96: Sales Coaching with Rob Jeppsen CEO/Cofounder at Xvoyant

good afternoon everybody this is john barrels make it happen monday hopefully on a good weekend i'm just getting back from where the hell was i this week uh uh dublin and i and uh london so on a little bit of a different time zone but i am fired up to have my guest today my brother from another mother rob jepson over at exvoyant what's up my man how you doing john what's up jb so good to be with you and welcome uh also thanks for having me with the make happen monday crowd i love the whole community the content you spit out is fire the engagement you get is amazing and you're right we are brothers man and i love every minute i get to spend with you and i'm so excited to spend a little time with you today my man likewise my friend i always enjoy our conversations i think the challenge on this one is going to be to keep this within a half hour 45 minutes right because i think you and i could shoot the shit for at least a couple days here on some of these topics we've done that before i know we have so so let's let's get right to it so this is going to be all about coaching which um i think everybody recognizes is probably one of the most important things a manager can do but it's one of the least uh uh it's one of the least things that managers do these days at least in my experience and uh and i'm going to come at this with a context of myself personally right so you know i'm i'm running jay barrows here i hired morgan a couple years ago um if i had all the time in the world and morgan don't get me like morgan's progressing really really well like he's going from an sdr and sdr manager and now i got him in full cycle sales and he's doing training and he's doing everything right and he's he's progressing faster than most but i know for a fact that if i was able to spend you know two three real days with him on a weekly basis and and actively coaching him that his ramp would be 5x what it is right now so so let's talk about the the current state of of of coaching right now and and the importance of it because well first of all for those of you who don't know you uh which if you don't know rob you should be ashamed of yourself but rob talk to me about what you're doing over at x buoyant and then talk to me about where you see coaching and managing these days okay first of all again thanks listen john the reason we get along so well is i feel like we're really kindreds in what you're doing for sales people what we do for managers and there's a lot of emphasis on sales engagement there's a lot of emphasis on sales activities i believe you're the best in the world at what you do and helping sales people learn how to fill that funnel and drive to close what we do is we come in and we help companies create structure around how managers help reps intentionally improve and that's what we do we help them add structure and also remove the administrative burden we have piece of technology that sits native in your sales force system makes it really easy for reps to see where their areas for biggest improvement but more than that we give your leaders an opportunity to have who should i coach what part of the process should we be coaching what deals should we be coaching we'll talk about that you and i see eye to eye deal coaching and deal chasing two different things um but mostly it's this how do we move away from the mindset of just more activities to more purpose-driven activities because if you can add more purpose to your activities i rarely find lazy people john i mean that we're in a world where the where the reps are they're in sales because they want to work hard they want to be successful most of them just don't know how and so i see a shift to coaching i see some things that scare me a little bit john because people are still looking at old data but here's what i found the companies that actually build process around how their managers go about their business just like they've done about how their reps go around their business they're the ones that build a dynasty so you and me we're dynasty builders brother and uh that's that's what i love about what we do we help build dynasties i love it man and i think so let's start with the root of the problem here right i in my opinion and you correct me if i'm wrong you know this better than i do but i think the root of the problem sits with uh the fact that most of the time um managers get promoted because they're the best rep right so they were the best rep at whatever they did you know they killed their numbers and then they got promoted to be a manager and then those managers are now being told okay now tell everybody to do what you how to do what you do and the problem with that is you know and you hear me talk a lot about art versus science and all that other stuff a lot of times those best reps are are to a certain degree the artists right they just have that innate ability to connect with people know where to manage their time those type of things and now they have to come and tell everybody to do what they did and it's hard for them to translate that because they're not they're in that quadrant of unconsciously competent right they just know how to do what they do whereas i think the best managers are the consciously competent ones they might be the b plus a minus reps but they know exactly how they got to their number exactly what they need to do and they can replicate that process but we get the a reps report you know the artists and then they sit there and they don't know how to do anything other than deal chase so they end up deal chasing and jumping in on deals to help close because that's the shortest term response you know that's the shortest term thing that they can do to show value but they don't know how to coach so there's the root of the problem and i write a wrong you're dead on in fact please finish your story the way you do the root of the problem is the best i've ever heard i quote you all the time john talk about picasso to your guest for a second yeah picasso analogy i thought you're going to go there i think it sets up our conversation really well yeah i mean i think you know i've always i was an artist when i was i mean well my first major was art in college right and and picasso blows my mind but picasso you know i could never be picasso there's no way i could ever be picasso okay but i always say if you have a paint by numbers and you tell me put yet yellow here red there orange there and get me most of the way there and then allow me to kind of smooth out the colors a little bit i'll come pretty damn close and i think that you know a good analogy i don't know if you've seen this you know those paint nights you ever done a paint night where you go into a bar and somebody shows you how to paint a painting that type of thing yep so they're a blast to do right yep and and it's funny because my wife is the exact opposite of an artist like she's a she's a scientist and she literally sucks at art okay but we go to one of these paint night things right and they the the guy picks up you know like a monet and you're looking at it like oh my god like how in the world could i paint that like that's a monet there's no way i could even come close but then the artist then the teacher if you will says okay take your take your this brush number three dip it in yellow or whatever it is and swap the bottom of it the whole bottom third of the page okay now take blue and do the corner this way and take yellow and do it this way and then by the end you know we don't all look like monet but they're all you can tell like that's that's pretty damn close yep and i think that's what we as as sales leaders need to figure out a way to do is put the structure in place so we can rise all tides right so everybody can come pretty damn close and look those picassos are going to be those picassos but but i think that if we can get the kind of the non-picassos that much better so that much closer we have a chance right i couldn't agree more that's why i'm glad you finished the story with that first of all it's awesome and i love it and i quote you on it all the time i think that if your listeners and you and me start talking about this the first thing is we think picasso's going to be the great leader and the answer is picasso's probably a shitty leader he's a killer artist maybe the greatest artist and as soon as you have him stop doing art and frustrated with these scientists they're like here's what i found john you tell me what you see because you work with tons of these people i found that when picasso tries to be a leader here's what i've seen one of two things happen they think if you can't do what i can do if you can't print your own monet or whatever piece of art that either you are dumb or you're lazy they think it's one of those two you're either not working hard enough or you're not smart enough for the job and my experience john has been it's neither they just need a leader to push the how button instead of the more button and i believe that we always get the more button as sales people you and me and everybody that's listening to this when we went into sales john we signed up for the more button okay if you don't like the more button get the hell out of sales okay our job is to fuel the growth of companies but the mistake is not button one the mistake is button two because we only push the activity button we say more activities more activities more activities i'm a believer in sales engagement you know i love what the guys at sales loft and outreach and places like that i'm a i'm a fan but it's almost never as simple as just do more activities sometimes and usually diminishing returns i i think to a certain degree yes but then there's diminishing returns once it reaches a certain plateau right amen so that's why button number two for the for the non-picassos picassos will just say work harder study figure it out the great leaders go to button number two is the how button i'm going to break it down and we're going to figure out how you know i live in utah there's lots of awesome mountains out here i'm going to get you out here we're going to do an event we're going to speak to a bunch of our of our leaders out here in silicon slope sometime yeah when you're climbing a mountain there's a lot of ways to get to the top john okay and one of the ways you make your stars your precassos when you say go they'll just go straight up to the top but for guys or or gals or people that can't just go straight to the top they may need a sherpa to take them up there right you may need to take some switchbacks on the way up there and our job as leaders is to find individualized routes for individualized people and if you don't have a leader that's going to help you with figuring out that route and it's going to be a sherpa to help you get there my first advice to the listeners is you probably need to be in an environment where you're going to get that because shitty leaders that's hard to fix so let's so let's talk about the scenarios here say say i got a manager yep um who's who's a player coach right they they they they're being asked to either have some sort of quota or at least be responsible for some quota but they also need to manage i i disagree with this approach so do i i don't think you can do both really effectively but let's talk about the reality it is what it happens all the time all the time so and look i'm a player coach i'm a straight up player coach i close deals i manage accounts and i'm trying to get morgan up there okay so what's some guy like me how do i put the the the structure in place and what the should the structure be for me to make sure that i i make coaching a priority that it should be first thing a non-negotiable is we have to create expectancy we have to have a coaching process just like you're asking morgan and you yourself because you're a player you have a sales process the question you better ask john is do i have a coaching process what is a coaching process okay so what's a coaching process let's talk about that so so 95 plus of sales orgs have a sales process the coaching process needs to be a way that you sit down one-on-one and we're re we're reinforcing the actual activities and skills that make you successful in the sales process here's some examples of the way i would say my coaching process first is a non-negotiable every member of the team needs to have a one-on-one with some frequency if you're a highly transactional one uh inside sales team it might need to be every week okay the two levers on how you know the frequency john what's the what's the cycle time look like but also what's the frequency of the activity if you're blowing out 100 calls a day a weekly one-on-one is probably a good thing to have okay and this is different and let me make sure i clarify one-on-one is different than a forecast review oh totally different i'm glad you brought that up that's one of so you know i have my seven deadly sins of sales of one-on-one sales coaching and that's one of them i call it flogging the forecast right you just keep beating that pipeline over and over until you try to beat a deal out and and a one-on-one is only about one thing here's the the i want i want every one of the listeners to think about this john i'm so glad you pushed pause brother it takes work to push pause on me sometimes so nice work man um how many meetings does your do each of your reps have every day every week every month shitloads right tons how many of them are 100 about their improvements a one-on-one should be about how you're going to improve you and me are both big sports fans okay who's your college basketball team on the ncb just finished who's your college team university maryland terps all the way baby terps all that i'm a tarheel okay i'm a tarheel we'll be friends but we both hate who we both hate duke right yes we do we both can come together and our hatred of duke there you go and so mike sheshevsky i can't hate him john because he's the most winningest coach of all time yep i have a killer picture that everyone should think about it's him in a timeout and he's got a grease board what is he doing in the grease board john you probably haven't seen it but you know him what's he doing with that grease board in the timeout what's he doing having a place right next play yeah if your timeouts if you're think of your one-on-ones it's calling timeout with your players okay okay you have next play mentality next play mentality next play for the activities i do if i have to tune my engine there's only three conversations john in a one-on-one so here's your coaching process you need to have a process that says if i i'm gonna start with results results to achieve relevancy number one am i hitting what john barrels wants me to do if i'm morgan and morgan so the answer is yes i'm hitting what john wants me to do if i'm now saying okay what about your personal aspirations morgan are you hitting what your personal aspirations if that's yes then i go to the last one let's look at your process does your sales process say you're going to stay in a good spot if all those are yes what's the biggest mistake that you think that a leader makes with that person john they just say good all right see you next week i'll leave you alone yeah awesome i'm gonna leave you alone that's the biggest mistake we can make um we need to coach those people too because a five to ten percent improvement with that person is usually more than a 15 to 20 percent improvement with someone in the middle right and also more important quality of coaching john this is important for your reps for your reps and your managers here quality of coaching is the number one driver of intent to stay with the company you want to lose your stars no no you know what the conversations john here's you're gonna like this the name of that conversation how good can you get man and you need to have a way of modeling what's this one thing worth if i change this tweak this one thing holy crap that's worth 18 that's worth four million dollars and your stars they eat that shit up they eat it up so it starts so it so it does start with the goal setting though and it and is this like obviously company revenue setting as far as what you got to hit your numbers and then we back into those but then is there that personal component of of self-development outside of results is it has to be and how concrete do you get with those goals so that's why you want to make sure that you understand their personal aspirations you probably heard me say uh am i hitting what john barrels wants but what about your personal aspirations personal aspirations needs to be part of the coaching process and too often it's not too often people just feel like i'm just a number i got news for everybody out here spreadsheet coaching needs to go away it's one of the biggest problems all i look at is your ratios those matter but if you don't if you're not taking someone on a journey that they want to go on then you're not going to be the legendary leader you're not going to be that person that changed a career i mean john i'm so glad you said that our our customers that build coaching process yes we use results to establish relevancy because if you aren't able to do the results then there's something else wrong sometimes it's personal things that are wrong right does that make sense yeah and um and one of the things that we've learned is career development needs to be part of the one-on-one are we taking you places in your career that you want to go for the incoming sales generation that's a massive deal john so let me ask you this is this is an old way of thinking um so my i've you know and i know we're going to get into this so this is kind of to a certain degree a segue of the distribution of talent right you got your top you got your a reps your b reps and your c reps and i've always been taught that you know with your a reps you you over you over communicate with them so you tell them everything that's going on with the business and all that other stuff and you let and you set very long-term goals with them and you allow them to kind of pick it up right so yeah outside of your target this year if you hit that like personally what do you want to do if you get 130 percent a quarter or something like that so hey i want to drive a beamer i want to you know i want an extra week off whatever it is and you and so they shape it right whereas your b reps a little bit more uh midterm short-term goals this quarter this month that type of stuff and you work on things together but it's a little bit more action driven whereas your c reps your c reps are your c reps for a reason right they they're they're used to losing right so they they they kind of have negative momentum on losing so what you have to do to change that is you have to be very very short-term with your goals so you look at it and say okay today can you make 50 dials today great tomorrow can you make 50 dials and get a meeting great next day can you make 50 dials get a meeting and you know a next step right so you've got to get them back on the winning track but you don't really look long-term with them as from a from a personal standpoint because you're trying to get them out of that shit rut that they're in is that an old antiquated way of looking at it or is that still have some sort of uh uh solace to it no the reason that i think that there's relevance there but i would i would say that i would take that with a twist john is what you just described was individualized coaching for individualized people fair to say yep i think that's still the thing you need to have individualized plans for individualized people you heard me say purpose-driven activities i i have fun with them when i speak we both speak at a lot of things i i say the secret is not more a more activities it's more pda and i'm not talking about public displays of affection i'm talking about more purpose-driven activities so for your stars there may be some short-term things like you know you need to take this class or maybe you need to work this you'll do this very specific thing sometimes it may be long-term i'm not going to say it's always for a star it's more long-term and always for someone that's down at the sea it's always short-term i'm not going to say that what i'm going to say is it always needs to be something that's relevant to what they're trying to accomplish relative to the company and their personal goals and that's why again you know keenan well we did a study with keenan and with gong who you also know well the three of us put together what i think was a really compelling coaching study john this is super important for your listeners as well because i think you know all of us really well 48 of reps say they never get coaching ever only 13 say it's any good now that's no big deal here's the big deal john we talk to the managers of those same people and we ask the managers how good are you at coaching what do you think the manager said well fantastic i'm great at the greatest we're crushing it we only need more leads we don't need help coaching our people just give us more leads and we're good to go okay and so this is why if you're a manager of people you should stop right now and say hmm because here's what i've learned john the managers aren't lazy they actually try here's what they do i was i was with a vp of sales of a company you would know well and i was having this conversation with him he's like yeah rob i think my guys do pretty good i said tell me why here's what they said i want your take on this john this will be fun he said number one we're we're hitting our number we're hitting our number okay great number two i talk to him all the time like i know we know our guys we know them well number three you're smiling big now because i because you probably hear this i feel like i'm really connected to all of the deals number four we don't have a massive turnover problem yeah what's the one thing that's missing from that development you got it he didn't have anything on here's how they're improving yeah and i think again another common friend we keep talking about these common friends doug landis you know who we both love uh he and i spent a lot of time talking about this i agree with doug he told me he thinks the most important thing a sales productivity leader or sales manager can say what is my plan for having x percent fill it in for you it might be one percent might be ten percent i don't care what it is do i have a plan with every rep how they're going to improve by x percent over this period of time and the reason that most miss john is they think about all of the quantifiable things like i know all the deals and all these things do you have a unique plan for every person do you or are you just talking to them because that's where i think that modern sales leaders are doing better than the old sales leaders they try to put everybody in these boxes and i don't i think there's three categories how good can you get do i need to tune my engine do i need to tune my deals and then the last one am i taking my career in a place that i'm excited about see it's it's what i and i i used to do this with my team and and a little bit of management coaching back when it was a basho was we would identify like the the 20 or 30 different categories of stuff that you needed to be successful in that role okay and it was you know you know cold car you know whatever it was like relationship development teamwork uh you know time management all these different things and we would go in and we would rate people on a scale like i would rank them and then they would rank them like i would say here's how i think you do on these areas and then marry it up right and see what the differences were that was always an interesting exercise but it also then identified okay where are the weakest like where do we need to focus on for your coaching plan so it kind of leads me to this conversation with you is i've always been a hey let's focus on your strengths and minimize your weaknesses from a coaching standpoint though what how should coach how should sales coaches and managers look at weaknesses versus strengths and and and and how to yeah and just how to approach that it's such a great question john i'm so glad you asked that i another large it's a billion dollar company that's one of our customers and we started our relationship with them that his philosophy was we his quote was we fix the lowest form of broken behavior that's what it was our mission is to fix the and it makes i like it there's a lot of reasons that instantly like makes total sense fix the lowest form of broken behavior again if you go back to what i believe is what modern leadership's about it's creating individual pathways for individual people now sometimes john it's as simple as let's get the thing that you're the least adept at and get better at it let's see if we can get better but sometimes if you have a killer if you have a kick-ass strength you know maybe you find can i do more of that can i actually double down on that well because that's what my problem has always been it's like my weaknesses are my weaknesses for a reason i don't right i don't fucking like doing them you know what i mean so so get me in a position where i can do the shit that i love to do that i'm great at and help me minimize my weaknesses so that they don't they don't get in the way of my strengths yes that's more my philosophy is let's let's put some things in place so that my weaknesses don't hurt me but really if i'm going to focus my energy i'm going to focus on what am i great at yes and so that's why let's look at yourself i wish we could hit rewind on this and go watch yourself so when you're asked a question you're like okay you know rob is it this or is it this and as soon as i answered and you got like yes i wanted my strength do you see how animated you got talking about doubling down in your strengths you got to get that reaction with your reps you want them to be fired up about the conversation because here's the biggest difference john we're talking about the mistakes that we make and and i hate talking about where people suck at coaching or whatever i just i always want to say how do we get better but we had a conversation that what a great coach would do is say john let's figure out what those strengths are and what you are going to do more of first and we get a commitment conversations don't equal commitment just like a rep if a rep has a killer conversation with a prospect but you get no commitment you make what i call a professional friend okay leaders have the same problem that's why sales and management are a lot more alike than people give credit because a rep has to find what the what the prospect values and then helps them create a path and commitment that they get there leaders need to find out what the rep values and then create a path and commitment to get them there and so what you and me should be talking about is we're going to make commitments on okay so you're doing this you want to double down on that okay let's go from here to here what's getting in the way this thing is getting in the way you don't have to become an expert at this but if we can make that so you suck just a little less at it or maybe you do the things you're great at slightly differently so you don't bump into that and then we get commitments where we're saying yes i'm going to do that here's how we're going to check back rob here's how you can be helpful in helping me do that and you get commitments that's why i think coaching fails is reps are not change averse john here's what i found my man reps are not averse to change because they want to win too bad you know what they're averse to is shitty coaching that's what they're averse to yeah so so let's talk about that that rep that gets shitty coaching right so so there's you know i think a small percentage of companies that they put their coaches and their managers in a position to be successful and really coach the right way there's a much larger so this is kind of the distribution of talent right there's the much larger middle ground where you have coaches and managers who want to do the right thing but just don't have a structure and a process around it and then there's a large group of people who just straight up suck at coaching and and and our deal chasers and are the numbers driven type of thing so i want to talk about that rep who's sitting there saying i don't i have no confidence that my manager can coach me really well and i need coaching is there some stuff that you can recommend for a rep to self-coach and help themselves get to that next level that and then we'll translate to the next levels here but let's talk about that rep out there that is just like man i'm not getting the support that i need i want to get better to your point we're not lazy we want to get better but i don't know how and and and i'm being told to do shit that that i don't really agree with and i need outside of getting a new job right and looking for a really good coach how can you coach yourself to get better in a way that gives that commitment to you right if there's one thing you said the plan with i was just a good friend um but there's that okay there's a commitment here and i need to have a commitment with myself to be better how do you do that so first of all this is a really important question because so many are poor coaches now that said here's what i do think i think most managers want to be good coaches yeah okay the first thing that i would do is i would have a conversation with my manager that you want specific things in your development you want their help i would go to them and enlist their help because john i think that most sales managers they became a manager because they want to help teams improve so i would first start with that that's the my first place i would go to and say hey i need a little more and i need you know this kind of direction now i also will say that you said something else if you got a bad leader a bad leader is a reason to leave a company it is period end of story but i'm not going to take it back i'm going to answer your question now i would start with looking at if you're in b2b i would start by understanding what are the building blocks and i would get really good at self-assessing self-correcting almost like a gps right and you've i don't have to regurgitate what you've said you've got to know your numbers first you got to be able to do your equation if you don't want to talk about go look at john barrow's stuff because that's what i'm talking about and john i can't say it better than you do but you and me both agree on that i think it's the rep has a responsibility to know their own equation is that fair to say yeah absolutely there's only four pistons that make a b2b sales engine go okay number of opportunities revenue per customer win rate and speed with those four things if you can look at what are the activities that make me get more opportunities what are the activities that make me get more revenue per customer what are the activities that change win rate what are the activities that change cycle time and i look at cycle time by start to close but also by stage if you have six stages and you can shave out four or five days in a stage holy crap you just took a month out of a cycle time john and the stuff you train people on are the exactly the activities that fit those four those four pistons let me give you an example i have oh i get i get uh i'm making plenty of calls but they're not converting into demos well then you're probably doing shitty outreach or you need to a b test or you need and so if i'm looking at those things and i can now start self-correcting i have proposals that get stuck on the vine that i propose and then you go anywhere i see this all the time john when we go in i see it's a very common place it happens so often i always start there when i look at people's uh stages and i our tech as you know identifies speed by stage as well start to finish when i see people that are hung up at the proposal stage you want to know what i found the number one reason for that is uh i got my reason it's usually uh they don't engage with the decision makers of the power yeah so it's that and the way you delivered the freaking proposal the way you deliver it okay like too many people send an email with something along these lines here's you know the proposal if you have any questions give me a call there you go you're laughing because you know i'm right oh yeah yeah well it's funny so we use uh so you know i use a scorecard right the give get scorecard and i use this to a certain degree from a coaching standpoint because what happened and this is you know morgan another perfect example here he was an sdr and an sdr manager right and so when he came on board here our three main personas are vp's of sales vp's enablement cro's now he didn't really know how to speak that language right so i was coaching him on how to speak that language so in the short term i said look i want you to just get some some wins under your belt so start calling into sdr managers right because you know he's a he's a celebrity in the sdr world so no problem and somehow and so we got a bunch of sdr managers getting like holy shit morgan ingram you're now with jay barrows with the jay barrows content absolutely we we need this okay and so i had them all score all these deals and what happened was he got a great bunch of great conversations and he got 15 deals in his pipeline like real early too like 15 deals out of the gate i'm like great and every week he was telling me oh these are definitely going to close they're definitely going to close they're definitely going to close and i'm like uh-huh sure right and i i wasn't too hard on his forecast reviews because i didn't what i wanted i wanted to prove a point to a certain degree and and i let six weeks go by so i let six weeks go by where every week he's telling me definitely going to close all 15 deals and after six weeks this is morgan i want you to do me a favor i want you to go look at the scorecards of all of the deals that you're working on right now and i want you to tell me what's missing there's something missing on every single one of them what is it and it came back to me in the checkbox of meeting with power it wasn't there he hadn't engaged with power in any of those 15 deals so now as a manager now i know what to coach him on so instead of coaching him on individual deals i'm now taking a step back and saying i have to now coach him on how to get to power earlier in the sales process and i'm making it so that he can't forecast a deal if he doesn't have power in there so it's almost like a forcing function to say look i don't give a shit about any of your deals until you access power right yeah so it's a way to pinpoint something to coach on because i think that's the hardest thing that rep uh that managers have is you know i get all these different reps or all these different areas and and i don't know so that's why they dive to deals and talk about individual deals because that's the easy thing to talk about right it's harder to talk about a component of the sales process that you have to coach to to level up across the board which is why i love tune the engine and tune the deal so first is my engine throwing enough out enough horsepower that i can expect if i get good at how i engage these deals that i can win that's why tune the deal first okay tune the engine first second is exactly what you said and my version of your song i got a second verse to your first verse that you just sang brother and what i would suggest to these people so the first thing was make sure you get that horsepower in your engine those four pistons you know that's a non-negotiable if you don't have enough horsepower in your engine your engine ain't gonna get you there is that fair to say okay now in the deals i love your example of of this one on getting access to power that's such a good example like my example of the way you deliver a proposal it's amazing like it's as simple as don't deliver a proposal unless they're on the phone then you hit send and then you talk through it because first i set up there will be no new information that we've already talked about so i want to make sure that when you get it right now there's no questions right and that's one of our rules we don't ever send people proposals we get them on the phone and then we send them we talk about it's you'd be blown away how much that changes win rates and speed by the way those two things yeah that's a free tip to everyone that's listening here's the second thing though that i would say tune the deals everyone has stages john and everyone has activities not enough people have what i call buyer verifiers you may have talked about this okay so we need to have our sales engagement create buyer engagement and so if you're a rep that feels like i'm being asked to do a bunch of this shit up here which we need to do but it's not getting me where i want to go and i don't know what to do about it i would advise you to spend time talking to high performers other leaders people like that what are the physical or the agreements that you need to get from customers at every stage along the way early on it's access to time you know and then it's access to power to your point and you need to know for every stage what's the buyer verifier that you can say i got that love your story about morgan because that's a verifier right so you need to know that for every stage and usually john it's only one and no more than two things per stage if it's more than that you're doing it wrong see we so that's what we do like we take the scorecard the give get scorecard and say there's like 20 gives and gets right you probably you know one to twenty one to twenty and you know one through five is usually stage one six through ten is usually stage two you know eleven through is stage three and there's always a primary get that you need at each one of those stages before you move to the next stage so you you have to get you know the decision criteria you have to get you know whatever a meeting with power to be able to move it from stage three to stage four um and and that's the easy thing about coaching right because then once you identify those must gets if you will to move it from each stage then you can coach the reps on getting those things because a lot of times those are the those are the awkward things that reps don't want to get or don't want to ask for or forget about because it's either awkward to ask for whatever and that's a pure coaching moment amen so that's why i say man if you want to coach yourself learn to tune your engine and then learn to tune your deals and it's not by being a pest it's by saying can my purpose driven activities get me verifiers if you can look at that say i'm not getting this verifier john uh can you help me learn how to get this verifier and if you got a leader who's not doing what you said that you figured out with morgan in this case access to power was the thing and it's interesting because we see the same thing we we sell to enablement we sell the heads of sales and it's easy to get people that don't have power excited and it happens to us all the time john yeah we actually you know as this is a this is a to to dub actually as a third uh level to to the conversation um morgan so i typically because i've been doing this for so long the way i work is you know you and i have a conversation i'm qualifying you whatever and i send you over a pdf that outlines the details of the program the pricing whatever it's just kind of a more of a sales doc if you will uh and then we have another call and you tell me what you want and then i just send you an sow so it's just an sow here's the price here's the terms there's no quote-unquote proposal in the middle of that right of that so but that's for me because because i've been doing this for so long and i got a big fat pipeline and i don't want your business i don't need your business i want it right so i have a lot of confidence now morgan getting into this there there's the the give get of getting the power right there's got to be an excuse to get the power and i think delivering the proposal is a great excuse so for instance hey rob thanks so much for your time you want a proposal fantastic you know what you had said earlier that these three other people are involved in the decision making process so i can make sure that i get everybody's you know so i can make sure that this proposal is exactly what you're looking for um can i get about 10 to 15 minutes on their calendar right just so i can ask them a few quick questions now you're going to push back and say you know what john i'm the guy i'm the guy right whatever okay rob you know what when can i deliver this proposal to you and the other people involved so i can walk you through it so you have all the information you need right now those two things sound pretty normal to ask for right and if you shoot me down on both of those i'm concerned right you're screwed already yeah but you have to have something to deliver right an sow is not so what we actually did with morgan was we created a proposal we created a reason to deliver so it's it maps out here's your priorities here's how our stuff aligns and it's and there's meat to it so now he has he is a justified hey let me now walk you through this proposal so i can answer any questions whereas before it was just an sow so it's like what am i going to walk you through so we actually had the manufacturer reason for him to go to get to power and i recommend actually a lot of managers out there if they don't have that because i'm a thousand percent on board with you don't just send over the proposal and say giddy up call me if you have any questions deliver it to them so if you don't have something complex enough i would almost manufacturing of something that's complex enough to give the reps a chance it's funny that you say that i had a cro call me that's working with our sales team and we've become friends through just we're in the we're all in this business together he's like hey man you got this deal you should be excited he goes but just between you and me we should try and get together we should beef up that that statement of work just to make sure that because our kind of company wants to know exactly what we're buying because it's so weird john that's why you got to connect to everybody some people get like that's too much shit i don't want to see all that stuff i just want to know how long how much etc and then you get other people like i need to know the whole deliverable i gotta have that's why it's so important to connect to those power people and ask the questions happened to me this is a large medical device company that i know you would know they hit me up said hey i got two vps that we got to get on board to get this done can you send me something that i can help them you know really see what we're doing and rather than because of course we have stuff you have everybody has stuff followed up so happy to do it can you tell me what the initiatives are that these guys are working on so i can make sure that what we send all i said was that you tell me exactly what's big for them right now you'd be blown away how i got a blueprint for each dude okay and we're not sending them anything like that and we're not going to send them anything we're going to walk them through stuff that we custom put together for them because this is a big enough deal it makes sense that's what what you're doing is exactly what i believe john everyone needs unique pathways and i loved your question if you've got if you're on your own come back to what you just said tune your engine what are the activities that make your engine create horsepower understand what are the gets what are the verifiers what are the ways that you know you have created buyer engagement because i love this john a salesperson could do damn near everything except for close a deal we can do all of it we just can't force them to sign right and you've done this i mean how many of the people here if we could see them in a room and we were co-presenting together we got to do that sometime that'll be fun for us to do okay how many people have done everything right and still lost a deal my hands up my hands up what about the other you have screwed it up 10 different ways and somehow you still won yep my hands up anybody who says no to one of those is either lying or they're new to sales yep this is why the gets this is why the verifiers this is why buyer engagement is so important if i could give one metaphor john and i'm sorry if this is a soapbox but i'm passionate about it you can tell it's a toll road okay we're on a toll road we're driving along we come to the toll booth the only person that can pay the toll is the buyer if you're not getting that toll paid by the buyer i got news for you you think you've moved through that toll booth you ain't you're still back there and you can move along and say that i think i got it but until you got it you don't and that i think is the best way for a rep to learn to self-correct and self-coach is to have a good understanding and if you got a shitty leader that hasn't helped you know what those gets are take charge you know reach out build an initiative build momentum around this because it won't just be you that benefits from it the rest of the team will benefit from it and your whole career will be better as a result love it all right man so well last topic here um because i i love your your new thought process on on this you know coaching the middle right moving just the middle right and and and kind of the old philosophy of really as your manager as a manager your only job is to get your your b reps to b a reps coach them to b as and pretty much fuck your c's like your c's suck don't waste time with them right um old school new school what are your thoughts around that so you refer this as a really hot spot as well i'm the reason i'm glad you brought it up john i'm thank you that you did because i'm seeing people starting talking about the middle again i'm seeing it come back ceb awesome company they wrote the challenger sale they i was when i was running sales at a multi i was responsible for three billion sales had about a thousand reps um i had a membership to ceb i spent over 30 grand a year for it and it was awesome okay 2005 they wrote the original science-based study on moving the middle now john the number one technology move of the time in 2005 was youtube was formed okay um the number one crm provider of the time was siebel okay sales force on that on that uh on that chart from idc and gartner was it's an emerging company to keep our eye on and because wire wi-fi now is standardized we actually think crm on the on demand may have a place okay in 2005 sales was different brother and that's when this study came out from ceb that said here's the middle here's your bell curve first of all everybody has 10 percent stars 70 percent middle 20 percent poor or 10 80 10 john we have hundreds of teams that we manage and we look at we see less than two percent on a pretty 10 70 20 or a 10 80 10 nobody's like that it's polarized there are those that get it those that don't and a few in the middle that are on a pathway okay here's what we found back then they said there's a there's a bottleneck it takes three to five hours per rep per month you probably heard that stat okay three to five hours of coaching per rep per month in order to have effectiveness that's because we didn't have good data we had shitty sales tools and ever it was hard to find root cause we couldn't tune the engine and we couldn't tune the deal today we can we have amazing tools like what your friends and mine at sales loft and outreach and so many others the gongs and the courses there are all these awesome companies that have changed the way we do things but here's what i've learned john data doesn't change people people change people and so today you can't say at the bottom this report and if anybody wants it hit me up i'll send you the report 2005 says you can't coach the dogs out of the kennel that's what it says you say that today you will never hire anybody okay on the top it says 10 on the top they're already as good as they're going to get it's only small improvements and it's only 10 of your team anyway so just hope you don't lose them literally that's what it says and in the middle if you can get 10 15 better than you win i say bullshit that's that's that study said whatever you do don't try and shift the curve we have a big study coming out in about three weeks four weeks john i'll send it to you i hope that you'll share with your people that shows a study based on over a hundred teams scientific what happened year over year in the year 2018 modern data you can shift curves and you can shift them fast because here's why john reps want to improve and if you can connect with them if you can be relevant to where they are relative to their goals and you can create commitments on how they create purpose to their activities you'd be blown away how fast people want to change that's what i would say today if you're a sales leader you owe a responsibility to your team to say i'm shifting curves this year i'm shifting curves next year i'm not just going to say thank god you fell into the middle and now you get some of my time and i'll finish with this john the big idea of that 2005 and you're right i am on a soapbox bro and i'm preaching keep going keep going uh the big idea in 2005 was you allocate time based on what your production is the middle okay here's what i would tell you now start measuring responsiveness to coaching if you want to know how it's as simple as setting coaching goals every month in your one-on-ones or every week in your one-on-ones and measuring do we do coaching goals are never hit this deal it's do this activity let's get this verifier let's do this and if we can now get into the point where we're measuring coachability here's the big idea i'll get a one-on-one my discretionary time goes to those that respond to coaching no matter how good you are yeah i was going to ask you right because great you know a's b's and c's and all that other stuff but the ones that the ones that you should put your effort into are the ones who are open and and take to coaching the ones that don't um i mean there's there's some stuff out there even in your top reps if your top reps aren't open to coaching there's a strong uh case i could make to fire in those top reps because if they're not coachable again you pretty much just have to hold your breath because they're gonna they're gonna leave eventually they're gonna do something and they're probably gonna disrupt your team because they're not gonna follow through and if you got your b's and c's paying attention to wanting to be like your a's and your a's an asshole not taking any of the coaching then the b's and c's it's gonna be hard to reinstill that to your b's and c's right you're dead on so the big idea is not what's your production that gets you my time it's your responsiveness to coaching and john it's one of the things again i don't come here to push my company but it's we're the only ones that i know that measure that i agree and and if you aren't as a leader measuring coaching you don't have to buy my stuff reach out i will show you how to do it it's as simple as set coaching goals and then track who hits them and who doesn't okay and if you start looking at that you compare coachability to process and process to outcomes you'll find shifting the curve is not like this big wild dream it's super scientific you won't be a picasso you will be that person just below picasso but you can shift them okay and you'll do it fast and and then what happens you have a dynasty if you get to the point where everybody's gotten to the point where it's no longer tuning the engine and tuning the deal it's how good can you get brother you're bill belichick and you just built a dynasty there you go my friends i love it awesome man well again uh we could go on for days on this shit because you know i think i think both you and i live on soapboxes so uh so that's why i love talking to my friends so let's uh let's so let the audience know um you said if you got managers out there you know reach out to you what's the best way to follow what you're doing and get in touch with you rob i'm heavy on linkedin like you and many others follow me on linkedin we spend a lot of we share a lot of content we got great stuff our leadership book just came out and and in like a week we had it downloaded over 5 000 times it showcased you john uh your contract that was a super successful leadership book uh go to exfoliant.com um but i'm telling you hit me up and i love our profession i'm passionate i want to help managers change how they lead and you know come to xy hit me up and i will give you like i'm like you john 90 of what you do you give people because you love the profession i do the same thing i will give give give as much as i can i want to help our reps here's what i'll finish with john i believe the manager's job is to help reps do their very best work so they can live their very best life find me on linkedin find me on x1.com and i will do everything i can help you do that love it my friends awesome always a pleasure thank you very much and everybody out there make it a great week go out there and make somebody happy if you do nothing else today don't make somebody smile if you do you know you had a good day so thank you all very much and make it happen thanks rob see you rob you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you.