The role of a leader is to create an environment where coaching can happen, to get authority from above, and to facilitate their team to get on with the work.

In this episode, Anna and her guests explore how to take sales coaching to the next level to empower collective leadership within sales teams.

Guests

David Clutterbuck is a leading coaching author and mentor, who combines purpose, robust research, and infectious enthusiasm.

Emmet Florish is the CEO Ctrl.io, and is on a mission to help sales managers tackle their biggest challenges.

Key takeaways

• Two things only the actual leader can do
• Great coaches exhibit compassion (for others and for themselves), curiosity, courage, and connectedness
• Why having “the data” can get in the way of coaching
• What does your team really need you for?
• How can you get out of your team’s way?
• How coaching expands from coaching the individual to coaching the system
• A coaching culture can’t simply be handed down – it has to be agreed upon and supported across the whole team
• A sales meeting doesn’t always have to be led by the sales team leader
• How to celebrate our mistakes for the learning they create

Links

• Connect with David on LinkedIn
• Connect with Emmet on LinkedIn
• Revenue Riser episode 4: Spread a little happiness and grow your sales
• Revenue Riser episode 5: CRM: actionable insight that drives sales

When we look at the qualities of great, coaches and great leaders, there are four that we've been able to identify.

One is compassion, really been interested in the other people.

Curiosity, being really interested in them, and their perspective.

Courage to really place up to the difficult questions.

And connectedness.

How connected are they with all the members of the team and with the external world?

And those four Cs seem to be real core qualities that we're looking for in a coach, and we're looking for in a leader.

There's a lot of talk about coaching, but what should you focus on if you truly want to coach the right kind of performance in your team?

Welcome to Revenue Riser.

I'm your host Anna Britnor Noga, and in this episode we'll be exploring some of the latest thinking about what makes great coaches and great leaders.

I was so delighted that David Clutterbuck accepted my invitation to share his wisdom and.

I first met David back in 1999 when I co-founded what would rapidly become the largest independent coaching and mentoring information resource.

David was already well established and regarded as a leading player in the field and now has an incredible number of books to his name.

To me, David always combined serious purpose, robust research, and a strong pinch of fun and infectious enthusiasm.

I met Emmet Florish more recently when his sales manager coaching platform came to my attention.

In fact, it was our conversation that led to this episode.

I was really taken by Emmet's down to worth recognition of the challenges sales managers and leaders have in really coaching their teams.

He's on a mission to fix that, and his candor and ideas are both common sense and refreshing.

We had a lot to talk about, so join us for a wealth of tips and ideas to take your coaching to the next level.

So coaching for sales leaders is a pretty big topic.

And David, I know leadership is changing the way we might think about leadership is changing, and particularly this idea of collective leadership, but individually incentivized people.

So do you wanna start off the conversation by giving us a sense of where you see leadership and some of the context around that?

The idea of leaders go back 60, 70 years or even less, and the idea that the leader was somebody who said as what, called the hub and spoke, the leader was in the center and they got everybody else to do things and told them what to do.

That model is so slow that it just doesn't work in a modern environment.

It hasn't worked for a long time.

And what we've seen is leadership being define much more in terms of make, of enabling things to happen.

So a secure leader is somebody who doesn't necessarily manage other people.

There's somebody who creates the environment where people can manage themselves.

And a lot of our research around that really reinforces that.

And if we just take what is leadership and it's basic core leadership has, is just three components.

You identify things that need to need attention.

You come up with how you're going to deal with them, and then you make sure that the solution you is implemented.

Now, doesn't mean that you have to say that you have to do all these things yourself.

Doesn't mean to say that has to be vested in one individual.

It's a process leadership.

And a big distinction is between being the leader, the titular person, and the whole process of leadership.

And what we're finding is increasingly that leadership is becoming a distributed function.

The boundary between what the titular leader does and the rest of the team, who takes the responsibility in authority for doing things, in other words, is becoming less clear.

It's a continuous and changing negotiation.

It's an evolution.

And in the research that we did we tried to find out what is it that only the teacher leader can do?

And we spent quite some time working on this, asking people around the world, looking at what very little research there is.

It's remarkable how little research there is on this.

Is millions of articles about leadership and books, about it, about leadership and the traits of leaders, but what they actually do is much smaller.

So what we learned from this was that the majority of things, everything from coaching to discipline, to, to deciding bonuses, setting strategy, these are all things the team can, can be shared with the team.

Only two things have emerged that we cannot find.

Good examples are being shared with the rest of the team.

One of those is getting authority from above.

So you can spend money, you can take people on your spit and so forth.

And the other one, Very simple, protecting the team from interference from outside, that stops them getting on with their work.

Everything else can be distributed.

I think those are the two things that probably leaders are most highly valued for by their team members.

Absolutely.

So big question, which wonderful question we like a coaching question is, what does your team actually need you for?

And then the other big question is how are you getting in the way of them actually getting on with their work?

I think it was interesting as this episode is all about coaching that and I'd entirely agree with you, I'm sure Emmett will as well, that coaching is something that can be done by anybody.

Yeah.

we think about, specifically for the leader and the kind of coaching that they're doing and, and perhaps this is a good point to bring you in here as well.

Leaders have a particular responsibility around coaching, don't they?

Yeah, Abs.

Absolutely.

And you know, it was interesting there to hear David talk about the evolution of leadership.

I'm obviously in the B2B SAS space.

It's relatively young in the software as a service space.

But we're starting to see some shoots of that evolution happening already.

I think um, you know, a lot of.

Times people have been put into management positions, particularly on the software sales side that are not necessarily great leaders.

They've not been shown how to lead.

They've been shown how to manage and they manage a lot by tasks and activities and CRM data and all that kind of good stuff.

Look, it's important, right?

I think one of your earlier podcast sessions talked about being data led.

I think was episode three, the early David.

He talked about having structure and consistency.

And how important that was to grow and scale the team.

I think it's the same thing from a coaching perspective.

You have to have structure, you have to be consistent in your expectations.

And I think that can come across in a certain way to certain organizations.

And I think where people kind of fall behind on the coaching side is they have all the data and they don't know to join up the dots and come up with a coaching plan from it.

So it was really interesting to hear David talk about, you know, the types of questions that can be asked as a leader.

I think a lot of the times, particularly in sales, because we're so data driven, we get in our own way, and it takes a little bit of experience to of go, you know, my job is to be almost canon fodder for the sales team to say, Okay, make sure I, I'm blocking anything that's distracting you from actually doing your job as a salesperson.

There's a lovely phrase that comes up frequently.

What the hell are we here for?

So there's so much data and it gets in the way of, actually so often we end up chasing the minutiae and forget why we are there.

And part of the leader as coach and the coach working with leaders is to help refocus what are we here for?

Ultimately, what are we trying to achieve and is what we are doing actually taking us towards that or getting in the way?

I think, I think you is interesting what you pointed out that, we talked about plans and a little bit at the startup and structure there for sales leaders.

And that kind of is conflicting on the sales side.

Because we get sales leaders all the time, say we want sales reps to our sales managers to coach their reps.

But then they say, You gotta be in the deals.

Drive those deals from you, drive those forward.

And what we've always said here, it control is, is we use a phrase, Deals or the launchpad for coaching.

Because on the software side we can see the activity that, that sales reps are doing.

We can see what managers are doing.

We see what's sticking from a sales training perspective.

We can see what skills need develop.

But it's not the be all and end all because from a coaching perspective, there is just so much more.

And when you have those conversations with your sales team, it is about facilitating, giving them that space for the managers to ask the questions as opposed to being the manager that goes in there and just goes, Do this thing, and do this thing, and do this thing.

Cause that's not really coaching, right?

That's just telling people what to do.

And there is this, there's this whole myth that the role of the leader or the team leader is to coach the team.

That sometimes can be true, but most of the time that's wrong.

The role of the team leader is to create the environment where coaching happens.

And much of that is between members of the team.

and if you wanna overcome the resistance of people, because people who need the help most are the ones who are most resistant to it very often because they don't wanna make it look small.

So the basic ground rules as a team leader in a sales environment, is that if you want people to be responsive to coaching by you, then you have to first reach out and seek coaching from.

And sharing your development plan with them and say, Look, this is how I'm trying to go.

I'd really value your feedback to me.

When they can do that, they feel comfortable that you're creating the psychological safety for them to be able engage with you where the coaching is relevant to them.

And it's this creating of a psychological contract that is not about boss, subordinate.

It is about working together to improve every.

And I think, sometimes we're sales people, egos get in the way, right?

And we feel that we have to know all the answers.

I know certainly for me, when I was a, a younger sales manager, I thought I did have to know all the answers and I did have to tell people what to do.

And it took me a long time to realize that, it's okay not to know the answers and to ask for that feedback.

Curious as to your experience there, David, when you go in and you go to an organization, you say that to people, like how often would a sales leader actually put that theory into practice to go, Here's my development plan here's what I'm doing, and be that open with, with their team?

You actually, I we find that sales people are often more conducive, largely because they're more curious than say people from our finance.

I mean, we don't wanna typify stereotype here at all.

But there is more curiosity.

Because they're more interested in people and therefore they're more interested.

So, and so that does seem to work, that they are open to being challenged in this way.

But of course there's always a personality factor.

Your high narcissist is not.

But I think when we ask the question, we get the team leader and the team together and we say, we say to the team, What do you need from your sales manager to be able to perform at your best?

And then they begin to learn this, and then they can begin to say, Okay, this is what I need from you in return.

So you create the conditions where the, where there's a constant exchange of potential for learning, but supportiveness for both, both ways.

It's not a ordinate, it's a collegiate environment, and that seems to be so healthy.

I think it's a really powerful place to get to and that psychological contract and that psychological.

Really important, I think the steps that people go through here.

And I'm interested in both of your experiences and views around this because.

A manager that has come into a role, little, as you both described, where they think they've gotta know all of the ,answers are in that loop where people are coming to them, they're looking at the deal, or they're looking at how somebody's getting on and they're coming up with suggestions or they're telling the person what they think they should be doing.

So you've end up in a pattern of behavior where the sales person thinks when I go and ask my boss about something or when we're having a one to one, they're gonna be telling me what they think I should be doing.

So when I've got a problem and I go and say, Hey boss, what do I do about this?

I'm expecting to be told what to do.

And so it's really interesting, I think when a leader starts to change that pattern of behavior, and, you know, they've had a bit of coaching on how to coach, so they think, Oh, I'm not gonna answer the question.

I'm gonna ask them a question and I'm gonna get them to come up with the answer.

And so they sort of dive in with some questions and it a, completely confuses the individual, and b, they kind of push back on it.

But they kind of say Well, hang on a minute.

I didn't come to you to be, you know, looking to you for the answer.

And so there's a mind shift that has to happen between those parties to start that process.

And of course, you know, over time then it builds up that trust and that expectation.

And I think ideally you wanna get to a place where often the individual doesn't go to the leader to say, I've got a problem, what should I do?

Because they can think I know what the leader's gonna ask me.

I can coach myself on this, at least to a point where now maybe I just wanna go in a bit of a sanity check that, am I going down the right path, perhaps.

But that process is, it sounds really simple to get people to that point, but it isn't, is it?

Absolutely we did about 10 years ago.

We went out and asked a lot of companies what actually happened when you did a sheep dip?

You know, um, a line manager's coach course, and you gave them two days and you sent them back enthusiastic into their teams.

And the first thing that happened was everybody thought What's he on?

I wonder if I should try some . And if they were clunky at it, which most of them were, It was really embarrassing and awkward for everybody.

And if they were any good at it, everybody said Well, hang on.

Why am I doing your job for you?

And so forth.

So we, it was not possible from the way that we constructed the research to get a nice meet figure.

But frequently we found within a handful of days they'd gone back to normal and everybody forgot all about it.

And what we learned from that, and we did experiments with a whole range of organizations from Aster through to the National Health Service.

We basically looked at how do you actually get the team and the team leader together, to build the confidence in the coaching process, to understand the coaching process?

We're just about to launch a whole new way of looking at this too.

We've been working on, we had a research team working on for a while now.

And the way that we see this working now is that you have the conversation as a team together.

And the team leader's role is to lead that conversation.

But they're learning at the same time.

And the first place you have to start is why should we have a coaching culture in this team?

And then you can start to look at things, some of the skills like listing skills and say, Okay, how can we get better at listening to our customers or other stakeholders?

How can we apply this into the real work that we're doing.

And so creating, you can create a really strong coaching culture in a team if you take it progressively and you see it as a co-learning exercise rather than something that the team leader is trying to impose upon the team.

I think that's a really good point.

One of the, my shortest tenure on my career path, if you look back at my LinkedIn profile and I just moved back from the States right?

We high performing sales organization.

We went from an account worth 150 million to 1.1 billion in annual revenues for the company.

Massive organization, really high performing.

And I came back to Ireland, joined this company and I had a manager there that used to say, Don't come to me with problems, just come to me with solutions.

Cause he read it in the book somewhere, right?

On page 27 of the book says, say that.

Did not sit well with me at all.

Cause I was like Well, if I knew what the solutions were, I wouldn't come and ask you, right?

So I was that person that did that.

And then I think, to your point of it has to be a collective hole to get the coaching climate put into place, it has to be the psychological safety.

You have to be open to it and then you have to make it referencable, if that's a word.

Cause you have to able to refer to what it is you're trying to achieve and you have to hold people accountable.

And it's not just coming down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments in tablet team, we're gonna be a coaching culture and everyone's gonna be.

People have to buy into the messaging and they have to agree with it, and you have to lead by example and show that, again, as a sales leader, I'm willing to be coached or I'm looking to get things done as well.

I think that's huge.

When we look at the qualities of great coaches and great leaders, they're very, very similar.

And, and the humility's floating around in there somewhere, but there are four that we've been able to identify.

One is compassion, really been interested in the other people, and having self-compassion too.

Another one is curiosity, being really interested in them, and then their perspective.

Courage is really important.

The courage to really place up to the difficult questions.

Like, what if I as the team leader and the team's biggest problem.

Which is a great question for external coaches to ask.

And connectedness.

How connected are they with all the members of the team and with the external world?

And those four Cs seem to be real core qualities that we're looking for in a coach, and we're looking for in a leader.

Yeah, and I think uh, again, coming back to some of the earlier discussion, culturally they have to be ingrained.

Because people can talk the talk whole day like, and they can say all the words.

We believe in our people and we're a family and we are coaching everyone and all that kind of stuff.

If at the end of the day they reward the bad behavior, particularly in a sales organization.

I'll give you an example that I, I had a sales leader that used to love talking about training and people development and everything.

And I was a sales director at the time and I was trying to ingrain that habit of having people come, be open, asking questions and all that.

And then at end of quarter it was just like Bam, bam, bam.

Where are my deals?

Where are my deals?

Where are my deals?

Uh, we have to get to this number.

And then there was one particular rep on the team used to try and hide his numbers in the CRM and he push 'em out.

And then he pulled them all in the end at the end of quarter.

And it was like, Great job, man.

Great job.

I know I could count on you, I know I could count on you, I knew could on you.

I said, Would you just undermined everything I'm trying to do as a sales leader in EMEA by reinforcing that bad behavior and it's not helping anybody and it's not coaching anybody, it's just going Hey, we we got the datas that aren't great?

Same thing when you change up your comp plan, you know?

I was reading a report today some company called High Bob.

I don't renew and further the VC code.

But basically there was a survey done of people in Ireland in the UK and Ireland.

And it said three out of 10 30 year olds are not happy in the tech world.

Primarily due to all the uncertainty in the space, right?

But also the other reasons were poor manager relationship.

and lack of career development.

So the biggest, most wanted perk they had was obviously flex hours and hybrid office location.

And that brings its own challenges then when it comes to coaching and managing people.

And that's a significant challenge we're facing, you know, say since the pandemic and covid.

Yeah, I mean, I was finding myself when you talked about being a happy family when everybody says, We are just one big family here in this team, or this organization.

I always respond with Really, Is it that bad?

Okay.

You could choose your family but not your, or choose your friends, but not your family.

And it just makes them stop and think, and I think, it's not just a family.

We aren't there to achieve a common purpose or to be much more precise, a shared purpose.

There's a big difference between a common purpose, which you see in a group and a shared purpose, which you have within a team.

Too many teams just have a common person.

Sales teams have this problem that very often they are structured so that they don't have a shared purpose.

They're not interdependent.

It's all about a common person.

They all, they're all there individually to make as much money as they can.

So part of the role of coaching as the team leader is to actually help them to develop a shared purpose, so they're supporting each other.

We had a classic example of this, oh, two or three years ago now.

And this was a sales team.

They got two died in the wall, long term divas, I suppose.

They, they were the guys.

They had the biggest accounts and they called all the shots.

And the team leader was, was never called this.

And they had a new team leader come in and, and, and she was quite fed up with this and she could see that they were stopping the potential growth of all the others because they'd a good account coming in and they'd say, I'll take that one.

And so they said, We need to create a team.

But these two guys just said, basically said no.

We're doing our own thing.

Thank you very much.

You carry on now, but we are not interested.

So on the basis, okay, well, the team is the group of people who are prepared to come together and support each other and to act like a.

So the team leader and the team worked with this, the two, and then they said Right, well in that case we have to have a contract with you two about how you are gonna contribute.

So they had nice document with with KPIs that they expected from them.

And they just basically ignored them, as it were, and just got on with building the business as a team.

And the five other guys.

And women started to gradually grow by coaching.

We've been coached by the manager, turning her attention to them rather than to the guys that were going off and doing their own thing.

Were quite happy in their own, own little world.

And over a period of about 18 months, the five of them started to overtake the other two.

And one of them realized what was happening and said, Actually, can I come in?

Please?

Can I play?

And that was okay.

And the other one was so pissed off, he left, and it didn't have that much difference.

And all sorts of, as usually in these cases, all sorts of skeletons came out of the cupboard at that point too.

So I think by focusing on those people who want to be a team, we can improve performance, the collective performance, much more than focusing on people's in as individuals.

And, this whole thing about individual salaries, rewards and bonuses without some kind of, cross fertilization of cost dependency, inevitably the way that we structure reward systems works against supporting your colleague.

I wonder now if there's a little more appetite since the days of Covid when sales people who are often quite sociable.

I think, not as many are as highly extrovert as people.

Imagine from the stereotype.

We do have much more of a mix, but nevertheless, you know, they're used to being out.

They're used to engaging with people and I think, you know, two years that Medi had working from home has caused more of them to look across and think What are my colleagues doing?

What are my peers doing?

What are they learning?

And I see a bit more appetite to do that.

But it is on the leader, as we talked about, to try and create the atmosphere in which that can happen, the environment, which could, it can happen because those things don't naturally occur, other than maybe on a person to person basis where they get on and there's a natural affinity.

But there's not really a structured or an inclusive way of learning there unless you create the environment for it is there?

Absolutely.

I mean, A great question to team leaders in a sales environment is what are you doing to leverage the whole system rather than the individual bits of it?

And so how are you creating additional value by getting people to collaborate as opposed to everybody just doing their own thing?

I'm amazed often that's the revelation is a question.

Absolutely and, and I've seen some great examples of, I mean, just taking really simple themes and thinking about, maybe sales leaders listening to this episode.

I thinking, God, there's, you know, there's a ton of stuff to do here.

Where do I start?

But just that sharing, you know, very often the weekly sales meeting, if that's what they have, or a monthly sales meeting is all about, everybody goes around and talks about what's on their forecast and the leader tells them Well, you know, this is new stuff coming from the company and, you know, new policies or new products or whatever.

And most people are trying to answer their emails or do other things when it's, you know, it is that classic non definition of listening, which is, you know what we listening is what we're doing while we're waiting for our turn to speak.

And it is that kind of mentality that it'll be coming up to my turn, but until then, I'm gonna half listen.

And actually just reinventing the sales meeting.

And there are so many ways you can do it, so it's not just a round robin, maybe you.

A different salesperson or somebody different lead the meeting.

It doesn't, to your point, David, it doesn't have to be the leader that leads the sales meeting.

Maybe you hand that over to different salespeople that you know, you, you deep dive into certain areas that you have more group discussions around here's the challenge we are facing, what do we do about it?

I mean, they're, they're the simplest things, but they take a bit of conscious thoughts and conscious effort to introduce, but can be really important stepping stones to helping to create that mindset that then is going to lead those individuals to talk more to each other.

Yeah, absolutely.

And as you said like, you know, pre, pre covid we're all extroverted, introverts, so all the sales people are out there doing their thing and I come across this all the time, right?

So since I moved back from, I was field sales in the States and I moved back, I was inside sales, and inside sales was always seen as the, the junior stepchild to, to real sales, which was field sales.

But like I've sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of software in Europe all over the phone.

But we always had a lot of craic, good fun in the office, right?

And you'd learn from your colleagues on the floor.

You'd learn, Hey, go Robbie said that message.

John said that message.

Mary said that, Oh, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try that on my next call.

And we've lost a lot of that, right?

Because you can't do that over Zoom calls.

So you know, when you're, when you go to look for ways to bring those, like we talked coachable moments together so you're using a bit of data that you see and then like we try and go, Okay, hey, rather than just thinking of shadowing for new people, I can go, you know what?

Emmett does a great demo of that new feature.

He's worked closely with the product management team.

Let's have him be the one to want a session on for the.

Completely separate from the weekly sales meeting, completely individual thing.

Or Bob did brilliant on the marketing campaign for product X.

Let's have Bob engagement marketing or whatever.

And have them step up to a little bit more than just do the deals and just do the revenue and just do the chasing stuff on the CRM.

And I think that's a massive, massive way to do it.

And, you know, for us.

in Ctrl, obviously our platform is designed around giving space for managers to keep on top of their coaching requirements.

And we focus an awful lot on pipeline interviews cuz of the space that we're in.

Everybody's favorite meeting or depending on who on where you're at, right?

But it's also the place where things can fall down a lot and expectations aren't very clear.

Like I've had sales reps say to me in the past that they absolutely dreaded the pipeline interview with me, um, because they felt that they were just gonna get everything wrong, highlighted as opposed to everything good that they were doing.

But over time they started getting better understanding of what I was looking for.

So they go, I'm gonna show him.

I'm gonna make sure he can't catch me at this time.

And they were right on top of everything that needed to get done.

So it ineffective became a great training ground for them.

I think that's what we want to make sure that we look at when we talk about Things like, like setting expectations very clearly with people and like having a space for them to come with their questions and for you to go with your questions and come up with a, like a joint defined plan for what they need to develop, and that's huge.

The one of the simplest things that a team leader can do is to just look at the team meetings and look at the emphasis.

Is it all about task?

Because a really effective team meeting is both task and learning, and half the time at least should be around learning, learning um, context.

So what have we learned?

Let's review whether we got that sale or we didn't get that sale.

What do we do right?

What do we do wrong?

What can we do better?

But it's all about review together.

And there were also lovely little techniques.

One of my favorite is cock up of the month.

And basically what you do with cock up of the month is, you have a prize and you win it for the best mistake of the month.

And it's not the mistake itself, you get it.

It's for the learning you've extracted and shared with the team.

And you know, it's a, it's a great way to make it safe to talk about things that went wrong.

Okay.

I've learned now not to park in this, in the, in the reserve car parking space of the managing director of one of the clients.

You, that's that kind of thing.

But it's the extracting of learning, getting into the habit, extracting of learning for this.

The one piece of advice if, as a sales manager you're gonna do that, is make sure you win it the first time to give people the confidence that you are, that you cock up as well.

And think we, we can build our portfolio of things that shift the emphasis towards learning.

As much as towards task achievement.

And if you can put all that learning, take all the personal development plans and put them into a team development plan and review that team learning plan as a regular part of, So you've got your sales review meetings, your learning review meetings at the same time, you're creating an engine for developing the whole team.

Back in the day we had a, a fails channel in Slack.

And I know a lot of companies do that, but again, it comes back to your point on psychological safety though.

Cause I remember the first couple of times someone put a fail in and the CEO, young guy of this, this company, made jokes and made fun of it, thought he was being funny, and it completely shut the whole thing down.

Cause people went, I'm not gonna be the one posted in that channel if that's the way it's gonna go, you know?

So again, it got a psychological safety there for that one, so.

Well, he, he, he's obviously a great candidate for the, the technical definition of a coach.

The technical definition of a coach is a coach is what comes immediately behind the horse's ass.

Yeah.

I love that.

I think the, I think that point around, the team though, and that learning mentality.

You know, It's interesting when we talk about, whether it's the cockup of the month, which I love that I'm sure there'll be a few people adopting that from this.

But looking at those, where have we lost business, which are our losses because nobody likes talking about those, but that's the ground where we're gonna learn the most generally.

So I think, you know, to your, both your points, bringing that out in the open in a safe way is so important.

And having a bit of structure around how we do it, having some behavioral guidelines around how we do it, and extracting that learning and then making sure that's shared, I think is hugely important.

And you know, it's easy to talk about the wins and, take all the kudos, but very often other salespeople hear about a win and think, Ah, yeah, but that was just that customer, or that was a unique set of circumstances.

They can't always relate it to their own situation.

Which in itself is a, is another topic around how people learn and making it relatable.

But the losses, people will very often think, Oh God, I don't wanna be in that position.

and privately, at least we'll be thinking, Oh God, that could be me.

So I think, creating that where it's not only okay to share, but it's actually critical to share those things becomes really important.

And you only get that by creating that psychological safety, but that coaching culture, that learning culture is fundamental to, to even getting to the point where you can start to do that effectively.

And d'you know, especially on the sales side because as sales reps and managers, like we do take the losses personally, right?

And we feel like we could have done more or it's always my fault, just the way we take credit for the waits too, right?

But I think when it comes to the losses, like you have to be in a position where you can review those losses and understand, Did I actually do some, enough on that myself personally?

And if I have done, then okay, what, where did it break down?

Is it on the product side?

Is it on the messaging side?

Is it just on the customer side?

Maybe there was a whole host of things that go into a deal being one and last and it's never just on the activity of one person.

So again, being open about that and being honest about it and being able to share that learning.

Cuz I guarantee if I have an opportunity and I lasted because I didn't position new feature X quite well, then okay.

four or five other people on the sales team had the same issue, and maybe we need to do a coaching session around how we demo that part of the product.

And figure it out together.

You know, We need to maybe, maybe nobody knows the answer, but collectively we could all contribute something to finding at least a hypothesis that we can go and, and work on and, and build on from there.

I did some work with a client quite a number of years ago and they were really trying to encourage that idea of account team selling.

So get away from the idea that you are an individual account seller, and you know, everybody else is sort of behind you, but actually you are going into the customer as a team.

So we had this whole account team program and the motto of it was Don't lose alone.

You know, It is one thing to say, I've come and won this, but if you come and say, I've lost this deal and you haven't lost it as a team, you've lost it because you didn't engage the team properly, you know you are in trouble.

If you've lost it collectively as a team, fine, you know, we'll learn from it and we'll do something different.

And that whole idea of don't lose alone became a really important mantra that got over some of those barriers to people wanting to just control it or just be used to being very self-sufficient and not really bringing other people in, or only bringing them in in a very tactical way when needed.

But you need that sort of impetus, I think to try and change things.

Most of what we talked about is been traditional, linear, think.

And what we're learning now is that all teams.

But particularly sales teams because of the in, of their influencing teams.

There's a great deal of potential for them to achieve a lot more by being aware of their internal systems and all the other systems around them.

So when we start talking about complex adaptive systems and chaos theory, you can see people go glazed eyes and, and not surprisingly, really, But you know, you can boil this down quite simply into quite simple dynamics and look at the role of the team, what the team is there for, and how it does what it does.

And look at the relationships between the stakeholders and influencers.

So stakeholders are people who are affected by what you do.

And influences are people who actually define what you could do or constrain what you can do.

And of course sometimes they're the same people.

But looking at all of your stakeholders as a team and what's the, what's the relationship with each one of those?

So we go from a linear, a linear point of view, we do or don't make sales with our customers to a systemic point of view where, let's look at the stakeholders and the relationship that we build with each of those stakeholders and how we're gonna listen to them and understand what's really driving them.

In Covid there were lots of examples of sales teams going out to their customers and saying What are the big problems that you are facing during Covid?

Okay, how can we work together to alleviate your problems and, and ours at the same time?

And there was some lovely examples of, of, of just having those conversations help both survive.

But if you go to a complex adaptive systems approach, you then say, what's the interactions, the whole system, between those stakeholders?

Different kinds of customers.

How do they interate with each other?

A sales team, can be, because it's gathering information all the time from lots of different customers, you are the bridge between them.

You can affect the whole system.

And it's learning how to do that so you coach not just individuals and you don't just coach the team, but you coach the system.

We had a lovely example of this.

It's outside of the sales area, but I like it as a nice example.

Here in the uk we've got a crisis with ambulances.

They're supposed to arrive in minutes and they take hours.

And the big reason for that is that ambulances accused of outside hospitals waiting for a bed to become available to put people into.

And the hospitals have got all these beds filled up with mostly old people who could be released to go home, but the social services haven't got the resources to be able to provide 'em with the care fast enough to take them outta the hospital bed.

And so the ambulance team with coaching said Well, okay, let's look at the system.

It's all intertwined here.

What's the intervention that we can get together to ease the problem for everybody?

And they came up with a very simple solution.

They got all the three various funding bodies together, more than three.

and said, Right, we'll rent a hotel and use it at a staging post for people in between coming out hospital and going to their home, to free up all those beds so that we can speed up the whole problem.

I think it's a nice, neat example of what we can do.

Because we are in that privileged position or salespeople in that privileged position of knowing what's happening in multiple companies across the sector, you have the potential to change things in the se in that center.

And I think the whole role of coaching is not just about the individual, I think it's about how we coach the system.

So in a way, every salesperson should be a coach to the system around them.

I love that, and I think that ties back in, you talked about those four characteristics of good coaches.

It's that compassion of understanding and empathizing with the problem.

It's that connectedness, very much that you just talked about.

And underpinning that, the curiosity and the courage to figure it out and make those bold statements, isn't it?

So, you know, I, I think, one message perhaps we're taking for sales leaders, but also for sales teams, is to what extent are they embodying those characteristics?

Because if they embody those, it's gonna take them on the right path to question that bigger picture, isn't it?

Yeah.

We have more power than we realize.

I think that neutral curiosity perspective is, is massive.

It behooves every sales leader to of pull their managers outta the trenches a little bit and of come up just a little peek above the parapet to say, What's really going on here in this whole system?

And what's really going on here in all of the industries and all the customers?

And try and join up some dots and tie it together.

And I think that's sometimes, uh, lacking for some organizations.

And I think that would really help a lot for, from a coaching perspective.

It's definitely something I think we see at that disruptive market level, when a company can see how they can disrupt a market and change the way things happen, we definitely start to see it there.

But there, the example you gave around ambulances, David, there are so many, actually much smaller and less life threatening instances, but which could have a huge impact.

But it takes that, I quite often talk about, it's a like a two, two circle Venn.

But you know, your customer knows a lot about their market and they know a little bit about the technology if that's what you're selling.

And you know a lot about the technology market and a little bit about their market.

But it's that coming together where you can find some really surprising new ways to do things that could impact on both.

And so if you then start to build that out in a more systemic way and look at different organizations and what's the connection between them, somewhere in the middle of that now, multi circle Venn is probably something nobody's thought of before that could be really significant.

And if I were to sum everything up, I like to think of one single courageous thing that a leader can do to change the direction and actually, and just get, get moving on this, this journey.

And that thing would be to go to the team as a whole and say to the team, How can you help me in creating the culture and environment that we need to be at our best?

And it's hard to resist that.

A good question that drives a lot of subsequent conversations, I think.

David, Emmett, this has been a really interesting conversation as I knew it would be bringing you both together and, and looking at this huge and important topic.

So thank you both very much.

Thank you too.

Thank you for having me.

Well, this episode promised a lot and I hope it delivered for you.

Some key takeaways for me were David's four Cs, compassion, curiosity, courage, and connectedness, combined with the two things, only the leader can do.

Emmet's point about data getting in the way also resonated in a world where data driven is a mantra that can sometimes prevent us from seeing the wood for the trees.

We're dealing with people and the big picture, not just the data.

Back in season two in my conversation with Kathy Belford and Matt Feland, Matt Liken developing people to sunflowers that need nurturing with the right conditions rather than being told to grow.

That image came back to me during our conversation here.

Finally, I think David sets us all a bold challenge to coach the system, not just the individual or the presenting problem.

Great advice in an uncertain, unpredictable, and disruptive world.

So thank you once again to Emmett and David for joining me.

Our final episode in this season takes a slightly different format.

As Alate celebrates its 20th year, we take a look at some of the trends we've seen over the years and where we think the B2B tech sales world is heading next.