The ABC’s of Developing Your Sales Team - Brian Caulfield - Coach2Scale - Episode # 002

Today’s guest is an ardent supporter of investing in their team to help them master their craft and maximize results. He’s spent his entire career in the technology and B2B SaaS arena leading through numerous GTM roles. Brian Caulfield is the Chief Operating Officer at TeamSnap. Brian joins Host Matt Benelli to discuss how to avoid the debilitating impacts of attrition, how to identify the three types of employees on your team, and why having a leadership group that believes in coaching is so important.
Takeaways: Attrition is one of the biggest hurdles for any team in trying to reach its goal or attain an outcome. Without having the right people in the right seats, teams will struggle to be successful. When constructing and managing a team, employees can be broken into three subsets: A Players, B Players, and C Players. Each type of employee needs different types of coaching and support in order to maximize both their growth and the company’s. A Players, also referred to in sales as “Eagles”, consistently produce great results but are hard to find. C Players are all talk and no action. They find excuses for every missed outcome. Leaders should weed C Players out of their teams.  B Players get the best benefit from coaching and can become “the closest thing to an A Player through effective coaching.” B Players likely make up the majority of your team so it’s worth investing in their development. The Sandler Sales methodology is a very effective coaching tool for developing B Players because it teaches them the science and technique components of selling and how to improve their sales approach by practicing those techniques. Coaching requires both top-down and bottom-up buy-in from an organization. To implement effective coaching methods, the leadership team needs to believe in coaching and want to make investments in developing their team. In order for that training to take hold and really stick with your employees, they must have a desire to be coached.  When finding a new job as a sales leader, make sure to interview the company about their commitment to coaching as much as they interview you. Find out if they’re willing to pay for the proper trainers, managers, and software tools that you know are needed. Sales managers should avoid focusing too much and getting too involved with certain deals. As tough as it might be to hear, sales reps need room to fail and lose a few deals so they can learn valuable lessons from those failures. Encourage your team to share things that they’ve learned from failures, that way every other rep doesn’t have to learn that same lesson the hard way.
Quote of the Show:“The biggest hurdle to hitting objectives, whether it's a releasing product or it's hitting a quota, is attrition. If you don't have butts in seats, it's really hard to win.” - Brian Caulfield
Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briancaulfieldintralinks/  TeamSnap Website: https://www.teamsnap.com/ 
Shoutouts: Richard Farlow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-f-b68a7a41/  Leif O'Leary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leifoleary/ 
Ways to Tune In: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yb1wPzUxyrfR0Dx35ym1A  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-build-a-coaching-culture/id1699901434  Google Podcasts: