Offerings · Coaching · Leadership and Manager Coaching
The methodology your team learned is already decaying.
I work with your first line managers on one short instrument they use in every opportunity review, and on the judgment behind it.
The longer version of thatClose
Not because anybody abandoned it. Because the quarter is loud and the hard question is optional. This is your managers being coached to ask it: the questions in every opportunity review, the behaviors they refuse to let slide, and the judgment to know which is which.
THE HIGH INTEGRITY SELLING SYSTEM · SUSTAIN THE BEHAVIORS
Coaching turns skills into habits. Habit becomes culture.
WHY PROGRAMS FAIL › WHAT WE DO ABOUT ITClose
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It doesn’t last because it is built as training, not as change management.
Your managers coach it on live deals, every week, until it is how your team works. They own it from day one. I do not.
- 6
The executives tinker before the behavior forms.
We agree the leading-indicator behaviors up front and measure them from the first week, so you see it working before the revenue moves and nobody changes course early.
WHAT MAKES IT HOLD
YOUR MANAGERS
Coach the how on live deals, and are coached on their coaching until they own it.
It lasts because your front-line leaders own it. Successful behaviors and their leading indicators are clear.
What it is
Entropy always erodes good, difficult behaviors. That is the sentence I put in front of managers, and everything here follows from it. A behavior nobody inspects decays, not because anyone decided to abandon it, but because the quarter is loud and the hard question is optional.
So the subject in this room is not a deal and it is not the method. It is the coaching itself. Your managers get a short instrument, the opportunity control points, which names the places where a manager's question changes an opportunity's outcome. Then we work on how they use it, on their own team's live deals, with me watching them coach rather than coaching for them.
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGER COACHING · WHAT IT IS
The opportunity control points
The instrument your managers get
Three inspection questions, their sub questions, and a rule. It fits on a page.
- The urgent problem
- Have we attached to an urgent problem, do we know its implications, and do we know whose problem it isSo what, for whom, and says who. A manager who asks those three, every time, finds out within a minute whether their rep has a problem worth a budget or a conversation they enjoyed.
- The decision criteria
- Are our differentiated capabilities prioritized in the buyer's decision criteriaWhy buy at all, why buy now, why buy from us, and again, says who. Knowing the decision criteria is not the standard. Influencing them is. A manager who accepts a list of criteria the rep merely collected has inspected nothing.
- The champion
- Is a real champion working a plan to the customer's outcomeNot a friendly contact. Someone with influence who sells in your absence and is personally invested, working a plan with your seller rather than a close plan your seller wrote alone.
- What a manager says when the answer is not there
- Two good answers exist for any of these questions: the right answer, and I do not know and here is how I will find out.Everything else is a gap, and a gap you can still act on is a good thing. When the rep is struggling to say it rather than to know it, teach through role play, right there, and stop discussing the deal.
Why this oneClose
The three rows above are the inspection. This one is the half that makes them usable, because a manager who asks them and gets no answer otherwise has nowhere to go.
The rest of what it isClose
Which makes coaching your managers' most critical skill, and it is the one almost nobody develops in them. They were promoted for selling. Then they were handed a team, a forecast and a methodology somebody else rolled out, and asked to enforce a standard nobody taught them how to enforce.
The instrument is tied to the same structure your team was trained in, so a manager inspects what their reps were actually taught rather than a second standard nobody mentioned. The skill they build is coaching a deal rather than taking it over, because a manager who rescues a rep's opportunity has closed one deal and taught nothing. And the questions are written down, so every manager asks them the same way.
Have we attached to an urgent problem, do we know its implications, and do we know whose problem it is
So what, for whom, and says who. A manager who asks those three, every time, finds out within a minute whether their rep has a problem worth a budget or a conversation they enjoyed.
Are our differentiated capabilities prioritized in the buyer's decision criteria
Why buy at all, why buy now, why buy from us, and again, says who. Knowing the decision criteria is not the standard. Influencing them is. A manager who accepts a list of criteria the rep merely collected has inspected nothing.
Is a real champion working a plan to the customer's outcome
Not a friendly contact. Someone with influence who sells in your absence and is personally invested, working a plan with your seller rather than a close plan your seller wrote alone.
What a manager says when the answer is not there
Two good answers exist for any of these questions: the right answer, and I do not know and here is how I will find out. Everything else is a gap, and a gap you can still act on is a good thing. When the rep is struggling to say it rather than to know it, teach through role play, right there, and stop discussing the deal.
The behaviors worth enforcing everywhere
Two, in the delivered work, and they are the two a manager can enforce without sitting in the meeting. Summarizing the buyer's story back to the buyer, in a structure that stays fixed while the voice stays the seller's own: personalize based on your style and interaction, keep the structural elements. And a mutual success plan, owned with the champion, that runs past signature to the customer's realized result.
- The method itself, where there is not yet one to enforce: Sales Training and GTM Transformation
- Live coaching on real opportunities while your managers learn to run it: Rep and Deal Coaching
- The same questions built into stage exits and the operating rhythm: Cross-Functionally Aligned GTM Process
Why it matters
What changes
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGER COACHING · IMPACT IT CREATES
The behaviors worth enforcing everywhere
Two, in the delivered workSummarizing the buyer's story back to the buyer
- A structure that stays fixed. Keep the structural elements.
- A voice that stays the seller's own. Personalize based on your style and interaction.
A mutual success plan, owned with the champion
- Owned with the champion, rather than a close plan your seller wrote alone.
- Runs past signature, to the customer's realized result.
Your opportunity reviews converge.
Three inspection questions, their sub questions and a rule for what happens when a rep cannot answer one, all on a single page, so what one manager refuses to let slide is what all of them refuse to let slide.
Two behaviors become how your team sells rather than what it was once taught.
A seller summarizes the buyer's story back to the buyer in a structure that holds while the voice stays their own, and a mutual success plan is owned with the champion and runs past signature to the result the customer actually wanted.
You find out what your field is really doing.
What is working and what needs more energy comes back quoted from your own people and dated, and it goes to the managers who have to act on it, so a read on the team is evidence rather than an opinion asserted at the end of a quarter.
Coaching gets aimed.
A skill and will read on each person tells a manager who needs teaching, who needs pushing and who needs neither, so the one hour they have for each rep goes to whatever is actually in the way.
The standard outlives the person who set it.
A manager who leaves takes their relationships and not your operating standard, and whoever replaces them inherits questions the team already expects rather than a rebuild.
Who it is for
What I usually hear before this starts
- We rolled the methodology out to the reps. Six months later you cannot tell.
- Every manager runs a pipeline review differently, so every rep prepares differently.
- My managers were terrific sellers. Coaching is a different job and nobody taught them it.
- Our reviews inspect the number. Nobody inspects the behavior that produces it.
This is the problem this offer is bought against. The full page →
How it runs
- Format
- Working sessions with your first line managers, one at a time for the coaching itself and together for the standard, plus a periodic review where I report what the field is doing, by name and by date, with the gaps next to the wins. I report on the reps to the managers. There is no manager scorecard, and I do not build one, because a manager who is being scored stops telling me what they cannot do.
- Cadence
- At the moments that matter rather than on a subscription: with your leaders before any training, so they lead it from the front rather than watch it; then coach the coach sessions, one per manager, alongside the live deal coaching their reps are getting rather than instead of it; then a review once there is enough field evidence to be worth reading.
- Who must be engaged
- Your first line managers, and the leader they report to. The reps are not in the room. The reps' deals are the evidence. Where those managers run customer success teams, your Chief Customer Officer is that leader and they sit in on the same terms. None of the control points change for a renewal conversation. A champion working a plan to the customer's realized outcome matters more once the contract is signed, not less.
- What you supply
- Managers who will be coached in front of each other, which is harder than it sounds. Access to real opportunity reviews rather than to a sample chosen to look good. And a leader above them who asks the same questions, because a manager whose own boss never asks will stop asking too.
- What it is not
- This is not leadership development and it is not a personality assessment. Neither is it a coaching service I keep running on your behalf. If I am still coaching your team a year from now, this offer has failed on its own terms.
Two reasons this works
The dependency ends up with the people who are staying
Every coaching arrangement creates a dependency. The only real question is who ends up carrying it, and most engagements answer that by accident. This one answers it on purpose: the person being developed is the one who is still going to be here.
Why that mattersClose
The measure I apply to it is an uncomfortable one and it is the right one. How quickly do these sessions stop being worth buying.
Cost: reinforcement carried out by people already on your payroll, at no session price once the engagement ends. Risk: the skill compounds where you keep it, because a manager coached this year is coaching the sellers they hire three years from now.
The behavior has to happen when nobody is watching
What a manager inspects is what survives them leaving the room. The control points are three questions asked in every review, so the behavior gets produced by the expectation of the question rather than by anybody's presence.
Why that mattersClose
Predictable questions produce predictable behaviors. When a rep knows they will be asked how they verified their champion, they verify the champion before the meeting, and by the third review they have stopped noticing that they do it. The work to get there happens on the manager's own reviews: they run one, I watch, and we debrief the coaching rather than the deal.
Revenue: the methodology gets used habitually because managers coach it, not because reps were told to. Cost: no second rollout of something your team already learned once. Risk: one standard across managers, so a seller who changes teams meets the same questions rather than a new opinion.
What it is like to work with me
“I had the privilege to work with Russell 3 times. After many years of selling and sales leadership where I have been trained at Solution Selling twice, Customer Centric Selling 3 times, Sandler once, Force Management 3 times, I can easily say that Russell is one of the best facilitators of sales training I have met. His ability to lead a room with 2, 3 or 400 people is absolutely incredible. Russell has this gift of feeling the energy of the people he interacts with and can instantly adapt his speech to them; Russell has an extremely strong psychology and can really lead and inspire others through a shared objective. Last point that really inspired me when I was working with him is that Russell enjoyed so much what he does that it is contagious with everyone and make them enjoying learning.”
“Russell, I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate your efforts this week! I’ve been through many sales trainings and this was the best I’ve ever attended, much due to you. My team is pumped!”
“Russell, I teared up at the end of your session b/c you reminded me of why I loved sales strategy so much. Thank you for your warmth, the kindness you exuded, and the passion you shared.”
“I was not exaggerating when I told you, and several others, that I have been in many training classes over the years, and this will absolutely stand out as the best one, bar none.”
“Russell’s ability to break down complex concepts into simple, actionable strategies made an immediate impact. Since then, I’ve brought him back multiple times. Russell has a unique talent for making sophisticated sales principles easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to apply in day-to-day selling. Russell immediately elevates any GTM teams efforts.”
Questions people ask
We rolled out a methodology to the reps and it faded. Is that what you fix?
Almost every failed rollout has that shape: the training reached the reps and the management system meant to sustain it was never built. Managers were never enabled to coach it, so deal hygiene drifted and the standard went with it. If that is what happened, you do not need another methodology. You need the managers enabled, which is smaller and cheaper than starting over.
Coaching my managers is my job. Why would I pay someone else to do it?
It is your job, and I am not doing it for you. I am teaching it, the way anything is taught: a standard, an instrument, practice, and honest feedback while someone watches. Most sales managers were promoted for selling well and never taught the second job. That is not a character problem and a title does not fix it.
Do the reps have to be coached first?
Usually they have been: the common sequence is training, then live deal coaching, then this. But where the framework already exists and the managers were the ones who got skipped, I have proposed the reverse and put this first. The diagnosis decides the order, not the catalogue.
What if my managers do not want to be coached?
Then we find out where each of them actually is and meet them there, which is exactly what I am asking them to do with their own people. Skill and will are different problems and they need different conversations. A manager who will not be coached in front of their peers is telling you what they will tolerate from their team.
This is the Sustain part of the work: the behaviors held in place by your own operating rhythm until they are simply how your managers lead. Your goal, not my service line, and the rhythm is yours to keep.
The best outcome here is that you do not need me.
Three weeks into coaching a client's sellers I told their president, unprompted, that he was buying the wrong thing: "Because if I'm coaching reps, um you're going to become dependent upon me. If I'm coaching your managers to effectively coach, you don't need me." It cut my own scope that month. It is still the argument, and it is why this offer exists.
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