92: David Bloom - Level Jump

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to our Boston Workshop, and a huge thank you to our sponsors, Sales Loft, Lead IQ, and Costello. Our next workshop is going to be on April 12th in Indianapolis. Come join us. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows of J. Barrows Training and Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend. I did for once because I went on a little mini vacation for the first time in a very long time with my wife and family. We went to the Bahamas for three days on a cruise, which was fantastic, especially after 22 sales kickoffs in less than 70 days. So I was about at my wit's end, and I had to take off and decompress a little bit. But I am back and full of fire, ready to go with an awesome guest, and this is somebody I've been working with for a long time.

Him and I share a very similar mentality on where things are going, specifically from a sales and training standpoint. David Bloom from Level Jump. How's it going, my friend? It's going great, John. Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Finally making this happen together. Exactly. So, hey, David, why don't you explain to the crowd here, first of all, what Level Jump's all about. But also, I'm always curious, you know, as a guest entrepreneur, if you call it that, why you decided to start Level Jump, you know, get out of the corporate rat race type of scenario and do your thing. So tell everybody what Level Jump's all about, and then kind of why. Why did you start this? And more importantly, why did you decide to go off on your own and build this?

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I'm tempted to tell you about Level Jump, but also tempted to ask a lot more about what happened in the Bahamas over the weekend and why we didn't record this then. I would have invested in a Make It Happen Monday from Atlantis of some sort. That would have been a fun thing. But next time around, yeah, so I don't want to do any pitching of any sort, but Level Jump, we're in the sales enablement space. We're focusing on sales onboarding and training. It's completely baked into Salesforce.com, and it's just to help with onboarding and training reps. So that's my high level. My why, I mean, my 30-second background, and John, we talked about this at length. I was a pre-med guy actually way back when in the day, believe it or not, and didn't want to go through medical school.

I had interest in business and ended up in the pharmaceutical industry. That was actually where I held the bag for the first time, and it was a different type of selling because you weren't really, doctors weren't asked to sign on the dotted line. It was a lot more consultative and more of an influence sale. I did that for many years. I did marketing. I did product development. I did strategy, and I always loved, when I got into marketing, I always loved being in front of the sales teams, right? Like, coming from sales myself, I loved going to the kickoffs, talking about the new strategies. People would call me, ask me for tips and tricks. Love that, and decided I wanted to get into the training business.

I mean, that's where you and I connect on so many things. I didn't actually get into sales training, but I was all about making people great. Like, my thing was, I believe if people have the will, we can give them the skill, and that's just like training in general. So, I started a training business for many years, did that for seven years, and wanted to get into tech. And a lot of my customers at that time, I was doing more management training. I wanted to get into tech, and they all said, go work for Salesforce. And at the time, I didn't actually even know what Salesforce was. I thought the cloud was a weather forecast. Like, I knew nothing. So, I ended up, subsequently ended up at Salesforce, sold that training business, worked at Salesforce a couple years, and that just exposed me to this whole world of B2B and SaaS and tech.

And just working with peers, I mean, so many things happened where I saw that the evolution of technology could really help with making people great, making sales people. I mean, we don't need to talk about sales technology, but I just wanted to build a company that was really focused on enabling sales people, making them great in a way that they haven't done in the past, and making it very much bringing their training that they're doing, how they learn from peers, and tying it to the performance and the metrics that they deliver from a pipeline and revenue standpoint. Love it. Yeah, I mean, I think you and I could obviously have an entire other podcast series, if you will, on just-in-time learning and all that stuff where we both see things are going.

But I digress. We're going to talk about some other stuff today that I think is actually a little bit more relevant to the group, to the crowd, which is, you know, ramp time, profitability of sales reps, how we should be looking at things from a business standpoint, if you're a leader out there, and how you should be looking at your reps, ramp, and then also, as a rep, how you should be looking at it. Because one of the things that struck me was, you know, Trish Bertuzzi over at the Bridge Group, they came out with a survey, I think it was relatively within the past year. And one of the things that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that the SDR role specifically, and we'll talk about all roles, but the SDR role specifically, they said that if SDRs get promoted in less than six months, okay, the failure rate from SDR to AE was something like 67%, something like a huge failure rate of an SDR going to an AE.

But if they stayed in that position for 18 months or more, the failure rate was 6%. Wow. So, I mean, and again, not surprising, you know, very interesting, but not surprising, right? Because what that tells me is that the longer you master your craft, the better you are, and the better positioned you are to be successful at the next level, right? I think that's where people, everybody's trying to skip the step of an SDR right now to get to the quote-unquote real sales rep, not understanding that if they don't master being a great SDR, first of all, the likelihood of them getting promoted to an AE is not high. But second of all, when they get there, and they now have to potentially fend for themselves, and all those leads aren't hitting their inbox, like they, and now they're dead in the water, right?

It's kind of like, I don't know if you're an art, you know, fan or anything like that, but Picasso is my favorite artist. And he literally, what I love about him is he went all in on one medium and mastered that medium before he went to the next one, right? And so if you look at his career, as it progressed, there was the blue period, there was this, there was cubism, there was all these different things, but he mastered them before he moved on to the next one. And that's why I think ramp time and there's one thing about staying in a role for longer, but there's another about ramping faster so you're more effective. So let's talk about that. You had said something interesting before we jumped on board here, as far as that, the CAC, right?

Cost of acquisition and a lot of SaaS companies and how they look at, hey, I need a shitload of money, right? Because I'm going to be super unprofitable here for a little while. But once it gets over that, we're going to hit the moon. So could you kind of give your explanation of what that means from a business standpoint, but also from as we look at sales reps? Yeah, no, 100%. So I guess, well, three things. Firstly, that stat is shocking to me. And who can master anything in six months? Right. Right? Like it's like, that makes, what's Malcolm Gladwell's whole thing is 10,000 hours. Oh, yeah. Right? Like it's, there's no, and I mean, we can also do a whole podcast on this whole BDR needing to go to AEs.

And this is just a message for all the BDRs out there that are listening. You have the most important job in the sales process. So stop rushing to get out of it. Like it's, it's the most important skill in the whole sales process. Like people are just, the BDR has gotten so beat up with this. Hey, when you want to be, it's like the pathway to AE. Right. It's like the first, it's, you know what? If you can't sell time and you can't sell meetings, you won't be able to sell anything. I mean, I tell everybody this, like, I don't care how senior you're getting your career. The most important skill you can master is prospecting because there's one solution to every other problem at every other stage of the sales process, negotiations, objection, handling, closing, discounting, all that stuff gets a hell of a lot easier with a big fat pipeline.

100%. 100%. You know, big fat pipeline, none of that shit really matters. You don't have to try too hard at the rest of that stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. And sometimes, I mean, the best advice I got early in my career was sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. And I think that really applies for the BDR role. Like, the reality is you've got to do the time. Like, you've got to, you know, not to make it sound like a sentence because it's really not bad, but you're not going to go back there. Like, you'll always have to figure out ways to prospect. It's probably one of the, if not the most important skill set in sales. But when you're in that role for six to me is too low, and if someone wants to promote you, you almost should say, hey, I want to hone this.

Like, you should be wanting to hone your craft. It's like, why would you go to grade 10 if you kind of are only halfway through grade nine? Like, it's, you know, that type of thing. But anyways, so yeah, profitability of a sales rep. We've really been thinking a lot about this. There's a term in finance, and it's used a lot, as you mentioned, in SaaS. It's called the J-curve. And what it essentially, I mean, I'm not going to show up. I'm not going to start drawing. But just imagine a J-curve. Actually, I am going to draw it because it will make it easier for people of what's going on. But it's a term used in finance. I'm just going to use a piece of paper here. It's a term used in finance. It just looks like this.

Here we go. Can the crowd kind of see that? It's a J-curve. There's an X and a Y-axis, and the J goes below the X-axis and comes above it eventually. There you go. There you go. So I talk about, so from a ramp perspective, we'll look at it from two perspectives. From a ramp perspective, let's talk about the sales rep attitude. Because, John, you and I have both held the bag. Here's what your attitude. So above the X-axis is a positive attitude, and below it is a negative attitude. And across this axis, sorry, I think I confused my X and a Y, but it's been so long. Yeah, I think I did too, mate. Yeah. Never is. It's a parabola. This is a parabola. We'll get all fancy. But this is time. We're going across with time.

And the idea is when you start a new job, it's like your attitude's positive. Two weeks in, you're like, I don't know. Am I going to make any money? And then you hit the bottom. And that's kind of like that valley of doubt. Like, oh shit, I was probably better at selling myself than I'm actually at sales. Maybe it's the wrong gig. Should have stayed at my last job. Then you find that first meeting, first pipe, close your first deal, close that second deal, hit quota, start hitting quota more consistently. And that's the game. Like that's, and as enablers, whether it be delivering training, whether it be software, our whole goal is to shift this curve in. We want to cut the time to hitting quota, first deal, deal cycle.

Because if I shorten it, I mean, I'll just kind of make arrows. We just want to shift it. It's just, I just shifted it over. And that's the goal. And for, you know, from the end user perspective, from a rep, what that means to you is you're learning faster. You're putting money in your pocket. You're on the leaderboard. You're getting noticed. People are saying, hey, what did, you know, what did Mary do in her first three months? You're already establishing yourself early. So that's in the ramp time to be super keen. It's not like, like a frosh week where it's your excuse for the six months. Yeah, you got a ramp quota. So only have to hit 70%. Crush that. Like that's designed, not just for you to feel like you can hit it, but you can also, the first three months, you can make a ton of money by really focusing on the learning.

Now, from a profitability perspective, so that's just mentality. And I don't know, John, tell me from a mentality perspective, you speak to reps all the time. Do you find that that's consistent with people's mentalities when they talk to you? I think yes. I think it would just be right out of, I think that curve starts though, out of whatever the training they go through is. So for instance, it's not day one, because day one is always the little honeymoon period, all new job, new people is awesome. Then they go through quote unquote bootcamp or whatever. They get stuffed with a bunch of knowledge, usually product knowledge, and then they get let out into the world. And I think that's where the dip happens.

Because now they have, usually there's not a lot of skills-based training in onboarding and bootcamp. It's almost all product oriented. And so what happens is, and I'd be interested in your perspective on this, what happens is they go out and they get their teeth kicked in. And that's where it's like, holy shit, why did I do this? And then they kind of start picking up from maybe other reps and, you know, some skills and just pure, you know, pure drive alone, kind of start to see the needle move and then they start to be successful. But the question I always have is with training, skills-based training, right? How to make a cold call, how to come up with a message, how to write that email. Is it better to let them go out into the world and get their teeth kicked in and then come back and give them the skills so that there's a higher appreciation for it?

Or is it better to give them the skills right out of camp so that they're executing immediately? It's kind of like my analogy on MBAs. Like, I'm sorry to piss off anybody out there. Sorry for this, but I'm going to say it. If you went and got your fucking MBA right out of college, what's the point? I mean, unless you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. To me, that's just a chicken shit way of saying, I'm not ready for the real world yet. Mommy and daddy are still going to pay for my shit. So I'm going to stay here in the safe zone. Because college, like an undergrad, I think is a joke, right? I literally think undergrad is a joke. It's a social education. I don't think it's an actual education.

And MBA is your actual education, but it's only when you choose to go back because you went into the real world and you realize, holy shit, I don't know anything. I need to now go select what I'm now interested in. And now I'm interested in learning. So thoughts on that as it relates to skills-based training from an onboarding standpoint. Yeah. I mean, MBA, people used to joke MBA should stand for mediocre but arrogant if you didn't get any experience in between it. But I actually, I did my MBA part-time for that reason. I took the classes at night because my thing was like, let me apply this during the day. Like that was kind of my exact thinking on that notion. With regards to, you know, getting your teeth kicked in, I would rather, you know, I think there's an in-between stage.

And we talk about this all the time when it comes to onboarding is rather than like drinking for the classic drink from the fire hose product training for two weeks, throw them out there, kick them in the teeth and have them come back looking for a dentist. I'd rather say like show them a little, go out, have one tooth kind of loosened and then come back. You know what I mean? Like let's focus on like maybe some braces and some bite plates first before we have to like do a whole facial reconstruction. But our whole thinking, and I talk about this with onboarding all the time, first of all, any onboarding that's product focused, you're essentially training your rep to be a bad rep. If you walk out of something that you know how to pitch product, that's what you're going to do.

And that's like the first thing you'll learn in your training is like do research on the person, make it about them. What's your problem? What's your point of view? If you teach people your product, they're going to throw up the product when they get you on the phone. So it's like you're actually setting them, you're going to get the best skills in the world with dialing and that kind of thing and that mentality or use whatever tools you want to get people on the call. You throw a product based on your onboarding training. You just, that lead costs you money, that reps costing you money. So I think product training should actually be very minimalized in bootcamp overall. Like you should be prepared to, rather than two weeks, spend a couple days, have the reps master your value prop and how it's impacted other customers.

So you're telling stories as opposed to pitching product, number one. And then I'm a big fan of get them on the phone right away. I love your whole mentality, John, of, you know, like having you do the ABCs people getting a, like, think of it like your C target can only knock your tooth so hard. So go get your tooth knocked a little bit from a C target, but you're practicing the story and then come back into the class on day five, learn a bit more. So it's not this two weeks and then like you've lost a month, two weeks of training, two weeks of getting your teeth kicked in. It's like in the first five days, get your tooth loose and tighten it. And then by day seven or eight, you're actually having a more meaningful conversation already and you'll ramp faster.

You know what I was thinking? And I just thought of this, uh, what would be awesome? Cause I don't know about you. I'm seeing a new role in sales come out, which is kind of the, almost the admin role where they clean up the list, they do the research and that type of stuff for the SDR so that they're not spending whatever the ridiculous amount of time they are spending doing research and those types of things. Why not be, why not make that part of the onboarding process where like you're teaching them about the ICP, you're teaching them about the personas. And while you're doing that, they're actually taking a list that they, that will be their territory and applying it to tear out their accounts, to fill in the contact information, to go look for this stuff so that now when you do then release them out to the wild, they actually have a super tight territory with all the information.

Like that makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than actually having a, a hundred percent. I love that. I mean, as part of programs and we recommend them to people, we say like, I love this notion of how in the first five days, the new, the new rep, BDR, AE, whatever the role is, they should have a real understanding of what it's like to be in the buyer's shoes. Not the product marketers. Like if you're, if you're thinking product marketing, you're thinking language and pitchy and trick trickery, get in your, get in the shoes. Like listen to this. I mean, call recordings massive with all, all the tech, listen to calls, like listen to what your customer is saying and understand what's resonating with them because you'll be able to get on a call and actually have a real conversation and not get nervous about like, Oh, but our product does this and it does this and, but it also does this.

Yeah, it's a, it's funny. The, that the, the overstuffing of, of product until I think you're spot on actually makes a rep way less productive and effective because again, that's all they have. Whereas if there's genuine curiosity there, they're like, it almost doesn't matter what, if you know, because you're not supposed to be the smart kid when you make that phone call. I always tell reps, the more, you know, the less effective you are in selling. That's why sales engineers are sales engineers, they're engineers. That's why they're not making the quote, like the commission that sales reps do because they're the product expert. They're the ones that we bring in to, to, to answer the hard questions.

But our job is just to get that conversation going and pull the right people in place and then get the hell out of the way. Right. So, so what are you seeing as, as like some of the best organizations that you work with? What are some of the things that they do to get reps ramped faster outside of product knowledge? Right. I mean, is it micro learning? Is it testing and coming back and like, what are some of the best practices that you've seen from an organizational standpoint? And then let's talk about a rep who doesn't have the organizational support and what they can do to ramp faster. Yeah, totally. So, I mean, listen, best in class companies, I'll say it holistically, because we get to speak to all types.

I think the most important thing fundamentally when you're onboarding, and I mean, I've been joking about this, but the team is really loving it internally is focus on quota, not quizzes. And at the beginning, you know, like quizzing is very much for product knowledge. It's kind of like we solve which problem, A, B, C, all of the above. Like it's, it's very academic. And if you train your people in the onboarding component of the boot camps or whatever to be academic, they're going to become academic salespeople. Like, what are you surprised? Like if you train them on the academia, how do you expect them to be consultative? So what we're seeing the best people, what I believe is they're focusing heavy on the stories, like heavy on why, why are current customers using the product and what type of value are they getting from it?

You need to know that after the second day, when we get people starting with things and we do this internally ourselves, John is after the first day, you know, you don't want to be able to spew how the product works after the first day. And this is literally what we do here is we'll say things like, okay, it's your first day at the office. You're going out with your buddies afterwards for drinks. They're saying, Hey, how was your first day in your new sales role? How would in three minutes or less or one minute or less, you explain why your company's exciting? You think they're going to be like, Oh, and then if you press this button here and then like, they're going to talk holistically about the vision and the mission of the company.

And then I take it a step further and say, Hey, tomorrow, pretend you're at a barbecue and your top ICP prospect is the one on the grill. Like they're grilling burgers and your burger's not quite ready. And they say, Hey, you know, it's some big guy trying to joke around that cause he's eating half the stuff and saying, Hey, your burger's not quite ready. And they said, what do you do? And you have like 30 seconds to say something to that person on the grill. That's going to be like, man, like here's your burger, but why don't you call me? Like, come talk to me. I'm going to be done in 15 minutes. Like those little, like you call them attention grabbers, like those kinds of things at the beginning and then really being able to tell the stories of how other customers have had value.

Like those are things that I think have to happen in the first week. And then most importantly is I think by the end of depending on sales cycles and all that stuff within the first couple of weeks, have some type of real metric that goes beyond testing and certification. Because I think if reps see my onboarding is based on passing a test, doing a case study and getting certified, and I do think it should be part of it. But if it's just that, then they get into the real world afterwards and the salesman, Hey, you had fun at bootcamp and you drank and you went and you did that thing. You went to the Giants game. That was all fun. Let me tell you how it works in the real world. Frosh week is over.

And I think if you incorporate things like booking pipeline, having your first meeting, doing live calling in the bootcamp. Like, I mean, if you role play it or just call the C people and getting people do the job in the bootcamp, those to me are some of the best practices in an onboarding piece. Yeah. I think that, so I did this a while ago, you know, 30, 60, 90, right. For a rep, the first 30 days was, um, they had to interview clients. So they had to, and I, this is what I did with Morgan. I said, I, here's 10 clients. Some are better than others. Yeah. I want you to go interview. And by the way, here's some clients that are working with us like consistently. Here's clients that worked with us like a year ago and haven't worked with us since.

So I want you to go interview them and ask them what were they were doing before? Why they choose Jay Barrows? Why do they, why did they continue to work with Jay Barrows? And why did they stop working with Jay Barrows? Or why was it a one and done scenario? Right. And while he was doing that, he was, you know, learning the stories, getting great feedback from clients. First of all, providing feedback to me too. And then it was, you know, and I, and I tell from a tactical standpoint, sales, sales reps, what they should do is take a case study at a, at a bare minimum, take a case study once a week and get to know how to tell the story. Even if it's not your own, just get to know how to tell that story.

Cause that's going to help with a bunch of stuff. First of all, it's going to help you believe in your company. The number, I believe the number one thing that you need to be successful in sales is a genuine belief in what you do. Like if you do not believe that your product or service can help and really make a difference to the right client, it's not for everybody, but to the right client, go find something else to do. Right. If you're just in it for a commission check, fuck off, literally get out of sales. Cause you're the ones who are giving us a bad name. So it's going to help you believe, right? Then it's going to give you stories that you can tell. So messaging, the easiest way to come up with messaging is you look at the bottom of a case study and you say, what was the result?

And that's your message. Hey, we showed this client, your industry, how to do this. You fit a similar profile. Want to talk? Yeah. Right. And then it also, it even helps with objection handling, right? Cause even I kind of joke around the objection handling techniques, right? One of them is like the old school feel, felt, found, right? Totally understand how you feel about that. I'll be able to felt the same way what they found was, you know, and it's an effective or just don't use the words feel, felt, found, but guess what feel, felt, found is case study. Another client had that issue. This is what they did. Here was the result. Feel, felt, found, right? So, so case studies and understanding the, the impact that your solution has on the right clients.

Totally. And then you can figure out the, the new one, the, a little bit of the details. So I love the live application piece of this. I love cold calling right out of bootcamp, um, or right in bootcamp, if you will. Um, and, and learning as you do, what are some other things that people should be thinking about to, to reduce that J curve, if you will, to, to, to expedite it a little bit more? Yeah. I mean, what, so ultimately what does that mean? Like if you stand in front of an investor meeting, no one's going to say, Hey, how quickly did everyone get certified? I think it's important to integrate to have the, you know, the eye on the prize, which is if it's a BDR in onboard in their bootcamp, they need to know how soon they need to book their first meeting or find their first part.

Like that should just be on day one of bootcamp. It's like, Hey everyone, we're going to teach you. We're going to interact. We're going to have fun. And we're going to build the team or camaraderie. But just so you know, by Friday of this week or Friday of next week, the expectation is that you'll have booked two meetings for AEs. You don't know yet. Like it's like, let's set, this is what we're here for. This is not like, yeah, it's going to be fun, but like get people thinking metrics right out of the gate. Like it's thinking it like, and setting that tone. And what we have found is if you set the BDR, first of all, the BDR will take the onboarding much more seriously because let's be honest, typically, depending on the company, people that are leading bootcamps, if it's sales training, sales enablement, whatever the role is, people are saying, okay, this is not who I report to.

So I don't have to do what they say. And you know what? They're going to, they're going to get me excited about the company, but do they really know what my job is? This is not my boss. Like imagine what an onboarding program, if it was two weeks and this would never happen, but imagine if an onboarding program was run by the VP of sales, how different would that look? Now I'm not saying that's the right thing, but that meant they would be right in on the, get on the phone, like get in and swim. Like you can't learn how to swim from a book or on the bed, moving your arms, like get in the water. It was funny. It's funny you bring that up. When I, when I was, when I worked at Xerox, um, you know, Xerox is famous for having like this onboarding program, right?

It used to be this eight week onboarding program that was, you had to fly to Rochester, sit there for eight weeks, learn all this shit, then come out, do an apprenticeship and then get your territory. The year I started, which was, you know, 99, 2000, something like that was the first year they had actually regionalized it where they brought it local, right? So Boston, but it was still an eight week program. And what happened was because I don't know how there was an open territory. And because of how I interviewed, they ended up putting me in territory. The minute that I started, right? So I didn't have the, I was going through training while trying to figure out my territory. And my boss was like, okay, you have to produce like, here's your quota day one.

And I was like, holy shit. And because of that, I really, I actually, I looked at the training as, yeah, yeah, yeah. To your point, you're not my boss. Uh, I'll check off these boxes for you, but I got to go figure this shit out. You know what I mean? I got to go sell and I got to do the real type of sale, which is day-to-day hand-to-hand combat. And this me reading something and regurgitating a presentation in a demo, who fucking cares? You know what I mean? Now through osmosis, I actually ended up getting a lot out of that training, but I totally disregarded it because I didn't see it as reality. Yeah. And there was no urgency. I mean, you had two conflicting priorities. There's like, do I read this material or do I like, I mean, a new lead just like a hot lead just came my way.

So that presentation is going to have to wait. But I think the magic of the equation is bringing the two things together where it's like, read the presentation and then go talk to the lead because that will reduce the chances of your teeth getting fully kicked in. You're not going to do it perfect. And I think, so that's one piece I think is just getting them doing the job faster in some capacity against a real metric. That's the first thing I would say in onboarding. And then the second thing, and this is the, this is, I mean, more of the art of it and trying to figure it out is only focus. You know, we talk about just in time, right? And bite-sized learning. It should really, in a lot of ways, not be that different from an onboarding perspective.

Give the rep only what they need to hit that first metric and then leave them alone. So if like in order for a BDR to be able to pick up the phone and start, if they need to know a story and they need to know a couple of key value props, a couple of attention grabbers and how to use the tech stack, teach that in two days. And on day three, get them on the phone and a story. And that will, that will shift it because then what you'll have is BDR saying like, Jesus, my, my sales enablement, my sales trainer, they get my job. Like they're not sitting here and puking on me for two weeks. They're giving me a little bit of what I need. So it's, it's not quite just in time, but they're giving me chunks of information.

They're making me apply it, hit some metrics that I'm going to be on the hook for on my own in 30, 60, 90 days, figuring out what I'm learning. And then they're going to give me a little more. That to me is how onboarding needs to work. And then try to tie to all the metrics. I don't, I mean, I don't think that, yes, but I think that extends to just in general learning, right? I mean, the bite-sized learning of, of learning, trying, learning, trying, at least I don't, and you probably know better than me from a learning experience, you know, different people learn differently. I, I think most sales reps though, learn by application. Like that's what actually got me gravitated. Why I gravitated so well to this training when I took it the first time Basho, because when I was taking all those other trainings, it was role play.

It was some, you know what I mean? It was really cool. But Basho was like, okay, here's how to do research and send an email. And now everybody open up your laptops, pick an account you want to get into, do some research, write that fucking email and send it. And it was like, oh, like, you mean like right now, like do my, like do my job. Okay. I like this. Right. And then, Hey, here's how to make a phone call. Here's how to leave a voicemail. Now everybody pick up your phone and co-call somebody and leave that voice. It's like, what? So like, that's why I, and again, I think most sales reps are like that. That's why I can't stand, I'm probably going to piss more people off on this one from a training standpoint.

Anybody who talks about instructional design, like I just want to throw up because as it relates to sales reps, okay. I think instructional design is fine for most others, most other learning types. I genuinely believe that sales reps learn differently. We were the C students. We were the, we were not the ones that sat there in the, in the, you know, and learned and took the syllabus and figured out our plan. And we were the ones who most of the, and I'm being very general here, drank our way through college, had a blast. And then the last day or two before a test crammed everything in and then passed it because we had to, but we learned by doing stuff. And I think, you know, what I try to extend with, with managers, especially with managers with limited resources is what I used to do with no money.

Like I was, we were startup zero money. I became our own training organization where we pick something just like you said, once a week as a team. And we said, I'd say, all right, everybody, what's the challenge we're trying to address this week? Uh, gatekeepers, John, we're getting killed by gatekeepers. All right, cool. Who wants to come up with a solution for that? I'll own it, right? Somebody would just do a simple little Google search on best way to handle gatekeepers, come up with a cool approach that we thought worked, talk it through, role play it a little just to get the kinks out. And then no joke, everybody would keep a pen and paper next to their desk and they would write every week at the top, they would write down challenge equals.

Gatekeepers approach equals whatever, right? And then write it out. And then a T-bar plus minus plus mine. It worked. It didn't work. It worked. It didn't work. And so I told him, I said, look, no matter what happens this week, do whatever you want to do with everything else. But when that thing happens, you all have to use that approach and you have to tell me whether it worked or didn't work. And then I would collect the pieces of paper at the end of the week and say, all right, everybody, we hit 200 gatekeepers last week. We got 70 pluses and 130 minuses. That's actually pretty damn good. Yeah. Put that to the list. You know what I mean? Like next week, oh, John, the pricing objection. And that micro learning turned us into this engine that we didn't have to spend money on training.

I mean, listen, 100%. I mean, you just kind of destroyed your own business right now by saying, hey guys, John just put him, take that advice John just gave and you won't need it anymore. Like it's a, but I mean, it's, that's the principle of it is you're always learning. Like sales is, it's a craft. Like you should always be practicing it. And whether it be your pattern paper with the T and the plus and minus, whatever, whatever works. Like it's, I'm with you a hundred percent, but it's, you know, on the instructional design piece. So listen, I mean, cause I like, cause I do agree that salespeople learn differently, but not all, some people want to get into sales for a couple of years as like an entry point to go into marketing.

And so they weren't necessarily the, like the, the person who wants to have a sales career, but they still need the same type of onboarding and ongoing training to be successful that for that three to five years. Like you can look, anyone we know today that's in, in go to market in general. So product marketing, I mean, we can sit here and name drop people all day long that held the bag at some point. The thing with instructional design, and I do believe that's very much like it's that L and D mentality. I've been fortunate to work with some people in L and D that they get excited about trying to crack salespeople because for them, it's the ultimate challenge for them. It's like, I'm an L and D person and I studied instructional design and adult education and all the theory.

And for them, it's like, but I just, I can't crack. I don't know what to do about salespeople. Like it doesn't work. I need a new playbook. Like what I learned in my, my whatever program, my, my bachelor of education did not have a chapter on sales. It's like the same way. There's no, you can't teach sales or you can't learn sales in university. You know, on, all on top of that, you cannot learn how to teach people sales in university either. So you've got these instructional designers that are kind of, they spin their wheels on it, but they get this notion of metrics because they get that salespeople don't care about necessarily, you know, the, the certification or the score or the badge. They want the green, like they want the green or they want recognition.

They want to get promoted from, you know, BDR to whatever, whatever it is. So they start, some are starting to really understand it and they're adjusting their, their design. They know, okay, I can't go deep because of the attention span problem I have, particularly with sales teams. But if I incorporate things that they do with some of the things we talk about there, there's a lot of instructional designers I'm finding now are more open to it because they can show ROI. Yeah. And I think that's the key is if you can show like to your point, the badges and the quizzes, I think unfortunately we've gotten a little bit too enamored with that stuff because it is that little like, Hey, I did my job.

That's why, for instance, a lot of these sales, uh, sales efficiency tools, if you will, that, that, uh, I'm going to pick on, uh, yes, where in tout app, like when they first came out, I've been thinking about this a lot when they first came out. Yes, they were great efficiency tools because you could send out emails and those types of things. But I think the reason they were so fucking popular when they first came out had nothing to do with how efficient a sales rep had to be. It had everything to do with letting me know when somebody opened an email. That's all it was. Because, because, because we, we fight such a battle here where our conversion, especially when it comes to prospecting that, you know, we look for the needle in the haystack and when we get a meeting, it's like, Oh, right.

But it's like, but like 99 out of a hundred. And so we're waiting for that one. Whereas if we can get some little, little wins along the way, that's like almost like these false positives, right? Oh, you open up my email. That felt good. There's a little endorphin rush there that happened because somebody opened it. So now we got hooked on that. And the same thing with badges, like, Oh, I got a badge. It's almost like, you know, Pavlov's dog. Like, okay, good, good, good. But I think that's, that's dehumanized the learning experience in the sense that all this gamification, at least in my, in my opinion, has really taken the focus away from the reality. Do you agree? Listen, I completely agree with this.

I mean, my thing is now, and again, I don't think I still get, you know, everyone still gets a rush when someone opened, you're waiting on a contract and it's like that email gets open at some random time in the night, like, Oh, they're thinking about it in the middle of the night. They woke up. It's really on their mind. So I think that, you know, those types of, um, endorphins, you know, same thing when you get pinged, remember the early days when you get to turn off notifications on your phone because whenever you're going to text, like, Ooh, who texted me? Um, that I think badging and all these, you know, gamification, listen, it wouldn't work for me personally. Like I, I don't care like that's, but there are some people that like that.

And if that's part of a culture of your organization, cool. And I don't think it should be eliminated if you, but I just don't think those are the answers alone. And I think ultimately, especially in sales, everyone wants recognition. Everyone wants to get, um, badges or win the game, especially with this emerging, how big gaming is today. So everyone wants to feel like they're playing a game at work, which is fine. But again, like I say, at the end of the day, tie it back to what you said at the beginning of the profitability of a rep, the business of a rep is there's no VP of sales standing in front of their board saying, Hey guys, great news. We, I know we missed the quarter. I know, but get this badging is up 180% and the average quiz was eight and a half out of 10 versus eight out of 10 last month.

I know we missed the quarter, but badging is not how good it like our team is. They're excited. They're happy. Like that guy's going to have a job much longer. Definitely not. Definitely not. So, so let's do this. Let's talk. I am curious on your thoughts on, uh, where the whole field of enablement, if you will, is going. So a little bit of a shift here from a bigger picture standpoint, which is, you know, enablement still isn't a word. So it's, and actually I did, I just was at sales loft conference and I did, uh, I was at Rainmaker 19 and one of the, so we were, we actually had a full video production crew there. We did a ton of awesome stuff. And, uh, there was one person that I wanted on camera for one reason.

I know. Doug Landis to go on his rant about enablement. He's like, fuck enablement. It's not even a goddamn word. And he like literally like blows the cover off it. And what he's calling is it's, it's not even sales productivity. It's, it's, uh, he actually, he coined it as revenue productivity. Yeah. Right. Cause it's a much bigger thing. So, so we're seeing, I think we're starting to see companies invest in quote unquote enablement sooner because they're seeing right. That it, that it's at, it's a much bigger function. Uh, but where, where are you seeing the most successful companies? Say, say you're growing, right? You got limited resources, whatever it is. And you got that 10, 20, 30, 50 people or whatever.

And you're on your way. You got the inbound leads coming. You got marketing running. You got some funding, that type of stuff. When should you look at enablement and, and, and how should you put some limited structure in place early to make sure you don't have to reinvent the wheel when you hit that wall? Yeah. Um, so a couple, I mean, a couple of questions in there and yeah, it's funny. You mentioned Doug, Doug and I are talking about where I told him, let's get your rant on a, on a webinar of some sort. So we're going to, we're going to have some fun with that one. So I don't want to go too far into that because we're putting some stuff together on that piece. Um, listen, I mean, here's the bottom line and enablement and there's a lot of things that I completely agree with on Doug and stuff, but it's also the, the market is kind of just taken it's taken on on its own.

Um, so in terms of their, so two questions, one of the market and then what can people be doing about it from a size perspective, the market's kind of, we've seen funny things happen. I mean, my take on the market is sales enablement was defined as marketing. Like that's what it was. And that's Doug's whole, like enablement was a marketing function. It's all about content and giving people the right stuff, the right content to give it different parts of the sales cycle. That's a serious decision to find it and blah, blah, blah. So sales name, it was like a marketing thing. And then you had the Martech, not Martech, but the content type of providers, like sales content management companies really hammering sales enablement saying it's all about content and the right content at the right time and giving your buyer the right content.

And what are they reading? And that kind of created this enablement bubble. And what happened was the piece that got overlooked that anyone who's been in the space, productivity, sales enablement, effectiveness, whatever we want to call it, they were missing an important piece, which was the coaching and training part, which is content might be king, but if rep doesn't know how to deliver the context of it, it doesn't matter. So it's like this whole content, but if you're not trained on the context of the right piece, you needed them hand in hand. And that is what we're seeing in enablement today is there is still this need, obviously, for the management of content, but your reps need to be trained and certified on how to deliver the stories, deliver that content, and just be effective at asking questions and all the things you and I are talking to today.

So we're seeing that as a trend is that you need both the content and the training piece to start coming together from that side. With regards to size, so it'll depend. So I think it's, I know that's the worst answer. We actually talk about the, we talk about this maturity spectrum where it kind of goes from, again, call it effectiveness, productivity, whatever we call it. It goes from like someone, it being a hobby for someone at the office where it's not a full time. Then it goes into being a role where someone, and the title you're seeing more and more today is sales enablement. That just took off. Like people are calling themselves sales enablement manager, director of sales enablement, productivity, not as much.

And you're seeing some sales effectiveness. That's just, you're seeing that on LinkedIn. That has nothing to do with anybody, but the mark is just kind of speaking in that way. And then you go, so you go from a hobbyist, sorry, like it's a hobby to it's someone specific. Roll to a department. And then this, when that happens, very much depends on the nature of the sale. Yeah. Right. And I think that's, it depends on how your buyer buys. If you have a really complex sale cycle, complex buys, complex solution, very consultative, you need it earlier. Like you need someone whose sole responsibility is making sure you're not wasting money on, you mentioned all the inbound leads are coming in. If those people aren't productive and effective at doing whatever needs to be done as part of your sales cycle, you're losing money from two.

You've got a leaky bucket on two sides, the marketing bucket, because you're losing the leads and the sales money you're spending on the sales team. You're losing money out of both sides. So you need, I would argue you need that role earlier. And then, I mean, the number we've heard is at 30 people at 30 reps, you need someone that's when you start, you know, you need more automation and you need more things. I hear some are as soon as 10. It very much depends on the business. But if you're at 50 reps and you don't have someone doing it full time and you're in that scale mode where you want to grow and you need repeatability and scalability, you're missing the boat. Like by 50 people, it's got to be there for sure.

Oh, absolutely. You know, and you'll see that you nailed kind of the progression, if you will. What I always see is, and I'm going to, there's a warning out there for anybody who's in this role to watch out because what happens is as a company grows, all of a sudden, I actually differ a little bit in your opinion as far as it, and Doug's, as far as it was a marketing, I think it was just pure training thing. I think what happened was that they, as people onboarded, they realized that they needed somebody outside of HR to do some onboarding based on skill level, based on skills, right? So it was like, oh shit, it's no longer the HR stuff and blah, blah, blah, get your, you know, get your stuff going.

Now it's like, okay, how do you do your job? And the VP is like, let's go sales. The VP of sales is usually player coach at those levels. So they're doing their thing. So, so literally training a rep on product knowledge was not something that, that they could do effectively in any way, shape or form. So then what happens is as a company grows, they say, all right, shit, we need somebody to help like train, like onboard people and train them in these particular skills. But then what happens is, and we'll go straight to sales, is that person might be a sales rep who was pretty good, right? But might not see themselves, to your point earlier, as being a lifelong sales rep, but really liked more educating people than selling.

So, hey, you know what? I'll take on this role. I like this. And the company looks at it as kind of almost like a necessary evil. Like, we don't want to do this. I don't want to spend a lot of money on this. Instead of giving this kid a huge commission, let's give them a little bit of a higher base salary and let them figure this out. They get limited resources, almost no investment, no tools, nothing, maybe, you know, a couple of tools here or there. And they're told to build while running. So, like, you have to run a million miles an hour and keep up with this train that's going and build something structurally so we don't fall apart. And usually that takes about a year and a half, two years for that poor person with limited experience, limited investment, and limited skill set and tools to get the shit kicked out of them and do the best with what they have, which is almost nothing.

And then what happens is the organization says, okay, now we have to get serious about this. Let's go hire an SVP or a VP of whatever enablement. And you're going to fall under that person. And that's effectively firing that person. What's that person's title, though, before they hire the VP or SVP? What would you call that person? I think it starts with director of training and then, you know, it might be, like, training manager. And then it moves to enablement something or other, director of enablement. And then they hire the VP of enablement. And, by the way, just for anybody out there in the corporate world, if you ever see a VP of anything, that gets a company to a certain stage and then the company hires an SVP of that thing, that is the nice way of firing the VP.

So, if there's anybody out there listening, and I say this because it happened to me and it's happened to a shitload of people that I know, that they're the ones that do all the heavy lifting, all the breakback work with no budget, right? And then it's, well, we think we want to bring somebody in here who's been there, done that. And they get a higher title than you, they get more money than you, and then your job is to educate them on everything you've learned and got your teeth kicked in over two years. And once you do that, you're out of a job. So, just anybody who gets hired for that, let you know you have a year, you have probably a year before you're going to get fired. Throwing it out there.

I mean, right? You've seen it? Well, and it's so funny, and this is kind of like one of the missions we talk about internally, is this whole notion of like, that person you're describing, right? It's like, maybe they're in the role. They're in the role. And if they're lucky, you know, the only tools they get access to are the tools we have already. Because, hey, can I get some budget for this? It's like, you know what? We've got that already. Why don't you leverage that? Like, leverage our existing investments is kind of the thing. And our whole thing is trying to help exactly these people prove that what they're doing is having an impact. So, it's like, they can go then, and this is the whole mentality, because we've moved away from like the sales rep from a business perspective.

The person in sales enablement or sales training, whatever the title they've been given, they need to be able to very quickly prove that what they're doing is having an impact. That's it. That's going to allow them to, A, put them in a position to rather they get hired above. And, again, speaking to the same people that you're speaking to right now and this podcast, if you're in that role, figure out ways. I mean, we get it. You're strapped with cash and no one wants to give you any love. Prove what you can do without the love. Like, prove what you can, like, just, but have a mentality, have a boardroom mentality of what it is that you can show, a needle you moved. And it can just be a little one and say, hey, this is the needle I was able to move with absolutely nothing.

Give me a little bit of money so I can prove a little bit more. And you start to build a natural business case. And I think that skill set in whatever job you have, that's how businesses run. Prove it works and you'll get money. That's how things work in the real world. So that skill set is equivalent to understanding how to cold call if you're a BDR. Well, and I think that goes back to what you had said earlier, which is pick the metrics that matter and coach and measure towards them. Right. There's a million metrics you could measure, figure out the ones that are most relevant to the business and the priorities and what they're trying to accomplish. And then micro focus on those to show the delta.

And then you'll start to get some budget. A hundred percent. And for BDRs that have a role, like, let's tie this full circle on the skill set. You know, you talk about this notion of when you're doing cold calling, the skill set of figuring out a couple ways to catch people's attention. You know, I read, I read this and I noticed these are your priorities. This is how we help. That same skill set, it's not a cold call, but that's the same way you deal with executives when you move up the chain. If you're talking to a VP that's about to hire someone above you, if you go to that VP and say, you know, hey, John, at the last town hall, you talked about how our three biggest priorities was net new acquisition.

I've been tracking net new acquisition as a core metric part of our enablement program that you've given me no money for. But I think if you gave me a little money, I could drive net new, you know, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. Absolutely. Awesome, David. Well, like I said, I think you and I, we have, we've gone almost, I think every conversation we've had, we've gone over. This one, unfortunately, I do have a hard stop because I have another few calls I have to make. But, David, tell everybody where they can find you, what you're doing these days and how they can connect. Yeah, totally. So you can find me on LinkedIn, David Bloom. Our company is Level Jump. The website's leveljumpsoftware.com.

Feel free to reach out. Love to hear what you're doing, if we can help you out in any way. John, this has been super fun. Look forward to doing it again sometime. As always, David. Thank you very much. And like I say always to everybody, go out there and make somebody happy. It's too much negativity going on these days. So do your best to brighten somebody's day up. All right? Go make it happen. Have a great week. Thank you all very much. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.