In each instance, sales skills will help coaches get more done and get more of what they need to succeed . Here are the three most important sales skills that every coach should learn and use.

1. Ask the Right Questions and You’ll Get the Desired Response

This is really two tactics in one because asking the right questions not only lets you know what motivates them (and therefore how to structure your pitch) but also it lets them do the talking. When your athlete, athletic director, booster president… whoever it is that you’re selling your idea to… does the talking, they feel understood. They feel like they had their chance to speak and tell you how they feel. They feel like you understand their point of view. Further, when you ask the right questions, you learn specifically what motivates them. When you learn more about them, you learn more about what they want in a solution.Here are some examples of the right questions…

• What do you think it will take to be successful?
• How do you plan to handle that?
• What has been your experience with ________ in the past?
• If you were to continue without making a change, how do you feel it will affect your success?
• If you could change one thing about ________, what would it be?

2. Get them saying “Yes” Before You Ask for What You Want

If you ask my 2, 4 or 6 year old what they want for dinner and your first two offers get rejected with a “no”, then any subsequent offer will also be a no… even if it’s their favorite food. Apparently we never grow out of this because when you get a grown-up saying “no” they tend to be in a “no” mindset. Conversely, when you get them saying “yes” they tend to be in a “yes” mindset. For example, if you want your booster president to approve an expense for purchasing a new piece of equipment you might ask him or her a series of “yes” questions like…

1. Raising money is hard work, right? (Yes)
2. Why do you work so hard at it? Is it because you know that it will help the program succeed? (Yes)
3. And do you feel that, if we continue to improve as a program because of the resources that you provide to the team, then this booster club is successful? (Yes)

And now for the pitch…

“If we are to purchase the new Super-Duper All-in-One Sports Widget Machine, then our athletes will be (bigger, stronger, faster, healthier, happier) which, as you know, is a big part of success. What do you think?” (Now, be quiet and let them talk.)

3. Have a Genuine Respect for the Other Party and They’ll Return the Favor

If you show the other party that you have a genuine respect for their point-of-view and their position, you’re more likely to have success. Everyone wants to be respected. That phrase is so important that I’ll repeat it… EVERYONE wants to be respected. You show respect by looking them in the eye, using their name (the most beautiful sound to someone is their own name), and using phrases like “I’d feel the same way if I were you.” Show them respect and you’re chances of success sky rocket!

Want to apply these new found skills to your program today? (YES!)
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1. Give them responsibility- People want responsibility. Delegate effectively and then don’t micro manage. Trust them and they’ll perform.
2. Give them ownership- In business they say, “if you want to get ahead then act as if you were the owner of the company”. Let people have a true say in what’s going on and they’ll begin to take a leadership role .
3. Know your core values and mission- People want to work for an organization with a clear goal and mission. Is it absolutely clear what your mission and values are?
4. Right people in the right places- If you have staff or volunteers with key strengths, be sure to utilize them. People want to be successful at their job so enable them in any way that you can. If they’re good with numbers, spreadsheets and tracking, then ask them to help with budgeting and projections.
5. Develop your own leadership skills- That means giving credit where credit is due, saying you’re sorry when you screw up, listening to the points of view of others, and become genuinely interested in them as a person.
6. Pay them as well as you can afford- Like it or not, raising money is key to attracting and retaining the best people. Certainly you must execute on the above mentioned items. If you do so and are also able to pay them well, then you have the makings of a championship program. This is where a well executed sports team fundraiser can directly impact your program.

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How to help your team break through.

As coaches, we often want our athletes to be self-motivated, driven and to hold themselves accountable for their own actions. We want this because we know that it will not only help us win more but also make our lives easier with fewer headaches and hand-holding. Rarely, however, do we set them up for success in the ways that we should. We train our athletes at practice and send them off to deal with the world and all if it’s temptations and time-wasters without the skills to overcome and succeed despite them. This may be the job of the parents, you say, but if the parents haven’t done their job then it’s your job– if you want to build a championship program that is.

1. Goal setting- most don’t understand goal-setting but this is a skill that, if learned and implemented, will frame their entire lives. Their goals and the action plans that they develop for them will govern their actions when you’re not around (wouldn’t that be nice!).
2. Identify strengths and weaknesses- Your own that is. Know yourself and you’ll better be able to serve your program. Build around your strengths and develop your weaknesses through reading, attending seminars, asking questions or, if possible, hiring.
3. Ownership- Remember when you got your first car? Remember how you treated it so much better than you treated your parents car? That’s because it was yours. Give your athletes ownership of something. That can be having a say in team rules, voting on team issues (captains, what time to practice over Christmas break, etc), or responsibility for maintaining the facility.
4. Let them talk- This tenet reminds me of a story I read in a psychology book. The same rules were set for 2 groups of people. One group was permitted to talk about what rules they wanted and the other was not given the opportunity to add their input. When surveyed after the exact same rules were in place, the group that was permitted to voice their opinion, even though those opinions did not influence the rules themselves, was much happier and much more accepting of the rules than the other. How can you let your athletes voice their opinions?
5. Teach to their learning style- Of course, this is Teaching 101 but many coaches tend to ignore this simple yet powerful concept as being a touchy-feely, soft way of leading a team. We have a coaching style that helped us learn best and that style is often most comfortable for us to teach from. However, our athletes learn in different ways. The magic of legendary Iowa wrestling coach Dan Gable was not the fact that he pushed his athletes to the breaking point like so many think. Instead he learned to reach each athlete in his own special way to bring out the best in them so that he could push them to be their absolute best.

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Jim Harshaw

My wife is a licensed child therapist who works with children from troubled backgrounds. Recently she was talking about a particular child that just was not responding to counseling, no matter the strategies or techniques used. Sage advice was offered to her from a highly respected therapist with whom she works.

“Our job is to give them the tools to cope with life and hope that they sink in.”

The importance of athletics extends far beyond the playing field. As coaches, we often fail to see our athletes as the people that they will be later in life. We train them today to produce for us tomorrow and during the years that they can help us win. We teach them to train hard, persevere, live a disciplined life and find a way to win against the odds. But rarely do we relate these lessons to how they can apply them to their lives outside of athletics as they unfold years from now.

Why Don’t We?
As a coach, you are judged by your success today not by the lifelong success of your former athletes. Therefore, your goals are centered around performance and achievement in the relative short-term (this season and maybe next) but rarely do we look at the long-term implications of the tools that we could be giving to them today. A failure to extrapolate the lessons learned in sports and apply them to life outside of and after sports, however, hinders your success in the present.

When you look at the lives of the most successful athletes in the world, you see that they live disciplined lives. Proper nutrition, studying opponents, strength training, good sleep habits, visualization, goal-setting and mental training are among the many activities that fill the days of the most elite athlete. These are all fundamental life skills that directly translate into a successful and fulfilling life after sports. When a coach embraces the fact that spending time and energy working with athletes on life skills will impact the team’s success today while improving the lifelong success of the athlete, then they will find the true gold that comes through coaching.

As does the therapist working with children, you too can give your athletes the tools to succeed today while knowing that these lessons will last them a lifetime.

Give your team the tools to succeed. Download the Quick Start Guide to marketing your team now. 

Here are three ways for you to consciously teach life lessons through sport on a regular basis with your team.

1. Anecdotes- Olympic Gold Medalist Kendall Cross recommended a book to me called “Application: If your athletes fail or even get embarrassed, how can you teach your athletes that failure is part of success? You can talk about Michael Jordan being cut from his high school basketball team or about how Sylvester Stallone failed spectacularly over and over and over before finally getting his foot in the door as an actor. Failure is a part of success. Make sure that your athletes understand this. 
2. Modeling- Demonstrate to your athletes the life lessons that you have learned through sport. It may have taken years for them to set-in but they are there. They may feel like they’ve’ always been there, but they’ve not. You worked for them. You earned them. Show your athletes how these lessons look in real life.
• Application: It has been said that the best form of leadership is to serve. Take on one of the lowly jobs that is relegated to the freshman as your own periodically. Mop the mats, carry the ball bag, clean up the water cups. And talk to your athletes about the value of serving each other.
3. Action- Get your athletes to actively engage in the lessons that you want them to learn. There’s no better way to learn than by doing.
• Application: You want your athletes to be respectful… respectful to teammates, opponents and their parents. Require that they volunteer to do one chore this evening after practice when they get home. How will the parents of your athletes feel about you when their son or daughter comes home and says “Coach said I have to help help you tonight. Can I take out the trash, mom?”

Want to learn a proven framework for developing your team leaders? Join me as I host a webinar with one of the world’s leading experts on sports leadership. Register now.  

As for the coaches that recommended the book to me, they’ve both since won NCAA Division I team championships! So, apparently they’re implementing what they learned in the book!

Jeff Janssen now travels across the country hosting workshops with some of the top athletic departments across the country like Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas and dozens of others schools.

Well, I called Jeff up and asked him if he’d be willing to share some of his valuable secrets with us and he said yes. So, along with the partners that you see below this video, we’re bringing you this awesome webinar at no cost. I wish I’d have had this opportunity back when I was coaching full-time.

So, take advantage of Jeff’s knowledge and experience and register for the webinar by entering your email in the box to the right.

This webinar is being sponsored by MyCoachBook.com Check it out today!

Google Plus is a social network just like Facebook or Twitter… in fact it has many similarities with those two services that we’ll talk about in a minute. But know this going in…. best practices still apply the same as they do on Facebook, Twitter, email or even in personal interaction with your fans. Share fresh, relevant, engaging, interesting content and then respond and interact with your community to build your relationship with them. That’s the goal here. Build relationships to get people to support your team. If you’re a business owner,… you want to build a relationship with your prospects and your customers. People like to do business with their friends. And people like to support teams with whom they have a relationship. That’s human nature. Don’t make social networking something other than that.

OVERVIEW (Part 1 of 3)

Google+ is similar in a lot of ways to Facebook but has one major key difference.

It allows you to segment your friends and community much more efficiently than Facebook. You can do this on Facebook but it’s just not as intuitive as Google+ has made it through their use of “Circles”. You can easily add people to one more circles through a simple drag and drop feature.

Google Plus has some similarities to Twitter in that you can “Follow” someone. That is, you don’t have to be friends with them to see what they’re posting and talking about. Facebook has recently reacted to this by allowing you to subscribe to a persons feed.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR GOOGLE PLUS PROFILE AND PAGE (Part 2 of 3)

There will be tons of back and forth and there already is. If you’re a marketer or just follow social technology, then you’ve already begun to see the competition spurring new features– many of them copy cat features.

Google Plus Pages

Google has just recently their version of the Facebook Page. To be clear, Facebook gives you the opportunity to have a:

• Profile- for you the person
• Page- for your business or org— in this case, your team.
• Group– which is a bit more of a defined group of people that are in a community.

ADVANCED GOOGLE PLUS PAGES FOR TEAMS (Part 3 of 3)

Pages are best for teams and businesses looking to leverage Facebook. Groups are more for internal communication amongst a group of people centered around a specific topic or defined community.

Similarly, now, you can create your Google profile and THEN create your organizations page

Personally, I believe that had Google and Facebook launched together today, Google would win. Facebook is a more mature social network and has market share. It’s where your fans are. But they’ll be on Google+ more and more. Anyone that has a Gmail account, uses Google Calendar or Google Docs or even Blogger (Google’s blogging application) already has a Google account. They just have to create your personal profile to have a Google+ account. Then you can “Follow” your favorite teams Google+ page, just like you follow them on Twitter or like them on Facebook. But Google+ pages have some unique differences. We’ll talk about those after we talk about how to create the account.

Note- Facebook pages allow you to have multiple admins. Google is working on allowing multiple administrators of pages but has not released this yet (as of this writing). So, for now you’ll just have one admin– or you can give the login/pwd to others to allow them to login. For now, that’s a limiting factor so I recommend having a community Google account that allows others to post to it.

Create Your Google Plus Profile by going to Google.com and clicking on the +You icon. Follow the directions (or watch the video).

Now that the account is created, let’s dive into some features…

First, how do you get fans… or “Followers” as they’re called on Google+? Here’s what I did first… I created my Page and posted the link to it on my Facebook page and tweeted it! So far my Facebook and Twitter accounts haven’t imploded so I guess Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone are cool with it. I suggest that you do this periodically. Fans can also find you via your badge on your website. You can also include it in your next email blast and add the link to your page in your email signature.

Video chat is the big differentiation with Google+. Google calls their video chat feature “Hangouts”. They enable teams to engage with fans through video conference calls. Up to 9 people can video conference at once- this could be your coaching staff holding a public round-table talking about the team. This could be an interview with a star athlete or even an open discussion with your most supportive and passionate fans or alumni. Then you can broadcast it to the world for all to watch live!

A few other things to note.  On Facebook you can use Facebook as your page. You can do that on Google+ but you can’t actually interact with other pages and people as your page. For example, you can’t +1 (Google’s version of the “like”) other pages or other content on the web.

Google + pages can’t even “at mention” a person unless that person is following the page. A “mention” is when, on Facebook, you type the @ symbol and start typing a page or person and it shows up as a link. You can do that on Google+ as a person (profile) and as a page… but you can only do it as a page when that person is following your page. (Try it and you’ll see what I’m talking about).

Also, you should note, when using Google+ as your page, you can’t follow someone unless they follow you first.

You can’t receive any notifications via email or text. I have a feeling that this may change down the road.

If you’re interested in being found, for example, if you’re a business, Google Plus has tremendous SEO (search engine optimization) benefits. First, if you’ve completed the Direct Connect (adding the script from Google to your website) then someone can easily find your Google+ page by searching your business with a plus before it. This is only available for a handful of major businesses but I think they’ll roll it out to all pages soon. Second, when someone pluses your content or page, similar to “liking” Facebook content, then you’re looked at by Google as more reputable and will show up higher in the search rankings. Google is a search engine- Faceobook is not. Because of this, Google’s search will become more based on what people really like.

My philosophy is that you need to make it easy for fans to be fans. Be where they are and build relationships with them. Google Plus is going to become a very important means of doing this. Get started sooner rather than later. Remember how you held off for years before creating your Facebook page? Don’t be left in the dust this time!

Take action today. Creat a Google Plus Page for your sports team!

 Note: Registration is open (and limited) for the next webinar. Special guest and leading expert Jeff Janssen will be sharing his secrets for building better team leaders that are responsible team leaders and earn the respect of their teammates.  Register now!

Webinar: Developing Effective Team Leaders

How to Develop Team Captains that are more Responsible and More Respected. 

Wed, Dec 7 at 9 PM EST

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 with Jeff Janssen, one of the world top experts on sports leadership. 

brought to you by www.MyCoachBook.com

When it comes to thinking about preparing for life after sport, most athletes and their support people, are focusing on what they will DO.  What new career can they pursue when they are no longer active in sport?  How can they earn money?

Unfortunately, less time is spent is spent on thinking about who they will BE once they are no longer an athlete, and this can be where the greatest difficulty may arise..  “Who am I” is the question they might ask as they face an identity challenge.

Having gone through the transition myself and retiring three times in 6 years after representing Australia at the 2000 Olympics in beach volleyball, I know what athletes go through.

It has been reported that 80% of athletes suffer from some sort of depression post-retirement, a figure supported by a current research study – I was interviewed for this (incomplete) study and the researcher is astounded at the number of elite athletes reporting some form of depression both during and after sport.

This problem is compounded by the fact that athletes think they are the only one going through this, and are ashamed to admit it.  They have gone through their sport career wearing an armour of invincibility and the common thought is that – “I should be able to deal with this.”

People don’t want to appear weak, but I think a bigger weakness is not facing one’s challenge and doing something about it.

3 Steps that will help athletes transition are;

1. Finding a new passion and new direction – goals that excite the individual as much as their sporting goals did.
2. Finding self-belief within for new skills and career – this might need some personal work to re-program an individual’s belief about what they are capable of.  I have found some athletes that focused on sport may feel they are not ‘smart’ enough to do anything else.  It is the belief, rather than their intelligence that holds them back from pursuing their dreams.
3. A key step to overcoming this and finding success beyond sport is expanding one’s identity.  To realise that the athlete is so much more than their sport and their past success.  Certain exercises can help the athlete see how their skillset allows them to do and be anything they set their mind to.

Life after sport is more than just finding a new career.

Annette Lynch (formerly Huygens-Tholen) is a 2000 Olympian, Success Coach, Presenter and Educator.  Her 8 step program and book “Success Beyond Sport” helps athletes with transition and retirement. 

Learn more at http://www.successbeyondsport.com