19 April 2009 | brian

“Setting a goal is not the main thing,” observed Tom Landry, the coach who led the Dallas Cowboys through 20 consecutive winning seasons. “It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” Making the plan and staying with it are two different things. It’s possible to create a plan in isolation, but its impossible to lead your team, whether it be a football team or a sales team, towards the goal without getting down in the mud and the blood with them. Business coaching, first and foremost, is about your people. It’s about giving them the tools they need to do their individual parts so the goals of the team can be achieved.

Know Your Team
Before you can even make a plan, you need to know what you’re working with. You need to know the members of your team, especially what makes them successful and what holds them back. In a recent survey of sales organizations, In the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, we found that among the World Class Sales Organizations, 98% understood why their top performers were successful as opposed to only 38% across all the organizations surveyed. There may be no more telling metric than this when it comes to knowing which sales teams will meet or exceed their goals and which won’t.

Review the Last Game
It’s not always pleasant to review benchmarking with your team, but it’s vital to improvement. As their coach, you need to follow through with every member of your team to insure that they are doing what your top performers have taught you are the keys to success. “Top performers are not born,” says Sam Reese, president and CEO of Miller Heiman. “In fact, they can be replicated to a great extent.” Among the most successful of the sales organizations surveyed, 85% reported that their performance review process helps improve their sales force’s job performance. Barely more than a quarter, 28%, of all sales organizations surveyed could say the same thing.

Drilling for Discipline
91% of the best performing sales organizations surveyed said that they leveraged the best practices of their top performers to improve everyone else. This requires discipline and preparedness on the part of your team. They need to exercise these best practices when stressed or away from the office. Natural talent might be enough to get the ball moving, but it’s discipline that scores the points. When asked what the single most important quality in a top performer is, the top performers gave almost equal weight to being disciplined and prepared as they did to being able to access and influence senior-level executives.

Walking the Walk
Reviewing your own performance as a coach is also important. You need to know that you’re getting the job done. This may be harder than it seems. When asked if they were leveraging the best practices of their top performers, 42% of C-level responded in the affirmative. However, only 23% of those on sales teams saw it happening. If you’re going through the motions, but the lessons aren’t being learned, you need to change your methods. Talk to your team, and make sure they’re really getting all the tools they need, and not just what you think they need. Above all, coaching is about serving your team so they can perform beyond what they believe is possible.

More Information
If you are interested in learning more ways to help your team, be sure to take a look at the Miller Heiman Sales Makeover.

Photo credit: nightthree