Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Last week, episode 115, we spent some time talking about key account management. For me, an often-overlooked principle around growing revenue in a business, right? One that gets favoured for new customers or initial revenue growth, rather than looking at our existing database and saying, hey, how can we actually get them to come back to our business or spend more with us?
What came out of that for me was the real importance around making sure that we have a trained team, a team that’s trained around our processes, our systems, right? But more importantly, one that’s also continuing to grow. We talk about growing with our customers and having repeat customers that come back to us and adding value and helping them along their journey. That the same goes with our team members, right? And it’s really clear the numbers are really consistent. Teams that are trained and teams that learn and grow together generally stay together longer. There are huge numbers of statistics out there, right? But there are motivators around money, there are motivators around culture, there are motivators around work, life balance. But there are also motivators around learning and personal development. And for me, this is another area, I think, within sales teams that we often necessarily overlook, but don’t prioritise to allow us to spend enough time simply developing our people.
I think lots of on the job coaching happens. That’s the informal training, if you like, where we have leaders who spend time with their teams and they try to help them improve. But formal training programs is one with the hundreds and hundreds of teams that I’ve worked with that I very rarely see prioritised. In fact, the majority of teams that I work with do not have formal training program. And it continues to blow my mind because certainly for me, in my experience across my six businesses, every single one of those had significant tenure, knowledge and revenue benefits from having a formalised and consistent training program.
So, today I don’t want to talk about a training program and how to create one in detail. But what I do want to do is talk about how we can take some of the stress out of building a program, but then more importantly, talk about how we can work out what we should be training our team on. Because once we get that right, things get a lot simpler. And I certainly have a resource here that is readily available. In fact, that’s one of the most commonly downloaded resources that we have across all of our business. And the link for that resource is www.strongersalesteams.com/calendar. Put that link in the podcast as per normal. All right. But for me, there’s a great resource there that can really help you go about how you structure your training program. But today we’re going to talk about how you actually get it right for your team so you’re delivering most value.
Okay, so as we get into this, I want to talk about what a great training program looks like. For me, I talk about the five C’s with businesses I work with around great training programs. Right? They’re customised, they’re concise, they’re compelling, they’re consistent and they involve an element of coaching. So, we’ll quickly run through those and certainly they’re in the show notes if we move through them quickly. But I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this.
But for me, great training programs, they’re customised, right? Which is what we’re going to talk about today. And that means they’re tailored for their team. I haven’t seen a lot of great training programs where people take off the shelf information available to them or roll in a program that’s simply on repeat. Right. From outsourced companies where they just do the same thing over and over again. They there’s certainly some benefit in patches to it. But where I’ve seen the majority of benefit come from training is when it really is customised to the business.
The second part is it’s concise. And what I mean by that is they’re not three hour long or four hour long or eight-hour long training sessions that are once a month or once a quarter, right? Yes, sure. We can have those sessions once or twice a year, right? Generally, once a year around strategic planning. But for me, they’re short and sharp. Generally, 45 minutes a week or 45 minutes a fortnight, 30 minutes of content, 15 minutes of workshopping or follow up.
Third piece is they’re compelling, right? And what I mean by that is they captivate an audience. So, they’re changing their formats, they’re changing their presenters. They’re simply not the same format of training every single week. But they bring people into the sessions by asking for their input, by asking for their engagement, by rotating who’s actually running the sessions. Right, some of the best programs I’ve seen when individual sales contributors are running sessions around their relative points of expertise, right? If they’re great negotiators or if they’re great at closing deals, or if they’re really good at understanding what a customer wants, we get those people to actually roll out those sessions.
Fourth place here is they’re consistent, right? So concise is important. They’re short and sharp, but consistent is that when they say they’re going to happen, they happen. And we build habits and reliable. Right. Reliable practices that our teams can follow. They know that training is every Monday morning or Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon, right. Whatever it may be, right. Three of the most common times I see for training, right? And they know that they need to have time in their calendar free.
And the last one is they’re coaching focused. So, for me, training is knowledge transfer, coaching is knowledge enhancement, right? So, we don’t just roll a session, a training session that’s about our product, right. And the value that it adds. We’ll actually have sessions that will build on that and we will also have coaching rolled into our one to ones or our team engagement program, right. Where you’re sharing time with each other and we’re actually consistently looking at how we can ascend the knowledge that we’ve transferred rather than simply deliver it on its own.
Okay. So those five Cs, again is training programs are customised, they’re concise, right. They’re compelling, they’re consistent and they’re coaching focused, right? Get those five things right when you’re building your program and that will seriously help the value that you’re delivering and the growth that you get from your team after that.
Now, I wanted to run through that today because I think that’s really important to think about as we’re talking about personalization of programs and how we really maximize value of our programs. Right? So apologies and thank you for humouring me as we went through some of those basics. What I want to now have a look at is how we actually build out the program. So, there’s four areas I’d like to talk about around how we can really maximize the success of a program. Right. They’re not structural, they’re very much around your team.
The first one is around looking at your team life cycle. So, where your team is at in their journey, Are they all new? Now, if they’re all new people, we’re going to be doing a lot more work on the technical elements of our product and how our business works. Right. If they’re an experienced group of people, we’re going to be focusing a lot more on repeating the basics and ascending the basics on perhaps a little bit more advanced training. I’m always reluctant to go too advanced in sales training. I’m a huge believer that basics need to be repeated again and again and again and certainly form three core quarters of the majority of training programs around. Right. But certainly, when it comes to the basics, we can start to dig in a little bit deeper with more experienced teams. So, we’ve got new versus old teams in terms of your life cycle, of your team. But we’ve also got right in the middle there where we’ve got a blend, right? And where we have some new team members and some experienced team members, which tends to be most teams out there, right? Making sure that we’re ready to blend some basic content in for our beginners, but also leveraging the experience of our more senior team members to help with that. But being able to challenge them through our content. Right. If we’re doing some basic training around our sales process. Right. That we can be challenging our more experienced salespeople around if they’re doing these practices consistently. Right. If they’ve built in bad habits, if they need to start thinking in a little bit more detail about rather than just asking customers questions. Right? But they might start to think about giving the customer a job or. Or the three Ds, right? Deliverables, decision makers and deadlines. Lots and lots of things where we can start to just dive in a little bit deeper without losing our less experienced team members.
So, for me, that’s the first consideration when we’re having a training program. I would always encourage you not to build a training program for polar ends of your team. But look in the middle. Look where the bell curve sits nice and consistently in the middle there. And aim for your training programs to be directed at that level of competence. If you have some newcomers that need to be brought up to speed or some team members that are just not grappling with concept as well as others. There are two things here. One is you set the bar that they need to get to. Right? So, you say, hey guys, this is where you need to be. Right. You’re not there yet. Let’s get you to that point. And number two is you actually tend to work with them a little bit more offline or you might take some of your more experienced people to help them along the journey. And then for your more experienced people, right. We don’t want to be pitching topics of content that’s too high and the others won’t drag along with. However, we just need to be mindful that perhaps outside of these sessions, in our one to one coaching, for example, we’re really driving them hard to ascend that knowledge or even within training sessions. Right. We’re driving them to think at the next level of what their implementation is. Right. So that’s number one when we’re actually looking at how we can build that content to really add value. It’s where is the lifecycle of our team.
Number two is I really encourage you to be 100% clear on what your sales process is. I work off five steps. Lead generation, meet and greet, quoting or presentation stage, closing out the deal, and key account management. For me to have a successful training program, you must know what the steps of your process are, right? Because once you know these steps, you can get really clear on how you train according to each of them. For me, the gaps, and this is point number two. Right. The crux here is once you know your sales process, the first point to start for me is training around your gaps. Let’s bring the gaps up. Right. I have a business that I’ve worked with. One of their gaps was in how they can get back to customers as quickly as possible, I. E. When a lead comes in, it doesn’t just join the queue and they contact it in a period of a few days. But we start to train those teams how to give the customer an initial response. Right. Then a more detailed response and then start to get into the real nuts and bolts of what they’re doing, for example. Right. It even might be changing mindset. I’ve worked with another team, right. And for me, their sales process gap was that no one was doing the same thing consistently. So, the training actually needed to be right. How do we consistently handle the process? So, we’re all doing the same thing or the majority of us are doing the majority of the same things the majority of the time. Last example I’ll give here is a business who was really not spending enough time in understanding what their customers want. So, their close rates were low because they were burning a lot of leads and they were bringing in customers who actually were never going to buy from them in the first place. Right. So, looking at your gaps is the second area I’d really focus on when it comes down to building a training program that delivers some value.
Third for me is looking at the areas within your business where you have some competitive advantage. Right. Or where you want to build some competitive advantage. For me, getting the training right, i.e arming your team so that they can articulate that value that you provide, that’s when you start to see really fantastic results across your business. Right. I’ve worked with a business and their value was all in the quality of their design and execution. But their teams were not talking about that, they were talking about the quality of their products. So, their training program started to focus on, well, hang on, this is more than just product, this is the design. Right. And in fact, for this business, it was all about turning a new house into a really liveable dream home. Right. And that’s where they focused a lot of their time around their training programs. We had another team where one of their strengths is actually the broad scope of the business. Right. They had some related experience in the markets they were targeting, but they didn’t talk about that enough. Right. They didn’t talk about the depth of knowledge they could bring which resulted in essentially being able to deliver higher outcomes for their customers. Alright. So, we started to spend some time training around that. Right. But the point here is, is if you can know where your points of competitive advantage are, that’s fantastic. But what’s powerful in execution is when your team can articulate them across the board.
So that’s the third area I’d be looking at. Number one is what’s the lifecycle of your team so we know where to pitch the training content. Number two is around your sales process and where the gaps are. Those areas you’re not doing very well and need to close down the gaps on. And number three so far is all about the areas of competitive advantage. So, where you know you’re good as a business but need to make sure that you are articulating that very effectively.
Okay, number four. Number four for me in really executing and building out a great training program is recognising where you want your team to be more efficient in how they go about their work. That could be anything from territory planning. So how they plan their days. Right. How they plan their physical days or their virtual days. Right. What point in time you’re doing, customer follow up, what point in time you’re quoting what point of time you’re doing internal meetings, right? How you’re streamlining internal meetings, how you’re building a great territory plan if you’re out on the road. So, you’re minimising driving time and maximizing time with customers, right? Avoiding peak hour, those type of things. How you’re using company systems, CRMs, accounting systems, quoting systems, right? But this one’s all about doing what you do repeatedly, faster. Do we roll in AI tools? Are we rolling in AI call coaching? Are we rolling in integrations using Zapier integrations, right? To be able to reduce the amount of double input from a quote template into an accounting system or from a prospecting sheet into your quoting template, right? How we can use existing quoting templates again and again and again and sorry, what I mean by that is presentation templates, right? We might have a standard quote, but how can we take presentation templates that show businesses what we do or customers what we do, right? Without having to recreate the wheel? How can we get faster at responding to emails? How can we be more impactful at having conversations with customers that are condensed, right? And what I mean by that is getting to the point really quickly with prospects so that we know if they’re qualified or not, right? Lots and lots of things we can do when it comes down to training our team to be more efficient. And if we can do that again, what the result is that if we had 40 hours in a week, right, if we can bring what we were doing in 40 hours down to 35, then we have five more hours to deal with customers, five more hours to deal with new customers, five more hours to deal with increasing transaction size of existing customers, or five more hours to deal with bringing repeat customers or new referrals into our business.
So, for me, they’re the four areas that if we can really focus on when we’re creating our training program, that’s when we’re going to see the magic happen, right? So, if I go back to those, it’s understanding your team lifecycle exactly where they’re at in their lifecycle. Number two is sales process, right? Where the gaps are so we can close them. Number three is all around areas of competitive advantage so we can articulate them really well. And last but not least is areas of efficiency, right? How we can get really, really good at the things that we need to do on repeat for our business. So that’s a nice short and sharp episode today. I hope that you can again take one thing out of that that you can tweak with your team and do again. And again and again. Because if you can, this 20 minutes will pay itself over dozens, if not hundreds of times.
Okay, so before we head off today in these solar episodes, I’ve had a few around now I’m in that road to Cairns. We are down to four weeks. Oh my God, I can’t believe it. Right? Going to be running, swimming 4Ks, riding 180 and running a marathon. It’s stupid. And please, Ironman athletes out there, I have so much respect for you, but for me I’m coming off a very short base and the last period of time has actually been about running. Last week we spoke about riding. You know, I’m kind of phasing in as much running as I can. I’ve got a bit of a history of having injuries so for me my focus has actually been on cadence. Something I never really knew until recently. Meredith, you know who you are up here in Noosa or in Coolum actually helped me increase my cadence, right steps per minute from 165. I now run it kind of 175, 177 and wow, has it made a difference to me getting injured but with the volume has come things like blisters and you know, all those other kind of running ailments you don’t want to talk about. But I’m learning about the benefits of things like bodyguard and having good socks and changing over your shoes at the moment right as I start. We through them pretty quickly. But I’m loving the strength that I’m building from being on the bike. It’s helping me run better and then my long runs are getting longer. I’m up to about 26 or so K’s now, which is a long time to be out running. But when you live up here it’s beautiful. So, four weeks to go. I’ll keep everyone posted.
Thank you. Please go out, create some beautiful training programs that really make a difference and until we meet next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E116 If You Don't Train Your Team, Expect Sales to Drop
