This article comes from Jeff Jaworski’s talk, ‘Leveraging sales coaching to drive higher performing teams’, at our 2023 Chicago Sales Enablement Summit, check out his full presentation here. 

Have you ever left a sales meeting feeling like you wasted an hour of your life you’ll never get back? 

Believe me, after 20+ years in the game I’ve seen some fairly uninspiring presentations, but I’ve realized rather than complain, why not help fix the problem?

As a sales veteran who’s worn every hat from customer, to sales rep, to sales leader, one of my proudest achievements was building Google's Global Sales Coaching Program during my time as Global Director of Enablement. 

When I first transitioned into enablement, I openly admitted I had zero experience. However, what I did have was firsthand knowledge of customers' frustrations and sellers' challenges, which drove my vision to help better our sales teams.

So in this article, I'll take you through the five key mindset shifts over five years that made Google's sales coaching program so successful and continue to drive meaningful business impact through transforming seller behaviors. 

My aim is to inspire you to make similar shifts in your sales enablement strategies, so here’s the inside scoop on what really moves the needle …

The spark: An opinion and an email

It all started with an opinion - "We need to go and actually pull back the curtain and go help the sales teams." 

My thinking was still conceptual during my first month of getting acclimated on the enablement side until our VP forwarded me an email thread about a potential project embedding sales coaches within sectors.

That project was my opportunity to make a real change. At the time, we had just launched an updated sales methodology called the Google Way of Selling to unify how we show up. 

However, our specialist resources remained focused on products and platforms rather than selling skills. The bottom line, if coaching didn't solve real problems, it wouldn't sustain.

With over 50 million bad B2B meetings costing US companies $283 billion annually, the opportunity to help was huge. 

We had aligned leadership, engaged sellers, and a clear coaching purpose - to make meetings more effective. Now we needed an execution plan.


Shift 1: Address the how, not just the what

Like most sales teams, we were great at pipeline targets and product feature knowledge, but in the quest to tick boxes, we'd lost sight of the customer. 

Sellers were unprepared, used generic slide decks, and lacked facilitation skills for discovery conversations.

So the first task was getting laser-focused on the how - the repeatable behaviors and soft skills that would set up more meaningful interactions.

We defined five simple skills all sellers should practice and apply to drive effective meetings - purpose and benefit framing up front, structured discovery questions, value messaging, objection handling techniques, and impactful closes.

The proof that this addressed a real gap came fast. In my first-ever coaching session shadowing a deal, the seller's default approach was leading with an agenda without room for two-way dialogue. 

When I asked him to flip the script and role play starting from the customer's perspective first, it was eye-opening. 

It was validating that even small mindset and skill tweaks created breakthroughs both sellers and customers would feel.