Sales can be hard. Your day is busy enough prospecting, chasing, disco-ing and demo-ing
It leaves little time for sales coaching with your manager or team.
Have you ever wondered:
- What is self-coaching?
- How self-coaching can build confidence and develop your full potential?
- Felt you should self-coach but don’t know how to start?
- Or would like some tips on making changes to your work performance?
- What are some of the challenges to self-coaching?
- Strategies to overcome any challenges?
We are going to answer all the above and more in this blog and accompanying video.
What self-coaching is and why do we do it?
Self-coaching for business or personal life is a bit like seeing yourself as a work in progress. It is a way of being able to better understand your heart and mind like being a non-judgmental observer of your inner world. The gift of self-coaching allows you to become a better performer as you develop the skill and allow yourself to grow. Self-coaching can be described as the path to self-mastery.
Self-coaching for salespeople is a game changer to increase performance. The practise of listening back to recorded sales or customer calls enables reps to move forward and embrace their next calls with more wisdom and success. Plus having insightful feedback with analytics on sales conversations gives you the tools to reflect and improve your customer conversations. Learn more here
The transformational power of self-coaching
Self-coaching is used for inner exploration and motivation by sporting legends Mo Farah and Tiger Woods
Learn 5 ways how self-coaching can help you
1. Embrace self-coaching by being open to feedback and being honest with yourself. Self-coaching is a positive experience that allows you to bring down your defences and helps you develop and grow.
2. Increased self-awareness or self-observation brings more clarity on growth areas and focus on which areas you need to coach yourself on. Knowing what you are thinking and feeling requires focused attention on yourself and mental clarity.
3. When you self-coach, you’re in charge. This is powerful as you are with yourself 100% of the time and this allows you the time and space to make positive changes. Taking charge of your life and work gives you an understanding of yourself and your own definition of success.
4. Self-coaching allows time to reflect on customer calls and listen back to them (you can hear things that might have been missed during a meeting/call). You can then choose conscious responses on how to react to events.
5. Those reps that are self-coaching are performing better and achieving higher results. See below.
We decided to construct our own analysis using our Jiminny coaching platform. In our study we compared reps who are self-coaching against those who are not coaching at all. The data showed those reps that spend at least three hours each month listening back to their calls and looking at their own development have on average a 5.5% higher win-rate than those who are not.
What are the challenges to self-coaching? And what are the tips to help?
The time factors 🕐
“I am a very busy person and don’t know how to fit this in my hectic schedule?”
💡 We have seen that dedicating just a tiny fraction of just 2% of your time to self-coaching in the working week can make a huge impact on your performance. We found that self-coaching in the morning is when you give yourself the best chance of being objective and not allowing other daily distractions to get in your way. Mark it in your calendar and prioritize time for this like you would do for perhaps a sales or prospect call.”
Facing our mess ups 😕
“I can’t bear to listen to how I’ve messed up on the phone. It was humiliating enough living through it the first time!”
💡 When listening back to a call in which you know you didn’t do well, start by setting yourself into “coach mode”. Don’t self-coach in the same location you do your usual sales or customer calls. It’s not helpful to remind yourself of things that went wrong. Go into a different room or place to coach. Don’t only focus on the negatives of what you did wrong on a call. Instead remind yourself the role of self-coach is a positive one and should be a confidence-building exercise. Recognise the parts of the call in which you did well. Learning from the great things you do will help to build your confidence.
Learn from our mistakes 😬
💡 It is important to learn from our mistakes to help us grow. Find a small and mighty thing from each call to help you grow. Pick one manageable learning to implement that will have the most impact on your performance.
It’s unnatural 🧙
“I hate listening to my own voice, it makes me feel really uncomfortable.”
💡 Many of us are uncomfortable listening to ourselves. This is because our minds amplify what we are focused on. Instead try and focus all your attention on your customer. Dial them up and dial yourself down. Playback the call from their perspective when reviewing conversational analytics. It helps you review the call-in balance without being too obsessed about yourself and being down about what you’re doing.
Emotional about outcomes 😢
“It's hard to remain objective when so much is at stake for hitting my monthly sales targets.”
💡 We get this concern. In sales, we have leadership boards and an array of targets to hit so the best way to deal with this challenge is to distance yourself from the emotion of the call. Try and become the narrator of the call. When you listen back to a call, say “Mia said this…” Rather than “I said this…” This helps create distance between you, the emotion of the call and gives an objective view of you and your performance.
3 Tips For Self-Coaching
1. Spend at least 2% of your time per week to spend on your personal development.
2. Be kind to yourself. Coaching is a positive experience
3. There is only one you - so rely on yourself and own your development.
Contact us now to find out how the Jiminny software can help you and your teammate
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