Unlocking Sales Success: A Strategic Approach to Training Your Team | Ep 40

Josh Long

00:00:01.200 - 00:00:06.753

This is episode 40, and on it I go over my view on the best approach to sales training and how.

Podcast Host

00:00:06.769 - 00:00:22.285

To best unlock your sales team. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last.

Josh Long

00:00:31.135 - 00:18:39.889

Hey. Hey. Excited to dig in with you today about sales training.

I think it's quite the black hole for a lot of companies, and I've had some discussions lately with some buddies about helping them with their companies and their teams. And I think it's great to want to invest in your people and want to help them get better at what they do.

And there's no shortage of people out there willing that are great, that have great intentions, have great skills and experience to help your team. But I think so many companies just don't know where to start. So I'm going to talk about a buddy of mine.

He's got, let's say, $100 million company in the distribution space. And so they've got outside sales reps, they've got some inside sales reps, they've got customer support reps, they've got some purchasing managers.

And he said, you know, we meet every Monday morning. There's like 35 to 40 of us, and we just don't know what to work on.

And so we had this gal come in, and a friend of one of the partners knew her, and she proposed doing a monthly call or monthly meeting once a month for an hour and a half of a training with all those people. And I was like, you know, that's not a bad idea, but it's not the best idea. And so we got into this discussion around, well, what is the best idea?

And the reality is that the best idea is to first assess, like, where. Where are you at in your marketplace? How much penetration do you have in certain markets, certain areas, certain prospects?

What needs to happen next for the growth of your company? And for them, it really is like 80, 20, right? We just need to go figure out who the 20% are that are generating 80% of the results.

And he's got about 10 people that are outside sales reps that are all doing well, but they aren't really supported or trained or equipped to go to the next level. And so for me, it was like, you know, let's look at those 10 and let's start figuring out where they're at, like, what's their quota?

How much are they producing? What are their best clients, who's on the line for them? What's in their pipeline and what do they need help with.

And then let's go look at their market and figure out who are the targets that you guys can go pursue and land and take away from your bigger competitors. And it really just became this super strategic conversation around how to lean more into the strengths as opposed to improve the weaknesses.

And I'm not saying that his customer support people or inside salespeople are weaknesses. They just don't have the leverage that his outside salespeople do.

And after about 20 minutes of talking, he saw really clearly that just having somebody come in once a month to do an hour and a half of training with everybody together wasn't really going to move the needle. And I wasn't trying to dissuade him from working with this other trainer. I didn't know that person at all.

I had no perspective on their effectiveness or anything like that. It's just starting with a more strategic question. And I think so many business owners don't, don't start there.

And obviously I'm a consultant, obviously I'm paid for results. Obviously I spend all my life analyzing like, how do we get the maximum output for the minimum resource?

How do we find the little hinge that swings the biggest door? How do we reduce waste and recover profits as quickly as possible? Those are just the things that go on in my brain all day, every day.

And so when I get into conversations with business owners, my goal is to just help them cut through the noise and try to find the most effective and efficient path forward.

And so with this friend of mine, we're going to continue the conversation and I'm excited to dig in because there's so many layers to improving their top performers performance and equipping them to figure out, hey, what do you need resource wise to be able to cut through the noise and help your company stand out in the crowd? What do you need to make it easier to get to decision makers?

And how can we equip you so that you're nurturing this six month to two year sales cycle to land these clients?

And then how can we go look at all of your best clients and what do they have in common and how did you find them and what's the analysis that needs to happen to start breaking down? Like, what was the recipe that went into place for you guys to land these wonderful clients?

Have you gotten endorsement letters from these top decision makers at your best clients on their company letterhead that they're willing to give you because they love you and have you asked for those things that you can put into maybe a proposal deck or a quote presentation or something that helps the new decision makers that you're trying to win over see that others just like them are already working with you and love working with you. So those are the things that come to mind.

Just off the top of my head, I mean, here, in a few seconds, a few minutes of talking to you, and it's exactly the same conversation I already had talking with my friend around how to dig into this more strategically to really, really unlock the big wins. Now, it doesn't mean that when we dig in with these top 10 sales reps that we have to put the throttle to 11 and light everybody's hair on fire.

That's not the goal. The goal is just how do we find the most effective path to getting the most meaningful outcome?

And so I would say with those 10 people, I expect, and I've done this before with other companies, where you find one person that's probably the best performer that's going to be able to handle change and be flexible and is excited to flex their muscle and keep stretching and growing. And we start with that one person and we say, hey, let's go test this out.

How about you approach these five or ten whales or dream clients or whatever, and see how they respond. And I'm going to work with you one on one. You go meet with them, come back, let's debrief, and let's figure out what's missing.

How did you get caught feeling like your pants were down in the meeting, or did they share something about your competitor that you didn't know? That is good insight now, good intel that we can go and recalibrate our approach with.

And so by taking just that one person, that one top performer, and going and testing some things without feeling like they're going to be derailed or distracted or demotivated, then we're able to test some things out before we go roll it out to the rest of the team. Now, we may say to the rest of the team, hey, Bob's over here trying this out.

We're going to give you feedback and feel free to apply whatever Bob's learned. We're not trying to hold you guys back from new things. We just don't want to go balls to the wall right out of the gate and have a lot of chaos.

Because in stable companies, you don't need to turn the throttle to 11 or put the throttle down to 11, and you don't need to rush to do something.

You could do it Methodically and figure out, okay, let's test some things and let's figure out what makes the most sense to roll forward that's the most sustainable and attracts the best clients and provides the greatest return on everybody's time. And so that's how I would approach. If we go all the way back, this whole conversation started with, how do we do sales training?

At the end of the day, there's a lot of companies out there selling sales training, and there's a lot of people going through sales training. And I'm not going to bash the sales training world.

I think, like most anything, training really only works for the people that are eager to use it and going to apply it. Just like education, right?

If we look at the school system, the school system was originally created to help filter out those that thrived in a formal education environment and that could climb and go to higher education to become the thought leaders, the experts, the professionals of the world.

And then everybody else was shuffled off to trades and labor roles and stuff that they were more adapted to or adept at, that sort I'm looking for, but they were more better suited for. And so when we think of training for salespeople, a lot of times it ends up being just like regular education.

We're trying to compensate for the weakness of the lowest common denominator.

And in that example of a Monday morning, once a month meeting with 35 to 40 people, 75% of which are customer support plus they're not really salespeople. You can't really do a lot of sales training and techniques and scripting with those people that are going to make a material difference.

The only thing that I would focus on with those customer support plus people are. Where are the areas where they're creating friction and preventing sales from coming in, from blocking orders that are lined up and ready to go.

And how can we use those customer support people to gather better intel about where there's friction for our best customers when they go to order, maybe there's something on the website that this one client just keeps ordering a specific thing because there's a variable on the website that's missing, or there's a glitch, or they go to checkout and there's a problem. And they said, oh, but I got charged shipping. I put in my customer order and it still charged me a lot of shipping.

And you guys give me free shipping and blah, blah, blah. And so that becomes a system problem, right? Where the system is blocking the sale.

And I would say that those customer support plus people are Great for feedback loops of where there's friction feedback around where customers are like, gosh, you know, if you guys get this in this size or this color, I'd buy a lot more. But otherwise I'm just buying this other standard size and lower volume. And they may not say that until they reach out to somebody.

And so I would use the customer support people to be more curious of like, hey, how can we help you better? What's missing? And be that frontline boots on the ground to get that feedback. And they're going to thrive in that because they're not hard closers.

They're not that are going to be super strategic around, hey, have you thought about adding this product line or this service line or whatever you do with your long term clients? They're just going to be more about making that client's lives easier and the experience more enjoyable.

And using them as a frontline to reduce friction and find those friction points is really critical. So as you think through gosh, my sales team's not performing. They need training.

And the reality is that sales training does help on the basics and I have seen it move the needle for some people.

But more often than not, especially with small businesses, your sales team needs better help prioritizing being strategic, figuring out where the growth opportunities are.

And I think that's where a really powerful VP of sales or sales manager comes in and works with the head of marketing and figures out, okay, what are our growth objectives? Where are we trying to move in the market? Meet with the CEO in that meeting, right?

Of what are our big opportunities that we can tackle and then break it down like, okay, if that's where we're going, marketing, here's what we need from you to support sales. Sales, here's how you can prioritize and figure out who that target audience is and just start marching down.

And in all of that, there's no need for sales training there. It's just more strategic targeting and better equipping of what resources do those salespeople need.

I had a client a year and a half ago with my buddy Perry Marshall.

He brought me in and the company was doing in the $37 million range and they had on my, I'll, I'll share a session later on my sustainable scale framework.

But if, when we look at it, they were really sales driven, they had a little bit of systems to support it, but they didn't have any marketing leadership. And so the sales team was just driving everything and they would go to trade shows and the owner was really an innovator.

He's kind of a harebrained Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Christopher Lloyd, character, brilliant guy, absolutely brilliant.

Had so many patents in their space and had built a great company, but they didn't have strategic marketing leadership and they really didn't have strategic sales leadership like I'm talking about. And so they hired us thinking we were going to fix all their marketing and we were going to come with this big whiz bang marketing plan.

All we did was clean things up, reduce some, some chaos and help them focus on, you know what, you just need to go after these 37 whales clients, whale prospects, and they're only 37. And if you land one or two of those a year, you guys will double in the next two to three years and keep doubling.

And they were so blown away, but it was just more strategic, right? And they had great salespeople that had been with them for over 10 years, were all capable, but they didn't have strategic guidance.

And so it was kind of like chaos on a stick before we got there. And they had hired this big marketing agency that they were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month with.

And I got them to cancel and save them bunches of money. And it was like they just needed. They ended up hiring a cmo. And he was okay, but he wasn't really critical for the role.

It was just, they just needed some high level strategic direction. And we were just involved for like two months. And it blew them away how clear this got.

And they said we'd given them years of work and focus to work on just from those couple months, but it really was just being more strategic and less chaotic. Less chasing squirrels and chasing the new shiny and more focus on, hey, what do you guys really need to go land these national accounts?

So as you think about sales training, it's not bad. It's fine. But it's not the most strategic thing you can do with your company and with your sales team.

I think the value of figuring out where your salespeople are performing, where they are feeling ill equipped to go after larger, bigger, better clients, where they are feeling like, hey, the market's turning. I don't know what to say.

All of that strategic stuff that should be coming from the CEO or the VP of sales or the head of marketing, CMO if you have one. And that's where the leverage comes in with, with regard to your sales team.

And inevitably, when I work with my buddy here with this company, I'm talking to you about that we're going to assess all the salespeople, and inevitably there's going to be somebody that's just not performing, and we're probably going to replace them and we're going to top grade them. And that happens 100% of the time.

When I come into any company for any role that we're looking at with their team, I just start shining some lights under the cracks and crevices, and I'm like, why? Why are they hiding over there? What's going on?

And I apply the lightest accountability, just a little bit of support and direction, and they either crack and quit or they prove that they're not going to. Not going to improve their performance, and we got to let them go.

And the beauty is when you top grade, when you take the bottom performer and replace them with somebody that challenges your best performer, the results are fantastic. And the energy that it brings into the company and all of the benefits are just fantastic.

So, anyway, I think at the end of the day, it's really hard for small business owners to know where to start when it comes to their sales team, unless they've been a sales manager themselves in the past. But even then, most business owners are just overwhelmed.

Running around, hair on fire, fire extinguisher in both hands, being a fireman, putting out fires that they started most likely. And I think stepping in more strategically.

And the beauty is when you do it more strategically, there's less chaos, you move slower, you tend to become a sniper, and you tend to take out the big game, um, off in the hillside one at a time. And you don't have to run around chasing all the squirrels or herding cats or whatever analogy that I can butcher for you.

But anyway, let me know your thoughts. Hope this is helpful. I think being more strategic and being more supportive of your top reps.

Lean into your strengths, lean into the little hinges that swing big doors, and stop worrying about compensating or recover or improving weaknesses. Is much better. Much better approach and produces way, way more fruit. So hope you get a lot from this and look forward to any feedback you have.

Take care. This podcast theme music is an excerpt.

Podcast Host

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From Triptych of Snippets by Septahelix.

Josh Long

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