Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions
By Keith Rosen Review by Jennifer Dawson Management is dead. Keith Rosen admits it’s a bold statement, but it underlies his innovative approach to creating sales champions and is certainly a thought-provoking sentence to slide into the opening chapter of his book. Since Rosen isn’t advocating for flat organizational structures or axing all sales management positions, it might be more accurate to say that management is on life support. The prescriptive, problem-focused, and punitive approach of traditional management, Rosen asserts, is failing today’s salespeople. Enter coaching, which Rosen defines as “the art of creating new possibilities.” Coaching’s collaborative, creative and solution-focused approach, while not a quick cure for managerial ills, promises to breathe new life into any sales department. Rosen spends a significant amount of time outlining the principles of coaching, the qualities of a “masterful coach”, fatal coaching mistakes, and describing traditional managerial approaches and why they don’t work. The key learning from the book, however–and this is where Rosen pens his second memorable phrase–is his assertion that “the question is the answer.” Why questions? In the role of coach, a sales manager engages in meaningful one-on-one conversations with salespeople which correspond to the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the talking is done by the salesperson, and 20 percent by the coach. In order for this to happen, the coach spends most of his or her time asking insightful, solution-focused questions and listening carefully to the answers, which invariably become the basis for further questions. It makes sense, then, that Rosen’s book is packed with examples of illuminating questions (including an appendix full of one-sentence gems). It’s a long book, but chapter 9 (“Facilitating an Effective Coaching Conversation”), chapter 12 (“Develop an Internal Coaching Program”) and the question-loaded Appendix are worth a careful read. It can be difficult to reconcile Rosen’s advice to focus a coaching session on the salesperson’s values, goals, and needs with the fact that the financial viability of a company depends largely on meeting and exceeding externally-dictated sales targets....
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