
The Modern SaaS Podcast · 2024-02-23 · 34 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
35 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Aditya Kothadiya, speaking at Avoma, argues that effective coaching must be proactive, continuous, and personalized rather than reactive and ad hoc. He emphasizes that coaching extends beyond sales to every customer-facing function - customer success, marketing, SDRs - since all brand interactions shape prospect and customer experience. The key is establishing a predictable operating rhythm through calendar-blocked activities: weekly call reviews (ideally 2-3 times per week), Friday reflection sessions where reps identify their best and worst calls, and daily deal grind sessions focusing on discovery, follow-ups, and email communication. Kothadiya highlights the importance of using tools like Avoma's AI-powered call scoring to identify individual rep patterns and strengths objectively, enabling truly personalized coaching rather than generic training that alienates already-strong performers. He also addresses hiring for coachability - assessing during interviews whether candidates accept feedback, implement suggestions, and embrace a coaching-rich culture. The interview process itself becomes a coaching preview, with role plays and assignments designed to reveal how candidates respond to constructive criticism. Kothadiya emphasizes that situational coaching through varied playbooks and roleplay scenarios prepares reps for real-world curveballs beyond scripted happy paths.
Aditya recommends at least 2-3 coaching touchpoints per week through scheduled call reviews, more than the typical weekly one-on-one. This can include daily deal grind sessions reviewing first calls, follow-ups, and email communication, plus Friday reflection sessions where reps identify their best and worst calls from the week.
Use AI-powered call scoring tools like Avoma to listen to hundreds of calls objectively and identify individual rep strengths (e.g., discovery, closing, relationship-building) and weaknesses. Once you understand each rep's unique patterns, tailor coaching to their specific gaps rather than forcing everyone through generic training programs.
Assess candidates through role plays, take-home assignments, and direct feedback during interviews to see if they accept criticism, admit mistakes, and willingly implement suggestions. Strong candidates will ask to redo assignments after receiving feedback, signaling genuine coachability beyond just claiming they're open to coaching.
Set expectations upfront that call listening is an open, transparent, objective process done for everyone - not an individual judgment. Position coaching as investment in their success and results, frame feedback around their improvement goals rather than management directives, and balance constructive feedback with recognition of strengths.
Real customer conversations include unexpected objections, competitor questions, and unique needs that scripts don't cover. Practicing multiple playbooks and scenarios during training builds a library of question variations and responses reps can flexibly draw from, so they can adapt naturally on calls instead of rigidly following a script.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
There are a handful of actionable practices - Friday calendar blocks for best/worst call review, weekly themed coaching with recorded objection responses, and the self→peer→manager coaching progression - but these are surrounded by extensive generic advice, Tom Brady analogies, and padding that dilutes the useful-per-minute rate significantly.
every Friday put a block on your calendar to identify the best call that you have done. Or the worst call you had where, uh, you struggled the most and share those two calls with your manager
every week we pick up a theme. We will say, okay, this week we are going to have this particular theme that we are going to coach reps on
The episode recycles well-worn coaching tropes - proactive vs. reactive, coaching culture, vulnerability as strength - and leans on the overused Tom Brady analogy. The peer-coaching tier and using the hiring interview itself as a live coaching preview are modest bright spots, but nothing here challenges conventional wisdom or offers a contrarian frame.
even someone like Tom Brady needs coaching. There's always these new plays that happen. It's not just because he's won Superball seven times that he doesn't need coaching
coaching Is not just somebody your leader or manager is coaching you. Uh, first of all, honestly, just you listening to your own call, I've seen you can get a lot better
Aditya is the CEO of Avoma, a conversation-intelligence SaaS, giving him direct practitioner credibility on coaching tooling and internal culture-building; however, his scale and evidence base are limited largely to his own company's experience, and the interview is conducted by his own marketing team member, which dampens independent validation of his claims.
I personally, one of the things I've done, we have this concept of daily, uh, deal grind. We call it as a deal grind because essentially we're grinding this deal review process to a level where we are trying to improve the finesse of our sales reps
We had a rep who used to, she was a new rep consistently. She was at 30% attendment when she joined you. We kept investing her, kept investing her. Uh, over the next three to four months she started hitting 60%, 70%, 80% attendment
Across 34 minutes there is essentially one concrete data point - a single anonymous rep going from 30% to 80% attainment over 3-4 months - and named internal concepts like 'daily deal grind,' but no external company examples, no cited research, no revenue figures, and no customer case studies beyond vague references to 'our customers.'
We had a rep who used to, she was a new rep consistently. She was at 30% attendment when she joined you. We kept investing her, kept investing her. Uh, over the next three to four months she started hitting 60%, 70%, 80% attendment
I would minimum allocate one hour to two hours every day to coaching, if not more minimum. That much time needs to be allocated
The host is Avoma's own marketing team member interviewing her company's CEO, resulting in entirely softball questions, zero pushback on any claim, and a stream of affirmations ('I love that,' 'Awesome,' 'This has been amazing') with no probing follow-ups or productive disagreement anywhere in the episode.
Awesome. Yeah, I think that that's uh, I love how you talk about coaching in all aspects
Yeah, no, thank you so much. This has been amazing. It's always nice to get your insights
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome back to the modern SaaS uh, podcast. I'm Erin Harchie, maybe a new face or voice for some of you. I actually had brand over here on the marketing team at a Voma and today I'm excited to kind of shake things up, make my debut on the pod. And we're switching things up today. We're going to put Aditya here on the hot seat and ask Aditya uh, some questions. I thought the perfect topic for today would be coaching. Especially starting off a new year 2024. We all want to create new habits, we all want to get better and coaching is probably on the top of many people's list at getting performance up and seeing growth with their team. So excited about today.
Speaker B: That's awesome. Arin, thanks for switching up. I know we have been talking internally about different initiatives around coaching and you said Aditya, why don't we talk about all these topics at ah, the podcast. And so here we are and excited to share about because on one hand we do sell coaching as a platform, there's a value in it. But more importantly we do have a lot of coaching culture. Things that we have learned over the period, things that we have best practices that we've implemented. So happy to talk to you about all those things.
Speaker A: Awesome. Well I wanted to kick things off with just the importance of sales coaching in general and why leaders. Why do you think leaders should put this on the top of their to do list?
Speaker B: Yeah and I think across uh, the board coaching, when you think about coaching you can think about this is not just for the sales coaching when you think about it coaching employee is the most important thing the way I think about it. So on one hand you have this external facing team members starts with sales customer success. These are people who are constantly having frontline conversations with your prospects, with your customers, then even marketing team. So coaching marketing team, coaching sales development team. These are the ones who are even having conversation before they are even your prospects. So anytime your brand um, is engaging with future prospects or customers I think it's important to have consistent behavior, have a top notch kind of experience that you can give to your prospects and customers. So and most of these people who are joining these companies have different baggage where they come from. So not necessarily they will always have the similar experience that they would think about. And you as a company who is trying to compete and out execute your competitors, you are also having some kind of definition that what is that part that look like and you expect them ever to follow certain behavior. And so I think that it's important to. When you think about coaching, there are multiple ways you can break down. It's one is just the uh, skills itself. They having the right skills for the right kind of job function that they have. If it's a outbound cold calling or outbound prospecting, what's the different skills look like? If it's a marketing person on the product marketing side, coaching on the copywriting, the messaging and so there's a lot of that can be improved as well. And then when you think about sales, they have different skills uh, that they would also require so that just the job function related skills are important. But then you also take a look at your own company, your own market, your own product that is also constantly evolving. So you also have to do a constant coaching around who are your new competitors, how do you position against them? What's the new product line that you've launched? The market is getting competitive. Then how do you address differentiators? What story do you tell? So the coaching at the beginning. Just because their skills are great, they're great at copywriting or they're uh, great at outbound does not mean that they'll be great at selling your particular product or telling your differentiated story. So that's why I think that skills is important. So coaching on those things important but at the same time coaching in your constantly evolving market ecosystem, your product, all of that is also equally important.
Speaker A: No, I love that. I love that you are not just thinking about the sales team but really every function of the org and anyone who is basically talking about the brand and having conversations with prospects, customers, maybe some leaders out there or CEOs listening to this are like wow, that that's great but that feels so overwhelming. Maybe kind of a bigger picture that they don't know how to get to. So how would you recommend even starting and kind of creating a rhythm of sales coaching with where to start? Are there any specific routines that you find particularly effective here?
Speaker B: Yeah, I think you already used the word rhythm. I think that's where the most important part most of the time people realize that it's not that people don't value coaching, they value coaching. But what happens is that Erin, it's a very ad hoc. People see something going wrong and then jump onto it very reactively. What we are trying to propose here, first of all, make it proactive coaching as a culture. Second of all, make it a continuous coaching culture. Not once in off because you found something is going wrong. Then you start giving feedback to somebody. And people have leaders typically will give Feedback, they will continue to coach. But is it a continuous coaching practice? That's what we are proposing here. And to your point, the operating rhythm, this is one of the big things that we try to define. People do have one on ones and they think that they're giving feedback in one on ones is basically doing coaching. And there are many asynchronous methods of also doing coaching on slack or email feedback, something like that. So that's also people think okay, I'm doing coaching. So you ask any leader, any manager, typically they'll say nobody accept that they're not doing coaching. They'll say yeah, I'm giving feedback to my team. The challenge is that when you look at that feedback it's very subjective. A lot of the times as I mentioned early on, it's very ad hoc. It's not consistent. And so what you're trying to change is that make this as a continuous coaching culture, but also consistent coaching culture in terms of the way you are very objective in giving feedback to not in one individual but also different individuals. And so one of the practice that we recommend at Avoma and to both for our own team, what we have done but also to recommend our customers is having this notion of put things into calendar and uh, maybe it's a weekly call review kind of coaching culture for your customer success team or maybe for your sales team. I still believe personally weekly is also very less. You need to do more do at least two, three times in a week. And you'll be surprised by listening to these calls, investing that time and having these blocks on the calendar. Both your reps know that this is not one of your listening to one particular individual reps calls. You're listening everyone's calls. And this is a kind of culture where calls are being listened. So you don't feel like oh, am I being judged? And is this something somebody is monitoring me? No, it says open, transparent process. Leaders are going to listen to some members calls. Some feedback is going to be constructive feedback, some is going to be slightly critical. It's going to be baggage of both. And when you kind of position it that way, the coaching culture overall across the board people start having more acceptance to the coaching as a feedback mechanism. There are many ways how we have done it. One of the things we used to recommend our customers and we also do it. We have this again not trying to pitch a woman but really one of the ways we have done it, we said okay, every Friday put a block on your calendar to identify the best call that you have done. Or the worst call you had where, uh, you struggled the most and share those two calls with your manager or with somebody who you would like to get feedback from. Just having that calendar event on your Friday afternoon is a good reminder that I need to go back. I had probably six or seven demos in this week. Which one was the best one, which one was the worst one? And it forces you to think yourself, in your opinion, what did you do well, where did you struggle? Identify those calls, share with those managers. And just having this routine helps people to make it a forcing function that, okay, this week's, these are the things that I need to have coaching done next week. These are the things that I need to get coaching on. So that's one way of kind of building that as a culture by adding these calendar blocks. I personally, one of the things I've done, we have this concept of daily, uh, deal grind. We call it as a deal grind because essentially we're grinding this deal review process to a level where we are trying to improve the finesse of our sales reps. Yes. So we look at the first call that they had. Sometimes on the second call that they had. How did the follow up happen? Sometimes you look at the email communication and we are doing coaching based on that. Hey, how do you follow up here? What could have been done where you asked different discovery questions and all of those things we're doing and it takes time. This is not easy. This is exactly how the most important thing, what I've observed about these, some of the reps have taken the feedback so seriously and so quickly that within few weeks they have immediately started changing the behavior. If you've given them feedback on, hey, here's how the, um, discovery needs to be done immediately in the next few calls, they start practicing it. And at the end of the day, you know, you know this, right? So we talked about this coaching in Superball, even someone like Tom Brady needs coaching. There's always these new plays that happen. It's not just because he's won Superball seven times that he doesn't need coaching. He's still hungry for it. Even at that stage, he's saying, I'm the best and I need still coaching. And even at that point, coaching is important for him. And so when you look at the reps, that's exactly what happens. That reps are constantly getting thrown into new curveballs. And uh, we want to make sure it's a consistent process by having these calendar blocks events on your recurring basis. That's how it becomes a consistent process. Otherwise it's ad hoc, which we obviously don't want it.
Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's so important to remember that everyone needs coaching, especially the Tom Brady's of maybe the sales world, the top performers, because everyone on your team has different strengths and maybe struggle in different situations. It kind of brings me to my next questions of how do you even tailor the coaching to the individual rep? And how much are you individualizing and personalized coaching and then how much are you seeing coaching as coaching the overall team?
Speaker B: Yeah, that's actually the really hard problem because most of the people, what they will do, they'll have these generic trainings and generic things. But when you look at it, there are some senior salespeople or senior customer success people, some would be junior in their journey. So different people need different kind of training. I've also seen some people are really great at building relationship, having great conversations at the beginning. But some people are not as technical to demonstrate the product. On the other hand, some people struggle to build a rapport, have the conversation, but they're super technical, they understand the product really well. Then you see some people who are great at closing, they know how to ask hard questions, but they're not really great in terms of follow ups. And uh, so they are good in the first call, but they fail in following the cadence and the playbook that you've defined. So when you look at each individual has different strengths and weaknesses. It's important that you create coaching culture that's unique to their needs. But it's easier said than done. Uh, how do you even identify where they're struggling? And this is where some of the tools, like what we have done of OMA is again not trying to oversell here. We will identify these patterns where AI is going and listening to everyone's calls, it's scoring them with a completely unbiased opinion in an objective way. And so you don't have to listen to every single call. There's no humanly possible way that you would be able to do it. This is where AI comes into play, where it can scale to listen to hundreds of thousands of calls. And after listening to all the thousands of calls, it's flagging you here. This person does this call opening really well. They do this discovery really well. This particular person does setting up the next steps really well. Once you know these individual rep level signals and their strengths and weaknesses, that's how you can then have these different coaching sessions with them. And it's absolutely important because this is another thing if you try to generalize the coaching program. And you say that everybody needs to go through this discovery. The reps who are already great at discovery, they roll out their eyes and they're like, ah, another program. Why does management think that I'm stupid here? They're micromanaging me. Why do I need to do this? I already know this. But then you fail to understand. Sure, they know that particular part now. They already tuned out. They start disbelieving your coaching program. And when you actually launch something that's going to be important for them, they're already looped out, they're already not listening to you. And so that's why I, um, personally believe that it's important to understand what are the strengths of each individual and how do you really define coaching program and then only focus on their weaknesses, Tell them about the strengths, tell them about the areas of improvement and have this very personalized conversation.
Speaker A: Yeah. And I want to kind of say hiring probably has a lot to do with that of even going back to the beginning of how do you think about coaching even when you're hiring these reps? What is, you know, obviously top performers, we want to get on the team and that's the ultimate goal. But how much do you put coaching in those interviews and define whether sales rep is coachable like you said?
Speaker B: And for all the things exactly as I said, it's absolutely important to hire somebody who is coachable because if you believe that a particular rep, uh, is top notch and he or she does not need a coaching, I think we are making a mistake assuming that kind of performance. What we really want to make sure that every rep demonstrate that they are coachable because as we said, they might be having certain strengths, but there are definitely going to be areas of improvements that we want to give them feedback upon and then try to improve those skills. And so this is where you do want to take, how do they take that feedback during the interview process itself. And uh, it's absolutely important I look for, uh, are they coachable or not. There are certain things I try to do in the call in the interview process to really hone that and identify that. And it's also important to set the expectations with them during the interview process that we are a culture of coaching. Many times I ask candidate what's their current coaching culture look like? And uh, you'll be kind of surprised that they tell none. Right now in my current organization, they have not seen that kind of culture. They don't see getting feedback from their managers. And when they come and join us, suddenly they Feel that, oh, there's so much coaching happening here and I want to set those expectations with those future candidates that in our company we immensely value coaching and we will be investing time in you, helping you to get better. And if you're not up, uh, for that game, maybe we are not the right fit. So that's. Setting the right expectation is important. So that's why I do check during the interviews for the coachability as well.
Speaker A: Yeah. And what is the feedback there? I think one fear that might be out there is that listening to calls, giving this, you know, regular feedback, you don't want the reps to feel like, wow, I'm just doing everything wrong. Right. How do you, how do you get coaching to be fun? And what are the feedback that you kind of see out there when you're doing your own coaching?
Speaker B: Um, I think this goes back to setting the expectations. If you don't set the right expectations at the beginning and you suddenly show up and start telling them all the negative things that they've done, that's when people are going to be defensive. Nobody likes feedback. It's plain and kind of everybody hates hearing the negative, critical feedback. Right. That's, that's the ultimate truth. But at the same time, if you set the right context, if you tell them that why you are giving the feedback and also the why behind the feedback, then people are more receptive to understand, okay, this is where the intention is coming from. This is why you're giving me this feedback. And you make it about them, not about you. If you tell them that you're giving feedback for you to do something better, they're not going to like it. If you tell them some about feedback, about them getting better, about them achieving certain results, then they're more receptive to listen to the feedback. And so one of the things I try to do just to identify these kind of attributes during our interview process itself, we have some of these role play situations, we have some of these, uh, take home assignment situations. We give these things. We don't ask them, are you coachable in the interview process? Of course everybody's going to say that I'm, um, coachable. I asked them about what their coaching culture looked like in their previous organizations. What kind of coaching have they received? And I give them an expectation that, saying that, hey, in the interview process, I'm going to give you coaching and certain elements here, I'm going to give you feedback and some of the feedback, you're not going to like it. And just by telling them that set of expectations I want to see how they react. I'm trying to see how they do they take that positively. Are they leaning in towards getting the feedback or are they pushing back? Um, and when I actually give the feedback during the interview process, you'll see a lot of people accept their mistakes, what they've done. So we look at all these writing, email related assignment, just even email writing is not something people think that somebody will give you coaching feedback. Everybody thinks that. They know it so well. Now you have chat, GPTs of the world, people leverage a lot of that. But still when you give them feedback, you want to see how do they take that feedback. Some of the people will rise up and they'll say, well, I accept this is probably, I should not have done it this way and this is what you would try to see. Or do they push back with the right argument or are they just being defensive for the sake of it? You'll be able to learn all those things. And the ones who accept the feedback, some of them actually go and say that, hey, you know what, can I do this, redo this assignment again. Now, uh, you got somebody who not only accepted the feedback, but they're willing to take that feedback and put it into practice. And very rarely I find that kind of individual. Of course, whoever done it, we have given them an offer. So that's what you're looking for. Are people there who are willing to take feedback, who are willing to get the coaching and once they get the coaching, are they willing to implement it? Once you also talk to them about these things that hey, here is exactly how it's going to be in our day to day calls when you join a voma, this is how we are going to do it. Because this is just a uh, sample preview and because we are invested in you, we don't want to just hire you and then leave you alone. And have you figured out on your own there might be some individuals who like to do that maybe then that's not the right fit. So hiring process is nothing but really it's not about finding the best candidates. Really finding the candidate, the best candidate who is actually the right fit for your organization. And somebody might be amazing closer, but if they do not demonstrate that coaching kind, uh, of attitude, then we may not want to hire them. And so those are the things I look forward during the interview process and push for the candidate to reveal those traits, reveal those attributes by slightly being a little bit direct with them and candid with them.
Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, I think that that's uh, I love how you talk about coaching in all aspects, and it really starts from the hiring process and you think about it in every kind of way throughout the organization. So that's awesome. You talked about role playing, and I think we've talked a little bit about this before. And, um, I think you have some kind of advice out there and good strategies on that. And there's, um, something called situational coaching that is getting a lot more traction, getting a lot more people talking about how do we make sure that reps feel prepared and comfortable in every situation and how do we prepare them. Right. Whether an objection comes and pops up or competitors mentioned, or you mentioned discovery. So what are some approaches that you've taken on that you feel like really helps with this situational coaching?
Speaker B: Yeah, and I think the way you said it, right. So having a thematic approach to some of these things is really, really important. A lot of the times while it's said that people say that, well, SMB, um, kind of sales is transactional, and so everything is just transactional sales. So it will be a cookie cutter kind of an approach. No, it's not. Every single conversation when you truly understand, is still slightly unique. Sure there are certain elements which are repetitive or you will get better at over the period, but even there, people do have some nuances that they want to understand things differently. They'll ask you certain situations, everyone's situation. I, uh, use this, but I don't want that. And it's kind of unique situation on its own. And so it's important that we address those nuances differently. And if reps only follow certain scripts and these new curve balls get thrown at them, then they struggle, they stumble upon and they don't answer those questions more effectively and they forget something else that they had practiced upon. So that's why it's important to throw these different curveballs at them, um, during the practice itself, have different playbooks and you don't want everything to be scripted. But at the same time, if you don't have any practice, then you're not going to also be able to have an effective conversation. So you still want to practice, but when you show up on the real call, it should not feel like you're just following the script and you're actually still you're picking different variations of the questions. While people are answering questions or having a conversation with you, you're also thinking, what is the next set of questions I'm going to ask them? What is the next set of phrase I'm going to say so that I convert the conversation in a certain direction. And that library of different things that they can do on the call happens by having multiple playbooks and multiple role plays during the practice itself. You don't go and show up just practicing one happy path and then just expect that it's going to do it exactly that way. So you have to identify different ICP is going to show up. You have to identify different stage of the company is going to show up. You have to identify some people are going to be replacement from incubant, your uh, competitors, some people are going to be absolutely newcomer. Everyone's how you sell your narrative, how you sell your story is going to be different based on who is in front of you. Sometimes there is a, uh, sales leader, sometimes there is a individual AE on SDR is also going doing the first demo with you. You have to really know now if they're in front of me, how do I continue to move the conversation forward. And when you try to understand these possibilities, it's absolutely important to do different role plays. And one of the ways what we do every week we pick up a theme. We will say, okay, this week we are going to have this particular theme that we are going to coach reps on. And one way to do it. We tell them, hey, here's the question or here's the objection. Prospects are asking you, um, go and record yourself independently and share the what are the 2 minutes, 3 minutes of recording? How would you respond when prospect says something like this and then share with us. Now what we're doing is that we're capturing individual reps, different feedback and you'll see how the same question, how each rep responds to that objection or different question. Then you're trying to listen to all of those together. You're saying, hey, which one is do you think is the best one? Then we give the coaching feedback and then combine collectively we're saying, okay, now this is the best practice that we want to implement. And that's really how the coaching happens. Which is basically on the situation related things.
Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's important. One thing that you mentioned there about asking others on the team how you felt about those specific responses. Obviously we can't do this all on ourselves with managing manager managers. Right. Uh, it's a lot of work. How do we get peer to peer coaching within the culture and how do we get other people on the team to kind of help with coaching to really get this culture of learning within our organization going?
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think you said it right. So one of the things is that coaching Is not just somebody your leader or manager is coaching you. Uh, first of all, honestly, just you listening to your own call, I've seen you can get a lot better. How often you are struggling, you can just by listening to your own call, you realize that I should have said that better. Maybe next time I'm going to use this phrase, or maybe that was not confident and I struggled there, I stumbled there. So we encourage reps to even listen to your own calls. First of all, just by listening to your own calls, you will improve the coaching initiative. Then the second thing we ask the reps, okay, now listen to other reps calls also. If you think that this particular other rep is better than you and they're, uh, for any reason, you maybe their performance is better, they're more senior than you, more experienced than you. Go and listen to their calls, see how they're doing it, try to take notes, mimic their behavior. And so without anybody giving anybody feedback and getting involved, you're still, this is what I call passive coaching. Just listening to these other people's calls, you're observing. And the more you observe, the more you understand different things, you're able to improve your own game as well. So that's the number one thing I tell people. Then comes the peer coaching. If you listen to someone, you're one of your top reps, cons, and let's say you feel now more connected to them, you try to behave like them, you try to implement certain practices from them, you go back to them, you say, hey, I learned this great thing about you, and I try to implement this in my thing, but I'm not there yet. Could you listen to this protocol and give me feedback on what happened here and how can I get better? Everyone loves people who like to follow them. So when you tell some other rep that I loved what you did and I'm trying to mimic that thing, everyone loves that. And now they're invested in you. They want to give you feedback, they want to help you get better like them. And that's the way how you want to include your peers who are better than you to be invested in you. And then obviously the third comes your manager. But as you said, if managers don't have time, this is how you still get your peers involved. And it could be not always from your own team. It could be somebody from product team, it could be somebody from marketing team. You can say, hey, marketing team member, in the, uh, onboarding process, you had this collateral, and I try to explain this, but I'm struggling here. Could you Review my call and listen to this call and give me feedback. What I'm saying, right, What I'm saying, the differentiations. And there are different ways how you can still get this mini coaching from different cross functional team members and get better before you show up to your manager. And then when you show up to your manager, you're already kind of prepared with multiple different ways and you're showing up that okay, you've already done so well across all these things, but they don't know that you've done all this effort by talking to different team members and getting better. So that's how uh, I mean the coaching should not be limited to just manager giving feedback to the reps. Reps should think about self coaching themselves, then the pure coaching and then the manager led coaching. So those are the three different levers how you should think about.
Speaker A: I love that. I think this is all really great advice and tips for managers out there, leaders out there. I wonder if you have any advice for continuing this up. Uh, right. Because maybe you, if we're honest, maybe we did a training, maybe we had two weeks of listening to calls and then it just stops. Right. And then we're kind of two months, three months go by and you're like, oh, I need to revisit this and maybe we're not doing the best job being holding ourselves accountable to this and our teams accountable to this. So what would you uh, say there and any advice you have there on making it a consistent process and really creating this culture?
Speaker B: Yeah, as I said, I think the first and foremost the why needs to be clear. The belief that this coaching is not something we are doing because somebody else told us, our managers told us, our leaders told us, you need to believe about this within yourself. So once you have that belief that this is important, this has helped me personally to grow, then you know that coaching is important and then you've seen your own benefits about coaching. Then you would be also investing the same time to help other get better as well. Your why needs to be really strong and your why will help you keep growing or going even though some new other challenges come in and you will not give up on the coaching. So that's my number one advice that believe the reason why coaching is important. We talked about Tom Brady example. It's exactly why he keeps going. Even after so many super bowl wins, he's still getting coaching. Now the same thing happens to your point. Another thing is that as I said, calendar routines, you have to have these routines on your calendar. Do not skip that Many people think that I'm going to do it one time. It doesn't happen. You have to have it blocked. Time on your calendar. Decide at very high level on a weekly basis how much time I'm investing on coaching. Allocate. Uh, that's your primary, one of the core initiatives. 20% time, 10% time, whatever it is that you can define. I would minimum allocate one hour to two hours every day to coaching, if not more minimum. That much time needs to be allocated. That is core initiative that you should be discussing with your leadership, with your management. That that's my core KPI, that I'm going to invest time in the coaching and do not try to take that as a secondary priority. That's one of your primary responsibilities. So that's another way how you are making it sure that the coaching is not getting deprived is. And last but not least, track the progress everyone if you're seeing the impact and the performance enhancement. We had a rep who used to, she was a new rep consistently. She was at 30% attendment when she joined you. We kept investing her, kept investing her. Uh, over the next three to four months she started hitting 60%, 70%, 80% attendment. Like you could see the graph every single month her performance was getting better. And that feedback loop is important for you to keep believing that yes, this works. I've proven this when I give the coaching feedback, the reps have performed better and that signal that fuel is important for you to keep going. And that is the same thing that those results are important for you to show to management that why do I need to invest in coaching? Because here's how this rep was here. And after coaching, after three months she's doubled her code attendment. And that's the kind of uh, success and momentum is also important for you to keep going. Awesome.
Speaker A: Uh, yeah, no, thank you so much. This has been amazing. It's always nice to get your insights and advice on everything and kind of have you in the hot seat answering the questions versus you interviewing other people. So thought this was a really great episode and a lot of insights here. Uh, with one final question. What is a, ah, hill you'll die on? When it comes to coaching, if listeners out there can leave with one piece of advice from you, what would you want that to be?
Speaker B: I would simply go with this continuous coaching mindset. It is one of the fundamental thing like I still personally feel there are so many things I'm doing wrong and I need to get coach. I constantly seek advice from other people. So I think you should not feel less in asking feedback and coaching from other people. Do not think that am I going to look stupid? Am I going to look that I don't know anything and what I'm asking and it's okay. You can set that concept. Hey, vulnerability is one of your strengths. Be vulnerable. Tell people, hey, I might be new into this, I don't know, I've not done this, I'm not expert in this domain. Put those disclaimers and then ask for feedback. When you tell that disclaimer, people already don't judge you. They know that you are already being vulnerable and you're already understanding your weaknesses and you're already self aware. That is a very big strength that people miss it. So rather than trying to hide and not ask for feedback, I would rather be vulnerable and say that I don't know enough about this. Can you help me out? Can you give me advice? Can you give me guidance? Even though you know and even the feedback might be repetitive. Treat that as a affirmation, confirmation about the philosophies that you already believe in. But seek for feedback and that's continuous coaching is the number one thing. I will die on that hill.
Speaker A: I love it. Well, thank you so much Aditya for taking your time. I know you're really busy. So offering these insights, I think it was uh, great to hear all of these different tips and like real world actionable things that people can start doing today to really up their coaching program. So thanks.
Speaker B: I love this. No, I love this impromptu one that you pulled me in that. Hey, uh, based on all this advice I was giving internally to the team, you said, aditya, why don't we just share this on podcast. So this is helpful. So always happy to share some of the nuances and there's a lot more we didn't get to a lot of tactical stuff. Maybe sometime we should always keep talking about these topics as well.
Speaker A: Yes, yes, uh, definitely. All right, thanks everyone for listening and make sure to share the pod, uh, and subscribe so that you can hear more of our weekly episodes. Thanks everyone.
Speaker B: Hm.
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