on this one.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think I could have probably worded it a little bit better in the chat, but I was thinking of this when, when Scott was talking about, you know, optional hours of coaching and trainings and things like that and something that' on my mind lately as I'm kind of to go to Mubarak's question. I'm a first time manager managing SDRs at Lessonlease, so trying to be conscious of. We do a lot of coaching, some optional, some scheduled, mandatory. And something I've been trying to reconcile with is how do I, and maybe I don't need to, but how do I, barring of course attainment and things I think play into this. But how do you.

How do you.

Not treat people.

Differently if they opt not to come to optional kind of optional coaching kind of the idea of like.

Are you willing to, are you as open to invest your time in someone who seemingly isn't investing their own time in their own development? Like I don't want to treat people.

Worse or invest less of myself in them just because they're not coming to these optional things. But I have to remind myself of that. And part of me is like, well, if you're not concerned with your own, like Scott, you know, I go to Thursday night sales. I tell people all the time, go to Thursday night sales. But I'm conflicted because.

I Can't encourage outside of work activity while maintaining work life balance. But then that shows me that you want to learn for yourself. So, like, I don't know, it's kind of a rambling question, but does that hopefully make sense?

I understand completely, but I have tough love for you and, you know, how do you not treat them differently? You don't. You don't. I mean, if you, if you play the tape back for yourself, you're essentially, you're essentially saying, should I put in just as much work to help somebody who doesn't care enough to help themselves? Why would any of us do that in any relationship that we have? I would never do that with somebody I was dating. I would never do that with somebody that I, that I worked with. One of the things that I used to do, Derek, is I used to track attendance at all the optional training that I did so I could see how many hours Derek put in and Scott put in and all this kind of thing outside of the norm as they are trying to improve. All right now, when we're looking at pipeline and we're looking at performance and all that kind of thing, if your numbers are great and your performance is great, I don't care that you didn't go to any of the optional trainings.

Because it would appear at this point.

In time that you didn't need it. If your numbers are terrible and you're not going to any of the optional trainings, my question is very simple. What are you doing to try to turn this thing around? I'm providing all of these opportunities for you. You're not taking advantage of any of them. What are the things you are doing to improve? Right. And if I have two people who are both on the cusp of like, do I keep this person or not? Do you decide to keep the person who put in 30 hours of work extra, whose performance is the same as the person who put zero extra hours of working? The answer is very clear to me. So I think that you're worrying about this a little bit too much and trying to be overly equitable with it all.

Look, I mean, there will always be.

Some element of, I am here to help the people who really want to get helped. I'm not going to force myself upon people who don't seem to care. That doesn't make sense. That's a shit use of your time there, to be perfectly honest with you.

I agree. I just, I feel like.

Like, like a jerk sometimes if I'm, you know, I'm like, well, you're not Helping yourself. Why am I going to go out of my way to help you? Which of course I will, but I feel like actually.

But that's actually exactly what somebody needs to hear something times. And honestly I've said that to people who have not been very happy with me, who have ended up leaving the organization and years later have come back and messaged me saying I didn't understand it then, but I understand it now. And what you said to me was the best thing that ever could have happened. So you have to, you have to just be confident in the fact that you're telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

Yeah.

And Derek, I think there's a management. This is part of the growth from into management is that you kind of have to adjust your mindset that.

Those conversations that might be uncomfortable are often the conversations we know we need to have. And give yourself permission to do it. Part of it is the delivery. Right. Old school. And Scott and I grew up this way of like, you either need to do this or get out of here.

Which is not. That's the jerk. Right? The healthy person, the healthy leader says, hey, I'm concerned enough about you that I'm bringing this up, but ultimately it's up to you. And so I think part of what I think you're looking for, Derek, it sounds like, is what's my style? How do I do that? And you've never done it before. It's as awkward as the first time you have to make a cold call. Right. It's kind of like the first time you have to give some feedback that maybe somebody doesn't want to hear. And it's that fear of rejection or dislike that's the same whether it's a cold call or giving some management feedback. And I think that's a really important piece to acknowledge that give yourself permission to be the leader that you always wish you had gotten if you never got it, or permission to be the leader like one you've had who did give you that feedback and you appreciated it. You can't control how someone responds to it.

Right.

All you can control is how what the message you give and the way you deliver it and you do that the best you can. And believe me, there are many times you might deliver it wrong and you have to come back to it. Right. Like Scott and I are both dads of 13 and 11 year olds. And believe me, there are times where we deliver great feedback to our boys and there are times where we totally fubar the whole thing and we call each other and we're like, oh, shit, did I say the wrong thing? Or we'll ask how we do this. So back to the batting cage and the coaching sessions. Like, we coach each other all the time on stuff personal and professional.

So I appreciate that. And that's. I come from more of that old school, you know, old school boys club, you know, do this or shape up or ship out kind of background. And coming into the exact opposite of that background at Lesan Lee, obviously I identify more with the compassionate side of things, but it's. I'm definitely struggling with not struggling, but noticing some challenges of finding. Finding my style and finding my way.

I'm happy to talk with you offline about this, Derek, as well, if you want. But the two things don't have to be disparate. This old school and compassionate. You can hold the line on people, but deliver the message in a caring, compassionate, supportive kind of way. So just be cautious of the tone that you use.

Right.

And the environment that you're having those conversations. And that's a good kind of skill to practice as we're speaking about batting cages and things like that. Like, I would practice with my managers how to have those kinds of conversations. So happy to follow up with you on that. I want to kind of pull us out of this for a second, though, Richard. I want to move to Galen here. We'll start with. You want to talk a little bit about the coaching stack, the sales tech stack versus the coaching stack, and are these things the same? Are they different? How is the sales stack evolving into more of a coaching stack? And how should an individual contributor think about using these tools to their greatest potential?

A lot of questions and a question, but let's start on one end of this. So coaching stack and tech stack, one way is to look at it. How will I be able to be better at my role? What do I need like a product in order to do my job better? That's what the tech stack is. The other piece is, is how do I enable myself or how do I enable my team to get to results and the desired outcome? And that's the enablement piece. How do I coach people on how to use this? Like last week I was talking to a CRO at cyber security company and he was mentioning to me then, this wasn't even a sales call. This was just like a networking opportunity for me to talk with this guy. And so he told me some of the challenges that they have within their company, which is to enable to make sure that their sales Reps are using all of the tech stacks that they have available to them. It's underutilized at this point. They're not using that to its full potential. They're barely using some of them to help them do their jobs better. So now he's like, what do I do with this? How do I get my sales team to actually use the things that we've invested money into? We're spending money every month on these tools and they're not using it and therefore they're not able to get more leads into the company. As an example, or if they're spending money on a solution to help them coach themselves on their phone calls, like we talked about, something like Gong would be super helpful. But if they're not actually, if they are recording the calls but they're never listening back to them, they're never talking about what happened in those conversations, it's being underutilized and the company spending all this money on something that is barely used. And so that's like how I think about using tech stack and enabling people is obviously, to Scott's point earlier, it needs to come from the top. How do you help people do this? Certain companies at certain stages, they do have teams to help, like a sales enablement team that would help them do more of that. And other times they don't have that, depending on the stage of that company. Like, if it's a startup, they're not probably going to invest in the sales enablement team. So now you're relying on the sales reps to do the enablement themselves with the tech stack available to them. So I don't know if that answered some of the questions. At least I think I lost track of some of the other ones.

That's all right. Ashley, maybe you can speak a little bit more into, like, as a rep, what are some of the best practices of using these tools to make sure you're getting the most out?

Yeah, so, I mean, like I've mentioned, I'm relatively new. When I first started as an sdr, I had never used with some of these tools. And so, you know, I think the original training of, like, here's this technology that we use to help you do your job, right? Like, that's the bare minimum basics. Like, you have to use this to send your emails or to track this or do that, whatever, make calls, et cetera. Outside of that, it like, it comes from the top down at that point of like, here's everything we have for you to do your job well. After that, it's on me and like, my peers to.

Like, leverage them to their fullest capabilities. And like Galen said, some people aren't doing that. And that, like, I think you have to understand also that, like, just like with any new technology, whether it's in your role or in your personal life, there are early adopters and there are laggards. And so there are going to be some people who are just like, going to jump on the technology and be like, clicking around and figuring out the best ways to use it. Like, I mean, when the first time I went to one of Morgan Ingram's muffins with Morgan's on Saturdays and he was talking about how to best use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, my mind was blown. I was like, I didn't know any of that stuff. So, like, then I take that back and I share that with, with my peers and my team and some people are going to jump all over that. They're gonna be like, great, I'm gonna try that right now. Other people are going to be slowed on the uptake, if at all, and they're going to think, well, I'm already doing whatever it is I'm doing and so I'm going to just stick with that. Right. So again, understanding at the human level, like, not only how people like to communicate, but also how they function when it comes to utilizing these tools in this tech stack and this enablement stack. From the perspective of like, what's tech stack versus, like coaching stack, I think there is some crossover. Like we use Gong, for example, for call recordings. But like everyone said here, like sharing those calls and what you do afterwards with those calls is how you get the coaching piece. So it's like a. You've got the tech stack. Like, we utilize this to record the calls, but then on the flip side of that, we use that to watch the film back and get coaching. So there is some crossover there.

Neeraj, what can you add to this in terms of the sales stack versus the coaching stack? Maybe even more so from like a leadership perspective.

Yeah, I mean, with the coaching stack, I have the basics I've written down here. You know, use Zoom, use calendly, use Salesforce. This is the basic sales tax you're all going to be using, which is great. From a leadership perspective perspective, Gong is superb. Everybody I know uses gong very effectively. But sometimes I think the leader. It's very important to go old school as well. Now. I'm a big believer in technology. I love technology. I embrace it. But to be successful in sales and to be successful as a coach or Leader, you got to mix old school with new school. And so the new school is a gong and the old school is a human one to one interaction. And it's sitting down with somebody and saying, okay, I've just been on this call with you. What do you think went well in that call? Fantastic. Okay. And what do you think we can improve on? Fantastic. Okay. And what are your takeaways going to be? Because next time we do a call, I want to see these takeaways implemented and that way people get slowly better, better, better. When you want to make any member of staff better, it's not just massive jump. They're all baby steps. And I always do top three takeaways every single time because people can learn in threes and fives and people, we just spend every week with them. It's all about consistency. It's like being successful at anything. Be consistent, be consistent, be consistent. Do coaching every single week and you will start to see amazing results with your team. I was in all of you, Scott, when you said you were doing this three times, that I wrote this down, the big smiley face, that's all you can see in this page, a big smiley face. Thinking that is amazing because I've never thought about that. And that's why I'm kind of here today. Not just to share my knowledge but also to learn. And I love that you did coaching three times a day. That is brilliant. But that's what I'm saying. That's old school coaching and it's wonderful. And you mix that with new school coaching of gone, you got a winning combination.

Come on, Richard, you can do it.

There you go.

I know doing that because Scott, Scott went, you know, on, on Internet crappiness side of life. But I want to talk a little bit about what do you do when you don't have a stack. Right. Like you know, when you, your early stage, you've only got a couple of reps when sometimes your own executive leadership doesn't. They see sales as a cost expenditure and don't want to invest in those things. So I've certainly got an opinion on this. But I'd love to see, you know, Galem or Niraj or Ashley, you know, what would you recommend if people don't have a, don't have anything other than maybe a basic CRM like salesforce.

Yeah. Let me answer this real quick. You hack your way through it, meaning you have to find other options to get to the same end goal. So for me the end goal was I need to hear these conversations because I Like to be in the moment in my meetings and my discovery calls, in my presentations and demos, with my prospects. I like to be in the moment and not worry about taking all of the notes. Like, I just take the highlights from the conversations. And I want that in order to go back to hearing how that conversation went afterwards and to coach myself. And not only do I do this in my job as a sales rep, but I do that outside of this as well. So, for example, I have a podcast a few people in this room, like Scott has been on a Tim Rich was coming on. What I do is I have to obviously edit it. So I listen back to the conversations. I then listen back to that conversation again once it's finalized and it's edited in order to help me go back into that conversation with the people I've spoke with on the podcast. And same thing applies in sales. So what do you do when you don't have certain tools at hand? Like if you don't have gong, if you don't have any of those resources, you pick up your phone and you record the conversation on your phone or you record the meeting on Zoom or whatever place you have it. Like last week, I had to ask one of my prospects in a presentation because we weren't on my Zoom. He wanted to meet on teams. So we did. And I asked him to record the conversation for me. And I told him this would be really helpful if we could record this conversation, if you and your team consent to that and then you can share that with me. And now I'm putting him to be accountable. But he did, and he was willing to do that for me and for his team who are unable to attend the meeting. So those are some ways I would recommend is find other opportunities to get to the same end goal. So if your end goal is I want to be able to coach myself, I want to be able to share this with the rest of my team for the sake of continuing to educate other people that you work with of how to do things or how you can improve on things. So I record it on my phone, I record it on my laptop, and then I have to upload that to Google Drive. Yes. This is additional extra steps when you could have just had something to just do all that for. You upload it to the cloud and everyone have access to it. But if you are working for a startup, as an example, you don't always have those type of resources. So you, as the sales rep, need to find other ways to get there. Or you as a manager or a VP of sales or whatever your role is. Need to think a little bit outside of the box and. And be creative until you have that solution in place.

That's awesome. I love that. Galem. I, like, just had this vision in my head is like a runner doesn't need to have like the newest Nike Vapor Flies to go for a run. You just need your body and your feet. Like, just go run. So, yeah, hack it together, figure it out.

Yep.

Neeraj, what do you see as you coach a lot of companies? Like, what are you seeing when they don't necessarily have a coaching tool?

Well, everything Gilliam said, if you imagine it with a man's voice and an Irish accent, that's exactly what I would have said. I mean, it almost worked for Word. I think she said it beautifully and succinctly. You know, I work. It's really interesting, this industry. You're always wanting to work with the biggest names out there, but most of the companies I work with have 10 salespeople or less. And so a lot of those maybe not as well funded and they don't tend to have all singing, all dancing technology. And a lot of the time they don't even have software to record on, but they all have Zoom now. So recording on Zoom is how things are done. And when I work with these companies, I will spend a morning, again, one on one with a team member and we will listen to the Zoom recording. And just to be clear, when you do call coaching or zoom recording coaching, you never listen to the entire call. It's quite rare you do that. What you do is you take the opening five minutes if. Because usually that's where people struggle the most, believe it or not. Or if someone's very good at opening, but they struggle in the middle, you focus in the middle, but you only take five or six minutes of the call or the Zoom call. And then like I said, you got to do the coaching that way. It's very old school. The only difference is you're using Zoom, but you're asking people, okay, what went well? You've got to start with the positive. How can we improve? Okay, what are your top three takeaways? This is one of the best friends you will ever have. When you have no money, okay, a notepad and a pen is very effective. And you keep looking at it and you make sure your staff are looking at it at the same time. It's important to let the staff know, you know, if you're lucky enough to work for a big company, talk to other people in the company who are successful. This is if you're a rep and find out what they're doing. That was some of the best advice I got. Find the most successful people, ask them what they're doing, and you'll find a lot of very similar habits. The one that surprised me most was how humble a lot of very successful people are. The ones who brag the most tend not to be the most successful, but also they are massive learners. And every Sales rep, every SDR, every AE, every single day needs to be learning at least 30 to 60 minutes a day. If not with a book, then with an audible or with a podcast or with a mixture of all three. But you got to be taking responsibility yourself. Don't just keep relying on your boss to do it, because a lot of the time the boss is going to be busy. A lot of the time towards the end of the quarter or the end of the year, you're not going to see your boss for a few days in a row sometimes. So as a sales rep, you've got to take a lot of responsibility. And that's why I love the idea of an accountability buddy. Somebody who will keep you accountable and support you and lift you higher every single time.

All right, let's. Let's go to some of our questions. Milo from Serbia.

Hold on.

Gotta unmute him. Scott.

Yeah, I got you guys. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing?

How's it going?

I have kids. I have kids running around, so they're just asking for my help. So that's what happens when you're working in the garden.

So a couple of things. So my question is that I was about to ask, in addition to the previous one, is how do you guys consider actually coaching up, meaning when you coach down? It's like we've been discussing coaching down from manager to rep, then we've talked about peer coaching, peer to peer. But let's say that you want to help a manager, a vp, a C level, understand some of the struggles, the pain points and what needs to happen in terms of the growth or whatever that's happening on a day to day basis. So I'm kind of curious what you guys think about that and how would you approach it. So that's one section. And I'll just quickly touch base on what Niraj and Gilliam said a little bit ago is I would strongly suggest if you guys are doing call reviews to let people do a group session, not just one on one. I will let peers talk to each other in terms of SDR level because they would be co as as you guys mentioned, coaching each other. And I think that's been great for us as a company as well. And we have a bunch of reps, but that's not the point right now. So anyway, yeah, I'll digress.

Agree.

Totally agree with the group session. Ashley, Galen, Neeraj, one of you want to take Milo's question?

Yeah, I love the concept of coaching up. And I mean, I'm actively doing it, so I think I've already said this before, but, like, communicating how you like to give and receive feedback and then like, being just really transparent about what you need in order to find success in your role. And then if you don't know that, being transparent about knowing that, you don't know. Because at the end of the day, for me, I know, like, I'm super excited that, that I'm like, hitting my numbers. That's awesome for me personally. But even bigger than that, it, like, makes my manager look good too. Right? She's responsible for the newer AES on our team. When we perform well, it makes her look good to the people above her. And, like, that's fulfilling for me as well. And so in order to do that, in order for us to work well together, she has to know how I communicate, how I work, and if it's, you know, I do better with, like, early morning feedback sessions, great, then let's schedule early morning. Or if it's, I, like, direct feedback immediately. As soon as something happens, come to me right away and let me know. Don't wait till the next day. Like, that's a bummer. Cool. She knows that now or when we're, like, listening to calls back, like, I go to her and say, this part I felt really confident at. This part I felt total shite at. So, like, let's focus on that, right? Like, I give her the direction of where to focus. That way she's not like, throwing things against the wall trying to figure out how do I. What do I do with Ashley today in our one on one or how do I do this? Or, like, I'm coming with an agenda and I have no idea if it's what she needs or wants or anything like that. And then I saw Jordana had a comment about hiring for coachability and yes, yes, yes, 1,000%, yes. I could talk all day about that. But, like, the willingness to receive feedback and hiring for that is just like, hands down. Totally agree.

Can I add something to the communication piece? Because this is a big one. When it comes to managing up. There are many ways to communicate with people. And to Ashley's points and other people's points. Early in this conversation we talk about that. How, how do you best communicate and just having that conversation. Sometimes you need to have uncomfortable conversations, et cetera. But something that worked really well for me that my VP gave me feedback on was I started to send him videos. I used Vidyard, which happens to be one of the sponsors today, but I used Vidyard every week to send him a short video of say here's how my week went last, last week. Here are some things that I'm following up on. Last week we talked about 1, 2, 3 things that were really important to you and here's how I can help you and just communicating through video. And it was like a five minute video or less, just talking through certain points to follow up on and then what we're looking forward to to our next one to one. So he had some action points as well for that conversation if that was something I had to bring to the table for him. So using different tools and different ways to communicate with your manager is another way to manage up and understanding what will work. You can ask directly how would you like me to communicate with you? And then you can also, in addition to that, try different avenues. You could try a video. I've also sent voice messages and again my VP came back and said, you know what, I've never sent a voice message to someone. You're the first person I've never used video to communicate, but this is the first time and I really like it. And so find opportunities to communicate with the people around you. If that's your boss, if that's your other coworkers, whoever is on the team, the best ways that they would like to receive that.

Scott, two times. There you go.

Ronnie, you did good.

All right, going to Niraj, jump in on this one about coaching up. And then we're going to go to Tiffany and I believe Donald before we, before we jump out of here. But Neeraj, I know you had something quick to say about coaching up.

Whenever you coach up, think very carefully about the language of the person you're speaking to. So the first time I ever asked a board member for a favor, it was an HR director. And we talked about profit and loss and she didn't give me what I wanted. And I told my boss and he says, look, you got to speak the person's language. HR directors don't care about profit and loss. They care about staff well being. And it was a kind of a golden moment for me. And so when I speak to financial directors, I speak about profit and loss. When I speak to CEOs, I speak about vision, I speak about market share. You know, when you speak to marketing people, I speak to them about their individual roi. So always be very aware of the fact when you're speaking to somebody higher up the chain than you, what language do they like to use? Because profit and loss is perfect for financial director, not hr. You know, vision and market share is perfect for CEO. Definitely not for a marketing person. So always be very aware of that. But what Gilliam and Ashley said, totally agree on managing up.

That's great. Tiffany, I know you had a really solid question you want to jump in and ask.

Yeah. So I am curious to build on the idea that Ashley had about open gyms and then wanting specifically to know about getting more reps in and speaking to Jordana about that safe space. So how do you encourage that practice time? Because I know I have been in sales and even though you're supposed to be role playing, people are having chit chats about their weekend. And so how do you get those reps in and how do you ensure that that practice is deliberate and is incorporating that feedback loop so you have the outcomes right? Like practicing it the wrong way is not going to give you the outcome that is going to be what you want.

It's a great question.

It's not going to be perfect every time. There are going to be those people who are off having a conversation about their awesome weekend. I'm not mad about that. That means they're building rapport with each other and they're bonding in the team. And like sales is, you know, often thought of as a lone wolf thing. So if we can build the team rapport, I'm happy about that. But you're right, like practicing the wrong way or not getting the reps in isn't really productive either.

And I think that just comes down to that open communication.

Kind of. I mean, I look at it like from the perspective of the actual like trapeze open gym that I went to. Right. The coach is walking around, he's making sure no one's gonna fall on their head and hurt themselves and kind of guiding here and there. So like just being there to.

Kind of help be those like bumpers, right. And bowling, whatever, those like guardrail things. We also make sure we have more tenured reps as well as newer junior reps, you know, in the same room. So there's some, some guidance there in that peer practice. And then just the continued feedback of like this is the purpose, this is the reason why we're here. Is so like, okay, you tried that. Objection. Handle. Okay, this is. Now do it again. Okay, now do it again. And you know, the person you're role playing with needs to be more difficult or needs to be a different Persona or whatever. Like, then do it again. Right. Do it until it feels just like muscle memory. You don't even have to think about it.

And that's the purpose, that's the goal. So like just continuing to reiterate why we're here, why we're doing it and what the goals are.

Yeah. And then go from there. No, thank you.

And I think the asynchronous part about the Vidyard that you mentioned, Galen, was important too. So, you know, looking at ways to make it asynchronous in that communication for the practice too is exciting to me. Me.

Thanks.

Awesome. Donald, I know you also had a question you wanted to bring in.

Yeah, thanks, Richard. Scott, I wanted to go back to your idea of the opt in. I love your idea of us taking accountability as individual sellers to get the time we need. But the question I had was around managing, balancing that with the role of the manager to say, hey, there's somebody with a performance challenge or maybe they're personally challenged, things are falling off and encouraging them to take more accountability, responsibility to opt in. I agree with your comment in there that compassion can combine with accountability, but I just wonder how you recommend managers kind of do that two way street piece of it. Because we can't just let them opt out and fail, right?

No, I think when you have the conversations with them.

You frame it in data and reality, which is like, hey, Donald, here's the situation, here's where you're at with your numbers, here's where you're at with your pipeline. I looked at, I'm looking at the attendance for all of our kind of optional trainings. It doesn't look like you've been able to be there for any of those. You know, what's, what's the story there? What can I do to best support you and help you turn this thing around? What do you need? What are you willing to do to go above and beyond what blockers are in the way that I can remove? What things can I facilitate if I'm not, you know, currently giving you training options that work for you? Right. And that way I think the onus goes back onto the rep of like, okay, this person, this team, this leader is doing literally everything that they can or expressing that they're willing to do everything they can to make me succeed. And some people need that little push and extra encouragement to seize and take advantage of those opportunities. And those people, you know, to Derek's point earlier, those people, I'll put the time in and suggest my managers put the time into. Those people, the reps who kind of back away or shy away from that conversation and don't follow up, they've already kind of made their decision. So honestly, Donald, I would let them kind of sink or swim. I really would.

And I chalk you'd have that outreach.

Point to at least say, hey, the numbers are here. What's up? You know, give them the chance to opt in.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I hope that answered your question.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Awesome. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap up and give a quick shout out to Vidyard for helping us as well as gong IO, the game changer in conversational intelligence and sales and of course, our good friends at salesforce sales cloud. Tim, thanks for jumping in and supporting us as we were eagerly awaiting the results of Scott's.

Sorry to let everybody down.

It's all right now. You haven't let us down. Well, tomorrow you can let us down, you know, or I mean, listen, that.

Was the first time I talked to him. It's hard to one call close a six figure deal, you know, that's might be a two call close. Richard. That's not bad.

That's not bad for you, Scott. I know, I know. Thanks, everybody. We really appreciate you guys joining us today. Thanks to our sponsors, thanks to our panelists, I put everybody's LinkedIn into the chat, so feel free to go and connect with people. And next Tuesday I'm doing another training on hostage negotiation sales skills, which seems to be a very fun topic. I put that link in the chat as well. And if you haven't checked out Thursday night sales from Scott, please go check it out. I promise you it's one of the best events out there and we'll stick around for a very long time. So thanks again, everybody. We really appreciate your time.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.