Coachability, with Kevin Davis [Episode 854]

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Kevin Davis is the founder of TopLine Leadership and author of The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness. In this episode Kevin and I are talking about the importance of hiring coachable sellers. We get into why coachability is becoming even more important and how to screen for coachability in a job interview.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Kevin. Welcome back to the show.

Kevin Davis: Thanks very much, Andy. Great to be here

Andy Paul: Great to talk with you again. So where have you been sheltering? These past many months.

Kevin Davis: In the Reno, Tahoe area.

Andy Paul: Beautiful.

Kevin Davis: Yeah. It’s a nice place to be. A little smokey. Now the California fires are drifting over this way, but-

Andy Paul: Oh yeah.

Kevin Davis: No, we don’t have any fires locally, but it’s pretty bad down in the Bay Area.

Andy Paul: Yeah, we’ll keep our fingers crossed for it. Cause September is sort of the fire season.

Kevin Davis: it certainly Yeah. 

Andy Paul: So yeah. Same thing is true here in Southern California. It’s September, October are the ones you want to watch out for in the Santa Ana winds start kicking up. All right, today we are going to talk about the importance of hiring coachable sellers among some other topics. And this is something you’d written about and it’s interesting. It’s, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of COVID and increase in virtual work and so on. And. Haven’t thought about it. Yeah. I was thinking back to the days when I was hiring people for positions in Europe and Asia and Australia as opening offices in those places and hiring sellers and sales managers there.

and certainly coach-ability was one, but here you people talking about that a lot, but there were other characteristics I thought were equally as important. And just curious in your take on that, because I thought, okay, I’ve got somebody remote. That’s gotta be. Self-sufficient to some degree, emotionally self-sufficient, if not, intellectually self-sufficient on the product, they have to be resilient that we are resourceful.

So in addition to coachability, and we’re going to dig into that, but I don’t hear people talk enough about screening for those characteristics. So if we’re gonna, if you’re gonna hire a sales team or if you’re moving your sales team virtually, and you think you’re going to keep a large chunk of them, if not all of them virtual for some foreseeable period of time.

Aren’t there more attributes we should be screening for

Kevin Davis: Absolutely. Obviously, somebody that is self-directed and motivated is essential because they have to be able to work independently on their own and. having clearly defined processes and standards of excellence so that we are not just communicating what we are bare minimums, but I would say our best producers, what is your top sales person do differently in terms of their skills and wills or attitudes.

And. And really look to that as a, as some of the qualities and characteristics. you’re you need to look for

Andy Paul: I was just thinking of this in the larger context that is inherent in this whole move to virtual, which was forced on us. We had to do it, but we’re now making this assumption. Everybody has the emotional makeup to work remotely. And especially in sales and it’s yeah, I don’t think that’s the case.

again, back to the, when I was hiring people for these offices overseas, it was like, that was really the first thing I was really more focused on us. How would these people be able to survive on their own coming from environments oftentimes where they were working for companies and they were, yeah.

Office-based and out in the field, the hybrid type role. And I just wonder, Is this really where the rubber is really going to meet the road for companies that continue to push down this virtual road? What if a substantial portion of their team just can’t operate in the environment?

We’re just assuming they can

Kevin Davis: obviously you’re going to have problems. I think if you’re managing an outside sales team, they’ve always been virtual and, as a manager, you could fly in and join them on important customer meetings and things of that nature. you had a chance to observe them.

and so that’s. I think one of the big changes is many of the inputs that sales managers had ways to observe their salespeople in the past have gone away. and. joining a sales person on an important zoom meeting. that’s such a small percentage. Of course the sales person is going to be well-prepared for that.

It’s an important meeting. But what I like to see when I would do a ride along with our sales person is how are they interacting with all the customers that other customers that call them? How do you know, what kind of calls are they receiving driving me? today, if you happen to work with a salesperson, they don’t want you riding in their car.

Andy Paul: Not for an extended period of time.

Kevin Davis: Yeah, you’re back in the other rental car with a mask on. and if you happen to have a customer meeting, you’re probably doing it in the lobby of a company standing 10 feet away from the customer. so we’ve lost our ability to observe in many ways that we had in the past. And Getting back to your original question. it’s, self-directed, it’s the people. I think a lot of outside salespeople have already been working in this virtual world. It’s the inside salespeople that are now forced to work from home that their life has changed. So you do need to pay attention to what are those, what are there, do they have kids running around and, kids working from home, there’s just so many different issues to deal with.

In this challenging time. According to the research, this is not going to go away, and can be more productive and make more calls from home. 

Andy Paul: Yeah, I just, it’s more thoughts about the nature of work itself. we’ve been office centric by and large. It’s just that field sales people, not withstanding. and so increasingly as we switched inside sales, we’ve built up and up the sales teams in the offices.

And I said, I just, I worry about this to serve an inherent assumption that. But not just for salespeople, workers in general that they can go do this for an extended period of time without sort of the human contact, the in-person human contact. Yeah.

Kevin Davis: it totally changes. I think it is the responsibility of the sales manager. to provide more consistent and purposeful communication and coaching to the team as a whole and to individuals on the team. otherwise. People who work from home. If they don’t have interaction with the team and they don’t connect as much with a team, they do develop some sense of isolation and, I’m all in this just for me.

And it’s only me here and they become disconnected from your company. that’s not good. 

Andy Paul: that’s what I said. I think it’s just going to be, I think this is, I don’t say the other shoe that’s going to drop, but it is a shoe that’s going to drop at some point. Is that? I don’t know. I don’t know how big a percentage of workers that is, but certainly less than the number that are working from home currently that over time just can’t perform in that environment.

it’s gonna be really interesting to see, so yeah.

Kevin Davis: It is, it’s a segue into our, the coachability topic. How important is that?

Andy Paul: it becomes very right. I think that this is this idea of hiring coachable, people being conscious about hiring coachable. People are supposed to serve, have nice desks. Hi, a nice to have, but being very conscious about it, it was relatively recent, but it’s, it is. Yeah. That to me, it’s like number one thing, right?

Kevin Davis: I completely agree. So let me ask you, Andy, do you know the origin of the word coach?

Andy Paul: no, I could stall you long enough to look it up here online, but not tell me what it is.

Kevin Davis: it dates back to England in the 14 and 15 hundreds where. if somebody wanted to move from point a to point B faster, a horse-drawn coach would enable them to do that. And that’s where the word coach comes from. So I think the important operational thing there is that the person has to want to move from point a to point B and the coach helps them get there faster.

And so when you start looking at coachability, obviously the person has to want to get better. They have to be committed to implementing your coaching. or they don’t really want to move from point a to point B and then you have a bigger problem.

Andy Paul: so that’s an interesting point is they have to want to improve now. there’s. More being written. I just recently read a book by Roger Connors called Get a coach, be a coach, which advocates that increasingly people have to become their own coach. what’s, what is your thought on that?

This whole idea of self-directed coaching is that I just

Kevin Davis: Yeah, I completely agree with that as the end game, but, a sales manager can help salespeople too. what percentage of opportunities in a sales person’s funnel does the manager actually get to coach the sales person on? It’s just a, it’s a small percentage obviously. And so if we can help that salesperson to understand how the sales manager coaches, because we’re asking better questions, we’re provoking thought.

We’re helping that sales person ask questions of him or herself that they, maybe wouldn’t be asking before an important meeting, helping them to learn how to coach. And then hopefully they will apply that skill with all of the other opportunities that are in their funnel and speed up their cycle of improvement and help them get better, faster.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I, so I’m torn on this. I absolutely agree that self, this idea of self-directed coaching is important. Because companies aren’t, haven’t stepped up for two reasons. One is, Hey companies, aren’t stepping up to do it. but B even in the absence of companies stepping up, you still have responsibility for self-improvement.

and bullets what’s interesting to me in sales is that you’re here. I think it was one of the professions in the business world that is most. Yeah, sort of performance oriented, And you really get out of it. What you put into it feels too small for a fraction of people to make that investment. And I’m just wondering if, in some respects, we keep wanting people to do this, make this investment, because we think that sales should actually, should be treated as more than a job.

Kevin Davis: when you say sales should be treated more than a job, what do you mean by that?

Andy Paul: it’s if, if you’re just going to the office nine to five and you’re doing a desk job, not yeah. Theoretically, Just saying, gosh, that not a whole lot of incentive to listen to a podcast, read a book, read articles, so on to get better, but. In sales, your compensation is tied to this, but I still see in general too few sellers making that investment.

So I call it the, treating it just as a job, as opposed to, I don’t know, maybe a lifestyle

Kevin Davis: obviously the best ones do. And when you start to think about what your best ones do, you’re averaging mediocre producers. Don’t certainly do this whole idea of improvement, but I would offer to flip the coin on that and say that one of the potential reasons why.

So many salespeople are perceived by managers as uncoachable because the manager is providing poor quality coaching.

Andy Paul: yes, absolutely. Absolutely. How many managers have been trained? How to coach

Kevin Davis: it, yeah. and, with the whole pandemic it’s, if you’ve lost your ability to observe your salespeople in action, the sales manager’s natural instinct is to fall back on what they can still see, which is activities and sales results. And that’s what I call scorecard coaching. it’s a way of.

if you’re in the game of golf, if you gave your scorecard to a coach and said, Hey, what do I need to do to get better? The coach can’t really help Oh, don’t make bogey on par threes. and yet many managers rely on scorecard coaching now because.

They have difficulty observing their salespeople in action. And so they’re just managing the numbers. So I would advise that managers really look at, getting more involved, making more proactive, and purposeful connections with your salespeople individually and collectively, 

Andy Paul: well, and use embraced technology like ring DNA that provides you a bill with our conversational AI product to record calls and, either self-coach them as an individual or for. managers surface coachable moments in the calls where you can come in and help your reps get better.

Kevin Davis: Absolutely. You’ve got to take your time and make sure that you have the technology and the tools, to see what’s going on and then provide better quality coaching, because. coaching by the numbers is looking in the rear view mirror. We’ve got to have the purpose of helping salespeople get better and make sure that the advice we’re giving them this month is better than the advice we gave them last month.

Andy Paul: Okay. So that brings up an interesting point because I’ve raised this question before. If you look at this idea of performance improvement as a process that sellers go through, I’ve made the statement before him. I’ll ask you, the Sarah asked the question before is if you say, okay, if performance improvement is a process and.

The rate at which a process moves is based on the rate determining step. I believe for reps’ improvement, the rate determining step is just what you said. It’s the rate at which their manager gets better.

Kevin Davis: yeah.

Andy Paul: I don’t think sellers can get better any faster at a rate faster than their manager gets better.

Kevin Davis: Yeah, that’s it. That’s a great observation, Andy. no question. and from a manager’s perspective, you can influence your salespeople and you can control yourself. So what can you, as a sales manager do better or differently? To make a more meaningful connection to each of your salespeople and speed up their cycle of learning.

Andy Paul: Yeah, so it brings up a bigger question, which is one that I was planning on asking a little bit later, but I’ll bring it up now because you’re talking about how we help our, how we enable our. Sales managers need to be better coaches because research shows that the most important thing a manager can do to improve the performance of their people is effective coaching. So you look at our annual spend as an industry on sales training, it’s $20 billion a year of which a tiny fraction is spent on training sales managers. There, I have a guest on the show named Peter economy. He’s written a book about first-time managers. He writes for Inc magazine, and he said the average age at which a person gets their first leadership training is like 41 or 42 years old.

After they’d been a manager for 10 years on average. So we put these people in a job and we expect them to perform, but we do nothing to prepare them. And so I’ve been doing this informal poll of people. And I actually, I wrote about it on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago and got a handful, a couple handful responses, but I’ve been asking other people it’s who taught you how to sell.

Yeah. Other than your own experience, what were the big major influences on you and learning how to sell? And invariably, the number one answer was always the coach manager. So I’m like, okay, we know that effective coaching is the thing that we can do to provide the biggest uplift in sales performance.

We know that we have managers who are not trained to be effective coaches. And yet we spend billions 20 billions of dollars a year on training salespeople. What if we flip that and spent that $20 billion on training sales managers instead?

Kevin Davis: it’s music to my ears. I just, 

Andy Paul: but why is it like, why don’t we do it? We know there’s a return there

Kevin Davis: Yeah, we’re just releasing a new online course called the sales manager’s guide to great online courses. And I think part of the. Problem in the past is, it’s been difficult. It’s more costly to bring managers together than salespeople because they’re spread out and there’s a reluctance to bring them out of the field and put them into training.

And then they get back to the office after they attended the two day leadership summit. if the company did do that and they’ve got, they. Two days of travel. Plus the two days in the training and I got four days of stuff they got to dig through when they’re supposed to be implementing the training.

it’s just, so I think a new model for sales manager education that is a remote model that delivers it up in bite sized chunks, accessible from any device is something that’s, will enable sales managers to get better, faster. And coach.

Andy Paul: well, and that gets back to this model. Self-directed coaching for managers. Yeah, I still feel I can sell though. And this is that companies have by and large abdicated the responsibility to improve the performance of their sellers and their sales managers.

Kevin Davis: I think there’s two issues here. Many companies assume that. A great salesperson will make a terrific sales manager, but the skills of managing and leading a sales team are completely different than selling skills. That’s one point and then many companies will deliver a general management training program and include the sales managers in the audience.

But. The sales managers are sitting there in their own minds, thinking, salespeople managing salespeople is different than managing quality control and production or anything else. So this, they maybe don’t take in as much as they might otherwise because they have this. Self-perception that they’re on an Island and they do something that’s unique to themselves.

They face challenges like, the highly productive salesperson that suddenly becomes stuck in a rut. The priMadonna sales rep who thinks a to treat is wonderful with customers and then dumps all over everybody inside the company, treats them horribly, and thinks the world owes them a favor.

and you have the, the disillusioned beginner, right? who’s hit that wall and isn’t seeing the success that he or she thought they would and how you deal with that. These are all challenges that are unique to a sales manager’s role and many, many sales managers haven’t really ever.

been educated on how to do it. In fact, I’ll share.

Andy Paul: none. Yeah. None of them have read your story.

Kevin Davis: Roosevelt had this quote, which is great. she said, learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

Andy Paul: so here’s a question for, and this is the topic of exploring a lot on the show with other guests is in my opinion, we. Fundamentally manage sales the same way we’ve been doing it for a hundred years now. We’ve got those senior sales leaders, VP CRO, whatever title I give them these days. And we assume since they’re in that role, that they are an expert in all these various areas.

You just started talking about it. Mindset and motivation and psychology. Do you mean talking about people in a slump, how you get people slump in performance improvement, which is a distinct skill itself, performance coaching? Yeah. I can create this long list of things that.

We assume somebody assumes they’re the expert in that. And there’s assuming that the next level down, they have some expertise in that as well. And yet these people have never, ever been trained in order to do it. It seems like we have to radically rethink how we manage sales. And for instance, why should managers need a coach? Why shouldn’t we have specialized coaches? Yeah, we’re doing specialized sales roles. We’ve got BDRs SDRs, AEs, a M CSMs and it works. Yeah. Still needs to be fine. Tuned and tweaked, but yeah, it can work. Why aren’t we specializing in management roles? Why don’t we specialize in staff roles to improve performance?

Kevin Davis: No. that’s a good point. I think I have seen some organizations that have designated the position of sales coach. I’ve definitely seen that. I think the challenge is that when you do that, essentially you give your sales managers the freedom to not be responsible for coaching.

Andy Paul: Yeah, that’s not their job. Their job is to manage the team to hit a number.

Kevin Davis: we have a designated sales coach who teaches them how to sell, and it’s the same thing. Like the Hey sales training is going to take care of that. My job is to manage the numbers. And look, I put sales performance management is definitely part of the equation. It’s you have to communicate to individual salespeople and the team, what the company expects in terms of behaviors, activities, and results.

That’s absolutely true, but your performance management can be far more effective if you’re also at least as much, if not more. On a teachable way on teaching your expertise, which is sales excellence to others. And we, their managers, get so overwhelmed and distracted and all is firefighting and stuck with urgent emergencies that come up during the day that they just, They never get time.

They don’t have as much time to get around to coaching. And so I would suggest that anybody listening to this who’s in a sales management role. Just take a look at your calendar right now. How many coaching sessions do you have scheduled with your salespeople? Because. We can complicate this, but it is very simple.

If you want to be a better coach, it starts with committing part of your calendar to coaching on a regular basis. And there’s a lot of different types of coaching conversations. You can have, top five deals in your funnel. You want to pick deals at various stages in the funnel, you can do a one-on-one monthly performance review.

You can do a loss review, a post-mortem. You can do role-playing. You can review the call, that ring DNA helped you record and play it back. And coach the salesperson. there’s a multitude of. Teachable things that a sales manager can do because the sales manager is the most capable seller on the team.

And the question is how effectively are sales managers teaching their expertise? And when they do get that, when they buy off on that and they commit to it with their calendar, their sales performance management improves exponentially because they’re not just talking about. Numbers. And how many calls the sales person made.

They’re actually talking about specific, tangible things the salesperson can do to get better, and they essentially become a teacher.

Andy Paul: The thing is, I think with a lot of frontline managers is. Not too dissimilar when I am, I got promoted pretty quickly into frontline manager, maybe 20 months into my first sales job. And, okay. It wasn’t a sales expert I’d been selling for a year and a half, two years. I just, and this is just a topic that, why get back this idea about hiring specialized coaches and so on is I think it’s unfair to expect. Frontline managers who are newly promoted. We shouldn’t have the expectation on their sales excerpts because they’re not, but coaches could be

Kevin Davis: Okay. I tell you what I’ve seen in that when companies commit to that career progression of sales coach, it followed, it is usually the sales coach position that is the stepping stone to become the manager. And what does that say?

Andy Paul: self-defeating.

Kevin Davis: yeah, it says, Hey, the sales coaches.

if you’re a really good sales coach, maybe you too can become a manager.

Andy Paul: yeah. Which is really backwards. Because it should be a parallel position. It should be. Yeah. It should be a career, not a stepping stone.

Kevin Davis: exactly.

Andy Paul: I use the example of people who listen, are probably tired of hearing this, but the example of, Sports. Yeah, because that’s a performance-based, professional sports, performance-based profession.

And the closest analog there is, and I’ll tell you there’s too, to sales and you look at the coaching staffs and what they do, and increasingly, they’ve specialized. No, they have physical performance and mental performance coaches, physical performance coaches, and multiple dimensions, one’s health and nutrition, the other’s strength.

you just look at the coaching staff, almost any professional sports organization that’s radically different from what it was years ago when it was, a couple of position coaches and so on. Now they’ve got all these specialists and they make a career out of being the specialist.

Oftentimes. So it’s Isn’t that a model for what we should be doing in sales is let’s have these specialized roles, the server, the height of it, which is still controversial and in soccer land, Liverpool, it’s my favorite club in soccer. They have a coach that’s paid just to coach throw ins. Now he’s one of the few that have done that, but the others are coming along because. They found that there is a tactical advantage to being able to execute certain, plays and motions. If you will, off of a, in that lead to, higher the statistic that was expected goals that lead to an expected goal rating of a certain shot.

And we can do something like that. But I think there’s, we have this reluctance to invest in it . The study that we all have seen about sales coaching is what an 18% uplift in performance through effective coaching on individual performance, through effective coaching. 18% pays for a lot of coaches.

Kevin Davis: Yes, it does.

Andy Paul: every time somebody says, we can’t afford that. look, can we afford not to give the certain state of things right now? save things being again, we’ve all seen the reports roughly only 50% of reps make their quota year after year, yada it’s like something should change.

Kevin Davis: absolutely.

Andy Paul: All right. I’m just trying to blow everything up.

Kevin Davis: that’s your professional role responsibility.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Muckraker but it’s true though. I think that we’re just stuck, we’ve taken this layer of technology and put it over sales and we said, Oh, this changed everything. And in reality it’s changed nothing.

Kevin Davis: Yep. I don’t disagree with that, but, speaking of, speaking of coaches,

Andy Paul: Yes.

Kevin Davis: and coachability, so I was reading. Jay Wright, who is the head men’s head basketball coach at Villanova university has a motto that he uses in recruiting players. Now he’s, by the way, what has been their head coach for almost 20 years won two national championships.

So an accomplished coach, he says

Andy Paul: For a tiny Catholic school.

Kevin Davis: he hires, he looks for players. Who are both hungry and humble for coachable. He says, I will only hire coachable people. How does he find a coachable sales person or shoes, a coachable basketball player. He looks for players who are hungry and humble. And I think, the hungry part, we all get, right?

That’s somebody who’s goal-oriented driven and all that kind of stuff. We get that. But humble, I would think that. Coach Would want to know somebody who’s bold and brash self-confidence to overcome any difficulties, but coach Wright has a great insight here. He says that humility is essential to coachability.

It’s a prerequisite, according to the coach, and when you think about it, you agree because it’s humility is. Is the, is, Hey, maybe I’m not as good as I can be. And so then I started thinking about, geez, maybe sales managers should start looking for candidates that have a little more humility following coach Wright’s guidance on this.

And how do you spot that in an interview process? I know, I think the answer, one of the answers is. is to find, is to ask, a candidate, tell me about the biggest loss and if the candidate kind of blames external factors or, or other reasons as to why they lost the deal, pricing is too high, those types of things.

That’s probably not a candidate with the humility to recognize. They are part of the reason that they lost that deal, a lack of skills or a lack of application or execution of what their company taught them to do, led them to a ruse. I don’t know. What do you think about that humility issue?

Andy Paul: Yeah, I think it’s a specific type of humility. And so when I was reading that quote from the coach, it struck me as that. And I think this is oftentimes the case in sales and hiring and so on. This is that. Yeah. We want somebody that’s. Humble in the sense of being self-effacing and modest and so on.

That’s great. But I think in these cases, what we’re really talking about is intellectual humility and which is the ability to acknowledge. There are things they don’t know. And I think as a player, I think that’s what the coach was right. Was really talking about it’s players that have that sense that, yeah, I can.

No, a lot of things. I don’t know that. If I learn, it will help me get better. and I think back to actually something I posted on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, which is still going strong in terms of people reacting to it and commenting on it was a quote from Kobe Bryant about what he thought was the most important attribute he brought to the game in terms of improvement.

And he said, curiosity,

Kevin Davis: that’s

Andy Paul: it wasn’t, I wasn’t spending extra hours in the gym. And so on. It was curiosity to learn more about how to, the strategy, tactics, moves skills, whatever is never being satisfied that you do that, at all. And I love the surf juxtaposition. But someone told me recently, “Recently, we’ve been using a lot, right?

Is that, you want people who are learn it alls not know-it-alls

Kevin Davis: I think your example of the Liverpool coach who specializes in throwing the ball in is a great example of that. wow. Think about all those players that thought they knew at all. And then all of a sudden the coach came along, that specializes in, thrown in the ball. maybe there’s some more things about something I’ve been doing all my life that I don’t know.

I wonder what this guy or gal can teach me.

Andy Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And this is what I think managers oftentimes are afraid of. Is the idea that they’re put in these jobs. And again, they presume their managers think that they are the experts and therefore if they have to ask for help, they’re somehow weak. And this is, played off for years and sales.

And it’s just ridiculous. We can’t expect frontline managers or directors, even VPs to be the font of all knowledge about human performance. Yeah, you have to be able to open up and be an environment where he’d say, yeah, there’s so many things I want to learn about this. We need more specialists brought in to help us.

And I think that for me, at least as I look at the future of sales is, and sales management, it’s more specialization, but can be a more specific benefit to individual contributors.

Kevin Davis: I think that’s spot on. And I think if you have salespeople who are coachable, because Hey, we’re providing better quality kits, sales coaching. I think that coachability is a prerequisite for loyalty.

Andy Paul: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s a, that is. Yeah, that is part of the equation is we’re going to move to a direction where we’re providing greater specialization, more fine tuned specialization on certain roles and skills. So on in helping our sellers get better, you’ve got to hire someone who’s coachable.

Otherwise you’re wasting it.

Kevin Davis: Yeah, you’re wasting it. And obviously from the sales person’s perspective. If your company can help them get better, faster, help them increase their income and achieve more of what they want faster than they’re going to become loyal. like you mentioned earlier, Andy, about, you asked sellers.

what helped, who helped you the most? And they report, they relate back to one of their previous sales managers that had a huge impact on them. and, that’s maybe that’s the manager that we still think of. mine was guy Campbell, and I stayed with that company for 10 years and he was one of the reasons.

that helped me along in the early phase of my sales career. 

Andy Paul: We all have those. Yeah. Actually in two weeks from when this is being recorded. So it will be after this is published, but, yeah, my guest on the show is going to be my first sales manager.

Kevin Davis: that’s great.

Andy Paul: Yeah. he just

Kevin Davis: I’m going to ask you for a call report. Is he?

Andy Paul: no, that’s funny. I should’ve asked that. but he just retired from a sales career as a very successful career as a senior executive at HP and, yeah, but it was fun reconnecting because he had a big influence on me.

all right, Kevin, we’ve run out of time, but, tell people how they can connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing.

Kevin Davis: our website is called topline leadership.com. And, I’m the author of a book called the sales manager’s guide to greatness, which is available on amazon.com or wherever books are sold. And, by the time you listen to this, we’ll have released our new sales manager’s guide to a great online course where sales managers can get the education that is so important to becoming a great sales manager.

I think that. It takes a great sales manager to build a successful sales team. And, so for a limited time, we’re offering a free lesson on deal coaching, what are the three steps to having better pre-call strategizing conversations with your salespeople? if you go to line leadership.com you’ll.

Find your way to the free lesson and check it out. And there’s 36 more after that, 

Andy Paul: All right. Directed coaching as we talked about. All right, Kevin, thank you very much. And look forward to doing it again.

Kevin Davis: Andy, thanks so much. You take care.