How to Use InsideOut Coaching for Sales Leaders

“Nothing happens until someone sells something.” —Eliot Burdett

The above quote is a truth so well-recognized that this phrase has been attributed to over a dozen individuals, including Henry Ford and Peter Drucker. It’s certainly something you, as a sales manager, are aware of. Your sales force plays an absolutely fundamental role in your organization.

Sales is a numbers game. Whether you’re trying to increase numbers, get the right numbers, or get those numbers in the right way, it isn’t easy.

At the end of the day, organizations depend on sales. Without sales, nothing else works. That’s some serious pressure. Face up to that pressure with confidence by coaching your team to higher, more consistent performance.

InsideOut Development has a number of tools and processes that can help you reach that higher performance and to capitalize on the training done within your sales force, utilize the tools already available to you, improve your CRM system, and tailor your sales methodology for increased success.

As a sales manager, you are probably familiar with using processes to drive results. When you want to increase pipeline velocity within your sales force, your sales reps turn to a process to guide their decisions. This is not the only time when your sales force might turn to an established sales process.

You, personally, may turn to processes to guide and manage the entirety of your sales force. Your account managers turn to a process to create and tailor sales strategies for their accounts. These are only a few examples. Processes work, they keep your sales force on the right track.

InsideOut Coaching coupled with Breakthroughs provide you and your sales force a process to turn to in order to improve performance. This isn’t meant to replace your sales methodology, but rather complement it.

One Fortune 500 financial services organization discovered this for themselves. After implementing Breakthroughs, employee engagement increased, issue-escalation decreased, overall ownership of tasks increased, and more employees were considered ready-to-lead candidates for management positions.

Those aren’t the only benefits that can come from implementing InsideOut Development tools and processes.

• The InsideOut Approach to coaching gives you a process to coach your sales force in a way that will decrease interference while improving the performance of your sales force by giving your sales representatives ownership of their progress.
• The GROW® Model gives your sales reps a process to decrease interference and decision fatigue and instead make better and faster decisions.
• InsideOut Coaching and Breakthroughs together give sales managers and reps a process to communicate and solve problems quickly and efficiently.
• InsideOut Development provides the tools to help to enhance the investments you’ve already made, including training, tools, and methodology.

A Process to Help You

InsideOut Development’s tools are founded in the InsideOut Approach rather than the more common Outside-In Approach. The Outside-In Approach focuses on telling, or advice giving. This is an incredibly useful approach—receiving information and learning what to do is essential—but the Outside-In Approach can fall short when sales representatives know what they are supposed to do, but are struggling with either the implementation of that knowledge—or struggling to get past the interference that’s stopping them from doing what they know.

The InsideOut Approach helps individuals to remove interference so that they can better act on the knowledge they have. For skilled sales representatives, this is far more critical than being given more instruction. Your sales representatives know what they are supposed to do. The InsideOut Approach to coaching can help them do it more consistently.

The tools and strategies learned in InsideOut Coaching remind managers to take a step back. When it comes time to coach, you know that instead of merely telling your sales reps what to do, you can encourage them to take ownership of their progress, and their pipeline, and do what they already know.

This doesn’t mean abandoning your sales representatives to their own means and mettle. Check-in conversations, a critical element of InsideOut Coaching, give you the opportunity to debrief with your sales representatives throughout the process, whether it be after sales calls, during periods of stalled movement, or after successfully landing a client. Check-in and feedback conversations keep you a part of the process while still encouraging and empowering your representatives.

Properly-coached employees are more successful—in fact they outperform their peers by 25%—and a large part of that performance stems from their empowerment from having ownership over their success.

How does Inside Coaching work? Check out this blog written by our own VP of Sales to see how he uses InsideOut Coaching to revolutionize his QBRs, making them more productive, easier, more energizing, and simpler.

A Process to Help Your Sales Representatives

The beauty of the GROW Model as taught in Breakthroughs and InsideOut Coaching, is that it complements—rather than replaces or adds to—the process you’re already using. The GROW Model gives structure to decision-making. This structure helps people make better, faster decisions. We call it decision velocity. Like pipeline velocity, the ability to make fast and accurate decisions is essential in any sales role.

In order to do improve decision velocity, you need to reduce the interference that your sales representatives are facing, much of that interference comes in the form of decision fatigue.

Your sales representatives are making hundreds of decisions every day. Some of these are relatively insignificant, while other decisions are far more important. Who they talk to, how they answer questions, how they appease an upset customer, or how they engage with a prospective customer.

A poor decision made at the cost of decision fatigue could result in an opportunity lost or worse—a customer lost. Decision fatigue, however, can be minimized through regular practice and coaching with the GROW Model.

By making the decision-making process replicable, sustainable, and convenient, your sales reps will be able to direct their focus to the important things. This will naturally lead to higher performance, faster-closed opportunities and better overall numbers.

And these results can last long into the future. Your sales reps can use the tools learned in Breakthroughs to build, sustain and improve day after day and year over year.

A Process to Help Your Middle Managers

In every department in every organization, it’s a common practice to promote sales representatives who are excellent at what they do into leadership positions, but it’s even more prevalent in sales teams.

There is a common belief that if someone is good at doing something, they must also be equally as good at helping others achieve it. If someone is a high performer, they will be able to teach others how to achieve that same high performance.

But without proper manager onboarding, these promotions can lead to a phenomenon called the Peter Principle: the idea that people are rewarded and promoted until they reach the point, through no fault of their own, where they are overmatched by the demands and obligations of their new position.

When the Peter Principle was first suggested, it was primarily meant to be satire. Since then, however three professors from the Universities of Minnesota, Yale, and MIT analyzed over 53,000 sales employees and came to a painful conclusion. The Peter Principle is real.

What does this mean for you? After all, 50% of employees who leave, leave because of bad managers. It’s your responsibility to help your new sales managers learn the skills they need to not just be fantastic sellers, but also to be incredible leaders.

InsideOut Coaching and InsideOut Breakthroughs provide managers a process to engage in coaching conversations. These conversations provide opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with their new team of reps, access proprietary tools for faster and better decision-making, and opportunities to receive feedback as they take to their role. InsideOut Coaching also helps them learn what and how to plan, prepare, and practice for taking up the mantle of leader, coach, and manager.

The Process and Your Sales Force

The InsideOut Approach, and all the tools provided by InsideOut Development, are meant to help you perform your best, to exceed the expectations others have for you. We also believe, however, that we can help you be able to exceed even your own expectations, or at least expectations you’ve had of your past investments.

• Sales Training: You’ve likely already invested time in training your sales force. Coaching helps to build on that training to bring your sales representatives to their best. Training may have taught your sales force what to do, coaching helps bring that training out in what they do.
• CRM System: If you’ve bought a CRM system, one of your main concerns may be getting from it the ROI that such systems claim. The GROW Model can help you ensure that you are getting everything out of it that you can, and help you plan on how to best use this tool to develop customer relationships going forward.
• Sales Tools: A CRM system is hardly the only tool you have at your disposal, and as with all tools you may be concerned with whether you are getting everything out of them that you can. Coaching conversations can show you where you aren’t fulfilling potential, and then help you fix that.
• Sales Methodology: As mentioned throughout, your ability to use your sales methodology to move customers down the funnel already exists, coaching isn’t there to replace that methodology. No, it’s there to help you get the best and most out of it that you can.

Good coaching is meant to help bring out the best of your sales representatives, but in so doing, it can also lead to a higher ROI on these investments you’ve already made. Your work, time, and effort won’t go to waste.

The Process of Success

Sales reps face challenges and pressures unique to a sales role, and immense pressure to perform well to meet the needs of the organization.

As Eliot Burdett said, and as you well know: “Nothing happens until someone sells something.”

That pressure can be overwhelming at times, but that doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way. InsideOut Development has the tools to help your sales force respond to that pressure with higher performance that will make the other divisions of your organization stare in awe as your sales force rises to the challenge and exceeds all expectations.

InsideOut Coaching, the GROW Model, Breakthroughs—all of these tools are about helping you and your sales representatives take control of the challenges facing you and giving your sales force ownership of guiding prospects and leads faster and more efficiently through the sales funnel.