I have now provided executive coaching to several executives and want to share my insights on the value of providing coaching or mentoring to your executive teams.
Challenges faced by business leaders
Quite often I have been coaching sales leaders who are immersed in the daily grind of operational activities and simply don’t have time to step back and review where they are at and assess if they are following the correct strategy. They are also in need of having an independent and impartial third party to give a second opinion or to validate their strategies and decisions.
Other leaders have been new to leading sales teams and need advice on best ways of coaching and getting the best from there teams, be it sales processes, sales metrics and sales performance.
In some cases, they’re facing challenges related to lead generation, product positioning, market segmentation, go to market and many other areas.
Values of coaching
It’s important in smaller organisations to get these aspects of your business fine tuned and this can be accelerated with coaching from seasoned executives who’ve been confronted with similar challenges and who can assist in coaching executives with strategies to develop and lead their respective teams and organisations.
Overall Company Strategy
Quite often the team does needs to have alignment on the overall company strategy and agree what the key priorities are for the business to meet its overall targets and objectives. Alignment is key and one method of achieving this is by the use of Objectives and Key results(OKRS). If used properly these OKRS can be utilised by an entire company to ensure everyone is steering in the same direction. Managers can define their teams objectives and Key Results, but each team member can define their own Objective and Key Results that then feed into the managers OKRS. Companies like Facebook, HP and Apple have used OKRS as a company wide initiative to drive business decisions and if done correctly can ensure alignment, easily tracked and refined.
Sales Coaching
All too often sales teams are keen to get in front of the customer to pitch their shiny new product. They’ ve had the product training and now all of the features and benefits of the product. But all to often, the sales teams do not cover off the basics. There are several key sales methodologies including SPIN, BANT, MEDDICC, Challenger Sales, but they all come down to some key important sales techniques to uncover the customer pain points, develop a good understanding of the impact of such pain points, and then determining the key situational aspects regarding budget, authority, need and timeline.
I am amazed at how sales teams I have seen that fail in these basic skills, but when I have seen this done properly the results speak for themselves.
These skills can be taught and are essential in any sales team in delivering great results.
If you are looking for an executive coach or want to know more, please do get in touch