177: Vrahram Kadkhodaian On The Importance Of Agility In Selling

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James Say What Sales Buckley, and this is another edition of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. As always, we'd like to thank our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Vanilla Soft, Vidyard, Proposify, Zoom Info, Loom Cube, and Rise for making these episodes possible. Today, our guest is VK, President and CEO at Prolific, a sales enablement company working to better your Salesforce experience. Check them out at prolific.com. John and VK are going to dive into VK's five factors of agility. We're going to tie them back to how each factor helps a sales team think on their feet, aid in their own company's growth, invest in their personal and professional development, and ultimately impact change not only for their own teams, but also for their prospects and customers as well.

All right, John, let's get started with VK and make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. I had a good one. My Patriots out of nowhere, 45 to nothing, smoked them. So I was actually quite surprised because we suck this year. But I am here with a very special guest of mine and a good friend of mine as well, and I'm excited to have this conversation. So VK, President and CEO over at Prolific. How's it going, my friend? Good, John. Good to be with you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on. VK, do me a favor. Give the team a little background, where you're coming from, what you're doing these days, just so we can have some context for this conversation.

Yeah, so I met you at Salesforce years ago and came over to Prolific. And what we do is we do smarter sales enablement for the Salesforce customer, where we bring key account management and digital content native into Salesforce, native on the front end, native on the back end. So you snap us in and you're off to the races. That's awesome, man. And I think that's a perfect transition to what we're going to talk about today, which is agility, right? And being agile and how I think that is, you know, the number one competitive differentiator for people these days. But before I do that, I wanted to publicly thank you. I've been meaning to actually write, there's a few people at the end of the year that I sit down and kind of write out something to.

And I just want to let you know, for people listening, VK, when the shit hit the fan, okay, in March, right, we had APAC, AMIA, you know, US stuff booked all over the place. And I saw the dominoes falling and I remember being on a plane, two sessions got canceled. I was in San Francisco and all of a sudden, no, I was in Boston and I was on my flight for one session that I was supposed to do, actually two sessions in Chicago. I'm literally on the plane, the door's closing and I get this text, are you still in Boston? And I didn't have your name in my phone at that time. So I was like, oh no, I'm like, VK, is this you? And you're like, yup. I'm like, are you canceling tomorrow? He goes, yup. So I legit grabbed my shit.

I sprinted off the plane and the woman was like, sorry, sir, we're closing the door. I go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm getting off this fucking plane. And they're like, no, no, no, sir, sorry, you have to sit down. I go, you really want me to do this? They're like, what? I'm like, okay, here we go. COVID, COVID, COVID. I'm like, I got COVID. You got to get me off this fucking plane. And they were like, are you serious right now? I'm like, you're damn right I'm serious. So anyways, but the reason I'm thanking you is because there was a time there for a few months where I always said that people, the way you treat people in bad times, uh, they'll remember. And you had this contract with me.

Uh, it was not an insignificant amount of money and you knew small business getting crushed here. And, and for everybody out there, VK paid that bill, even though I didn't deliver that in training. Um, and I can't tell you how much that, that meant the world to me, man. I really, I really do want to say thank you for that. Cause that meant the world to me that you would do that for us. That means the world to me that you remembered it, John, and you've been a great partner of ours. Our growth is directly tied to you, but you're a good person. And, um, you know, at the end of the day, you're welcome. And thank you for everything you've done. And, you know, we established our, we, we established our relationship on trust and you've delivered to our team throughout the year.

No one knew what was going to happen with COVID. I'm just happy that you got off the plane. We were absolutely going to make you whole and, um, you've made us whole throughout the years. So thank you for that as well. Awesome. And for people listening out there, man, being a good person matters. It really does, especially in today's world. So be a good person. Um, so VK, let's get into agility, man, because I do believe now that agility is hands down, uh, the number one competitive differentiator for sales reps to be more agile and learn and adapt, but also for our customers, like the messaging that I'm using right now, that's getting the highest response rate is, it is legitimately when I put agility in the subject line, right.

And then I talk about how I can help their sales teams become more agile. So what are you seeing out there? Like, what are some of the things that your team's doing or you're seeing that is fostering that, that continuous improvement agility factor there? Are there some foundational things that we can focus on here that, that actually put some structure in place to allow for that? Totally. And you know, I think COVID has turned this whole thing on its head, right? And we've got to think about the pandemic. We got to think about remote work. We got to think about buyers, sellers, everybody working in a very different way. No one's used to this kind of life that we're living right now. And if you say that, oh, it's been a breeze.

Well, I'd love to just come and hang out with you guys for a week and just understand how, but really we've, we've anchored ourselves on five things when it comes to agility, John. I think the first, it's probably the most important. It's what you're striving for. It's trust, empathy, adaptive planning. So basically iterative planning, not only just the strategy of it, but also the tactics. I think training is a really, really big part of it. Not one size fits all methodologies don't necessarily work for us. Just being cognizant of that, you've been a huge part of the training aspect for us. And then quite frankly, standing and delivering and collaboration and making sure that you have that, that daily cadence of getting your team together and actually having that collaboration session.

So in summary, trust, empathy, adaptive planning, training, and then collaboration with the stand and deliver standup sessions. Love it. So let's peel back each one of those. Let's talk about trust. From an agility standpoint, I think trust is everything, friendships, relationships, those types of things. How do you get a rep to build trust in this type of environment? How do you help them become more agile with that too? Because there's this, we used to be able to go on site, develop some rapport, have a talk about your back, look in your office, you're a fisherman, right? But now we've lost that. I mean, we have a little bit of it, you can see in the, you know, my boom box in the back and maybe make a funny comment on that of like, are you an 80s rap kid or whatever?

And the answer is yes. But, but how can you build trust in this type of environment or how's your team doing it? Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting because just like me, I'm in my home office right now. You can take a look at my little whiteboard, that little picture in my white, my daughter gave me all my little funky awards that I won at some point in my sales career. Just seeing me in my home environment with my camera on automatically helps build trust, hopefully with you, because this is my world. This is my space, right? But then I think, you know, in this world that we're in, empathy goes a very long way, right? Most organizations, people that you're talking to don't necessarily have a say in what's going to happen in their business.

They don't have a say in what's going to happen in their lives. And they don't have a say in what's going to happen necessarily with their careers, especially in this world. So I think the trust is earned with empathy, but you're also earning it with just having basic conversations about what people are experiencing, right? Genuinely caring and genuinely being interested. That old adage of get to know your customer, get to know their business, get to know what they're doing. I remember back in the day with Chris Voss, I know you're a big Chris Voss fan, Chris Voss fan. You know, Chris Voss says, the priorities that I have right now are the most important thing. That's the only thing that matters.

Yeah. When I went back and I took a look at your podcast and you even talk about that. And Chris even talks about that. He says, what my business was in 2008 doesn't mean that that's what my business is today. So building trust with what the world is like today in everyone's business is really, really important. And guess what? If our solutions are going to work for you, then great. If they're not going to work for you, we're going to tell you they're not going to work for you. There's no point in like forcing anything because we're all in it together. I think that is the baseline of building trust in the world that we're living in right now. And I think it goes a long way. And I think that's, you know, I made that mental switch probably four or five years ago to disqualify more than qualify, right?

Like I ask all the questions why you shouldn't do business with me. And I'll be the first one to say, yeah, you know what? We're not a good fit. Hey, right. Because I don't, because also right now with all the reviews and social media and all that stuff, you get one client that starts talking shit about you and that's going to make it damn near impossible for you to do business moving forward. Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. And, you know, I think, I think part of, part of building trust with empathy is coming to the table with real solutions with results that people are looking for. We had a customer, huge medical device company that came to us during COVID and said, look, I've got, you know, a thousand plus people that are working from home that can't go into the hospital to sell our medical devices.

And I said to him, I said, I said, wow, that's, that's really crazy. Think about that. One thousand sellers sitting at home. You know what the burn rate is on a thousand professionally trained and educated medical device sales reps sitting at home for the next nine months. And I asked, I asked this person, I said, what, what's the biggest challenge that you have right now? He's like, honestly, my biggest challenge is trying to make them productive in a world where nobody, whether you've been doing this for six months, or you've been doing this for 30 years, knows how to adapt to, because our entire business is to interface with physicians. And, you know, the empathy came back with just trying to internalize that and really putting us in that person's shoes.

And it all clicked to say, okay, well, I think we can help you now that I really understand how you feel. Like it was giving me anxiety, just trying to understand the situation, you know, and then we, we solution and we got to the point where we can help them out. But the point is, is that we probably would have sound, sounded very insincere or just like everyone else. If we said, Hey, we've got the perfect solution for you in this environment, because we're built for one from all. Right. I mean, who cares? Okay. Yeah. You really know what I'm experiencing here? Well, and I think so for you, for somebody like you and me, right? I mean, I run my own little company. You, you're the CEO of yours.

You know, I think we've, we've earned the right to do this. And I think you and I can look at business owners and have empathy for what they go through. Right. I think that's, that's why you paid that bill. Right. Cause you knew that I was fucked, um, based on 70% of my revenues getting ripped away from me, but to a rep, right. How do they build empathy for the people that they're going after? Um, because I've talked about this a bunch on the podcast is like, can you teach genuine curiosity? And, you know, I think you can put a framework to help people be more curious, whatever. And then the give a shit factor, you got to give a shit. Right. But how do you get that, that younger kid to, to have real empathy and not fake empathy.

Cause I think actually fake empathy is, is worse than no empathy at all. You know, the whole, I hope you and your family are doing well, shut up. Right. Like, like, do you genuinely give a shit? So how do you build empathy into that agile framework that you talked about to, to, to create it, if you will, or to at least facilitate it? Yeah. You know, and, and I think, I think this has been the, the oldest kind of conversation in sales is the genuine curiosity factor. Right. And I think right now building, building that for a sales rep around, you have an opportunity to really make an impact for a potential customer by having genuine curiosity on how that customer's business has changed. Because I can promise you one thing, their business has changed.

So truly understanding the ins and outs of their business, understanding how their plans have evolved, understanding how their priorities have evolved and changed, understanding what's important to them. Because I can tell you about our business. What was important to us one year ago, isn't what's important to us today. Well, let's talk about, I was going to ask that, like for you as the CEO of software company, right? Like prime, what has, like, how have you changed from December of last year to now, as far as how you view things, what your strategy has been growth projections, like let's get, let's give the audience a little insight from an executive level about how your decision-making has changed, how you're viewing things differently now.

Because I think that's where hopefully we can help the reps listening to this, have empathy for what somebody like you is going through. Totally. I think the biggest thing that happened to us from a decision-making perspective was the uncertainty of what's going to happen in this environment. Usually when things are bad, you can make decisions. When things are good, you can make decisions. But when you don't know, you don't really know what decisions to make, right? So I'm always looking for people to help me with that process. So let's play this thing through. If it happens this way, you do this. If it happens that way, you do this. But I can tell you right now, going into 2021, the number one thing we wanted to invest in was customer growth and acquisition, right?

Because we grew almost 700% in one year. So if we're growing that fast, we want to continue growing at that pace, right? But when the whole market is collapsing around you and unsure of what's going to happen, you have to revisit that priority and say, hey, does it really make sense to put customer acquisition at the top of your list? Or is it customer retention? Is it customer success? Is it the investments that you want to make in your people? I think it was a great opportunity for us to invest in our people. I'm proud to say that none of our team members were affected by COVID. You know, we kept the whole team. And what we did was we doubled down on our customers. We made sure, hey, do we have the right programs in place?

Do we have the right training in place? How do we process and prove certain things? How do we invest in certain areas that we may have overlooked in previous years? So all of those things came full circle for us in the beginning of Q1 of 2020 when there was so much uncertainty, right? And hopefully as a result of that, that helped build trust with our people and in turn build trust with our customers and build trust with our partners like you and everyone else that touches the prolific brand. So hopefully that gives you some perspective. Definitely. Well, I mean, it's funny, you know, on a more micro level, we something similar, you know, we went like this year was a holy shit, what's going on?

Let's try to grab as much revenue as we possibly can. I didn't care where it was coming from or who it was coming from. I wanted to, we gave away a ton of free stuff to existing clients to make sure that they were staying going through this. But now next year, next year is yes, a growth year, whatever, but now next year for us is a profitability year. So it went from, we're not a high growth software company, even though we have this new platform, but it shifted. Now it's now, no, we've made the investment. Now let's get the most out of that investment. And it's more about profit than it is about revenue for us, right? A little more of a lifestyle company. And you said the same, like, I'm super proud.

Like my priority shifted drastically as soon as, cause 70% of our revenues got ripped away from us. And so we were going for 4 million this year, right? So my 4 million number got cut to 2.5 overnight. And that was just to keep the lights on. But my priority was no longer 4 million. It wasn't the revenue number. It was to keep all my employees employed. Like my number one goal, I didn't take salary for a couple months. You know, I dropped everybody to a certain level that was, you know, okay, you're going to pay your bills, right? PPP came in and that would, that helped too. But I was like, no, no, no. Our goal here is to keep this team in place. So whatever I got to do to be able to make that happen, I'm going to do it.

And to your point, built trust, built, built passion for doing the right thing. Cause now I didn't care. Now it wasn't about your commission. Now it wasn't about this. It was like, let's do the right thing. Let's go help out as many people as we can. But let's, let's try to deliver training when we can sell it when we can. But if we have to give it away for a nice little Q and a, just as a pep meat pep talk for some people and fuck it, you know what I mean? We became a bit of a motivational speaking group for the, for like three to four months there. Cause we were just like, people are bored as shit and they're freaking out. So it's like, I don't know, me and Morgan, Hey, what's up? Do a little clown show.

Get people laughing for an hour. So I don't know. You know what you bring up a really good point, which is like the third point of the five points, if you will, which is adaptive planning and iterative planning. Right. And I think adaptive planning is so important, not only as executives and business leaders and business owners, but also as sales professionals, because I can assure you that a sales rep that was successful in 2019 with the type of process and plan that they laid out and some of the tactics and the strategies that they used would not necessarily adapt to the 2020 environment. Right. So I think from where I sit, I'm always iterating the plan, you know, every Friday I meet with our head of finance, our head of legal, right.

Our controller, we sit down and we talk about how things are evolving, things that we need to shift on and change on. And guess what? A lot of the feedback that we get is coming from our people with a lot of the things that we're thinking about, because we need to hear what's happening. I can't just go into a conference room and sit in there and listen to 15 people talk anymore. You know what I mean? I have to be invited to a Zoom call. I have to be invited to a meeting. I have to be invited to something. Our team members aren't in the office, right? So that iterative approach is so important, even in sales. So what's working today? What's working this week? What's working next month? Even something as simple as putting agile in the subject line with respect to what we're selling and, you know, all the tips and tricks that you've taught us.

Being agile with iterative planning is so fundamental to success in this environment, because the one constant is change, rapid change, right? So we have to be ahead of that. BK is super insightful, and his thoughts on agility seem to have us all thinking that we could do better in that arena. Don't forget that you can send me your sales wins at james at jbarrows.com to be featured on next week's episode. Today, we salute Corbett Pollock of Criteria Corp. Corbett used probing questions about what was important to his prospect when going head to head against a competitor. He learned what their priority was and spoke about that instead of trash talking his competition. At the end of the conversation, he was able to talk math and budget with his prospect and close that deal.

Way to take the high road, Corbett. Keep making it happen. You too can close like Corbett did and take that high road simply by joining us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to invest in your own skill set and professional development. Stop waiting for your manager to give you the green light to grow professionally and earn that upward mobility you're after. Join us at ondemand.jbarrows.com and invest in yourself today. We'll see you there. Let's keep making it happen. You had mentioned something about how you double down on your existing customers. How much do you right now tap into that, your existing customers, to help you become more agile as a CEO, right? Because in context on this, I think in sales, we guess a lot, right?

You're a persona, so you're a CEO in SaaS. You know, I can kind of make some, okay, what are your priorities right now? I can come up with some messaging or I found a trigger. You just did this. So maybe you need this. But our customers are the ones who know the challenges that they're going through. So how much do you incorporate feedback from customers into your sale? Yeah, that's an excellent question, John. You know, one of the things that I wanted to do when I came to Prolific was I want everything that we do to come from the customer, right? So what we doubled down on was more customer advisory boards, more product distribution boards with our customers. Every release, we do three releases per year, is coming from our customers.

So all of those feature sets, there's platform stuff that they don't have a choice on, right? That only makes everything better. But when it comes to our features and the innovation that we drive, it's all coming from our customers. The way we engage with them is coming from our customers. The surveys that we send out every quarter is coming from them, right? So at the end of the day, our entire focus is obsessed on the customer because we firmly believe that we can't sit in our labs, dream up the future without involving our customers because the customers already know what they want. And as a result of that is artificial intelligence. Once you define artificial intelligence for me, you let me know because I still, being in tech, I still don't, I can't define it, right?

You've got stuff like Watson and then you've got stuff like logic, but somewhere in between is what we're doing. All of that being smarter with our application came from our customers and that's what we invest in. Yeah, I think one of my friends from India, he said, AI means also in India. That's how he defined it. He's like, it's a front end that looks pretty with a bunch of people behind the scenes cranking out shit that makes it look like it's actually artificial intelligence. And he said it, not me, I'm not from India. So I took it, right? But I think you're right. I mean, it amazes me. We're getting into now where we have customer, you know, we're starting to build out some customer advisory boards based on personas in certain industries.

So what we do is we create messaging that we think using the framework and all that other stuff. But before we start firing it out there, right, we go to those, you know, VP of sales and say, hey, if you got this message, would this resonate with you? Are these the challenges that you're facing with right now? Is this content relevant to you? And they, yeah, you know, you know, this one kind of sucks and this one's good. All right, cool. We stamp that. Then we go execute with it. And it's this, this is the viral loop. I think more and more people have to get customer success involved in the sales process and sales more involved in customer success. So you're starting those two lines blurred right there.

But the voice of the customers is the voice because they're the ones telling you, they're the ones spending the money. 100%. And you know what? I think it's also interesting because don't listen to the herd. I mean, you want, you want to listen to the herd when you're, when you're thinking about the data, right? When you see the data, you want to see all the positivity and all the numbers where you think they're supposed to go. That's, that's, that's a confirmation, right? Yeah. I would just say, you know, in my world, you know, spending time on the outliers, right? Where you found one thing that someone said that was really, really interesting. And you dig in deeper and you dig in deeper and you dig in deeper and you dig in deeper.

And then what you realize is once you dug in deeper, all of the people that said that they were really in love with the one feature set or the one thing that you thought was in good shape. This one little thing that the outlier told you about could have fundamentally broken everything you built because you didn't spend the time giving it the time of day. You know what I mean? So every little detail in this environment and being adaptive to it matters. And that to your point with you, you look at those outliers because most people don't write the bell curve, right? Let's focus on the middle. But those outliers talk about the outside, you know, and I hate the outside the box and that type of crap, but those are the ones where you get those ideas from.

Those conversations with those, wait a minute, why are, like for me, there's a, there's a client, a couple of clients and I'm like, I don't even know why you do business with me. Like your industry is so obscure and so, but, but they're like, but John, this is why. And I'm like, Ooh, wait a minute. I didn't think of that. You know what I mean? Like maybe there's a massive opportunity over there. Let's go try it out. Right. And let's use them as the linchpin to, to get into that industry. So I think we need to be doing, and this is where I think the, agility factor of just surveys or constantly polling, not only your employees, but your, your, your audience, your customers, you know, we're agile with content because we can, you know, Chris Merrill talks about, he's my CRO.

He talks about this pinwheel approach, the thing that we have, right. Where we have this, now we have a pretty broad audience. So what we do is we pull the audience. What do you want? What do you want to learn about? We get all the feedback from them. We distill it down and we look at it and say, okay, well, let's create content around what people are looking for. We create that content. We put it in the platform. We get people bought in. We do another, Hey, what do you guys want to, and then we just, and it just self-fulfilling, right? Yep. Totally agree with you. And, you know, I think coming to the fourth point, which is training. And I think this is probably one of the toughest ones. And I'll tell you why, you know, we were, we were in a situation where it's, it's a big deal, you know, contract negotiation, all this kind of stuff.

And, um, one of our junior team members has got this amazing opportunity, but, you know, now they're talking to a senior executive that has many, many years of negotiating, you know, in their back pocket. Yeah. So how do you, how do you enable that person to have that conversation without just taking that conversation over? Right. And then, and then we've also learned that people learn differently, right? You know, for me, I'm a visual person, right? If I'm on a video all day long on calls all day long, there's a really good chance I have not listened, not because I don't want to listen and understand, but because that's not how I learn. Right. So I think, I think training and you're the expert here, John, I'm curious to hear from you, but, you know, we've got to find a way in this environment to be adaptive with the way we, we train, we invest, and we think about the growth potential of our people, right?

It's, it's a tough one. Well, and this is what I suggest in these areas that, that is also helps in this regard. I actually just got off a webinar with a group and talked about this, about this, this idea of micro learning on very specific topics. So for instance, um, and this is also, this is engagement, this is accountability, this is, um, adaptability and everything else where you pick a topic, I don't care what it is, right? So say it's, uh, dealing with a certain objection or presenting to the C-suite or whatever it is. Okay. What's the problem? What's the problem we're trying to address? Cool. Who wants to own this? Somebody on the team. I got it. Give them the framework of what you're looking for.

Okay. Here's the problem. Here's what we're trying to accomplish. The end goal, go find a solution in the middle of that. That helps us get to that end goal. Okay. Now they go out and do research. They read a blog. They, you know, take a, watch a video of, you know, somebody like me talking or whatever, bring it back to the team and say, okay, I'm pretty sure that this approach is going to work. So let's do a little role play on this. Let's figure out a way to how to track the impact of it. Right. So this is why it's got to be super micro so that we can actually say, did it make a difference? Right now for the next week, month, whatever it is, let's everybody out of all the other stuff that you're doing, do whatever the hell you want to do.

But when that thing happens, you got to do that. And you got to write down a piece of paper. Did it work? Did it not work? Plus, minus, whatever. Okay. Now the person that owns it, project manages it. So from a management standpoint, I can now see who's good and bad. So there's management material. They're also accountable because they have to produce the results at the end and they have to present to the team. And we're constantly testing new things out because now it's, it's not whether or not an approach works or not. It isn't like if it works great, if it doesn't, that's okay too. Because you just figured out something that doesn't work. And that's where I think the motivation comes in because it's so hard right now to stay motivated in this environment.

But if you micro test, if you split test different approaches and at the end of the day, and you've heard me say this before, you know, you make $50 in a day and you get no meetings. That's a shitty day. Yes. But if you make $50 with $25 and $25 and you still get no meetings, that's actually not a bad day. Right. You just figured out a couple of things that don't work. Right. Absolutely right. Yeah. And I love how you A-B test. I think that's the one thing I remember back, back moons ago when I was at Salesforce and I was in your training and then, you know, all the training that you were, you were running at Salesforce. The one thing that the team really took away from was A-B testing, right?

You know, don't just do one thing and expect the same or different. You got to, you got to try a whole bunch of different things and fail fast. And, and hopefully that's what our team is doing. And I think that's what they're doing. Right. Um, I think the other part of training that I think is like, just really interesting is I've never been so into neuroscience as I am right now. Neurologistic programming and like the way people think about things. I think it's just fascinating because there's no way that you could train me the same way that you could train someone else. And it's not that I'm unique. We're all unique. We all are. And every one of us has like a different way of learning. So the challenges that we face in this world with the, the breaking it up, doing smaller portions of training and, and, and reinforcing it, practicing it and all that kind of stuff.

We've got to find a way to get better at it because who knows how long this is going to last. And quite frankly, it's opened up a lot of potential and opportunity if we do it right, but it also will smack you in the face. If you do it the same way you've already done it. If you're just trying to adapt your onsite approach and trying to cram that into a remote approach, you're done. You're done. You're done. No chance in hell. And then I think the last thing, you know, that's five point is standing and delivering. Right. Okay. Um, you know, Eddie real well, Eddie owns our sales team, former Salesforce, rockstar. He, uh, um, you know, he holds a, a daily standup. Some days he has to cancel it because there's a competing priority, but you know, and some days it's a very serious standup, right?

Like we're behind our number and we need to ramp things up or guess what we're on track for a record month, which, you know, is always awesome, but it's an opportunity for the team to talk. It's an opportunity for the people to share wins, successes, failures, things that we're struggled with. And hopefully there's some days where they're not even talking about business. They're just shooting the shit and having a beer, but that personal touch, I think that stand and deliver in this remote environment keeps them agile because what worked for somebody might not be working for somebody else, or there's lessons that can be learned across the team that everybody can share from. So, so bringing that personal touch, I think at the end of the day or at the beginning of the day or the middle of the day, whatever part of the day it is, I think is a really important part of the process.

Oh, totally. And I think it plays well with that. What I just kind of mapped out there as far as micro training, right? So everybody on the team is going to be excellent at something. Let's figure out what that is. Let's have them train the team, right? So for instance, like somebody is just baller at sales navigator. You know what I mean? Like they're a savant, you know what I mean? Get them up on a, for a lunch and learn and have them stand and deliver on how they use sales navigator to find opportunities. And it's like, holy shit, I just learned something there, right? Somebody else might be incredible at developing rapport. Like, especially in the remote world. So have them stand and deliver about how do you, here's a structure of how you develop rapport faster in this environment.

First of all, that allows people to shine. Second of all, you know, it gets them to talk about something they're great at talking about. So it's actually easy because they're passionate about it and they're really good at it. And then to your point, best practices across the team, you get better. Yeah, for sure. And you know, um, one, one other thing that we were doing before, um, before the pandemic, you know, going back to Chris for a minute. So I got everyone his book, right? So I never said it on my shelf. We got like a whole bunch of these books and we, we distributed it and we were doing like a little, uh, like a little, uh, book club where we were reading a chapter. We were talking about it, something like mirroring or using your late night FM DJ voice.

All right. All right. Things that are kind of important, but you overlook, or quite frankly, you've never developed. Some people just do it naturally, but, but reinforcing those things, even in this environment, if it's just for 30 minutes where you take a chapter and you have one person just kind of summarizing for everybody, might be a great way to not only get the team together, but hopefully learn a new skill. Right. Absolutely. That's where, when we do, you know, one of the things that I've got away from it because of timing and everything else, but it was always so eyeopening when I would go around to the room at the end of a training, if we had time to say, all right, everybody, what's the one thing you got out of today?

Right. And the first, like, say there's 20 reps in the room, you know, the first two or three are the obvious ones, like the core stuff, like, okay, good. Right. But then when it forced somebody can, I've always said, you can't say the same thing as somebody else. You can't say ditto. You can't say whatever you have to pick something. And, and inevitably, oh yeah, I remember that, that one thing that you talked about it is, I thought that was really, and all of a sudden you'd see the other light bulbs go off. Shit. Yeah, man. I forgot about that. That actually was a good one. Right. And that reinforcement of the stuff that works, but also the little things that, that a lot of us just miss because like you hear somebody say it and it's kind of off color, but you're like, wait a minute, that was valuable.

Let me try to figure out how to use that. Right. And I think that's that active listening plays into it. Uh, you can translate that to customers and hearing the nuggets from them to be like, Ooh, there it is. Like, that's the reason they're going to do this or not. Right. Yeah, for sure. John. So anyways, those are, those are just kind of my tips and tricks in this world. Nothing's fluid, but they were, we're all learning and adapting together. And, you know, thank God it's December. Fuck 2020, man. In every way. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, I think everybody is looking for a fresh start come January, even though I don't think it's going to change much right now, you know, in the next two to three months, I think there's something very, very symbolic about January 1st, 2021 at this point.

Uh, I, I hope a lot of people see it as a, as a symbol of optimism, right? Where it's like, okay, we got through that. We're still here, right? We're still here. Yeah. It's going to be a slug for the next two or three months here, but hopefully we're going to start moving in a positive direction. Um, and I think that, that collective optimism is what's going to stir this, this, uh, spur this, this, this comeback, if you will, for us. And, you know, if I can just say one more thing around ability, I think, you know, in line with the optimism, you know, you and I were talking about this in our families and how we live on a plane and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, my, my wife, I got two little kids, two little girls, five and three.

And my wife the other day, she's like, you know, you've never had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with us if much ever. And it dawned on me that said, you know what? It's tough working from home. It's tough not being on the road, meeting with people, meeting with the teams and all those kinds of stuff. But you know what? There's a silver lining. So take this opportunity to really invest in yourself, especially in your, if you're in sales, get into really good habits, like running or meditating or reading or spending time with your family and kids. Because you know what? Yes, it's tough. And there's a lot of things that we have to adapt to. But it's also an opportunity for us to kind of grow personally and professionally.

So that's the last thing I would say before, or I, you know, stop with my words. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it was just spot on, man. I think this is, I've always, thankfully had a very opportunistic lens. So no matter how shitty things are, I've had the ability to kind of put two and two together pretty quick and go, ooh, there's an opportunity. And for me, you know, this was a no brainer. I mean, being home every night to, I don't care if I, I don't care if I'm training from nine o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night. I get to put my daughter to bed every single night. And, and I get to see my wife every single morning, you know, I mean, I, I don't know. I do think I, Morgan and I talked about this, that hopefully the silver lining of this is, you know, a lot of his generation, the millennials and stuff, you know, he's like, John, I think we've kind of, we've, we've grown up in a point and click world.

So going back to empathy and all these other things, like we, we don't really see the person on the other end of that phone or the other end of that email as a person. We just see them as a number that we have to hit so we can hit our target. Maybe just maybe the, the outcome of this is, is a recentering of what's important, right? Of you, I mean, you said this when we were kicking things off, like you, you found out who your real friends were. You figured out who you cared about now that you're home. Cause they're the only ones you text. They're the only ones you proactively reach out to. And all those other people that were part of your circle that are, that you haven't talked to now in six, seven, eight months.

So there's a reason for that. Well, you're, you're an institution, John, God bless you and what you're doing, man. We, uh, we couldn't do what we're doing without you guys. So thanks for everything. Absolutely. Okay. And actually we got, um, you know, we got a, uh, January, we're doing a webinar coming up on the 12th about this, right? Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have some fun on that one. So, uh, January 12th, be on the lookout for, it's going to be about agility, going to get super tactical with it too. Um, and, uh, BK, how, what do you want people to go, uh, learn more about prolific, about you follow what, what do you want to send people here? Prolific.com. We'd love to talk to you.

If you're a Salesforce customer, I think we can help you out and, uh, and, uh, finish the year, Sean. I love it. And just for anybody who's looking at, uh, LinkedIn, it's V-R-A-H-R-A-M plug that in and you'll, you'll come across prolific as P-R-O-L-F-I-Q. All right. So put that in your search, go find them. Go see what they're doing. I really do, uh, think what you guys are doing in the space is, is, is definitely better and different than, uh, than, than the common, uh, we won't mention any names, but the other ones. You're the best, man. All right, brother. Thank you so much for joining. Hopefully y'all had to enjoy the conversation as much as I did and got a few nuggets out of here that will make a difference in your world.

But like I always say at the end of every podcast here, no matter how bad your day went or how bad your day is, go out and make somebody smile. Cause if you made somebody smile today, you had a good day. So thank you all very much. Have a great week. Take care, John. Thanks. All right, y'all. VK really put it down for us. I feel like we learned a lot in this episode. His insights on decision-making and how that's changed for leaders in 2020 was very intuitive. It's also nice to know that some CEOs out there are still willing to admit that they need their team as much as their team needs them. No one can know everything. And VK is a shining example of what it means to truly care about what you do and why you do it.

Thanks for talking to our audience today, VK. We really appreciate your time. You can visit us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to explore all of JBSales courses, podcasts, webinars, and training sessions anytime you want. This annual subscription to JBSales On Demand will be the best investment you yourself can make in your own personal and professional growth and development as we look forward to 2021. We'll see you next time. And until then, sell better.