Ep14 Improve Sales Coaching Adoption & Joe Gibbs

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode #14

One of our listeners, Rachel, shared her companies view about sales management and the difficulty managers have in transitioning from being a top-performing rep to sales management. 

Sales managers have to live in two worlds, traditional “management skills” and also sales productivity contribution. Sales Enablement leaders looking to implement sales coaching need to be clear about their focus and intent. What can sales enablement leaders do to add value?  

Joe Gibbs won Super Bowls 3 different quarterbacks. How? He coached to a system, encouraging people to be themselves, and focusing on outcomes.

There are a lot of people talking about front-line sales managers and having them “go coach more.” As much as that’s been discussed, sales coaching hasn’t really taken off. 

The guys talk about:

– What is sales coaching – the difference between sales coaching activities and sales coaching programs

– Unleashing the value of coaching, by embracing the sales leadership perspective

– What are the attributes of successful coaching programs?

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Scott Santucci 00:01

Hi, team, this is a What is that? So, what is a What is what is that? So, what I’m trying to do is create some structure and curiosity around some servers, certain things and some concepts and explain them and help make them relatable, explain why and whatnot and provide some texture around what’s going on, what are some of the things we’ve got? They are super simple. The difficulty is there’s a learning curve to get to simple, and then a comfort factor about applying. And a lot of this has to do with ambiguity, and why we need to produce lots of things to make things accessible. So, I’m trying to what is that? What do you think about what is that? Is that the right title? What should I call this series? You tell me because this is for you, you got to give me feedback. Okay, so one of the things that I think we all understand and can appreciate is that there are many silos involved inside of business. And they create lots of friction, which cancel each other out. And there is a need for Orchestration. I’m hopeful that casting you guys and in specific roles, what’s fascinating is behaving in silos instead of operating and roles. What is that? What that is, is a massive amount of muscle memory that we have to create tools out visualize, that holds us in silos, we are prisoners of silos. And we think that we think we say, examples or symptoms of thinking in a silo. I don’t know what marketing’s doing. You don’t need to know what marketing is doing if you’re doing your role in our operating model. Or if you need to know column but ask them. There’s nothing preventing anybody from doing that. Other examples of being in silos, I mean topics, you can generate your own topics, you you have your own, your job is to figure out how to make your role or the span of things that you can contribute to fit. And what we’re all experiencing is this, either a lack of an operating model, or let you know, lack of clarity. And what we need to be able to recognize is all these things are VOCA related. We were clearly not prepared for the speed of V. We continue to use words like business outcomes, yet we haven’t defined what makes business language versus nonbusiness language. So, we haven’t made that tangible for other people. So, we’re going to continue to struggle in uncertainty. So, we have uncertainty. Complexity is what’s interesting is what makes something simple for one person is complex for something else. It feels complex learning something simple. So, there’s a lot of paradox. If you look at the if you study complex systems theory, one of the things that is associated with complexity is paradoxes. Don’t assume things are conflicting. Question it because it’s probably complexity. And then finally, of course, ambiguity. Why do we have to have lots of slides because ambiguity is the thing that people hate the most, particularly in business, they can’t stand it, they can accept the speed. People have recognized the complexity, that’s something that people have tools over. It’s the total fuzziness, and fog of ambiguity. And unfortunately, ambiguity is why there are so many friction points on the left. And, you know, the only way to overcome ambiguity is to create things to make things less and less foggy and to have patience as as we bring it along. But that’s ultimately a key element of Orchestration. Now, one of the things around Orchestration is that Orchestration to Orchestrate across many departments requires an operating model. So not only do you need to be able to orchestrate yourself, but you have to orchestrate orchestrators. So, each of the different cogs have to be orchestration engines and upon themselves that have to tie together to overall orchestration. That’s the role of being a catalyst. And that means there are rules that the other cogs have to follow. When those cogs don’t follow those rules, they spin off out of control. Now, some of the cogs want to know how they fit into everything else. And what happens is too much time gets spent talking about the operating model and the philosophy of things and not doing so there’s this balancing act that we need to learn how to establish and that clients are going to need you’d have to just establish the phenomenon that we are experiencing happens inside our clients. There is a reason we’re organized. I’m going to repeat this. Stay in your roles and question your roles and why you’re organized. Don’t try to keep coming up with reasons to not be in your roles. The reason why is we have to simulate our clients’ experiences, it’s the experience stupid to be able to appreciate what an operating model is. So, we can at least have the bedside manner to talk them through it. While we create the space to create the actual physical artifacts, we can’t say things like muscle memory, that’s not a tangible, concrete thing. And just because we’ve all experienced, and we use words, that means stuff to us, they don’t have meaning to other people. So here are some examples of operating models. This is from IBM. I’m not going to talk to it. I’m just going to make observations. Here’s one around the it operating model. Hint, notice the word capabilities over here, capability service, rigid service management on activities across functions. What its capabilities mean, here. Over here, let’s zoom in on here. This is from Bain McKinsey. Look, what they’re saying is the operating model is the gap between strategy and execution. Hopefully, you have seen often that we’ve talked about the blend between strategy and execution, what is the organizational thing that makes it happen? It’s an operating model. But operating models are too new for people, or too conceptual, too theoretical, they’re architecture driven. So, I’ve learned that particularly in the sales and marketing space, where the muscle memory that we have, there is too much activity. So, we have the balancing act, right? It seems contradictory. On the one hand, we’re not doing enough, but yet we’re criticizing people for doing activity without thinking. But we’re thinking too much that we’ve got analysis, paralysis and not producing, then when we produce, it’s not the right thing. So, all these different seemingly conflicting variables are experienced, even when you go try to introduce an operating model. Operating models are the key to success for any digital transformation, because what operating models do is cut between strategy and execution. And one of the things that we’re going to talk about is, operating models have had their heyday in shared services organizations that are very functional, oriented, like legal, but they are introducing them breaks down because you don’t have the vocabulary of only legal or the vocabulary of only human resources. What you’re doing is you’re cross pollinating across the vocabulary between sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and this English-to-English translation problem kicks in that English-to-English translation problem is huge, and colossally huge, and we need to do a whole lot more work of written bringing it to fruition and making it concrete. Now, that’s not the purpose of this video, it’s just sort of set up things, criteria for success, if you will.

Scott Santucci 08:14

But what is a business within a business? Why did I share all those other things? What I’ve learned is the easiest way to get people to think about a business within a business is to get them to think about their their function, as a company within a company, and what company are you? We use that metaphor in the, in the research, we have a lot of material to make this really, really concrete, I mean a ton of material, all we need to do is force ourselves to apply it, all that material and make it more concrete and connect the dots with what we’re actually experiencing ourselves. What are we experiencing ourselves? It requires a lot of discipline just to stay super focused and say so what are we? What kind of entity is a sales enablement function? What kind of entity? What kind of service are we providing is growth enablement? What kind of slide am I producing? What is my role? How do I add value? The basic questions have to get answered. And that clarity allows you to operate. So, the business within a business construct is very simple. It’s been developed over years and years and years. And it’s very simple, but it’s basically saying, who are your investors? Just like any other business, a business has investors, right? Then a company has its infrastructure. So, if your ups part of your infrastructure, your trucks, your fleets, the computing infrastructure, the buildings, physical infrastructure, all of that is infrastructure. And then in between, they have business processes a business has processes, where they convert inputs into outputs. And in between is where value is created. That’s where value is created. That is how it works at its most simplistic way. So, the, the arrow represents a business process, which you can define at any altitude level that you want the conversion of inputs to outputs this conversion process. The more you do this, the more valuable you are. And it rests on top of infrastructure of which investors are paying for. So, investors are paying for this infrastructure. And what they really want are people who convert inputs to outputs valuable and add value. Okay, so now let’s frame this out through the lens of Jen. So, Jen, is trying to figure out how she’s adding value we can comment with, with subjectivity that she’s adding value, but we don’t have any objective measures to communicate if she’s adding value or not. And that creates ambiguity. And any kind of ambiguity creates anxiety. What we have to do is police that place that out, so the way that we help that we’re helping guide her on the organizational part. The other thing that she’s got is I’ve got she’s got a lot of people working for her, how are they contributing value? I hopefully, hopefully we all are experiencing probably the same dilemma, at least can experience on the on the hand of her own team. What how do we contribute? Everybody wants to add value. But do we know how all the piece parts fit together? Are we just blurting in and not understanding the situation, what the operating model or the business within a business construct does is allows us to lay out all the variables to start thinking through how the dots get connected? And in any business, that process there’s going to be that group that converts the supply? You know, the suppliers are the input sources of input in a business. So, the suppliers have a manufacturing process might be the chemicals and all that other stuff, how it gets mixed together into something valuable, like maybe, maybe paint, and then it gets out to customers, it gets distributed customers. So, these that those are all clear processes in the digital world, what this process looks like we need to map out, it just isn’t mapped out in a knowledge worker way. But we have the ability to say, Okay, let’s put a box. And every one of these boxes represents a scope. And so, for Jen to continue to add value. So that’s, that’s her right here. She’s gonna need investors, she gets funding from something, there is an expectation associated with the money that she gets, we’re giving you money to do what in return, we get what.

Scott Santucci 13:07

So, think about the value proposition that we’re trying to work on. Hi, I’m Jan, I want you to give me more money, that’s investors. In return, I’m going to give you less stuff, you’re not paying for a whole bunch of punchless things. As a result, you get better return. That’s a really hard business proposition. Where inside the world, have you experienced somebody selling you that? Wherever you bought that before? So, it’s hard to empathize. It’s easy to conceptualize. It’s hard to empathize. And this is why we have to do a lot better job of making things tangible. And the way we make things tangible is through slides, but the slides must be situationally aware, which means empathetic, we have to walk in the shoes. In your case, you need to walk in the shoes of me. Are you asking questions about what I’m experiencing? Your client isn’t Jen, I am your client. Look how hard it is to get your head around anybody’s head around who customers are. I’m going to flesh this out more. And there are many podcasts that we’ve got Brian and I have done to help flesh this out. But here’s, here’s the scope. Okay, so this is Jen in the middle. She’s got her enablement operations team, we have to figure out what needs to go in scope to be able to deliver the most value. So, like any business, what what’s the first thing you think about as any business while the business is what services that you offer? So, what services does Jen offer? Well, before we start thinking about the services, we could say, well, she does kickoff that’s an activity. She has sales training. Is that a service? Is sales training a service, or is it an activity? How wired are people to just doing activities? And how immediately do we want to blurt that out? So, if we want to, if we want to go through the service part, like any business, you want to be able to establish the expectations with your investors. And the most basic form that businesses do is step number one, they write a mission and charter statement, you know, why do you exist? You need to write that out and flesh that out in order to get investors. Right. So, what does that look like? Well, then the next thing is you need to establish an executive committee, or a board of directors or some group of people in Jen’s case, so the mission and charter statement is something that we need to work on, and we’re going to fine tune. But she but it’s pretty easy to identify who’s paying, what budgets are, who are paying for her services. So, what that does is allows her to start connecting the dots between services versus expectations of people who aren’t paying for something. This gets it this kind of decision making or discipline, as a word, again, helps create the foundation so that she can push back, it provides the foundation. So, who where are all of the sources of money? And then maybe there’s other departments that she wants to include that she can stitch together to provide other services? Well, who would be those wallet owners? And how do you make the argument to move some budget resources to your budget resources? Okay, so then what you would need to be able to do is say, Okay, well, the quid pro quo, if this is the budget that I’ve got, and this is the things that I want to do, and these are the people involved, how will you evaluate my success? What does success look like? What are my success indicators? Are they measurable or not? Are they subjective? Or not? How do you create that kind of construct? So as a frame of reference, the value equation is a success indicator of a valuable conversation. In other words, a service that a customer that a salesperson gives to a customer, okay, now, given that, given that basic, hopefully, these these building blocks are in place, and by the way, hopefully, you guys are following here, there’s a ton of detail on each one, and we establish or build up the details from there. Okay, so then what you would need to do is, if you want to run this overall department of services with success indicators, mission charter, you’re gonna have to have a vision of what you’re doing. And this is a big gap that a lot of people have coming up with a vision. So, for example, if you are an architect, what’s your vision of how what services you’re providing? To me, your executive committee of one, your suppliers would be detangler, clarity, etc. Every what success indicators have you co created to create? Alright.

Scott Santucci 18:16

So, these are the this is sort of structure. And this is where things start, you get to start really thinking and being thoughtful, how am I going to connect the dots? What is my responsibility? What is my accountability? accountability is a huge factor in making an operating model work. And in businesses where we’re so associated with my value is on what I produce, rather than my value is what I enable, then it gets it gets really fuzzy. This is why it’s incredibly important to have a consistent cadence, about establishing what your success indicators are. and managing expectations, talking through expectations. The only way that you’re going to do it is just talking it through. So that’s why you create a a feedback loop based on these indicators. Okay, now, it’s likely that you’re not going to have a one services company, you’re going to have to have a portfolio. So, we have a portfolio of services that we offer, we offer clarity services, detangling, services, architect services, capability, services, concept or services. So, we’re, my ability to manage the expectations of the whole part, if I’m Gen is dictated by the service portfolio and the vision that my of how well people are orchestrating in those in those groups. We have to be able to empathize with that, because we’re going to have to be able to guide you through that because for Jen to be able to execute on some of the things that we’re doing. She’s gonna have to do this too. So, this is why things become self fulfilling prophecies if we don’t produce them. We don’t, aren’t able to capitalize on the opportunities, we don’t have to solve the problems, we just have to make slides and make things more and more clear. And make sure that what we’re doing is we’re interacting and engaging, engaging, engaging, engaging, not just doing and assuming. So, these are all things that are common challenges associated with an operating model. But using a business within a business model helps illuminate this stuff and gives guidance of what we should be doing. And what should be expected of somebody who’s running a service portfolio, for example, okay. I did this wrong. Shoot, I did this in order, or so. Here’s the service portfolio. The next thing that you’re going to need to be able to do, or Jen’s gonna need to do is, how does she steward How is she a good steward of her company’s resources? How does the executive committee know she’s investing the money the right way? And doing the right things? How is she also governing all of the different service portfolio leads to make sure they’re driving towards the result, the end result, the outcome that’s expected of Jen, rather than the deliverables that they know how to do the things that they always know how to do. So, this stewardship, this governance, this, are you driving accountability is a huge gap, huge gap. And one of the things is that we should be able to feel it ourselves. And think about how we establish order. What does good stewardship look like? How do you establish that order? How do you decide when to replace and when not to replace? How do we how do you evaluate talent? How do you go about doing this when you realize you’re doing something new? And how do you build the muscle memory, when people just don’t want to go through whatever your process is? Or how do you? How do you get people trained up lots of questions when you convert from one model to the next, around stewardship and governance? And these are all things hopefully, we can all experience ourselves based on or empathize with ourselves based on our experiences. Now, the other thing about stewardship is, how do you manage your suppliers. So, one of the things that’s very common today in the current state siloed world, is to throw your hands up, and either say the process doesn’t work. Or I need X, Y, and Z for marketing. And until those things get resolved, I can’t do my part. But unfortunately, that the company still expects you to produce. So, it’ll hold your hands up that way doesn’t work. And those are all situations that we’re gonna run into in spades at Mimecast. Guys, I believe, we just have to get aware. And we have to put order in place. And we have to recognize that we have to be more accountable.

Scott Santucci 23:13

And we have to take notes of what going through this experiences, so that we can guide Jen of what to look for and how long it’s going to take if she reorganizes around the service portfolios, how long it’s going to take, what is the prototype stage look like? What tangibly happens in the limited production run? Hopefully, you’ve seen we are our team skips directly to want to scale things. And it’s not working. Why? Because we haven’t nailed what a prototype is. We haven’t built prototypes ourselves. We’re not building prototypes as a team together. And then we’re not reflecting on Hmm, how do we make this more repeatable? How do we build order like that to organize those things, so that we can then scale, we can’t just throw bodies at it, or hire different people or assume that it’s a skill set, or make assumptions that this is consulting or not consulting, because what we’re doing is not consulting, it’s not pure consulting? So, we have to be really careful about assumptions that we’re making and making sure we’re really paying attention to how digital works. And digital works in a completely different way than what we expect. It’s not analog. So, this is the first thing you’ve got to be able to do is figure out who your suppliers are, and what this looks like. Pretty simple. Then you have to figure out so what is valuable that I’m providing to my customers, and who actually are my customers. So, one of the things that’s that we’ve noticed is sometimes we’re building things for Eli. Sometimes we’re building things for individual salespeople. Sometimes we’re building things for Jen rarely are people building things for me. I am your customer, I am your customer, I am your customer. So that phenomenon that we just described of how quick it is for us, for us as individuals who’ve all talked this through. And we are, we know, this is what we’re selling to the client, look how difficult it is for us. Imagine how difficult that is for a client. And what we need to do to make things more clear. And the way that we make things more clear is to make slides like this that would have specific talk tracks to them. The talk tracks to the slide here, hopefully you can articulate I have points and points and points. The way that I arrived at it is to make many observations of what commonly happens, hopefully nothing that you’ve seen, you’re seeing Look, I’m making clear observations, I have specific examples that fit into specific buckets so they can put context around it. That’s what we’re doing here. And these are the same kinds of things that you need to do your value add isn’t in the solutioning part, the value add is organizing, because if you organize guess what the solution will come to life and then you’ll have a way to talk through it. And you know, add value. So, the value adding process starts with making inventory. But ultimately, it’s going through and using this as a tool or a tool like this, maybe one that you develop yourself and we can share what all of our individual operating models of how we’re creating situational awareness, then you’re going to need to be able to say how do I measure results? So, if if we’ve gotten this figured out? And we do this, how do we measure results? And part of the thing that you have to figure out is that in some cases detangler is a supplier to catalyst.

Scott Santucci 26:55

So detangler might be here and I might I’m going to be able to push back and say, No, I don’t want this, I don’t want that. Detangler can get frustrated about it, or detangler can go Hmm, how do I meet him where he needs? Why does he need that, etc. In some cases, I am going to be the supplier to detangler. It’s all based on the situation and what’s the what’s the objective that we’re looking to do, you have to be aware and have that kind of situational awareness at all times. This is the reality of digital. Okay. So now the the other thing that Jen is gonna have to do is Jen’s gonna have to mount this new engine, this new operating engine, on top of an infrastructure that has policies. So, what’s interesting about it is I’ve published are published, I wouldn’t say published, we didn’t write, write these up, and that’s on me. But for me, the most minimum amount of policies are the rules of engagement, and the principles, and I try to have as few policies as possible. But what’s interesting is, a lot of people want more policies, and or infer policies that that don’t that don’t exist, it’s a very interesting phenomenon. Some people operate better without a lot of rules. Some people operate with no rules. So, there are policies that that happen. What’s very fascinating it with inside a company, is because they don’t go back and retroactively. Eliminate policies. So that’s probably something I could do a better job of, or we could do a better job of illuminating what the policies are. You have multiple policies that people operate on. Here’s an example, the 2019 growth plan versus the 2020 growth plan. If both are available on SharePoint, and those aren’t managed in version controlled, if I read both of those, they’re coming from an authoritative source, which policy do I follow? So, these things become huge issues. When you think about rule, the policies that you ask salespeople to follow. So, rules of engagement is his example here. Now, there’s another set of classifications that are regulation. So, regulation might be well, this is the terms of our contract, we have to hit these things that might be regulations for us. Just do these things, don’t do other things. Or you can do other things, but just make sure they don’t violate these things. But in companies like a QB up, there are a lot of regulations with revenue recognition. There’s regulations about content because of legal policies that people have set up or that become regulations. So, there are certain things that are guidelines and messages, and you know, things that are conflicting under policies, and then there are regulations that companies just have to follow and what happens His people over invest in details and details and regulations and details and details and policies. And it becomes really hard to sort those out. These things all become constraints with which Jen has to manage in terms of routine. And then finally, technology is part of infrastructure as well, we could also put facilities in here too. So, there are other things, other variables that we could put into infrastructure. But for agenda, agenda thrive, she’s got to think through all of these things. For us to thrive, we have to think through all of these things. I’ve noticed that we take technology for granted or we make changes and don’t include people or things like that. We, we don’t have a lot of regulations or policies and the like, and for whatever reason, we haven’t created order. And that’s what we’re trying to establish when I say discipline or follow the process. But we need to document that more. So, it’s easier to follow, but not documented so heavily that it’s impossible to fall into confusing. These are all variables that our clients are going to go through to. So, the prototype stage is how do we build an idea, a tangible example that yes, it’s possible to sell complex things in a digital way, by a platform? Yes, that’s possible. And then now the second stage that we want to give start gearing up for would be think of all the things that need to happen in order to figure out the stuff. How do we find the right set of people to bring along and bring one batch through and make sure they get it, then learn from that batch, and then replay it back? How will we learn to make things repeatable? We have to learn from doing.

Scott Santucci 31:53

And how, so this is what our opportunity is with it, where we are with a caveat right now, how do we learn from doing? What tools do you use? If this is unclear, I need you to question me, and help us pull out what tools are required? And what tools are required balancing the need from are we building infrastructure? Or are we producing valuable results, we have to think through these these things of how we’re using our time. And also recognizing this is hard. So that means we got to be lacs nimble, more flexible and a lot more curious with each other. These are all of the different variables, these are examples of piece parts, what we’ll go through at another time, I’m looking forward to your feedback, we’re gonna run through what this looks like. This is a different way to, you know, to click down and, and organize thoughts or whatever. So that’s a sort of details of operating a relationship rhythm. Okay, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. I would love you guys to be able to talk through how to how does this relate to you? How would you build your own operating model? If you were capability co architect co detangler. Co? And why don’t you treat it like if you’re running your own business? In your own business? Would you talk to your customers about what’s valuable? Yes, I hope so. When you’d be curious and interview them? Why don’t you interview who you think your customers are? Just inside our own little team? Think about it. Architecture should be your primary. Who is your customer? Did Would you agree? Does everybody agree? And I think if we can just have some simpler conversations around that and have this as a bearing point. This will help us operate in a more more repeatable way and allows us to establish better expectations. My expectations are that you’re smart. play the role of your be your role and flush it into it. Instead of being thinking your role is a job title. Your role is an executive role. How would you How would you build that out? How would you? What is your role in the overall design of everything that we’re doing? How can I make the vision of what we’re doing a lot more clear and concrete? These are common challenges that that we’re we’re dealing with, I need your help. I need your help to make the operating model concrete. Because it’s clear the early returns of our pilot are resonating extremely well with our investors or Gen Z investors so we can get more money. How much more money boatloads more money if we’re able to provide discipline and order and get outside of thinking about ourselves as individuals and more as a team. And using an operating model construct. This might be one area to help. I don’t want a solution. I want to give this as an idea. Why don’t we try leveraging this or tweaking? How about we tweak this? tweak this model ourselves? And how can we use the Orchestration orb which is new? How can we update this with the information that we’ve got? How can we update this based on things that we know? How can we update this by the analysis of say the sales enablement society letter to members? Where does that fit in? How does How is that an expression of doing this? Interesting, interesting things. Let’s be curious. Thank you.