One thing I notice all the time with managers is that they’re vague on follow-up. How often have you heard, “Just get back to me on a good time to follow up,” or, “We’ll figure out a good time to follow up later.”
The vaguer you are, the less likely you are to actually follow up on your employee’s process. That’s why the fourth stage of game-changing sales coaching is all about the follow-up.
You’ve already established position of strength, gained rapport, and worked through The 8 Objectives of Coaching. Now that you’ve worked through all that, it’s time to wait for your employee to act and then hold them accountable.
When you meet, this is the way I like to coach through the follow-up: “The last time we talked, you said that you were going to do blank to achieve blank. How did it go? What was the outcome?” They’re going to have one of these three responses.
1. They followed through and it worked.
2. They followed through and it didn’t work.
3. They didn’t do it.
So let’s talk about how to address all three, and by the end of this article you’re going to feel confident and assured about coaching through each one.
Stage 4: The Follow-Up from Forrest Performance Group on Vimeo.
1. It worked.
At this moment you want them to re-live that success. So for instance, “Tell me more. What happened? How did it feel? What did it look like? What specifically did you do that gave you that success?” Go back into a leash check with them and ask, “Do you believe in the new process, do you believe you can do it going forward, and do you believe it will work 100% of the time?” When they say yes, celebrate that moment.
This is what you coached through this entire process to hear. Now you can decide to either have them use their new process for another task, or start over with a completely new goal.
2. It didn’t work.
The first thing you need to do if it didn’t work is to clarify that they followed their own process. I had a client named Lily, and she was using our seven-step process to push the sale forward in the first 15 minutes of meeting a prospect. She came back and said, “Jason, the process just doesn’t work. There’s nothing I can do.”
So we went back through her process, and we discovered that she skipped two entire steps. Once she fixed that, her process clicked.
One thing I know about a process is that employees can get discouraged if it doesn’t work right away. As a coach, if there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing, it’s important to celebrate the effort, not the results. I have a client who gives out incentives to their employees for filling out their Sales Strategy Form, not for making the sale. Why do you think they do it this way? Because they know that the process works, and if they can get their people zoomed in on the process, the results will follow. Your job is to celebrate the effort to keep your people internally inspired and externally motivated.
3. They didn’t do it.
On the surface, this is a simple one to diagnose – you went through all these steps with your employee and they didn’t follow through, so now you just need to coach them to act. But underneath the surface there are some leashes here you need to address that led them to this outcome. There are usually two reasons someone didn’t act; they either don’t believe in their process, or they don’t believe in themselves.
If they don’t believe their process, pattern and strategy is going to work, go back to their how step and work through those reluctances one by one. If it’s a good plan and they just need to execute, coach them through it.
If it’s a flawed plan and it needs to change, just take ownership. Take the blame for calling the wrong play, and then work with your employee right there to come up with a new plan of action. This kind of transparency is so valued by employees, and it’s guaranteed to strengthen your position of strength with them even more than you’ve already done.
If they don’t believe in themselves, on the other hand, now it’s time to revisit the belief step and really build them up so they can be intrinsically pulled toward achieving their goal. Sometimes you need to lend your belief to your employees so they can borrow your certainty and belief in them. When you can do that for your people, you’ll drive them to accomplish more than they ever thought possible.
