5 Benefits of Clearly Defined Coaching Goals

If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you going to know when you get there?

In the coaching side of my practice I sometimes run across clients that have been previously told to ‘improve their performance’, but not what part(s) of their performance actually need improvement. When coaching a client/employee it is important for both the coach and the client/employee to have specific goals and timelines.

Goals have to be established in order to give direction and purpose to the coaching session whether it is a client or an employee. Ambiguous goals are usually never achieved and may cause frustration, at a minimum.

Defining Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time  driven (SMART) goals will plot a marker in the horizon. It’ll act as your beacon. Without that beacon you are navigating blindly.

Having no clearly defined goal causes frustration for both you and your client/employee because there never seems to be any improvement or progress. It creates a constant cycle of failing to meet some objective – a cycle that will keep repeating without a clearly defined goal.

Setting a clearly defined goal gives you and your client/employee direction and purpose. Imagine being handed a bunch of tools and materials and told to build something without a clear vision or goal of what is to be built. 

The same holds true for developmental goals. It is not good enough to tell your employee they must improve in sales or build widgets faster. These types of goals create more confusion because they do not know where to start because they don't know where they're specifically going.

Here are 5 benefits to establishing clearly defined goals upfront for your client/employee:

• Both you and your client/employee have a better chance of starting in the right direction together

• Coaching time is more efficient once goals are discussed upfront

• You are able to plan ahead of the session and prepare targeted questions

• Coaching session are direct and avoid meandering

• You, as the coach, will come across more clear, instilling confidence in your client/employee

Going back to the building analogy, you may end up building a stool when what was really needed was as birdhouse. Clearly defined goals are the cornerstone of effective and successful coaching. 

By establishing clearly defined goals you help to set your client/employee up for success.

For more information about coaching and mentoring, or to see how The Cobalt Group can help you with this or any other business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

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Copyright © 2019 The Cobalt Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Are We Going to Abilene?

We've all been there. We are in a discussion about something and we sense that the path we’re taking is the wrong direction. Either through what we believe the evidence to be or by instinct, we know that the decision being made is going to be a bad decision. But then, we just sit there and say nothing.

Right after I received my Wings of Gold in the Navy I was sent to their Leadership, Management, Education, and Training (LMET) course. This was the first course on leadership and management that I received in the Navy and it was a good course. I was a young Ensign and had already been a supervisor before joining the Navy. In one of the sessions we were discussing what I mentioned in the first paragraph and they had us watch a short movie called ‘The Road to Abilene’. As I recall, it was about a group of people that were sitting around, bored, on a hot Friday or Saturday afternoon trying to decide what to do when someone suggests that they take a trip to Abilene (about an hour away) for dinner. No one really protests but no one really wants to spend the hour on a hot and dusty car trip. When they get to the cafe, the food is just as bad as the drive. Then they drive back home and are exhausted.

One of them says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The others now said they would rather have stayed home but went along with it since the everyone else seemed so eager. Then they all sit around and try to figure out why it was that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to stay at home, but did not admit to it when they had the chance to say so.

I have experienced this in the Navy and in my corporate career. Someone comes up with what they think is a good idea and the rest of us aren't really sure, or know we shouldn't, but we all just go with it. No one wants to speak up and be the voice of reason or dissent, and challenge the group think or momentum that the idea is beginning to build. There have been times when I was in decision meetings on what tactic to use to destroy a target, or what opportunities to pursue, and I knew inherently that the decisions being made were bad but I didn’t speak up. In the Navy some of those could have life or death consequences, while the corporate consequence was usually fiduciary. Regardless, I should have spoken up. Why didn’t I?

It is hard for a lot of us to say no in these circumstances. Perhaps we aren’t sure of our reasoning. Perhaps we fear the group pressure that would follow. Maybe we fear not being seen as a team player. The reality is most people want to be liked and perceived as part of the team so at times we seem to agree to things even if we think the decision is bad. Whatever the psychology or the reason is, the fact is that by agreeing to going down a path that is undoubtedly wrong is detrimental to you, your team and your organization. And they deserve better from you.

It is not always easy but if something isn't right about the direction being taken, or if it doesn’t seem right, speak up. There are ways to do it tactfully that won’t make you seem like a counterproductive member of the team. You just might be surprised at how many others feet the same way but chose, for whatever reason, not to rock the boat. And the last thing you want to do is waste time and resources on a venture that is likely doomed to fail.

So if you have a doubt, be the one to speak up and ask, “Are we going to Abilene?”

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2014 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

To Pursue or Not To Pursue

That is the question. We all want to grow our business to some degree. Regardless of whether we sell a product or a service we are looking for more opportunities to win. The issue then becomes what opportunities should we pursue to do this. Not every deal is a good deal. You may have all the requirements nailed and it can still be a lousy deal for you. So how, then, should we decide which deals To Pursue or Not To Pursue?

Each company will have their own qualification and bid/no bid guidelines to help make that decision. But the basic questions that I feel need to be answered are:

Is the opportunity real? Not every opportunity you come across is a real opportunity. Liken it to job boards. I had a recruiter once tell me that 80% of job postings are not real. I don’t think that this is the case with business opportunities but everything we come across is not a real deal. That is what the qualification process is about. Is there a real need? Is there a budget? Is it truly a competitive deal?

Are we competitive? Just because we have some relevant quals and experience doesn’t mean we are competitive. Do we have a viable solution? Can we differentiate our solution? Can we afford to compete?

Are we aligned to win? Assume we are competitive. Do we know the customer? Do we have any relationships with the customer? Are we credible to the customer? Do we have customer confirmation that our solution would be acceptable? Just having quals and experience doesn’t necessarily mean we are positioned well to win.

Is it worth winning? To my statement above, not every opportunity is worth winning. There are risks involved with any business. Are they mitigated and are they acceptable? What is the ROI/profit? Can we make money doing this work? Is there a strategic value? I have pursued deals in the past that our group knew would not be as profitable as we wanted, if at all, because there was a strategic value in pursuing it. I have also walked away from opportunities that were right up our swim lane because we determined, for a variety of reasons, that it just wasn’t right for us. It’s not always a simple thing to decide.

Now these are just high level, basic categories of thoughts and questions. Each of these categories has a dozen or more other questions to help qualify the opportunity and decide on whether or not to pursue it. And as basic as it may sound, whatever your company uses to for this bid/no bid process is useless unless it is objectively applied. Not following your qualification guidelines usually results in wasting resources (time, material and money) that could have been better used on an opportunity that you had a better probability of winning. Or, it would have led you to walk away from what looked like a good deal but could have ended up being a nightmare.

Just like customers are looking for the right provider of a good or service, providers should be looking for the customers that are a fit for them. Not all customers are necessarily good customers for you. So the question is…To Pursue or Not To Pursue? What are some of the things you use to make that decision?

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2014 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

The One That Got Away

In the second year of my first sales job with a major IT company I was working the biggest deal I had in my pipeline to that date. 

It was going to be $8.5M over a five year period. The math was easy and even back then it would have been half of my annual quota for the next five years (assuming no yearly increases – yeah, right!). And with a deal that size I had a lot of help from upper management.

I was in tight with the customer. It was a small group and they were all of the decision makers. 

Fairly fresh out of many sales training courses, I applied all of that knowledge to every aspect of my capture plan for that deal. I met with the customer often, and a lot of those were at his request. 

I knew the requirements inside and out and we had a solution that answered it, and then some. The customer verified that our solution was a great fit, too.

Then, as often happens in government sales, the program was put on hold. The customer didn’t know for how long but felt that it was most likely till the end of the government fiscal year. 

I wasn’t too worried. That was 6 months away and I had two things in my favor – the first month of the next government fiscal year was also the last month of my company’s fiscal year so I thought it would be a great close out for that year and, secondly, I had a great pipeline that would take me over my quota if that deal happened to slip even further.

I told that customer that I would check in periodically and asked that if things changed to please let me know as well. 

I called about 3 months later and discovered that only weeks prior they had gotten their money and went with a competitor. I asked why they chose the competition and, in so many words, he told me that my competitor stayed engaged and sold them on their solution. 

I was mad at myself (and so was my management) for making such a rookie mistake – I quit selling!

From then on, I made sure that I never quit selling to any customer, even if a program was cancelled. 

That discipline paid off two years later when I closed the biggest software sale of my career, and the biggest one that company had that year – all because I stayed engaged with a customer that had another competitor’s solution selected and their customer didn’t like it. 

Because I was in contact on a frequent basis even after we weren't selected, they called me back and 19 months later I closed the deal.

As I learned more about the trade of selling I have made many other mistakes since ‘the one that got away’. I learned the hard way that in the field of sales 

– Never Quit Selling!

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with your sales force, or with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.