Ep 24: In the Sales Leadership Trenches: Ditch the BDR Checklist and Start Leading Through Active Coaching

Celeste: [00:00:00] Hello. Hello. It is Celeste on the sales edge. I am joined by Maggie Maloney and we are going to talk about stopping over engineering of discovery with your team. So Maggie, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Maggie: So my name is Maggie Maloney. I am the global head of strategic account development at Televerde. So I lead a sales development team that helps support our, our internal sales team, the majority of our, our strategy, coaching up our team Account targeting and, and generating new business through outbound prospecting.

Celeste: So I had met Maggie through Gap Selling training and have like glommed on her on LinkedIn because The information she's pumping out as a front line manager, like in the trenches doing the do is very inspiring for other sales leaders who maybe have [00:01:00] taken their foot off the gas and are not as connected with what their team is doing day to day.

So Maggie, what recently struck me is you made a post about how we are overengineering the sales process, especially with discovery, on forcing our teams to ask specific questions. And tell us about how you stripped that away from what your team, your team, and what you're doing.

Maggie: Yeah. So it's, it's been, it's been a wild ride, right? Because the first thing I did is I I took away all of the questions that my team typically had for qualification which is how they were running discovery. What was really missing from that was understanding current state, future state, you know, all of the great things that I've learned from reading gap and participating in the training. And, Also, it was, it was breaking the conversational flow, right? And I think when we think about like, how do we earn trust?

[00:02:00] How do we get people to open up? It's through that active listening, maintaining conversational flow that we're really able to get deep within the business conversation, understand what people are struggling with you know, what they need to address their challenges. And so yeah, I, I took away their questions.

Celeste: What, and if you need to take your dog out, more than welcome to be on camera. Sounds like your dog is chiming in, like, yes, this is the way. Strip the teams of the checklist and the questions. And I'm sure that was very jarring to your team to not have this safety net of go to questions to ask. So instead, how do you frame it up for them to have those guide rails for discovery?

Maggie: So, yeah, it was super jarring for them, right? A lot of my team, you know, they've, they've been doing this for, for some time. And it is, it's, it's a guardrail. It's, it's a guide to how do we conduct this [00:03:00] conversation. And so, one of the things that we've been doing is we've been trying to role play through, like, what does it mean?

Because it really comes from the active listening and being super, super present in what's actually being shared for you and what's the next step. logical question. What's that thing that you're curious about and you want to know more about? And like, I'm always sharing with them. I'm like, it's one thing to hear, but a lot of times I think we hear, we assume that we know what, what they are, that we understand everything, but prospects always know a lot more about the world than they're even sharing on the surface level.

And so it's through this sort of. Exercise that we're doing. It's a it's a popcorn session for role playing. What we are practicing is we're actually taking snippets of calls from gong and [00:04:00] then we're role playing that out as a team Right because I think what happens a lot of time is we try and How is this conversation going to go?

And you have to kind of let go of those expectations. And so what we're doing is it's starting as it popcorns around in terms of one person asking the question, a person answers, but we're starting with a clip through Gong. So what they're able to do then is they're able to listen to that and then that one person will answer like a question that they might want to know something more about and then they choose someone to answer that because then There's no expectation.

I think even when I role play with the team, it's, I'm guiding the conversation through what I say, cause I know where I want them to go. But if we do it as a group in this way, it's like, nobody knows what anyone's going to say or ask. And it gives a little bit more of a realistic scenario. What does it look like when you're on the call with the prospect?

Cause you never know. You can ask a question and think, you know, you're going to get the, what kind of answer you're going to get. And you can get something completely different.

Celeste: Yes, [00:05:00] stop with the scripted roleplay, start with the real play. I love that because it's very similar to what we do in roleplay, which freaks people out where we just start, okay, ask me a question, and then the next person has to pick up from that, and we're looking to see are they actually listening. Are they using responsive questions?

Are they diving deeper, but you can't script it.

Maggie: You can't like it's you. It's conversation like it's conversation. It's not scripted. And that's the one thing I always tell my team because I listen. This idea came from listening to a massive amount of calls towards the end of last month. And one of the things that I noticed is that I, those little cues, it's like, wait, like, they said this, like, and it's surprising.

Like, I've had some reps where I'm like listening to calls and like, They'll ask a question and the prospect is like, did I say that? [00:06:00] And it's like, you walk and they're like, yeah, like you, and they're like, Oh yeah. And it's like those moments like that, like that is how we build trust is through that listening and really like listening and asking intelligent questions and like building that curiosity.

It's like, to the Kenan's point, right? Like you don't have to be liked, but it's through that active listening that you build that trust. And if you're going through and it's like, Oh, yeah, like I heard this, but like, I know the next question that I need to ask is whatever is on this call guide, you're, you're breaking that flow and you're breaking that trust without even realizing it.

Right, but you can kind of hear it. Like, if you go back and listen to those calls, you hear the dynamic change. You hear the, the, the pitch change and you can just feel like the demeanor change and it's like, I don't know, it's like the most important thing to me. So that's like our number one focus is more than anything is [00:07:00] maintaining that conversational flow and active listening by asking those questions and getting really, really curious without the script.

Celeste: many team members don't want to change how they're doing things. It's our blanky, it's our binky, but we know how are you working with your team to adopt a new way of approaching discovery?

Maggie: Oh, it's, it's really through, it's really through the practice. Right. Even as like one of the things I've seen over time is so it's been about two weeks, well, mid, mid July that we started like this really heavy, like, You know, what could you have asked to progress the conversation, even with just like general objection handling, things like that to really get their mind listening.

So they have an exercise that they're doing where it's self evaluation, listening to gong calls. We have the [00:08:00] role plays that we're doing to practice some of that. One of the, and where I say, like, it's really the practice piece of it is I have ladies on my, and agents on my team that. They can self coach themselves to the same capacity that I self coach them or that I coach them like they will go in and they are leaving the same feedback that I would leave, which, so it's not an understanding.

It's not a, it's a practice. It's so ingrained in us that it's hard. Live with a person with a prospect on the phone to actually implement the things that you know, you should be implementing because it's so it's been so ingrained. So that's the only that's the only thing that I found that is working like through that self coaching and then the practical application as a team and working through that, that we started to see those shifts in the calls that we're having.

Celeste: And. I know you shared with me prior about your team's [00:09:00] successes and the wins that they've had. For other sales leaders, as we kind of wrap up this mini session, what would you say to them if they're not taking the time to listen to calls, to actively coach on behaviors and changing behaviors, and to take the time to pour into their team?

What would you say to them to like spark that for them to turn around?

Yeah, that was

yeah.

Awesome. Well, I've appreciated you sharing what you're working on with your team. I think it's genius and the other one from it hit up Maggie all of her content on LinkedIn She will continue to share her dream as a leader and thank you so much for being with us