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#86: Listen as Duane Dufault, SaaS expert and sales consultant, discusses sales coaching, good sales leadership, and how to improve coaching sessions for maximum effectiveness.
Explore the human side of sales and business with host Tyler Lindley. Leaders in their field share a dose of inspiration through stories about life and business. Sales professionals provide tactical tips you can put into practice today. It all comes together to help you chart your path forward.
Achieve your goals on your terms — get inspired by stories from extraordinary people, elevate your performance with the latest outbound tactics, and find the lift you need to take your career to the next level.
The Sales Lift Podcast
Episode #86
Turning Sales Managers into Coaches & Leaders w/ Duane Dufault
Hosted by: Tyler Lindley
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[00:00:00] Tyler Lindley: Hey, Sales Lift Nation , it's your host. Tyler Lindley. Today, I have Duane Dufault on the podcast. Hey Duane, how's it going? Going really good, Tyler. Thanks for having, yeah, thanks for coming on Duane. Normally I introduce the guest, but I want to kick it back over to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
[00:00:19] Duane Dufault: Yeah, I can sand why it's a little challenging. I do a lot of different stuff. I spent the last decade in sales and half that decade, specifically in SaaS and helped couple companies grow. And so I took that and turned into a little bit of a consultancy working with SAS founders and sales managers. I wear a lot of hats.
I do a lot of fractional executive work, fractional CRO fractional VP. And basically what that means is I work directly with the SAS founder or one of their, to help scale revenue strategies at the simplest form is what we focused on.
[00:00:47] Tyler Lindley: Perfect. In today's topic. We're gonna talk about sales coaching, which I know is a topic near and dear to both of our hearts.
What are some of the gaps that you're seeing in the market when it comes to sales coaching, where are companies falling short in their sales coaching efforts doing? It's
[00:01:03] Duane Dufault: a great question. And it's such a broad question too, and narrowing it down to two specific things. One, we still run into the stereotypical or cliche way to promote into sales leadership by.
Picking top sales reps. That's not a bad idea because then they can show people. They have that credibility with the team, all that stuff is there, but then nothing really goes past the first three or four weeks of them being in that role. You have the rah, the excitement, the, Hey, this person's gonna crush it.
And after three or four weeks, maybe months, There's no direct coaching from their boss on how to continue being a better manager, giving them the tools necessary for them to actually have impact. And so what I've seen a lot of times in this specific area is they'll have some results on the team in the first, maybe two months, depending on the sales cycle of the product.
But then after the first full quarter and into the set one, everything just falls flat. They still have a good vibe on the team. The culture is still there. But the numbers aren't moving. It's really interesting to see because they were never really taught even in their sales producers role, how to successfully manage the growth process you can manage and lead a team and be exciting and help people be excited about their job, but where they end up not getting education, which is the second.
Gap that I see is how to really unpack what's going on in the sales team to tactically coach, either the team as a whole, or break down an individual. And so the other area that second part is understanding how to look at data that's in the CRM marketing tech to effectively. See where the gaps are understanding how to approach a situation, but then successfully running a one-on-one call or a coaching call.
The biggest gap that I see in sales coaching is we have a huge part of our sales leader market or whatever you wanna call it. That's between team lead and VP of this weird, vague, I'm a sales manager land of all the different titles and all the different responsibilities. There's no one there leading the charge to help these managers understand all the different aspects of being a leader, but then also effectively managing the growth process for the team.
[00:03:18] Tyler Lindley: Yep. I totally agree to bring up your first point there that top rep, why are they usually the default choice? Just to be the manager, just being the top rep and knowing that you can. Sell as an individual contributor mm-hmm does a lot of those skills translate to the management role or do you see there's huge gaps there just in terms of choosing that one or two people on your team, a couple
[00:03:37] Duane Dufault: questions in there I'll tackle the first 1, 1, 1 of the reasons why a lot of sales managers need your response to promoting the top rep is because they can do it.
They can teach other people to do it. And even in sales, you've got challenger mindset and you do commercial teaching and all that stuff. That's still different than. An ongoing relationship with your team and holding 'em accountable. It's a completely different skillset than being able to put in the activity close and really fine tune your sales process to being okay with resting your commission, check on someone else's efforts.
Yep. It's a complete different mindset. It's like when you adopt a kid, like this is really cool. Well, I'm really excited about it, but then this seven year old shows up at your house and you're, I don't know how to get into tighter shoes. Yep. And so it's a completely different mindset I've seen. Top reps make that transition, but it's usually because they have an amazing support system in place to help teach them those
[00:04:28] Tyler Lindley: other things, which a lot of companies don't have that amazing support system in place.
And that's the gap. And it sounds like you're looking to solve is that there's just not a lot of resources that. Teach the manager, how to manage that, teach the manager, how to coach. They're just probably most times winging it, which winging it probably can look okay. Sometimes. And probably horrible.
Sometimes I imagine ,
[00:04:49] Duane Dufault: it's the winging it thing is interesting because I have one off meetings with new sales managers, sales directors, and VPs a few times a week. And I'll ask, 'em a question like, Hey, what's your process to run to a one on one. And it's usually sputtering fragmented sentences that ends with me listen to calls or they don't know.
Just the foundation of what makes a good coaching call. Cause for me, I know that a one-on-one and a coaching call are vastly different and most sales managers try to jam everything into one call because they wanna respect the sales rep's time. And I totally get that, but they're different. And so it's like, I'm calling it a second pandemic, but.
That feels awkward. What I'm trying to solve for I'm trying to really help is helping the two sides of sales management. You have the management, which is tactical stuff. Yep. Understanding where to look, how to unpack, look at the results to work backwards, into understanding how to focus on leading indicators in their process.
And then the other side of it is just the leadership side. Is understanding how to connect with the person behind the position and working with who they are on the inside, and truly working through a level of empathy that you have because you are once there. And that's one of the reasons why I think previously successful sales reps can become a truly great sales manager, because if they can tap into their experience and their emotions, when they were going through that phase and channel that through a leadership strategy, then they have so much more impact because.
They can speak from a position of experience. A lot of times when conferences were a thing and you would see two speakers on stage, one of them seemed to be okay. And the other one was amazing, but even the message that they were presenting wasn't that impactful. But you can tell that they were speaking from a position of experience, that it was flowing out of their soul and express, seeing the pain and the experience that they had being in their role.
When the other person was just a paid speaker who decided on a topic that got really good from Toastmasters. And so when you have a awesome sales rep that is coming to their own being a sales manager or a sales leader, most of the time, they lack some level of real leadership experience. The other's leading by example.
That's totally fine, but it's understanding what it takes the levers to pull what to pay attention to as a leader of people that a lot of reps don't get exposure to either they don't have a good leader that they're following. Yep. Or they just never thought of, I should read leadership books to get better at my job.
There's
[00:07:03] Tyler Lindley: a big disconnect there. Exactly. And I think that experience, like you said, is important, cuz I think it can build trust and empathy. Mm-hmm within the team you've been in the trenches. You're not just saying this. Just say it you've actually been there. You've done it. Hey, I sold this. I was the top rep.
I was on president. Club. I think it builds that level of trust, but if you don't have all those other leadership soft skills to go along with it, they might just end up thinking you're an asshole, or might just think whether you're micromanaged or, Hey, let me just show you how this is done. Right. Let me just tick over this call.
I love it. When the manager's riding along on the call, next thing you know, they're running the call, which at the end of the day, that is. Not really managing or leading. That's just taking over you trying to be the top individual contributor. And now the top manager, who's still acting like the top ICS.
it's really
[00:07:46] Duane Dufault: interesting that you bring that specific topic up because one of the conversations I have is. Where to pull their future sales manager and nine times outta 10, they go and ask about some big logo. Mm. And I'm like, if it's a couple, one of the traditional sales training methodologies is that you hire a whole bunch of people and then you have a sales manager or a sales league go in and shadow them and do the ridealongs.
But what ends up happening is that sales team lead ends up doing all the closing. What you do is that old adage of you teach man to fish type of thing. They hand the fishing pole and cast. Within the sales manager ends up, reeling it in you teach sales reps to be dependent on that process. They come from this big logo and they're like, oh, this company is listed on the New York stock exchange.
They're a really great company and they bring this person in and then they hand them the keys and they just nose dive the entire time. Cuz they don't have the ability to think on their feet. They don't have the resources or experiences to really do that. Effectively. You have a team full of people that they don't understand that the sales process.
Is like a framework instead of benchmark criteria. Yep. And so it's interesting to see that when I'm hiring sales managers, or if I need a hybrid sales rep to go into a startup, I almost never pull from a big logo. In fact, I've used that as a filter out because I know from experience that they're so tactically specialized in their role, and you've worked at a company where that's really specific, where if they're like, Hey.
We're selling in Northern California to the mid-market about this specific module. If the prospect asks about something else that puts in a different category, they're like, oh, I can't touch that. Not my job.
[00:09:13] Tyler Lindley: Hold on. Let me go talk to these eight other people they can get, they can help out. you're saying for smaller teams, they need to have the ability to almost think on their feet more.
If they're coming from a larger organization, they maybe have been so specialized and they're in their lane. That they don't have that ability to see the forest for the trees. So for smaller teams, you look at different skill sets. Yeah. That have more of that broader perspective. It sounds you've gotta
[00:09:36] Duane Dufault: be a deep generalist in today's landscape of startups, whether you're an SDR, an account executive, a sales manager, you have to be a deep generalist.
Specializing is great for scale. Yep. Because once you get a certain point as an, in an organization, the deep generalist becomes a negative. Unless they're in sales manager, because then you have people that get distracted by certain things. And if you need to scale, you have to have people that are specialized, but early stage companies, they bring in these big local sales reps.
Oh, they're gonna be a great sales manager one day. And if they completely missed the fact that they're not tracking this data point in CRM, that could be a huge indicator for more opportunities. It's because they were never exposed to that process in their previous two roles, cuz they didn't need to.
They had a sales op guy that would
[00:10:18] Tyler Lindley: run that report, a sales engineer, they had marketing support. They had everything they needed. I like the term deep generalist. That's not what I've heard before, but I like that perspective. I think that not just for startups, but I think in a lot of sales organizations, unless you're at a massive massive company, I think that deep generalist type background or mindset or persona, I think that becoming what's needed in every role, regardless of whether you're an SDR, you're an AE or sales manager.
You can't just be specialized in one thing, you gotta know enough about everything in order to be successful these days,
[00:10:47] Duane Dufault: especially as an SDR, you have to be a deep generalist in your customer's life. Mm. The prospect that you're going after, right? you have to understand what their potential pain points are.
And instead of acting on assumptions, you use them as the areas of questions. And so if you're so. Focused and narrow. I don't wanna say narrowminded cuz it's negative, but if you're so focused on what you're good at, you miss all opportunities. All the time. I was working with a recruiting agency, not a SaaS company, but it was a recruiting agency and they wanted to turn their sales process into a SaaS flow on how they manage these existing customer base.
And when I was unpacking their prospecting and their discovery process, they were only focused on whatever role. That they got from their customer. That's all they were focusing on. I'm like, have you gone to their career page and asked 'em about these other roles that they're hiring for? No. I'm like, if you want to increase your average sale to take the blinders off for a second, just ask a couple simple questions.
And it was like the second month I've been doing that. They're like, we need to hire a salesperson because we have too much. I'm like, it's these simple hacks. If you're a deep generalist in your customer's world, then you know which rocks to turn over, you know, which corners look around. And instead of assuming that those are there, you ask questions about it and use it as a guide.
The deep generalist is also something that I really like in the channel partner world, which can be different topic, but it's becoming a much more desired trait in well rounded sales people to be a deep generalist, because you need to be agile. You need to be able to pivot and you need to be able to act on your feet while on the call, instead of saying, oh, let me grab my sales engineer.
Right. Let me go grab, we'll
[00:12:16] Tyler Lindley: get back to you in 48 hours. Yeah. You just need to do it within the convers. I totally agree. And if you compare that with curiosity, with empathy, with good questions, which at the end of the day in sales, that's all we really do is ask good questions. If you learn how to ask good questions and shut up, you can be great at sales.
I think a lot of sales reps have a tendency to just keep on talking, keep on pitching, right? Keep on. Oh yeah. More, more, more, more, more where they take all the air out of the conversation and they don't ever actually uncover those rocks. If they would just take a breath and ask a good question and listen, maybe they could learn something.
[00:12:45] Duane Dufault: One of the best things I like seeing in a call recording AI tools get gone or refract or something of that nature is that talk ratio. Mm it's really interesting to see how underperforming reps talk way too much in the beginning, but then don't talk that much in the end and the successful ones. It's almost flipped.
They talk way less. In the beginning, but then they end up talking a lot more at the end because they're gathering information and what's interesting is the stereotype sales hire. I get it all the time when I'm talking to people. Oh, you should be in sales. It's because my demeanor and I'm like, I
[00:13:18] Tyler Lindley: am imagine that.
[00:13:20] Duane Dufault: Yeah. It's interesting because. I see it often where people see a certain personality type. They're like, oh, you should be in sales. People love talking to it's like, let's, hold on. I know some introverts that are amazing salespeople that are so comfortable with silence on the call. You can feel it. And I had to learn that because as a.
Sales coach. You have to be well run. You have to be a deep generalist and term enable to coach your team effectively because one, one of the pitfalls I've seen with hiring top sales reps is they try to just recreate themselves. Yep. And then two, they never had the experience or know how to work with different personality types.
And one of the best personality types I've seen has been an introvert that doesn't talk that much. I had to learn how to coach that person. Cause I'm like, I do not understand that way of thinking it's harder, but I'll tell you what, that's the personality type. That wins probably three or four times more in the enterprise sales situation.
Mm-hmm yeah, because they can slow down. They can think through the questions they pause. Whereas when you have high energy SDR stream, roll the conversation when they missed all these opportunities with this potential a million dollar ACV contract, it's being able to understand your sales rep. Your team, how to utilize their strengths in the different areas and place 'em accordingly.
It really, really empower and focus on their strengths rather than this person isn't like me in this area. So they're not gonna do good. It's in sales leadership. It's all about making the conversation, not about yourself, removing your ego, remove the lens and filter you had about the stuff that you did, and really, really, really focus on the, of the individuals on the team and placing them like
[00:14:50] Tyler Lindley: you would on the chest tape.
Exactly. If you have a team of five, you're gonna have five, very different personalities, very different styles, very different approaches to their sales process. How do you manage those? That becomes almost the most important part of your job. One thing I want to dig into a little bit deeper, Dwayne, earlier, you talked about the difference in sales coaching between sales management, between a one-on-one and a coaching call.
And it like you see this as an area where. A lot of managers sometimes just combine the two or there's not really a clear distinction. Where do you see folks not really doing one-on-one and coaching calls, all that? Well, one,
[00:15:24] Duane Dufault: they think they're the same one-on-ones and coaching calls. Even a lot of sales training courses.
They think of them as the same, but a one-on-one is for the sales rep. It's 30 to 45 minutes of you. Don't bring an agenda. It's for them. It's their opportunity to ask you questions about the organization. If they want to talk about career development, this is their time where they're not being coached.
This is their time to be heard for them to express things that are going on. And a lot of times. You learn so much more about the team. You have the privilege to lead from those meetings than you do on tactical coaching calls. Those meetings are what builds, trust and courage in your team, rather than just showing them how to dial a phone more.
And what that does is it gives you the longer leash or the room to who then go in really deep with the tactical stuff, because they know you give a shit mm-hmm . If you don't. Structure times to show them you care, then they don't believe that you care when you're trying to jam it in between all these little reports and such.
And so you one in sales and especially in sales leadership, you really have to be intentional in tactical on these types of things because sales sucks. It's a hard job. It's one of the hardest jobs to get. And. If you think about how you felt in roles like that, you feel alone, especially in the remote world, you feel unheard.
You don't know what certain anxieties mean. And a lot of young sales reps, whether young in their career doesn't have to be young in age. Don't understand how to use the emotions and feelings that come up when they get hung up on, when they see their colleague, who's newer than they are start crushing it and they feel stagnant.
Yeah. And so those one-on-one calls are to help. With those things it's to help with the empathy side and really allow that rep a platform to express themselves in a way they usually don't get to. Yeah. You create a connection and a level of trust with your rep that you wouldn't get any other
[00:17:18] Tyler Lindley: time. And it sounds like just to touch on that one on ones for managers, you're there to listen.
Mm-hmm , you're there to. Listen and figure out what's going on in their world. What's important. Then what questions do they have? What are they thinking about? And then how can I help them just from a personal standpoint, from a professional standpoint, but it is mainly just a listening exercise for the manager.
I
[00:17:40] Duane Dufault: think the only thing I bring as an agenda item for that yep. Two things. I always like to check in to see how they're doing in their role in their career. Yep. How they feel about the company. Have they put any thought towards the next six months? And especially if they're not to that level of trust yet, then I'll bring it.
Career progression, but then the other thing I like to focus on is I'll help them schedule their next PTL. Mm. One of the things I like to do is I like to set goals and competitions around vacations. Mm. Or we put all these goals and competitions around revenue numbers. When's your next vacation? Are you going?
Is it exciting? Yep. Doesn't mean just a Friday off. Cause I want that to be okay with people that walk away for a couple weeks. The one-on-one stuff is interesting and it it's really, it's something that needs to be more intentional on every sales team, whether it's a team of one or a team of 100, that's gotta be a process that people bring it.
[00:18:23] Tyler Lindley: So what are then the key differences between that one on one, which is a, mainly a listening exercise. It's just, you're learning about them. What's going on in their world. How can you help them versus a coaching call? What are the key differences between the
[00:18:35] Duane Dufault: two? A coaching call is tactics. This is where you get into the data, but it's not you just spewing information at 'em as a sales manager.
One when coaching calls just that I like to run is the rep. Knows what's gonna happen on those calls leading up to it. Yep. They know, I set the standard that they bring information, they bring their own resources. I'll bring mine. What I do on sales teams is I put in an SLA, so a service level agreement for their role, for an SDR, for an account executive for channel rep.
Yep. That has certain requirements to be successful in that role. And so part of that is that you bring at least five calls to our coaching call that we will review together and I'll do the same thing. Oftentimes end up being the same call because we're awesome. And. So, what we do is we unpack what their numbers have been called, set ratios, talk times, whatever, but then we'll go through specific things in those calls to really understand.
But what I do is much like a good discovery call is I'll ask 'em. Questions' like, how's your week been going? Walk me through why your call count was lower this week, but your opportunities were higher. What have you different? Because. If you come in with the assumptions, from your perspective on what your rep is doing, they're not gonna feel hurt.
They're gonna feel like they're just being talked to. And so there's been so many times where I come into these coaching calls and I come in with a perception. I come in with my thoughts and I'll ask thinking, I'm gonna get a specific answer about this opportunity they were working. So I'll ask the question, Hey, why in the call this way, walk me through how we got to that point.
Cause that that's a really good point because on the previous call that wasn't recorded. Because it was an inbound call from a state that doesn't allow it or whatever. He's like, we talked about this, this and this. And so the reason why I ended the call and I'm like, oh, that just changed my perception.
And you did that right. Instead of me having to correct you where a lot of times sales managers won't take that approach. And they're like, Hey, I saw you did this. And so you need to work on one, two and three things.
[00:20:18] Tyler Lindley: Yeah. This was wrong. Here's the five things you did wrong in this call now go fix them.
Yeah. Oh gosh. Furthermore, I hate it. When managers give them five things. One thing that I've tried to do, I coach a lot of SDR. So folks newer in their sales career, I try to have one thing. That I'm coaching 'em on at a time, I'll try to tell them three to five things that I really liked about what they did.
And then instead of choosing three to five things, I didn't like I choose one. What is the one thing that they could have done better so that if they try to focus on one thing, it's just that one thing it's not three to five. Cause then they won't fix anything. It's just one, one at a time. It might be three to five over time.
But what one thing are they gonna work on over the next week or so it's
[00:20:55] Duane Dufault: impressive to see how true the cliche saying of you seek their four year old. Fine. If you go into a rep's call looking for problems, you're not gonna see any of the good shit. And when you come to that call, all you're gonna be is spewing negativity to your team, and they're gonna leave defeated, but I do the same thing.
I did one or. Specifically to work on whether it's they need to continue doing something great. Yep. Or they need to adjust it to where this thing gets focused on. Because in sales management, we really, really want to do a good job and we bring ourselves to that call and we are like, oh, I would've done it this way.
And that's usually not gonna work for them cuz they're not you. But it's like you said, the one or two specific things, but the, one of the things that I do you as well is I give them a week or so to implement that feedback. Yep. A lot of sales managers. They do a new topic every week, every week, it's something, or they'll go through a book club, for example.
And I love doing book clubs with teams and they'll do a new chapter every week. Where's the implementation period. How can they apply
[00:21:50] Tyler Lindley: that? what are you talking about implementation, period. We gotta get through the book. Yeah, we gotta get
[00:21:54] Duane Dufault: through this. And so with the tactical sales coaching calls, they'll have all these things.
It could be the best coaching call on the planet, but they give them six things to work on. And then it's new
[00:22:03] Tyler Lindley: shit the next week. And then it's six more things seven days from then. And then what are they implementing then? Probably nothing because what do they have time to implement? Yes. How are they reviewing it?
What's the feedback loop. What's the feedback mechanism for, Hey, we decided we were gonna work on this one or two things. Now let's hear how it's changed. Let's hear how your intro changed or your closing changed or whatever we're working on. How did that change? There's gotta be that feedback loop or else we're just talking at them and we're not working.
[00:22:28] Duane Dufault: Them and thinking about it as a sales call, when you're ending a demo or a discovery call, and in your process, you have a good part for expectations. When should I follow up with you? How do you want this information delivered? Whatever, do the same thing with your team, where at the last five minutes you leave room to basically say the focus of the next week is gonna be X, Y, and Z.
What I'm gonna do as your sales managers, I'm gonna pick a couple of calls or over the next five days, and I'm just gonna slack you. Yep. Hey, saw that you did a really great job here. Oh, Hey, have you been able to implement this? It's the follow through on the coaching that. I would say 99% of sales managers completely miss, because they don't know to look for it.
And you have to have that follow through on the coaching. Let's pick one or two specific things let's give 'em a week or so to implement that you, as the manager bring emphasis to that and be tactical and do it for them. Remember as a leader, you're here to serve and remove a roadblock. Mm-hmm not to just promote how, who you think you are with
[00:23:19] Tyler Lindley: that title.
love it. Dwayne. We could go on for hours. Where can my listeners find you online? If they wanna learn more about you and what you do? Honestly,
[00:23:27] Duane Dufault: I do a lot on LinkedIn, much like a lot of people in this space, but you can go to my website, win default.com. I've got a three playbook, the metric manager, and it really talks about the sales activity, pipeline and opportunity pipeline.
But then I'm jumping on this whole TikTok bandwagon. It's really interesting. but the organic reach is crazy. I post videos on there every other day. But the easiest part is just go to LinkedIn or go my website. Those are
[00:23:50] Tyler Lindley: probably the easiest ones. Nice, perfect. I'm on TikTok as well. So we'll hashtag sales talk.
There you go. Let's hop on there. We'll do some collab, some duet. The thing I love about TikTok is just how easy it is to create to creator's dream. Definitely find Dwayne's website, connect with him on LinkedIn, and then also on TikTok. Dwayne, love the conversation. We'll have you back on a new part too.
It and point soon. Definitely. All right, thanks.
Thank you so much for listening to today's show, you can find all the links discussed and the show notes@thesaleslift.com. That's the th E sales S a L E S. Lift L I F t.com have questions for me. Email me at Tyler, the sales lift.com. We look forward to seeing you back here next week, and we hope today's show brings you the sales lift.
Your business needs. Remember ideas plus action equals results. You've got new ideas. Now it's time to take action and the results will follow. See you next
[00:24:52] Duane Dufault: time.