You will coach a rep or practice partner on one behaviour and check the change two weeks later.
Most coaching stops at the session. The manager gives good feedback, the rep agrees, and both go back to work. A month later, neither of them can say whether anything changed, and the next session starts from scratch with a new point. Coaching that is never checked feels like advice, and advice is easy to forget.
This exercise completes the loop. You will run a coaching session, agree one behaviour, check the next three calls, and write down what changed. We will follow Wei Ming and Raj through it.
Use the script you wrote in lesson 6.2, Call reviews that reps look forward to. If you do not manage a team yet, run it with a practice partner, such as a colleague or a friend in sales, on one of their recorded calls. Check that everyone on the recording was told it was being recorded, and handle the file as your company's policy and the PDPA require.
Before the session, look at your note from lesson 6.1, Coach one behaviour at a time. It holds the behaviour you think matters most. Then let the rep pick the call and the moment, as lesson 6.2 described, and follow the four parts: goal, reality, options, way forward.
Wei Ming's session with Raj followed the script closely. Raj picked a call with a logistics firm where the buyer had gone quiet after the price. Listening back, Raj noticed for himself that he had never asked what the buyer's current payroll problems cost. That linked straight to the behaviour in Wei Ming's note.
The way forward part of GROW should end with a single, specific behaviour the rep will try on their next three calls. Three is enough to see whether the behaviour shows up and few enough that it happens within a week or two for most reps.
Make the behaviour something you can count. "Ask better questions" cannot be checked. "When the buyer names a problem, ask at least one follow-up about its cost or frequency before moving on" can, because you can listen to a call and count how many times the buyer named a problem and how many of those got a follow-up.
Before the session ends, agree how you will check. There are two options. You can listen to the three calls yourself, if they are recorded. Or the rep can send a short self-report after each call: how many problems the buyer mentioned, and for how many they asked a follow-up, with an example of what they asked.
Wei Ming and Raj agreed that Raj would record the next three first meetings, with the buyers' agreement, and Wei Ming would listen to them within a week.
To know whether something changed, you need to know where it started. Before the next three calls happen, go back to two or three of the rep's recent calls and count the behaviour.
Wei Ming listened to three of Raj's calls from the previous fortnight. Across the three, buyers named seven problems in total. Raj asked a follow-up about cost or frequency on one of them. That is the baseline: one in seven.
If you are working from self-reports, ask the rep to estimate the baseline from memory, and note that it is an estimate.
After the three calls, listen to them or read the self-reports, and count the same thing in the same way.
In Raj's next three first meetings, buyers named eight problems. Raj asked a follow-up about cost or frequency on five of them. On one call, with a bakery chain, the buyer answered that fixing payroll errors took her assistant "most of two days a month", which gave Raj a number to come back to when he presented the price.
Look beyond the count, too. Did the behaviour sound natural or forced? Did it change anything about the rest of the call? On two of Raj's calls, the follow-up question led to a second meeting being agreed, though with only three calls you cannot say the question caused it.
Write a short before-and-after note. Keep it factual: the behaviour, the baseline, the result, an example, and what you will coach next.
Wei Ming's note read: "Raj. Behaviour: follow-up question on cost or frequency when buyer names a problem. Before: 1 of 7 problems in three calls. After: 5 of 8 in three calls. Best example: the two days a month answer from the bakery chain. Still missing on problems mentioned late in the call. Next: keep this going for two more weeks, then move to asking for a specific next step, using the numbers he now gets."
Share the note with the rep. Seeing one of seven become five of eight, in writing, shows them the coaching worked and that the effort was noticed.
Decide what comes next. If the behaviour has stuck, move to a new one, often the next problem on your original list. If it has partly stuck, as Raj's had, give it a little longer before adding something new. If nothing changed, go back to the session and find out why: was the behaviour unclear, uncomfortable, or simply forgotten in the middle of a busy week?
You should finish with a coaching record: the call you reviewed, the behaviour you chose and why, your GROW session notes, the baseline count, the count from the next three calls, and the before-and-after note. That is the module 6 capstone, and it also feeds the coaching record in the final project.
The activity below asks you to run the full cycle. Book the session and the check date at the same time, so the follow-up is in both calendars before the coaching starts.
Run a coaching session, agree one behaviour, review the next three calls and write a short before-and-after note.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).