If you’re anything like me, no one really taught you how to sell.
Most sales teams do absolute jack when it comes to setting up their reps for success. I see two major themes with sales training programs today:
- Problem #1: Most sales trainings absolutely suck. Reps endure fluffy onboarding programs and dated SKO trainings with content from 1972 that leaves you wondering…What the hell do I actually say to this prospect?
- Problem #2: Most trainings go in one ear, out the other. Even if the trainings are okay, teams spend spend 80% of their time on upfront trainings and only 20% on the reinforcement. 30 days later, no one remembers a damn thing. Shocker.
So when I became a VP of Sales, I flipped that ratio on its head:
We’d focused 20% on running hyper-tactical sales trainings and 80% on reinforcing the concepts until we knew it stuck.
We called it 20-80 Training Rhythms. Let's break it down in 3 steps:
- Pick a 20-80 focus
- Run a hyper-tactical sales training
- Reinforce it in weekly training rhythms
No useless trainings here.
1: Pick a 20-80 focus
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You have to pick one area to level up your team every month or quarter.
Not two. Not three. Not seven. ONE.
Why? Because we’re going to drill it into our team’s head until you know they’ve got it down:
- Every Month: Run one sales training in visceral detail (the 20%). The exact words to say on a cold call. The 7 questions you can ask to get a painful story on a discovery call. The reps needed to know exactly what to say, why to say it, and how to say it.
- Every Week: Maniacally reinforce it in your training rhythms (the 80%). New cold call opener? 4 call reviews. New multithreading process? 4 deal reviews. New discovery questions? 4 tape teardowns. Over and over and over again.
A big part of sales leadership is knowing which problems you want to let burn.
If you try to train your reps on everything all at once, they will remember nothing.
But if you pick one thing every month… they will be massively leveled up in 12 domains of sales every single year and that’s way more than any other team out there can say.
2: Run a hyper-tactical sales training
Let me be clear, NOTHING matters if your upfront training absolutely sucks.
Most teams throw their sales enablement rep up there to cite some BS Gartner studies and share a bunch of cringey discovery questions that the AEs know won’t actually work.
The best teams make their #1 reps run the trainings, while enablement supports the training. If I needed my team to change their behavior, I would put the training in the hands of my #1 rep, Morgan Melo. Three things would happen:
- Morgan would be bought in (and getting top reps bought in is the hardest part)
- Everyone else would be bought in (because everyone respected her)
- The training would be even better (because she’s IN THE GAME)
From there, my job was to have an unreasonably high standard for tactical trainings. My two rules were as follows:
- Break everything down into 3x3 steps. A basic discovery call framework is agenda, questions, next steps. An agenda can be further broken into purpose, plan, outcome. This is a forcing function for reps to put things in chronological order and not miss steps.
- Tell me exactly what to say when giving examples: Give me the literal words you say out of your mouth when you say purpose, plan, outcome. This is a forcing function to eliminate advice that sounds good in theory but sucks in practice.
Pro tip: Look at how these newsletters are structured. They’re almost always 3x3.
3: Reinforce it in weekly training rhythms
In past newsletters I’ve covered my core training rhythms. They are as follows:
- Monday Morning Meeting (Mon)
- Top 10 Deals (Tues, AEs)
- Cold Call / Email Teardowns (Tues, SDRs)
- Pipeline Reviews (Weds/Thurs)
- Tape Reviews or Monthly Training (Friday)
The key is to avoid establishing new rhythms whenever possible. The whole point of a rhythm is that it doesn’t change. It’s a constant. Your team gets addicted to the format of a tape review, a deal review, a pipeline review.
Instead, you reinforce the concepts inside the existing rhythms. For example…
- If we’re working on new discovery questions, we’re reinforcing that in weekly tape reviews and in early stage pipeline reviews.
- If we’re rolling out new objection talk tracks, we’re reinforcing that in the weekly call reviews and maybe in the 5-minute squeeze in our MMM.
- If we’re trying to get to power more consistently, we’re making sure reps have a path to power mapped out in every deal and pipeline review.
Week 1, the new discovery questions come out crazy awkward.
Week 2, one of the craftier reps gets it.
Week 3, the team starts finishing your sentences in the tape reviews.
Week 4, you start winning the discovery calls you lost 30 days prior.
That’s what happens when you keep your eye focused on the ball, folks.
That’s when you know you can move on.
That’s how you get your reps to President’s Club
And now...this training program is available to you
Folks, if you can’t tell, I get very fired up by this stuff.
But the good news is that we’re building this training program for every 30MPC team and listener out there with our courses:
