GONG RECIPE BOOK
Designing a Structured Coaching Program for Your Teams
Ingredients: Feedback, scorecards, coaching inbox, coaching metrics
What is it?
For coaching to truly be effective, it needs to be recurring, structured, and equitable. In short, there needs to be an overarching coaching culture that incentivizes both coaches and coachees to dedicate time to coaching. Gong can contribute to this by providing tools to 1) help standardize coaching efforts, 2) make it easy to create feedback loops, and 3) help coaches stay on top of their coaching to-do’s.
Who is it for?
When a company adopts a structured coaching culture, everyone benefits: Individual contributors find their professional and personal advancement prioritized, and managers can focus their coaching efforts on high-value, data-driven priorities. Organizations often see improved individual and team performance, increased job satisfaction and retention, and an increase in quota attainment (where applicable).
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How does Gong help out?
Gong provides out-of-the-box functionality that can be used to help drive a standardized, data-driven coaching culture. This includes:
Skill- and deal-based insights that can be used to define what “good” looks like, raise warnings when problems arise, and help coaches uncover coachable opportunities:
- Team Insights > Activity
- Team Insights > Interaction
- Team Insights > Responsiveness
- Team Insights > Gong Usage
- Deals > Deal Boards
- Deals > Deal Drivers
- Deals > Win/Loss
Gong makes it easy to create an asynchronous, bidirectional feedback loop. Managers can use Gong to provide just-in-time feedback to their direct reports instead of having to wait for one-on-one meetings, and individual contributors can request feedback, giving them ownership of their own coaching and development.
Additionally, scorecards create a structured framework for providing feedback, encourages consistency in review criteria, and produces data that teams can use to better coach and level up their team.
Dashboards help coaches quickly find and take action on coaching requests, as well as 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, ensure equitable coaching efforts among their team members, and take action.
- Coaching > Coaching Metrics – This dashboard helps enablement managers and managers of managers drive a consistent coaching culture by providing an overview of coaching behavior among all coaches.
How does it work?
1. Define what good looks like
The Insights and Deals tab in Gong makes it easy to gather key information needed for determining your coaching priorities. You can identify what good looks like, see what your baseline behaviors are, and configure warnings to inform you of problem areas and areas for coaching.
2. Â Identify priorities and create goals
Knowledge in hand, you can now work to identify your coaching priorities, both at the team and individual levels. It’s important to prioritize your initiatives and to create realistic, attainable goals.
3. Create a feedback loop
Coaching isn’t one-directional. While managers can and should identify coachable opportunities using Gong and provide asynchronous feedback via comments and scorecards, individual contributors should also be empowered to contribute to their own self-development by using the “Request Feedback” function to solicit feedback from their manager, peers, or other teammates. They can also participate in peer-to-peer feedback via commenting and scorecards.
4. Stay on top of coaching efforts
Part of creating a standardized, structured coaching program involves ensuring that managers stay on top of their coaching to-do’s. Managers can use the Coaching Inbox, streams, and subscriptions to keep up with their coaching efforts. They can also use the Coaching Metrics tab to compare their own coaching efforts with those of their peers.
Pro tips
Let Gong do the work for you! The Coaching Inbox is the best place to manage your coaching to-do’s, find open feedback requests, and take action on those requests.
But you can also set up streams and subscriptions to deliver coachable moments directly to your inbox. Choose when you want to receive these emails—immediately, daily, or weekly—so you can provide just-in-time feedback and course-correction on a schedule that works for you.