24: Learning in Sales

all right everybody john barrows make it happen mondays thanks for joining me as usual i um sorry for last week i uh i was out in singapore i was like i was actually on a plane to singapore i tried to log in remotely but wi-fi on airplanes these days is brutal um and so i wasn't able to get through so anyways i posted that little uh selling a service video if you haven't seen that go check it out it's uh it's interesting uh good for that company to put that together you got to give those employees credit uh so anyways um but yeah before we got started today i did want to talk about some things on my mind about training um but i did want to give a couple of shout outs here first of all for everybody out in houston and louisian and let just hang strong uh help each other out i know right now you guys are going through some a lot issues with the rain out there uh and the flooding everything else so all i'm seeing on the news right now is is people helping each other out grabbing boats rescuing people just because it's so overwhelming so hang in there um hopefully this will be over soon and uh another shout out is to ireland uh all my half brothers and sisters out there in in dublin and such i'm half irish so uh good job this weekend mcgregor he he did you he did you proud so he kind of backed up what he was talking about with mayweather i thought that fight could have gone either way but i think it pretty much ended the exact way it should have uh mayweather went out 50 you know mcgregor talked some smack and backed it up actually lasted 10 rounds uh there was even a little controversy at the end there when they had to call it but anyways i know my brother and out in dublin were up at five o'clock in the morning uh drinking all the way through the evening ready for that fight and i'm pretty sure uh sunday and even today monday uh not too much work's getting done out there so anyways wanted to give those shout outs but let's get talking about training um as always feel free to jump in with questions if you have questions i'm happy to answer that's you know mostly what this is for is but uh it's always to pick a topic and go off on it for a little while as far as my thoughts here and i wanted to talk a little bit about training because training to me is obviously my world but i never thought i was going to get into this world and now i've seen it from both sides i've seen it from the purchaser side and also the consumer side and i've seen it from the delivery side and wanted to chat a little bit about why and how to approach training um because i think some people are looking at it in a way that doesn't exactly do anybody any favors uh you know i always looked at training as a way to sharpen the sword to get back to basics for me i think the the biggest benefits of training training like on-site training or something like that ideally is it gets us to stop and think for a minute about hey is what we're doing working really because i think so many of us just get caught up in the day-to-day and just going a million miles an hour and not stopping and thinking every once in a while so i think that's one the other is it gets us back to basics so for those of us that have been in sales for a while earlier on ideally we had some things that built our foundation that we did and then we got successful and a lot of times we get away from those things that have made us successful some of the foundational pieces of of sales and training so i think training brings us back to that and says oh yeah you know i should be doing that simple stuff like goal setting and those type of things and then the third piece of training is is it sharpens the sword or it gives us new tips and ideas and things to do so you know we can do new tips new ideas and again you've heard me talk a lot about how things are evolving so fast right now in sales if you're not paying attention to what's happening and if you're not adding new tools to the tool belt on a regular basis you're gonna get replaced i've just had three meetings this morning as a matter of fact with clients talking about how and i'm not going to name him names here but how they're no longer hiring from certain companies who used to be the pillar of wow if you came from that company you knew what you were talking about from sales but now a lot of these companies are actually not hiring from those companies because that was the old way of selling you know the the show up and pitch a good product maybe develop a really good relationship with the client and and drone through a powerpoint deck really really well um those days are done you know the idea of really focusing on the client the client has more education than ever before and more options than ever before so we really have to shift into that solution selling mindset the adding value mindset and it's just a it's different than when i was taught how to sell early on so that's why i think if you're not going to sales trainings on a regular basis or at least not consuming new content um about sales and training and those type of things you're going to get left behind real fast here so those three things are the the value that i see in sales training but the type of delivery mechanisms are obviously changing as well there's the on-site old school and i still do a lot of that where it's one day on training and kind of get everybody all fired up and collaborate and then there's all the online resources today i want to talk about us as individuals forget about companies buying sales training because that's not what this is this isn't a pitch to buy sales training um this is actually a anti-pitch on sales training at least the a lot of stuff that i do um as far as flying around and doing all that because there's so much content out there right now that you can learn almost anything for free or for just a few bucks and so the way i look at it is you need to schedule this into your routine to educate yourself on certain topics and then you need to consciously try consciously work on specific things on a regular basis to to make sure that you're improving so let me explain um you know if you were to look at yourself as a sales professional and say okay let's take a look at all the different aspects of sales right there's there's time management there's account planning and account mapping and territory mapping and strategy then there's the outbound prospecting um then there's you know and there's messaging in that there's there's email there's phone there's social selling uh as part of that then there's the qualification phase once you get somebody on the phone how do you run that quick qual call for 10 15 minutes and then there's the demo or the presentation and then there's the negotiations uh objection handling and closing so if you kind of map out all those different stages you look at it and say okay where do i need some help i think most of us need help at all those different stages but it's it's impossible to try to address all of them at the same time that's why i don't think there's any one sales training out there that has a methodology that you should say okay this is i'm a sandler guy or i'm a miller hyman guy because they're those programs are awesome but they have gaps in them obviously and so by identifying kind of doing a swot analysis if you will and identifying where your strengths and weaknesses are throughout the sales process and then finding content that is relevant to just that piece okay so let's take a look at qualification um as far as how you qualify an account now i think i personally actually think there's a gap in qualification training because most people train you how to run a full-blown detailed meeting but that qualification call there's limited content out there about that so how do you set that stage run that call call and then end it with enough time to say um you know hey you know next steps here like we got a full-on detailed meeting with a customized presentation well with that now just go and search for the content that's around that piece and and just maybe watch a webinar or listen to a podcast or watch a couple of videos or two and and pick up on a couple of nuggets or tips and then focus on that for that week so for instance i used to do this with my teams but i also do this myself whereas it's like all right this week what do i want to work on this week that qualification call okay cool let me do a half hour worth of research here this morning on qualification techniques or structure on how to run those call calls and then all week this week out of all the other things that i'm working on right now what's you know let me make sure i focus on doing that and i keep a pad and paper next to my desk still to this day and anytime i'm trying a new technique or a new approach i write down what that approach is and then as i'm going through my week i have it as a visual reminder and then i just do a plus minus okay it worked it didn't work or it was good or it didn't work it led to a favorable outcome or it didn't and that way at the end of the week depending on how many calls i'm doing that week i can take a look at that and say yeah that worked or no that didn't there's a tendency to if it doesn't work once or twice to get away from it and kind of go back to what we were comfortable with but i really recommend you pushing yourself and getting a little bit uncomfortable and trying it more than just once or twice you know trying it 10 15 20 times unless it's a straight up disaster obviously if it's a straight up disaster people are saying what the hell are you talking about um that's one thing you know you shift immediately but if you're just if you're just not comfortable with it you just got to get comfortable with it because a lot of our delivery and how we interact at various stages of the sales process and the information that we get at those stages a lot of it has to do with the confidence and our approach to it but we got to build that confidence right you're never good at something the first time you do it think about playing golf right first time somebody put a golf club in my hands i was like wait hold your hold your hands like this and then straighten your arm like that and then swing through i'm like i feel like an idiot here but then after doing it a few times you realize okay if i do put all this stuff together it ends up going straight um it's the same thing with sales any time you're trying a new technique or a new approach it's not going to feel right you have to put a conscious effort effort into trying it multiple times and giving it a chance so i always say if you're not if you're not getting uncomfortable in sales you're not getting any better all right so you need to be constantly putting yourself in that uncomfortable position to try new things and this is why i think practice is so important so a lot of times you know i again you've heard me talk about this before excuse me i tear out my accounts i got my tier ones tier twos and tier threes my tier ones are my great accounts those are the ones i focus on a lot and where i listen to on social media come up with very thoughtful contact strategies around i do a ton of planning for those meetings tier twos i'm a little bit more okay structured with i'm going to take a consistent approach to these and my tier threes you know i used to throw away my tier threes and say uh you know you're gross i don't even want to approach you because you're bad customers anyways but now i love my tier threes for one very specific reason and it's practice so anytime i'm trying something new or i'm working on something i run a list of my tier threes and and i try that approach i'm a little bit more aggressive for instance with my approach to them than i would be on somebody else so i can build up my confidence to go after my tier twos and my tier tier ones it's kind of like pricing for instance there's a there's a point where you could look at and say you know what i am just not confident when when delivering pricing or when talking about pricing and so because for me i wasn't as an example it always cracks me up with sales reps and i was in this boat where when you when when a customer talks about price you know say something's ten thousand dollars or whatever when somebody says john how much does this cost the answer should be ten thousand dollars and then you should shut up and wait for it all right but it's never ten thousand dollars when when somebody asks john how much does this cost the answer is always well it's ten thousand but it really depends on how you are uh and now mind you i might have been hearing i might have heard ten uh twenty thousand from your competitors thirty thousand fifteen or whatever and i heard ten from you and i was like oh man that's actually pretty reasonable um but as soon as you heard as soon as i heard the word but come out of your mouth i'm not i'm not paying ten thousand dollars anymore so you automatically gave me a discount before i even asked for one so for me i actually had to get confident with my pricing because oddly enough i was actually more confident delivering my pricing to my tier ones like my big accounts because i knew they could afford it whereas i had i still do have a soft spot in my heart for uh for small businesses because i used to be a vp of sales of an smb company with no money like we had we had no funding we were self-funded and so if somebody were to come in and tell me hey john uh you know we're uh you were you know here's how much my training costs and it was ten twenty thirty thousand dollars i would legit laugh them out of my office okay because i you know i might have five thousand dollars for the whole year for training for my team and so now i have that soft spot in my heart for small businesses and so what i found is early when i was doing this training the on-site stuff i would actually give more discounts to smaller clients because i would feel bad for them i'd be like ah you know especially if they're only going to put like five or six reps in the training like ah that's because i charge day rates that's a pretty high per head rate and all this other stuff but then all of a sudden i started realizing you know a day in my time is a day in my time a day away from my daughter is a day away from my daughter and so i had to start building up my confidence to go after pricing to to talk about pricing when um in a very confident way so i got a bunch of those tier threes in my pipeline and when the pricing discussion came up i was like okay and just want to let you know the price is ten thousand dollars and i don't discount and then i would just wait for it and half the time i'd get whoa john that's way more expensive than i was expecting it to be um the other and you know what that was actually probably a good thing because they were probably not good clients for me anyways uh the other half of the people would say okay well i just had to ask is that okay yeah sure i had to say no is that right and so what i did was i built up my confidence with my tier threes and then went after my tier twos and then went after my tier ones and then started kind of getting comfortable with how i deliver price and now you know again i've talked about why i don't discount but first of all i train negotiation training so what kind of a sales trainer would i be if i if i discounted but on negotiation training specifically but you know and i have that big big fat pipeline but i found that when i deliver price the confidence in how i deliver it now tends to even not even make it an issue so for instance again this morning i had a couple of meetings and one of them they talked about price and you know it's a little bit of a smaller company and i just said it didn't even blink and and you could feel the uncomfortable silence but they were like okay you know just send us over the paperwork we'll take a look at it now does that mean they didn't freak out on the back end you know what i probably should have done is pushed it a little bit further and is is that within your range type of thing just to get that which i missed this morning um so for instance that's something i can work on this week going back to training what can i do is i can i can deliver pricing but then confirm with them if that's within their range or within their budget because sometimes i miss out on that piece so anyways my point is on training is really take it upon yourself all right don't wait for your um employer uh or your boss or your manager or anybody to invest in training for you and say oh you know this company doesn't invest in me well consider that uh an added benefit if they do i know i've been doing a lot of research on millennials and different um uh you know different yeah millennials pretty much and uh and how they a big part of what they look for in their jobs is to um is to is the investment that the company makes in them and are they are they feeling like they're being invested in and learning and continuously improving now i think that's always been important but it seems like this generation that's a bigger part of how they make decisions on who to work for and stuff which is great and you know what those companies those ones that do that are are fantastic but i would really urge you not to look to the company to do that because if you do you're going to be sadly you're your expectations are not going to be met and you're going to keep bouncing to companies to try to find that one if you take it upon yourself to say you know what i'm going to i'm going to teach myself these skills i'm going to take it upon myself to learn these things and take an active mindset on learning that's where you start to carve out your own path and and your own uh career growth and your success metrics and all that other stuff so there's tons of tools out there i mean first of all you could just do a google search on pretty much anything on youtube on any topic and there's a million people out there and at first i was like you know what be careful about the the people who position themselves as thought leaders who really haven't ever done anything but i've changed that a little bit because hey what's the harm even if somebody's out there giving a tip or a nugget or an idea on how to do something and they've never done it before um as much as that pains me because i i really wish there was more people out there who were practitioners and not just people who were telling people what to do but actually giving real world experiences hey i did this and yeah don't do that or you know versus just spawning off some techniques but you know at the end of the day if the technique as long as it's not offensive or sneaky or or sleazy or something like that if the technique sounds reasonable give it a shot and see what happens because it might fit your personality versus my personality it might it might you know fit into your process better than my process and the way they deliver it could be a little bit different so i would really encourage you to pick a topic like i said kind of outline your sales process if you will all the different stages identify the one that you personally are having the biggest challenge with and then go do a little bit of homework to find out somebody out there who is speaking about that topic and giving nuggets tips ideas structure around that topic and then trying it consciously for a week writing it down on a piece of paper and saying out of all the other things that i'm doing this week this is what i'm going to focus on and at the end of the week doing a little recap for yourself um you know again there's free stuff out there you can also sign up for stuff like udemy or linkedin learning you know i found linkedin learning to be pretty interesting because what it's doing is it's actually recommending content for you so based on your profile and this is where i think everything's going with just in time learning and all that other stuff but um is you know based on your profile so if you're an sdr and it's going to say hey you know what other sdrs are watching this type of content and they're getting promoted to be bdrs aes whatever the next role is so you should probably watch this content so it's starting to prescribe stuff which i find very interesting um so again i think that's where the world is going is we're going to start to have based on our profile based on the stage that we're at in the sales process we're going to get you know hey you should do this but don't wait for that all right go out take it upon yourself to educate yourselves and this is you know people ask me about sales books you know john what sales books you know there's not too many sales books i love because most sales books i'd say 80 of them are fluff and there's 20 of the content that is that is meaningful and those tips and nuggets i think are out there so you don't necessarily have to read an entire book to get to that one nugget that one tip or that structure that's why i'm more of a blog person you know i'll set up a feedly account um if you don't have those i've talked about it before f-e-e-d-l-y it's a it's an rss aggregator and i actually have a tab called sales training and i go and i listen and i and i look for all the other sales training companies that provide sales training and in addition to mine and i follow their blogs and a lot of them put out really good content that's free and um you know it's maybe not a hundred percent of what they sell but it's pretty close and so you can by putting those things together you can start to put together your own sales training program so think about that for this week about what do you want to work on this week even if it's like a weak word here's another one that i'll throw out there is we all have weak words that we put into our vocabulary that distract from our messages the ums the maybes possibly's touching base checking in those type of things pick one of those and say you know what this week i'm going to focus on not touching base or not using the word basically and i'm going to ask my people around me to if they hear me say that then you know just to throw something at me or whatever it is because those small little improvements you know they start building up and you know i live my life by the rule of one percent which is set the bar but a high but attainable level and then every single day instead of throwing the bar up here try to get one percent better every single day you do that you start to get you start to see measurable improvements on a regular basis look at yourself at the end of today and say was i better today than i was yesterday if you can answer that genuinely you're doing you're moving in the right direction so i'll take a couple questions here um there's actually one from lucas what's up man uh do you have any travel tips for road warriors uh yeah well considering that two weeks ago i went to dublin for a day i left on a wednesday night landed on thursday morning trained on thursday came home on friday and then i left for singapore on sunday night landed tuesday morning trained tuesday wednesday and came home on thursday uh yeah travel is has become part of my uh my existence whether i like it or like it or not and there's some tips i guess say you know it's a little bit of a broad question but i'll hit on a couple of them one is if you haven't here in the states if you haven't signed for tsa if you haven't signed up for the tsa stuff do it it takes 10 minutes you go online you sign up then you have to go someplace give your fingerprints and your passport or whatever and answer a couple of questions and then you get automatic tsa and i will tell you if i didn't have that i would not travel if i had to wait in those regular lines i don't even if i travel two or three times a year i would do this by the way so if you haven't done it do it um that's one the second one is pick an airline i don't care how shitty it is you know mine's united everybody always talks about how bad united is that's yeah that's for people that don't have status if you do have status on an airline you get treated completely different so don't always just look for the best deal or the cheapest flight look for the one that you can stay consistent with because those points pile up and the stat the points are fine i don't really care you know it helps me get a flight every once in a while but um it's more the status that you're looking for the other thing is uh you know pack accordingly you've seen if you follow my uh if you follow my instagram post you saw i posted a little while ago that i have a backpack and i packed three days my trip to singapore which was really just two but three days into a backpack and if you can get it into a backpack where it just fits under your um under the seat in front of you so you don't have to fight for headroom space that makes all the difference in the world i do that by i've changed my um get up now i used to wear dress pants a dress shirt and and nice shoes now i got shell toes um jeans and a nice shirt the jeans you can wear jeans like two or three days in a row without having to wash them every single day so that's made all the difference in the world because now i just pack three shirts three pair of underwear and three t-shirts and three socks you know a backpack and i'm out the other thing is uh battery battery battery um so get that i get about 15 different battery supply things and um also plan b for everything okay so i have a small projector that i bring uh when i go to training so in case their projector dies i have mine i got extra markers i got extra pens i got extra batteries and i got a battery uh charger for my laptop just in case i can't plug in on a flight because that for me is on a plane is actually a fantastic time for me to get shit done so i put my head down put some earplugs in and just hammer through work so instead of checking out the game of thrones or whatever which i watched last night i watched the first and second episodes of the season and holy shit it's getting good i know everybody was talking to me like you're not watching it yet i'm like no i haven't had time so anyways yeah first couple of episodes have been bananas um and uh you know instead of doing that and catching up on all those things catch up on work like the downtime work schedule your downtime work for those type of trips so for instance anytime i have a project that i need to do where it's just i need to hone in and bang out two three hours on one specific thing i actually schedule that for my my my travel days so i want a flight from san francisco to boston or boston to san francisco i got six hours there that i can stay focused on one thing as opposed to being in the office here and having to deal with calls and emails and all that other stuff so there's that um what other tips uh yeah try to get your toiletries down to the point where you don't have to take them out that's why the tsa thing is that's probably my biggest recommendation is go tsa because or global entry uh look i think you're up in canada so do global entry because those type of things make travel tolerable it's getting worse right now the customer service and everything else what i'm watching on airlines it's getting worse the chairs are getting smaller the seats are getting smaller the leg room is getting especially in basic coach um customer service is horrendous and so just make sure that you avoid all that shit if you possibly can again i wouldn't be able to i wouldn't be able to do this if i didn't have tsa pre-approved and wasn't able to get on a plane first or second so um those are some tips um don't know if anybody has any other questions but i'll keep talking a little bit about the uh the mentality of travel because a lot of people have this wow john either it's awesome because you're going to singapore and it's not i'll tell you right now the inside of a taxi the inside of a hotel and the inside of a training facility look the same no matter where you go in this world um i rarely get to do anything cool but also you know from a travel standpoint it's like oh i couldn't do that well if you plan it out and and you have a system um it's actually it's again going back to routine i i got i now have this very specific routine i go through every time i get on a plane uh i work up until a certain time i call uber uber brings me to the airport i go about an hour and a half before so i can grab a bite to eat and make sure all my emails are downloaded and my projects are ready and i set my goals for the flight i get on the flight as soon as i can get my laptop open i open it up i hopefully can connect to wi-fi and then so do those things but if i can't i got a project to work on for however long i'm there and then when i land i'm caught up and i can get ready to go and probably crash out and wake up the next morning and do my training so that the process that routine and then like i said always always always always have a plan b make sure that you're monitoring everything uh all the different channels for all the alerts and everything like that and and plan for the worst um if you're not gonna be able to get something make sure you have a like for instance for me if i'm not be able to get to a training because i miss a layover or something like that um then i have a blue jeans which is what i'm doing now so i can light that up i can be in the airport i've done it before where i got 30 people in a room waiting for me and i miss the class so instead of you know saying oh we need to reschedule this seeing if the client would be open for cutting the price in half or something like that and doing it remotely i mean shit happens right people need to understand that so anyways those are some of my tips um let's see let's see here's another one what's the worst thing that you encountered in sales in your life and how did you overcome it the worst thing i've ever go overcome in sales who uh that's what told uh whoever asked that question um give me a little bit more color around that one which is uh worst thing as far as worst thing that's ever happened to me or worst thing a client's done um okay i'll i'll give you one while i wait for that uh piece and then we i gotta bounce here because i got our one o'clock but uh i went into a trip okay so uh i was working at this one company um i'll name it basho and there was it's what this training is based off of but then they came up with this software that was supposed to be associated with this with the training right but it wasn't ready whatever and the new ceo came and pushed for it like we got to get this in front of our clients and so i had this one customer my best customer here in boston and i had a great relationship with this woman she was the worldwide she was the head of worldwide training for them and uh and she was in my ceo was like get me in get me in front of them so said fine set up a meeting and it was me my vp of sales and my coo and the whole idea was uh we were going to present i was going to set this i didn't really even know what this software was all about so i was going to do the quick little intro thanks for coming in i was going to hand it to my vp of sales who was going to do kind of the sales pitch and then we were going to hand it over to my coo who had developed the the software and he was going to present it he was our coo slash cto anyways we're sitting at this big conference room table and it's me my my client vp billion dollar software corporation by the way uh the vp of worldwide sales enablement and then she had brought in her vp of worldwide sales operations right so two bigwigs in this call it's me my vp of sales and my ceo sitting down at the end of the table and the whiteboard was here and um so i'm sitting there talking and i'm like hey jill thanks so much for coming in today i appreciate it and all of a sudden i see her go like this whoa and she covers her face with um with her notebook like this she's like oh and i'm like huh and i look up and um i don't use a mac i still use a pc by the way this surface uh laptop is by the way um anyways but uh i don't you know with max apparently they uh so every once in a while they'll they'll throw up your album out or artwork up as a kind of a screensaver type of thing and apparently my coo had some very um eclectic uh taste in music music and uh up on the screen was something you know i've seen some weird shit before uh but this album artwork was interesting and offensive to say the least uh it was three unicorns i'll post it in this thing you'll if you're offended don't look at it um but uh yeah so it was three so and i don't have a filter so i look i'm like what the fuck is that and uh and i look back and again she's horrified the guy sitting next door is laughing his ass off my vp of sales is doing the chuckle dance because he can't hold his shit together he's like literally giggling so hard he can't stop and my coo is like feverishly ripping cords out of his laptop trying to get it off the screen and i'm like my number one client billion dollar software organization that we're trying to sell this into and one of my best relationships and this clown show is happening and so i'm like uh i just looked at joe i was like joe you and me right here i don't know what's going on up on that screen but i know tony's going to get that off as soon as he possibly can and we're going to move through this uh because you know i do think that there is some value in this software for you and your organization based on this and i tried to power through it uh needless to say that meeting didn't go too well uh they they tolerated us being there but afterwards as i was leaving you know i was gonna i was about literally about to call her and apologize because i did obviously in there but um uh she called me and she goes john i just want to let you know if you and i didn't have the relationship that we had uh we would have called the police and had you thrown out of here and you would never be allowed back on this campus again and i was like yes i'm i apologize that'll never happen again those two will never be allowed back in your office again she's like no they won't now i was able to maintain that relationship because her and i had such a strong relationship which is why a relationship selling is not dead i don't care what people say it is still very important as part of the process but man that put me in a really awkward position so that was one of the worst things that happened to me in a while and from a sales standpoint and there's like there's only so much you can do with that um again thank god i had a good relationship so anyways i gotta bounce here i gotta call but hopefully you got some value out of this one again training train yourselves don't wait pick a topic once a week do a google search read a blog listen to a podcast apply it that week consciously track and measure to see if it works and then pick the next thing next week and get one percent better every single day all right everybody keep making it happen have a good one later you you