Coaching for sales managers and their teams

Tony Latimer

Background and situation

Tony Latimer coaches sales managers and their teams following skills workshops. He calls this ˜guided implementation .

The process

Tony s approach to coaching consists of:

clearly positioning the purpose and intent of the sessions;
defining the present;
identifying the desired future;
helping coachees to get to their future.

The main purpose of the coaching sessions is to help individuals to apply the skills learnt during training; Tony has found, however, that the coach has to ˜deal with lots of other issues if they exist in order to help coachees implement their learning.

Whilst Tony uses this process, he fundamentally believes that you have to ˜go where the coachee needs to , and to do this he uses non-judgemental listening with selective questioning.

Positive aspects of this approach

Allowing coachees to talk about what they want or need to enables them to work on wider issues and potential blocks to implementation of their new skills. Everyone needs someone to talk to, but few get the opportunity. Tony says there are an ˜amazing number of people who comment afterwards that they have never in xx years told anyone this stuff .

Challenges faced

Tony s challenges were: overcoming years of conditioning to give people answers and to judge them; emptying the mind and trusting the process.

Learning

Tony learnt how to become less judgemental and not to give way to the temptation to lecture or give answers from his own perspective. He also learnt that emotional moments will happen and that it is important not to react to them.

Top tips

Get formal training in a process.
Try and experience it as a coachee before coaching someone else.
Be flexible.

Advice for the coachee

˜Absolutely none. In the hands of a good coach [coachees] don t need any. Giving advice goes against good coaching process and will prejudice the outcome. What you really want is for the coachee to just go along and see what happens.

Final thoughts

Trust the process. Everyone would get some benefit from skilled coaching.

Authors comments

The process described here is very loose and relies heavily upon the facilitation and communication skills of the coach. These must be highly developed in order to underpin the confidence needed for the coach to ˜go with the flow .