Hi, this is Joelle and I am one of the sales and leadership coaches with Emerge Sales Training. We have free training available for you to make closing sales an enjoyable process for you and your customers, or to make recruiting an enjoyable process for you and your potential business builder. Sign up at emergesalestraining.com/freetraining
Hi everyone and happy Saturday. I want to ask you: have you ever been in a situation where one of your team members has decided to take a break from building their business and you are left wondering who is going to maintain that team and those customers? Have you ever been in a situation where your team is thriving and you have no more time to train and develop new people? These are some of the questions from network marketers that I have heard recently and that is why it’s important to talk about some solutions. If this sounds familiar, keep reading!!!
Today we are going to talk about how to coach all the people without losing your mind by understanding some fundamental steps in designing group coaching and after reading this you will be able to use these principles to develop and execute group coaching programs to better support your team.
After hearing some of the struggles out there, it got me thinking of what you would need to know to be confident in implementing group coaching as an option in your business so I picked up the book called Effective Group Coaching by Jennifer Britton. I thought this book would be useful in understanding where and how to start and to give some clear steps to follow so that you can set up a group coaching option in your business, should the need arise. So let’s jump in……
Step 1: Identify the need or skill gap
- So here you would think about challenges you see for multiple people on your team, or if there is a need to train multiple people at once (like in the examples I mentioned at the beginning of this post).
Step 2: Pick a topic
- This could be all the steps necessary to launch a new person or an area that is challenging for people on your team
Step 3: Main points of the topic/skill you want to develop
- When designing group coaching, less is more. Here at Emerge we teach to keep things simple so this area is no different. In the book, Jennifer talks about the 80/20 rule. Think about all the content for this topic that you would want to cover and then…..remove 20% of it. Keeping the 80% will ensure that you keep the most important concepts and allow for engagement and practice during the session. The tendency can be that we want to cover too much at once.
- Break up the topic into smaller pieces over multiple sessions if you need to. I’m going to give tips on how to get people to keep coming in just a minute.
Step 4: Activities and coaching questions
- What are you going to practice during the call?
- “Coaching really happens between sessions” is the common adage described in the book. What does this mean? We want to create action that will reinforce the topic we just coached on. What activities does your team need to do?
Step 5: Duration
- As I mentioned earlier, this means not only the length of each particular call or session but how long it will take to cover the topic so how many weeks, months, etc. In relating this to the sales process, what builds value for a customer or team member to show up to something? Knowing what is going to be covered (your topic) and time frame. So, let people know the start date, end date and how long each session will be. If it is going to be an ongoing thing, let the people know that too.
Step 6: Materials needed (if any)
- This includes copies of verbiage or outlines you need to practice and develop skills.
You can use this process to help you design a group option for coaching should you discover a need in your business for it. Some of you might be thinking……Am I qualified to do this? Can I even do this? The answer is YES! Ask yourself: What similarities are there between coaching people individually and group coaching? Start with what is the same as a foundation. What core skills do you have? Start with what you know and build from there!
Thank you so much for reading our post today. To sign up for one of our free trainings on closing or recruiting, go to emergesalestraining.com/freetraining.