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
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