Sales Managers Mastermind: Micro-Learning

Why Debriefing Matters

Hey, it's Jody from Sandler Keystone. In this video we're going to talk about debriefing — the importance of debriefing, a little bit of the structure, and we'll get into some of the mechanics of how to use tools and technologies like ChatGPT and LLMs to effectively debrief calls and better coach your sales team. Let's break down the importance and the why behind debriefing, because if you're going to have your sales team buy into the idea of debriefing calls, they need to be sold on the why. Otherwise they're going to drag their feet and push back. The key is they have to see the value.

I know what you're already saying — I don't have a lot of time for this — and nobody does. But I'm going to share with you some ways to make it super efficient and get the best value out of the time you do put into this. Now with technology, we've gone from a place where you had to be live in every meeting to debrief it, or meet with salespeople in a live session, to a place where technology can greatly accelerate your ability to debrief a call and, most importantly, how to best coach people based on that debriefing.

One of the challenges managers have is that when a deal goes bad — when a salesperson has been working on something and it doesn't happen, or a meeting just doesn't have an effective outcome — many times managers aren't sure why. It's really hard to understand how to grow our salespeople if we don't know what's happening in the field. We can't be in every meeting, we can't be on every virtual call, we can't be traveling with everyone in the field. So what happens is many managers look at a salesperson or a deal that didn't work out and think, I can't figure out what the issue is.

What debriefing enables us to do is break down afterwards what worked and what didn't work, because how are we going to coach our people if we don't know what's happening in a sales call? In most sports, coaches debrief the game after the game. In football, they watch game film on Monday morning after a Sunday game. If we're going to help our people get better at selling, we need to watch the game film.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. If we have a salesperson who regularly isn't closing sales, isn't converting first meetings to second meetings — whatever the growth area is — and we don't know what the issue is, they keep making the same mistake. We're not doing salespeople a service if we don't provide the coaching to help them grow. But how are we supposed to help them grow if we don't really know what the issue is?

Using a Structured Debriefing Framework

On the screen here you'll see some sample debriefing questions. You can use this as a guide or take it as is. The idea is these are questions the salesperson knows I'm going to ask — things like: what's their pain, who makes decisions, what's their DISC profile, what's our next step. These questions use the Sandler methodology as a framework to debrief.

What you don't want to do is what's called gotcha management — where a salesperson comes back from a call and you start peppering them with questions. Did you do this? Did you do that? That's not coaching. Debriefing is very much like an upfront contract. It's an adult-to-adult conversation with a salesperson that says: here's how this works. I won't play gotcha management after a sales meeting. When you come back, we won't just ask "how did the call go?" — we'll pull out the debriefing questions and use those as the guide. That structure makes our time most productive and helps me provide you the best coaching possible.

Amplifying Debriefs with Technology

In addition to the classic set of debriefing questions, which has been around for a long time, we now have technology that can greatly increase your impact as a manager. If you're using any kind of call transcription service — like Otter or Fathom, and there are a whole bunch of them out there — I'm a big fan of Fathom. Fathom is a tool that runs on virtual sales meetings and provides an AI recap of the key points covered and what the next steps are. It also enables you as a manager, if you have the Fathom recording of a salesperson's call, to interact with it and ask it questions through the AI — things like: I'm this person's manager, what could they have done differently? How would you coach me to coach my salesperson? It is lights out — an amplifier for you as a manager to take the transcription, spend a little time with it, and now coach your people effectively.

If you don't have access to that kind of technology, the old-school debriefing questions still work. But consider amplifying your effectiveness by using call transcription software. Fathom runs on Zoom, Teams, and other virtual meeting platforms. There's also technology like Otter that you can run on your cell phone in a live, in-person meeting.

Imagine this process before your next debriefing: the salesperson gets you the call recording so you can review it. You interact with the AI, review the summary and the AI's input, and by the time they come in for the actual coaching session, you already know what happened. You don't spend 30 minutes understanding the meeting — AI showed you that in five minutes. Now you can spend the next 25 minutes of that 30 working on coaching your salesperson on improvements.

Running an Effective Debriefing Session

It's important with all of this not to lose the human aspect of the coaching you provide. The structure I'd recommend is straightforward: schedule a dedicated meeting to debrief. The key is that the meeting is structured. You start with an upfront contract — here's why we're here. You review the analytics if you have the transcription technology, or you go through the debriefing questions if you don't. Either way, you maintain the structure of the meeting and don't go off on tangents.

A challenge many managers face is that a debriefing starts focused and then suddenly you're so far down a path that has nothing to do with debriefing. The purpose of the debriefing is for you to learn enough about the situation to coach that salesperson. One of your primary roles as a sales manager is to grow your people, and this is all about catching the things that lurk below the surface — things that aren't easily observable. If we're going to grow our people, we have to know what the real issue is, because this all results in lagging indicators: not having a higher closing ratio, not opening new doors, not closing bigger deals, not getting to higher-level decision makers. It all comes back to understanding what the real issue is.