You work hard to create relationship with someone in a decision team and convert them into believers in both the business impact opportunity and your company / solution. But it’s not good enough to just get your points across to them. They have to be able to get your points across to others. And they may be up against other team members advocating for someone else.
Coaching an advocate to be effective within their team situation is like teaching a sales rep how to sell.
If you do this effectively your advocate will come back to you to report results. How they did? Where they struggled? Who else was advocating in the room? Make sure you continue on with the coaching! Strategize what may happen next and how they can “win!”
Finding Winners offers options to help you get great at advocate coaching. It is a Top Gun skill for sure, and the only way to become great at it, is to practice it in real situations (dogfight). Given the danger of alienating a contact when you try this, it is very worthwhile to practice it in real, but non business risk situations. And this skill is very useful for the customer success team to get good at as well – they often are in situations where their advocate needs to engage effectively internally to help extricate yourself from a customer eruption.
The “Top Gun” Finding Winners experience is unique and incredibly effective. In customer simulation sessions (role play), we play your client scenarios. It’s real. It’s intense. The feedback is tough, but fair. The sessions are recorded so folks can go back and see if feedback was on target and these videos become invaluable on boarding tools for new folks coming into the team.
About the Author: Scott Martiny is the former CEO of two companies, one a startup. He has also held positions that involved leading, sales, support, project management, product management and development teams. His current company Finding Winners is a consulting company which executes role play based team development programs.