Trusted Advisor vs. Trusted Coach

Hello Sales Reset Community

When you’re leading a selling conversation, what do you prioritise?

What is your role?

Here are some options:

1. Make a sale: My role is to get an order.

2. Explain what I’m selling: My role is to help customers understand our products and services.

3. Sales process: My role is to follow my company’s conventional selling process through discovery, presentation, overcoming objections, quotation and closing.

4. 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.

5. 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:

1. Ask questions instead of explaining and advising.

2. 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:

1. Explain and advise: Use your knowledge to spend all your time answering customer’s questions and advising.

2. 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!