Coaching
Can we run it ourselves? This is the engagement for a team that owns the motion and is still learning to run it.
Four ways in Diagnostic Advisory Build Coaching
What it is
Scheduled sessions with the person or the small team who owns the revenue motion, plus access between them when something is live. The work stays theirs throughout. My part is to test the thinking, name what is being avoided, and say what I have seen go wrong with the same decision elsewhere.
The gap this answers is capability. The team is in place, the design is broadly right, and what is missing is the practice of running it: reading the funnel math and believing it, holding a forecast cadence that produces a number anyone will stand behind.
It is not interim management and it is not a seat in your leadership meeting owning the number week to week. I do not run the motion, take the decisions or carry the accountability for them.
How a retainer runs
There is no curriculum, and the agenda is whatever is in front of them that month. If the same question keeps arriving in the same shape after two quarters, the retainer is covering for a structural problem and I will say so.
Who it suits
Usually someone who has recently taken on more than they have run before.
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First-time remit
Promoted into owning functions they have never run, which for most people means operations, customer success or compensation is new ground.
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New system to run
A comp plan, a forecast method or a customer lifecycle designed recently, now meeting a full year of exceptions for the first time.
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No peer
Senior enough that nobody internally checks their reasoning, and new enough in the role that somebody should.
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Capability gap
A diagnostic where the org and capability findings dominated, and the roadmap is executable in-house once confidence catches up.
Coaching commissioned for a person by their manager, without the person having asked, reliably fails. The first call is best held with them, and not about them.
When it is not the right route
Three situations where coaching is the comfortable answer and the wrong one.
- The thing has to exist by the end of the quarter
- Coaching produces a team that can do it. If nobody has the bandwidth, buy the hands. The other three routes are on the home page.
- The design question is still open
- Coaching someone through an unsettled motion makes them fluent in the wrong one. Settle it with advisory, or find out what it should be with a diagnostic.
- The problem is one person, not the system
- Coaching becomes a way of postponing a performance conversation, and an outside adviser will not have that conversation for you.
How the first call works
Forty-five minutes, no charge. No pitch. No deck. Best held with the person who would actually be coached. You leave with my read on it and a straight answer on whether coaching is the right route or another one is.
If it is, you get a written scope, a cadence and a number before anything starts.