Navigating power differences during sales

To be effective in selling team coaching into organizations, we have to be able to navigate power differences. It’s a pre-requisite to building genuine partnerships with clients. Yet differences in rank and power often feel cast in stone.

If you don’t have a clear, strong voice then you can’t get an audience at high levels in the client organization, amongst decision makers.

In the seminar on February 4th, we will explore advanced skills for team coaches to navigate rank issues during business development. This post is about how systemic awareness and skill around rank can help team coaches build better partnerships with clients.

Relationships are at the heart of B2B team coaching sales

Working with advanced team coaches this week in the Wider Value Core Program, I was reminded again how fundamental to our business development are the client relationships we build. As team coaches, our goal is to enable transformative organizational growth. To achieve this our client relationships must at their heart be partnerships. Not relationships of submission, or coercion, or slimy deal making. Generative partnerships that create value in the client organization and their ecosystem.

Partnerships require a large chunk of mutual respect. For that we need to become adept at navigating rank differences and making adjustments to power differentials. The goal is to find balance with whoever we are meeting in the client system. We as coaches should not be too far below the client in their perception of rank, and not too far above them either. Remember, this is not about being a dizzyingly clever consultant.

Making meaning together in a live seminar

What we can do, when we gather together in the advanced Wider Value seminar on February 4th, includes:

• Map out landscapes – how client ecosystems allocate rank, particularly when considering hiring a team coach.
• Help illuminate each other’s blind spots.
• Where do you put yourself down/up?
• Where do others diminish or elevate your rank?
• Learn from those who are experienced at claiming rank even when it has been unfairly taken away.
• Learn from those who are grounded in using their high rank for good purpose.

Every relationship has many layers of rank and power at play

Each of us has some sources of elevated rank. For example as team coaches, we gain rank from our advanced skills and experience. Our personal energy and presence often has even bigger impact on our rank. And our vision of improved collaboration and innovation in workplaces is the core business rank we must deliver on.

And each one of us feels acutely wherever we lack rank – for some it is about arbitrarily assigned categorization that affects every aspect of life. If you are reading this you are likely aware how systemic categories like race, gender, culture, language and sexual orientation have huge impact on people’s lives. Other rank factors are more personal and internal – such as lack of confidence, or impostor syndrome.

There are also radical variations in rank within the client organization, for example between divisions of a company, between HR and line management, up and down the hierarchy, and so on. The way our brand is perceived is crucial in our rank as service providers. Some of us have been given a lot of rank and are looking for ways to use it well or even let it go. The list is endless.

Building a vision

Imagine the benefits if you are able to claim rank when you have been somehow diminished in the client’s perception. What about being able to let some of your rank go when you are being experienced as talking down to a potential client? There are practices of body, mind and spirit that help. And awareness of your blind spots is crucial. This awareness is best built through community engagement with other people.

Experienced team coaches are invited to apply to join the conversation at the Wider Value seminar on navigating power differences during sales on February 4th.