Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Sales Leadership
The best sales leaders are great coaches. If you’ve made the jump from sales rep to sales manager, you know that effective coaching is a learned skill. If you’ve seen the latest season of Netflix’s Last Chance U: Basketball, you know that Coach John Mosley Junior, Men’s Basketball coach at East Los Angeles College, thrives on coaching his players to success. I had the chance to interview him for a two-part series on The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast.
What struck me most about Coach Mosley is his authenticity and his approach to servant leadership. He is there for his players, for his team. He has an unbelievable ability to meet people where they are and coaches no one the same. Through this process, he helps people find the will to achieve greatness.
Nobody fails on his watch. He has embraced the accountability and needed responsibility to make his team successful. The series and his interview provide some great takeaways for sales leaders. I encourage you to watch the series and listen to his approach.
Look at your team. How can you reach your people wherever they're at? Have you earned your team's trust? Based on what? Do you know the story behind your own people’s motivation? When you're upset with somebody, when somebody is driving you nuts, if somebody slid from a level four to a level two, remember, there's always a story behind their behavior.
As a leader, do you have the skillset and the energy to go invest in that story?
That’s what elite leaders do. As a sales leader, you have the opportunity to build your managers into great sales coaches, because you’ve done it before. Here are great resources you can use to enable your front-line managers to coach to success.
As a former college athlete, I was moved by Coach Mosley’s approach to leadership. I was also taken by the stories of the players he coaches. These guys come from less than privileged backgrounds. They’re using their basketball skills to gain some stability. His coaches aren’t on salary. Coach Mosley even buys some of his players socks for the season. There is one scene in the documentary where their basketball hoops are too high and they have to figure out how to pay for them to be lowered. These aren’t players trying to snag the latest pair of Air Jordans. They’re on their own journey to upward mobility.
When I saw Last Chance U: Basketball and learned more about the program at ELAC, I wanted to support Coach Mosley, his coaches and his players. My bet is you will want to as well. Here are two ways to make it happen:
For larger donations that require tax deductions:
- Donate to the ELAC Student-Athlete Fund
- Specify "Men's Basketball" in the comments
- The foundation is a 501C3
- Federal Tax ID# 33-0034221
For smaller donations:
Be uncommon. Be elite. Stay humble and Go ELAC Huskies!
A Conversation with Coach John Mosley Jr.
If you can't tell, coaching is a topic we're very passionate about at Force Management. We've compiled more details and resources about this series and coaching your sales team to success. You can dig deeper and access the full series here.
