EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
We’re missing Corey Frank today, but we still have a meaty solo episode for you from Chris. Chris is diving into a perplexing sales practice – coaching cold calls. Perplexing because everyone talks coaching up, yet so few actually do it. He explains why this type of coaching is critical yet so scarce, why both the coach and the call induce fear, and how to actually make coaching work. With compelling examples from golf and hostage negotiations, Chris breaks down the elements of an effective coaching framework. The key – simplify each call into bite-sized pieces and target very specific first failures to drive rapid gains. This episode overflows with accessible coaching advice for sales leaders. Join us for this Market Dominance Guys Episode, “Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching.”
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
“Comfort is always the enemy of performance.” – Chris Beall
Others:
“Use recordings to model great calls, not critique.”
Here are 5 key points from the Chris Beall episode on coaching cold calls:
- Coaching cold calls and unscheduled sales conversations is critical but rarely done effectively.
- Recordings and delayed feedback don’t work well for coaching short, high-pressure sales calls.
- Fear of judgment from the manager and fear of rejection on the call inhibit performance during coaching.
- Coach one specific first failure at a time, use repetition, and offer feedback immediately after the call.
- Simplify calls into a repeatable framework focused on building trust, avoiding too much value too early, and closing for the next meeting.
Chris Beall (00:08):
Hey everybody. Chris Beal here with another episode of Market Dominance. Guys, I’m going solo today. Corey’s tied up doing some kind of work that is probably super useful I’m sure, and I got a moment so I thought I’d do something fairly quick, but on a subject that’s really been on my mind a lot recently, and that’s coaching, and it’s amazing to me but probably shouldn’t be that there’s so much talk about coaching in sales and there’s so little actual coaching. So the question is why and is there something we can do about it or is this, there’s something we should do about it First, I believe that at least for ambush calls for the cold call and the follow-up call that are unscheduled coaching is super important and super effective and the reason is that it’s a short performance and the performance has got to be pretty precise to be effective, but it doesn’t have to be perfect and we often fail fairly early in a cold call or fairly early in a follow-up call and when we do, we don’t have a chance at what would come next.
Chris Beall (01:18):
There’s not a lot of recovery time because there’s an inclination on the part of the person receiving the call to go ahead and say, Hey, great, thanks for calling me goodbye. And that’s if they’re being nice. So what to do about it? Well, one thing that’s recommended and one thing that’s done a lot is recordings. So you record so that you can have a recording for the coach to listen to. And self-coaching and self-coaching recordings can actually be reasonably effective as long as the person who’s coaching themselves has got a framework, they have a way of looking at and thinking about the recording. And as long as they get over the hump with regard to listening to themselves, a lot of people are very, very uncomfortable listening to themselves on a recording. I know I used to be, maybe I still am for all I know.
Chris Beall (02:10):
I used to make recorded videos back many, many years ago when I worked at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin and I’d make a video every day and these were training videos in the world of software design and software development requirements, engineering subjects like that. And first few times I had to just look at that camera, how far away was it? I don’t know, 16 inches, something like that, big studio camera and then even worse, spend the afternoon with my good friend Mr. Singer going through the material and editing it. And first I didn’t have a very objective view because I was too concerned about that mismatch between what my voice sounds like to me inside, no echoing in my bony head and what it sounds like when it’s recorded and coming back to me. So with recorded coaching, even self-coaching, it’s rather challenging to get to the point where you’re listening, I would say clearly.
Chris Beall (03:11):
And you still have to have a framework that you’re listening for and so it’s hard using recordings to coach somebody else that’s really commonly said that it’s happening. It’s really, really common. There are products out there whose purpose is entirely to help you coach your reps and what I tend to find is they don’t get used very much and when they do, they tend to get used in a way that isn’t very effective either. Some scores are put on them that says, you did this well at this, you did this well at that, kind of like grading a paper or something like that. Or they’re used to point out multiple places that the rep could have improved. And while it sounds great, most of the time, one, it doesn’t happen, it’s just too much work. And two, the reps don’t know how to really interpret those offline comments.
Chris Beall (04:08):
Those comments that came from somebody listening to a recording and making their observations whether structured or unstructured. Meanwhile, there’s an Allego study that says, and I think it’s pretty accurate, that 54% of sales managers report that they provide an optimum amount of coaching, but only 37% of sales reps agree with their managers on that one. And 93% of sales managers report the coaching sessions they’re providing are high quality. Only 68% of reps agree with that, and I guarantee you that’s not for coaching. Ambush calls, cold calls and follow-ups. Now why am I so kind of focused on ambush calls? Because when we’re out to dominate markets, we only have that first opportunity to make a good impression and that good impression means it’s getting trust. So the whole concept of market dominance as we put it forth here on market dominance, guys, pretty simple pave the market with trust, harvest that trust over the next 12 quarters that it’s going to take for the folks in your market overall, all of them to ultimately decide that they’re going to replace their current solution with a new solution, which is when you have a shot.
Chris Beall (05:24):
So you’ve got a lot of patience, you have a lot of persistence, you have a lot of structured follow-up management that needs to be done. And in addition, you have these very short conversations that require coaching and they tend to happen, especially now in a work from home world, they happen somewhere else where the manager no longer is. So the old idea of walking around and at least standing there and listening for somebody to get a connection with a target and talk to them, that doesn’t happen as much anymore. You can’t really
Chris Beall (05:56):
Walk around your rep’s living room, their office, or whatever at home or some Starbucks, god forbid, and listen for them. Also, if you’re using conventional dialing technology like a telephone or a regular dialer, you’re just not getting that many conversations. So if you’re talking to say two people an hour, that’s a long wait for the coach. So it’s super inconvenient and expensive people like managers or coaches, if you have a specialized coach which are pretty rare, simply don’t have the time to stand there and wait for a conversation, especially given how many of those conversations end up being super short, 10, 15 seconds because they’re a brush off because they’re a quick hangup because the other person really didn’t want to be ambushed, which is always the case and the skill wasn’t there to get through the first part of the conversation and get to something that felt more coachable.
Chris Beall (06:51):
So it’s quite interesting when we look at the world of coaching, I think everybody knows it’s very important that it’s almost impossible to improve without it, that the unit of change within a sales team that’s doing outbound calling is the individual rep. A rep will be very stable in their skills over time. They don’t jump up and down with regard to their ability to open or their ability to get curious or their ability to handle standard kinds of cold calling objections or their ability to close for the meeting. Those things are pretty stable. One of them is the current bottleneck of their process and as the coach you need to find that one and then help the rep see a better way of executing that and I guess I’ll say feel progress. That is when they execute in a better way, it not only produces a better result, but it feels better.
Chris Beall (07:48):
It’s a very emotional business cold calling and it’s because when we call we’re the invisible stranger and we know that those objections really are kind of personal away, not to us as a person but to us in the role that we’ve chosen to adopt the person who ambushed them. And so we already have some concerns inside us about that and it’s kind of difficult to get over those concerns and get on with it much less to perform something new under that stress. So why is it that we don’t coach cold calls and unscheduled follow-up calls very much? Well, they’re not scheduled so the coach can’t make themselves available, but they’re also very fast. A lot happens in a short amount of time. So what should you coach? Do you coach something overall like the tone or the pace or how confident they sounded? Do you coach their word choice?
Chris Beall (08:45):
What do you coach? It’s not obvious what to coach. And so generally what does get coached if anything is a bit of a mishmash and the coach, the manager to get as much in to that particular coaching unit, I’ll call it that feedback unit as they can and there’s just no way to change multiple things at the same time for the next performance as a rep and so you just end up with a mess. The other thing is there’s multiple agendas. So for instance, we run at ConnectAndSell. We run these things called flight schools and in the first session of flight school, which goes on for three hours, you’re making cold calls as the student, you’re actually doing real calls, you’re doing the whole call end to end. Your goal is the usual goal. You’re trying to get somebody to put a meeting on the calendar and yet for three hours you’re going to be coached for the first three hours on every conversation or at least almost every conversation immediately after the conversation while it’s still fresh in your mind and freshens your body.
Chris Beall (09:50):
Quite frankly, you’re going to be coached on how well you execute the first seven seconds of that conversation. The first seven seconds are well known now by a number of folks who’ve studied this to be the amount of time we have to get someone to trust us. And given that trust is imperative in B2B, both within the call and then over the long period of time that we might have a relationship with somebody if we move forward with them, trust is so important. We have to make sure that we nail it. So we spend three hours in our Flight Schools three hours on just practicing getting trust and we do it the way that Chris Voss, the author of Never Split. The Difference How to Negotiate is If Your Life Depends On, it taught me one evening when I was very fortunate to get to ask him this question, how long do we have to get trust in a cold call?
Chris Beall (10:43):
He said, seven seconds. And he said, but it’s easy. All we have to do is show the other person. We see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy and then we need to demonstrate to them that we’re competent to solve a problem they have right now. Well, we are the problem. Cold caller is the problem they have right now. So it’s very easy to offer us a solution to that problem and it’s actually fairly straightforward to make it clear that you see the world through their eyes. Just declare yourself to be a bad thing and move on. So we teach people to say, I know I’m an interruption. I have 27 seconds to tell you why I called. I know I’m an interruption, says I’m a bad thing and I’m not interrupting your day. I’m an interruption notice, I’m a noun, I’m a bad thing.
Chris Beall (11:30):
Nobody ever says, oh, an interruption, that’s a great thing. And then immediately we change our voice to a playful and curious voice and we offer a solution to the problem they have right now, which is us. Well there is in all of that I can only say a lot. So when we’re coaching, we’ve got to find one part to work on and then we need to master that part because that part comes before the next part and if we don’t master the first part, there’s nothing to master in the second part. It’s kind of like if I swing at the golf club at the ball and I miss the ball or I hit it off the heel or off the toe or whatever, it doesn’t really matter how great my follow through looks. It’s just like getting over that. What we need to do is actually figure out how to do the thing before we might hit the ball.
Chris Beall (12:22):
It might be our stance, it might be our grip, it may be the way that we take the club back. It may be whether we’re keeping our head relatively stable. There’s a bunch of things that we need to do, but they’re all before impact. None of them are after impact. So when we’re coaching, we need to coach the before and then observe the after and then go back and coach the before again. So it’s very important to have an agenda that’s appropriate for what you’re able to coach rather than the agenda being let’s make the whole thing better. And there’s various pieces. Cold calls are quite short, maybe five sentences that are always there and maybe three or four or more that are sometimes there average length of times about a minute and eight seconds unless you successfully schedule a meeting in which case you’ve got another, say a minute or so of meeting logistics work to do.
Chris Beall (13:17):
So in that call lots can happen. You’ve got to get trust, you’ve got to at least acquiesce to move forward. You have to get curious and that’s something that takes about three hours to coach and is also just the curiosity element of the call. You need to avoid too much value because too much value leads to the classic we’re all set objection, the objection. That is frankly not handleable. And so we’ve got to avoid that. Learning to avoid something is very hard. We’re tempted to bring in more value and under stress we tend to say we’re great. Here’s something more about us. And so learning how not to do something is actually much harder than quite frankly learning to do it. So these are keys to different parts of the call. So you can’t really coach the whole call. You have to break it down and then you have to allow time between the coaching sessions and the learning sessions in order for that to be internalized.
Chris Beall (14:17):
Repetition is super important. After you’ve coached one thing, first failure we call it, you need to have the coach, the rep actually repeats that particular thing that they’re going to say probably 3, 4, 5 times immediately before going and performing again. And you need to have a mechanism to get to the next conversation quickly. I think that’s how we at ConnectAndSell fell into all of this coaching and training stuff. We never intended to be there, but we do provide conversations pretty quickly, a minute and a half, two minutes. If you’re connecting to the next live human, maybe three, four minutes if you’re connecting to the perfect target, the actual person on your list, and that amount of time is still long enough that you’re coaching input and the practice that you might have done will start to fade. That’s why it takes repetition before the performance and then repetition of the performance and the next coaching cycle should be immediate and it should be the first failure actually it should be okay, you did that a little bit better, but this still could be improved.
Chris Beall (15:29):
So that’s really key to getting coaching to work. The coaching has got to be immediate. Most coaching is way, way, way, way too late. Coaching somebody on Friday I about a performance they had on Monday, don’t bother. It’s just not going to get anything done. This is where I think managers often confuse what I’ll call deal work with coaching. They think that they’re coaching, they’re actually talking through how a deal might go, what some tactics and techniques might be, and they get an agreement from the rep to do something better, different whatever in the next interaction that they have with the prospect. And that feels like coaching, that’s more like advising and it’s nice and it’s important unless it’s just war stories. But coaching is really to improve performance and you need to have the performance and the coaching and the performance and the coaching be very close to each other in time.
Chris Beall (16:28):
Minutes are okay, not very many minutes, hours are too long and a week may as well be forever. So the other thing that is required for coaching to work is you need, you actually need a script. There’s nothing to coach to without a script. Coaching to generalities just doesn’t work. If I’m going to teach you how to swing a golf club, I’ve got to have a specific idea in mind of how the golf swing works. I can’t teach you a generic kind of like, well, it’ll be whatever it happens to be. Let’s see what feels good. I have to have a plan. You have to adopt the plan, then we have to break the plan down. And because it’s a ballistic activity, a golf swing or a cold call, they follow a pattern and what you just did determines what you get to do next or what you can do next.
Chris Beall (17:22):
You can’t stop golf swing partway down successfully. I know Tiger Woods can do it. I tried it once and if this were on video, I’d show you the two broken figures that I got from my efforts. Somebody was walking in the way of it, so it was probably worthwhile, but it just showed that you think you can do things that you probably can’t do. That is you have this very sort of ballistic activity, but it needs a plan. It needs a first thing, a second thing, a third thing, a fourth thing. You need to start with the first one and then you need to be coached through that until you’ve mastered it, not to perfection, but to be sufficient to support the next one. If you’re getting enough folks to go with you and trust you into the second part of the conversation, then you can start to be coached on getting curiosity.
Chris Beall (18:13):
A classic cold call goes from fear. That’s the prospect’s fear, not yours to trust in seven seconds because you did the two things Chris said you should do out of curiosity, which is how we avoid too much value, too much value and triggers the hey, we’re all set objection. And then from there into basically commitment, asking for a close, you make an offer, let’s meet. And then you’ve got to handle the natural objections after all, you ambush somebody and you have to also be ready to set yourself up for some sort of a follow-up conversation later because most of the time you’re probably not going to get a meeting on a cold call. So these are all important. I’ll call it tactical factors in coaching. You need a script as a framework to coach to you, coach to first failure. You need to have immediate repetition and practice of what the rep’s going to say next.
Chris Beall (19:13):
Then they need to have performance hard on the heels of that experience. And then you’re observing for where they improve and for still first failure and then you give the feedback on where they improved the coaching on the next thing to practice. You practice 3, 4, 5 reps and go back in and perform again. So that’s the essence of coaching. Now we have kind of a real problem though, which is that the coach and the call are independently scary. The coach is probably the manager and managers have hiring and firing authority or at least strong influence over the people on their team. And that means the coaching may be interpreted as judgment, judgment on performance that might lead to potentially loss of job. It’s very hard to improve performance unless you feel free to try whatever it is that’s being suggested. And when you’re afraid of failing at that thing, you’re less likely to perform it particularly well.
Chris Beall (20:15):
So you have the coach being scary and then you also have the call itself being scary because nobody likes to be that invisible stranger. The invisible stranger tends to get rejected. People don’t like to be rejected. Jeff Blunt wrote a beautiful book on the subject called Objections about how we feel objections as rejection and rejection is one of the most painful things we can feel. I have a theory as to why in the environment of evolution, the village being rejected ultimately could mean being rejected from the village. The word for that is exiled and exile was generally considered a punishment worse than death. So we’re afraid of the coach because they hold power over us and we’re afraid of the call because we know where the bad thing is and we know we’re going to trigger a response. And you put those two fears together and they tend to be somewhat paralytic with regard to performance.
Chris Beall (21:13):
And everybody’s different with regard to how they handle that kind of fear. Some people, they can perform reasonably well, even if they’re scared in multiple dimensions. These people can go out and be a concert pianist or a major league baseball pitcher or whatever, and they can be under tremendous pressure and still perform. Most of us haven’t practiced that much and don’t have that much sort of, I don’t know, Prozac running in our veins I suppose is a way to put it. So what do we do about it? Well, one thing to do is just physically remove the coach. So it’s natural to work from home. You can’t really feel in a product like ConnectAndSell if you’re the user. You’re having conversations with people, you don’t really feel like somebody might be listening to those conversations, even if they’re clicking the little whisper button after the conversation to give you their positive feedback and to give you their first failure observation, to let you practice a little bit with them and to go back into pushing the button as we call it and having the next conversation.
Chris Beall (22:19):
But that physical separation is actually very effective because out of sight is out of mind. It’s hard to keep in mind two things. One is I’m talking to this person that I just ambushed and the other is that somebody I can’t see at all is listening to me. So that’s a good separation to achieve and it’s actually one of the reasons that the old walk around listening to somebody, or as they said wire jacking, that’s where you plug into the audio line. You plug into the headset as the coach and you’re listening. That’s why that’s actually a harder environment, the physical environment to get high performance, which you want. You want the highest level of performance because you’re looking for what shows up as a flaw. When performance is good, when performance is bad for some other reason, somebody they’re sick, they’re grieving, whatever it happens to be, that’s a bad time to coach.
Chris Beall (23:17):
All we’re going to find out is that they’re sick or they’re grieving or whatever. We’re not going to learn very much. So what can we do about all this? Well emphasize long live coaching. Listen in, be patient. If you don’t have technology like ConnectAndSell, and so you’re going to wait a while, you couldn’t coach multiple folks at the same time, if you can at least aggregate the audio and switch from one to another and get an indication when a call is actually in play when talking, and again, coach one thing at a time. First failure, avoid the temptation to coach the entire conversation. Use repetition immediately before the performance and of the performance itself. That is repetition before the fragment to be tried a little bit differently and repetition of the entire call. I think it’s a great idea to coach about 20 calls in a row over maybe three hours.
Chris Beall (24:12):
That’s why we structured Flight School like that. But at least having repetition of the entire performance of repetition of the coaching fragment is important. Tune up. Your listening there is drift. Everybody drifts. They drift from best practice under pressure. They go to what’s comfortable. So a rep who might’ve said at one point, I know I’m an interruption, might take up saying, I know I’m a bit of an interruption, or I know that I’m interrupting your day. Those are very, very different. And the rep goes there because quite frankly, it’s more comfortable. Comfort is always the enemy of performance in almost everything and in cold calling, it sure is. So you might get comfortable as a cold caller, but there’s a more comfortable thing to do, which is to not be as good a cold caller. So use a simple script. Five sentences are enough to get the job done with the framework.
Chris Beall (25:06):
Drive out fear every way that you can, including not being physically present and use recordings to model great calls, not to critique.
Practice listening to recordings with your reps to find the things they improved and let them find the flaws on their own.
For recordings, it’s a little bit challenging to go in and say there was your first failure because it isn’t followed by an immediate performance.
So in summary, coaching is tremendous for cold calls and for follow-up calls, it makes a huge difference. You’re asking somebody to perform something very difficult, very technical, very nuanced, very ballistic. One thing leads to another in a challenging emotional environment where they know they are a bad thing and there’s no getting around that last part. They never become a good thing. Even if in your heart you’re trying to help somebody, you also know you’re an interruption.
Chris Beall (26:03):
It’s super important to coach. It allows us to move the needle actually fairly quickly. We know in these Flight School sessions we’ve seen teams go from like 40% of quota to 110% in four or three hour sessions and stay there. As long as there is coaching for drift that goes on an ongoing basis. Simplicity is the key. Coaches got to have a chance of listening for the same thing over and over. So it’s really, really important to do it. But most of what’s called coaching isn’t really coaching, it’s kind of advising it’s too far after the fact.
So if you can figure out ways, be listening behind the scenes, coming in and whispering to somebody immediately after a conversation and helping them perform that little bit better on first failure, you’ll find over time that and fairly short amount of time that what you’re hoping for in the bottom line, which is conversion rates, small number of conversations, leads to a bigger number of meetings, and a larger number of meetings are being set per rep hour, which is the key number. You’ll find that stuff improves on its own. So start from the beginning, you’ll get to the end. Eventually, you’ll get some great results. So for market dominance guys, without Corey Frank here, I’m Chris Beall. Just thought you might like a sort of practicum on coaching and happy calling out there.
