101: Salesloft's VP of Sales Enablement Shawn Fowler

good afternoon everybody this is john barrows make it happen monday hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend i'm very excited to have my guest on here today for a lot of different reasons i think we're going to cover a lot of different topics today uh their the company that he works for is a very strategic partner of mine sean fowler what's going on my friend over at sales loft how you been my friend good good john i'm excited to be on the show i'm a huge fan of the show actually so it's pretty exciting to be on this um yeah things are great things are fantastic yeah sean tell everybody what you do what you're doing over well first of all how long you've been over at sales loft uh and what you've been up to over there um with them yeah i uh i joined sales loft in february of 2018 so it's been close to a year and a half now um and it's been incredibly busy when i when i joined i think we were around employee number 200 and now we're i think approaching 450 i just had 19 people in sales onboarding for our may cohort finished so uh we've been we've been really busy sounds like it and and why let me i always find this interesting right um i talk about questions like you know asking pleasure and pain questions and i always used to ask the question like how long right that's kind of a check it out on linkedin whatever but but my favorite my better question now is like why'd you choose to work at sales loft like what was one of the things that drove you to to make the choice at this stage of your career to come to head over to sales loft yeah there's actually a really good story around that too because i did it on purpose right like at sales loft i'm in sales enablement and i have been for a while and i at sales loft to get to train sales people to sell sales software to other sales people which is about as meta sales as it can get right and i and i love it because i i love sales and i love studying sales and i love seeing what works and i also love watching people be better and before i joined sales loft i was at ibm and i had on paper i had like a great position like i'd kind of reached the point you want to reach in sales enablement i had 50 something people on my team i was responsible for sales worldwide for our business unit i had a budget i had managers under me some of those managers had managers under them and i left to come to sales loft where i had one employee right but but the truth is i waited for it like when kyle first started sales loft back in the in the prospector days i remember uh seeing him on linkedin and i had some people who knew kyle and uh it just looked like there was something special going on there and then as i began to meet more and more people who worked there i realized like this this was real and it was it was the next evolution in sales in my opinion you know i i used to i worked at a company called silver pop which sold email marketing and then marketing automation and i got to watch that space grow and evolve and mature and then become commoditized and become commonplace you know in the marketing world and i i see sales loft as as the next thing right where that's that's happening with the the sales world it's revolutionizing literally the way sales people conduct their their day-to-day lives and i think that's really exciting the other reason though is um it's culture i mean i everybody everybody has a shitty day at work sometimes but if you absolutely love the people you have a shitty day with makes everything a lot better you know yeah and that's because i was going to bring that back to you saw kyle and i think you know so i met kyle way way back in the day um when when he was doing the prospector thing and actually one of the kids that i trained uh sent him a why you why you now email like one of the emails that we used to focus the majority of our time on and he got back and kyle was so impressed he wrote a blog post about it and said hey this is one of the best sales emails i've ever read and the kid was so amped that he had sent it he said john check it out this email that i sent to that ceo got like he actually wrote a blog post about it so i reached out to kyle i was like yo what's up i was like that kid who sent you that email that you wrote that blog post about i trained him how to do that you want to train why you're now back to him but uh but it but i kyle's always struck me as is you know i've always said if there's one company that i'd ever go work for again which i probably won't but uh but if there is because i'm that big of a pain in the ass it'd be because it's the culture right i mean i do agree in the space right now and it's a hot space and and all that stuff but to me culture matters most and and the people you surround yourself matter with the most so well let me let me give you a quick example i don't want to get like off topic or anything but i started february 12th 2018 right the the week after i started was our sales kickoff yeah i gave a presentation or a sales kickoff the day that i started actually they came to me with kind of the new um first call deck right just like a short deck to go through to kind of set the stage for what we're going to talk about and ask for help on it and i got to got to shape uh what that story was going to be and then a few weeks later it was going to be rainmaker three weeks after i started was going to be rainmaker which is our customer conference and they wanted everybody to be certified on the new messaging for rainmaker and i was like okay now i've i've done certifications plenty of times before um and i think it's a very effective way to do things but you also kind of have to uh keep those in your pocket and use them strategically because there's a certain amount of tolerance that a sales team is going to have for that and uh i was impressed i mean i was this new person coming in like i i had never sold sales loft before um and the team just did it and there was like there was no real complaining there was no no real pushback they just did it and they did it well and they took criticism and feedback and some of them i made them do it two or three times before they finally got it to where i wanted it to be and uh i've never experienced that before and when you when you have a good culture you have trust and you have people who are willing to do more because they believe in themselves and they believe in each other and they trust that you're trying to do the right thing for them and it's it's unstoppable when you have something like that yeah i mean i would say with with if you ever want to get somebody to to do more than what they're asked to do their job right what's on their job description if they don't feel a part of something bigger you'll never get you know what i mean if they don't believe in the vision if they don't believe in where things are going uh and that they have a piece in that then they'll just do their job right that's why you know i used to work at xerox you used to work at ibm i the thing with that was and again great companies but i always felt like at xerox no matter how hard i worked no matter what i did i wasn't going to move that that stock price more than 0.00 and if i left there'd be somebody coming and backfilling me that was probably you know maybe as good or a little bit less but it didn't really matter all that much which is why when i kind of really got into startups and and kind of the smb space i i loved it because it was you could see the difference you're making you know what i mean like genuinely say like hey i closed that deal and therefore we as a company hit our target and therefore we got that next round of fun you know what i mean like yeah yeah yeah it's huge and also you close that deal which means that the next deal that looks like that doesn't look impossible now right because other people see that this is possible too right like it's it's just incredible the influence you can have on other people in a company like that yeah yeah and so i think that's a good transition as far as influence is concerned because because with our conversation you know you got a you got a pretty interesting background man you know you know you got your phd uh you know then you i think it's so were you a sales engineer at silver pop yeah that's how i got into sales um i started out i was a trainer at silver pop initially before that i'd done alzheimer's research i literally yeah i had i had no i'd never worked for a company before i'd always worked for academic institutions yeah um and i i was on a grant and my grant was about to run out and they were actually going to start a startup based on the research i'd been doing in alzheimer's but i'd just gotten married i just bought a house we wanted to start a family like it's like i probably need like insurance and instability um so i i ended up working at silver pop and i was hired as a trainer to train mostly the technical stuff because i have a web programming background okay and uh i didn't understand anything about marketing i definitely didn't understand anything about digital marketing but i jumped in and had to learn how to use our product and i taught live probably eight to ten kind of online webinars per week right and then i created a bunch of uh interactive web-based training as well and what was really interesting is when you when you when you teach that many classes and we were teaching marketers they are asking questions about how to use your product to solve problems and then after a while you've helped them solve enough problems that you begin to develop some expertise in marketing and then after like a year of that you become an expert at digital marketing because you've helped all these different people solve their problems um and so when i when i got into sales engineering which was kind of kind of on accident i had a friend who had moved from from training to sales engineering and he was like you should you should really be a sales engineer and i was like i don't know i don't think i want to be in sales because i had this image of what sales was and it meant that you were an asshole and i was like i don't think i'm an asshole turns out i was wrong um but but i walked by the director of sales engineering's office and uh i said hey i hear you're hiring sales engineers i'd like to talk to you about it sometime if you get the chance and he was like i just offered the job to somebody this morning and i was like okay well you know if you're hiring in the future just let me know and i'd like to talk to you about it and he said let me know by lunch and the job is yours so i went to lunch with my wife that day and i was like i think i'm in sales now and i never looked back i fell in love with it pretty pretty quickly uh and then got to have a variety of different sales and sales leadership and sales enablement jobs and it's it's who i am now it's what i do i love it so your perspective here is interesting to me as far as academic we were talking about this before we got on um academics and and why sales has historically not been taught in school right what what do you see as the difference of how sales reps learn versus how the academic world teaches everybody else right because i think you know one of the things that we when it comes to trainers right i it's always you always hear the adage it's always easy to tell people how to do this stuff than it is to do it so most sales trainers i come across are either failed sales professionals or professional presenters where they tell people and it sounds really good but realistically it doesn't and so you know i think historically it's been the practitioners in sales that are the best teachers in sales so why so what do you see as the difference right and and one more caveat to this i'll give you an example like when this one is pure ignorance on my part i'm just gonna admit that up front when when i put my content together i put it together like jett hoffman and basho and so i kind of followed his guide because i like that that it connected with me about how i learned and doing things and tactical stuff and then kind of i went off on my own and i took my content i kept bumping up against sales enablement people and their first question to me would be uh so is it uh does it follow instructional design you know stuff and i and i'd be like uh well no and and back a few years back that was that was an important thing like instructional design and so i was like okay so i got some instructional designer to take my content and put it through the instructional design stuff whatever the fuck it is and i fucking hated it i literally hated it i was just like i looked at the manual i was like this is shit i looked at the way they cut every i'm like this is awful and so i you know out of the five grand that i spent to have them do it i just i basically ignored it completely so help me understand why it you know the historical educational academia is having such a hard time understanding how to connect and train sales professionals in a in a university setting yeah so i think i think there are a few reasons and i think some of it's changing too i mean you're beginning to see some academic institutions start to wake up a little bit more with regard to sales but uh number one traditionally and it's not just in academia traditionally in the u.s sales has not always been the most highly regarded profession right like it's been viewed largely as a necessary evil in business right and i think that's changing a lot and i think it has in in my lifetime i think you and i are probably close to the same age i'm 42 i've yeah so i've watched it change in my lifetime um so i don't think there's been as much focus on it because it wasn't as well respected that's that's the first thing right the second one though is in academia you have to be certain like certainty is the point of science right like you want to be certain about it you want to be predictive with what you're finding um when i wrote my dissertation my dissertation's 70 something pages and then another 15 pages of citing references to say see it's real it's true other people say it too right like that's what you're doing um and that doesn't work in sales you know we've we've talked about this uh the the talk track you used last year the subject line you lose you use last year everybody's using it now it does not work right like sales is constantly changing constantly evolving it's almost like um fashion or music in that way right there's like a zeitgeist that's happening in the market and you have to figure out how to be at the front of that zeitgeist in order to get people's attention or you just get lost with everybody else and that's the opposite of certainty right like you you constantly basically on the edge of the market if you're doing it right to figure out what works and move forward right and figuring out what works is the last piece because uh when you're training somebody the best you can do is give them a systematic way for them to figure out what works because what works is going to vary from situation to situation i i end up with this debate a lot uh where there there are people who are in sales there are people some of them who are in sales enablement who want to give talk tracks to people they want to tell people here is what you say here is what you do right and i think there's some value in that there's some value in that when somebody's first getting started like you've got a 24 year old sdr their last job was a waiter you know or like a bartender or they were a valet or whatever yeah you might need to tell them what to say for a minute right um but then at some point they need to learn to figure out what to say they need to internalize that way of thinking right they need to actually get smarter as opposed to just being able to like go through the motions and um that's hard it's hard to teach people to be smarter it takes it takes reinforcement over time to make that happen and that's not just a sales trainer who's going to do that you can lay the foundation and provide approaches to doing it systematic approaches ideally um but you're going to have to have either that trainer reinforce it over and over again or more commonly you have to have managers who are bought in to that approach because those are the people who are going to reinforce that over and over and over again on a daily basis to change behaviors and i think you're i mean i love it the question i have is how do you can you so again we had this conversation i think you're in a line on this as far as you know i talk about catching your sales group right and and where you wake up one day uh as a sales rep and you just it all it just clicks you know you you stop trying so hard um you know you and and i use tommy boy as the example right helen you look like a helen let me tell you why i suck as a sales rep and when he does that you know he he lets he lets his inhibitions down you know he's got confidence in him he's self-deprecating right and the woman's like wow you're sick and you know i'll go fire up those wings for you and and in that moment he caught a sales group right because before that he was trying way too hard he was trying to be like his dad right you stick your head up a butcher's ass but no that's not right so so so in that moment and and i always wonder like as a as a trainer as an enabler as a as somebody who is trying to educate people and help people skip a few steps right that's i always say it's like look my goal isn't to teach you exactly what to do and how to do it my goal is to give you share share with you some experiences i've had over the 23 years of selling here so hopefully you can skip a few steps but you're still going to get you still need to get your punched in the face you still need to get hit right and and learn how to deal with it so how can we i want to talk about us on the leadership and enablement side and then i want to talk about a rep side of the house how can we expedite that that that that groove if you will that when it when it clicks is there is there anything that we can do to help expedite that process yeah i think there's a few things number one i think is is to have uh well god i hate to say it i think you kind of have to break down the reps yourself a little bit right because because people tend to get this idea that um i did the same thing when i first got into sales too where this is what i'm supposed to do and this is what i'm supposed to say and this is how i'm supposed to be because i watched somebody else do what they do naturally and that's all you've got to go on right like i i uh like to write and when you're you know in college i wanted to be a writer when i was in college and then i realized um that's probably a terrible path for me i was an artist my first was okay okay yeah never mind you probably like emulated artists i emulated certain writers i tried to write like stupidly like sartre like if you're gonna write like somebody try to write like somebody who sold a lot of books right um but you try to emulate other people and it's the same thing in sales people either have an idea of what sales is because they watch the freaking boiler room which is exactly doing it wrong right or they watched other people who do it and think i'm gonna do it like them well you're not gonna do it like them you're gonna do it like you you have to do it like you right and so getting them to give up because that's what happens in tommy boy he gave up he gave up on trying to be his dad right getting them to give up on being whoever that person is in their head is a big part of it and i i like to use role playing for that like i'll i'll role play especially with our strs i do it with our our um our closers as well uh but especially like on cold calls where it's like the ring ring and you've got to earn your way to the next stage of the call and i just do what i normally do like especially when i was at ibm where i'd be like i'm on my way to a meeting sorry i don't have time click you know like if i don't have time i don't have time like you've got to figure out how to get my attention and move to the next stage and i think role playing helps a lot because it's an at-bat and at-bats is ultimately what's going to do it for everybody yeah it's funny i was talking to my so jeff hoffman right the mj hoffman he comes uh he started basho and he's a mentor of mine and everything and i had a conversation with him and he's like sales is like one of the only professions that you know we we don't we don't really practice all that much in the sense that we practice on the job but it's almost like a you know osmosis in the sense that we just kind of go go go go go and then all of a sudden you know i remember for me as far as an education is concerned and evolving i wouldn't practice i would just go in real world situations and i would say something and you know if i said something stupid if i asked a dumb question to a cco it would look and say well that's a dumb question and i would go okay well i guess i won't ask that again you know what i mean and and it's it's rare that we take the time to learn practice consciously right to say you know what no this is and this is what i recommend everybody um you know at least once a week block off an hour hour to learn something new to try something new and maybe have a focal point that week of something you're going to consciously try right i used to do this with my team where everybody would have a notebook um next to their desk and we would every week we would pick something that we would want to work on as a group right so like an objection or uh you know getting through gatekeepers or whatever it is and we'd come up with the approach uh like that we thought was good right we'd google it best way to handle gatekeepers or something like that and we'd write down to the top of the paper um uh challenge equals gatekeepers approach equals whatever that approach is then we'd role play it a little bit to kind of knock the dust off and then that week no matter what happened every time that thing came up so whatever you were doing go ahead and do whatever you want to do but whenever that thing happened you had to use that approach right so you had to consciously be like okay nope okay gatekeeper boom i'm using that and then it was a plus minus it worked it didn't work it worked it didn't work and and then i would collect that information add it all up and say all right it either worked or it didn't work right but it was my way of trying to force the reps into consciously practicing something as opposed to just doing i love that i mean and that's that's what a lot of it comes down to if you're not doing something on purpose if you're not being intentional about what you're doing you can't get better at it because you're doing something different there's just it's it's it's variability there's there's like limitless variability in that situation and when you're in sales uh it's like tennis right like you can only control how you hit the ball you can't control how the person on the other side hits the ball you can only control how you hit the ball so if you're not intentional about how you you hit the ball you have no control over anything in that process right um so you have to do something intentional and you have to intentionally test as well right if you don't i learned that when i was helping marketers right at some point i'd worked with several thousand marketers over the course of eight years and the ones who were consistently performing were the ones who were constantly testing but they had a baseline they knew what worked for them right and they could be intentional with the way they tested it's the same thing in sales at both the organizational and individual level it's the same thing and and because i love that because it kind of leads to the same you know now the rep side of the house what can reps do to to expedite their um uh their education they're evolving into sales and and and that groove if you will that intentional piece right i think um you know morgan who who's now about two years with me like coming up on two years a year and a half um he you know he did great right he was an sdr and an sdr manager and when he came on board i stuffed a lot of stuff down his throat right um and and we came up with cadences we came up with messaging based on personas and all this other stuff and you know what he came out of the gate pretty strong and but then his his his results just kind of plateaued and and he came to me and he said john you know i'm a little worried you know i'm not getting the results that i would expect to get based on the work that we've put in from a messaging standpoint and all that other stuff and i said morgan i go i'll tell you one thing ma'am your results aren't going to change all that much um i know why they plateaued and they're not going to change all that much until something happens and he's like well what what i go until you start giving a shit and i said that very specifically and look i said look i understand you give a shit about working here i understand you give a shit about your job i understand all that stuff but you but until you genuinely start giving a shit and are intentional about when you go to a website looking for things and making connections with people and when you go on somebody's linkedin page you're not just looking for triggers like i try to raise the tide for reps who are just blasting out template emails my training my goal is to wake them up a little bit and show them hey look do a little bit of homework and your results will increase pretty significantly and and so the kind of baby step there is pick like five triggers that that that uh you can look for on a website and you can make a connection to so merger and acquisition open up a new office launch a new product whatever right and then you could craft messaging and connect the dots and so it's like great okay cool there's a merger and acquisition here's my merger and acquisition messaging let's put it together let's send that will absolutely get you better results than blasting out of template emails to a million people but it will only get you so far until you start looking at that website or reading that article or looking at that um linkedin profile with intent to be like you know what i i'm like let me really genuinely search for something here where i can make a difference that's when you're you know go to the next level so how do you as a sales rep because i you can't teach drive you can't teach passion you can't teach people how to give a shit so how do you start giving a shit how do you like you know what i mean like i it's something i've always struggled with because i can't teach you how to get up and want to be successful so how how do reps who are kind of sitting there going through the motions maybe not working at a company like sales loft where they're super passionate about it and in lieu of going and finding another job how do you figure that out so um it's hard to figure out it's hard to create to be honest with you right like there when when i hire uh i look for in fact i have like my own little model of sales competence right the bottom of the model of sales competence is sales skills and those are you know asking good questions doing good discovery pushing challenging like all the stuff you think about with sales skills on top of that's market knowledge on top of that's product knowledge and at the very top is organizational knowledge now you know it's in order of most fundamental to least fundamental the organizational knowledge is the least fundamental in sales skills there are some things that are just characteristics that you have to hire for in my opinion right you've got to hire for uh empathy so people who are capable of perceiving how someone else is experiencing a situation and adjust accordingly and that doesn't always mean to make it easier for them sometimes that means to make them feel more uncomfortable right um you have to hire for resilience because the best sales people in the world win 30% of the time they get told no 70% of the time and that's a hard combination of skills to hire for because to get rejected all the time and to be high empathy and really feel it and still do it it's it's a hard combination to find and if you have just those two you can be a good salesperson but if you want to be a great salesperson you need number three which is curiosity you have to want to know shit just because you want to know and i can't tell you how many times that has served me well as a salesperson well i'll be asking questions really it's always the same conversation no matter what you sell how do you make money how can i help you make more money right you don't the second one you don't explicitly ask right because that's your job to figure out but that's what you're thinking the whole time how can i help you make more money and as soon as you realize that that is really your job as a salesperson as soon as you realize that everything for me at least started to click much much more quickly and that's what i try to train our reps on you are a business person who is talking to another business person and you're trying to create a situation in which you both benefit that means you have value they have value you're both accountable right but your job is to go in there and help them figure out how to make more money and if you actually view things through that lens it makes things a lot easier in my opinion but if you're not if you're not naturally curious if you're not naturally empathetic if you're not um naturally resilient theoretically you can teach those things but it's kind of like teaching somebody how to kiss like if you date somebody and you don't like the way they kiss it's probably better just to break up you know what i'm saying i think you got to hire for some of those things to be honest with you no i couldn't i agree i think that you know jack welsh um giggy jack welsh he he reframe he reframed my entire mindset on hiring um i worked for him for a couple months to get his online mba program off the ground but but back you know shit when i was 25 26 he was my business idol you know the book winning is one of my favorite books of all time business books of all time and i remember he came to boston and he goes uh and he does his little you know q a you know it's probably a thousand people in this theater he's doing a q a and i stood up and i and i said jack and at the time we were about 50 people uh my my company was about 50 people and i said to him i said jack you talk a lot about passion and drive and all this stuff different stuff i go you know i i started a company and look when we were five people everybody's obviously like super passionate 10 people super pat 20 people fired up you know 30 50 and we're and i said we're at 50 and it feels like that 51st person just shows up to do their job right and and and i was frustrated because i'm like and my question was is how do you instill your passion on somebody else how do you get them to get you know as fired up as you are about your business and he just looked at me he's like you're looking at it all wrong he's like you can't teach passion you can't teach drive you have to hire for that he's like you can teach skill you can teach you know your process you can teach any of that stuff you can't teach drive and so that literally that conversation as brief as it was flipped my entire mindset and one of my first questions when i when i used to interview a lot more was what are you passionate about like genuinely like and by the way i could give a shit what you're passionate about it's how you describe to me what you're passionate about that i care about right because if you're like oh i really enjoy technology and serving people and making sure that they get the best out of our solution and you know blah blah blah i'm like what that's what you're passionate about but if you're like holy shit did you see the bruins on fucking monday night are you on your mind like that first period was the worst period i've ever seen in fucking hockey but then all of a sudden they came back and krug's hit on that dude blew my god you know what i mean like yeah if you're describing that like even though the bruins and hockey have literally nothing to do with our conversation but how you describe that tells me every now right now my job as a manager is to wrangle that passion and and try to direct some of it over to my business so that you can exude that because i always believe this somebody said this to me early in my career that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm it's 100 true as well if you can't get excited about what you're selling why shouldn't anybody else right if you can't get excited about helping someone why are you even doing this there are other ways to make money right there are ways to make money where you don't have to talk to people right you need to be excited about it and if you can't then do something else because why would you want to live your life that way i i don't i don't understand why you would want to spend your time talking about something you don't care about right um and the truth is if you approach sales the right way you actually can help people over and over and over again right and it's a lot of fun too the first time because when you're a sales engineer you don't have a number right when you're a sales engineer uh you just basically show up and do demos and pitch and stuff like that uh and when i was doing it like i i worked with number one some incredible sales reps i didn't know shit about sales when i first became a sales engineer i knew everything about our product right and i got partnered with a guy i'll call him out chad french chad french was rock star sales guy he was new uh he was really great at sales he didn't know shit about our product so we were we were a good partnership and he taught me a lot about sales and i had a few other people who i was partnered with that taught me a lot and it's it's interesting because you kind of get like a sales mba if you are in a sales engineering role because you get to work with all these different people in all these different situations and you get to hear what some of them say that works and what some of them say that doesn't work and sometimes it's the same thing just the one person says it differently or they say it in the right context right and it's a really great way to get educated in sales but you know you don't you don't have a number necessarily as a sales engineer and the first time i got a number it was i was selling services actually the first time i got a number and it was eight hundred thousand dollars and an eight hundred thousand dollar services number not software just on services and when i first started her average services deal size was thirty five hundred dollars now luckily luckily my boss had just rolled out some new services offerings that were like 30 60 grand so i was gonna say that chipping away man that's a lot of stuff yeah but uh and i was nervous at first but then after i closed my first deal i was like i have a business but i don't have to do any of the shitty boring parts of the business you know what i'm saying like i just get to do the cool part of the business this is this is freaking great and if you don't realize that as a salesperson you're making a huge mistake you get to have a business but just do the fun part right uh and if you can't get excited about that i don't know if you can get excited about anything and and so with so sales engineer i think there's a um misconception out there by a lot of sales professionals that i'd like to dive in a little bit with you here which is product knowledge right being the so there's one thing about you know everybody here thought leader and industry expert and look at the end of the day if you can rise to that level where after whatever malcolm you know 10 000 hours blah blah blah you are that person okay um but do you believe that sales reps how how far down the product knowledge map does a sales rep uh should a sales rep go to to be effective to be to be successful right because because there's a reason sales engineers are sales engineers they're not sales right i always kind of joke i was one sales guy within 50 engineers okay i would i had no when i was selling outsourced it services i had no fucking idea what computers did what a firewall did i mean i learned it through osmosis and talking to these guys but i would always bring a sales engineer and it always struck me that they were fantastic in front of clients but if i didn't control them they would outsell themselves because they would educate so much because that's what engineers do an engineer's mindset is fixing problems right so if you as a customer are sitting in front of me and you have a problem i'm going to talk to you about it right i'm going to talk to you about and try to fix that um so my job as a sales sales rep was to basically say shut up this is where the customer has to pay for that okay so do you is is there a kind of a sweet spot if you will of product knowledge that makes you effective but not overly like oh my god because and i'm sorry i'm rambling but there's one more thing about product knowledge with onboarding too which is i think the mistake that a lot of companies do there's a stuff so much product knowledge down somebody's throat a sales rep's throat that when they get out into the real world and they unleash them on their territory if that's the only thing i have then that's the only thing i'm going to do i'm going to tell you everything about my product because i that's what i just got my badge for so where's the sweet spot and how do you drip that out as far as product knowledge to get a rep to be successful without being too overly knowledgeable so that they outsell themselves yeah so a few things here uh number one the last statement you made around uh being overly focused on product training and enablement is really common and it's a problem right you give a rep a knife they'll use a knife you give a rep a sword they use a sword give a rep a gun they'll use a gun whatever you arm them with is what they're going to use and the truth is a lot of times feature selling is the easiest point of entry right everything else in sales is uh intangible right it's it's somewhat ambiguous um and the product's not so they'll just gravitate to that over and over and over again right so i think when we do our onboarding uh i actually align our onboarding with that pyramid i was just talking about the the sales confidence model i don't give a shit how much you know about the product until you know why someone would need the product and how they would use the product and who those people are and what their challenges are and um what they think about when they get up in the like that we sell to sales ops a lot of times right and uh the the somewhat inappropriate analogy i'll make is scooby-doo right because in scooby-doo like uh in every episode you know shaggy and scooby go off to get high and um fred and daphne go off to make out right and then velma solves every freaking mystery by herself right and that's sales ops like there's no glory in sales ops nobody's ever like yeah you sure did unify the shit out of that data you know like nobody ever says that there's just somebody sitting sitting back holding things down doing all the work that's it but i want our reps to be thinking like in those terms these are the these are the people you're selling to they have real problems they have like this real emotional state and when you talk to them you need to understand that state right um so i i care more about market knowledge than i do about product knowledge initially but uh the sweet spot for the right amount of product knowledge is as much as possible and i say this because you want to have a business conversation and i learned this after i've been in a sales engineer for a year or so that the best way for me to answer product questions was not to show it was for me to answer the questions and then turn the conversation back to a business conversation but the more you know about the product the more specifically you can talk about how to affect their business and how how much more confidently you can answer their questions and when you've really hit hit your stride from a product perspective is when somebody says hey can you do this and you're like no we don't do it that way and i very rarely want to tell reps exactly what to say but i will tell them this the way to answer that question is no we don't do it that way what do you hope to accomplish and the reason is usually when people ask a question that's really specific about your product it's because one of two things has happened number one a competitor told them to ask it that way right or number two um they've got an existing business process where that's how they do it right and that doesn't mean there could be six other ways that are better than the way that they do it that they could do it with your product but when you're confident enough to not apologize for your product when you when you realize there's so much value in what your product can do that if it doesn't do one or two things it's fine right no we don't do it that way what do you want to accomplish that's when you know you fit your sweet spot so the more you know about the product the better but it's so you don't have to talk about the product right so you can talk about the business outcomes yeah i think i did so that's an interesting i like that take on that because i always said like you need to know enough to bring the smart kids in um to answer those questions or whatever it is but i like the idea of knowing enough to not have to use a slide deck you know what i mean yeah to to ebb and flow with the conversation and stop the conversation at a certain point when you see things are going off the rails or they're not looking at it the right way or or they're not the right fit i think that's that's kind of for me you know it happened a while ago where instead of qualifying people right and searching for qualification criteria i stopped actually doing that and i started i started disqualifying people more i actually started searching for the reasons why they shouldn't do business with me because i got so sick of those things coming up anyways that i was like fuck it i'm gonna find them anyways like oh you do it that way oh then we're probably not a good fit for you oh you do it that way well why do you do it that way that's interesting because we do it this way why you know i mean and i'd be like all right never mind and oddly enough that's when things like absolutely shifted for me from a confidence standpoint and from a result standpoint because when i really i always say this is why prospecting to me is the most important thing that you can do as a sales professional i don't care what role you're in ae csm doesn't matter constantly going out there and looking for opportunities because there's one there's one thing and i'll and i'll tell you and then we'll finish up here but there's one thing that i found that instills confidence in a lot of reps it's when they don't need the business it's when they want it right if i want your business it's a much different conversation than if i need your business and that's why prospecting to me because a big fat pipeline solves all problems right i mean negotiations discounting all that stuff like i straight up don't discount anymore because i don't have to it's like look i'm booked out through 8 august at this point you know what i mean like i know the price this is the price exactly and and morgan you're it's fun because i'm watching him do that right now because he's now done enough trainings when i'm going back to that give a shit thing right and this is where i you know and one more dive a little bit deeper into this for you you know one of the things i do is before you get out there in the world of selling you have to go talk to my customers like if you hire if i hire you first things first is interview everybody in the company and ask and set it up like a sales meeting do some research on them find time on their calendar i do the same thing as you like i act as a customer of theirs and they have to get on my calendar and i i say no i'm too busy i cancel meetings and i see how they were going to react and then they have to interview me just like they would interview a customer and then do a little book report on why everybody loves working for this company right so that's step one is to believe in the business step two is now go talk to customers and interview customers and to your point you know not necessarily i'd love to like be like a week in their shoes in the sense of like figure out a way to put the the sales rep a week in that customer's job so that they can experience what that customer experienced but in lieu of that interview because that belief is what's going to get you to be successful right yeah that belief is what's going to get you to catch that groove a lot faster and so you know is there is there anything the kind of final thoughts here that that you can recommend organizations do kind of in into your point in a framework in a systematic way you said something earlier about scaffolding um that that can put some structure in place to to get reps to blossom to get reps to um believe in what they're doing and be successful there sooner rather than later yeah i mean uh part of it is is what you just said which is working with customers like learning customer stories when when i was at silverpot my boss was a guy named drew pronte and when he came on board i mean i've been there for years and he came on board and within a month he knew about as much as i did from a customer perspective and it's because he went through every day and read a case study we had a nice big fat library case studies he went through every day and read a case study and just saw like these are the actual results our customers are getting right and and it's it's just intensely valuable the more you can read about how you're impacting customers the more you can talk to your customers and see like the real results they're getting uh the more confident you're going to be going out and telling those stories and that's the second part is having those stories when you first start as a rep you don't have your own stories you know at some point if you've been selling for a year or two years or three years you've got stories where you've watched you've literally watched customers you've sold transform their business right you've watched them be successful and now that's your story too because you played a part in that and you can pull that out of your back pocket and use it informally during the sales process it's not like okay i'm gonna line this up and then i'm gonna tell this story and then i'm gonna tell the story it's just like you and i are talking something comes up and you throw the story out um so when you first start as a rep yeah you got to get some stories you got to read some case studies you've got to if you've got if you've got sales loft and you can use meeting intelligence you've got gong you've got chorus like watch those videos watch those meetings you're going to learn so much by doing that you'll learn the the challenges your customers have you know the objections they have you'll learn um how how people deal with that and you'll learn the successes as well like the more you learn that the more you have stories that you begin to internalize the more successful you're going to be because you'll realize this is actually what you're doing uh sales you can make a lot of money um i don't i don't want to say sales is a service a service profession it's not but there is a service element to it if you do it the right way right because people have real problems and if you work for a decent company with a decent product you can fix those problems you can make somebody's life better and the more you focus on that the more you'll realize the rest of it kind of flows now it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows right like you still have to control the deal cycle you have still have to push it towards something you still have to hold your rep account i mean so your customer accountable right for the for the whole conversation but it changes your mindset a lot and to your point you have a lot more power in that situation right you realize like we're doing something together i as a salesperson you're asking somebody to dance right they might not want to dance with you but if you do you're dancing go dance right do the thing yeah make it a fun one and it's uh customer success i i think it's funny because i think the the similarities between sales and customer success it's almost the exact same role if you just take the word and the perception not the reality the perception of sales out of the equation yes i agree with you boiler room glengarry glen ross right that type of stuff worst sales movies i've ever seen in my life because they depict sales in all the wrong ways great movies fun movies worst sales movies tommy boy best movie um but but if you think about that you know i'll go in and i'll do a training for a sales team and they'll put customer success in there right they'll put like three or four customers because hey why not right because i say fill up the room with as many people as you want um and inevitably we'll walk out of that and this and and the sales over there oh that was awesome and the customer success will be like oh that was really good i just wish it was a little bit more customer success oriented now fast forward i do a separate session for just customer success and i take the word sales out of my and i do the exact same presentation training and the customer success walks out going holy shit that was the best thing i've exactly you know what i mean and it's just and and i'm and you're starting to see a lot of customer success people obviously need to cross sell upsell so they're turning they're being forced to turn into sales but they think it's this dirty word and i just beg people out there to take the perception that they have of sales off of like out of the equation and put the reality in it and realize that you to your point sean we're help we're sitting there helping people man at the end of the day i don't sell people shit i help solve your problems or help you achieve your goals that's it and if your goals aren't big enough and your problems aren't big enough why are we talking yeah that's it right there so awesome man well i like i always say i probably could have this conversation with you for a while here we could go i am so interested in your education background and the phd shit but uh but we only have so much time here um so sean talk to me a little bit about um how people like what sales loft up to these days how can people find out more information about what you i know i know from an onboarding standpoint you're always looking to hire so where can people find out more information yeah i mean go to this go to the sales loft uh website number one right just to see what we're doing if you're interested in working at sales loft we've got always a pretty big active careers page uh it takes a few interviews to get in because we're pretty selective about who we hire but if you're the type of person who wants to work at sales loft you should probably value that right um you can find me on linkedin it's linkedin.com whatever it is slash ks fowler it's sean s-h-a-w-n i work with a bunch of other sean's they all spell it the wrong way i'm the old person who sells it spells it the right way um yeah and then come check out check out our blog check us out on linkedin those are the best ways to do it awesome anything got you fired up right now that you're working on like specifically uh yeah i don't want to talk too much about it all right but um i'm working on a new approach to uh our enterprise sales motion and specifically a way to learn more about our customers business and how to provide more value up front during the sales process and in the thing that i'm i'm excited about the value i think it'll bring to our customers because especially in the enterprise it's a very educational process still for sales uh so helping them see the value uh i'm also really excited because it gives me a chance to be more involved in deals and that's the hardest thing about going from being a rep to either being a management or being an enablement is like one minute you're you're tony gonzalez who's who's better than gronk and edelman by the way i'll be it not even close but one minute you're tony gonzalez catching passes for first downs and touchdowns and the next minute you're a coach on the sidelines and it's it's hard to get used to that so any chance i get to get in front of customers and uh and be part of sales cycles i absolutely love awesome man well i appreciate i'm looking forward to the i i have a good idea of where sales loft is headed with a lot of the stuff that you guys are doing i'm real interested in what you're working on uh so so i can gain more insights there but uh like i said man if anybody's out there looking for an incredible company to buy into a vision and and go to that next level of their career highly recommend checking out sales loft if it's a from a technology standpoint it's the it's one of the only ones that we tend to recommend um and we use ourselves so you guys have got something special going on over there tell kyle i said hi and the whole team um and uh just like every always people hopefully you enjoyed this got some value out of it and uh if you do nothing else today if you go make somebody smile you know you had a good day so go make somebody smile today and uh you know what's uh make this world a little bit of a better place so thanks again sean i really appreciate you coming on thank you really enjoyed it take care absolutely all right everybody make it a great day cheers bye bye so so so so so so so so oh so oh oh oh oh oh oh Thank you.

Thank you.