Real behaviour change takes 6 months. Here's why.

Coaching sits in an interesting place inside revenue teams. It gets talked about a lot, but it's often confused with training, mentoring, or just regular pipeline reviews dressed up with a different name.

I want to walk you through where coaching actually lives inside enablement, how it differs from everything else you're probably already doing, and how you can use it to genuinely move the needle on revenue.

I'm certified through the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and I'll be honest with you: I started out as a skeptic. When the certification was first offered to me, I thought it sounded fluffy.

Two years post-license, I'm passionate about it. I use it with sellers, with leaders, and yes, even with my own kids (they're starting to catch on).

Let's get into it.

Training, mentoring, and coaching are three different things

You'd be surprised how often these get used interchangeably, so let's settle it.

Training is a direct transfer of knowledge. I'm telling you something and hoping you retain it. Straightforward.

Mentoring is showing you how to do something the way I do it. I'm taking my experience and pulling you along with me so you can see how I've done it (or how someone else has done it).

Coaching is something different entirely. It's a partnership with the participant that's thought-provoking and creative. The goal is to help sellers maximize their personal and professional potential.

Coaching is deeply personal, which means you can't really come up with one topic in advance and say, "Right, I'm going to make you better at the CRM today."

In coaching, the coachee brings the topic to you.

That's the key. The change is owned and driven by the coachee. I often go into coaching conversations with no idea what we'll be coaching on, and that's the best part.

Because the coachee is bringing the topic to the table, they're committed. They're driven to change it. Compare that to me walking up and saying, "Hey, your numbers are low, you should probably work on this." Completely different dynamic.

The two types of coaching you need to know

Business coaching, according to Lee Hecht Harrison, is a co-creative development process designed to help individuals or teams achieve and sustain performance in ways linked to the organization's needs and measurable business results.

Within that, there are two flavours.

Developmental coaching is what you'd typically see in career coaching, personal coaching, life coaching, or leadership and DEI work. It uses a lot of probing questions to help individuals reach their own realizations.

It takes a long-term approach to building habits and competencies. The coach doesn't tell the coachee the outcome because the coachee brings the outcome to them.

Directive coaching is what we tend to use more with sellers. Why? Short attention spans, for one. We also want to get to results quicker. If you bring a salesperson in and just keep firing question after question at them, they'll tap out pretty fast.

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