Coaches – A Critical Partner

A “Coach” is a person who can help you secure an opportunity. They often are not the direct buyer, but if you can develop a buyer or a major influencer in the purchase of the services you offer, that is the best coach of all.

The Coach’s Role
The Coach will work on your behalf to provide critical information that you would not otherwise be able to find through research. That information may be related to upcoming opportunities not yet public, background and passions of critical influencers, secret influencers such as the CEOs assistant that others might miss.

A critical role as to any specific sales objective is to identify all of the technical buyers, user buyers, economic buyers, the critical issue that will drive a win for each of them and thus their support, and their respective levels of influence over the sales decision. These are all critical pieces of information that will provide you with a fair advantage over your competition.

Finally, a major role of a great coach is to help secure introductions to the various influencers so that you can tell your story to decision-makers already interested in listening to it.

Identifying a Coach
According to Heimann and Sanchez, my experience and logic, a coach must absolutely satisfy three criteria:

1. “The Coach’s Credibility. A good Coach must have credibility with the Buying Influencers for your particular sales objective.”
2. “Your Credibility. A Coach is someone with whom you, the person orchestrating the sale, have personal credibility.”
3. “Desiring Your Success. The crucial distinction between your Coach and the other Buying Influencers is that by definition the Coach wants you to make this sale.”
The New Strategic Selling, Heimann and Sanchez at page 263-4.

Of course, the Coach is useless to you if she has no credibility with the other people you need to get on your side in order to secure the opportunity. Do not underestimate people because of their rank or title. I once secured a major piece of business for a prior firm where the receptionist was one of my incredibly invaluable Coaches. She knew everything about everyone, held the key to getting through to everyone, and they all loved her. She loved doughnuts.

Everyone in the world operates, consciously or unconsciously, on one basic principal:

Will this person make me look great in front of the people who are most important to me?

Your best friend in the world will NOT help you within her company if she does not believe you will make this statement come true for her. She simply cannot afford it. Her career depends on it. She will make excuses like, “Oh, I am so sorry, that is against company policy. My hands are tied.” If you are her friend, you will not ask her to put herself in that position until you are certain you will make this happen for her.

A Coach will not want you to succeed unless you can prove this is true as to him, personally. That means the Coach has to trust you individually. The Coach has to know, not just believe, that you will make him look great or better. It is your responsibility to make sure that the Coach knows that:

You are truly passionate about the service you will provide the company;
You have dedicated yourself to becoming a true “best in the world” expert in the area of the service you will provide the company;
You will provide “delight-the-customer” service throughout the execution of the service for the company; and, perhaps most important,
You will make this a true win for the Coach by understanding what is, and who are, most important to the Coach.

While this is certainly true as to every Buying Influencer, the Coach is arguably the most important influencer and the first one you need to secure in order to make a complex sale. You simply cannot gather enough valuable intelligence to have a truly fair advantage without a Coach to guide you.

Finding a Coach
Some of this is trial and error, but of course you want to be as certain as possible before you rely on a Coach. It is often wise early on to identify more than one potential Coach.

Choose individuals with whom you have credibility. Ideally, you will have done very successful work of this type with him in the past. If your colleague has done the wondrous work, that is a good start but not as ideal. Professional services are based on individual expertise. One person’s expertise does not necessarily translate into trusted expertise in another in the same firm. Least helpful, as we addressed above, you are old friends and he is well aware of your stellar reputation. As you move farther away from a direct on point mutual win with this potential Coach, the more you have to prove in order to secure the required level of personal credibility.

You then have to find out if they can actually help you in this sales objective. Of course you should do your homework. Read their bios, research them on-line, etc. Ask the potential Coaches in the firm the same questions and see if the information you get is the same. If not, you will have to determine who provided the reliable information. You certainly do not want to evaluate multiple potential Coaches in the same company without telling each that you are friends with the other.

Once you have established personal credibility with the Coach and established that the Coach has credibility with the relevant Buying Influencers you have identified, you have to determine how your securing this opportunity can be a major personal win for the Coach so that they will want you to succeed.

Which individuals are most important to the Coach?
How can your success on the project make the Coach look great in the eyes of those individuals?
How is this win for the Coach unique to you as the vendor?
How can you prove this to the Coach?

This same process has to occur as to each influencer as well. Once you have established personal credibility and that the Coach has internal credibility, it is perfectly appropriate for you to ask the individual to be your Coach on the project. The term Coach has a very high level of recognition and reputation associated with it. Sometimes this acknowledgement is a big enough win. To be sure, ask the Coach how this can be a great win for him. Then prove to him that you can make that happen.

As you do extraordinary work for the company, and make your Coaches look great, that relationship will deepen. Make sure that your work and customer service is so extraordinary that each person you work with becomes an internal Coach for the next piece of work. Cultivating Coaches throughout an organization will help you and your firm secure all of their work, all of the time and get them to tell all of their influential friends at other firms about you.

Conclusion
Find one or more Coaches for every significant sales objective. Use the Coach to secure a fair advantage over your competitors through intelligence gathering and introductions to the buying influencers critical to your sale. Build a stable of Coaches in each firm.