When to Tell and When to Ask
Reflections on Sales Coaching After Three Decades in the Field
By Jeji James, Sales Force Effectiveness Manager for Nestle MENA
Mike’s Note: Jeji James has three decades of sale management experience at Nestlé across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and MENA. He has been very successful building sales field forces across 20+ markets. I got to know Jeji as a client when I consulted for Nestle India. Since then, I have been honoured to be Jeji’s friend and he as my “sales effectiveness coach” based on his blogs, LinkedIn posts and occasional coffees as he now lives in Dubai. Read on……
I have gradually become less interested in whether sales managers are coaching and more interested in whether the salespeople under his/her leadership are becoming more capable because of it. That distinction has taken me some years to appreciate.
I started as a sales representative, being managed and coached myself. Later I managed teams, eventually leading a field force of several hundred people. Then came roles working with sales managers and leaders across different markets and cultures. Through all of that, coaching was important. But so were the numbers. And in sales, the numbers have a way of winning.
There is always a target to deliver, a customer issue to resolve or an execution gap that needs attention. An experienced manager can often see the answer quickly. So we tell, correct, demonstrate and sometimes step in ourselves. Very often it works. The number comes.
The harder question is what happens the next time. If the salesperson still needs us, the sales manager, to solve the same kind of problem, perhaps we managed the outcome without developing the capability behind it.
That does not make managing wrong. Sometimes salespeople need a clear answer. There are standards that are not negotiable and moments when direction is more useful than another question. The difficult part is recognising which moment you are in. And that requires credibility.
Some of that comes from having been there yourself. From having faced customers, carried a number and learnt that what looks straightforward in a review can feel very different in the field.
Experience does not mean your answer is automatically the right one. It gives you enough context to recognise what you are seeing and, perhaps, to ask a better question. Then comes empathy and curiosity, because the answer that worked for you may not be the answer the salesperson needs.
Working across India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the wider Asia and Oceania region and, more recently, the Middle East added another dimension. I expected coaching to be very different across cultures. The nuances certainly were. People responded differently to challenge. Agreement in one culture could mean something quite different in another. How feedback was received and how trust was built varied.
But over time, I became more struck by what did not change. People wanted to be respected and understood. And they could sense whether you were genuinely invested in helping them grow and succeed. The communication nuances changed. The underlying human need changed far less.
I see generations similarly. Gen Z may prefer faster feedback, shorter interactions or different channels. That is for those of us doing the coaching to adapt to. Just remember the channel is not the coaching.
Perhaps the greatest constraint is time. Numbers are visible today. Development takes longer to show itself. Under pressure, it is easier to manage the salesperson to the number than invest the time to develop him/her to deliver it themselves.
And a coaching conversation alone does not change capability. Follow-up matters. What happened when they tried it? What worked? What did not? What would they do differently next time? Without that, even a good coaching conversation can remain just that: a conversation with agreement but no lasting growth, change or success.
After more than three decades around sales organisations, I am not sure there is a perfect formula for sales coaching. Credibility matters. So does empathy, curiosity and judgement. Perhaps the hardest judgement is knowing whether the salesperson in front of you needs an answer, a question, a challenge or simply some space.
The measure, for me, is simpler. When you the sales coach is no longer beside them, can the salesperson handle the next situation better than they could before?
If they can, something worked. You may want to ask yourself and the salesperson a question: Can or did the salesperson handle the customer or account situation better than they could before?
Thank you Jeji for your keen insight. Connect to Jeji via his LinkedIn page to regularly receive his golden nuggets of sales wisdom at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeji-james-82631211/
Michael J Griffin
CEO and Founder of ELAvate
Global Sales Productivity Consultant
Maxwell Leadership Founding Member
michael.griffin@elavateglobal.com
+65-91194008 (WhatsApp)