Are your salespeople practicing during the game, or are they practicing in practice to get ready for the game? In this episode we dig into actionable tactics to make intentional and productive practice a reality in the world of B2B sales.
Are your salespeople practicing during the game, or are they practicing in practice to get ready for the game? In this episode we dig into actionable tactics to make intentional and productive practice a reality in the world of B2B sales.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder Corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. We're talking about practice today. Jonathan Mayhan, co-founder of the Practice Lab, we're going to be digging into this whole idea of how do we get better with practice. Jonathan, good to see you, yeah no good to be on here. Corey, yeah, this is the original AI.
Speaker 2:If anybody doesn't know, the Allen Iverson interview.
Speaker 1:you got to go back and watch that. He's sitting there at the post game interview. They're asking about practice. He's like practice, practice. We're out there playing the game. He asked me about practice and it's hilarious. So the original AI, Allen Iverson, who scored 38 points, shooting 31% from the field and never won a championship. Now we're on to the new AI. You know what? The new AI isn't going to change human behavior by itself. Humans need to get better, and that's where Jonathan comes in. Why are you dedicating this portion of your career to helping people practice?
Speaker 2:Wonderful question.
Speaker 2:It's I spent like 10 years in sales, you know, before this, and it's the piece that I always needed and never got.
Speaker 2:And I guess I'm one of those people when I suddenly see clearly that something is a miss, that something is being done the wrong way, I have this really strong desire to try to see if I can figure it out and fix it. And really this started as just like a side hustle for me, right, but it's something I just got so engrossed in, so passionate about and so interested in that, you know, eventually became my main hustle. And this is this is not what I do, but really just because for 10 years I had to watch salespeople struggle unnecessarily. And once I really saw the light and realized, wait a minute, we're the only discipline who struggles in this way without you know, using practice to solve the problem, I realized, hey, this is what I want to do. So I want to help out the sales community with this, helping them to practice and grow their skills in the same ways that musicians and athletes and Olympic athletes do, because shoot it works so well for them.
Speaker 1:Let's get some clarity on specifically what is the problem that you're solving?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the problem is that sales is a really, really freaking difficult thing to do. Well, and when I say do well, right, we're trying to talk about the, you know, consultative selling that I think most folks you know agree is the way to go right, where you're listening and you're empathetic and you're taking time to understand your needs and you're really, you know, adding value to the relationship and helping them, rather than just selling. When you're presenting, you're not just like talking about all the cool things you can do, but you're helping to weave a narrative, the way their life would be different once they had your solution in it. Like that's the kind of selling that we all agree should be happening. And it's really actually very difficult to do. And unfortunately, salespeople are kind of left on their own to figure out how to close the gap between what they just know in their mind should be happening versus what's actually happening. And the funny thing about what they know in their mind is they weren't born with that.
Speaker 1:When you're born, you have some. I don't know much about kids. I don't have any yet. I probably have some someday, but I'm almost 40. So we'll see. I think the thing with babies is they've got a desire to eat, for example, and then at some point they have a desire to go explore and walk around and things like this. They don't ever have this natural biological desire to sell something that doesn't exist. It's not part of our DNA programming. What happens is it's an environmental influence. They see things. They either see it at the store, because pretty much the only salespeople they're exposed to are in retail, or they see it in movies, which are hilarious and exaggerated, and that's what forms their perception of sales. So when they go out and try to do what they've seen other people do, it doesn't align with what good sales practices look like. That's my opinion. Here's your thoughts. You actually have kids, so you probably are more clear. You actually have kids, so you probably are more qualified to talk on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting. Certainly, I think that the way sales has typically been done and the way most people experience salespeople is not a particularly effective way to sell, nor is it a good experience for the buyer or the seller. So there is a certain kind of like reprogramming that has to happen with what you think your role is as a salesperson. And actually I'll say that most sales training companies out there actually do a pretty good job of helping people with this, helping people to see how their job isn't to push and pressure and convince.
Speaker 2:Their job is to help and serve and remove friction in the buying process and I think that most people who have been in sales for a while, who have been exposed to good sales training and good sales podcasts and sales advice on LinkedIn. Most of them have kind of absorbed that and come around to that and seen their job as a seller to be different. The problem is, though, to actually do that requires massive amounts of mental and cognitive and emotional and communication skills, and those skills aren't generally ones. Most people are born with a particularly high supply, and most people in their lives don't have to develop them in particularly high supply, at least not the amount you would need to really sell effectively. So you get a situation where everyone is being trained on like what good selling looks like they're nodding their heads going, yeah you're right.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, this is amazing. They love the sales trainer.
Speaker 2:Right, they are there, or whoever you know was teaching them. But in the end nothing really changes.
Speaker 2:Because in the moment when the pressure is on, you got a buyer in front of you and it's your job to, like you know, do some discovery and unpack the situation. It's hard to think up the right question to ask and the right things to say and the right way to leave the conversation. It's hard to pick up on all the subtle social nonverbal cues that are happening in the call right, especially on Zoom. It's hard to manage your own emotions. It's hard to read their emotions. It's hard to word your questions in a way that makes them effective right. It's hard to respond in the moment when something goes off course and it's unexpected.
Speaker 2:All of those things require really advanced mental skills and the whole sales industry. So this is kind of coming back to the question of what's the problem. The problem is the whole sales industry is ignoring the skills component of good selling. They're assuming that once you know what good selling is, once you understand in your mind what your role in the sales process is, boom, you're good to go. Now go do that. Go do that. Good selling stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, you just said. You just said no and do. And this is what Hillman, my co-founder, always says is you got to bridge the gap between knowing something and doing something. And his little funny joke that he has is he says if everybody knew, if everybody did what they knew, they'd all be skinny, rich and happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, seriously.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that gap between knowing and doing is a huge gap. And it's a gap that mostly gets ignored in sales or if it's addressed, it's just assumed that the reason they're doing it is because they don't really care and they don't really want to and they're really trying right, not even about sales.
Speaker 1:This is the fascinating thing. I do a lot of activities because I'm 40 and single, so activities abound. I play chess, I play pool, I play golf, I fish and in all of these things well. So chess is really about knowing, because you don't have to physically do anything, you just have to know what to do. Now the knowing is pretty hard once you get to a certain level. I mean, it's hard for anybody, because the rating scale just puts you against people that are about at your level where you've got a 50-50 chance of winning In pool and in other activities golf specifically, because you've got three-dimensional axis, more so than you do in pool.
Speaker 1:You've got to physically do it, so you don't have to know what shot to hit and you have to do it. And in pool you've got things you can control, big three things angle, spin and speed. So you've got to know the angle, you've got to know the spin, you've got to know the speed, and it's not intuitive. But you can watch Efren Reyes videos on YouTube all day long. You can watch who's just shame, van boning, the current, the new Efren. You can watch those guys and you say, oh yeah, I know how to do that, and then you go to the pool hall, you get the shot to get somebody in a tournament. Even if you remember the shot, doing it under pressure ain't going to happen, yeah 100%.
Speaker 1:And this is a thing in sales right. When you look at other industries.
Speaker 2:It's laughable, like you just mentioned, it's laughable to think you could prepare for your next pool tournament by sitting in on a seminar about pool right.
Speaker 1:It's laughable.
Speaker 2:You know you would need the practice, but in sales we actually think that can do to fix the problem right. There are companies out there who see wow, our team is doing a pretty poor job during demos. Let's hire a sales trainer to talk with them for three hours, explain how to run a good demo and boom, problem solved. And they actually think that's going to work and are actually disappointed and surprised when, three months later, people are still just demoing the way they've always demoed.
Speaker 1:Well, it's funny on that front because the sales trainers know what works too.
Speaker 1:But then when someone because I mean I own a sales training company people come to us all the time, they're like we have $20,000 to spend, like okay, well, you've got a $200,000 problem, what do you want us to do? They're like we have $20,000. It sounds like cool. Here's what we can do for 20K, that's it. But you know what you can't do for 20K? Do something for a large team that's going to stick 12 months from now unless they've got an awesome sales enablement team internally that can actually run with this stuff. But I've talked about this on several shows before, where the sales enablement team typically put so much effort into the preparation vetting vendors, doing project planning, things like that and then having an event, and then they don't put a ton of effort into the afters thing because they're moved onto the next stuff. But what you're talking about is you got to put the effort into the reinforcement and the practice, so you deploy those skills in some kind of training and you've got to practice, practice, practice till you get mastery.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and I'll even kind of make a bit of a distinction there too, though the practice piece and the reinforcement piece are both of the parts of elements. They can be happening at the same time, but they are different. So a lot of times I hear people talk about reinforcing training, and obviously that's better right. Compare someone showing up and explaining to you how to do it once versus someone showing up and explaining to you how to do it and reminding you how to do it and reminding you how it's important to do it every single month. Clearly, the reinforcement piece matters, but reinforcement itself doesn't solve the fundamental gap between knowing and doing. It's like if, the first time you told me I wasn't able to pull it off, you coming back a month later and telling me again I'm still not going to be able to pull it off.
Speaker 1:That just types the retention of the knowing it doesn't help anything on the doing side of it right.
Speaker 2:That's it. So reinforcement is wonderful for retention, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of the doing. You need the practice for the doing, but of course you're totally right that one practice experience isn't going to do much. You need repeated or practice experiences over time to really do it. So it's like combining practice and reinforcement, is it? But reinforcement on its own isn't necessarily going to solve your knowing versus doing problem. It's just going to solve their retention problem. But again, knowing it wasn't the problem to begin with.
Speaker 2:So still, knowing it three months later isn't really going to solve your problem of behavior change.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's say you've got somebody who's been trained, the content's been deployed, the knowledge has been obtained. Average person that's in an upward career trajectory and that's the nice way of saying they're still working their way into their job. They haven't mastered the job yet. How many hours a week should they be practicing? I know it depends. Give me a range, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I can say that when I was a seller there were periods where I practiced for an hour a day and those were my very best selling periods. That's when I was hitting my own personal records and exceeding my quota by a lot. So I think an hour a day if you can swing, it is really good.
Speaker 1:Now the only way I was able to do that was by coming in early to work.
Speaker 2:I wasn't able to give up my 40 hours of productivity time, so I just kind of added on some hours in the morning, got up a little bit earlier. So if you could do an hour a day, that'll serve you best, or even half an hour a day, that'll serve you best. Now, that being said, I know many people are doing no practice today and the idea of an hour a day is just lappable. So I can say that we've seen teams just do an hour a week and see really meaningful progress.
Speaker 1:So if all you can do is an hour a, week, you're still going to see good progress.
Speaker 2:Just something, yeah, like most salespeople get. I mean, if you think about like practice where it's there's no money on the line, it's not a real prospect, right? Most salespeople get I don't know a couple hours a year of like shitty role play their manager made them do during a one on one. That's all they get, like. Generally speaking, in sales, the opportunity to actually practice your skills in advance in an environment that isn't you know money on the line is basically zero, which is, again, crazy, because you go look at every other performance based discipline, from chess players to professional athletes to, you know, improv comedians every single one of them spends more time preparing than actually performing when money is on the line.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just stand up, I spend, I'd say for my I've got about 20 minutes of standard material right now. It took me three years to get that together. Probably 200 hours of work over the course of three years for 20 minutes. Actually, you know what probably took me 400 hours, I don't know, I don't really count. I just enjoyed the writing jokes and then guess what, guess who can't deliver it as good as he wants to, and so he's taken a pause from actually doing standup this guy, because it's not just knowing the joke. You got to write the joke, you got to know the joke, you got to deliver the joke. And the really hard part for me is tying them all together into a common thread that has that callback and just hits hard, cause that's where it gets fun and that's what separates the amateurs from the pros. You mentioned the idea of role plays. I want to dig into that a little bit more. What makes a good role play?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the way role plays typically done is not particularly not very effective for a handful of ways. One is the environment and the context of it which leads to changes in the reps brain and how the reps brain shows up. So I'm going to explain what I mean by this. There's really two fundamental modes your brain can be operating in. It's the performance zone or the improvement zone. Actually, I borrowed those expressions from Rob Jeffsson when we were talking on his podcast, so he was props to him for those terms, but performance zone and improvement zone.
Speaker 2:In the performance zone your brain's objective is to do the very best it can reliably do in that moment. And this is kind of a balancing act of brain plays between what things will be best but also what it can most reliably do Right. And you know, some people's personalities might like aim for something more risky that might pay off better, where some people will always stick to the tried and truth. But everyone's going to be balancing those factors what do I think will work best? But also what's tried and true, that I know under pressure I can do. So, you know. An example is if you're a volleyball player and just yesterday you learned a jump serve, but you just learned it yesterday and now you're in a championship game, you're not going to try that jumps, you're going to stick with what you know right.
Speaker 1:And you're going to do the very best, yeah.
Speaker 2:You're going to do the very best serve you can right now. So that's the performance zone, and in the performance zone you typically don't do anything differently. All you do is you just do whatever your current best is. You play it safe. Play it safe and play it reliably right what you can count on versus the improvement zone, the objective there is to learn, to grow, to be better, to do different, to try something new on for size.
Speaker 2:So the improvement zone is where you really want to practice and the improvement zone is where you aren't actually trying to do the best you can do. You're trying to learn something new, trying to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. You're almost trying to fumble and make a mistake, because once you fumble and make a mistake, that's your sign that you reach the edge of your abilities and that's where you want to be. So most role plays happen in the performance zone. On sales teams today it's like hey guys, we got a new talk track, we got to get you certified.
Speaker 2:You got to stand up here in front of the room. You got to hop on a Zoom call with me. You got to do the new talk track and prove to me that you can do it. And that's the role play that they do. That is the performance zone. Right? That is prove to me, you can do it. No one's going to get any better doing that, or even you know, even if it's not like a certification thing, I've seen teams who did like objection handling role plays and again, the context is all right. One of the time everyone's got to do this. I know you hate it, but you got to do it. Get up here. I'm going to hit you with an objection and you got to try to overcome it in front of everybody and your sales leadership, and we want to see if you can do it All right. Here's my objection Give it your best shot. Again, under that environment, the person's trying to prove their worth. They're trying to prove to the manager and their peers they know what they can do and they can handle it.
Speaker 1:All they're going to do in that environment is whatever their current best is. Yeah, they're not going to get any better than I can do anything differently. They're just going to take whatever their current best is and they're just going to do that.
Speaker 2:So they're not going to get any better from me. It's almost just going to like solidify, make more permanent, whatever their best is. So for a role play to be effective, it needs to be in a totally different context and understanding Right. It needs to be clear going into it. The reason we're here is to push ourselves to our abilities and to make mistakes. You're not here to show off. You're not here to prove how good you are. We're here to find what's weak in your performance so that we can grow and improve it.
Speaker 2:So there needs to be an element of psychological safety, there, where people feel willing to be vulnerable, to make mistakes, to mess up. That's how you get them an improvement zone. That's how they are brain. You can make new choices, explore new paths, do things differently and ultimately change their behavior.
Speaker 1:There's so much to dig in here.
Speaker 2:So that's the first thing the context.
Speaker 1:We're going deep. We're going deep on this. There's so much to dig in here. Okay, the first thing I want to talk about is how do you make sure that your role play partner is doing a good job. So let's say there's two people. There's person A and person B. Person A is the person that's practicing, that's trying to get better. Person B is playing a role in order to be part of this conversation and give person A the opportunity to be better.
Speaker 1:In my experience, I've seen a lot of people that are person B, that are playing the role, just do a terrible job and not actually be realistic, and that leads to one of two things Either person A doesn't take it seriously because they're like oh, that's not how it actually works in the real world, or it's just too easy and person B is not able to adapt. Again, using the chess analogy, when I play the computer on the airplane, when I don't have Wi-Fi connection, I can pick an easy or medium or a hard opponent to play against and they're going to adapt to the level that I set out for them. I see people struggle with this when it comes to role play. So how do we get person B, the person that's playing the role to help person A. How do we get them to do a good job?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what a wonderful question. The answer is person B is never going to do a good job. We need to design the practice so that it doesn't require person B to do a good job in order for the skill to be grown. And hey, if someone finds a way to make person B do a great job, I'm more proud of them. But we've been tinkering for two years and we haven't found a way to reliably make person B do a good job, being a prospect. So we've had to design our exercise and our practice so that it doesn't require that of that person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how do we do that? I mean again, don't give me your secret sauce for your business. That's what I'm trying to get into. Let's talk conceptually. We have to know what that looks like and we have to put thought into it and we have to design it. And if someone doesn't know how to do that, I imagine they can reach out to you. How can they reach you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. You go chatting up on LinkedIn. I talk about this all the time, so definitely find me there. That was not my intention.
Speaker 1:So, everybody, that's not my intention. I wasn't here trying to steal the guy's IP. I was just super curious about this because I've seen this as such a big problem, where you get in there and they're like just doing stuff that doesn't make any sense and then all of a sudden it doesn't go anywhere. All right, so let's say that we've designed a really good role play and then we execute on it. How do we know when we're ready to exit? The learning Is the learning zone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't. Before we move on, I'm happy to answer, at least at a high level, that question asked, because I'm sure people are wondering now because that is a million dollar question. Right, how do you design practice that doesn't require a good practice partner. So a couple ways they didn't teach us that in college.
Speaker 1:we missed that class. Yeah, For sure. By the way all you professors out there, especially you folks at University of Pennsylvania, that don't think that sales is an academic worthy topic yours exhibit 256 for why it should be. So a couple ways to deal with that.
Speaker 2:One is that you can do practice that isn't role play based, and that is a big part of how we deal with it. There's exercises we do that just straight up aren't role plays. One is you can have real life, human to human conversations where you practice your communication skills but no one's making anything up Right.
Speaker 2:So, for example, if you want your salespeople to be better at the soft skills of reading body language, listening, being curious, being empathetic, they don't need to be selling to practice those things, you can put them in a human to human conversation with a partner and they can have a real conversation as real people, where one of them's you know talking and sharing and the other person is practicing the specific techniques and guidance they were given on how to tap into the curiosity and how to, like you know, be more empathetic Right. So one is to avoid role play altogether.
Speaker 2:There's another version of practice where we actually use recordings of that company's real sales cards as, like the mental gym we take their brains to, and those are the situations they're supposed to respond to, and react to and make decisions based on so again, not a practice partner a real recording of a real person. You get to respond to that scenario, make decisions based on that scenario. So that's one way to deal with it is just don't use role play, because there are some fundamental limitations to role play based on you know how good person V is at playing their part.
Speaker 2:But the other thing is that the time when you do use role play is for the more predictable moments. Those predictable moments in the sales conversation that carry a lot of weight and how it goes right, because if you're selling a product and you have competitors, it's just about all this. Do you can guarantee that at some time in the next month, one of your prospects is going to ask you the question how do you?
Speaker 1:compare to competitor.
Speaker 2:X and you better be able to handle that question in a smooth, confident, effective way, so you can role play that moment. So you figure out in advance what good looks like. So you figure out in advance what are the elements that need to be present in this response what is the tone we want to use, what's the language you want to use, what are the points you want to hit on. Then you have your practice partner feed you the prompt hey, how do you compare to competitor X? And then you practice your response, because person B may not be able to role play a whole conversation realistically, but they can say the words how do you compare to competitor X? Pretty damn realistically.
Speaker 1:Same thing with like common objections.
Speaker 2:Right, if you want to make sure the next time your prospect says you know we're going to have to hold this off six months. If you want to make sure that you can respond to that.
Speaker 2:Well, you can figure out what a good response looks like in advance, what a good framework is, how you want to handle it and approach it, and then you can have your partner feed you the prompt and we're going to have to hold off six months. So the way you solve that problem of the person B can't do it realistically is to zoom in a specific moments and give person B a really freaking easy job. Just give me this prompt, that's all I need you to do.
Speaker 1:Well, it's almost the difference between having fixed information and variable information. When it comes to objections, there's only a certain number of objections you're going to frequently hear. When it comes to competitors, there's only a certain number of competitors. You should have something that's out of the can for each of those. And I'll just use the chess analogy again. By the way, if y'all aren't playing chess, it's so great for your brain, great exercise. And if you have kids, keep them off drugs, get them on chess. Chesscom has great subscriptions for $10 a month. It's the most amazing thing in the world. They're not even a sponsor. I just really like them because there's there's specific tactics in chess. There's things like a discovered attack.
Speaker 1:So discovered attack is I've got my bishop pointed at your king, but I've got my knight in front of my bishop. So imagine that the knight's the horse, the bishop's the pointy one. For those of you that aren't indoctrinated, well, what happens is if that bishop's pointed at the king at a diagonal, that's check, but I've got my knight, my horse, in front of that bishop. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move my knight up to an over one or over to an up one. That's how a knight moves. It's funny how the night moves. Sorry, I had to do that. Bob Seeger's, great, All right. And so you move the, you move the knight, and all of a sudden the bishop's putting the king in check. So wherever you move the knight to, you can't be killed. So you could put him on a dangerous square where normally he could be killed, and you could even do something sneaky like attack a queen. So you're doing a double attack through this discovered check.
Speaker 1:Now, if you don't know what a discovered check is, you're not going to be able to play that move, but if you know what it is, you're going to be able to play it. You're going to look for it, you're going to be able to set it up and you're going to know when your opponent's playing it, which is the same exact thing. As you've got to know what the objections are, you've got to know what the competitors are and then, when it actually happens, be able to observe it and then execute on it. It's literally the same thing.
Speaker 1:But I think the problem with sales is that people look at this and they're like, yeah, but it's all variables. No, it's not all variables. There's a lot of fixed information, and so I think that's one of the things that I'd hope folks take away from this if you're not of this mindset that there is the fixed information, there's the variable information, and we've got to train our team inside and out and just really build their muscle around that fixed information Because, yeah, the pieces could be anywhere on the board, but a discovered attack can always be used.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, and I think what makes this approach challenging is you do have to like zoom in and figure out what are those key, pivotal moments that like have outsize impact on how the sales goes right. And then you got to figure out what does good look like in those moments so that you can really do effective practice. So competitor questions, common objections, those are good. I even think a little bit of this could be done in discovery.
Speaker 1:I would never advocate. I agree, yeah, the pain that we solve, the pain points solve for each persona in each market segment. That's fixed. We know what it is and all of this stuff has been solved for. We built a product for a reason, so we probably know all that stuff. When we built the product, we've got the best sales people on the team somewhere. They've probably already figured all this stuff out. Let's just go extract this information from these people's brains and then bring that onto the practice field. That's the way that I'd approach it, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I would. Myself, I would never advocate role playing a whole discovery call for the reason we mentioned the person B is not going to do a good job. However, you can role play moments. So, for example, one moment that I hear all the time when I'm reviewing sales calls is the moment where a buyer brings up a surface level pain. Yeah, we've been struggling with X lately. More often than not, the way the seller handles that moment is to go oh yeah, okay, we can help with that and then move right along.
Speaker 2:Oh no, and you're like no, dig deeper, so you can practice that moment. Surface level, pain comes up. We've been struggling with X seller pauses, so it gets curious. So it digs in a little bit more. Ask questions to uncover root causes, uncover impacts, uncover, you know, all these things that we know we need.
Speaker 1:So while you can't role play a whole conversation.
Speaker 2:You can role play that moment and how to handle that moment better.
Speaker 1:So if you are going to, use role plays.
Speaker 2:It's better to zoom in on moments for those things that are really variable, really unpredictable, like the rest of the discovery conversation or even like a lot of negotiations. That's where we generally recommend people use a different mode of practice, other than role play, just to strengthen their brains.
Speaker 2:Because the truth is if you can grow and strengthen wiring in your brain so that your brain is better at listening, better at reading body language, better at being curious, better at managing its own emotions, better at coming up with questions on the fly. You're going to handle every situation better, right? So just it doesn't matter how you get those skills. You can get those skills outside the context of sales, but get those skills and then you'll lose a soul better.
Speaker 2:Here's a football analogy and you may even know the team that says I'm not close enough to both of know it. But there's a football team that pretty regularly has their linebackers trained in the off season as boxers not because they want them throwing punches on the field, but because when you train as a boxer it strengthens the neurological wiring between your brain and your hands. It makes your hands faster, it makes your hands more accurate. Once you have that wiring, you're going to be a better linebacker.
Speaker 2:So similarly in sales you can practice becoming better at sales by doing things that aren't sales, just like you can become a better linebacker by doing boxing. It's all about just taking this hardware that you got between your ears and upgrading it and whatever means necessary so that you can form better in sales situations.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm swearing by the fact that chess and pool makes me a better salesperson.
Speaker 2:Wouldn't surprise me. I have a long time experience so I can't say for sure, but wouldn't surprise me.
Speaker 1:You see the world and I like pool because you have to physically do it and you have to control your emotions. And I think emotions are because when you're pulling golf for the same thing, especially when it folks like me, specifically folks that are well over 200 pounds and well over six feet tall, we like to swing hard because we've swung hard and hit home runs and we've hit 300 yard drives. And I was coaching somebody and pulling on my buddies the other day he's probably 65 and he said, hey, can I get a pool lesson? So sure, let's do it. So we went across the street, shot some pool and I noticed something that he was holding his stick so hard and some coaching I got from Dr Dave. If you're interested in learning some pool fundamentals, dr Dave on YouTube. He's amazing. I did a three day workshop with him Awesome guy and great teacher.
Speaker 1:I think he was teacher of the year last year and Dr Dave taught me something. He said look, you're holding your stick too tight. I just want you to do this and it's my right hand. So imagine you're holding the back end of the pool cue. He said I, just before you shoot, I want you to wiggle your fingers. Wiggle your fingers and cradle the thing and it takes that grip and it breaks the grip with the finger wiggle. All of a sudden you've got this loose grip which minimizes the probability that you're going to point the stick with your backhand. Your backhand is just there to guide it. It's like your left hand in the golf swing it's just there to guide it.
Speaker 1:And knowing your equipment, knowing how you're supposed to use your equipment, all of this type of things, I like using these analogies because it ties it back to sales and makes it less of this ambiguous thing.
Speaker 1:So there's the physical piece, but then there's the mental piece as well, and you talk about emotions and it was funny the example you gave. That was such an emotional based example that I see people use all the time where someone surfaces a pain and maybe it's not even a good pain point, it's just a symptom and the salesperson gets all excited and says that we can solve that. In the minute the salesperson gets emotional, they take off their lab coat and stethoscope and they start being a party animal or something and they're like oh yeah, we're going to do that, let's go Instead of being diagnostic, because when you tell your doctor that your arm hurts, they don't say, oh cool, let me give you some surgery or prescription. You got to go deeper into that. So what are some ways that you've seen are effective in helping salespeople recognize when they're getting over emotional and when they should just stay in the doctor, mindset that we'll be more diagnostic?
Speaker 2:I think the thing that we've done to help people is use practice and put people in the improvement zone, because we're in the performance zone and you're all focused just on the outcome, the outcome, the outcome.
Speaker 2:It's actually really really hard under that pressure to choose to do things differently and respond differently. Right, willpower alone is not a great way to change, you know, deeply dug grooves in your brain of habit and behavior. So by putting people in the improvement zone that we managed and we get them in the space. And we didn't explicitly instruct people when they're doing these exercises. When your partner says something, don't feel the pressure to jump in immediately Pause. Think about what they just said. Think about what it means. Give your body a second, keep your brain a second to actually get curious, right, because curiosity is that itch you get when you notice there's something you don't know and you kind of want to know it. But in order to have curiosity, you first have to notice the things you don't know and it usually takes especially when you're training this muscle.
Speaker 1:It takes some time for you to again say okay, I just learned something.
Speaker 2:Let me absorb that. But now let me pause and now think, now that I know that, what gaps in my knowledge can I see?
Speaker 1:And which of those?
Speaker 2:do. I feel a little itch around Something I want to, you know, get curious about. Then you can use that curiosity to inform the next question. But when you're training some, when you're training this muscle for the first time, that is not going to happen in a split second. That's going to take two seconds or three seconds to happen. So again, if you are forcing people in the performance zone, it's just never going to happen. They're going to change the behavior.
Speaker 2:So the way to do it, is to put your people in the improvement zone give them that space to slow down, to think, to consider the response before jumping in Now. Eventually they will have to speed it up, but the trick is by slowing down you allow them to choose a new path, to do something different, to start digging a new groove in their brain circuitry. That becomes accessible to them when they need it.
Speaker 1:One example here is which case study or which customer story to use, because I often see people they master one or two of them, they use them all the time, but they don't push themselves to learn 20 of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and again which one to use in which moment?
Speaker 1:to exactly, and if you're telling a customer story for the first time, you're not going to be good at it because you're not going to anything you do for the first time. So what I'm hearing is we need to make sure that we're getting improvement zone time as we're mastering each one of those case studies, and then, once we know it inside or not, we know how to deliver it, we know how to tee it up Then we can move it over to the performance zone and just execute.
Speaker 2:Yeah no, absolutely so. In that case, right. What I would have the team do is spend some time in advance learning the case study. This is like the knowledge piece, right? This is the part where you just want to fill their head with knowledge and information. There's a place for that. That's step one. Then step two is you put them in these practice scenarios where their partner feeds them various prompts and then, based on the prompt, they have to choose which customer story to tell.
Speaker 1:And the first time through you give people plenty of time.
Speaker 2:All right, they're going to give you the prompt. Take 30 seconds if you need a minute, if you need to think through all the case studies you have, figure out which one will work and then tell that story.
Speaker 1:And then, as you keep going.
Speaker 2:You can tighten it up a little bit and eventually look at to the point where it is instantaneous. The moment they hear this prompt, they know the right customer story to tell.
Speaker 1:But you're not going to get there right away.
Speaker 2:You need that time and improvement zone where there is that space to slow down and to think right and to make new connections in their brain and their mind they hadn't made before.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then you can speed things up first. So to the question that you asked even earlier.
Speaker 1:That didn't get around answering when do you leave the improvement zone?
Speaker 2:Right. When do you take it to performance zone? I think the answer for that is just when it starts getting boring Like when you're so good at it that you're like, oh my God, really, we're doing this exercise again, like I fucking got this.
Speaker 2:That's when you take it to performance zone. That's when you speed it up. That's when you put the pressure on and see if it holds up in. This behavior sticks, but not until it's boring, right? Until then, keep people in proven zone. Give them the space to slow down, to think it through, take the pressure off. Let them dig those new grooves in their brain before you apply the pressure and make them speed it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. I think the thing that comes after that is it's boring. But you've got it Once it's in the performance zone. Everything in the performance zone should be somewhat boring because it's just fundamentals. You're not trying new things and experimenting on the fly. You're executing what you know works right. It can be fun to piece all together, but you're not necessarily going Wild West and just making new stuff up on the fly. You're just taking the things that you developed in the improvement zone. You did them until they're good and then the fun, the exciting part, isn't necessarily doing that thing differently. It's piecing that thing together with other things over the course of a conversation where you're executing all of them well and you're just fundamentally sound throughout the entire conversation. Is that a fair representation?
Speaker 2:I'd add something else though, another way of describing it. I think the performance zone if assuming we're talking about performance zone is like real sales calls when there's real one in the line and it's real. That should always be rather interesting, and actually that's good, it's Christmas presents are on the line. If I don't, if.
Speaker 1:I don't perform. We're getting a call and stockings this year.
Speaker 2:But that should actually be a little different than your practice. Interestingly enough, this is great quote, but who knows who came up with it? I'm sure somebody knows, but I don't know who came up with this quote. But I love it. It's something effective. Learn the rules like a scientist so you can break them like an artist. And in practice is when you're learning the rules like a scientist.
Speaker 2:This prompt comes up you deliver this response using this framework right, and you're pretty. You're pretty structured, you're pretty rigid about what good looks like and adhering to a standard.
Speaker 1:But once you're in a real situation.
Speaker 2:It's actually better to almost kind of forget all the logical knowledge you learned and just let your gut lead the way, Because now that you've spent all of those hours and hours and hours practicing following the rules, your gut has been pre programmed with all this great skill and knowledge about how to handle these things. You can now actually trust your gut and what you couldn't before. So usually when we have people practice, we have them pretty rigidly follow the instructions of what to do.
Speaker 1:But once it's a real sales call, get all that and just do what your gut tells you to do.
Speaker 2:Because you spent 25 hours in the last month programming your gut with all the information it needs and how to handle this as well, you can now trust your gut in the moment. So oftentimes the performance does look different than the practice and you are actually trying new things on precise and performance because you're using this intuition.
Speaker 1:And that's actually good.
Speaker 2:And again, you can trust your intuition. Once you've spent 25 hours programming your intuition with the practice right, you can trust a lot better.
Speaker 1:The variance between what perfect looks like and what you actually do isn't even that high. If you're, if you've got that mastery, so you're in the, you're in the zone, you're trusting your gut, you're in the live meeting. You do it a little bit differently, but it's still close to perfect because you mastered what perfect looks like as you're running improvement zone. I think so.
Speaker 2:In practice, things are a lot more structured, they're a lot more predictable, they're a lot more known. So the best response in practice tends to be pretty predictable, pretty known, pretty standardized. The real world's a lot less predictable, throwing a lot more curveballs. Therefore, what the best response is also is going to be a little bit more predictable, or a little bit more unpredictable, because the situation you're in is unpredictable.
Speaker 2:So that's how I like to think about it. So in practice, again, you focus on the science, you focus on following the rules, you focus on discipline and doing it right, but then, when you get in the call, you give your intuition some breathing room to actually adjust based on what you're seeing.
Speaker 2:And then you can reflect afterwards and figure out what prompts your intuition gave you that were spot on, that took you down the right path, and what prompts your intuition gave you that were actually a little off and you would have been better off to stick to the script.
Speaker 1:And that's part of the process. The debrief Athletes watch film. Soldiers have after-action reports. What do you suggest that salespeople do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the same thing watching calls. So when I was a seller, I actually set aside an hour a day. Sometimes I would get me a schedule over it, but I probably spent two to three hours a day reviewing game tape. Sometimes it was my own. Your manager loved you. I was definitely the example right Of what I was supposed to do. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Even my numbers weren't always spectacular.
Speaker 2:I was always very good at adhering to the basics and the discipline side of it so yeah, I was watching two to three hours of game tape, sometimes my own, sometimes others. And just enough, I think I almost found watching others to be more helpful sometimes, but that's never hearing, or there.
Speaker 2:The way most people review game tape is good, and that is that they watch it, and maybe they watch it at the end, or maybe they pause a little bit and they say, okay, how was that? How would I rate that on a scale of one to 10?
Speaker 1:How good was that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I liked what he did there and I liked your question and, yeah, I think next time that comes up maybe she could do a little differently, and it's all very much looking vast and kind of like rating what you saw, like you're a critic evaluating and assessing what you saw, and there's real value in them, so go ahead and do that. However, the other really powerful piece of game tape and how to use it is you can also use game tape as a way to train your brain and how to think about what to do next. So you play the clip, the buyer says something, you pause it.
Speaker 2:You don't think back on the last few minutes of the clip and what the seller did and rate the performance. You think about what the buyer just said, what that means, what they're probably thinking and how you as a seller would pivot based on what you just learned. What question you would ask as a seller? Yeah, this is the question I would ask if I was in that situation. So then you play the tape. You'll end up hearing what the seller said and maybe you can compare that to what you said and in your mind and see what you like better.
Speaker 1:But really it's not about what the seller says.
Speaker 2:next, you keep listening and keep listening. The buyer gives drop some more information. Then you pause and you say, okay, based on that new information, what do I know, what do I still need to know and what's a good question I could ask to steer the conversation in that direction. And then you go through the mental process of processing what you just heard and then making decisions about what you heard, about what to restate the conversation, and then finding a specific sentence, a set of words that'll accomplish the task of moving the conversation in that direction. And you actually get to use this call as kind of a training ground for your brain to grow skill and grow more aptitude if that's even a word at this process of listening, learning, thinking, processing, making decisions, coming up with questions. So that's the other way to use call review. It's not just like rating what you heard the seller do, it's putting yourself in a situation with a seller and giving your brain a chance to practice. What would I do?
Speaker 1:I love that, so here's what I would say. That's the valedictorian answer. That's the answer that everyone on the team has. Now. Imagine you got the kid over in the corner Blue Tarski, for example. Everyone knows who that is. Some people might know he's got two pencils up his nose and a dunce hat on. He's on your team, though. How do you get him closer to what you just described?
Speaker 2:Hmm, that's a good question. I think a couple of things come to mind right.
Speaker 2:One is you can do some of this stuff as a group, so everyone in the class is together. So you played the clip and ask everyone to submit their answer. You can do this as part of your one-on-ones, where you grab a clip of this struggling sales rep and play it for them and pause it and say, all right, what would you say next? How would you handle this? I think, similarly, you could do this asynchronously. You could do some call reviews, notice the moment this rep handled poorly, send that clip to the rep and say, hey, look at this moment, watch this part in the clip, tell me how you'd handle moment eight minutes 11 seconds differently next time. But I think for a rep like that you'd probably need to do a little bit more of the leading the dance, drawing their attention to the moments and prompting them with questions.
Speaker 1:Probably, that's awesome. And then at what point do you zoom out and say, look, we're good here when we need to work on it. Something else has nothing to do with the call. I see this problem all the time when it comes to coaching. People get so obsessed because there's these conversational analytics tools and they say we use vendor X as coaching and I say, all right, cool. What happens when there's poor pre-meeting prep, when there's no time management, when they don't understand the industry, they don't understand the personas, they don't understand how to navigate external stakeholders beyond just what's in the meeting. They don't understand how to navigate internal stakeholders. I did a show with Bob Britton and we talked about working with legal and procurement and finance. And all these people inside your own company not procurement inside your own company, sorry, finance and legal inside your own company to get deals over the finish line. All these things are happening outside the call and my fear is that that's part of it too. Well, imagine you can have practice in those areas as well, maybe with some scenarios or the like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for those outside the call things, that's actually something we haven't spent much time on, so I don't know if I'm really the one to speak on that.
Speaker 1:The reason we haven't spent much time on.
Speaker 2:That is that the after the call stuff isn't a make or break performance where you have two seconds to figure out what to do next.
Speaker 1:Oh, the pressure's not as high, because you can ask for help.
Speaker 2:You can ask for help. You can consult a document. You can go into your team's LMS system and figure out what standard protocol for handling this is. You can go ask your manager what his thoughts are, what his thoughts are. Her thoughts are Like when it's not in a call, the skill piece matters a little less, because you can fill in what you lack in skill by pulling on resources around you. When it's in a call, it's all about your skill. There's no pulling on other resources. There's no tapping on a colleague to help. It's like they just said something. Now it's your turn to talk. What are you gonna say? Right, you got maybe two seconds to think before the silence gets weird.
Speaker 2:So we don't really focus on that, but there probably is a role for practice to play in it too, Although you probably could do a little more simple practice. You wouldn't have to like go to the great lengths that I've described to make a perfect practice environment, Because, again, it's just a matter of like when this situation happens, what resources do you pull to Boom? That almost is like a knowledge thing more than a skill thing.
Speaker 1:That's not the answer I was expecting, but that was a not a good answer. I love that. Last thing I'm gonna ask you and then we're gonna hop. One thing that I noticed that folks are struggle with sometimes and that you know if they solve for this, they solve for a lot of things. How do you get someone real comfortable at saying I don't know? And I'll add one more piece of context.
Speaker 1:I was talking to someone at dinner last night and he's an executive at a company, he's vice president, and he said his last job interview. He got the job and the feedback was out. Of all the candidates we talked to, you were the only one that said I don't know in the interview and you said it three times and that set you apart from everybody else. And I think it's the same not just in a job interview but also in a prospect conversation.
Speaker 1:If you've got some BS answer to anything that they ask you, they can start to see it, because a lot of folks that folks are selling to they've been doing the job for a heck of a lot longer than you've been selling it. Your team's been selling it and so they know this stuff inside and out and your product might be new, it might be exciting, but it's really just the second generation of the product or the fourth iteration of the third generation of the product. It's not actually new in hardly any cases. I mean Elon's Rockets to Mars. There's just another version of what we had in the 60s. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of that actually would fall into the knowledge, perspective, attitude, understanding bucket that sales trainers are usually pretty well equipped for or motivational speakers are really equipped for, right, because you do have to deal with the underlying emotional insecurities there. So you got to deal with a mindset thing. So help shift people's expectations of what it means to be a competent salesperson, to make them recognize that's not part of it. Shift people's understanding of the dynamic at play in a seller-buyer relationship and help them understand how refreshing that transparency and honesty is. This is all like mindset, conceptual stuff, where you really could just kind of teach to your team or maybe even lead a group discussion to kind of shift people's perspective and thinking.
Speaker 2:I think that's an important piece. If you wanted to work in a practice element, though, you could do that right, it wouldn't be the most. You certainly would want to do the mindset piece too. But after you had done the mindset piece, I'm imagining just a simple exercise where you come up with like three really solid ways to say I don't know that will allow you to say face as a seller and that sound good to hear as a buyer, and then you just do a real simple role-place. Ask partner player B. Ask a question that the rep might not know the answer to, and rep A but what time is it?
Speaker 1:It's one of those three Barrow Alaska tonight.
Speaker 2:Or even more business related questions, like well so in six months what? Release is your product team gonna have Right? Most of these people don't know that.
Speaker 1:And they can just practice using one of those three particular products.
Speaker 2:you gave them and figure out which one they like best, and that's not dealing with the underlying mindset issue, but that is like digging new neurological grooves, new memories, new patterns that they can access in the moment when they want to. So you could use it for something like that.
Speaker 1:Well, john, this is super informative. I really enjoyed chatting with you. How can folks reach out to you, and is there anything that you want to plug?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm fairly active on LinkedIn, as I mentioned before, so you'll find the link to that in the show notes. Feel free to connect with me there. I talk about this practice stuff a fair amount on there. If, after listening to this, you're thinking yourself shit, maybe my team should do some practice too. Reach out to us. So probably the best way to get ahold of us is by emailing hello at thepracticelabco notcom. Well, we'll go somewhere else entirely. So the priceco. And just let us know you heard the episode with Corey and that you're interested in exploring using practice on your team, cause we've spent two years going through the process of developing deliberate, practice-based programs for sales teams so we can help your sales teams develop these soft skills that we kind of referenced on this conversation of listening and empathy and coming up with good questions.
Speaker 2:Those will tend to make them really good in discovery calls but even beyond.
Speaker 2:But we can also just zoom in on tactical moments in their demo, of how to have a better demo and how to get the buyer talking more and how to get the demo focus off of features and functionality and get the conversation centered more on use cases and impact and value. We have all this stuff already pre-built out, ready to go and we can come run these practice sessions with your team. We can even equip you with blueprints that you can use to run these practice sessions on your own. While the process of like coming up with exercises from scratch is kind of challenging, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean practice has to be difficult, right.
Speaker 1:There are ways to do it.
Speaker 2:That's easier and, again, we spent two years figuring that out, so we'd be happy to share what we've learned and explore working together.
Speaker 1:So hello at the practiceco.
Speaker 2:That's my plug.
Speaker 1:I love it. It can be easier, it can be more fun. Jonathan Mayhan, thank you for joining me. I'm Corey Bray. If you want to check out the free version of Coach CRM, go to coachcrmcom. If you want, I'll give away a course today. If you want a course on coaching salespeople, shoot a note to freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Like. Subscribe Apple Spotify Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time, ما vinyl frLinkgruntsorg.