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Coaching Themselves Out

“Coaching members out.” I heard this phrase a few months ago as a euphemism for firing or terminating. I thought it was a good way of sharing how leadership and managers ensure smooth transitions out of a company, beyond just “getting rid of an employee”.
Then, I heard a twist to the phrase – “coaching themselves out”. In this case, it’s the member of an organization who is removing him/ herself by subtle environmental/ cultural cues. This doesn’t necessarily mean a company is ostracizing a team member, or otherwise explicitly motivating a team member to leave. That’s bad.
I heard this phrase from a company who was recently voted as one of the best companies to work for. Folks here coach themselves out because they feel they are the “wrong fit”. Their values, ambitions, and the like do not align with that of the company’s.
The company is enthusiastic about living out the mission and values. Here, team members are encouraged to speak up to other team members when they are not living up to the mission and values.
Being so vocal and explicit about mission and values entrenches folks who believe and follow the prerogative. On the other hand, such explicit faith means those who do not align eventually leave on their own accord. Culture begets culture.

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Book Review: You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar

In keeping with my theme of sales books this year, I read David Sandler’s You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. Sandler is also the founder of the sales training company with hundreds of franchise locations across the world – Sandler Sales Institute.
I was recommended this book from a former Sandler sales trainer as one of the preeminent books on sales like SPIN Selling and The Challenger Sale. It was one of the first books to break down the complex sales process, and was written to heavily qualify sales opportunities. The gist, like SPIN, was to get the prospect to qualify themselves and want to buy vs. the sales rep selling.
I admit this wasn’t my favorite sales book. It wouldn’t be in my top “self-help” books. However, I think I need to re-read the book to better understand the pieces of the book. As it stands, I was thrown off by the many self-promotions of the book and its clear lead for the Sandler Training courses.
All that being said, here were my top take-aways:
  • Sandler goes into depth and length into teaching the reader to separate the Identity and Role of a person (I/R). Sandler recognizes the difficulty of sales and “close” rates such that results can be de-motivating. He wants readers to recognize that sales not who a person is – trying to separate who someone is with what needs to be done. Thus, sales can be coached and improved.
  • Monkey’s fist is a sales concept borrowed from marine life – instead of tossing a heavy rope to tie up a boat, shipmen will toss over a lighter “monkey’s fist” that is tied to the heavier rope. This allows a reciver on a dock to easily catch the fist and reel in the heavy rope. This concept is used in sales as a means to easy a prospect into a sale rather than going full bore into a sale.
  • Buyers buy when they feel OK. This can be counter to aspects of The Challenger Sale where a Challenger teaches/ challenges a prospect. In many ways, this can put prospects off. Sandler points out that buyers want to feel “OK”. If they don’t feel OK, then they will be defensive and not in a receptive position to listen to you.
  • Mitigate buyer’s remorse when a prospect may back out at the last second, or cancel an order shortly after buying. In this case, Sandler offers tips to slow down the sales cycle by offering a recap of what the buyer is looking for, how the product/ service enables the prospect, and confronting any “negative” feelings head-on. Sandler highlights the importance to follow up with prospects to make sure they want what is being bought. This is another area where reverse psychology can play a role making the buyer talk him/ herself into completing the buy and being happy with the decision.
  • Using an upfront contract throughout the sales cycle helps the prospect agree on nexdt steps prior to any step is truly taken. This enables prospects to more likely move forward with a sale – “advance”.

As I said, this was not one of my favorite sales books. It is indeed packed with good sales information. However, it was not the more engaging reads while the breadth of the book was a lot to absorb.

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Effective Coaching Habits: Building On Gong.io

On Tuesday, I talked about the importance of coaching – Coaches, Coaching, Coach. Today, I want to build on that with sales call coaching. It’s on my mind as we, as a company, start to leverage a new tool to get better visibility and analytics of our calls. I start with Gong.io’s 9 Data-Driven Call Coaching Habits of Effective Sales Leaders.
First, here are the nine habits:
  1. Coaching by “using” your team
  2. Invest in the “middle of the pack”
  3. Don’t water the garden with a firehose
  4. Establish a coaching cadence
  5. Meet for a team coaching session every Tuesday at 2PM
  6. Recorded calls > live shadowing
  7. Positive reinforcement
  8. Theme du jour
  9. Leverage technology

Of these, I want to point out habits 1, 3, 5, 6, and 8.
  • Coaching by “using” your team. Your team is your best asset to act and react for coaching. Using the team creates a collaborative environment. It enables the team members to coach each other. This creates a sustainable environment where the team acts as just that – a team.
  • Don’t water the garden with a firehose. Odd phrasing, admittedly. However, the habit is recommending focus on parts of the call, not the whole call. Trying to improve on too many facets is ineffective and usually ends up causing calls to degenerate.
  • Meet for a team coaching session every Tuesday at 2PM. If you don’t read the article linked above, know that this doesn’t mean to schedule on Tuesdays at 2PM. Instead, it’s an example of scheduling time on the calendar and making a regular cadence of it. Remember: you make time for the things that matter.
  • Recorded calls > live shadowing. Trying to coach in the middle of a call is good, but similar to garden watering above, sales professionals should be focused on the call. They should not try to adapt on-the-fly. Do the autopsy of the call when it’s over. Adapt for the next.
  • Theme du jour. Focusing energy and improving on skills requires repetition. Thus, it’s important to coach on a specific goal several times in succession. Don’t shift until the goal is effectively achieved or improved upon.

Sales coaching is paramount for our industry to improve and adapt to changing times. As technology makes outreach easier, sales skills will be the differentiator.

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Coaches, Coaching, Coach

My startup’s product gives companies automatic visibility –no added work or key entry from anyone— into their business relationships – everyone involved, the ongoing discussions, meetings occurred and upcoming, and more. We’re built on the premise that transparency yields greater sales results. This shouldn’t be too much of a shock when you consider how teams (sales teams, sports teams, etc.) frequently put communication as the cornerstone of team strategies.
Of course, visibility gives leaders and managers capacity to coach team members. Coaches review game film with players for coaching – pre-game or post. For our customers, it’s enlightening when leadership tout the coaching aspect of our product. For many, it’s a key one benefit they hadn’t thought of, but rises as just as powerful as their original buying intent.
I’ve always been a fan of coaching. Coaching is how players (in any role) get better (+ practice). It’s how C players become B players, B players to A players, and so on.
When was the last time you were coached? Why? Did you ask for it? Did you accept it? What was the outcome?
Heck, reviewing history, especially our “last game” (soccer game, sales call, etc.), enables us to coach ourselves. This was a great point I noticed after reading Inner Game of Tennis. Self-reflection –watching and listening to ourselves– is a fantastic way to coach ourselves.
For the most part, we want to be better versions of ourselves. Sometimes, that means trying harder. Sometimes, that means trying more often. Coaching by a peer, a leader, or ourselves gives us the chance to make whatever effort we use moreeffective.
Look for coaches. Ask for coaching. Be a coach.
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Context Shows the Value Beneath the Counter-Intuitive Surface

I was shared a lesson about context through a story of the fabled NASA rockets that helped NASA reach space, orbit the earth, and reach the moon.
Paraphrasing, the rockets evolved a great deal, especially captured in their sizes with the Saturn rocket (took the astronauts to the moon) greater than 35 stories tall. The earlier iterations propelled the rockets only so far. To reach the moon, the rockets had to be bigger. Common wisdom would suggest that bigger rockets added heft. Heft is counter to the goal of going farther and faster. Except, size hid the real need for “bigger” – more fuel.
Greater context can reveal the real value of an investment. What looks on the surface to be counter-intuitive can actually be a catalyst for a desired outcome.
A few examples where this plays out:
  • Instead of working, taking an hour off. That one hour may seem counter to the need for greater productivity. However, context of that hour may reveal an hour of exercise which has shown time and time again massive benefits mentally, emotionally, physically, etc.
  • Regular coaching of employees. Everyone’s working hard, right? There’s a lot to do and things seem to be working fine. Why coach or have periodic touch-points? Because there’s context happening that aren’t visible on the surface. Because being a B-player works, but being an A-player works better.
  • Slowing down a sale to learn more about the challenges a prospect faces. The more we close, the more money we make, right? Glengarry tells us to Always Be Closing. However, always aiming for the close can scare off prospects without understanding and value creation. It’s not just the one-time sale. It’s the consistent selling of a vendor-customer relationship. (Well, for complex sales anyways.)

It turns out we’re pretty smart, but we are also quick to jump to conclusions. What seems counter to a goal or objective can actually be a catalyst. All it takes is context for understanding.

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At The End of My 2.5-Year Startup Roller Coaster: 21 Rough Lessons Learned from Failure

Yowza, starting a startup from nothing is wicked hard. After 2.5 years at Body Boss, my team and I have been riding the startup roller coaster with high highs and low lows. Our ride has been one of the most frustrating, stressful, challenging, and rewarding experiences of our lives. A ride that sadly stops here.
We aimed at curing time-consuming spreadsheet madness and bringing intelligence into a world where technology feared to go before – the gyms of high schools, colleges, and the like. We made pivots to our dream, but sadly, we won’t be continuing further. Our market is incredibly young, and though growing, does not provide a sustainable operation for the foreseeable future. So as it stands, we’ll be supporting Body Boss as it is today, but unless/ until the market matures, we won’t be building out new features or spending heavy resources on marketing at this time. 
As they say, you learn more from failure than success. And boy have we learned… If you’re looking to start your own venture, the below list of 21 lessons we’ve learned should help plot out your course and watch out for traps. Or in the least, these lessons can save you from punching helpless pillows or picking up all the papers you threw in the air from frustration:
  1. Have customer-PARTNERS at the beginning. Partners at the beginning give you momentum coming out of the gate to not only build the product, but also to sell the product. Social motivation is a powerful tool.
  2. Research should weigh heavily on building your product/ service WITH your customer-PARTNERS. Engaging your customer-partners early and often (in an effective way) will mitigate risks you’re building something that they don’t want, need, or it’s just too far outside the process. The first versions of your product/ service will need refining, and communicative partners will tell you how to improve.
  3. Dedication to the startup is clutch to iterate. I’ve said it in a post before that speed is one of the critical elements of a winning startup strategy. With speed, you can iterate through ideas and test them with your customers. The best way to do this is to work full-time on the startup and have high quality engineers/ developers. Quality builders can implement changes quickly and mitigate against the risks of glaring bugs.
  4. For a tech startup these days, design is the second part of the winning strategy.If it isn’t quick to understand and navigate, users will likely not give you the time of day to figure it out.
  5. Quick set-up is the catalyst for early success. Apps these days that sign up and login with Facebook, or have API implementation with big platforms like Salesforce.com can help customers get set up quick. It turns out to be a turn-key solution. Most people don’t want to take precious time to learn or set up a program, especially when they have an existing, albeit weaker, solution.
  6. Establish an effective method and rhythm to reach prospects. With social media, many people believe it’s the best way to reach new customers. But it’s not necessarily. You should know how your target market absorbs new ideas/ products. Do they read magazines? Do they read blogs? Are they social media users? Your marketing strategy may not make sense.
  7. Don’t believe you’ve made a sale till days after a check clears. Can’t tell you how many prospects said they’d buy only to go cold a day later. And even when someone gives you his/ her credit card information, wait for the amount to clear your bank account before you celebrate that new signing.
  8. Establish roles be it with titles or equity. It’s amazing what happens when everyone is equal and everyone has different ideas – wheels spin but you’re going nowhere. I applaud those avant-garde companies trying out flat orgs with “no titles”, but that’s not for me. In Body Boss, we had 4 Co-Founders — equal shares, no hierarchy… just friends. To have a single, clear vision to fall back on when consensus isn’t there is a beautiful thing.
  9. Treat your startup like a real company. Your startup is not a hobby. It can’t be a “project” if you want it to be something greater. It’s a company. Take it seriously. Everyday you aren’t improving your company, everyday you’re not making your product or service better, you’re wasting your company’s talent and resources. Sadly and ironically, that happens to be your own.
  10. Market like a king with a blacksmith’s earnings. If you’re going to spend any money on marketing like attending trade shows, make sure you standout. We once sponsored a dinner for an event thinking it’d be a great way for us to reach prospects, except it didn’t. Everyone just ate and barely heard our message. That’s a good bit of money down the drain. If your hard-earned dollar isn’t going to WOW and prompt your prospect to the call to action (CTA), don’t bother.
  11. Be ready to pitch anytime and everytime you walk outside. It’s an amazingly small world, and you will run into potential customers, investors, or just everyday people who can connect you. Be ready to pitch.
  12. All about the team. To have diversity in a team is incredibly frustrating. However, it’s beautiful. It’s needed. For success, you need people to debate productively. If you don’t debate new, fresh ideas from your team (not just customers), you may be potentially paddling down a waterfall in unison. Diversity forces you to sometimes build only what’s necessary, and cut out the fat unless there’s true value. That, or you may never get those new, fresh ideas at all.
  13. New sales are good, but recurring sales are better. One issue that we found at Body Boss was many customers subscribed and bought in, but then, didn’t re-subscribe. After talking to many, there were various reasons why it didn’t work out including glaring product-related issues that we weren’t aware of. If they don’t sign back up, find out why because marketing a product that loses customers later can crush your business. Existing customers can be powerful advocates, and word-of-mouth marketing is the best type of marketing.
  14. Solve a real problem. Definitely don’t introduce a new one. So much of the above can also be addressed if you solve a real problem. With a real problem, you’ll get the buy-in from prospects to buy what you’re selling, or work with you because in the end, IT’S A PROBLEM!
  15. Pick an industry where you have LOADS of experience can go a really long way. Not only to give yourself and your startup credibility, but it’s a great way to network and find your initial customer-partners. I think one of our struggles at Body Boss has been because we approached professional strength and conditioning within an institutional setting – a setting none of us have had much experience. Thus, we didn’t understand our customers as well as we should’ve to build and sell our product.
  16. Know your limitations, and when to break them. Not all of your customers will buy into what you’re selling. Not all of your team members can work full-time. You might not have the skills to pick up the keyboard and start coding. However, all of these challenges end up being opportunities to build a greater startup, a better product, and a better service. If you pay attention to those limitations, you may be able to find creative solutions around (or through) them.
  17. Know when to stay rigid, when to flex, and when to break on your ideals. We start companies with the confidence that we can do things better. By that very nature, we enter with ideals. Know when your ideals should stick or when they should take a back seat for the growth of your company.
  18. Don’t make excuses. Just sell. My main role in Body Boss is to sell. I catch myself sometimes saying, “oh, it’s hard because of timing” or “they’re not answering their phones, so… yeah”. It’s admittedly poor. If you feel an inkling like you didn’t bust your @$$, then you probably didn’t. Find the value. Convert.
  19. Measure everything you can within reason. Use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. Analyze user engagement data (effectively, not analysis paralysis). Track by device, by user, what is your customer doing? With data comes the ability to draw patterns and make actionable changes. “What gets measured gets improved.” (That’s actually a Trademark we have.)
  20. It’s your company so choose who to hear and who to listen to. Everyone has ideas. Everyone will give you advice whether you want it or not. Know which ones make sense. It’s your company. You have to make the calls.
  21. SALES IS HARD! At the end of the day, companies, teams, etc. are made of people. And because you’re selling to people, it only makes sense that not everyone will be seeking the same values out of your product. It’s best to learn quickly about your prospect when selling, and catering your value prop accordingly. A couple tips: (1) the international language and what everyone wants more of: money. Help them pull and push the lever to add revenue and/ or cut costs. (2) You have two ears and one mouth. Let your prospects do the talking so you can assess what he/ she needs, and they’ll be bought in. (3) In-person goes farther than phone or email. Also, emails suck. Too easy for customers to delete/ not read.

Are you ready for the ride? Have you perhaps fallen victim to any of these hard lessons? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs?

(Also, how fitting is it that I’m petrified of roller coasters? They freak me out.)
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