- Weekly Sales Reset
- Posts
- Engaging more effectively by sharing valuable insights and using coaching skills
Engaging more effectively by sharing valuable insights and using coaching skills
End of week reflection questions to help you review and retain what you've learned
Peter Button
January 31, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
Hello Sales Reset Community
This week, our Weekly Sales Reset theme has been how to engage more effectively with your customers by sharing valuable insights and using coaching skills.
How did you get on?
What did you learn?
What was the impact on your sales results?
Here are some questions to help you reflect on what you’ve learned and practised this week. Thinking back to all your conversations with customers this week:
best example: What was the best example of you deliberately sharing a genuinely valuable insight and following up with a good coaching question?
customer reactions: How did your customers react when you tried to use your coaching skills with them?
coaching skills: When did you use coaching skills with your customers, and what difference did this approach make to the conversations?
next week and beyond: What are the most significant things you’ve learned this week that you expect to take into next week and beyond?
The content of this week's newsletters:
Sell better by sharing valuable insights and using coaching skills
Your customers will look forward to speaking with you!
What’s the very best way to engage with your customers?
It’s when you share insights they find genuinely valuable. Ideally, your insights will enable customers to unlock situations they’ve been wrestling to resolve.
Your engagement with customers will reach new heights when you help them think through the implications of the insights you’ve shared.
To do this effectively, you’ll need two key ingredients:
Genuinely Valuable Insights: When we talk about insights, we mean valuable knowledge that reveals new perspectives, challenges or opportunities.
Coaching Skills: This means the expertise to help customers define their needs more accurately and have the confidence to continue developing proposals and plans.
These key ingredients are useful at every stage of your customer relationship, from prospecting to long-term key account management.
Here’s how it works:
Insight: Share some valuable insight with your customer.
Coaching: Use your coaching skills to enable your customers to think through the implications of this insight.
Outcomes: Your coaching goal is to enable your customers to clarify the outcomes they might seek from your shared insight.
Actions: This conversation will ideally lead to clear next actions. Which might include reviewing how your products and services might help! 😀
Here’s an example from my world of selling sales training programmes to salespeople and their sales team leaders:
Insight: “Everybody acknowledges the value of continuing sales training, but many salespeople are unaware of their need for sustained and deliberate practice to establish expertise.”
Coaching: “What is your plan for continuing sales training and practice that will lead to growing expertise?”
Outcomes: “I will work with my sales team leader to develop and maintain my personal learning and earning plan.”
Actions: I will schedule a meeting in our calendars to discuss how we will use Weekly Sales Reset and Sales Reset Leaders newsletter recommendations.
What might examples of insight and coaching look like in your unique market sector if you sell this way with your customers?
Let’s look at the practicalities.
Genuinely Valuable Insights
Why should customers or prospects make any time available to speak with you?
They’re busy people. They’ve all got many other things they could do with their time rather than speak with you.
The answer is that they’ll make time for you if they can learn something new that they will find valuable.
You’ll need a reliable source of continuing valuable insights to share!
Where will you learn the genuinely valuable insights you need for this way of selling?
Sources of valuable insights:
Customers: Stories from your existing customers.
Industry News Sources: What news sources should you follow in your market?
Your Network: How much effort are you expending to develop and maintain the best personal network? This includes LinkedIn and professional associations, friendships, ex-colleagues, etc.
Trusted Publishers: Where do you get your news? Consider subscribing to highly professional publications with hard-earned reputations.
Social Media: Find and follow the people who invest significant effort in sharing valuable insights in your sector.
Finding The Time
Investing all the time required to become aware of these new insights is an increasingly necessary part of being a professional salesperson.
How can you build this into your routines and habits every day?
Coaching Skills For Sellers
If you’ve subscribed to Weekly Sales Reset for a while, you’ll know this is what makes our approach to selling so different.
We’re convinced that the best way to sell is by using coaching skills with customers.
What do we mean by “coaching”.
The starting point is that coaching is not the same as advising:
Advising: Providing expert recommendations or guidance based on knowledge and experience to inform decision-making.
Coaching: A collaborative process that empowers people to clarify goals, develop solutions, and be sufficiently confident to proceed with the next steps.
The most essential coaching skill is asking great questions. These coaching questions are typically open-ended.
We’ll look at this in more detail in your mid-week newsletter.
In the meantime, what are your plans to improve and maintain your stock of genuinely valuable insights?
Practical Next Actions
This week, spend a couple of minutes before every conversation with customers preparing: “What are the most valuable insights I can share with this customer today?”
Listen more attentively as your customers and prospects share aspects of their situation. What fresh and valuable insights can you learn?
After you’ve shared insights, pause and ask open questions that allow your customer to explore the implications of this insight for their unique situation.
Trusted Advisor vs. Trusted Coach
Coaching is not advising!
When you’re leading a selling conversation, what do you prioritise?
What is your role?
Here are some options:
Make a sale: My role is to get an order.
Explain what I’m selling: My role is to help customers understand our products and services.
Sales process: My role is to follow my company’s conventional selling process through discovery, presentation, overcoming objections, quotation and closing.
Coach my customer: My role is to use my coaching skills to help customers consider all the implications of potentially using my products and services.
Co-create proposals: My role is collaborating with my customers to develop increasingly compelling proposals as more stakeholders become involved.
At Sales Reset, we’re committed to helping you abandon options 1-3 and embrace options 4 and 5.
This week, we’re focusing on using coaching skills with customers. Next week, we'll focus on co-creating proposals.
Your Weekly Sales Reset newsletter at the start of the week introduced the big idea of sharing valuable insights. We explained that these insights aim to open up new opportunities for your customers or fresh perspectives on their challenges.
These insights will ideally open up the opportunity for you to coach your customers.
How should you coach your customers?
Coaching is not advising!
Let’s start with the basics. Coaching is not advising.
For many years, sellers have aspired to become “trusted advisors.” At Sales Reset, we know that becoming “trusted coaches” is a more powerful, sophisticated, and ultimately more effective way of selling.
A trusted advisor uses their knowledge and experience to understand and address specific client needs to offer tailored recommendations and solutions.
A salesperson who uses coaching skills seeks to empower customers to uncover insights and develop solutions themselves. This approach leads to significantly greater engagement, improving the probability of success.
The key difference lies in the approach: advising provides direct guidance based on expertise, whereas coaching facilitates the customer’s problem-solving process through questioning and active listening.
How to use coaching skills with customers
There’s lots to learn about using coaching skills with customers!
Here are two fundamental recommendations:
Ask questions instead of explaining and advising.
Help them develop their own plan and next actions.
Ask questions instead of explaining and advising
You probably know a lot about what you’re selling.
You have two ways of using all that you know:
Explain and advise: Use your knowledge to spend all your time answering customer’s questions and advising.
Ask questions: Use your knowledge to ask insightful questions, especially open questions, that stretch your customer’s understanding.
In the real world, most sellers will inevitably and correctly spend some of their selling time explaining and advising.
We strongly recommend spending more of your selling time asking questions to enable your customers to think through what they need to achieve with a potential investment.
With these coaching questions, you aim to help your customers clarify their desired improvement outcomes. What are their objectives?
Help them develop their own plan and next actions
When your customers’ objectives are sufficiently clear, the next goal of your coaching is to help them develop credible plans.
Help your customer clarify who needs to do what and by when so that your products and services deliver the outcomes they need.
In your Weekly Sales Reset next week, we’ll examine how you can turn all of the key parts of your coaching session with your customer into a compelling proposal!
Reply