Thanks for coming to our recent customer event, Championship coaching: How to lead better 1:1s with Gong! 

As promised, here are tips to help you leverage Gong to devise a blueprint for better 1:1s.
 

Efficiently do the pre-work required to understand skill gaps and earn the right. 

BEFORE: Here’s how to take 5-10 minutes to prep for a 1:1

• Isolate what matters most. If everything is important, nothing is. 

  • Identify Deal drivers - across your team, which sales skills have the biggest impact on success? Examples from healthy deals: a next step on the calendar, the client is responsive and engaged, you are multi-threaded into multiple champions, and we’ve talked about pricing early.

  • If you don’t know where to start…check out the interaction tab

  • Worth exploring and discussing more than 1 option here before deciding on what to partner with your rep. Ideally, improving in this area gets your rep one step closer to a career goal/aspiration they have. 

• Align on what great looks like

  • Before you dive into any coaching engagement, define the goal post. Decide how you’ll know when they’ve nailed it. Discuss how you’ll know. This part is fun.

• Bring coachable moments to explore

  • Get a baseline - play the game of catch-up by asking questions like “Who are you talking to?”, “What did you talk about?”, or “What’s the next step?” Find out the answers before your 1:1s to avoid cutting into coaching time.

SIMILAR TO CLIENT CALLS you shouldn’t have to ask questions where the answers are accessible. Highly effective 1:1s go deep into one of two key focus areas. Pick one and make the most of the time you have to pick it apart! 

DURING: Review reality

• Create safety, reinforce the why, set expectations.

  • Show up to every single one of these meetings with a smile, curiosity, openness, and a true desire to help whoever you’re working with, it shows.

• Roll the game tape 

  • Once you’ve agreed on a skill focus area, easily isolate to calls where that will happen using Gong. Whether it’s a moment of the call like setting an upfront contract or asking for referral - a topic, like pricing, terms, the competition - or a talk track, like a new product you’re selling or an old product you need to sell more of…anything that happens between your rep and your customer is searchable and trackable in gong.

  • Do’s; assign ownership of who brings the example. Be genuinely curious..,.about how your rep perceives what’s happening, how they are doing, how they could improve. Be vigilant for how they are responding/reacting - re-create safety and remind them of how excited you are to help them with this.

  • Don'ts; turn this into a roast, like my college basketball coach. Don’t only look for the bad, being a critic is easy. Don’t allow coaching creep to set in, and start wandering into coaching on completely unrelated topics.

• Explore reality together, sharpen the spear

  • Asking open questions like “if you’re going to teach a seminar on this in a week, what do you have to learn” or “what could you do to improve by 30% in this area by this next week”. And see where it goes. . Done right, this is fun, because they are learning transferable skills, and you’re there to help them. - if your rep isn’t buying in, they either don’t feel safe or don’t think it’s important. Worth finding out why.

AFTER - Co-own progress

Co-own progress - visibility makes it easy for what they’re learning to become a habit

• Create reasonable short term goals

  • Do; align on what’s possible over the next week, next two max.  Work to set these goals together, and on how to track and measure progress.
  • Could sound like; in one week, what’s reasonable to commit to in order to continue making progress
  • Don’t; Set arbitrary goals like convert X deals to Stage Y. Reps should have a hand in setting their goals for the week, allowing you to gage their confidence (or overconfidence) and set them on the path to achieving the

• Create alerts, catch reps improving

  • My design team was probably wondering why i’m displaying a back-end page to hundreds of customers, it’s because you need to know how to do this.

  • For each rep - what are the key phrases and words that’ll tell you your target skill is or isn’t happening? Alert

    • PS - you should do the same for your priorities. There are 3 things in my business that I want to be notified EVERY time they come up…alerts serve those to me. Our team does not have a pricing conversation without me listening to the snippet from that call.

• Recognize progress, of any size

  • People move at different speeds - some love change, can make drastic changes to their process in moments. Others are more like turning a cruise ship. Either way, praise is like sunlight to the human spirit, and any improvement is cause for celebration.

    • When your rep does something new, unfamiliar, and it works? Share with your team - catch everyone doing things the right way, pretty soon everyone will be listening and learning from each other behind your back.

  • Reps want to know how to completely transform their skillset? Happens one small step at a time. Every time you cross off an objective, decide what’s next. The best reps love this, systematically improving their skillset and having an accountability partner to help them do it.

Check out the Sales Coaching Template for High Performing 1:1s here!  

Look out for a post-event email tomorrow morning from Bruno with the event recording!

If you attended the event, tell us what you thought of it in the comments section below!