Peak Performance Selling

Carole Mahoney

Episode Summary

As the founder of Unbound Growth, Carole Mahoney coaches business leaders, sales leaders and Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial MBA students on sales. She has been featured as a top 15 sales Influencer in 2020 by LinkedIn, a Woman to Watch in Sales by Sales Hacker, and a top sales coach by Ambition. Salespeople who have been through the Unbound Growth coaching programs have gone from on-plan to top performers and closed the largest deals in company history. Sales managers have coached their teams to achieve over 130% of quota while increasing customer retention to over 98%. Sales executives have cut their hiring time in half and increased the success of sales hires by over 90%.

Episode Notes

"There’s ROI in coaching, in training your managers on how to coach and enabling them how to do so! I haven’t seen a higher ROI from anything other than coaching."

• Got into sales kicking and screaming
• Grew up in a house with a used car salesman
• Thought she could go into marketing and make sales people obsolete
• Started her own company during recession 
• Realized she needed to learn HOW to sell
• Miller Heyman, SPIN, Solution Selling
• Everybody wants to grow their business - but what does that MEAN?
• I fell in love with sales because I changed my perception, my mindset and therefore my behaviors and results
• My Mission is to help businesses grow and create jobs, you can’t do it if you aren’t selling
• Can’t take marketing leads to the BANK
• Sales reps/managers who get coaching on the job will stay longer and are happier on the job
• Talent Retention and a culture of coaching is critical
• Coaching in general was you only needed a coach if you were WEAK or NEEDED help or were Less than
• High performing athletes are open to finding out what their hidden weaknesses are so they can be their absolute best
• Change behaviors and change results
• If you’ve never been coached yourself, you won’t know how to coach
• Management/coaching turns into pipeline review were they tell you what you need to do next
• Objective management group - 7% of managers are actually coaching AND have been trained how to Coach out of ~750,000 managers
• CSO Insights 3 hours of coaching = 17% increase in quota attainment 
• Sales managers who spend 50% of their time coaching, their team has 49% more abilities to sell!
• There’s ROI in coaching, in training your managers on how to coach and enabling them how to do so!
• I haven’t seen a higher ROI from anything other than coaching
• Coaching is not just a 1 time event, it needs to be part of a regular cadence and needs to be objective and individualized to everyone
• Not just sales coaching but Career development sales coaching - what are they trying to accomplish in 6, 12, 18 months?
• At the top what is the expectation leadership is creating? Are they providing the resources to get this done
• The Renaissance of Sales
• We’re seeing the science of how people change, take behaviors and actions now come to sales to help everyone learn the lessons people had to learn the hard way
• Sales is all about helping people make the decisions that are best for them!
• Harvard MBA students were struggling with the same exact things most every other seller was struggling with - Not asking enough questions, making it all about themselves, talking too much
•  Changing beliefs about what Sales is really all about makes all the aspects of e
• Daniel Pink To Sell Is Human 7/10 have negative connotation of sales
• Figure out our strengths, what are our hidden weaknesses
• Do we coach to strengths or weaknesses? This is trying to pick a person apart as if they are not whole
• Superman even has a weakness and can’t help people if he is crippled by his weakness
• Growth Mindset
• Take small pieces and focus on the things that help you get where you want to go
• If you could wave a magic wand what skill would you give sellers and leaders? Self-Awareness
• It’s a process and happens over time - personally meaningful - to her independent, self-sufficient, have freedom → now she knows what she needs that align with her values to get what she wants
• I don’t need stuff to feel content, but I need to see the people around me happy 
• I want to leave companies in better places than I found them!**
• Building self-awareness - trying a lot of different things and understanding where it is you want to go and what is important to you
• Because I was willing to get through it I was willing to take the gut punch to continually build self-awareness bit by bit every day
• Self care in sales 
• The more self-aware you become the more you start to take care of yourself
• As a seller you can’t be of service to your buyers if you have all this stuff going on with you
• As sales leaders when the pressure comes onto you how are you rolling that down to others that are there and looking to you for support 
• To bounce back, you can only control the things you can control.  You can’t control the outcome you can only control your process. 
• The down months is when the self-care routine is even more important
• Morning routine to get her through the day to be set-up calm/cool for her day:
  • Noom app for health (same process she uses with sellers and sales leaders), fitbit - how good did I sleep last night, how will that impact me later in the day?, yoga routine, dog walk 
• Detach yourself from the outcome and focus on the process that you have control over and celebrate the small wins along the way
• If you aren’t constantly reaching out to people on a regular basis, when the time comes for them to spend you won’t be there!
• Most people do goal setting in a Silo - become a dredge of work. Goal setting should be fun, should be light, should bring you JOY!
• What do you want your day to day life to look like with the people closest around you in 3,6,12 months and WHY is that important to you?
• If I were to tell you there was no way you could fail, what would you go for?
• Have those goal setting conversations with those people that are closest to you, make it fun!
• If you can’t have a financial or important conversation with your partner, how can you do that with your buyers?
• If you can’t have a conversation with those closest to you about what’s meaningful to them, how can you expect to find a compelling reason for a buyer to make a change?!
• If your sellers can’t do it for themselves, how are they going to do it with your buyers?
• MOST important skill in the best leaders - Fierce open and growth mindset- they will own their mistakes, share their learning and address the ways others can not make the same mistakes
• Connect with Carole on LinkedIn, Email, Unboundgrowth.com, Instagram, FB, Twitter

LINKS:

• INBOUND 2020  - Search for Carole Mahoney & Slide Deck
• UNBOUND GROWTH
• Fascinate Sally Hogshead - self-awareness assessment