Carole Mahoney

As the founder of Unbound Growth, Carole Mahoney coaches business leaders, sales pros & 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%.

• 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 effectively AND have been trained how to Coach
• 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