Great sales coaching starts with great communication skills

Communication. A key skill to success.

As we all know, the way we communicate and develop a relationship with our prospects is absolutely crucial to our success.

And yet we don't know how to communicate. I didn't know how to communicate effectively until I made selling my passion.

We all think we know how to communicate. When I audit sales teams and ask them to measure their ability to communicate and develop a rapport with their prospects between 1 and 5, the mark they give themselves is invariably a 5, occasionally a 4. Personally, if I had to rate myself, I'd give myself a 3 at best, as there are so many things I know now that I need to keep improving (I'm also fairly critical of myself because of my DISC profile). And not so long ago, I would have given myself a generous 2. It's the classic Dunning-Krugger effect, where people with a poor aptitude for a task overestimate themselves, and people with a good knowledge of how to perform that task underestimate themselves.

There are many things that help us communicate better. Whether it's better understanding your own emotional profile, knowing the principles of transactional analysis and applying them, working on your formulations and repeating them using, for example, the daily journal, avoiding falling into the trap of the shift position and staying in the support position by practising active listening. The list goes on. In short, good communication is difficult.

And if communication is crucial in sales success, it is also crucial in the coaching of sales teams.

So how do we go about it? A bit of theory

A framework that is very important to understand in order to better coach the members of your sales team is that of transactional analysis (just as valid for customer and prospect conversations, it goes without saying). Without going into too much detail in this post, because the subject is absolutely endless, transactional analysis stipulates two important things:

1- That we have three states of ego within us, parent, adult and child. These are described in the diagram below. You can read details about these ego states on this link too. When we communicate, we send and receive information in one of these states. Parent state is either controlling or nurturing, child is adapted or free and the adult is purely rational, data driven. A real life example would be a question from one person: "What time is it?" This comes from an adult ego state because it is purely based on information. If the person asks responds with a phrase like "Buy yourself a watch", it's the critical parent ego state that's at play.

2- To be effective, communication between two individuals must avoid being crossed between two ego states. In the example above, an appropriate response from the respondant would be simply to give information, "it's 11.45". The two people are then communicating from adult to adult. But if the answer is as suggested above, then it's crossed and therefore ineffective.

Application in coaching and team management

In a coaching conversation between a sales manager and a sales person, the coaching manager has to communicate in two ego states. The nurturing parent and the adult. For example, during a coaching session, you should avoid being critical (critical parent), which would trigger the child state, either submissive or rebellious, in the coachee and therefore would not lead to any development that would benefit the sales person. It's also important to avoid being in a free child ego state, for example making jokes to try and keep a good atmosphere. I'm simplifying on purpose, but contact me if you'd like to discuss this in more detail.

Positioning yourself as a nurturing parent is essential when you're trying to develop an individual. As I mentioned earlier, the individual needs to step out of their comfort zone and adopt approaches and habits that are unfamiliar to them. It is therefore up to the manager to "surround" the person with understanding and "nurturing" communication. It's also important to bring your adult self to the table, focusing on the facts.

For example, specific situations that could have been improved, KPIs that are going to be put in place to measure progress, a personal development plan that is going to be documented to help the sales person, etc...