Reverse Engineered Coaching: Part 2
Welcome to Reverse Engineered Coaching, part 2.
I was talking to a good friend of mine, Mike Carroll, who's a great sales expert nationwide and owner of Intelligent Conversations, and I was telling him of this recent discovery. We call them Coaching Badges, and a badge is where you complete a conversation. From a linear standpoint, the first step is to train people on a good coaching methodology, then we practice that conversation, and then we send them out in the field to implement. After that point, we wonder if they are coaching.
Many companies will request for someone to sit in on their team's meetings in the field and observe. I think we have to be very careful with that, since someone observing you tends to impact whether or not they are having authentic conversations. I'll be candid: I have no problem role playing in front of a group. I've been doing this 32 years. If someone wants to observe me, I'm not uncomfortable with it. Yet I'll be the first to admit someone observing you does change the dynamic in those conversations.
I once had someone ask me if he could sit on on a few sessions while I coached. I said sure, and in the first coaching session I had where he was just supposed to observe, he interjected. I ended up having to kick him out of the room because it wasn't fair to the person that I was coaching. We weren't there for his benefit, we were there for the person being coached's benefit. So it is a dynamic shift. My friend Mike and I were exchanging some messages about this methodology, about Reverse Engineered Coaching, detailing what do we want to know.
I had asked a friend in sales when he goes out and has things that he wants to know about his prospects or customers, what specifically does he need to know in terms of the information to collect? This is exactly what he said:
"What I try to do when I meet with prospects is let them know that they can trust me."
I pushed for more, specifically the information he needed to know to help a client. And he replied, "It depends."
In actuality, it doesn't. It doesn't depend on the person. He asked me what information I asked for from my prospects and clients. I gave him the same answer I ask all my clients:
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Do you have a coaching program?
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How are you measuring it?
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How often are you practicing coaching?
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Do you have ratings of your leaders who are coaching?
My sales friend looked at me and said, "Wow, that's really interesting. I've never thought of it this way."
Sales and coaching parallel each other. They run side by side.
Our objective when we're coaching someone for career development is to find out what someone wants to do with their career. In terms of a motivation conversation, don't we want to find out what specifically motivates them and what are the milestones they see they need to achieve to do that?
If we're coaching someone to handle sales objections, don't we want to know:
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What sales objections you got?
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What the next steps are and how you handled them?
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What's your comfort level with those objections?
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What do you perceive the prospect's reaction to your reaction on those objections to be?
What I think we have to do is itemize what we need to know and then prompt people to take time to develop questions to get that information.
Reverse engineered coaching reverses things, outlining all the information we need to know, and then to craft some really good coaching questions to get there and know that information. What we've been doing is saying here are some great coaching questions, go apply them. We kind of wonder if it's working.
Welcome to Reverse Engineered Coaching, part two.
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