GONG RECIPE BOOK

Establishing a Lightweight Coaching Culture Using Gong

Ingredients: Call review, coaching inbox, comments/feedback, mobile app

What is it?

If your organization doesn’t have a coaching culture, you probably want to think about starting one. For a lot of teams, a lightweight coaching culture may be just the right starting point. To kick it off, the most important thing is establishing and instilling coaching habits, which not only creates a solid foundation to build off of, but it also helps teams start to see the benefits of coaching right off the bat.

Who is it for?

A lightweight coaching culture can be a good fit for smaller companies just getting started, or even for larger companies that haven’t prioritized coaching in the past and are looking to take their first steps in that direction. Establishing a coaching culture has the biggest impact on individual contributors and their direct managers.

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How does Gong help out?

Gong weaves coaching features directly into its call listening/review interface, allowing both managers and individual contributors to take coaching-related actions quickly and easily while reviewing calls. These features include:

General call review

Commenting and tagging reps or other stakeholders on calls

Requesting and leaving feedback

Filling out scorecards

Gong also makes it easy for managers to quickly find and take action on coaching requests, as well as to track their own coaching efforts and keep themselves accountable.

Coaching > Coaching Inbox – This dashboard is a centralized place where coaches can manage their coaching to-do’s, see who hasn’t been coached in a while and all their feedback requests in one place, and take action to ensure equitable coaching efforts among their team members.

How does it work?

Review Calls

For many leaders, the act of recording and listening to calls is itself a huge step in establishing a coaching culture. Individual contributors can review their own calls to learn how to better understand customers and their needs and prepare for future calls. Likewise, managers can review their team members’ calls asynchronously, freeing them from having to attend all calls while at the same time giving them important visibility into how it went, and provide coaching and feedback to their direct reports.

Weave coaching actions into call reviews

While reviewing calls, a manager, teammate, or other viewer can quickly and easily provide feedback and coaching directly tied to key conversation moments. By providing comments and feedback in context, coaches can give their team members specific examples to review and follow, rather than vague, high-level tips that are hard to implement. Furthermore, these features make it possible to provide asynchronous coaching, without having to wait until a one-on-one meeting. Additionally, scorecards create a structured framework for providing feedback, encourage consistency in review criteria, and produce data that teams can use to better coach and level up their team.

Stay on top of coaching efforts

The hardest part of creating habits and practices is consistency, especially at the beginning. In the early stages, when habits aren’t yet fully ingrained and integrated, tools can help to keep you accountable. Managers can use the Coaching Inbox to manage their outstanding coaching to-do’s, such as reviewing certain reps’ calls and commenting or filling out scorecards, and ensure their coaching efforts are spread equitably among their team.

Pro tips

Take your Gong coaching on the go! With the Gong App, you can listen to calls and provide feedback whenever and wherever.

Set up notifications for Streams to deliver coachable moments directly to your inbox. You can choose when you want to receive these emails—immediately, daily, or weekly—so you can provide just-in-time feedback and course-correction based on your own schedule.

Make sure you are getting notifications for your coaching inbox, and Gong will notify you whenever you have a new request for feedback from a team member or a coaching opportunity.