Change management is the make-or-break when it comes to making sales training and enablement programs successful. In this episode, we dig into several actionable tactics companies can use to up-level their change management programs with little to moderate effort.
Change management is the make-or-break when it comes to making sales training and enablement programs successful. In this episode, we dig into several actionable tactics companies can use to up-level their change management programs with little to moderate effort.
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. I'm here with Dell Nikai, the founder of Lead to Catalyze. We're going to be talking about a topic that is exciting. Bear with us. On its surface, you might be like why are you talking about that today? That's a detail. It's not a detail. It's the cornerstone that's going to make organizations get value out of the projects, the programs, the technology, the services that they're implementing across their team. We're talking about change management, dell. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good. I'm good, corey, thank you for having me on, and, yes, it's not the sexiest term, but it's so so crucial for actually achieving business objectives.
Speaker 1:Well, it's funny because I've had so many folks on where we've led the conversation to. Where does this thing that we're talking about, whatever it is not work, and the answer is always something around change, management, process, documentation, etc. So I'm glad that we can go super deep into this specific topic. So you founded a firm to just focus on this one piece. What led you to do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've been doing this essentially in house for over 15 years and what I've consistently seen is that companies as a whole, and leaders in particular, really lack the ability to drive strategic initiatives in a way that's sustained and that sustaining that actual program, the technology driving that adoption, is really what drives the outcomes that businesses are looking for. So, short of that, there's a lot of time, resources, capacity invested in all of these different programs and it doesn't lead to the outcomes that companies are really needing and looking for, which just leads to a lot of change, fatigue, frustration and people just hitting their heads against the wall like what is going on. So it's a real need.
Speaker 1:So is it fair to say that the goal of change management is to make sure that new initiatives stick?
Speaker 2:It's stick, but it's also really importantly, how we get buy-in from the employees. It's not enough to just say we're going to do this thing, we've decided on the strategy, this is the direction. We're going to start moving in this direction and expect everyone to fall in line. You really need to create that buy-in, and there's that side of it that a lot of people miss.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think it's even more important these days because people change jobs so often and if you've got a team of folks who have been successful doing certain things with certain tools in the past and all of a sudden you come and you say, hey, we're doing it this different way. You hired them because of who they are, because of the skill set they're bringing to their team, and now you're disrupting that to some extent. So let's start with a buy-in piece. What are some tactics folks can use to get buy-in from their teams as they're approaching change, and maybe use some kind of specific changes and example here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So I typically follow ADCART as a change framework. It basically stands for awareness, desire, ability Actually, sorry about that, it's awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. So basically that first two phases is what most companies skip, which is just starting with the why why are we doing this? Why are we doing this now? And then the desire is really important, where you want to identify what's in it for them.
Speaker 2:So to your point, let's say you have a lot of veteran sales reps that you have on your team. If you're going to institute a new sales methodology, you really need to get their buy-in on that. If they're used to doing something a certain way, if they're tenured with your company or just in general within that industry, it's going to be hard for them to just completely overhaul what they're doing and what they've been used to doing, because there is that status quo bias that we all fall into, where we go back to what we're comfortable with. So what is in it for your sellers, why would they want to make this change? And also having the conversation around what are their fears, concerns, challenges, around this new initiative that you're going to be leading with them. It's important to address that as opposed to just trying to overlook that and hope and assume that they will come along for the ride with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so as you do that, I imagine it's not easy to get everybody all on the same page. Yeah, I know you've got enough people on the right page to move past that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's an interesting question, because some of what you can do to help drive that change is to break it down a little bit, where you build some champions to start, and one way of doing that is by piloting a program where you pull in some of the people that are louder voices that people tend to listen to more often they're peers and see how you can make it work within that group. The benefit of that is you can actually pivot and adjust the program as needed if something is not working, but then they can be your champions to really sell it and say, hey, this is actually working for me and peers are much more likely to listen to their peers and anybody else. From my experience, yeah, love that.
Speaker 1:I was working on a project one time and the company went from being a single product company to a multi product company. They went from having one salesperson selling into the customer to having sales, engineering and services and even customer success all involved. And I remember I was talking to the salesperson and he was I think he'd been at the company for about 15 years and he came up to me during a break that we had and he said Corey, look, I got to tell you when I started working here 15 years together, four of us, we sat in cubicles it was me I'm making up names Mike, dave and Ron. He said Ron set three cubicles down from me. We worked together for two years.
Speaker 1:I might have said six sentences to that guy ever. That's the culture that we had. And so I'm sitting here thinking, oh wow, this is interesting. But the funny thing was, before we even got to the point where we were having a session around it, the sales leadership had got the team to buy into. So much pain around. Deals aren't closing because we're not working as a team. And I think that's the interesting thing here and it's awesome because you can demonstrate good sales skills even as you're trying to roll out other initiatives internally, you do some discovery. You find the pain points of the salespeople, which is I can't get my deals over the finish line because I can't figure out how to work with everybody, because we've never done that before.
Speaker 2:Right, absolutely yeah, and that's a really interesting point too, because the more you can loop in the field in what you're trying to drive and get their perspectives and have them feel heard as part of the process before you initiate the change, the more of that buy-in you can build early on.
Speaker 1:How do you do that in a way that doesn't drag on forever, because I can imagine it just be meeting on meeting, on meeting on meeting over time. But you got to get started at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think being very intentional about who you're pulling in. Sometimes it makes sense to pull in natural detractors. You know who those people are within your company, your organization or team and you want to pull them in, to have them be part of the conversation, to turn that around and have them be a champion as opposed to a detractor. There are other people that you know that are naturally strong in how they are selling or how they are demoing or whatever the skill is that you're trying to focus on and having them be pulled into the project Because, again, going back to peer respect their peers likely respect their perspective and efforts that can go a long way as well. So, starting small and intentionally with a group of people, Love it Okay.
Speaker 1:So once you've got buy-in to a program, to something that you're going to go disrupt, where do you look next to make sure that the change starts to stick and become long-term successful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And then I think that the reason why change management is so challenging is because there's all these moving pieces all at the same time. I can answer that in one way, but there's multiple facets of it that we really need to be focusing on, one of them being equipping the leaders to sustain the change. I think that is by far what I've seen as the biggest gap. Is leaders really either wanting to, being willing to or knowing how to sustain the change? Some of that is through effective coaching. Some of that is just by holding their teams accountable to whatever that initiative is, and this is especially relevant when any kind of behavior change is involved. So I think that is definitely one piece of.
Speaker 2:Do your leaders understand exactly what is happening? Why have they bought in? There's a change management process with just the leaders before you roll this out to the teams directly. So that is a really important stage. And then are they equipped to be able to carry that forward? It could be a coaching framework, it could be different resources, tools for them to be able to coach effectively, but that is one of the key ways to really sustain a change in a way that carries the buy-in forward Because, again, you can't just tell people what to do. Especially as adults, we don't like being told what to do. So how do we ensure that they are feeling like they have some autonomy, some control over this process and change in a way that benefits them? So I think that is a key aspect at that phase.
Speaker 1:Got it? No, I buy that for sure. Yeah, it's hard to tell people what to do, especially top performer, alpha type folks who you often run into in sales and sales leadership. I've got a couple of things I wanna dig into. So the first comment is around that's a snapshot of today. I feel like the way I'm absorbing this conversation is it's a snapshot of today. But then what happens is people leave the company, new people come in from the outside and you have internal promotions. Talk me through how you navigate that. Maybe it's not just one answer. Maybe you've gotta look at each three of those topics separately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in terms of ADCAR, the next three steps are knowledge, ability and reinforcement right.
Speaker 2:So, from that perspective, as you're building out a program, you have to be mindful of what you just described, which is another thing that's often missed is what happens if I have new sellers coming in. Do I have this built into the onboarding program? And when I have new leaders, what is their role in managing the change and being able to carry it forward? So I think one aspect of it is how are you gonna drive this forward with internal changes that will absolutely happen over the next three, six, nine months or longer, depending on how long the initiative needs to be sustained. So that's definitely one aspect of it. I think another one is being able to figure out what are ways that you can reinforce this and keep it top of mind.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've done for my sales leaders in the past is create like a coaching guide, so tied to any initiative. Before I roll anything out, I define, week by week for duration of time, what exactly is my expectation of them. So how are they gonna be coaching to it, reinforcing it in their team meetings and one-on-ones? And that's another aspect of this that I think is a gap that I've noticed, which is just leaders in particular and their skills and ability to be able to manage their team, and sometimes it's based on the challenges that they're facing within the current economy. In this case, a lot of leaders are being pulled into opportunities.
Speaker 2:I had this happen with my previous company, where they were asked to actively be involved in opportunities. We don't wanna let anything slip, and, while that's understandable, it takes them away from doing what I believe leaders should be focusing on, which is developing their people, supporting them to be effective, not being the closers and you talked about this in one of your episodes around super closers which short-term might be effective. Long-term it's gonna have a negative impact overall on your culture, morale and what you're trying to achieve as a leader. So I think that's another aspect of it how effective are your leaders in doing their job? And it's not to throw shade at leaders. I think, especially for sales leaders, right now, it's one of the most challenging roles because of all of these different obstacles that they're having to overcome and juggling that they have to do as well. So I think it's just understanding what are their strengths and gaps and how can we help them fill some of those gaps to be able to sustain it moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure I think it's. One analogy I heard once was it's like a doctor that goes in and takes the height and the weight and the blood pressure and then does some stitches. While there's sick patients out in the waiting room waiting to be seen, there's other people in the doctor's office that can do all of those things, maybe not the stitches part. I don't know how hard it is to do stitches.
Speaker 1:Who knows who knows yeah, but the other things if you've got the manager doing things that the salesperson should be doing, there's seven other salespeople not being coached. The metrics aren't being reviewed, they're not focused on hiring, they're not focused on internal promotion paths, they're not focused on working with enablement. The manager's working on a deal for a person instead of all of these other things that could have exponential impact on the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one thing I've been talking about lately is how I feel that enablement is an extension of the leadership team, and what I feel has happened is enablement has been brought in essentially to fill in some of those gaps, whether it's capacity, skillset, desire to do certain things as far as enabling their go-to-market organization. And while there are certain roles that enablement does fill, I think what's happened is there's a misunderstanding that now enablement is responsible for onboarding, for upskilling, for driving adoption, reinforcement, accountability. There is no way to scale enablement to do all of that. Your leaders have to be really involved in that part of the process of reinforcing and holding their teams accountable. I typically define that in three ways the leaders are the champions for their team, they're the coaches for their team and, ultimately, managers in holding their teams accountable. So it's important not to misunderstand what the enablement team's role is with what the sales leaders role is.
Speaker 1:Love that. How often do you see the enablement role and the sales leader role written down, shared with each other and well understood?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I think a lot of us do establish our charter and do define what we do, what we don't do, but ultimately, in application, I don't think that there's a really clear and good alignment. Some of that has to be driven by the executive sponsor, which in this case should be the CRO, and unless the CRO is willing to hold his leaders accountable to that reinforcement, to effective coaching, it's really hard to get that to be sustained. Because initially, when you have those conversations as I did when I was rolling out a new sales methodology I had the buy-in from the leaders. We talked about change management, we talked about, hey, here's a coaching framework you can use, and they all bought into it, but we didn't see the execution and the follow-through. And it's really hard to do that if that is not owned by someone who's driving that. As, hey, here's an expectation I have of you sales leader.
Speaker 1:What's that sound like coming from the CRO?
Speaker 2:I think it's twofold. One of them is it's one thing to say that coaching and being able to help build your team is really important to me and something I expect of you. It's another to demonstrate that ability and skill set and willingness to invest in coaching. So I think the times when I've heard and seen it actually work are when that CRO themselves takes that kind of approach with their leaders. So, instead of jumping in and solving problems and telling their leaders what to do, they take a coaching mindset which is all about asking questions as opposed to giving feedback and just telling people what to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so then the leaders can see it demonstrated by the, by the CRO. Okay, no, I'm another CR. This is fun, we're going deep into this. I have another CRO question. Imagine you're rolling out a program, yeah, and let's just say, for argument's sake, it's a 20 hour time investment for the sales leaders, for the sales, let's say frontline managers, to get to where they need to be. How do you get the CRO to invest the time to do that? Because you've got influence but not authority. They've got it because if you're rolling sales methodology and the CRO doesn't understand the sales methodology, it's going to be very hard for them to coach, inspect, emulate and even use aspects of it in things like coaching conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the CR should absolutely be involved.
Speaker 2:I think the challenge, and something I've been talking to the enablement community about lately, is how do we drive strategic initiatives differently than what we have been doing in the past, so we can no longer make wholesale changes where we bring everyone together for days at a time to implement something new. We have to be more agile because we have to operate at the pace of business, which is very fast. It doesn't mean we want to quickly turn things around and expect to achieve the outcomes we're looking for. It's just we have to take a different tact to actually helping our leaders build the skills necessary to drive that initiative and helping even the go-to-market organization as a whole be able to execute on that and drive the new behaviors. It's more in the approach that I think is important for us to be mindful of. 20 hours is a lot of time and how you navigate that. They still have to be coaching, supporting their team members. That is a huge time commitment. So looking at how you're rolling out a program, I think, is the key there.
Speaker 1:This has been my experience, as people get so nervous about how much time stuff takes. Last time I checked Harvard's not doing a one-week MBA program. You can't get an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon in two weeks. These things are hard. If you're in a world where you didn't study management and you didn't study coaching and you didn't study things like change management and adult learning and all the other things that you need to know to make these things actually successful. You're not just going to be able to snap your fingers and get it.
Speaker 2:Right, that is a very good point. I think the approach that I'm describing is more like something I did with my onboarding program, which is kind of asynchronous for some of the content, meaning that they can consume it on their own time and some of it was live, but it was no more than two hours in a single day where it was more manageable for them to build it into their schedule. So if a sales leader needs to sit in on a call as the executive sponsor in that conversation to create that alignment between the vendor and the customer, they still have the time to do that. So they're not being pulled into a four, eight hour long meeting in one day on one topic. So just make it manageable. I agree with you, things don't happen quickly and that's a big part of change management. That people don't understand is especially, again, when it comes to behavior change. People cannot change their behaviors that quickly, especially if they've been doing it a certain way for years and years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, two places. I want to love this. We're just flowing. We're like water. We're flowing with this conversation.
Speaker 1:I want to dig into the asynchronous piece, but I also want to dig into the reinforcement. Let's, let's start with reinforcement conceptually, so something, and use the example of sales methodology. Let's just roll with that. So you're rolling sales methodology. We do it in pieces over the course of. We're in August right now. Let's, let's say we're in August.
Speaker 1:Hellman, my co-founder, is actually rolling out sales methodology at three companies right now. If you want to learn more about triangle selling, we've got a, I've got an offer for you. I can't think of the offer off the top of my head, but I'll give you a free copy of triangle selling the book on Kindle or paperback. Us only Send me a note. Free stuff at coach serumcom. Free stuff at coach serumcom. Okay, so you're rolling out of sales methodology over a course of weeks, which I agree is the right way to do it, cause you do a little piece of it, it works. You do a little piece of it, it works. Oh, wow, now we've got buy it, now I'm getting coached to it. And then you get to the, the other, more complex, more edge KC pieces towards, towards the end, and then you buy the whole toolkit.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When it comes to reinforcement, people forget lots of things. I did a recent episode with Dan Doyle and who's building reading technology and he he got deep into the ebbing house for getting curve and people forget 82%, or whatever it is, of things that they learned in a month. How many hours should somebody just bookmark a month to just maintain what they've learned and what they're doing inside of a company? Or is that not even the right way to think about it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting and it's 90% is lost within a week, 70% within 24 hours. It's insane. So I think what is important is the kind of learning culture you're establishing within your organization, which is why another reason why coaching is so important, because then people will want to take the initiative to do that, to your point of spending some time to upscale, uplevel themselves, maybe listen to their own calls, maybe pull in a peer, a mentor, and have that conversation of what could I have done differently. That was an approach I took with rolling out of a methodology pilot, of just having peer groups where they're talking to each other primarily and giving each other advice and guidance around how to do things. So I think the culture really matters in that case. Is it like short-term focused culture or is it more long-term? Let's build on this kind of culture.
Speaker 2:So that's really important and I think, with building out programs, before you roll anything out, that should be built into your program plan. So what does that actually look like? Are there additional sessions that you have? Are there just micro-learning sessions, like a five-minute video or piece of content that they read that reinforces what they've been learning? And then the continuous coaching ultimately is what I found to be the most effective where if they're constantly keeping that top of mind there could be team call reviews that you do. I found that to be really, really effective, again, if you have the right culture to support that, where they would be willing to get that feedback from their peers and the leader practically can just sit back and allow the team to support each other. And the one point I do think is important to make here, too, is that most people know the areas that they can improve in.
Speaker 2:From my experience in coaching several sellers, hundreds of them even sales leaders most people know where their gaps are. It's just giving them the time and space to figure out how to do things better and differently. So being able to facilitate that, so having it be part of your program, creating the kind of culture that supports it and creating a space for learning, I think is key.
Speaker 1:I love it. I think everybody wants to learn. They just want to make sure they're not wasting their time. That's the big trade-off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's where the self-driven learning kind of comes into and where asynchronous learning can be really valuable, where, if people know what they can improve on and want to improve, they have a source to go to to be able to do that. As adults, if you think about something that you're trying to learn or something you're trying to get more information about, if you're invested enough in that you're going to take the time to do it, no one has to tell you to do that. So creating the resources to allow that to happen is very, very essential.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that brings me to the next question around. Oh wait, I wanted to touch on one other thing. So I love the car reviews.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I found super helpful is creating some formalized pre-meeting prep docs for either discovery call, demo team meeting, quarterly business review, onsite, whatever they are and you don't have to use them every time. But if someone's struggling, they're nervous, they're new, they just got promoted or they just think it's a really big, important meeting especially. Or go back and listen to my episode with Alice Hyman where we talk about how to engage your internal executives who help juice up your deal. There's all of these things and all of a sudden it becomes a little more complex and, hey, maybe you want to write some things down, not for every single meeting and every single deal, but if you combine really good pre-meeting prep with really good call review, action after action report and pipeline review, I think those are two things that can make training or methodology or whatever program you rolled out come to life and make it relevant to what's in it for me and answer that original question that you had when we kicked this off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good point and figuring out a way of carrying that forward with sales methodology. I think of that as a common language. So how do you carry that common language forward and how do you integrate it across the company where, even when you're talking to marketing, about top of funnel activities, everyone is focusing on that shared language? So being able to integrate that in different ways of your interaction within the go-to-market organization is really valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if you don't use a language, it's lost Absolutely. I'm googling right now. So you've got Latin, which nobody speaks, and then you've got Aramaic, which appears to be no longer used by people. Those are the two languages I can think of. Right, yeah, this is gone. It's gone, yeah. And then, if anybody's ever been to Tokyo and doesn't speak any Japanese, it makes it very challenging to get around, because they don't even use addresses in many neighborhoods.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, I did not know that yeah it was tough, so make sure you have Google Maps on your full battery when you get to Tokyo. All right, I'm going to ask you an incredibly loaded question. Okay, go for it On a scale of one to 10. How well do companies use their learning management systems for asynchronous learning?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question. So one thing that I've been kind of moving away from and it goes to the point of how people learn and how to provide the resources to help people be more curious and want to pursue that information is actually moving a little bit away from LMS is especially LMS is so. The reason for that is because, if you think about it, mindset really matters and whatever you're doing and if someone goes to log into the traditional LMS to learn something, it feels a little stiff and rigid, and also for you to be able to change a program like that that requires someone to use a learning tool to create content, whether it's like articulate storyline, whatever it is that they're using to build that. As soon as they're done building it, something might change and they have to adjust that and people don't do well sitting there for hours at a time learning something new, different, which is why, like different kinds of content management systems, are trying to integrate learning into them, which allows it to be a little bit more agile and also more of a micro learning focus, which is how we're able to consume information.
Speaker 2:People don't have loads of time, necessarily, or loads of attention to give one topic at any given time. But if you break it apart and make it easier to follow and understand and consume, that's going to be more effective. So how effectively are they using it? I think it's just created this bad rap, for LMS is and also it is very limiting because it requires you to build out a sharp, like solid, program and there are different ways of doing that without necessarily needing the LMS.
Speaker 1:Got it. Okay, this isn't a debate podcast, but I want to debate a topic. Yeah, micro learning versus long form content. This is. This is fascinating because a lot of people are saying, oh, micro learning is the new thing, micro learning is easier. I agree that micro learning and triggers dopamine in a way that long form content doesn't. But we've seen come. There's a company called Grovo I think they're out of business so I can talk about them and their whole thing was micro learning is the future. Look, 60 second videos, balloons, confetti, yay, you finished. And that that thing completely imploded.
Speaker 1:You've got Instagram and tick tock, where I think I've come out of the closet as an admitted Instagram user. Watch cool videos, golf videos and poker videos. I was, I was watching last night and I'm sitting there and like I've been watching people break and run eight ball and nine ball tables for 15 minutes. I should go do something else, but it's so exciting because every time you're like, oh, I wonder what angle is going to use on the shot, wonder what spending is going to use on the shot, and then you'll good when you get it right. And I know other people look at other things on Instagram, but the.
Speaker 1:The question then becomes why are the most popular podcasts in the world three hours long, where you've got these, these dopamine, almost drug? I mean, there's a debate to be had. Is Instagram worse for you than cigarettes? I don't. I'm not taking a position on that, but I think it's a. It's a fair, it's a fair debate. So do you need to have really short, tight, micro, or is long form with some kind of context and engagement? I'd love to hear what your thoughts on this topic are.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great question and a fair one to ask.
Speaker 2:I think that the key goes back to when I said about people's interest in learning and having a learning culture and culture of curiosity, where someone may want to spend two hours learning something and you provide the resources for them to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:What I've learned over my tenure is that you cannot provide content in a single modality. You need to be able to provide it in multiple modalities, because what happens is some people like to read like pages and pages of content. Some people like to watch like a 20 minute video on on a topic, and it's not even just learning styles, it's almost preferences of how people like to absorb information, especially if they're excited by something or interested in a topic. Where someone can be a speed reader and really enjoy reading something quickly and visually allows them to digest it better as well. So I think it's having the different modalities that support however much time that person can and wants to take to learn that piece of content or topic. So it's not necessarily either, or I think it's more varying. The modality is to allow people to learn in the way that they prefer.
Speaker 1:So here's where it gets troublesome, because now you've got varying modalities and you've got varying roles. So in a let's let's say B2B company, you've got your prospecting team and you might have two prospecting teams. One does inbound, one does outbound. Then you've got your sales team and you might have multiple sales teams. One does big deals, one does small deals. Then you've got your customer success team and you might have multiple of those. One does onboarding and one does everything else. That's six. Layer on account management, layer on sales engineering, that's eight. Now we've got eight teams in the revenue org, excluding operations and enablement stats. Let's call that 10 with different modalities. How in the heck you get good, updated stuff for these people? That's nuts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that is definitely a challenge in terms of keeping content up to date and being role specific. I don't necessarily think that every single piece of the content for the roles you described has to be completely different.
Speaker 1:I think that's that's the key right.
Speaker 2:So they're going to be core aspects of what you're introducing, what you're having them learn, that are going to be consistent. There's the application side, I think, is where it needs to be more differentiated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like target market, for example. So target market for an inbound prospecting team, it's basically saying, hey, is this inbound lead in our target market? For an outbound team, they say, hey, I'm building a list. Right, what list should I build based on the target market? And for customer success team, maybe there's a new product launch where there's some M&A activity, new company that they bought, and they say, okay, well, based on this new product, based on this new company we bought, which ones of my customers should I try to cross sell into? Yeah, so it's one core topic target market, ideal, customer profile, whatever your preference is. Yeah, I like the concise version and then maybe some derivative learning for each one of those specific roles based on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that goes back to where I think the leaders role is so important, because you can't have, like to your point, 20 different programs, but you, as a leader, you know, you've, you've been around, you understand what it takes to be effective as a CSM, for instance, to be able to ensure that they're identifying the right customers to try to upsell, cross sell into. So then you can take that general learning and help them apply it specifically to their roles and listen to their calls. Is it working? What do they need to adjust and pivot? So that's where being a little bit more agile comes into play, when you're able to have more of a coaching culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm talking myself into this stuff being very complicated, so I knew this is where we're gonna get to it, because it is With the concept being you roll it out and whatever it is it could be a sales methodology, it could be a new product launch, it could be a lot of things then you've gotta get it to stick. So now we've got the reinforcement piece, which I guess could be less role specific over time, because the core of it could be. So if you're a new product launch, for example, what pain points does this product solve? For which personas in which market segments? That's not super role specific. How to demo it might be different for an SC versus NAE, and then BDRs don't and onboarding don't need to worry about it as much.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it. So then, from a performance management perspective thinking, how do we quantify this? And could it be something that's actually quantifiable in terms of numbers, or is it a binary thing where it's yes or no? We did it, we didn't do it? What do you see over time to make sure that we can inspect it and see if it's actually happening across the org, because I'm sure a lot of folks listening to some bigger companies, they can't just walk around the office and look at everybody, or they've got remote teams and have no idea what's going on.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and that comes down to your technology and your ability to really align on competency maps that also identify the leading behaviors, that indicate whether or not someone is going to accomplish those lagging indicators, because that is harder to focus on.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna know if you're really moving the leader, if you're a needle on those KPIs, if you're just focusing on the lagging indicators. So I think, for instance, with conversation intelligence tools being able to identify are they actually speaking on this one particular topic, if it's discovery related, for instance, are they asking some of those core questions? Are they digging deeper? Are they quantifying business impact negative, positive. So there are different ways to use enablement technology, especially to be able to measure how effectively the team is adopting these new behaviors and new messaging, for instance, if it's more product related. So there are different tools that we all use and the key is to figure out how do you pull the right data points from these different tech pieces to be able to show what's actually happening in the field. So then you can take that and adjust and adapt as you need.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then the managers just need to have to be they have to be ninjas around that type of thing. Yeah, yeah, Because you can't automate this stuff. We're on chat GPT-4. I don't know what chat GPT-5 is gonna be, but it's not gonna be where we need it to be, and maybe six or seven, and then at some point we're just gonna be automated away and we can just go fishing or whatever we wanna do. Yeah, but there won't be any fish left because they've automated fishing by that point. Geez, what is the world coming to? Yeah, I think that's the hard part and that's where we see frontline managers having a really hard job, because you've got these very specific structured tools for salespeople and for the executive forecasting thing. It's just, it's baked. Look at the forecast, boom, boom, boom. There you go, and then the sales managers sitting there saying, well, I've got things in seven different places and I'm trying to understand. What the heck do I do with all this information?
Speaker 2:That's the key, too, whether you're a sales leader or an enabler. I think the biggest challenge that we have right now in terms of being more data driven is the disparate data sources and how you consolidate that information to build meaningful insights. So even if you're showing that that behavior is actually being adopted, does it actually drive the outcomes you're looking for? So tying it back to your CRM data is part of the challenge and certainly an obstacle for a lot of leaders that I've seen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then when you're having your one-on-ones with your team, if you're remote, that's your time and your time's gonna be focused on the most important things and you're not having that water cooler discussion or the sales enablement, sales operations. Folks aren't able to talk to frontline managers just very briefly and say, hey, could we do this thing? Or hey, that thing that we talked about, has it moved on the priority list at all? Right, yep, and it just becomes a little harder to Get data. Yeah, get over the edge here. Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 1:Well, if your team's struggling with desperate data sources and can't make sense to figure out how to get coaching going, I've got a content piece for you here. Shoot me in the free stuff at coachcrmcom, free stuff at coachcrmcom, and we'll show you how you can take insights from different sources, get it together and drive a single coaching program as opposed to just a bunch of things everywhere. All right. So when it comes to the job change, if somebody's getting promoted internally, how do you get them ramped up? Are you starting to ramp them before the promotion gets approved? After it gets approved? Walk me through the timeline here, because I think this is one of the big misses for folks you get in the role. Oh wow, no, I've got to hurry up and wait for the role. The role opens, I'm in the role. Oh, I need this person producing right now. How do we work through this idea of change management, really making sure they're ready for the role so they can do the job?
Speaker 2:Are you talking about an individual contributor turning into a sales leader?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's start there. I think there's a couple interesting paths. One is the individual contributor turning into a frontline manager and then the second one is the frontline manager turning into the second-line manager. Yeah, I think that one's also fascinating because if the frontline manager was spending all their time super-closing, that transition is going to be very, very hard. Yeah, absolutely. They had a really really great Boston mentor. The transition is probably going to be one of the easier transitions that they make.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's start with the individual contributor to frontline leader. I think that is probably another huge gap that I've seen where we don't invest enough time in upscaling leaders. I always say leadership does not come with a handbook, so it's really important for us to equip them to be effective in their role. Something as simple as how to conduct a one-on-one, or even having a consistent one-on-one, we might take for granted that people know to do that. I had three individual contributors promoted into a leadership role at my previous company and I pulled them all together immediately and said okay, we're going to have this program, we're going to do bi-weekly coaching. You're going to tell me about what's going on and start to apply some of the learnings around how to just generally manage your team. So, depending on the company and how open they are to sharing, when individual contributors are going to be promoted into leadership roles, you can work with sales leadership and enablement, if you have it, to be able to prepare those newly found leaders to be able to execute effectively and jump into it and have the support that they need to step into that leadership role.
Speaker 2:But then it's a little different to your point if there are managers of managers, where it is a completely different skill set. They're having to empower that manager, to empower their team. Being able to understand what the requirements of the role are, as well as those competencies can go really far in helping to build those skills. So we've done things where we've built out a career roadmap and for you to get to that next stage. Here are the things that you need to do and learn to get to that next stage. So it could be even going from like a BDR role to an AE role. What are the skills you need to develop to get there? So having the career path and the supporting resources to enable people to be able to be ready to jump in, I think is really valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen that work really well, especially if you combine it with some kinds of quizzes and certifications along the way, especially on an incremental basis, because if you're a BDR and you can't ask good discovery questions, you're not going to be a good AE. But you can ask discovery questions as BDR.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're an AE and you can't manage your time well or you can't manage your pipeline, you're not going to be successful as a manager. Right, exactly, there's so many skills that you can have, and I think, as folks build competency matrices I've got a show on that, I think it's episode seven or so. It's around there if you scroll down on your Spotify or Apple, if you build those and then you show the overlap between the rules I don't think I talked about that in the episode you build the overlap and you say, look, here's the competency and here's the career path, and then we say here's the complete overlap. So, for example, if you're asking a pain question as a BDR, that's the exact same pain question you'd ask as an AE.
Speaker 1:Now, if you want to understand other things, like who else is involved in the decision process, you're not going to go super deep as a BDR. You're going to weigh deep on it as an AE. So you might have a green overlap on the pain question. You might have a yellow overlap on what we call political resources and triangle selling Right. And when it comes to redlining contracts, there's no overlap at all, right, yeah, same thing for sales engineering With the demos, maybe if you've got a complex product, if you're doing ERP or something like that. Yeah, sales engineering is going to go super deep, but sales people should still be able to do a 30-second demo of at least the dashboard pages.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, and less reliant on the sales engineer when they don't need them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes me cry when people say that they don't do demos. Like demoing is not I can do about any product. Give me any product, tell me what the person is, two pain points to solve and give me 15 seconds to worry. It's not hard to demo. It's hard to get super deep on a use case because you got to know what questions to ask, you got to understand the world. But to do a 60-second five-minute demo to just gauge interest, it's not hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's about changing the behavior, so it's not a show up and throw up oh geez, Gaging demo. I think that that is where the gap is, that I've seen.
Speaker 1:Why do people do that? Are they just so proud of the place that they work and the things that their company made and like look at the great place I work at? Let me show you all the amazing things that we do.
Speaker 2:I think it's just easier to talk than it is to ask questions, especially difficult questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because if you ask a difficult question, you know what answer you might get. No, yeah, oh. No, it's ruined my day. Now I'm going to have more pipeline reviews. Yeah, I really like quizzes, probably because I'm a nerd. Yeah, I was number one in my high school class and I went to an Ivy League school, so people are probably like, oh, whatever, but I love quizzes and I think the reason I was successful academically is because I did them and I took them very seriously and I prepared for them. Yeah, how do you get a team that thinks that quizzes are not a good use of time to lean in and say, look, this is a thing we need to do?
Speaker 2:It is an important part of learning. There's a book called Make it Stick Not to be Confused with Made to Stick.
Speaker 1:Amazing book.
Speaker 2:Explicitly talks about the value of being tested on a topic that helps with recall and retention. So that is an important learning tool and having at least leaders understand the importance of that is key to get the reinforcement around. Hey, there's a reason why we're asking you to do this. It's going to make it easier for you to actually recall when you're on conversations with your customers. So it's not just purely an exercise, which is, I think, where certifications can go a little bit wrong, because people think, oh, here's just another certification and it's just a checkbox for us to fill out, but there's true value in that assessment part of the certification.
Speaker 2:And people miss the mark sometimes on that.
Speaker 1:Have you asked leaders to read Make it Stick.
Speaker 2:I'm not. No, that would be interesting.
Speaker 1:If you had a room full of sales leaders right now and you could assign them two books, what would they be?
Speaker 2:And they have to read them. I think one of my favorite leadership books is Radical Candor by Kim Scott. He talks about caring personally and challenging directly. Those are essentially the two things you need to do as a leader Overly simplified, but essentially does come down to that if you're an effective leader. From my perspective, and not enough people challenge directly and help people grow and get them outside of their comfort zone. So that's part of it. The other one I'd have to give a little bit more thought to. That's a good question.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's too hard, I'd go with Make it Stick. I think that's critical, because here's the thing, right, if you don't know something, you can't do it, period, you literally can't do it. And if you can't do it, you can't do it well. And I think the bridging the gap between knowing and doing is huge. But go out there. So anybody that's out there working in sales leadership, put together 10 question quizzes, go ask your new. And I love and here's the other question People always ask me how do I structure the quiz?
Speaker 1:I like to do open-ended questions only, not multiple choice, for two reasons. One, multiple choice quizzes are very hard to write. Well, because you have to come up with good wrong answers and it takes a lot of time. And, yeah, you can automate the grading, whatever, but grading short answer isn't hard. Don't make it an essay base. Just ask a question that they have to actually, and it can even be hey, give an example of how you use the share framework to provide a compelling demo to a prospect. That could be it. And then it's fascinating what you see, because you get all your teams in spreadsheet and you look at the answers and if the answers are all good, that's fine, that's great. But what if they're not all the same? What if they're all different? Now you've got a team out there that's doing different things and maybe it's OK for some things, maybe it's not, but if your goal is to establish a common language with a sales methodology, uh-oh.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing I wanted to say around the certification is that that's a word that is not well-defined. Some people think certification is mock role play, like hey, dell. So pretend like you're CFO and I'm Corey and I'm the salesperson. I'm going to ask you some discovery questions. You ready? Ok, let's go. That's helpful-ish, kind of whatever. But what's really helpful is having a. She's been talking about competency matrix a lot. I love that. It's perfect. Have a competency matrix and then do a certification and a re-certification. If you can quarterly take a call, go, pick a random discovery call, run that against the competency matrix for doing discovery. Did they do it? Did they do it? Well, that's how you do it. You can actually make it work. And then that ties back to the original point they made when we first got on here, which is what's in it for them? Well, what's in it for them is I'm helping you increase your win rate, increase your deal size. Decrease your sales cycle, get promoted, make more money, be happier, not work as late, all of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think jumping around a little bit here, but Drive is another favorite book of mine by Daniel Pink, and really understanding your team's motivation and where that comes from is a core leadership skill as well.
Speaker 1:If you don't know where they're going, they might end up someplace else. Yogi Berra, yeah, yeah, you got to know what people want to do. If you don't know what people are trying to get out of life, then you're going to have mutual frustration, because they're wanting one thing. You're wanting something else for them. Yeah, it's already hard enough to want something for someone else, right? It's even harder if you don't know what that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:All right, del, we're catching up on time here. We're catching up on time. We're running up on time. I had too much coffee this morning. I just started drinking coffee two months ago, so I'm 39 years old. I had my first cup of coffee what? In the June 2023,. Write that down.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:It's nuts. Yeah, I just kind of liked it. It's in like a snow, but I like it. Now it's good. Just puts mice in it. I don't like hot things either, but yeah, throws mice in it. We're rocking. So, del, do you have anything that you want to plug? How can folks reach out to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. As I mentioned, the business is new, so we're still working on branding and the website, but if you have any questions around driving transformation initiatives at your company, however big or small, remember that change takes a lot of effort and takes time, and your leaders have to be well equipped to catalyze the change. So I'm here to help reach out anytime.
Speaker 1:Make it stick, love it, yes, don't. Thank you so much for joining us. If you want to check out what we're doing at Coach Sierra, we go to coachsierremcom. We got a free version, not a free trial, full free version for you. Check that out and then, like, subscribe Apple Spotify sales management podcast. We'll see you next time.