John Madden and Meeting Individual Needs

The ASLAN Other-Centered^® Leader 
Coaches Quiz Blog Series

Every winner has a coach, and every coach has a philosophy.  The ASLAN Other-Centered^® Leader Coaches Quiz matches your coaching style with some of the legendary coaches in sports.  Here is a deeper look inside the philosophy of one of today's best.

John Madden was the head coach of the Oakland Raiders for only ten years, but he amassed over 100 wins, even among the likes of other great coaches like Chuck Noll, Vince Lombardi, and Don Shula. His teams had seven division titles and five championships before finally winning the Super Bowl in 1977.

Madden's win record doesn't tell the whole story, however. His general manager, former head coach Al Davis, had a habit of collecting players who were difficult to work with, many of whom had been rejected by other teams. Madden was able to take these disparate personalities and mold them into a team that could win games in a very competitive field.

From the very beginning, Madden was an analyst, a trait that served him well as he left coaching to become an iconic sports broadcaster. As much as he analyzed the game and came up with winning strategies, however, he never lost sight of his players as people with different personalities and different needs.

Former player Pat Toomay remembers being amazed at Madden's coaching style: "When I met John Madden on my first day of Raiders training camp in July 1977, I was struck by his ease and affability, but I was most impressed by his thoughtfulness." Realizing that Toomay was exhausted on arriving from traveling across the country and partway back to get to the camp, Madden gave him the time he needed to rest even though training camp was in full swing. "I'd never encountered such flexibility in a head coach."

Although Madden only lasted 10 years as a head coach, retiring because of his health (ulcers) and to be more of a part of his sons' lives, he spent the next 30 years of his life continuing to shape the game of football by communicating his passion for the sport and its players as a broadcaster and later the creator of the wildly popular Madden Football video game franchise, which has sold over 100 million copies in 26 years.

Madden was known for his friendships with NFL coaches, both during and after his coaching career. His focus on the person-as-a-person, not as a commodity, helped popularize the sport of football and make it what it is today.

Like Madden, sales coaches need to analyze both their sales team members and the competition to come up with ways to train and teach their reps how to be the best they can be as a sales team. A one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway approach will only lead to resentments and failure as individual training needs and sales problems remain unmet.

In this excerpt from the whitepaper "6 Pitfalls of a Sales Training Initiative," the importance of team- and individual-specific sales training programs is highlighted.

Pitfall 6 - Implementing a Sales Program

Generic sales development programs always miss the mark. Would you train an ice skater the same as a hockey player? Of course not. The same is true in sales. An inside account manager selling in the SMB space is vastly different than an account manager working with channel partners who sell to complex, enterprise accounts. Account managers are not biz dev people and biz dev reps are vastly different than an outbound telesales rep. In reality, there are 11 unique sales roles and each requires a different set of skills and training. If you fail to address the unique challenges of each role, reps hyper focus on the 10 to 20% that isn't relevant to their role.

Therefore, if you are investing in outside curriculum, ensure that it was created for the role you have chosen to develop. If the partner you are considering hasn't identified the unique roles and built their library of content accordingly, raise the red flag. More investigating is required.

Secondly, all the conceptual models must be linked to the specific challenges faced by the participant. Time must be invested in creating the exercises, examples, and case studies, specific to their role. To be blunt, generic content, even if it's uniquely created for the role, simply doesn't work. As stated earlier, change is hard. Most reps will not put in the additional effort to link the concepts to their world. The application must be built in from the start, or the participants will walk out complaining, "They just didn't understand my world" and the investment will be lost.

Finally, generic coaching and leadership models that are often deployed to develop the front line managers - while effective at teaching leadership principles and a conversational guide for conducting a coaching session, will fail to provide the tactical tools needed to address the root cause of the performance gap. Using a golf analogy, if they learned how to have a collaborative discussion with the golfer about how to improve their game but have no idea how to fix their slice, the coaching session may be well received but the player will still walk away with the same gap.

Again the core problem is in the linkage. An effective coaching program will move beyond the conceptual model and provide leaders with the insight to diagnose the root cause of the problem and then accurately prescribe an effective developmental plan. Since most leadership programs were created for every possible role, from engineers to accountants, this critical step of the program is missing. Unless the content was specifically built for equipping sales leaders, the linkage is candidly just not possible. And without this critical element of the program, managers will either revert back to show and tell ("give me the club I'll show you how to hit the ball") or just bail on coaching altogether. And both paths lead to pretty much the same results.

Because John Madden knew the importance of getting to know his individual players, he was able to successfully coach them and help them grow as individuals and members of a team.

Make sure your sales training program follows in the successful path of John Madden and is not generic, but rather is tailored to your industry and the specific needs of your sales team.

To learn more, download the entire ASLAN Training paper and contact us with any questions you may have about sales training and our Other-Centered^® programs which are tailored to each company we work with.