48: Just In Time Learning With Jake Miller From Allego

good afternoon everybody this is john barrels make it happen monday thanks for joining us hopefully you all had a great weekend uh i got after it a little bit too much this weekend had a few too many drinks on recovering at 49 years old is a little bit harder these days but i am super excited to be on to um on today with a good guest jake over at a lego jake you want to tell everybody hi and where you're coming from how you doing everybody so uh i'm head up product marketing over at a lego uh you know my background i came up in sales came up selling in the high ticket retail space so just commission only no base pay just hustling every day uh kind of really when i first started out kind of sucked at it and so like a lot of things you know uh somebody recommended a brian tracy book just classic stuff uh read through it was like kind of really mind blown about a lot of the stuff he was saying and uh started applying it and getting more serious about you know being deliberate throughout the sales process and uh started closing a lot more deals became really kind of student of sales uh fast forward several years end up stumbling across a lego and kind of flipped out when i heard about it and uh end up taking over product marketing here nice so talk to tell everybody a little bit about a lego because i think that sets the stage for our conversation and again this isn't going to be you know for those of you out there you know this isn't a product pitching anyway this is but just to give some context around this conversation because this is actually one crowdsource sales training is near and dear to my heart uh so kind of give it some context around what a lego is all about and then we'll talk about you know other alternatives and different approaches yeah so and i'll spare everybody the elevator pitch on the show so i'll just go through kind of a couple scenarios that i think everybody can relate to that kind of i think paints a picture and like you said frames up a discussion about this so uh you know we probably all everybody's been in that situation where you wind up in kind of a random conversation with an expert at your company maybe it's like the at the christmas party and it's the head of products and they say some stuff that just like completely blows your mind you know like wow and so you start using that in every conversation that you have after that uh and you know and you sound 10 times smarter than your competition so you wind up eating their lunch uh or maybe it's you know maybe it's like a with a top rep at your company you overhear them on the phone they position something a certain way and you're like ah it's genius uh you know and you start you use that every time so basically we built a lego to be able to bottle up that experience and make it available for sales reps any time that they want because you know those those moments never happen enough right so uh you know it's in the form of short how-to videos from the people at your company that you want to hear from but that you just you know you never get enough face time with right and so you know it winds up yeah so that i mean that's basically what it's all about winds up being just a platform for sales reps to be able to get the stuff they need and that and that really excuse me does kind of lead to this discussion and what you and i are talking because we're working on a couple of things to get my content out there on your platform and others um but it's you know just to give everybody a sense here you know probably about four or five years ago i had this idea of uh it's called sales from the streets and jake we talked about this right which was which was exactly this concept which is crowdsource sales training because when i got into this industry you know i actually never wanted to be in sales training because i just had such a negative perception of sales trainers and sales training content because even books and stuff like that it's like you'd sit through an entire day's worth of sales training and you'd walk out with like one or two nuggets and you and and that's a success like that's happy it's like i just spent eight hours and i just figured out what to put into a subject line yay and i'm sitting there going like really do you have to spend eight hours to get that one nugget that is valuable same thing with a book right i don't read books because right 90 of the book is full of shit it's fluff just so they can get thick enough to justify the 1999 or whatever they charge for it but ultimately there's one or two things in there so my theory was hey you've been to the trainings i've been to the trainings we've all been we've all read the books we've all picked out our specific nuggets around this why not help each other out so to kind of create this community it was an app where exactly what you just said there's like hey i just asked this question here's my tip on how to handle objections you know here it is and then put it into it you know sort by and hey i sort by objection handling thumbs up thumbs down and i'll tell you right now i i still believe that it was a brilliant idea it was a brilliant app but it was way too ahead of its time it was about four years ago when video was really just starting to crank um but people were still a little bit uncomfortable putting their stuff out there um now i think we're we're right in the middle of it and so what are you let's so let's talk about um because right now yes we're right in the middle of it and i think everybody's ready for that so but there's now there's just so much content out there and we were talking just in prep for this you know there's so much content out there like what do i know and and who should i be paying attention to right because there's a couple of examples like some people like like my style they're like somebody else's style some people are are pretending to be thought leaders when they're really not some people are just purposing other people's shit and and the problem is i see right now is a lot of kids who are maybe just getting started in sales get pushed in a different direction to talk to you know to go listen to that guy or that guy or that woman or whatever and it might be bringing them down a bad path because it's like oh you know that person isn't really that thought leader what they're spewing there isn't really good stuff it's really it sounds good but when applicable it actually hurts you so where does where would a rep start these days um on on on where to start consuming information that is um that'll help yeah i mean i think the biggest thing is you know youtube is such a great resource like you said you've got to be careful with what you find because i mean i think the the most important thing is is number one finding somebody that is your style you know i mean so much of selling and the tips techniques tactics strategy so much of it is is about finesse right and it's so much is about how you deliver a lot of these messages so if you're you know first of all you know right off the bat look around find people that are your style make note of it maybe just make a spreadsheet of some of videos that you that you know that are that really kind of resonate with you but then for more of the beginner reps like you're talking about something that you know we see people doing is like just going through and finding kind of curating uh so like if you're a more experienced rep or if you've got on your team some more experienced rep going through and curating content on on a platform like youtube or wherever it might be uh and then being able to turn around and and share that with the rest of your team right and because the thing is like that that right there is a really good way to really kind of stand out you know among your team if you're going through and you're finding really good and it can't be like you know you can't just be doing it for show like quickly try to go through and say oh yeah hey everybody look at you know it's got to be something that you really agree with you know it's something that you find is actually helpful for your sales process at your company uh and so i mean a lot you know a lot of times it's just kind of take takes that kind of initial couple people to to kick it off and start sharing in sharing with one another on a team content like this and then that's how you can kind of start to bring up some of the newer reps uh and then you know when you're when when you put in you see somebody else put in and then you get out and then and then it kind of starts that whole thing that's like one of the coolest things that we've seen i think with the internet and with youtube in general just like people you see well you see a lot of uh a lot of the negative side of people has come out obviously because of the internet and youtube stuff but you've seen like a real real uh generosity that people have to share their ideas share their tips tactics techniques people just go on there and and you know and putting up putting up great information so i think that's i think that's a good way to kind of do it yeah yeah and i and i think it's funny because um you brought up something there as far as don't just share just to share it right because it sounds interesting um one of the things that in you know morgan on my team um you know being 25 26 years old or whatever you know he was building his brand he started putting content out there and you know a lot of people they all thought leader and that type of stuff and you know it's funny how very few thought leaders ever call themselves thought leaders um and morgan if you ask him he wouldn't he wouldn't he would say he's i'm not a thought leader but what he does is he he consumes the content so he actually goes and this is kind of my my lens on things and how kind of a i flip the social selling to say okay now i can see how this makes sense for me because instead of just tweeting and posting and sharing stuff that you know just to build a following i started looking at it as educating myself first right so so consuming content to learn and then applying it and seeing if it worked or it didn't and that's again i'm going to give morgan a ton of credit on this that's what he would do like when he started his sdr chronicles before i brought him on board here that's what he would do he would like read a book or he would go get a tip from somebody whoever it was in the industry he would then go apply it and and see how it worked and then he would then he would write do a video on it you know then he would say okay you know what you know i just read about this or i learned about this i applied it and this is what happens and either i'm recommending you do it or i'm recommending you don't and i think that's where you know when i say let's let's get started here as far as a rep is concerned because too many reps my my perception on this and i'd like to get your thoughts is too many reps wait for their organization to invest in them from an education standpoint they're like oh i don't have the training or oh i don't have the tools and oh you know we don't have that so you know there's my excuse and i'm sorry there's zero excuse right now the amount of contents out that that's out there there is zero excuse to say that you are not being educated enough now maybe your company isn't investing you but if you're not investing in yourself the amount of content that's out there is is just mind-blowing and i think jake to your point it's you know go out there and start you know the youtubes of the world do a like feedly is another thing i don't use feedly at all actually yeah right and that curates content as well it's like so you put on like sales tips or something like that and then you just do you know you search for okay and then you start listening to those voices to say okay what do i like what do i not like and i i agree with you where it says you know look for stuff that is your voice because the nuances matter but i also look to stuff like stretch yourself a little bit right stuff that's a little bit more uncomfortable um because you always want to be trying something that's that's maybe a little bit outside your comfort zone so that you can get better right um so so with that you know i think we talk we can talk about how to how to start looking for the content and then how to house it you had said earlier like if i'm starting without a lego right without any one of these platforms that curates this content for me um what would if you were an individual rep at a company right now whose company isn't quote-unquote investing in them um and you so you said fuck it i'm gonna join i'm gonna go on youtube i'm gonna look at content i'm gonna check out feedly how would you organize it all so that you you were um first of all you have one repository of it that you could go back to but also then understanding for yourself what's working what's not because you want to keep that clean right you want you don't want to just put shit on there that sucks and leave it on there so what were some what would be some of the ways that you would approach this not using a lego yeah i mean i think one kind of key way especially for using videos uh or you know if you're linking out to youtube if you have like if you start like a shared shared doc or shared um you know shared like a google sheet even with like people on your team just to kind of go back through and you know create another column where you can where you can mark like hey times where this may have worked times where this did not work so well um you know initial thoughts thoughts after i used it like you said it's key to really to not just throw stuff up there first when you're looking around for stuff turn around and actually try it out and try it out a couple times right because a lot of times it takes practice i mean we've all been there you you wind up you go to use a new technique and you say it the first couple times and you're like yeah that did not come out how i had hopefully planned it you know when i was thinking about it in my head or when i was planning i so you know try try this stuff out first you know as and then and then go in uh and then post it up in like a google a google doc or in a google sheet just not kind of a shared space among your team uh and then you know it's like as soon as you start to it's just about kind of getting that groundswell going you have a couple you know a couple friends that you know on your team a couple people that you that you click with push them to to get involved with it with you um because that it really does start to take a group of people to be able to do this uh because then you got other people and other perspectives putting into the system like like you said about um having uh you know stretching stretching your comfort zone or stretching i mean that's a huge especially for you know newer reps you're right i mean it's not just about trying to find what's your style you know i can remember starting out a lot of the stuff that you know people would would recommend to try are different techniques it feels weird at first sometimes to say to to be delivering certain stuff so yeah i think i think that's i think that's key cool yeah and i mean i i would just simply same thing put a google doc together that i would actually break it down by the stage of the sales process so you're tagging the resources so you can sort by quickly right because that's the key here it's not just to have a repository of shit is to have it broken down by the different categories that you're focused on and then have a comment section so that people can say yes or no or even a rating system that it says yes you know this is really good stuff or no this isn't very good at all so that again you're constantly top grading to a certain degree um and and keeping it updated um with that um you know let's talk about you know how to you know so we talked about collecting the information but now uh creating the the information you know one of the things that was stunning to me when i first started sales from the streets was i thought you know hey i i would i remember going to dreamforce uh with my video camera and going around to like all my top vps of sales like people who are ballers in the industry and being like hey i'm starting this crowdsource sales training like give me your best nugget give me your best tip or whatever it was and it was always it i mean took really good baller reps they'd be like uh you know do your homework before you make a phone call to somebody and it was some like weak ass thing and i remember being excited because i was in the moment i'm recording you and i record somebody else and i had all these videos i'm like this is gonna be great and then i sat down afterwards i was like holy shit these are awful or they weren't awful they were just so basic and so getting that those tips and nuggets out uh of people were hard but what i realized was is is getting people to tell stories was a lot easier so how do you get people to like how do you get those top sales reps to to to share their best nuggets that aren't just the yeah no shit like do your homework before you make a phone call you know have a reason that type of stuff like what what were some of the things that you're doing at a lego to help companies curate that content outside of looking on youtube and but from their top reps right yeah so that's that's a key key that's it's a great question because you know a lot of times it's about having a structure to the stuff that you're asking and and what you were starting to do with interviews you know that's that's a key that's a real that's a great way to get people going right i mean to interview somebody you know you know someone goes out on a talk show some celebrity or whatever they may seem super interesting but half of that is because they're being engaged right um so that that's one way that we found but but having more of a specific topic so like say you know we see a lot of companies doing like you know putting out a thing to to all the sales reps saying like hey at this stage of the process we're we're getting hit with xyz every single time against this competitor with this use case how do you guys handle that so basically making a really specific request and then having everybody send it back in uh and then you kind of go through them and say all right which ones are really really good like the best like exactly how we want everybody to do it and then being able to spread that out so you know so everybody everybody can um can benefit you know and then and then another thing is just you know making it easy enough to do just making sure that it's something that that's pretty easy for reps they don't and and part of that is you know having a real kind of specific topic that they're that to to talk to um you know it will see you know people you know reps will talk about like hey you know i was you know preparing for a call and like you know i was i hadn't called on this vertical in like two three weeks and you know i i was about to go online and do a bunch of research about it but i wound up poking around through the videos and i found so-and-so had done a video last week and she was talking about this really cool way to um this really this hot button issue in that industry and how that she mapped out this whole way to to tie it back to our solution so i just used that and it sparked a conversation and it put me ahead and i feel like that's what helped me stay ahead for the whole rest of the deal so um yeah i think i think just really having kind of specifics that you're that you're to solicit that information from folks is i think i um went back so i i worked with box pretty heavy a while back when they were especially when they were first getting off ground and uh we did this project with them where it was it was kind of a sales from the streets but just for them specifically and this was before all those platforms were out there and i what i started doing was i was um i was interviewing their talk i said give me your top reps and let me have an interview with them and i would and i took kind of a similar approach where it's like hey you know tell me your favorite nuggets your tips or whatever it was and again it was just i was like holy shit like what i realized most people don't think in nuggets and tips they think in in like kind of a story right so it's like okay so i flipped it around and and what i did was i told the rep and this is what i would recommend a lot of people do if they're trying to curate content especially from their top reps so even a junior rep can go in and maybe uh interview one of their top reps and sit down for lunch or something like that and just turn your iphone on and and just let it record okay um or you know turn on a zoom session like this and pick their brain but then ask them hey could you walk me through the most recent deal you closed okay like pick the pick your favorite deal that you closed recently or or the one you lost recently and let's start from the beginning so where the lead come from how did you know they were right and then kind of walk them through the sales process in those stages to say where did it come from how did you even know they were a good lead uh what did you do before you even reached out to them when you reached out to them who did you reach out to and why what was your contact strategy you know what were some of the objections that you faced how did you present to them those type of things and if you just ask them questions about something it's more situational based then you start to get people to really get oh this is exactly how i did that and you'll pull the nuggets out of it right because i think that's like questioning 101 right is is you don't want to ask hypothetical questions you don't want to ask you know because you know i'll give you what you want to hear when you ask a hypothetical question if you ask situational based questions which is give me an example of when this happens so i and i'll kind of translate this to um to hiring right you know if i were to ask you hey when was the last you know give me an example or i'm sorry um what would you do if you got jake what would you do if you got in an argument with your manager like how would you approach it that's a hypothetical right you're gonna say well you know i would sit down i'd really make sure i understood what my challenge was and i'd come up with solutions because i'm not just a problem guy i'm a solution guy right and then i'd sit down i'd have this and you'd be like holy shit this person's incredible but if i were to ask you jake give me an example the last time you disagreed with your manager and how did you approach it now you're gonna have a hard time now you have to think about that and it's a hard time lying on the fly right right so it's the same thing with curating content like that real world content is is so much more valuable than some staged canned hey you know here's something that sounds pretty on paper but when you try it it's actually oh my god like that wow that's a disaster and i'm gonna warn everybody out there i'm gonna warn everybody out there right now when it comes to sales trainers okay myself included um we know our content so well that when a sales trainer does a role play or does a video or does a training where they pull somebody up and they do this and they kind of make themselves look good it's because i've been doing this for 10 fucking years you know what i mean and i can make you i can make it look sound look and sound just flawless but reality says in in especially in a made-up environment right like a you know that type of thing but reality says most sales trainers when put in a real world situation and that happens they nearly that smooth and that shit doesn't work nearly as well so i would be i would caution anybody out there to take you know what some sales trainer says and be like not even what they say but how they say it like oh this is you know this is it right and and be just cautious that that ain't really it because i think the real world stuff talk to me about a lego i mean obviously you want to curate content from anybody but do you see the bigger adoption with internal teams being stuff that they have come up with versus what the outsiders bring in yeah i mean yeah i think the biggest thing because that's kind of the where you know where kind of youtube stops and then having your own bringing in your own system and just trying to take videos yourselves kind of begins a lot of the more company specific stuff like you know if you know like i said before if you're uh about to call on a certain vertical you haven't talked you had to call on a couple weeks being able to hear somebody actually from your company and how they actually specifically say it just specific to your solution and to that maybe to that competitor against with this use case or whatever it might be so yeah i mean a big a major part of the adoption you see is uh is with kind of internal content because you know and and then with product stuff too i mean so much of the time it and especially with these increasingly complex solutions that we all deal with yeah being able to just kind of have that wisdom from somebody who's an expert inside your company uh is key i mean it just it kind of gives you just another uh another tool in your bag that you can use to to be able to just push things forward and really and really kind of differentiate by just by being able to bring insights and really sound 10 times smarter so um yeah and i think to your point about you know recording uh trying to get just kind of putting on your camera and and recording some stuff another big thing that people do is recording sales calls you know you know say the customer hey you know is it okay if we record this you know for for you know what just purposes purposes yeah exactly and so recording that and then being able to go back through uh and have somebody you know just kind of curate it it could be just you like if you're a rep at the company going back through hey guys you know we recorded this call um you know i went through and there's a couple like really awesome if you know if you do it with like say a top salesperson at your company or somebody who's really um really experienced uh you know to be able to then say hey because a lot of times people don't know and especially a lot of times in sales people don't always know um how they do it you know it's just kind of like ah i don't know i just do it right and so so the key is if you can kind of capture somebody in their quote unquote natural habitat right and then be able to kind of pull out some of those nuggets and share it um it's key because then the other thing is how often are we seeing people leave organization i mean i don't know what the the stats are at this point now but i mean you know people are coming and going all the time you got a lot of experienced reps retiring so if you're able to start to do stuff like this you can really capture some of this real like rich knowledge that people have learned hard won knowledge you know over the years so yeah that's it that's a big big way yeah i think just just making sure that to your point collecting it and even if it's just yourself um so you know i i've interviewed a lot of top a reps and they have that exact same uh feedback which is look i don't know how i do what i do i just do it um but if you were to sit down and listen to them it's like oh man you know how they how they said that or how they relate or whatever or again if you ask them how they how do they prepare for a meeting they might not be able to tell you off the top of their head but it's like you know what research did you do what resources did you use those type of things and then the other piece of this is i would recommend you know putting the mirror up on yourself and and having the having the being conscious of of what's working and what's not and almost doing a debrief after your calls and your meetings to say what worked and what didn't work and and and you know either a notepad next to you that says holy shit i just asked a really good question and that opened up the floodgates of information or hey i just got this you know this objection and i stumbled through it and so i you know that was you know that was bad um and even recording yourself on that stuff uh you know tools right now like gong and chorus and those type of things are fantastic from a call review standpoint because now you can go back in and you can be very specific with hey this section you said this and wow let's let's now just take that clip out and this is going to be our objection handling for that pricing because that was super smooth the way you handled that right right exactly yeah and then and like you said and being and going back and really trying to be deliberate about what you know practicing the some of the stuff that you do right because so much of the time you know you come out with it and it's like it takes a couple tries so you know being able to sit and be real conscious um and then you know after when you're done with a call like you said just sit down just make yourself sit down and just take a couple just a couple things off the top of your head and just write them down and then put them in in like a you know one location that you can keep coming back to because a lot of times and it doesn't have to be you don't have to do a crazy amount of work i mean it's just a few key points that are sticking out in your mind right then and there so yeah yeah so just to wrap up and i didn't just to get your thoughts on kind of some key takeaways here one of the things that you know obviously if i was a rep right now in a company ideally there's that company that's curating this stuff for me and whatever but i'm still going to do this on my own i think this the google sheet or whatever segmenting things out doing a little bit of you know spending an hour a week an hour a week on youtube an hour a week on on feedly or something like that and just reading through and then taking your favorites putting them in there so that you can curate that sharing it with your team um but then focusing on something once a week so here's here's kind of my my thing for teams and individuals is on mondays this is what i used to do with my sales team is i'd say all right guys you know what challenge are we trying to address this week right or what's one of the top challenges that we're having right now oh john you know we're having we're getting killed trying to get you know gatekeepers are killing us it's like okay well what are some ways that we let's do some research here let's find out a couple of different ways like techniques if you will on how to deal with gatekeepers okay cool google it youtube whatever role play it practice it a little bit now no matter what everybody's doing this week you know write down on a piece of paper the challenge is you know getting through gatekeepers the the approach is x whatever that approach is and write it out and then consciously all week when that situation comes up use that thing and then do a plus minus plus minus to see if it's actually working and then i would collect all those pieces of paper at the end and say all right everybody we use this approach a hundred times we got 60 pluses and 40 minuses like hey that's a good job on that one let's put that one on the list so this constant like continuous learning where once a week we just pick something and then we shared whatever was working throughout the week started to move things in the right direction for us and and allowed me as a vp of sales of a self-funded company with zero money to really train my team without having to spend a dime and you know as much as i like money making money as a trainer and you guys as a platform you can you could you could educate yourself i think i heard a stat or something the other day that you can get a legitimate harvard education 100 of harvard shit is online for free you just don't get the degree you just got to put the work into putting it together so any last things that for the company for for the reps to think about or any tips or nuggets that you could uh kind of help point people in the right direction as it relates to continuous improvement and crowdsourced and engagement learning yeah and i'd say from just to build on what you just recommended i mean and and that that's a great great way to kind of get started and then from there like just iterate on those different you know on that different stuff that you find online tailor it to how you how it works in your sales process with your against your competitors for your solution and then you know capture and have everybody capture how how specifically they went about doing it for their solution whether it's you know taking a video of yourself on how you did it or whether it's just writing it out and like you said starting to iterate on that stuff and really tailoring it for you taking stuff out in you know in on on the web and on youtube bring it internal work on it iterate it and and kind of sculpt it for yours for your uh particular sales process and your solution and yeah that's a great way to go about doing it cool all right jake we're finishing up here any um how can people kind of find out more about you more about a lego and that type of stuff uh and then we'll get out of here so what's the easiest way to find out about you guys yeah check us out on linkedin uh and then also hit us up on uh lego.com and uh read through we got you know a lot of information on our blog um you know resources that we you can check out for different different ways that you can go about doing some of the stuff that we talked about today cool awesome jake well thank you so much for joining me here uh for those of you watching thank you very much for those of you listening on the podcast appreciate it um so yeah just uh just you know i think the theme here and the takeaway here is just always try to get a little bit better don't try to make it this huge herculean thing of trying to say okay shit now i gotta go through this whole program do a little bit every day you get i i live my life by the rule of one percent which is set the hard but a bar at a high but attainable level and then every day once you reach that bar just go one percent better right watch that one extra video try that one extra technique and i promise you as you do that you'll get a lot better a lot faster all right all right everybody have a great week and make it happen later thanks Good night, good night.

Good night, good night.