To scale your team, you need everyone speaking the same language internally and externally. To get it right, you will need a strong coaching culture on your team. Learn how to build a coaching habit the right way.

To scale your GTM team, you need a common language. Every person in the company should understand who your customer is, what products you sell, what success looks like for your customer, and how the company makes money.

Once you have a common language, the sales execution is straightforward. Every salesperson must execute by:

• Calling on leads of the same quality
• At the same effort and velocity (number of calls or meetings)
• With the same energy (lots of enthusiasm, act like you want the business)
• Using the same message (value proposition and benefits of your offering)
• Following the same sales process

It’s all about consistent and uniform sales effort. Sure, there is always room for a salesperson to add their personal flare or insight on a deal. But the bulk of sales effort should look and feel the same to the customer regardless of who is running the sale.

This sounds simple but it’s quite difficult to execute. That’s because sales teams are made up of humans, and humans are complex. Especially sales humans.

They come in with their beliefs about what they should sound like on the phone or in a demo. They want to inject their personality in the sale. They have lives outside of work that interfere with their focus or energy day-to-day.

All of this combined leads to inconsistent sales results. It’s your job as a leader to limit the range of variable outcomes. If sales execution is a set of waves, you want the waves to be consistent in height, length, spacing, etc. (see image above)

So how do you get a team to execute with such consistency? You have to coach the team.

You already know that sales coaching is required to achieve outstanding sales execution. Companies are pouring money into this space. The sales coaching software industry is estimated to be over $80 billion dollars. Not a typo, that’s $80 BILLION dollars.

Then why, with so much common knowledge about the importance of sales coaching, do companies fail to set this up the right way? In most early-stage companies, there isn’t enough time or bandwidth to focus on coaching and onboarding.

Take onboarding, for example. Jason Lemkin recently posted about what kind of onboarding to expect if you are joining an early-stage company…

Once you hit 50 people on the team, there are no excuses. You have to have real onboarding. By that time you have a handful of salespeople working on driving revenue for the business. You have customer success working with customers to make sure they are getting value from the product. You have a customer support team answering customer calls and responding to support tickets. You might even have a marketing team that is driving demand and engagement from your target market.

Every person on the team needs to be coached, not just sales. The company is responsible for giving access to professional development and coaching. This makes the team more valuable, more effective, and will make the team happier because they are getting better at their jobs.

How to know if you have a coaching problem

There’s a simple litmus test for every Go-To-Market team to see if the team is communicating the right way with customers. Go to each person on the marketing, sales, and customer success teams and ask them these questions:

1. Who is our customer?
2. What does our product do for our customers?
3. What does success look like for our customers?
4. How does the company make money?

Record the answers to each question. Do it in a survey like google forms or Typeform.

When you review the responses, you will be surprised at how varied the answers are. They will be close enough for you to see that the team generally understands how and what the company does, but notice the language that people use. You will see inconsistencies and that is your opportunity.

If there is variance in how the team understands these basic for points about your business, how do you think they are coming off to the customer in sales conversations or customer success conversations?
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It’s a scary thought to imagine 5 different customers getting 5 different experiences depending on who they talk to.

So how do you fix this?

Listen to your customer calls

It’s one thing to get on the phone with customers. You should be doing that already.

It’s another thing to listen to the calls that your team is having when you aren’t there. That’s where you will see the biggest opportunity to improve.

Start using a conversation intelligence tool like Gong or Chorus to map customer calls back to your CRM.

Pick out a few calls to review with the team and listen for the following:
- what are the buying signals from the customer?

- how does the customer explain their business challenges?

- how does the salesperson uncover more of the pain in the business?

- How does the salesperson describe the benefits of using your product or services?

- What kind of enthusiasm does the salesperson bring to the call? Are they acting like they want the business?

By listening to calls, you can identify what works so that you can start coaching the rest of the team what works.

Put your messaging in black and white. Write it down

In order to coach the team, you need to deliver the message in a presentation, in a 1:1, and on a piece of paper that you can leave with them to study and implement on their own.

You may be against call scripts. You don’t want robots, right? But you need to tell reps how they should be talking about your product and how they can navigate objections on sales calls. This isn’t just about cold calling and cold outreach. It applies to each stage of your sales process.

Write down exactly what you want reps to say on the phone when they are:
- prospecting to new customers

- asking discovery questions about the prospect’s business to see if they are a fit for the product

- talking about the product and the benefits of using the product

- asking for a demo and setting up the meeting

- running a demo and showcasing the value of the product

- asking for the sale, and negotiating that sale

When you write it down for your team, you remove any question about how it is supposed to be executed. You can guarantee that reps will make it their own by introducing their own style, and that’s OK. At least you have given the path to success and you can bring them back to that path when they are too far off.

This also applies to your your Quarterly Business Review templates for your customer success team, your response templates for your support team, and every other place where your team is regularly interacting with customers.

Write it down in excruciating detail. Bonus points if you include your team and get them to build the scripts and templates with you. This is the ultimate buy-in from the team and increases the chances they will adopt the habits they need.

Tell your team that Coaching is a priority

This may seem obvious, but you should make it known to the team that you are focusing on coaching.

Start by highlighting the status quo. Show the results from the team survey. Share a few of the call recordings so the team can hear the inconsistencies in sales execution.

You would be surprised by how many on your team don’t even think this is a problem. Make it known and explain exactly how you are going to improve it for the business.

Build a coaching habit that fits into your operating rhythm

I have written before about building a Culture of Sales Success. Coaching is mandatory in a Success culture because it drives success for the individual as it does for the company.

You can incorporate the coaching into your operating rhythm for the business. Start by including a weekly “call camp” where you bring the sales team together to listen to sales calls.

The first few will be awkward. Most people don’t like hearing themselves on the phone, especially in front of their peers. Once you get past the awkwardness, you will find the team leaning into the exercise. They want to see how others are doing the same job. They want to get better. They want to critique each other and point out opportunities for improvement. Bringing the team together around coaching is an important step in establishing a coaching culture.

Different types of coaching to implement

Now that you have established a call camp, you can pull more coaching into your team culture. Here are some of the many ways to run coaching with your team:

• Call coaching and call camps (peer coaching)
• 1:1 coaching and deal review
• Sales enablement for sales process for product releases and for other generally applicable
• On-the-fly coaching through ride-alongs and joining customer calls
• Ad hoc coaching in forecast meetings, pipeline meetings, etc.

Coaching should be everywhere on the team. Anyone who needs help should have access to help. There should be both scheduled and ad-hoc coaching sessions. It needs to be obvious that the team is prioritizing coaching and skills development.

Always remember to highlight the bright spots

Your team should look forward to the coaching, they should feel the value of it. Don’t make it too painful for them, or make it so that they are getting yelled at every time they go into a coaching session. This will make them hate the coaching session.

It’s important to mix in positive coaching sessions with the more critical coaching sessions. It’s easy to find the bad in every call, even with your best reps. Find and celebrate the wins. Run competitions to reward the folks who exemplify the habits. The ones who run flawless demos. The ones who handle customer challenges with grace. This is how you make the habit desirable.

Being “coachable” is part of your hiring criteria

Hire for "coachability". When you interview, give each candidate an assignment like a mock call. Give them feedback on their performance and see if they can apply the feedback.

Look for experience in situations where coaching is critical. Ex-collegiate athletes are always popular for this reason, but there are many other places that coaching is important.

Listen for anecdotes from their past about how they improved as a result of implementing coaching or feedback. You want candidates who are adaptable and can implement coaching on the fly.

Some people are not open to coaching. They are not open to constructive criticism. Those candidates are not going to be a good fit for your business if they are resistant to coaching.

Coach the Coaches

Every leader should be bought into the coaching culture. They are stewards of and participants in the culture. They should embody the habits of the coaching culture, but they should also seek out the coaching themselves.

Coaching leaders is more difficult than coaching a front-line rep. It’s more nuanced because you are coaching on how to manage people. Nevertheless, coaching is a skill like any other and there are many ways to level up your leadership team to be better coaches for their direct reports.

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1. Read leadership books together. Leadership can be lonely so give your leaders a space where they can talk openly about their challenges running and coaching the team.
2. Run skip-level meetings. Meet with your managers’ direct reports. Learn about how each front-line rep views the manager and where the front-line thinks the manager can improve
3. Bring the leadership team into the sales enablement rhythm. All managers are responsible for coaching. Give the managers and leaders responsibility for enabling the entire sales team by having them own a monthly training session. This could be a training on anything that the manager is interested in or skilled at. They could run the call camps or they could run a session on pipeline management. The topic doesn’t matter at long as the leader is owning part of the coaching rhythm.

It may feel like a huge burden to coach everyone on the team, but you don’t have to do it alone. You can rely on your leaders. Many of them are already looking for a way to help. Bring them into the coaching rhythm and give your coaching efforts some leverage.

Invest in yourself

And what about you? How are you getting better at your job? Peyton Manning had Tony Dungy. Some of the most effective business leaders in the world have been coached by people like Bill Campbell or Jerry Colonna. What makes you different?

Go get a coach. Preferably one who has tactical experience with the specific things you are working on right now.

I started working with a coach in October of 2018 and it changed my life. His name is Barrett Foster and he had a ton of experience scaling sales teams to $100MM and beyond.

What started as a professional and tactical relationship became very personal. I consider Barrett a close friend today and I have learned many things from him over the years.

The same can be true for you, but you need to get comfortable being vulnerable.

Coaching isn’t right for everyone. But if you are reading this essay, then you are likely trying to scale your business. That means you are pushing harder than most others push themselves at work. You are reaching for greatness and you will get there faster if you have someone helping you. So go get a coach.