It’s Time to Get Back in the Game: How to Be a Player-Coach (The Future of Work Series, Part 5)

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Is this you? 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a salesperson started her own promotional products business. It was a tough time to start, but she was hell-bent on winning, and the experience made her leaner, hungrier. 

Scrap after scrap, account after account, she fought to build a solid book of business and was so successful that eventually, she needed help. Hiring one production person to help with orders, then another, she began to realize she could duplicate her efforts by hiring a salesperson. Then one salesperson became two, and before long, the starving young sales scrapper evolved into a full-fledged entrepreneur, building a team, and replicating herself and her habits into a driving force that reflected her vision and values. 

After some success, she finally was able to release her hand from the throttle and let the business ride with guided oversight on a semi-regular basis. And the business grew, along with the economy. And what was once a small-time, independent sales success story became the fulfillment of an entrepreneurial dream. 

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Then suddenly, out-of-nowhere, disaster struck.  

The economy tanked. Markets roiled. Clients shrank or disappeared altogether. Her carefully crafted book of business was turned upside down, shaken, and left in tatters. To respond to the dramatic drop in business, she cut costs, painfully trimming back her small team. Struggling to keep her once growing enterprise intact, her outward enthusiasm, which was so crucial for building morale and her small empire in the early years, came back to her like muscle memory, telling her troops, “we’ll get through this, we’ve done it before!” 

But inside herself, at night, when the last zoom call ended, she closed her laptop, buried her head in her hands, and questioned … everything. Can we really do this? Do I even have the strength to do this again? I’ve done it before, but this … this feels different ... the odds seem stacked against us, more than I’ve ever known. I don’t even know if I have the energy for this fight.

If that’s you, and your story and you’ve shared it with me in confidence, you might be wondering why I’m divulging it to everyone.

My reason? 

It’s not only your story. 

I’ve heard this story a dozen times in the past few months. After years in this business, I’ve been fortunate to walk alongside many of you -not as customers, not as competitors- but as friends. Over the past few months, we’ve shared calls. Emails. Text messages. Many of our conversations are tainted with “what-if-I-never” and “I-don’t-know-that-I-even-want-to-do-this-anymore” thoughts. All completely understandable. 

I’ve been through a few recessions in my career but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the entrepreneurial struggle so raw, so visceral as I have this past season. I listen quietly, offer few words, ask questions, and mostly, lean into my friends and their struggle. 

But I also started seeking answers. 

Throughout this series on the future of work, we’ve explored the disruption that’s now here, the three habits shattered by the virtual workforce, your outdated selling skills and how to fix them and most importantly, most critically, the four demands the client of the future wants from you now. Along with your stories of struggle and triumph, it’s those four demands that keep nagging me, whispering to me, the answer is right here. 

And it was there. And it is. 

Let me ask you a really hard question. It’s hard, because, for many of us, it’s hard, to be honest with ourselves about this topic.

How much time, on the phone, in email, and through video calls, have you -personally- spent with your top 10 clients in the past 2-3 months? 

If you’re like most of us, you likely spent time at the onset of COVID calling your client with check-ins, wondering aloud with them, letting them know you were thinking of them. But then, like many, your interest, and your curiosity withered, replaced by PPE sourcing or … just waiting.

But the answer to our way through this is both within the client and within yourself. 

Think back to your early days as an emerging salesperson-entrepreneur. There was a secret to your success to recover there and the secret is: you were close, very close, to your best clients. You were close enough to know their problems, beyond simple product requests. You were close enough to recruit and train an entire team, team members who duplicated your efforts and helped you grow. But then you delegated the task of future client-knowledge to your team. 

And those were drastically different times. 

You can’t layer your old knowledge about the customer and their challenges over the current crisis today because we’re living with unprecedented problems now.

Your focus needs to shift back to where it once began: with clients. You must evolve from hands-off entrepreneur to player-coach. 

Here are three practical ways you can get back in the game and lead your team (and you!) to a new season of growth and re-inspiration.

(1) Get Back in the Game 

In an interview with The Atlantic, Kobe Bryant told editor Mike Sager that he was constantly re-inventing. He didn’t have all the answers, he never considered himself a master of the game, he stayed open to the newness, despite many years of experience. “You have to be open-minded and not rigid. If you’re rigid, that’s weakness … I will not make the same mistakes in the future that I have made in the past,” Kobe continued, “I will make new mistakes, I am sure. And I will learn from them, too.” 

It’s time for you to get back in the game. You’ve delegated that strategic client role to your team for far too long. As you shake off that coach’s coat and tie and put on your team uniform again, re-invent your role with the customer. You might need to re-introduce yourself to many, explaining to them that you are there to learn so that you can best know how to invest your resources in helping them solve problems. As you did in the early days, arrive with questions and be open-minded. The customer is facing foreign challenges (previous post) and you can’t discover what those are behind PPE requests only. 

At a time when we all want to play it conservatively, as the pros, we must, as Kobe said, be audaciously bold enough to make new mistakes. 

Player-coach action step: Set up a non-product specific quarterly meeting with your key clients. I know quarterly meetings are aggressive, but so is the situation we’re all in. Let them know you think a regular meeting is important due to the fluidity of today’s climate and just want to make sure, as things change, that you and your team are tracking with them, their department, and their priorities, through the changes. You want their problems to become your problems, and their opportunities to become your opportunities.

(2) Re-engineer Your All-Star Team

Lebron James: three NBA championships, four MVP awards, and two Olympic gold medals ... I mean, c'mon, why does Lebron still need a coach?! 

One word: perspective. 

After you’re armed with knowledge about your current client, then, and only then, can you turn your attention to coaching. Each member of your all-star team has a role they fulfill but they are limited to only their unique perspective. 

It’s not our intent, as player-coaches, to play every position on the team, nor to become the all-star player to our client. The sales team should still have priority over the day-to-day client relationship, we’re not talking about dabbling between sales and client. Rather, you’re watching how the game changes so that you can adjust your entire team to rise to the challenge. 

Strategic leadership has their sights set on the whole game.

As you’ll discover, the client demands a problem-solving approach (previous post) and as such, their new demands will dictate a complete restructuring of your team. The distributor of tomorrow needs to reorganize their all-star team from product-sourcers only to problem-solvers. This means the skills they need to cultivate extend way beyond product search capabilities. They need to not merely be resourceful, but creative thinkers, ingenious at adapting to any situation, and above all, they must possess a client-obsessed attitude.

The good news is, you don’t need to replace your amazing and resourceful team with a different type of employee. That incredible team you’ve worked so hard to train and motivate now needs a course-adjustment, from simply seeing their own role with the client as reactive to proactive. Clients demand you know them better, which means more customer research. Those well-honed skills that your team has earned to source anything from anywhere now needs a pivot. They need to widen their search-and-solve talent from product-centric to client-centric. 

Squad goals: What does this look like in real life, day-to-day? Your team is spending more time studying trends, less time looking through digital catalogs. Your team is spending more time researching clients and industries and less time researching product. Your team meetings consist of -not the latest, greatest item- but reports on clients and their place in the market, prospective clients, and progress. And you are spending less time asking what they are working on (product and project follow-up) and more time on coaching them how to be better players.

Does your team have your guidance and moreover, your support to start changing their work habits to be more proactive and less reactive? What new skills will they need to acquire to meet the demands of tomorrow’s client? 

Player-coach action step: Have each of your team members read the Four Demands the Client of the Future Wants From You Now (some distributors have already done this), there’s an audio version on that page as well. Discuss with your team how each role needs to change to meet this new demand. Then, as the coach, teach or train them in the new skills, the new fundamentals (client research, market research, etc) that they will need to win a new season. 

And while you’re reorganizing your structure, it’s the perfect time to …

(3) Refresh Your Culture and Renew Your Spirit

We’ve already experienced an epic transformation in work culture. Nearly the whole work-world shifted to dramatic changes in their daily work habits, from conventional offices to remote teams (for insight into how pervasive this change is, see our previous post about the three old habits that were shattered by the new, virtual workforce). Some were ready, but many were caught flat-footed and a few are not only adjusting to it, but rocking it. 

Since we’re already in a state of flux, now is the perfect time to not only realign your team but also, ignite an inspiring new culture. 

Fiveash & the Fuelians

As an example, our friends at Brand Fuel have been burning rocket fuel for over twenty years. Ever the risk-takers, when COVID hit, they saw it as an opportunity to embrace change, a chance to (re)evolutionize and reimagine the way they would work moving forward. Moving from their more traditional office in Norfolk, VA they opened a new, smaller space in the Vibe Creative District in Virginia Beach. Same team, but smaller space with a new, open floor plan. Surrounded by a creative community, the choice was brilliant. No “waiting for business to get back to normal” for Brand Fuel. The change is here to stay and they not only embrace it, but they’re preparing for the new demands required by the customer. I asked Robert Fiveash, co-founder of Brand Fuel, why the change? Robert replied that the space will turbo-charge their eXperiences Program and provide close collaboration with a hyper-creative community. 

Remember our story in the beginning, the entrepreneur with her head in her hands? The lesson here is not to move your office or open up a new space, the lesson from Brand Fuel is that it’s the perfect time to take a risk and re-engineer your culture, ie, how you and your team work; in so doing, you’ll refuel your team’s esprit de corps while skyrocketing your own spirit. 

Player-coach action step: We’ll have more practical steps on to transform a virtual work culture in a future post, but for now, a suggested action step is to think of the ways in which your new work culture needs a re-vision. 

Be a Raptor: Deep Bench, Great Coach

As many know, commonsku’s headquarters is located in Toronto, home of the NBA underdog champs the Toronto Raptors. While writing this article, I thought I’d ask my own team why they thought the Raptors won the championship. 

Catherine Graham, commonsku’s CEO replied, “they had a deep bench where they are not reliant on any one superstar, low ego across the whole team, a patient coach in Nick Nurse.” Aaron Kucherawy, Manager of Customer Success, said it was player development, which you could attribute to great coaching.

It triggered a thought: In my former role, leading a large distributor for years, we focused on big company store fulfillment programs and as such, had a revolving door of challenges: sourcing, kitting, warehousing, fulfillment, shipping, e-commerce, team clashes, frustration, exhaustion … you name it, there was no end. But, because of the complexity, it required me to be a player-coach. I had to be in frequent, strategic communication with all client-stakeholders (client-obsessed) and focused on team development as a whole. 

Which gave me a secret weapon, a coaching technique that I learned late in the game. But it became the one thing that expedited wins and allowed me to mitigate frustration while aligning my team’s purpose. Any time we had ego clashes, frustration, misunderstandings, questions about direction, opportunities we were unsure of, I learned to lead (coach) our conversations with, “let’s talk about the client and what they want here.” 

Those words, “the client,” had a magical way of getting the focus off of us and our problems and helped us focus on the opportunity. It wasn’t my opinion that helped us make our most dramatic and profitable changes, (I made tons of mistakes), but depth of client-knowledge made me passionate about developing a deep bench while the focus kept us all out of the spotlight and aware of the entire team. There was no Lebron James carrying the team, it was a unified mission, hell-bent on client focus, requiring a deep bench of passionate players.

The game of basketball is a 129-year-old game. The promotional products industry is a 231-year-old game. You might think, surely the game hasn’t changed that much over time and I know all that there is to know about this business, but Toronto’s Coach Nick Nurse would disagree.

“The game is changing so fast right before our eyes … we’ve gotta be trying to think of what’s coming next before it comes next.”

Well said, Coach.

Time for us to suit up.

You can now download the complete Future of Work eBook in a free, easy to read, downloadable PDF. Click here to get your copy!