EP51: Coaching vs. Evaluating - How Fear Impacts Performance

When we’re performing in the presence of someone we know to be more expert than we are, our performance usually suffers. In the world of sales, managers often put this pressure on salespeople, although often unwittingly. They may approach their sales rep with every intention of being a helpful coach, but too often they slip into the role of a critical evaluator instead. And as soon as a salesperson thinks they’re being evaluated, fear sets in — their stomach sinks, their voice tightens up, their intended flow of words gets backed up — and there goes their normal, relaxed performance.

In this podcast, Chris talks with Susan Finch, president of Funnel Radio, on this topic and then segues into the benefits of how a mutually beneficial relationship between members of the company’s team (sales, research, engineering/manufacturing, customer support) creates the best possible means of serving customers. Chris and Susan then discuss how showing appreciation and respect for the behind-the-scenes team members keeps those people from feeling invisible, motivates them to perform better, and to willingly offer support to the people on the front line.

Join Chris and Susan for another relaxed, entertaining, and informative Market Dominance Guys podcast as they explore what works and what doesn’t when managing salespeople and dominating your market.

 

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The complete transcript of this episode is below:

Chris Beall (01:54):

Sales is a game ultimately of dissonance and irony, ultimately of dissonance and irony. There's very little of it where you get to play it straight up because you're operating in the field of other people's emotions and their factual vulnerability. They are vulnerable to you if they let you begin to pitch them, and so there's resistance, "psychological reactance" is generally what it's called, and they can't help it. Then if you respond to that by being offended that they're rejecting you by raising an objection, you're toast.

Jeb Blount wrote a whole book on this called Objections. Here's the book. I mean, it's a brilliant book. Don't take my synopsis and say, "I've read the book," but here's the book. Inside, we hear objections, which are reasonable things for people to say in their circumstance, as rejection, and rejection is the toughest thing that happens to us because it creates embarrassment for us. How we handle hearing an objection and dealing with our inevitable emotional response internally that it's rejection is the key to handling the hard part of sales, which is what to do when they say no and they don't mean it.

What do you do when they say no, but that's not what they mean, because you can't say, "You didn't mean that"? What do you do? Jeb makes this point, which is you do a thing called "ledging." I'm an old climber, as you know. My game growing up was rock-climbing and mountaineering and a ledge, when I just heard the word for this first time, "ledging," a ledge is a safe place. Ledges are where you sit and belay, they're where you sleep, and they're where you don't need handholds anymore. When you're climbing, sometimes you can go through extended periods of time where one hand or the other must be very active on the rock holding on, or else bad things happen, right? For certain kinds of climbs that can get worse than others. It's always a game where you can't make an awful lot of mistakes. It's kind of a tense game. A ledge is where you can relax and that's his point.

How do you ledge? You just have to have a word or phrase that you say out loud at that point that tells you that you've had the reaction of rejection to an objection so that you can have a little bit of time to regain your equilibrium, assess the situation, categorize the objection, and know what kinds of things you might want to be addressing at that point. My ledge is the word "fantastic," so when somebody calls me and says, "Our number nine production system just went down for the second time this week," I say, "Fantastic," because that feels like rejection by the system to me. It's like, "Oh, man, did it go down? Our users need it. It's down. That's not a good thing." I feel bad on the inside, so I go to my ledge and my ledge is the word "fantastic." It sounds good to me, "fantastic." I love the way it sounds. It's poetic. It's three syllables, it's like a little haiku: "Fantastic!" It's real easy to say with an exclamation point on the end and not be sarcastic.

Susan Finch (05:24):

But that is the key, too: It takes practice.

Chris Beall (05:32):

Yes. Everything takes practice. That takes a lot. You golfers know this, right? The hard thing in golf is not hitting the shot that you know is your weakness when trouble is on the side that you tend to go, so all of us have a tendency to either hit the ball left or hit the ball right. There's nobody who has a tendency to hit it down