Top coaches in any field understand the importance of challenging the individuals on their teams—pushing them beyond what they thought they were capable of doing. Indeed, I have found that a person’s best efforts often come when he is pushed outside of his comfort zone.
The best sales coaches do not employ a one-size-fits all methodology, but rather tailor the approach according to the individuals they are trying to push. The goal is to help their team break through mental and physical barriers in order to achieve victory.
In strategic opportunity planning, this often takes the form of asking questions that shake the reps’ settled ideas. So, after choosing the right targets and developing a preliminary strategy, it is time to ask really good questions.
What’s a good question?
While working with a capital equipment manufacturer, we saw the dangers of assuming sales strategy is a one-size-fits-all plan.
Consider Lisa, one of the company’s top sales managers, who managed seven reps. Lisa met with her team every Monday over the phone, and conducted one-on-one phone meetings with each sales rep to review the top accounts each was working on for the month. Lisa and the rep talked about an average of six to eight accounts in each call. These represented the reps’ targeted accounts.
As part of our work with this client, we shadowed Lisa during her Monday meetings. Her first call was with Kevin, a solid if unspectacular performer, who usually hit his quotas. Kevin had been with the company for two years.
Lisa began by getting a list of Kevin’s top accounts. Starting at the top of the list, Lisa asked a series of questions about the account.
- Who was Kevin’s main advocate?
- Whom else did Kevin know?
- Who were his adversaries?
- What product was Kevin selling?
- Why did the customer want it?
- What was the revenue potential?
- What stage was it in?
- When would it close?
- Did Kevin need any help from her?
Kevin was able to answer the questions fairly quickly and effortlessly. Lisa then went onto the next name on the list.
This Q&A process played out pretty much the same way for all of Lisa’s reps with whom she met that day. She asked virtually the same questions of each rep, and each rep supplied her with answers. We wondered if every Monday looked and sounded the same way, with the list of accounts changing ever so slightly.
What we most wanted to know was how valuable was the process for the individuals involved. For Lisa, it was an all-day affair—as she ploughed through Information Gathering 101. For the reps, it was also a time investment. We wondered about perceived return on that investment, as well as real returns, as measured by opportunities won.
In a candid moment, Lisa acknowledged that the reps resisted the Monday meetings, and she secretly loathed them. Her entire day was sucked dry, for one thing. “But I have to know what’s going on in the field because my boss is asking me. And if I don’t know what’s going on, I run the risk of being called out if a deal turns sideways. That is not pretty when it happens. It’s much worse if we are caught with our pants down,” she confided.
Like the other managers with whom she worked, Lisa also felt that her contributions, despite the reps’ less-than-enthusiastic attendance, were valuable to the team.
For the client, the most alarming part of Lisa’s revelation is that she was only one of 10 sales managers who conducted weekly meetings like these. Each one followed a similar process. Extrapolated out, that was quite a bit of time spent reviewing accounts. We did not doubt that the other managers shared some of Lisa’s beliefs. On the other hand, even though they didn’t enjoy spending all day in the meetings, the managers all felt they were adding value by helping the sales rep move the opportunity closer to close
Here’s where the story took a turn for the ironic. The sales teams hated the weekly meetings. The reps also seemed to chafe at both the structure of the meetings and the content. As one of the reps told us, “I hate these Monday meetings. They are almost always a waste of time. They insult my intelligence. And they do not really help me win business. Look, I am a team player, so I want to play by the rules. I work hard every day, and I think I know my customers pretty well. But the questions my manager asks me can be answered with a damn report from our CRM. Why waste my time with something our CRM can provide?”
While we wanted to commend the client for insisting that managers had regular and formal communication with their sales teams, we wondered if they knew how counterproductive the meetings actually were thought to be. At its simplest level, you could say this was a failure of their questioning model.
Here’s what we mean: Almost everyone involved in sales performance improvement today will tell you that a question-based customer contact model is the way to sell. We have known since the days of Socrates that questions tend to be more persuasive than statements do. This question-based approach is also effective in coaching.
However, what’s occasionally missed in all the hyperbole about using questions is that not all questions are created equal—and not all of them are equally effective. In other words, contrary to what your teachers have told you, there actually are dumb questions.
Check back next week when we go over how Lisa can implement a more effective questioning strategy.
