Sales Leadership

The Essential Leadership Framework to Coach Sales Champions, Inspire Excellence, and Exceed Your Business Goals

Keith Rosen

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119483250
• eBook ISBN: 9781119483274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

"Coaching is the universal language of learning, development, and change." Imagine a workplace without fear, stress, or worry. Instead, you're acknowledged as a valued, contributing team player who doesn't sacrifice priorities, values, happiness, or your life for your job. Sound ludicrous? Consider this is a reality in many thriving organizations. Most leadership books don't apply to sales leadership. Sales leaders are uniquely and indispensably special and need to be coached in a way that's aligned with their role, core competencies, and individuality to achieve their personal goals and company objectives. What if you can successfully coach anyone in 15, 5, or even 60 seconds using one question? Sales Leadership makes delivering consistent, high-impact coaching easy. For busy, caring managers, this removes the pressure and misconception that, "Coaching is difficult, doesn't work, and I don't have time to coach." Since most managers don't know how to coach, they become part of the non-stop, problem-solving legion of frustrated Chief Problem Solvers who habitually do others' work, create dependency, and nourish the seed of mediocrity. Great business leaders shift from doing people's jobs to developing them by learning the language of leadership coaching. In its powerful simplicity, Sales Leadership delivers a chronological path to develop a thriving coaching culture and coaching leaders who develop top performing teams and sales champions. Using Keith's intuitive LEADS Coaching Framework™, the coaching talk tracks for critical conversations, and his Enrollment strategy to create loyal, unified teams, you will inspire immediate change. Now, coaching is easily woven into your daily conversations and rhythm of business so that it becomes a natural, healthy habit. In his award-winning book, Coaching Salespeople Into Sales Champions, Keith was the first Master Certified Coach to share his personal coaching playbook that is now the standard for coaching excellence. Ten years later, and one million miles traveled, he reveals the evolution of sales leadership and coaching mastery through his experiences working with Fortune 5000 companies and small businesses worldwide. In the first book ever titled Sales Leadership, you'll master the ability to:

• Ask more questions, give less advice, and build trust and accountability to rely on people to do their job.
• Reduce your workload and save 20 hours a week on unproductive and wasteful activities.
• Shatter the toxic myths around coaching to eliminate generational gaps and departmental silos.
• Achieve business objectives, boost sales faster, and retain more customers.
• Create buy-in around strategic change and improve daily performance metrics.
• Assess company readiness and ensure implementation of a successful and sustainable coaching initiative and create a healthy, happy workplace.

"People create the mindset, mindset shapes behavior, behavior defines culture, and ultimately, culture determines success. That's why the primary business objective is: To Make Your People More Valuable."

CHAPTER 1
Preparing for the Cultural Evolution

People create the mindset, mindset shapes behavior, behavior defines culture, and ultimately, culture determines success. That's why the primary business objective is to make your people more valuable.

WHAT'S YOUR BUSINESS DNA?

We were ending the second day working with a team of managers in Beijing, China. During every program I deliver, I want to ensure that expectations are met, know what their biggest learning moment is, and capture their commitment after our time together was over. This is necessary to make sure that what we worked on becomes embedded in the way the managers lead and coach.

As we went around the room, Pierre, one of the managers, paused to share a horrific experience he had just a week earlier.

“I received some disturbing news from our corporate office last week. During last month's quarterly senior leadership meeting, Chan, one of the VPs had a heart attack in the middle of the meeting. Of course, we called an ambulance immediately. Within minutes, he was rushed to the hospital.

“As you can imagine, everyone else in the meeting was extremely concerned about Chan. And yet, the meeting continued. Reports were reviewed. Business plans evaluated. Priorities reaffirmed. Team performance and scorecards assessed.

“An hour passed. The hospital called the main office to share the devastating news. Chan had died moments after arriving at the hospital.”

While there's nothing worse than the sudden and untimely passing of a good person, here's what I found most troublesome about this horrific story. The administrator from the hospital asked one of the other VPs in that meeting, “Who would be the proper family member to contact and let them know about Chan's death?”

Ten people were in that meeting. Some of them had worked together for over 12 years. And yet, when the hospital administrator asked how to contact Chan's family, not one person in the room had an answer.

No one really knew who Chan was. They knew him as an employee and a peer, but certainly not as a human being. It's a disturbing story, but it's one we can all learn from.

Think about your company. Think about your team, your peers, your customers. How much do you really know about them, personally? How much time and attention do you invest in fostering a deeper connection with people?

Keeping HR compliance in mind, do you really know the people you work with?

I can't think of anyone who would want to work at a company like Chan's. The sad truth is, there's a good chance most people already do.

BURN THE BRIDGE OF MEDIOCRITY

Countless studies detail the business impact that effective coaching has on performance, productivity, attitude, employee engagement, and of course, company culture. Which is why I won't be focusing on any of that.

Data isn't going to help you create a coaching culture, but it clearly shows that you need one.

THE SCATHING TRUTH

What about those companies that do not have fantastic DNA? How can struggling and great companies alike achieve enduring success?

If you want to change the face of your business, you need to alter the most fundamental composition of your organization. To do so, every employee must focus their thoughts, listening, and attention on the heartbeat of the business, which comes not from products and services, but from people.

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FROM THE SIDELINES

While Chapter 1 focuses on what needs to be present to launch a companywide coaching initiative, it also applies to building your team's culture. The rest of the book focuses on you, and your transformation into a world‐class leader and coach so you can develop champions. That includes deep dives into skill set and mindset development, talk tracks or coach tracks, and templates that will make you and your team best‐in‐class.

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CHOOSE NO INITIATIVE OVER A FAILED INITIATIVE

Every time you put profit over people, the promise of improving the work environment will fail. Employees will perceive any course you roll out or coaching offered as an event‐based flavor of the month. Your good intentions to develop people into champions become overshadowed by the company's underlying, self‐serving agenda to achieve business objectives.

The frustration rises on both sides.

Company leaders:	“We just invested in our people! They should be following what they learned.”
Your Employees:	“Nothing new here. The company was hot on coaching this month, but it's always going to be about the results. Things always go back to the way they were.”

No traction is created, no positive change can be sustained, and cultures inevitably backslide into a fear‐based, results‐driven workplace. The additional cost of a failed initiative is that companies learn the wrong lesson: that coaching doesn't work.

So what's the secret to developing a thriving, top‐performing coaching culture that people want to be part of? How do you prepare any company for this transformational journey? How do you prevent it from being just another fleeting idea due to the cultural volatility that exists within your company?

Before we answer this question, let's create some alignment around the definition of culture.

EXAMINING CULTURE

Merriam‐Webster's dictionary defines culture as, “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. The characteristic features of everyday existence shared by people in a place or time.”

This definition applies to any organized group, such as universities, networking events, trade associations, conferences, social networks, nonprofits, a neighborhood fitness center, and even governments. It seems we're all part of and operate in a variety of cultures as we move through the world around us.

BOARDROOM OR BORED ROOM: DEFINING CORPORATE CULTURE

The infamously stodgy word corporate refers to the collective body that makes up any organization. Merriam‐Webster's definition of culture also includes:

b: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization; a corporate culture focused on the bottom line; c: the set of values, or social practices associated with a field, activity, or societal characteristic … d) the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

THE COMPANY ECOSYSTEM

Many pieces must be addressed to solve this cultural puzzle. It's an environment that encapsulates a shared feeling, belief system, attitude, and set of values. Culture dictates how people should behave, perform, and treat one another.

Every company's culture exists within a network of unique individuals engaging and interacting with each other. A hea...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE: The Power of Why
• CHAPTER 1: Preparing for the Cultural Evolution
• CHAPTER 2: L.E.A.D.S.: Your Guiding Framework for Transformational Coaching
• CHAPTER 3: The L.E.A.D.S. Coaching Model at Work
• CHAPTER 4: How to Coach in 10 Minutes or Less
• CHAPTER 5: Tools to Manage the Coaching Process and Assess Results
• CHAPTER 6: Transforming Critical Conversations into Positive Change and Measurable Results
• CHAPTER 7: Creating Unity, Trust, and Buy‐In: The Art of Enrollment
• CHAPTER 8: Seven Essential Enrollment Conversations That Create Companywide Alignment
• CHAPTER 9: Coach Tracks: Turn Difficult Situations into Coaching Wins
• CHAPTER 10: Mindful Coaching: The Inner Game of Coaching Champions
• CHAPTER 11: Know Your Players: Transforming Talent Through Observation and Feedback
• CHAPTER 12: 15 Common Coaching Killers That Sabotage Coaching Success
• CHAPTER 13: Culture‐Shift: Sustaining The Habit of Coaching
• PART I: YOUR JOURNEY BEGINS HERE
• APPENDIX: Seven Steps to Creating a Top Performing Coaching Culture
• Become the Model of Exemplary Sales Leadership
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT