The Coaching Effect Blog

We are proud to announce and welcome our newest Independent Sales Partner, Chris Champagne. Chris will be responsible for representing all of EcSell Institute’s programming and services, including the Coaching Effect Survey, ONE-UP Coaching Cloud, the Coaching Effect Performance System, Academies, and the annual Coaching Effect Summit.

Every other Monday the EcSell Institute team gathers at the conference room table, or conference line, for a team meeting. An agenda is always sent out in advance in order to keep things moving at a productive pace and so team members can plan accordingly to the items of business that will be covered. 

Top-notch team leaders and coaches know that team development meetings are important to building cohesive, high-performing teams. They can be a great way to step away from daily grind activities and focus on often neglected, yet extremely critical work-impacting, topics such as:

• Developing strategies and work plans
• Creating shared goals
• Communicating and building relationships
• Discovering and shaping (and even repairing) team dynamics 

You’ve all read about it, heard about it and likely tried to implement it.  You intellectually understand the concept and perhaps have seen the benefits.  But very few leaders are emotionally ready to follow through on one of the most basic and challenging growth perpetuating behaviors - coaching through change. How do I know this?  By looking at the data of leaders at all levels who, despite understanding how activity and behavior change will lead to improved team sales results, either consciously or subconsciously continue doing the same things and obtaining the same results.

Last month we began our series on how leadership is portrayed in popular films and TV shows to see if those tropes work in the real world. For example, do managers who do things like give a motivational speech or a tough assignment really help their teams perform better? Our first blog looked at managers who were rated as good motivators by their teams and found that they led teams that sold nearly half a million more a year than other teams. So yes, the popular movie trope of the motivational manager seems to actually work in the real world.

“Because the world faces many challenges, and they can only be solved by teams. Those teams need coaches.” – "Trillion Dollar Coach"

Our mission at the EcSell Institute is to create a world where everyone knows what great coaching feels like. The individuals that were fortunate enough to know and interact with Bill Campbell experienced a world like this. The Trillion Dollar Coach is a fantastic new book that focuses on the life and coaching secrets of Bill Campbell.

From his early days coaching football at Columbia, to his time spent at Google, through his later days mentoring and coaching some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, for free I might add, Bill positively impacted the lives of thousands of individuals and helped them become better people and professionals than they could have without him in their lives.

One of the most important things a manager can do to help their team members perform better is to coach them to improve their selling skills. Sales training is a critical first step in building a team member's selling skills, but without consistent coaching and feedback from a manager to support that training, the development of those new skills will stagnate.

To deliver the most effective feedback, try these tips:

Over and over again in our research, we find that the relationship between a team member and their leader or manager (aka: coach) is one of the most important variables that impacts performance. Understandably, we often are asked by leaders how they can be better relationship builders with their team. One of the easiest, most meaningful, and highly effective ways to go about this is by simply asking more questions. 

What do influencers and business owners like Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, Bill McDermott, and Richard Branson all have in common when it comes to their personal brands?

I posed this question during a personal branding breakout session I led at EcSell Institute’s 2019 Sales Coaching Summit (now rebranded as The Coaching Effect Summit) in Charlotte, NC back in April. There were some solid guesses, but no one guessed that all of these individuals have larger social media followings than the company brands they own, lead, or manage. Is that not crazy?!

Do you broadcast happiness? Do you share good news, support, encourage, congratulate or thank the people in your life? Could you possibly be underestimating the power of positivity?

Each of us could make improvements in this area, and Michelle Gielan’s recent keynote about "happiness" during EcSell Institute’s Sales Coaching Summit (rebranded as The Coaching Effect Summit now) in Charlotte, NC, was just what many of the attendees, including myself, were craving. As a former CBS news anchor and author of Broadcasting Happiness, Michelle's objective was to educate and emphasize the science of happiness by working to create success in sales through positive engagement.