(121) How To Lead Sales Trainings (That Don’t Put Your Reps to Sleep) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQUKw6BBI-4

Transcript: (00:00) Most sales leaders do absolute jack in terms of preparing their team to sell in any way, shape, or form. They pass off all training to enablement. No one pays attention. They either fall asleep, they turn their camera off, they go on Slack, and nothing actually sticks after you do these useless 48 hour sales kickoff training sessions. (00:22) So, in this module, we are going to teach you one, how to design a training program that actually wakes your reps up and teaches them something new. Two, we will teach you how to reinforce the training using what we call coaching rhythms. And then three, we will teach you how to make sure that you know that this training program actually worked, aka it stuck and you can see the results of it. (00:44) So, first Mark, let's talk about the difference between training and coaching. Training is teaching somebody something new. Think of that like a lecture. Coaching is demonstrating and modeling and helping somebody reinforce what you just learned. So if I train somebody how to do a discovery call, I would be like, "This is how we do a discovery call. Follow these steps. (01:07) " Coaching then is taking them through a role play. Coaching is then looking at a live call and telling them how they have done the process or not done the process. And unfortunately in most orgs, training is where everything stops. We do some training, enablement does something, we say something in a team meeting and then we completely lose reinforcement. (01:29) That would be like your math teacher teaching you algebra and never giving you any homework, never giving you an exam, never doing anything. So that doesn't work. So what we need to do instead is we need to make sure that we train and teach and then we coach by reinforcing. So Mark, would you give me like an example of how I could construct a training program if I wanted to teach my reps? Slow down. (01:51) Okay, Arman, you're already making the mistake. All right. No, first of all, we have to decide how do we prioritize what we want to train. And there's three kind of levels that training come from. First of all is an or initiative. Hey, we're launching a new product or we have a new sales methodology that we're going to do. (02:09) The second one is kind of enablement of how we're going to do that or maybe something that you see as a manager that you want to do, right? And hey, we have to roll out Medpic now. we have to figure that out or like I'm seeing I need a qualification thing for my team and then the third level is the personal initiatives like hey you know what Arman really needs help with this specific part of the deal cycle so I need to work with Arman so the first thing we have to do is look at what level that we want to teach or the skill that we want to bring (02:35) about is coming from so that we can prioritize it correctly so from there how do I think about how much my team can take on in any given month or quarter this is important because many times we try to push too much down to reps and they can't digest it and therefore it doesn't change their behaviors or the outcomes. (02:52) I've developed a sales enablement matrix that does two things. One is it tells you how big of a program do you need to create to get an outcome you want and secondly it sets expectations with the people around you of what they can expect you to deliver with that program. The way that it works is it's a nine box. The x-axis is capability. (03:12) Capability is defined as aware, competent or mastery. Aware means we're going to know know about it. You might hear it 10 or 20% of the time out in the wild. Competent is 50 to 60% of the time you're going to hear it the way you want. Mastery is 80 to 90% of the time you're going to hear it the way that you want. That's on the x-axis. (03:28) On the y- axis we have cognitive load. That's how hard is it going to be for a rep to make the mental changes and adjustments that they need in order to do the outcome that you want. That's low, medium, high. We now have a nine box. And what we do is for every initiative we say what level of capability do we want? What's the cognitive load? You plot it on the box and that's the number of points that you get for that specific initiative. (03:53) At outreach we found out that you could do about 16 points of enablement per quarter. Your might be different but that's how you figure out you know what I can't do two mastery level high cognitive load initiatives cuz that's 18 points. So, when your CEO is like, "Hey, we're launching a new product. You need to change a demo." And, "Oh, yeah. (04:10) I want this new sales process." That's when you pump your brakes and say, "You know what? Can't do that." And I'll give you a story about this. Manny, the CEO at Outreach, came to me one day and he's like, "Mark, you know what? We're launching this new product. I also would like to revamp the demo. (04:25) And there's this other thing with forecasting I'd like you to do." And I was like, "Whoa, dude. I'll tell you what, no problem. Please tell finance that what I would like them to do is close the books in two days, change over our ERP system, completely revamp our pricing and package. He's like, dude, we can't do that. That's insane. (04:39) I was like, that's what you just asked me to do. And there's some kind of dissonance between executives and salespeople. And what executives think is if I have decided that this will change, the salespeople can immediately make that change. That's not humanly possible. It takes real change management efforts to get somebody to change. (04:59) So that's what we want to do is we want to create a way for you to say no and yes and a way to set expectations and understand how big of a program you need to build to get the changes you want. So folks tell you don't try to train your team on new discovery methodology, new forecasting methodology, new AE prospecting methodology. (05:18) Basically all the things we talked about in section one. Don't teach them all at the exact same time. dose these one month, one quarter, one week at a time and solve one problem at a time. So, we're going to go through three example training programs that you could build at three different levels of competency. So, we're going to go through a mastery program that you'd run over a quarter, a competent program that you would run over a month, and then just an awareness program that you would run over a week. (05:47) So, let's start with a mastery program that you'd run over a quarter. So let's say that I'm going to do a training at the mastery level on revamping our entire discovery process. That's going to be a high cognitive load. This is going to be a quarterlong project. Week one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the overview of everything that's going to happen inside of that discovery and we're going to take one piece of it. (06:10) So in my discovery, one of the things is dig the pain hole. That's mean like getting to second and third level pain. I'm gonna emphasize that in training for the entire first month and we're going to reinforce that with ongoing coaching the entire month. We're not going to handle the other aspects of the discovery training yet. (06:27) We have an entire quarter to get this right. Let's break it down into pieces. The first piece is digging the pain hole. The second piece is diagnose and confirm. We're going to do that in month two. We're going to go deep into it. All of our call coaching is going to be around that. We'll revisit the first month stuff every once in a while, but we're mainly going to focus now on making sure that we can diagnose and confirm. (06:47) And then the last thing is a brief vision of the future. That's the last part. We'll do that in month three and the first week, really emphasize it. And then we're going to reinforce and start to tell reps that they need to submit their live prospect calls so that we can certify them against those. So folks, notice a couple things here. (07:03) Number one, Mark is teaching one part of the discovery process each month. So, a lot of times people will be like, "Here's your agenda. Here's your discovery questions. Here's your next steps. Here are 17 stories." And then they're mad when someone doesn't remember like story number 16 in the second week because they still haven't figured out how to set an agenda. (07:22) So, you've either got to be like okay with them just like understanding the parts but not getting it all correct or you've got to zone in on like one part really really deep. Part number two is for each section he's reinforcing that specific part of the discovery call. So if step number one was dig the pain hole, all of Mark's call reviews are focused on digging the pain hole. (07:46) And then if step number two in month two is all about diagnose and confirm, well then all of those call reviews and role plays should be focused on diagnosing and confirming. I'm going to use the same example of discovery, but instead of taking it to mastery, I'm only going to take it to competency. Well, now that it's in competency, it only requires a month-long reinforcement and training process. (08:08) So, I'm going in the first week to go over all the steps, give them the introduction of everything that we're going to do. Then, I'm going to take those three steps and then the remaining three meets of the month, I'm going to do one step each week instead of one step a month for mastery. Now, you can see the difference. (08:23) Mastery is we are going to focus on this. It's going to be part of our DNA. Everybody I'm going to get on a call, everybody's going to do it the same way. competence is we don't have as much time. I got some other big stuff. I need to see some improvements here, but I know I'm not going to hear it exactly how I want to. (08:37) And you're starting to see we're building a program to meet the expectations that we're going to set with other people around what they can expect us to deliver around these training issues. Now, let's say we take this down to awareness. At this point, it's probably not even worth running a week-long discovery program. (08:56) I feel like awareness level is really only for like very tiny things you would want your team to be aware of like you need to know that we have this new integration or you need to know that this like feature is slightly changing not like you need to be generally aware of discovery as an AE that seems like an undertone right I think one thing that you could do is say hey we're going to be developing a new discovery process here's some training that you can go on your own and take a look at right you don't need them to do anything with it you're not expecting (09:24) ing them to take it on their own, but you're showing them, hey, I want you to be aware that we're moving in this direction. You might do that in Q2 before you hit them hard in Q3 with doing the entire quarter long process. So, Mark, I might be thinking, shoot, this is a lot more meetings if I'm doing deal coaching or deal reviews every single week. (09:43) I'm doing reinforcement rhythms every single week. You talked about finding a way to make sure that your reinforcement rhythms are not new meetings, they're using your existing coaching rhythms. Could you talk about that a little bit more? I have four basic rhythms that we run in two different buckets. The four rhythms are deal reviews, team meetings, bi-weekly one-on ones, and then kind of our org wide coaching. (10:05) The first two, deal reviews and team meetings are much more around process. Are we running the forecast process? Is our sales process running right? Are is our AES prospecting? You talk about the deal reviews for sales and forecasting and your team meetings. This is where you might talk about your AE prospecting workflow. (10:23) The second bucket is skill-based. This is where I want to teach somebody how to do a discovery call, how to do negotiations. That would be in your bi-weekly one-on- ones where you're doing personal development with people and skill development or in this bi-weekly team training where you might do like a group call coaching session. (10:39) Let's take two examples because again, there's two buckets of these meetings. What you don't want to do is take your one-on- ones and talk about your forecasting methodology. What you want to do is you want to take your deal review and make sure that you use that for forecasting. That's where we're going to take exactly what we learned in one of the other modules and we're going to make sure that they're thinking about forecasting the right way. (10:59) And if they're not, we're going to ask them the questions that help them realize that how they're off and then we're going to guide them to the right way of thinking and we're going to reinforce that week after week after week. If it's a skill-based thing, let's say that we're teaching them new discovery skills and that what we would do is we do our training, but in our bi-weekly one-on-one or in our team meeting, that's where we would slot in the, "Oh, you know what? We want to make sure today that we do our team call coaching (11:24) on our new discovery process. We're not going to just do a random call about a big deal." Bring your enablement into your regular operating rhythm meetings and you kind of kill two birds with one stone. You get the reinforcement of the training that you've already done and you also get to fill those containers with things that are valuable and it makes you look consistent as a leader. (11:45) So, if I've trained my team on forecasting this quarter, I reinforce that in deal reviews. If I've trained my team on discovery, I can reinforce that in team meeting one-on- ones or orwide skill building sessions. Very rarely do you need to schedule a new meeting on top of your rhythms. Instead, whenever you're training your team on something new, try to reinforce it in one of your existing four rhythms. (12:07) And pro tip is if you find yourself creating new meetings, you've probably overtrained and overdone it with your reps. If you can't fit what you're training and teaching them into the established rhythms, you either don't have enough rhythm or you're trying to do too much. So, let's walk through some of the keys to running trainings that don't suck, which is pretty uncommon on Salesforce. (12:29) The first one is is pick the best rep to run the meeting. All right, top reps that can demonstrate the skill that use it every single day, they're the best people to train it. They have the clout. They have the street cred. They have the attention of those people. People want to know how they're winning. (12:45) Use those top reps in order to do your training. You as a manager can also do the training, and that's not bad either, but you have to be willing to demonstrate it in front of reps in live calls. Don't be doing trainings with your team internally and then not showing them how to do that stuff in live calls. Great pro tip on this one is take a something that someone needs that you find in their deal review. (13:07) You find out, oh, they're having trouble getting an eye date and say this, your next call for that deal, why don't you have me come in and I'll model for you how to get that eye date in real time. You can watch me do it. That is a way to get street credit. That's real training right there that people care about. It moves deals. (13:21) The last person that you should bring in to do training is your enablement team. However, they're the first person you should bring in when you're thinking about doing training. Their job is to help support you in delivering the materials and the concepts in the right way. But their job isn't to do your training. (13:38) That's your rep's job on your team and your job. All right. Now, we need to run a great meeting and do a great training because we have a great person. The key to this is show don't tell. 70% of us are visual learners and all of us learn better experientially with our hands on something. So, let's take cold call training as an example. The first thing I'm going to do is lay out the framework. (13:58) The framework for me is opener, provocative question, green turkey, and then three strikes and you're out. Then, what I'm going to do is I'm going to break each one of those steps down and show how they interrelate. What do they actually mean? How do they actually work? Once I have that, I'm going to have reps talk to me about how they might make it their own. (14:15) What changes would they make? How would they think it would do? How does their personality fit into this? Once we have that locked in, we go straight into role plays and get over that hesitancy of trying a new skill. If you do those four things, explain the whole picture, break down the parts individually, make sure that they have a sense of ownership and like I've can put my own little salt and pepper on this and season it the way I like to. (14:37) And then lastly, do a great roleplay to start to lock in it with an experiential learning uh situation. That's how you turn something from a lecture that people ignore and do slack during into something that people look forward to because they can feel themselves changing and adopting the new skills that will help them. One of the things I like to say is process makes you great, but documentation makes you legendary. (14:59) So the things that we've taught you are processes. If you adopt them, you're going to be great. If you actually write them down and memorialize them in a document, all of a sudden you're going to become legendary. And so what I mean by that is is when you do a training, create a one-pager for yourself. Like how would I have done this if I was a manager when you're a VP, I'm telling you, you're going to go grab those documents to help your your managers out, right? There's a one pager for the rep. (15:25) Give the rep something to tangibly hand hold on to, maybe something that they can put on their desk while they're in a call to reference while they're doing these things, right? Those are things that really make a difference. And it goes from, hey, my manager just had this cool idea to train me on to, "This guy is freaking prepared. He's got paperwork. (15:44) He's showing me how to do it. I've got leave behinds to help me with this." That kind of seriousness from the manager creates seriousness in the rep. Folks, it's not super hard to do this stuff. If you have a deck, you can present the deck, plug it into chat GBT and then have chat GBT spit out a notion doc that bullet points out a lot of the outlines that you need and then just store those inside of notion or a Google doc or something like that. (16:08) You do not have to be this brilliant graphic designer to build basic enablement handbooks. They can literally be 3x3 bullet outlines and that is more than most sales teams have. So now that you've got the right person, now that you've done an effective trading, how do you know if it actually works? There's two ways. Quantitative. (16:24) That means you pick a metric that you want to move and you make sure that it moves. And there's bad metrics and good metrics. A bad metric, for example, with discovery would be like we want to increase our win rates. Win rates are pretty distant from the discovery process. There's a lot of other things that can affect the win rate. (16:40) A better metric would be what does our stage one to stage two conversion look like. That's what is meaningful in that specific area of the sales process. So quantitative is a metric. Make sure that it's really close and as tight to the behavior that you're trying to get as possible. The other one is qualitative. We want to hear things like, "Boom, did you hear how Oman killed that discovery call today? Oh my god, did you see how Jamie crushed his cold call?" Like, we're looking for those tape review, gong call outs, customer reactions, you (17:11) know, what are the things that we can do qualitatively that show us that we're moving the needle? So you're looking for quantitative number movement and you're looking for qualitative emotional kind of feedback that's saying yes, we're making a difference. People are seeing a difference in what we're doing. (17:23) And folks, that's part of the reason you do the reinforcement rhythms is you train in week one and then in weeks 2, three, four, you coach, coach, coach, and you will see how people are improving on discovery between weeks 2, three, and four. But if you just train in week one and then hope they're getting it in the next 3 weeks, you're going to flip the table because in week four you're going to watch a call and you're going to be like, "Well, people completely forgot everything we taught them four weeks ago." And that's because (17:47) you didn't reinforce it every single week. Yep. All right, let's recap. One, make sure you don't overload your team. Just make sure that you're not doing so much stuff that nobody can digest everything that you're doing. Two, make sure that you have the right people in the room doing the training. (18:01) Who the content comes from all matters almost as much as the content itself. Three is make sure that you do more reinforcement than you do training. If you're not reinforcing things, behaviors probably aren't happening. And then lastly is make sure that you have some kind of quantitative or qualitative way to make sure that the training that you've done is getting you the benefits that you hope for. folks. (18:21) Attached. You will see down below a copy of the rep enablement matrix and example rhythms that you can use to reinforce discovery, forecasting, and other common skill changes you will have in sales.