165: David Bloom On World Class Sales Enablement

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode, as always, is brought to you by our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Owler, Sendoso, Out of the Box, and Zoom Info. Today, we're going to be talking with David Bloom, founder and CEO at LevelJump, an outcome-based sales enablement platform that ties revenue back to coaching, training, and go-to-market strategies. David and John are going to pick apart sales enablement needs being tied to real revenue outcomes, the emergence of sales enablement as a strategic function in companies everywhere, and enabling your sales reps where they are.

And then, they're going to tackle a really sensitive subject, manager buy-in. This is a huge challenge for most sales reps out there that are looking to bring something new to the table. Remember that JBSales On Demand is available to everyone now. Just visit ondemand.jbarrows.com and stop waiting to develop your sales skills. You have the power. That choice is yours. We'll see you there. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make it happen Mondays. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. This one's coming out of a three-day weekend where I, for the first time, shut down and did nothing, which was fantastic. And I'm here to talk with a good friend of mine, somebody who's actually become a very good friend of mine because we share a very similar mentality on a lot of different things, but mainly when it comes to learning.

David Bloom, CEO over at LevelJump. How are you, my friend? Doing great, John. Thanks for having me. So excited to be here. Yeah, this is going to be fun. So for those of you who haven't heard in the past, David and I, we might go off on plenty of tangents here because we like to talk a lot about a lot of different things. We're going to try to keep it focused, though, on learning. So before this, though, kind of how to take your learning into your own hands here. But before, David, could you give us a little context, give us a little background, what you're doing, what LevelJump is all about, kind of how you got to where you are right now? Yeah, sure. It's the story. People call it the founding story.

It's titled How I Got Into This Mess. That's the title if we have to make it a book, but we won't write a book. Yeah, so I obviously, I grew up in sales. I started in the pharmaceutical industry, actually. I was a pre-med guy. I thought, hey, I like business too. Ended up in the pharmaceutical industry for just under 10 years. A different type of sale, for the most part, more of an influence sale. But I worked at companies like Pfizer and Glaxo doing marketing, sales, product. And I always loved getting in front of sales teams. I loved doing the kickoff meetings and when we had face-to-face kickoff meetings, obviously. I loved doing that. I always loved chatting with the sales teams and always loved watching people get better.

That was a huge passion of mine. And I ended up, and John and I have talked about this, I started a training company. So I actually come from a training background. It wasn't sales specific, but it was all about making people a little bit better every day. It was for business. It was how to be a better manager, how to be a better coach. And I just loved that. And I did that for a bunch of years and it wasn't super scalable. I got a bit interested in technology. So I went and worked at Salesforce actually for a couple of years. And it was two of probably the best professional development years of my life because I really just got exposure to all things you can imagine that you would learn working at Salesforce.

But from a learning perspective, I thought, hey, there's got to be a better way for salespeople to really get better at what they need to do. And that kind of inspired me to leave and start level jump. And five years later, you know, we're one of these top sales enablement companies that's really focusing on a different kind of, I mean, it's fundamental in making people better, but it's around learning, giving reps just in time enablement. And most importantly, we've really stumbled on a concept in the last little while called outcome-based enablement, which for the reps perspective is not so much, what did you score on the test and how many courses did you take? It's how much money did it put in your pocket, right?

Like what outcome for the business did it drive? Because that puts money in your pocket. And that's the ultimate what's in it for you was all about the outcomes they drive. And that's where we are today. So because that just in time learning and the tying to revenue has always been this, like for me, it's always been a no brainer, right? Like I don't want to sit in a training room and then, you know, two months later, try to remember what that, you know, idiot trainer talked about and try to apply it. And I also want to figure out like, Hey, if I just did that, did it make an impact? So like, and to your point, did it make me more money? And as a business, did it make me more money? But why do you think the, I don't know, this is more of my curiosity.

Why do you think so many companies don't tie training to direct revenue generating stuff, right? Because what I get frustrated with, you know, this the ROI conversation when, when any executive brings up, John, well, what's the ROI of your training? I'm like, really? You want to have this stupid conversation? Fine. Okay. Jackass, you know, what, what's your existing conversion ratios, your email outreach campaigns to your tier one accounts in the CISO persona? Like what's that number look like? And the, Oh, I don't know. Well then shut up about your stupid ROI. So why do you think sales organizations with a organ with, with specifically sales that is, should be easily measured, right? As far as metrics and all those other things, and then the impact of certain activities, why do you think it's such a elusive thing that most organizations don't do?

They say they do, but they actually don't do it. Why? I mean, it's because they haven't been able to, it's, it's actually, it's the funniest question. And if you and I jumped into a DeLorean time machine right now and went back 15 years, this conversation was happening amongst the marketing community where they were saying, Hey, I'm spending, you know, I have a $10 million budget. I'm getting ROI and 50% of that. I just don't know which 50% of it. Like that was the marketing thing. And at the time it was like, well, I'm doing digital marketing now. Cause I'm, I'm advertising on Google, but I'm doing email marketing and, you know, MailChimp back in the day, you would send out your, you buy your list, your database of emails, and you'd send out a hundred thousand emails and you'd say, well, 3000 opened and 1000 responded.

And of those 1000, you know, it's four, 400 booked a meeting. So I have a 0.4% conversion rate of email to meeting. And that was kind of your way of attempting to do it. But then you had this, you know, same question, but how do we know which marketing campaign was better if you were just measuring the click rate? Like that was it. And then you saw this emergence of marketing automation, which at the time wasn't even called that Marketo think of Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, HubSpot, you name your marketing tool. They, they were pioneers in taking your marketing programs and being able to do attribution to influence on pipeline revenue conversions. And that's, that's what I see happening in the training space today.

That's our vision is to do what Marketo and Pardot did for marketers. The same thing for training to give you more visibility and insight to measure it. They haven't been able to measure things other than how many people clicked on my email. And I think that's the frustrated part, right? Cause there's so many variables that you can measure that you could look at. Nobody knows what to look at, but then it's the, it's the tracking of that stuff. That is always the, what I see is always the hardest part, right? Cause management, it's like CRM it's the, it's always seen as a management oversight, right? Track that shit. So I can yell at you about how many you didn't do. Right. Um, it's never brought back around to say, Hey, if you do those things, let me, I'll come back to you with some data that says, stop doing those, do these more.

Right. So that, that feedback loop and what you're trying to build is that feedback loop almost embedded into it. Right. Cause what you're saying is do the activity as part of your job, not just to do the activity. Right. And understand why you're doing the activity. Yeah. So if you, you know, it's like, think of even, I mean, think in between now the emergence of all the tools like sales loft and, uh, and outreach is an example. The emergence of that was that, okay, now sending emails on mass while we can do attribution and marketing can drive that that doesn't work for the sales teams. And we got into this whole personalization at scale and sending, and then you started tracking, we've gotten more sophisticated with open rates and how often, and you get a notification that you sent it to Chicago, but someone in LA opened it.

So we really, it's, it's no different. Cause now we're answering the question is how effective are my email campaigns as a rep. And that's what that thing empowered. And we've got to get to the same level with on the training side of the house, because you know what, we can get super good at booking meetings and getting people on the phone. But if we don't say the right thing and uncover value, you just wasted all of the money that was invested in outreach sales loft. You choose your tech. If at the end of the day, they can't deliver the value prop and uncover a problem and run a sales cycle, all that stuff doesn't matter. And it's funny because the tactical stuff matters, right? Strategy, who gives a shit tactics or what?

Because, and that's why, you know, I always say I'm the benefactor of very low expectations because most sales training sucks. Right. And it's also driven by somebody who hasn't sold in fucking 50 years. But with this training, well, at least what gravitated, what I gravitated towards was those nuggets. Was that literally to your point or like, what do I, exactly what do I say? Like, or what's a, how, what's a phrase I can use to uncover this or whatever. And that's what I found I gravitated towards. And that's what I've kind of built this training around, which is these nuggets that feed right into the just in time, which is not, let me go take a, you know, training. And then a few days later, remember, but I'm about to make that phone call to that C-level, whatever it is.

And I'm at stage four of the sales process. What is the most optimal thing or how can I most best approach this scenario or prepare for this scenario if nothing else? Right. It's also success leaves clues, right? So there's a good chance that what you're about to do, one of your colleagues has done it before. So yeah, I've sold to media companies my whole life, but oh my goodness, I got a call right now with someone in the manufacturing business. There's someone who closed a manufacturing deal before that probably has got a success or, hey, make sure you don't use this word or don't do this or, and success leaves clues. And that's the information. That's what you need to know right before you get on a call.

So let's talk about taking our, our, our learning and our education into our own hands here, because I think, you know, in the euphoric state companies get it, the sales and marketing alignments there. Enablement is, is actually a true, you know, you know, revenue generate, you know, they help sales reps actually learn, right? I mean, what is the land is hate sales enablement. What does he call it these days? Sales productivity. Sales productivity. Yep. Not these days. Always from day one, he's always called it sales productivity, which I totally agree with. So let's the euphoric state. We got level jump. I can tie the J barrels training into it and I can fucking analyze everything. Right. Let's back way the fuck off.

I'm a sales rep here. Uh, and I know I got to get better. And first of all, any sales reps who's waiting for their company to invest in them, you're going to lose period. Um, consider that a benefit, right. But still take this into your own hands. I'm going to start with the question of have you personally, David, always been a lifelong learner? Always. When did that hit you? When did it hit you? Have you always been genuinely curious? Like even as a kid that you were like, always want to learn new stuff or was there a point where you kind of got into business and said, I better be fucking up in my game on a regular basis? Cause I don't think a lot of people are. Yeah. So, I mean, two parts of the question, the curiosity piece.

Um, I don't think it was just in business. I think curiosity is one of those things. Like, I think that you think when you go to college, university, it doesn't matter your degree, you learn a lot about yourself. Right. And I think one of the things when you're at a party, are you just at the bar, like counting how many shots you can do? But before that, when you're having a conversation, are you, are you interested in who they are? If you, if you're at a bar and talking to someone who has an interesting accent, do you kind of say, Oh, this person is not like me. Or do you say, where are you from? I've never heard an accent. That to me is curiosity is nothing to do with sales. If you like that, you should think about getting into sales because curiosity is, is, is number one.

Um, so I think that's the curiosity piece. Um, and then you bring that to business. Oftentimes people think they, I'm curious, I should go on consulting because I like to, you know, I like to ask a lot of questions and I'll get paid by the hour for questions. It's kind of like, come on, man. Like it's, yeah. But do you like that is how you want to do? But I mean, there's no, if you sell, if you're a consultative seller, there's nothing better in the world because it's like that you only make money when you've given them something to help them. Um, as opposed to, I'm going to ask you lots of questions. Imagine if discoveries today, if, if reps made money based on how many questions they asked.

Oh, Jesus Christ. There's a use case for gong. Like they'll never fly. But yeah, I mean, and then learning, I mean, listen, I've always been, I always enjoyed school, but I always was one of those. If, if it wasn't interest to me, I couldn't do well in it. I just, I mean, I could, but you, you'd have to threaten me with something. I just, I had to be curious in the topic to want to learn more about it. Um, I think when I, when I think back and then through, you know, as, as you kind of grow our ability to learn in different ways has changed too. Like you can now don't just have to read long books. You can read a blog post or a video or whatever. So all that things are working. I don't know. I don't know what's going on in Boston today, but I'll tell you in Toronto, it's, it's really hot here.

I don't know if it's like, I was going to get into that all day. We're, we're, we're close. My friend, we're close. For those of you listening to this, uh, they're up in the, David's up in Toronto. I'm in Boston and we're playing obviously game six coming up here, uh, tomorrow night at six 30 East coast time to see if the Celtics could put away. And I don't have to wear that Toronto Jersey with barrels on the back. Ah, you got the Tatum one. Nice. Nice. Yep. We'll see. We'll see. I'm not counting my chickens before they're hatched here, my friend. I never, I never accept a win before it's an actual win. So, so go, but getting back to kind of that winning in that lifelong stuff, right. Of, of the, you know, cause I think like, let's talk about basketball, right?

I mean, I think there's a point where somebody clicks and says, I fucking love basketball and I want to learn as much as I can about it. Like Kobe and like a lot of the sports athletes, like you could tell there was this thirst for always trying to get better. Yeah. Right. Is that, and you talk about curiosity and I always ask this, I ask this question a lot. Can you teach genuine curiosity? Can you teach that desire to get better on a, or is it something that has to happen to you? I think there's an innate, some people are just curious and some people are just driven. But I also think that there's a moment in people's lives where sometimes they can wake up to it. So do you know how to foster that?

Do you know how to like help people find that curiosity, help people find that drive to get better every day? Or is that something that they just got to do on them on their own? I mean, listen, drive is a hard one. Yeah. Curiosity is different. Like I think drive, it's like you're driven or you're not like it's find something you're passionate about and that will help you be driven. And that's, that's a big sort of spiritual conversation. The curiosity piece. I believe it can be, I think you can help learn it. I think some will be better at it than others naturally. Like some just know how to ask layering questions naturally without even being, they just know it's, it's, it's, it's, they're wired.

I think wanting to be curious and tying it even back to sales is let's be honest. A lot of people, not everyone gets into sales to be in it their whole life. Like, especially if you're young, you're getting into sales as entry long. I started as a BDR and work my way up being a, then a manager, whatever. So it's chops that will help you throughout your career, curiosity, wherever you are. But in sales in particular, you want to, you want to get great at it quickly because it's a skillset that actually applies beyond just selling to a prospect. I mean, if you get promoted, so for all you millennials out there, if you're, if you've got plans to be a VP one day in a CRO, you are always not to the, you're always selling.

It might not be to a prospect, but you come to a board meeting because you need budget for 10 more people. That is a sales pitch. And if you're curious about, Hey, what are our objectives? I was reading like the same things you would put in a prospecting email. Hey, I noticed in your share agree in, uh, in the recent report, sales were down because you didn't know different. Hey, I'm a CRO and we need, we need 20 more guys. Cause you saw the results of our last quarter. So it's the same thing. And this is the ultimate sales, the best place to master that craft. Um, and I just, you know, I think you can absolutely drill into it and the self-paced learning. It's like anything else. I mean, the beauty of YouTube, which is, is already old at this stage, right?

YouTube is not very old as a matter of fact. Yeah. Right. Like YouTube is old technology at this stage, but you hear all the things of how, you know, how do I change this light bulb or how do I do this? Or I went, you know, a couple of weeks ago I took a trip with my family as well. We jumped in the van and we didn't have enough room. So my youngest daughter says, well, can we take out the seat? And I'm like, I don't know. I haven't done that before. She's like, well, YouTube it. I did. And I took out the seat like three minutes later now, am I going to become a mechanic and do that? But it just shows like, if you're, if you just want to figure it out and learn it, if you don't know, like how to prospect, if you Googled in sales prospecting and YouTube, you get a ton of great content, who you like, who you connect with different methodologies are different, but there is absolutely enough content.

I mean, this stuff you guys do, you guys just launched your beautiful thing. Um, your Netflix for sales, no different. If you're curious and you want to get better, it's all there for you. So how do you, so how do you identify the parts that, cause I think people go down this track of I get, I get better. So let me Google something. And they started this kind of a broad level. How do you self-identify what you need help with? Like, so say, so say you've kind of woken, you've said, you know what, I'd like this sales shit. I want to get better at it. Whatever your job is, I don't care. Um, and, and, and, but how do you like, where do you start? Do you, do you dissect, do you, do you outline the various stages of the sales process, figure out which one is, is your, your worst at, like, what's the baseline that you work from?

Yeah. So are we talking about people that are currently working in jobs right now or someone trying to get into sales? Um, let's talk about the people who are in sales right now. They're in sales, they got a job, they might've been laid off or whatever, but they, they, they work at a company and they're in sales trying to figure it out. Yeah. So I think for those that are in sales today, um, understand the science of sales that you're probably, I mean, if you join a company, depending on the stage, they're going to have a playbook and they're going to coach you to that playbook and you may or may not agree with it, but if it's proven, and I've always said this, if there is a playbook that's proven and you think you can do it better first prove you can do it their way, right?

Like establish that you can do it their way. And then you earn the right to say, I think I can do it better. Yes. And then if you, if you get it better, good for you, great kudos. If you don't go back to the old way, cause that costs everybody money, but at least earn the right to do that. I think that, you know, where it starts is if you're in a company, you hope same thing you might have, you might like the process, but hit your manager. It's like, I don't even learn anything from this guy. Like, you know, like this, this guy is, uh, you know, it's one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Roll for so long. Been there. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's like, it's, uh, I've had one manager in my entire career that I've respected one, one.

That's it. Oh, the other, the other dozen sucked hard. I mean, we can riff on like jokes from the office, but I just picture like the sales manager coming over. Like it, when, when we're in the office, someone in the row leaning over, cause they're maybe not doing something right. And they're just kind of like, do you know why I've been in this role for five years? It'll be like, because you're not so good at it and there's no, yeah. So everyone's had a manager they don't really agree with, but in a perfect scenario, if you have a manager and even if it's not your direct manager, find a coach or a mentor that you connect with from a style perspective and ask them the questions like the, Hey, I'm not sure where I'm missing the mark.

And then use your own data. Like, I mean, you have, you always talked about the sales equation. No, if you don't have an equation, you don't even know where to start. Like it's kind of like that process, right? Like if you, like people, I remember when I was, you know, managing my first startup and I had like seven or eight reps reporting to me, I, I remember I kept telling them and I was, I was young and stupid myself. So I would tell them, I was like, guys, I need you to be more strategic with your thinking. Like you've got to start thinking, you know, outside the box, blah, blah, blah. And they, and I remember one time vividly, they came to me and they said, John, like, look, dude, like, we're just not strategic thinkers.

Like I don't even know how to think strategically. So what guy, you know, and I'm like, okay, let me demystify strategic thinking here for you. Okay. All strategic thinking is, at least in my opinion, is outlining a process, whatever the process is. And by the way, I don't care how bad the process is. Just outline it. Okay. Then find the weakest link of that process. Like whatever the weakest link is now pull that piece down, come up with three or four options on how to deal with that thing. Pick one, play around with it for a little while, plug it in, and then see how the process runs. And if the process got better, go find the next weakest link, pull that down, peak that up. Right. And if it didn't get better, find another solution for it.

So it's almost like this micro focal points of, let me try this first. Right. Let me, let me plug this in. So as it comes to enablement from your perspective, like what are some of those areas that, that, that you're finding are the areas that reps need the most help with that tie the highest to revenue, right? Cause let's start with there. Like if we're going to, if we're going to start someplace, let's, what's the thing that'll make me the most money. So based on what you've seen, what are the areas where that there's that gap and that what can reps do about it? Yeah. So it always, this is the sales velocity equation. It'll always come down to one of four things for the most part. It's a, you know, do I have enough deals to work?

Am I closing enough of those deals and am I closing them big enough? So it's like deal size cycle length and number of deals I'm working. And then the last one I would throw in would be, are my new guys ramping on time? Like are the new guys starting to contribute? So, so let's, let's leave the onboarding one. Let's talk about for, I got a team of three people of 10 people. And so where are they losing? Is it cause they don't have enough at bats? Cause that's the first thing like enablement often is like, Oh, we needed an enablement program to increase sales. Like, okay. But what's so, okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. 10 and obvious. Where do we go from there? Like what, what's the end? And this drills down for each of these scenarios to answer the individual question.

I got a team of 10 people. Okay. Forget about a company of a hundred reps, a thousand reps as a sales manager. I got 10 people on my team. They're all going to need different enablements. They're all going to have different enablement challenges because three of the guys are, they're like prospecting machines and they get into like a ton of deals and they're, they're great at building their, their rapport and they close a lot of deals, but the deal size is like 30% of average deal size. So they're leaving a ton of money on the table. So that's going to be one type of, of enablement requirement. Whereas you can have someone else that's also, you know, you choose your three, like you just said, pull out which section you're not good at.

And what, you know, I would be amazed if there was a company that said, oh, if we just did this one, because you don't have that there's, you would say of the three problems we have, if we did this one, it would have the biggest impact. If we could teach our reps to discount less and increase our deal size by 20%, we don't need to hire anybody. We don't need to, well, we will crush our number next year. So it's figuring out what the lever is. And then for that specific company, figuring out what, so that's the outcome you want. We need less discounting. We need bigger deals, less discounting because we win. We're good at winning. We're just not, we let's win on value. We give it away and then build an enablement program that's designed or training program to just be better at that.

Right. Just be better at that. All right. I hope you guys are enjoying the show. This has been a great episode so far. Don't forget to send your sales wins to jamesatjbarrows.com. Today, we're highlighting Sammy Bennett of Manobite. She's not only new to sales, but also new to software, but she recently got started with JD Sales On Demand, and I am already starting to see her in my feeds, creating great, relevant content. Welcome to the family, Sammy. Keep making it happen. Do you believe that in assessment tools? Because a lot of times I get involved with companies and they're like, oh, we need training. I'm like, why do you need training? Well, our conversion ratios aren't high enough and we've lost these deals.

Okay. Well, how do you know it's like, why is training going to fix that? Well, because we need to upskill. And it's always these fluffy answers of why, like, it's this reactive thing. And, and I tell them sometimes I say, hey, have you ever done an assessment on your team's skillsets? And first of all, not only where their skillsets are, but also what's their propensity or what's their ability to adapt or to adopt the training, right? So do you believe in, in taking some type of self-assessment if I'm an individual rep or actual assessment as an organization to figure out where those gaps are? And if my team's even the right people on the bus? Yeah. I mean, I think that's the second step. I actually think people do that too quick thinking that's going to give the answers.

I think the step before that is actually doing a proper data assessment. Okay. Actually run your numbers. It actually amazes me if you speak to companies and say, hey, of those three, I just gave you deal size, right? Deal size, number of deals or the cycle length. If you could choose one of those three to make better, which one you'd be, they'd kind of go all of them. Say, I know, I know, I get it. I know all of them are good, but which one you only can choose one, which one people aren't sure right away. And you need to be able to answer that before you get, cause then it's like, well, cause then you, cause what are you measuring the outcome on upskill? Yeah. I was upskill them on being amazing salespeople.

Cool. But what part you can't turn everyone into an all purpose, amazing salesperson with one training program, hone in on what's the outcome you want that person to drive, which one is going to move. And then I believe that then it's like the upskilling or the benchmarking and say, okay, we've isolated that no matter what happens, our team cannot beat Microsoft. We don't know why, but when we win, our deals are fine, but we just can't beat Microsoft and then do an assessment on that as to why. And I do like the assessment. I love the call recording. You know, like you use a gong to get into competes. Are you saying the right words? I think you can really build neat assessments to uncover why people are losing to whatever the choose your thing.

And then tailor training against that to show ROI. See like, that's like, we're painting this picture of how things should be fucking done, man, but they're not. And it pisses me off. And you know why? And look, I've kind of, I've, I've accepted the fact, just like I've accepted the fact that 80% of this world are fucking sheep and need to be told what to do. I've also accepted the fact that probably only 10 to 20% of the people in my trainings are the ones who give a shit, right? And are actually going to adapt this stuff. And I've also accepted the fact that most leaders, when they invest in training, at least 50% of the time, they do it because they want to show they've invested in their team.

And by the way, I asked that question. So people below the power line will never, no, no, no, we need to uptake an ROI calculator. Let me show it. But once I get to the executive level, I come and look, I'm not selling something that's a million dollars. So take that for what it's worth, right? But I'll, I'll get to you eventually, David, say my, you know, my ACV is like 30 G's or something like that. And I'll get to real conversation. I'll be saying, Hey, David, just out of curiosity, how much of this investing in this training is to show that you're investing in the team versus trying to make sure that they're upskilling. And I'll, you at least half the time, I'll get a pause. Yeah. I just, I just got to show my team that I'm best in them, which don't get me wrong is a huge benefit to training, right?

Like, Oh my God, my team's investing in me and that's motivational and all that other stuff. But it is such a lost opportunity that the lack of tracking, the lack of, the lack of reinforcement of content that they are making these investments in is just mind blowing to me. Why don't they? Is it because it's too hard to figure out what those baselines are? They can't get the reps to track the stuff that they, the way that they should be tracking. Like, what's the, what do you think the core reason that most people don't really have those numbers? Like you asked for, like, why what pick one of those three? I don't know. Like, what's the baseline metric that you're going to measure off? I don't know.

Like why? I mean, listen, sales leaders, it's, it's, it's mind boggling to me. I, listen, it could be they, they themselves never experienced real training or they were a product of being in really crappy training up there, up their career. So when they are now in a position, they're like, yeah, yeah, that's when I need a training. I need someone who hasn't sold anything in, in 30 years to come in here because his book just launched to explain to me how our team is going to sell. That's going to fly. That's going to help. Right. So there's that they may have just had poor training along the line. So I think that, and it's just, you can't change their mind. They've been in two, one too many seminars that didn't do anything for them.

Why would it be something for you? So that would be one. The second is, yeah, some do look at it as retention. Like I want people to think that it's, uh, but there's, you know, it's the, you need, there are some people that believe it works and probably understand the map that this isn't going to fix your whole team. But if you've isolated, you know, if you've isolated a problem that you want to drive a change in behavior around and focus on that, it's like, I don't know, think of an example of let's say you had, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to come up with a medical analogy is if you gave your, if you found out you had like an early stage cancer and you did chemotherapy to your whole body, the side effects of that are far worse.

But if you knew that you have something like on the back of your neck and you can just focus there, you're going to solve the problem better. Um, so it's the same thing. Like don't throw a ton of training at a rep thinking like, all right, we did our job here. Good luck to you. Isolate one thing that's going to make the rep feel the impact. And that will drive further curiosity, want to go further into the training. Well, and that's also a way that you can actually leverage the team, right? Because I talk a lot about split testing and doing that, but as an individual, like getting to a statistically relevant number for split testing is damn near impossible, right? Like you have to do so. I mean, I go a hundred because it's an easy number.

I'm not a math major and it helps me do the numbers, right? The conversion ratios. But, but as a team, like this is what I used to do, but you know, without any enablement, anything was we would literally pick something once a week, right? And I'd say on the, on our Monday team meetings, we'd say, all right, forecast review, goal setting, all that crap. Okay. All right. What's the thing we got to work on this week? Everybody, uh, you know, the pricing objection, John, or, you know, getting through gatekeepers or whatever it was. I'd be all right, cool. Somebody like open up your laptop, Google best way of handling pricing objection. Let's pick a, let's pick an approach or pick something that we feel like is, is a, is a way to address that challenge.

And then I would write down on a notebook. I would say, all right, everybody write down on your notebook. Challenge equals pricing objection approach equals feel found, whatever it is. And then kind of script out what you would say. And then a plus minus, like a T bar plus minus. And I told him, I go, no matter what happens this week, when that you do whatever you want to do, but when that thing happens, when, when you get that specific objection, you've got to use that approach. All right. And we roll play on it and whatever. And then I would say, write a plus or minus it worked. It didn't work. And then at the end of the week, I would just add up the numbers. I would say, all right, everybody, we hit that objection 50 times.

We got 20 positives and 30 negatives. That's actually pretty decent. Let's put that on the list next week. What do you want to do? So there's micro learning, right? So, so what are some of those things that, that you find that from a mic? Cause that's what I'm trying to figure out is to your, to our point of, of level jump here, specifically tying that, that, that training, that learning to revenue, right? What are some of those pieces? Is it, is it how to ask a better question? Like what are some of the things that you're seeing? No, no, no. I love, I love the question. I'm going to take this off. Yeah. It feels ready to take it off. Oh, now you got the Toronto. All right. Now I can talk. You're tainting it.

You were tainting the jersey with your own. I figured if I took it off too early, you wouldn't want to put this on. I wouldn't post it at all. There you go. The archives. It's like, the hell is he wearing that shit on my smartphone? Oh, hey, bring it, man. We'll see. We'll see who wins. Oh man, that, that, that would, it's a good thing we didn't do this next week. Cause that could have been real embarrassing for one of us. It's at least, I mean, I'm, I'm sitting, not looking as pretty, but, but nonetheless. Okay. So things happening today. I think the, the, the pieces to tie it, to tie it all together. I like just in time, you know, I've always liked just in time because it's, it's a preemptor and it gives, I mean, we don't have to, we've talked about this at the length, but I think the beauty today, and we have the technology to do it is that workflow you just described that you used to do with your team of like, Hey, let's try this approach.

And then yes or no, did you do it? And what happened at the end? And let's work on it next week. That can all be automated now. And that's powered by like a calling out gong as, as the brand name, but conversation intelligence now can actually tell you if what you learned from John's like Jay Barrow's content within the confines of level jump. Like I kind of think of the workflow as, okay, we need to get better at, I'll use the same example, beating Microsoft. Let's just pick on Microsoft. So it's kind of like, here's Jay Barrow's talking about how to do a great, this is how you uncover pain, how you do discovery to uncover pain. And then here's our product marketer explaining how you tie, not how you puke out our product, but how based on that pain, you explain how to solve it.

That leads to our product. Like that's the ultimate way to do it. It's all about you. So you uncover the pain, your methodology can work. I don't care what you're selling. The Jay Barrow's approach to sales can approach to work on anything, but then tailoring it to how that company solves the problem and then go book, you know, 10 meetings where you do that. And the beauty is with the trackers and conversation intelligence, you can pull out the keywords that, so you know that it's happening. And then, I mean, the piece we're kind of closing the loop on is linking that back to revenue. So you can actually say, it's not just about, you know, the old way it was, I took a course in my LMS and look at my certificate, but we all know that that doesn't do anything except collect dust.

The idea is, did you actually change a behavior? Because that's what drives the real ROI. It's not the training you took. You can take the training a hundred times. If you don't, you can watch them a hundred minutes or a thousand minutes. If you don't change your behavior and use it, it doesn't matter. And understanding why you're using it. So it's kind of like understanding that, Hey, we have data now that shows that if you uncover pain, the Jay Barrows way and tie it back to our product, the way our product marketer showed you and speak less than 50% of the time. And don't say this fricking word chances that you close pipeline and deals. That's where we tie it all together is much higher. So now it's like, now it's like, Hey, it's not even about curiosity.

And are you a lifelong learner anymore? Like that's, that's, that's an evangelistic piece. It's more like, Hey man, data shows that if you follow this methodology and say it this way, you'll close more business and put more money in your pocket. That's why. So this is why, and keep bringing up Gong. I'm a huge fan because now there's, there's your metrics for your team, but at a bare minimum, the, the, the thing I think what's so cool about all the data that's happening and all the insights that are out there right now is it at least gives us a baseline to measure against. Totally. So now when we talk about, okay, well, what's that KPI? Well, if you don't know, look, here's the industry based on millions of lines, you know, millions of phone calls, millions of emails sent, you know, whatever it is, here's the baseline metric of what it, of what average is.

Okay. Now let's, let's do your, whatever you do to compare that against that. And then let's use that to try and split test and try different things out. Right. Because that's where you can start to, to get uncomfortable. Right. Because I do believe, do you believe that you have to get uncomfortable in order to get better? 100%. I don't know how other way to do it. Right. You got to fail to get better. You got to get uncomfortable to get better. And so, you know, quick example here, micro learning, you know, you know me like the, my favorite intros, Hey David, thanks for taking my call. You got a couple of minutes. The reason for my call today is right. And I kind of get into the reason for my call and I shit on, Hey, how you doing today?

Blah, blah, blah. Like that's all crap. But gone came out with some data a while back that said that the best intro is hi, David, this is John Barrows from JB sales. How have you been? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I read that and I was like, that's stupid, but I'm like millions of lines, millions of phone calls. Like let John, you're an old, you're 44 year old man. Like put your ego aside and let's see if this right. So what I did was I split tested my approach. Hey, thanks for taking my call. Do you got a couple of minutes? Do you have to, Hey David, this is John Barrows from JB sales. How have you been? And it was awkward as shit. Cause I, cause it was something new that I was trying and I was like, Oh my God, it was like the first time whole call.

Yeah. But it worked. It, it, it, it didn't necessarily get me better results than mine because mine was smooth and I had inherited it and it just kind of works for me. But what I did recognize was how much it fucked with your brain. Because I would say, Hi David, this is John Barrows with JB sales. And so most of the time you don't know me, but then when I shift to how have you been, that's more of a friendly, like, that's what I would say to you. You know what I mean? Hey David, what's up, man? How you been? Right. I don't say that to a pro most people don't say that to somebody they've never met before. So you could, I literally like majority of the time I'd get, uh, fine. Uh, how are you?

And you know what I mean? And, and, and then I would have their attention. So just something as minor as that showing the, the, the adjustment, right. Gets you better. It's like golf, right? You go, I mean, do you, do you believe in that? Watch, you know, go get some tips, then get videotape doing it and then watch yourself and then change it. Right. Just a little thing, only a little thing at a time. Like don't have someone change your whole swing, do one adjustment to your grip and just do that. Like it's micro learning. Same idea. Yeah. I, I, what have you like, so what have you been working on for yourself these days? Cause I, I mean, I think there's millions of different, uh, places we can take this as far as what reps should look at.

It's like literally how to even intro a call, how to close a call, how to use the Sandler upfront contract, you know, how to like asking one specific discovery question and that type of stuff. What are some of the things that you and your team have been working on that, that you found to move the dial that you found interesting, at least in the, in the data sets that you're working with? Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of my favorite things that we started, so we were doing it before and then we caught, you know, COVID hit and it was kind of like all broke loose. Right. So you were kind of like, I don't know what to do. But it's kind of, you know, it's stabilized a little bit and we're, you know, the world's far from back to normal, but it's adjusting into what will turn into its new normal.

We do this thing, John, we call it the gong show and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's, um, we, so we're gong users where each rep has to choose two calls. One, they think they crushed and one, they think they sucked. Right. So, and everyone, so we're not a huge team and what we do is we share them and the calls are less than 30 minutes and we, we kind of give everyone a week or 10 days. So, cause to sit and listen to 10 calls at once is, but it's like, let's go through it. And we have a little bit of a, of a checklist to go through. Um, and then we get back together and it's not to listen to the calls just to talk through them. And what I actually started doing for the first time, cause my thing was, everyone's going to give feedback and we're thankful.

We've got a great sales team and everyone's insightful and people have been doing it. So everyone's giving good feedback. But what I actually started doing was actually using the gong data. And the first time around, all I did was talk time because, you know, one rep was talking a little more than the average, but you know, gong is done. And listen, I'm calling out gong because we have a great partnership with them. I mean, there's like, I'm just talking conversation intelligence. Exec vision, chorus, like there's like, yeah, exactly. Great. Exec vision and course is doing like, I mean, that's Doug, Doug's behind them. So all the great stuff, but just conversation intelligence in general. And we do what we call this gong show is everyone gave feedback.

I like how you ask this question and this, and you can generally do a diagnostic and then you've got the key stats and everyone kind of went around and gave the rep their feedback. So about the call, here's what I liked that you did. Here's what I didn't. And then I would try to sum it up with the data saying, you know, talk time is great. You didn't have a long monologue. And then for value prop. So we have specific words, like we're very big on talking about driving outcomes and impact and having milestones. Like those are key value drivers for us. So I like, or training and metrics. So I like to see in the value prop and we have it set up to make sure you're saying those words enough. And we literally went through it and everyone was able to kind of judge each other on their call.

And people walked away with one thing that they knew they had to get better at, which was wild. And then we can benchmark, we can do this again in 90 days against two calls and literally just pull the gong data and show you used to, or there's a patience tracker in gong, which is super cool. I never knew about it before. It tells you at times how long, so you're talking to a prospect and they say something to you at times, how long before you, you answer. Cause if you think about it, so you're selling me something, I'm giving you an objection and you've heard it a million times and you could answer it with your eyes closed with two hats standing on your head, right? Like, so you are so excited to spit it out because you know, it's going to work, but as a result, you're not patient.

And that's a neat thing. Cause it changes the, it sounds pitchy. You don't even realize it. So we had two people that had low patience and they're not impatient people. And I said to them, this doesn't trust me. You guys aren't impatient. You're just excited. You're excited to answer their question, but you still got to, so now people are focusing on pausing. So little nuances like that help you a little with the golf swing. It's something we've been doing. That's, I mean, the gong data on that objection handling we worked on is like the, at the best reps pause five times longer than average reps when, when given an objection, right? Average reps jump right in, and to your point, even if the answer's legit, it comes across as defensive.

It comes across as like, you didn't, you know, whereas the average reps pause and it's only like two seconds. Um, but it's like, or it's like 1.8 seconds. And then they ask a question, right? So, so we, same thing on our team. We've been like, I've said to them guys, default answer to any objection is a question. Default. Okay. Let's just do that and see what happens. And our conversion ratio has increased. You know what I mean? Like we started handling objections far better. Um, and I think that's where it gets kind of, that's where it gets interesting in this world, right? It's like, I'm telling people a lot of these days that this is fucking, it's brutal now, like working from home by yourself in sales.

We used to have the luxury of being around a bullpen of other people that were going through the same misery as we were. Right. But now, now we're sitting by ourselves. And so how can you keep yourself motivated? How can you keep yourself engaged? Yes. Learning is a huge part of that, but also testing and trying different things out so that you, cause at the end of the day, if you, even if you didn't hit your results or your numbers that you were supposed to, if you learn something to me, that's a good day, right? Totally. Yeah. Totally. A better day. A better day. It's well, well, and learning something that will fundamentally shift your conversion rates is far more valuable than booking a meeting that day.

Oh God. Yeah. Or learning what you, well, or learning what you shouldn't do. Right. Like I, you know, there's that close called the, uh, the, uh, the walk away. No, not the walk away. The, um, doorknob closes when you lose a deal and you go back and say, Hey, what's the real reason? Right. Usually, you know, maybe 10% of people actually give you that feedback, but I always say, Hey, you know, for my own personal and professional development here, like, could you help me understand what really happened? Cause they're going to give you some surface level. Sorry, John, you know, you're too expensive or some bullshit. But then after they do that, awkwardness is down. You say, Hey, what's the real reason they open up to you.

That information is better than any deal I've ever closed in my life. Yeah. A hundred percent. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. What are you hearing? Like, what are people doing? Cause I think about that a lot as well. Cause I actually have, um, what I'm starting to hear a little bit about, it's too early to make a hypothesis on, but there's, um, more now there's an uptick of people wanting to hire people that have more proven experience versus the young for millennial, because they're not in the pen to get the on the floor coaching and inspiration. Someone who's tried and true and understands, um, yeah, you're not here to play ping pong, but actually your job is to hit this number, not to get your next promotion.

Like it's a, so a little bit of a movement to that. I don't, what are you hearing in terms of that? Yeah. Well, I'm hearing yes, but I think it's a lazy response to what's happening right now, because I think that people, I think the, you know, and Trish Bertuzzi and I had a whole webinar on this cause I was getting real nervous, like when March and April hit and I was watching companies just legit hack off their entire CSDR organization. Cause they were like, you know what? Fuck it. They're a cost center for us. They going back to measurement, they don't know really how to measure them in any other way than meetings to revenue. Right? So it's a, that's it. Like, well, how many qualified meetings are you setting that how many turn into revenue?

It's a very binary metric. Right? So they don't look at all the other stuff. And in a, and I think the reason for that is in a growth economy, you can get pretty lazy with that stuff. And the SDR model makes sense because it is a cost to sale, but it's a growth engine for your sales organization where you're building sales teams. Right? And you're building the type of sales rep you want. Problem is, is in a down economy, it becomes a cost center. People don't know how to measure. They say, shit, I might as well lean in on my AEs, tell them to go prospect and sorry, SDR. I don't need a 50, 70, 80, 90, a hundred thousand dollar resource making cold calls when I can push a button myself. And so I think it stems from a lot of that where people are starting to see, oh no, now again, lazy on the other side.

Let me go hire people with experience, but those people come with baggage and all that other stuff. So I think it's about reassessing what the whole structure looks like. You know what I mean? Like I think the SDR model has to be completely re rethought of as not just meeting generators, but also, uh, Intel gatherers, right? Like gathering insights into the marketplace and what's happening out there so that we can feed back, you know, really doing account-based selling in a real way, like bottom up and gathering insights there. But yeah, I could easily see, I don't have enough data that the, to the hypothesis of hiring more experience, but I could easily see where it's going to default to that because again, the laziness factor of, uh, now I, you know, I don't want, like, I don't know how to cultivate a culture of younger reps that, that to build this kind of groundswell, if you will, of momentum and energy and all that other stuff.

Now that everybody's working from home, it's damn near impossible. So I could see it happening easily. You know, it's funny you mentioned, I mean, I, uh, you speak about curiosity. One of my curiosity questions, if I were interviewing someone, when I would interview SDR is my, one of my questions would be, have you read, have you read Trish Bertuzzi's book? Have you heard of Trish Bertuzzi? Oh yeah. But you know, Trish said, and it's interesting on the SDR thing was when you hire BDRs, the outcomes you want them to drive are one of two things. You either want them to book as many meetings as possible, or do you want them to be booking qualified pipeline? Cause that's a very different motion.

But I think you could be honest, something huge here, John, where just given the, the economy right now and where we are, there could be a third one where the outcome is go find key learnings on an account. And you, cause you can measure that, like go, go speak to like, as if you speak to, let's say you speak to 20 people today. Cause at the end of the day, the connect rate is like the ultimate driver, right? So go connect with people and okay, fine. You're not, there's no project there. Cool. So no pipeline, you could book a meeting, but let's be honest, it's going to piss people off. Cause there's no project there, but just uncover a learning that can be fed elsewhere. Like maybe it's, Oh, we're using your competitive product.

So uncover, well, when does that expire? How are you liking it? What do you not like about it? That is worth its weight in gold. And you can drive that as an outcome in a slower market of saying BDR has become intelligence gather, and that can become an outcome. You drive five account based learnings that could be a huge value in three months from now, five months from now. Like what we're doing right now, James and Morgan, uh, Morgan's AE effectively James SDR picking one account once a month and James like tier one up. Like that's what James is. What he's doing is he's talking, his mantra is he has to talk to 10 to 20 individual frontline sales reps that week and just ask him, Hey, what's going on in the, you know, what are some of the challenges?

What are the tools you use? And then just gathering, gathering, gathering while he's doing research and all that other stuff. And at the end of the week, him and Morgan sit down and say, okay, what'd you learn? He's like, well, these are some of the themes and trends. And here's what, here's Morgan then takes that and develops an actual like real story up to the executive level saying, Hey, we've been talking to 10, 15, 20 of your reps. And we've heard that their main challenges are X, Y, and Z. So now it's no longer me guessing what your problems are. I now know what your fucking problems are. And if we shift that mentality to took, because there is one group of people that is taught to gather data.

It's SDRs. And so, and if you're a CEO, I mean, you're a CEO, you're a company, what's better to benchmark off of something that Gartner came out with or some random ass fucking survey or data that your team can collect on your exact target audience. I love it. I mean, I think that's, cause that's not even, that's not even personalization at scale. It's, it's at a new level because you're not the competitive advantage is you're using your SDR as a competitive advantage to gather intelligence. That's not available to the rest of the world. If you're just looking at press releases in their website and, you know, doing whatever research, every SDR can do that today. But if someone is able to get individual contributors on the phone and ask back to curiosity, Hey man, I was just curious, hard time.

I'm a rep like you. Um, how, like, what are you doing, man? Like, what are you doing? Like getting that kind of insight and finding a thread to, and then send it up. I love that approach. Or even here's also the one you go into your existing client base and do surveys of them. What do you like? What do you not like in this environment? What are you using those types of things? And all that Intel can help you and I leader CEOs reshift and come up with new product offerings, come up with new strategy based on what the real feedback is from the people who use our stuff or the people who aren't using our stuff, but might need it. And I think that, that, that, that's what I'm hoping this whole COVID mess does is it kind of has shaken everybody to a point where they reassess and, and kind of like really just take a step back and say, what the fuck am I doing right now?

Is it actually working? What are some other options here? How can I restructure some of this so that I can put the right people in the right places to do the right things and then train them accordingly? Right. That's accurate. Yeah. Well, like I said, we could fucking talk about, I think like outside of a million other tangents about Celtics and everything else, uh, we can keep going, but I think we're going to wrap this up here. So, uh, dude, talk to me about like, A, how can people get in touch? B, what should, what do you, what do you want people to leave with, uh, from, from this one? Like, what do you want them to think about coming out of this podcast? I mean, yeah. So in general, I mean, unprecedented times people in selling, if you've been in sales through this time, there's no better training in the world.

If like, if you, at the end of this, whenever end means through this, stay in sales. I mean, this is, this has been the, you know, there's, there's the golf joke that, you know, golf is 50%, 50% mental and 50% in your head. Uh, it's not that different in sales today. If you can, you know, this has been the, cause it's a mental game, right? People, you know, the ups and downs, the highs and lows. If you can get through arguably the hardest selling time you will ever see in your lifetime stay in sales. That's my big thing. That's number one. Number two is during that time, hone your craft, but hone it for a new normal. The button has been reset in everything from go to market. So all the things that worked before, I'm not saying they don't work now, but you got a, every, nothing is, everything is fair game, right?

Everything is fair game to be challenged right now. So if someone, if you have anyone who says, well, that's how we've done it all these years, it's kind of like, this is a new world right now. So agile selling. Yeah. Agile selling. So that's, that's my second thing. Um, you know, on our side, just, you know, for, so where to find me, we're at, uh, so level jump.io. Um, our big thing is, is we're trying, we're, we have not changed what we're delivering from a value perspective. Anything, what we're doing has become more relevant, which is think about your outcome first. That's the thing. Everyone's like, let's do enablement because we want to make our people. We feel have a good program here.

And I don't know, cause I want my boss to see, I invest my people. It should start with the outcome, right? Like, and that's the why you're here to start with the why. Like there's tons of books on start with the why. It's no different in sales. Start with your own. Why what's the outcome that's going to drive and have the most impact on you as an individual sales rep, as a sales manager, as a sales leader, what's the outcome that's going to move your dial the most and really hone in your curiosity to your personal thing. If you have small, a smaller deal size problem, don't go reading and get curious on other, on other things, get, you know, hone in on the outcome you're trying to drive. And there's tons of information higher, you know, there's amazing trainers available.

Obviously John, one of them or, you know, whatever, just, but do focus on the outcome you're trying to drive and our pieces. That's what, that's our mission. Um, if we can help anyone in any way, like help them go towards an outcome and tailor, whether it be John's content or the metrics you're trying to drive or what's in gong happening, just do it in a data way and just, you know, figure out ways how we can get just a little bit better every single day. I love that. Yeah. That rule. I live my life by the rule of 1%, get 1% better every fucking day. And that's one more pushup, one more cold call, one more question, whatever it is, it makes it a lot easier. So awesome, David. Well, look, I appreciate this as always.

Hopefully all got some out of this has got you to think a little bit. Uh, and, uh, yeah, good luck on a game six there, my friend. See what happens. Hey, I will look, I will wear the Jersey. I still got it. I still got, I was going to buy you one. You didn't have to go out there and buy one, man. I would have got you. I kept the tags. There you go. All right. Awesome. Everybody. Well, look, thanks for listening. And as always, uh, like I always say, look, even if you're having a shitty day, go make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day if that's the case. All right. Cause this world needs a lot more of that. All right. Thanks, David. Thanks everybody for listening. Have a great week.

Cheers. All right, everyone. That episode was absolute fire. Don't forget that on demand is now available to you. Just visit on demand.jbarrows.com. And you can now hit me up for a 30 minute sales skills consultation. Just reach out at jamesatjbarrows.com. Join our Facebook community. Make it happen with JB sales. We'd love to hear from you there. And don't forget to hit subscribe on this episode so that you can get new make it happen Monday episodes every week. Please send your sales wins to me. I'd love to hear them. We will be highlighting individual sales reps on episodes moving forward. We'll see you guys next week where we make it happen one more time.