You all know what I think about coaching, so I brought on another coaching enthusiast to banter about how to build and scale effective coaching cultures within B2B companies.
You all know what I think about coaching, so I brought on another coaching enthusiast to banter about how to build and scale effective coaching cultures within B2B companies.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. We're talking about coaching today. Love it. Here she is Vanessa Metcalf Coach. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Not too bad, Corey. Nice to see you again. Thank you for having me and really stoked to dive into a topic that I know is near and dear to both of our hearts.
Speaker 1:Both of our hearts. I've known Vanessa for a long time. She's a really strong senior sales enablement leader and we're chatting on the interwebs and said let's talk about the topic of coaching. So, Vanessa, 2023, what comes to mind around coaching? Why is it important now? What's changed? What's hard? What are people getting right? What are people getting wrong? What's the first thing that pops into your mind on the topic of coaching?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting. I think a lot of things have changed, actually, and some things not at all. I think coaching is still just as important as it was when pre-COVID, when everything was in office and hunky dory, we didn't have to deal with some of the amazing things that come with remote work, but obviously some trials and tribulations that come with it as well. I still think there's a number of organizations where they're not doing it, not even not doing it right, just straight up not doing it. It's not embedded into the DNA of the organization or the leadership team, and I think it's incumbent on your senior sales leaders, of course, but also enablement, to be kind of the change in there, really drive some adherence to it. Right, and it's also important to come up with the coaching programs, to come up with the sales manager cadence, to figure out what tools are they using to make coaching easier for the sales leaders, and also to teach your coaches how to coach.
Speaker 2:It's not a given that every single sales leader is going to have done it before or know how to do it well, right? I think that's something that C-suite your enablement folks, your sales leaders. You need to be prepared when you start to dig in and analyze hey, what does coaching look like here at Company X? And that's okay. For the answer to be hey, it doesn't look very good, or it's not happening at all, and that's okay. I think you can combat those things pretty easily. But again, you need the strategy, you need the plan, you need the tools and then, of course, you need the people development and the skill development of the coaches themselves.
Speaker 1:I think that's an opportunity for somebody to get some creditor. If they're so, imagine that that you're a manager, you're sales name, a leader inside of a company and CRO hasn't made coaching a priority. They're about forecasting, forecasting, forecasting, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. That's what their focus is. If you're somebody that's on the sales team, on the sales enablement team, what would you do to grab the bull by the horns and start to make coaching more of a culture and lead from the middle up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, love it. Well, I think a CRO, like all of us, right? They're humans that sometimes have their blinders on, and so if coaching is not a priority, I think again how are you, as the senior sales leader, the senior enablement leader, ideally together in partnership how are you making it a priority for Mr and Mrs CRO and, to that end, of course, talk their language correlated with something that does matter to them, right? So, if you can show something that we used to do at both my last words actually is once we had our coaching program in place, we had the sales manager cadence, which we can talk more about both of those things if you want as well, so that kind of dictated, okay?
Speaker 2:How does a sales leader spend their time in a 4050 whatever it might be hour week? What portion of that should be dedicated to coaching, right? What are the coaching KPIs? So what output and volume should be they be expected to produce? There has to be some accountability. And what is the coaching plan? Right? So it shouldn't just be a disjointed plan. That happens. You know, I'm going to listen to this call recording, then that one, then there's this one over here, and then my rep asked me to do this one. What's the actual plan? How does it tie to skill and competencies? How does it tie to specific initiatives the company might have going on? Is their new positioning? Is their new products are taking a market? There are new methodology right that you want to understand. How is the market receiving that? How is my rep executing on that, etc. All this to say.
Speaker 2:Once that's in place, you can do some analysis to understand. Now that we have our coaching output, we're monitoring the KPIs, we know how much coaching should be happening, we know the plan of how coaching should be executed on and we've tied that to actual skill development. So it's not random and disjointed. Now let's correlate that to performance Right. Let's look at coaching versus quota attainment. Let's look at it versus tenor. Let's look at it versus I don't know number of promotions. There's all sorts of ways you can break down that data and all sorts of studies that you can use to really educate, improve to your CRO that this matters right as an organization, not just enablement, not just sales leaders up down sideways. It's something that we should be focused on, to get it into the organization's DNA and make sure it stays there, right? This isn't like a one time effort that you check the box. It needs to be an ongoing basis.
Speaker 1:Well, it's almost like you can do your own discovery, because the reason we do discovery is to find a reason for somebody to change and for somebody to invest resources.
Speaker 1:And if we're going to go from a culture where we're not coaching to a culture where we are coaching, you're going to have to have a reason to change and a reason to get resources. And those resources don't need to be financial, it could just be people's time taking managers off of calls, for example, and putting them into coaching conversations. So, less super closing, less doing other people's jobs for them, more coaching and developing the folks. And if you do that and you can do the qualitative observations, you can do the quantitative stuff that you're talking about, getting into the metrics, and you can start even building out the program a little bit, testing it with your team and showing those results. You've done the discovery, you've come up with a solution, you've implemented the solution. You see, there, you show the results. That's something that you can bubble up and say, hey boss, look, we can expand this across the Oregon. Here's the impact it's already having.
Speaker 2:That's it, corey, exactly, and think about why people are attracted to jobs in the first place, right? They wanna grow, they wanna learn. If they're having to coach themselves or look to their peers, sometimes that can be amazing and I actually encourage it. Sometimes you can pick up some bad habits and it's also, I think, can come in on the organization again and make sure your sales leaders know what they're talking about and they are equipped and confident and enabled to go ahead and execute on that coaching.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I love what you said and that's one of the things that I like about establishing sort of an operating cadence when it comes to how your sales leaders' time should be broken down, because sometimes that's not guided or I don't wanna go as far as to say prescribed, because I think there's a lot of there's incredible sales leaders out there that know what it takes and how they should be spending their time. But from a standardization perspective, you wanna replicate what the gold standard is right and have that be across all leaders, all regions, all segments, et cetera. And so I think when you break that down and understand, okay, what portion of this person's time should be spent co-selling to your point, right, because sometimes if there's too much of that, they're just like a super seller versus an actual leader, or coach.
Speaker 1:That's what they want to do oftentimes, and here's the problem right If that's what you want to do, that's you can do that as a frontline manager. You can't do it as a second-line manager. So you're missing out on these opportunities to develop your management skills by going back and doing the job that you used to have, while preventing someone who's got that job today from doing their job because you're doing it for them.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and that's not to say you should do none of it. Of course you should be customer-facing, you should join calls, but it's not to your point to do the actual selling for your rep. How are they gonna develop? How are they gonna learn these lessons if they don't have the ad-bats right? So I think there's a fine balance there, and once you understand your sales management cadence, it helps you understand exactly what that balance is. Also, the portion that should be dedicated to I don't know Salesforce cleanup, admin things. There's a number of things that can go into that cadence, but one of them has to be coaching right, and then, when it's clear to everyone across the organization, all right. This is the percentage of time per week that I should be spending on coaching. Here's in my schedule when I'm going to do it. Here are my coaching models and best practices. Whether you're using something like Grow or SBI, I mean, you can work with your LND team to figure out what models your organization wants to use.
Speaker 1:And then we talk about If you don't have a coaching model, email freestuffatcoachsearmcom and I'll send you a free copy of our course, $500 value. As you sign up for it, you'll see that 90 minutes of coaching framework by myself and Hillman. All right, keep going. I had to insert that.
Speaker 2:I said no long ads. I didn't say no long ads, Nice plug, no, I wanna. Yeah, go ahead and toss me that link Now.
Speaker 1:I'm interested, I wanna take a look, that sounds great. I've gotta take her people Because, yeah, I mean that's it.
Speaker 2:Now you gotta take her. There's a lot of awesome stuff out there where sometimes it feels daunting, I think, to enable people of like, how are we gonna create a coaching program from scratch, Especially if you're working in an organization where coaching's not a thing and in fact there's resistance right, Don't tell me how to do my job, kind of thing. So if you can leverage a lot of the awesome stuff out there like Cory and Hillman are working on, that's amazing. There's a starter for you and yeah, and then once you have your dedicated portion of time in your week that you're using and you've got your plan right so you know how to tie it to skills and competencies, so that the person's on an actual plan related to skill development and it's not like these random acts of coaching that I think you're off to the races.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, and if you don't have a competency framework in place, go back on your Spotify or Apple. There's a whole episode I did on competencies and how to give away on that as well.
Speaker 2:And Amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just, it's huge Cause if you don't. Competencies is one of those things. It's like my favorite Yogi Berra quote If you don't know where you're going, you might end up someplace else. And so if you're not defining what specifically you need for the role, it's, you're missing out on building the foundation for the person. So, vanessa, my concern here is all of this is great and well, but what happens when we're behind on our number for the quarter and, all of a sudden, we're in freakout mode and everything has to be all hands on deck, let's get these deals over the finish line, no matter what? Does the baby get thrown out with a bathwater when it comes to really developing each individual person when we just need to close revenue?
Speaker 2:Right. No, the baby should not get thrown out with the bathwater.
Speaker 1:Dave the baby, we're a baby here.
Speaker 2:We are. Yes, that's a different podcast, but, yes, that's good. Maybe you just need to change the bathwater, right? Maybe the cadence that got you to where you are until the end of the quarter maybe that gets shaken up a little bit and it looks a little bit different, right? Perhaps the coaching topics you were working on previously now need to change when you've got a few of these swing deals that are just about at the line, right, or you want to get a few of these deals outside of the legal, the procurement process. So I think your focus with coaching is naturally going to be a little bit different when the pressure's on and it's, you know, end of quarter and everyone's got to deliver and everyone's just holding their breath right and doing our best. But the practice itself should not be abandoned, no way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. No, it's hard because the business has to hit its goals, otherwise other bad things happen. But if you don't develop your team, then other bad things happen, and there's only so many hours in a week.
Speaker 2:Well, and I would just argue how there's only so many hours in a week. And I would argue, like how does a team hit its goals if they're not being developed, or you know that good habit that they have or the way they articulate a value on that thing is not reinforced, or we don't instill confidence. You know, like it's just they're one in the same, like great performance and repeatable success and coaching are synonymous. So I just don't see them as mutually exclusive and I think if you're getting that kind of pushback from senior leaders in your organization, it may just mean that they don't understand that correlation yet either and there might just need to be some further education. That happens there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then what role do you see sales enable in playing here?
Speaker 2:So I think that depends on the organization, of course, and what you know big strategic priorities they have going on. In my mind, though, regardless because that can always look different, no matter who you're working for or what the company does I think that coaching is always a major pillar of any enablement functions over our team goals. I think it's the multiplier effect right, and I think it's incumbent on any senior sales enablement leader to do a few things. One is partner. None of this you're doing on your own, by the way. If you're going about this with just enablement pushing this on everyone else, you're starting in the wrong place. So the first thing is you've got to have the partnership with sales leadership all the way up to the VP level to go about doing what I'm about to say, and if you don't have that, then let's start at the basics and, you know, get some deposits in the trust account and go ahead and build those partnerships.
Speaker 2:But if you do have that in place, then I think what you need to think about is what is the program right? And by whole program I'm talking about everything from the coaching models and frameworks, the templates that we talked about. I'm talking about how do you tie in the skill and competency developments, right? So the kind of benchmarks of what good looks like to do the day to day job of an AE, of a BDR, of an AM, whatever it might be. The coaching tools. So there's lots of them out there. Some people are even still using, like their, their Salesforce, their CRM to do coaching. But there's a lot of other really amazing ones, coach CRM being one of them.
Speaker 1:Well, the most important tool the most important tool for coaching is your mouth. Because I'll tell you one thing yeah, and again, yeah, we have coach CRM. So coach CRM how she diagnosed, prioritize and drive accountability doesn't coach. Computers cannot coach people, period. If you think computers can coach people, please send me a message. Let's debate that, because it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Computers can do a few things. They can capture information, they can structure information, they can get very specific, tailored feedback on very specific things. So if the computer has you, if it asks you a question, says hey, the prospect just said your price is too high. What do you say? And then you say something yeah, the computer can kind of give you some feedback on that, that's fine. But that's not coaching, that's giving feedback on one specific thing. And then, in terms of call scoring, that's awesome. For assessments it's a current state how well did you do against a rubric? That's awesome. Then the question is all right, cool. So Corey just got it two out of five at three out of five, a one out of five, a five out of five, a four out of five, a two out of five, a one out of five. I'm going to stop now, but I just got all the scores.
Speaker 1:Yeah what are you going to do about it? Coaching happens between two human beings, maybe three human beings, I don't know. Let's just say two with your mouths and that's what's. That's what is actually going to drive behavior change and over the time it's on. Tool here is just just not so. All we do is help create a coaching culture and help execs understand how they get more other managers. That's all we're trying to do and, like the coaching has to happen between the people.
Speaker 2:That's right, exactly, yeah, there's some interesting AI developments as far as coaching goes, but totally agree. I mean, yeah, they're missing the context that a human would have and certainly a computer is not going to again link it back to the plan. And seller A really needs help on discovery right, and that's what we've been working on over the past three months. But seller B is killer at discovery and they just need some help with like negotiation at the end to. You know, computers not going to understand those things for you and even if it did, I think it hurts, you know, a sales team, the culture of a sales team, to have that come purely from a computer or from AI.
Speaker 1:So well, it hurts the culture of a person, because imagine telling your spouse that you're going to be late for dinner because the AI told you that you have to do something. That's absurd, right? Oh, sorry, sorry, daughter, I have to miss your soft bugging tonight because the computer is having me do a task. No, absolutely not. Yeah, nobody's going to do that.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, 100%. Yeah. And then just to put a bow on the last part of your question, I think the other thing enablement can help do to drive a culture of coaching and get more out of your sales leaders is come up with mutually agreed upon coaching KPIs. Don't just leave it open, because what you're going to see if you leave it completely open and I have seen this before is why I feel so passionate and bullish about it is that you're going to have some people who are crushing it and to Xing what you think is like the normal standard for coaching output and other people who do like a call a week or something like that one coaching session for week. So I think you want to understand and there's going to be ups and downs based on the rap, based on the week, based on is it in a quarter or start a quarter? Right, but understand across the board what does average look like in terms of the gold standard? And then drive accountability to those KPIs.
Speaker 2:And keep in mind Coaching for a BDR org is going to be a very different volume than coaching for an AE org, particularly if it's like a you know, complex sale, long sale cycle, even within the AE org.
Speaker 2:Probably segment by segment is going to look a little bit different, but I have found a lot of success with as long as the coaches have been enabled, you've got your program. They can tie into skills and competencies. I found a lot of success with actually establishing the KPIs and get by and on those all the way up to the, the CRO, cso, whoever might be. So they are also advocating for the importance of coaching output and then manage to that right. If you're doing that, you're going to see consistency, which will then allow you to run some analysis on how is this actually translating into outcomes that the business and my CRO Care is about right. So we talked about performance, we talked about tenor, maybe number of promotions and shocker, but typically the amount of coaching always correlates to that team or individual success quota attainment, number of times you know, quarter over quarter, that quote is hit, that sort of thing. So I think that's the main ways that enabling can help drive coaching programs forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. Well, and good point on the difference between the enterprise. I've got one customer I've worked with who's really struggling to use calls as the way to coach. They dig into calls and the problem with a call in the enterprise is that it's completely out of context. And so what we found in that case was that to effectively coach a call, you have to do a few things. A you have to dig into the CRM and understand where the deals at. What have we got for discovery notes? What have we got for next steps?
Speaker 1:Secondly, you need to look at that pre meeting prep for that call. What were we trying to get out of it? Because it's not abundantly clear, if you've got one of these deals, that you're going to have 20, 3050 meetings to get it over the finish line for actual, true enterprise sales. Just listening to what happened in the meeting doesn't really tell you that much. And then the third piece is what's the team involved in that? So did they bring a sales engineer, that they're bringing implementation consultant? Who's in the meeting and what are those roles of each one of those individuals? And did they execute the way that they wanted to? That's done in this particular case and I'll tell you, I listened to some of the calls for these types of deals.
Speaker 1:I could get a couple things out of it, but I couldn't really understand what was going on and I went back to the customer. I said, look, you can't just rely on the call. I was trapped that people run into as they find their favorite way to coach. Like I listen to calls or I look at deals or I look at pipeline or I look at the email sequencing tool got to coach the player, not the play. Zoom out and really use your noggin to figure out. How do I diagnose the root cause that's going to move the needle for this person and it's not going to be from one data point, it's going to be from a series of data points.
Speaker 2:I love that, corey. That was like the most distinct way that I've ever heard it put right Coach, the player, not the play. Because when we get too caught up in just these specific accounts or these specific deals or like a specific call to your point within that deal, we're missing the whole individual, right? If we think about, like, skills and competencies, it's an iceberg. And you know, the part of the iceberg you can't see are the competencies. They're the things, they're the actual characteristics of people. It's what motivates people.
Speaker 2:The skills are the surface level things that anyone needs to do a great job at. Being an AE, right, you need to have domain knowledge, you need to have product knowledge, you need to understand how to position the thing. Competencies are a little bit different, and so I think you're right, coaching needs to be looked at holistically in that sense, because humans are messy creatures, right, and as a leader, it's up to all of us to make sure that you're thinking about it from that holistic sense. So, yes, you've got the specific deal coaching, the specific skill coaching, but then hey, maybe this person, they're going through something pretty tough in life and they need some motivation. Maybe you need to figure out kind of like, hey, they've been at this for seven, eight, nine years now. How do we keep them motivated? So anyways, there's all sorts of things we could talk about there. But totally agree, player not the play.
Speaker 1:Life's hard, life's hard and one of the things when it comes to motivation is you mentioned earlier on and I put a pen in it around the remote team. So you've got folks that are in different places and you've always had this with field sales, which is it's funny, because a lot of field sales teams traditionally have just been inside sales, out of their house, and that's what a lot of companies have created now. So you've got some people in the office like me. Beautiful office, austin Texas. If anybody's in Austin Texas and wants to record an episode of sales management and podcast, hit me up. I've got a studio here. I'm just doing this in conference room today, but we've got a full studio we can jump into.
Speaker 1:I did an hour 48 one with Taft 1 the other day. That'll be, I think that just came out. So when you're listening to this you can go back and listen to it. But the thing with remote is you can't rub off on somebody else. You can't just overhear something in the break room. You can't ask a quick question. You can, but it's a little more annoying to interrupt someone's day when you can't even see what they're doing, as opposed if you see somebody that's eating a candy bar and you walk over and you say hey, vanessa, can I ask you a quick question? So what has your experience been in terms of getting people good at coaching in a remote setting when they don't have that line of sight visibility to their teammates?
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah, no, I think, like back in the day when I started out in sales, right, and I was carrying bag, that that was so much of how we learned was just something that your peer said that was impressed upon you and that line sounded really great, or this play work for them, let me go ahead and take that and the learning curve was actually, I think, quicker because of that.
Speaker 1:Much quicker.
Speaker 2:I think yeah, I think in a remote culture, nothing has changed around the importance of coaching and some of the best practices of how you can go about executing on it. I think you just have to be more intentional about it. So, from that peer to peer angle, right, because there's no water cooler chats, because you're not sitting in the sales floor, that's open concept and you can just overhear everyone's calls which, by the way, I think is a huge confidence booster as well. But because those things aren't happening and they're not necessarily possible right now, one there is technology that you could look at if you wanna do, like team calling and things like that. But secondly, just reach out to your peers, right, listen to their calls and reach out to them for coffee chats and learn what they're doing, what's working, what's not. How do you avoid falling on your face like they did, right? How do you avoid kind of walking into the same walls that they did and same thing with your leaders? So I think coaching is not a one way thing, it's a team sport, and so, to that end, I think it's also up to the sellers to, yes, be active in their seeking of advice from peers, but also from their leader. So have a clear idea of what you think needs to go into your coaching plan, right?
Speaker 2:No one is incredible at everything, even the people that have done this for 20, 30, 40 years. I don't care who you are. Everyone has room for improvement, and sometimes even the skills that you have, let's say, mastered. Maybe there's regression, right, depending on how. If you're in a new market, or you're selling new products to new personas, or you're in an economic downturn, there's always something you can learn, and the point is let's create a coaching ecosystem where we can all learn from one another. It's not just leader to seller.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that Everybody's developing. Yeah, there's only funny. I have to say this it's funny. There's only two things that would lead somebody to being very, very, very good at sales and broke, and that's either that they're not good at marriage or they're not good at gambling, and then they just kind of keep doing the same thing to fund those two activities. Other than that, they probably moved on to some other aspects of life.
Speaker 2:You like to have marriage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've got a couple of friends, that's you know on number six or number seven, I was like that sounds like an expensive habit.
Speaker 2:Ah, Ah, those friends should not listen to this part of the podcast.
Speaker 1:No, no, you know who you are. I don't think.
Speaker 2:Maybe you're posting.
Speaker 1:Anyways, we won't say their name, all right, so that's good. The remote piece is hard. I think the thing with remote is it makes hiring much easier. It makes management harder. Yes, because if you can hire anybody anywhere, cool. Well, yeah, oh wow. Somebody's in New York City Great. Somebody's in Wyoming, jackson Hole One company we work with. They've got a bunch of people in Jackson Hole Wyoming. You like to see what a cool way to build a team? Great, and you can just do that, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. So I think there is a bit of a vibe of inequity because pre-pandemic you'd have obviously you've got your main hubs if you did not have a remote first culture and there's a lot of those legacy reps that still live around those hubs and those people may still be getting together in person. They may still be experiencing coaching in person, which just is a little bit different than remote versus throughout the pandemic. Obviously, everyone did what they had to do and started hiring all over the place, which totally agree with you, it makes hiring a lot easier. It democratizes your talent pool, like there's just all sorts of freedoms that come with it. But I think, because you have that with some sales teams where some people are remote without really the option of being in person or not too many opportunities to do it, versus some people who are in person and can go to the office albeit it's probably a different feeling than it was pre-pandemic that can create some inequities a little bit with the way that people receive coaching, which is also an interesting dynamic happening in 2023.
Speaker 1:So how do you make up for that? Where do you need to make up for that?
Speaker 2:I think sales leaders need to be that much more intentional about making your remote employees feel not feel like there's any inequity. Simple as that. If you're seeing a lot of your sellers in person, then you've got to make sure your remote ones don't feel like they're disadvantaged by any means right, and you're actively encouraging them to interact with one another and interact with you and just making it easy for them to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, the interesting thing about that is that it's kind of a solved problem because for all the sales leaders that have worked with field sales teams over the years, that's been the case. But I think the difference is that now you're dealing with folks that are more junior, that have more, let's say, developmental gaps than those people before, because you weren't hiring intrualable field sales people. That was somebody that had 8, 10, 15 years of experience. Now you've got people that are remote, that have zero years of experience, and I think that's the thing that's changed significantly, right 100%, and we'll see how that potentially does or does not impact the future of sales.
Speaker 2:Right, you don't have BDRs coming up through the ranks the way that they used to, so that will be interesting to see. But, like always, humans are highly adaptable individuals. We'll figure out how to get it right and, like I said, I think there's a lot of awesome tools out there to help us do it.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and I think from a lifestyle perspective, there's also the trade-off of you've got somebody that's in the office. If they're in the office in a city, they're paying a lot for things like real estate transportation. If they're living on the lake in Kansas, they're living the life, yep.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Big yard and big boat.
Speaker 2:Yes, I hope so for that individual and, arguably, what is remote giving people back? It's giving back, at least for me, and I know a number of other people would say this. It's given us back a ton of time, right, I'm not spending 2 and 1 half hours on the commute anymore. That's time that if I'm a seller or I'm a leader and I have some of that time back, great, you've got more time to think about coaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the sad part about that is they've got less time to listen to the Sales Management podcast. But is that the worst thing in the world? You can still. You should go for walks every day. I go for walks. I have a 15 minute commute to the office. I walk and it's good for you Moving around. I just lost 50 pounds because I walked around a lot. It a little bit less.
Speaker 2:It was a good time, you know. That's exactly why I always tell people to get a dog, because if you're not walking every day, they'll force you to Dogs are the best.
Speaker 1:All right, I think. The last thing I want to dig into is around this idea of the competency. So we've got the concept of the competency matrix is what are all the things that somebody has to be good at in order to succeed their job? So if they're an account executive, for example, it might be high level discovery, demo, sales process, things like that, and then each one of those you can double click into it and there's some detailed information. If you don't have a competency matrix, email, freestufficouchtmrmcom and I'll send you one, but you've got to understand what that is out of the gate. Vanessa, how often do you revisit that score it, update it and see where folks are at, just as a health check?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. I will try coming off video for this and if I break up we'll go ahead and put me back on. Oh, ok, I think you.
Speaker 1:No, you're good.
Speaker 2:So I would say you want to score it quarterly was the cadence that we were into in terms of updating it. Probably I don't know at least once a year, but again, it depends on the organization. There could be certain skills and competencies that you just know aren't going to change, no matter what the market conditions are.
Speaker 1:Right, so you do a per roll, absolutely. S&b account executive, outbound BDR customer success manager that's an onboarding specialist. It's per roll and then the person fits into that role and then it's scored against what's expected for that specific role, right?
Speaker 2:Exactly so I should have started there. Yes, it has to be role-based because obviously what's going to make a BDR successful is going to be a different skill set, or at least partially different skill set, than what's going to make a CSM successful. So yes, I think it's got to be role-based. You've got to, of course, create it in partnership with the go-to-market leaders of that audience. I would say, as far as scoring quarterly because you can also tie it into performance reviews and just generally development if you want to but yeah, minimally quarterly.
Speaker 2:Again, this also can feed you the things that go into your coaching plan. So that's minimally right. A lot of leaders I work with would look at those with the rep weekly as part of their 101. So that's kind of up to the individual and up to the organization. And then, as far as reviewing the skill competency list itself, I would say at least once a year, because of things do change with the skills and competencies and maybe the company starts broadening its partner ecosystem or maybe services become a lot more important than they used to be. I'm just thinking of random examples. Then those have to be incorporated into the skill and competency list.
Speaker 1:So things like selling services, selling your partners. Those are not innate skills and people need to really develop those. So I think what maybe what I'm reading between the lines is, if there's a big enablement effort to launch a new program, make sure that part of that program launch includes an amendment into the competency matrix.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, that's right.
Speaker 1:Love it. This is great. Well, we're about out of time. Any last words for us? Anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2:Nothing I would want to plug specifically. I would just say that make sure coaching is up there. Make sure it's on the radar of your CRO, if it's not already. Make sure you're working on it really closely with your sales leaders and for all the enablers out there. This has to be part of your priority list. It has to be considered one of your major pillars of success when it comes to your whole enablement strategic framework, and I don't know about where they are yet across the board. So that would be my only plug, just for anyone who's listening or cares about this topic. Make sure it's top of mind for you and all of your C-speed as well.
Speaker 1:And if you don't want to build it yourself, shoot me a note. Free stuff at coachsrmcom and we'll get you some stuff to run with. I'm Corey Bragg. That is the perfect URL Corey.
Speaker 1:It's great. I like vanity metrics. I'm not going to tell my other ones. You know them because you booked this through one of them. I love vanity URLs. All right, vanessa. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm Corey Bragg, host of Sales Management Podcast. Check out coachsrmcom. We've got free version, not just free trial. We've got a whole free version that you can go use. We've got some other stuff that you can do too. Lots of giveaways. Today. That email address was free stuff at coachsrmcom. Subscribe to us. Spotify and Apple. We got these coming out twice a week. At least we might start doing more because I'm having so much fun recording this. We'll see you next time.