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. I am up and about today and Yahweh, who edits all of our podcasts and does a wonderful job. Big call out to you, Yahweh. In fact, I don’t think I’ve given you a call out through 129 episodes. So, my bad and many apologies, but Yahweh’s just seen my burst of energy as we’re starting to record out this podcast. But I think for me, I get really engaged and really upbeat when I know that I’m either winning, so I’m succeeding in business. My health, my personal health is really going well. Something’s happening in my family, particularly with my daughter. There’s something that she’s doing well. Yeah. Last week she was on the front cover of the school she goes to. She was on the front cover there for sports, the diamond dash that they had. Right. She was one of the highest highlighted runners from the day. Right. And it was fantastic. A great running style, great for a little preppy, or when I’m learning new things. And for me, I find that when I’m learning, I really feel like I’m growing and I’m contributing and my almost my forward prospects tend to grow the more and more I can learn and look, for many of us in the world at the moment, using AI is a really heavy topic that we’re focusing on around how we can learn.
So, it’s been a little while since I spoke about how we as leaders, be sales leaders or business leaders can really effectively help our teams learn faster. That word fast is really important because the faster that any of our teams learn, the quicker their capabilities clearly grow and the more valuable they can become to our business. It’s Also fantastic for team engagement, right. When we have teams that are learning together. And I had a meeting this morning with a very proficient leader who does a very good job for her business. But her comments to me were, Ben, I’m not just learning enough anymore. And for me it was like, wow, that is a warning sign, right? For her leaders to say, we’ve got a high flight risk here, right? So, when we have teams that are learning and learning not just well, but rapidly, then it’s great for our team’s culture. It’s great for clearly our engagement and tenure, right? For me, turnover rates tend to really fall when we have teams that are on rapid learning cycles because primarily the hard work and the remuneration become less impactful or less important. Because we have teams that are learning, right? Because people are picking up new skills and future prospects. As I said earlier, are really rising. So today, going to focus all about how we can effectively help our teams learn better. And I’ll also talk a little bit about some AI tools that we can use to perhaps awesome ways we can use AI more impactfully to help us really drive that learning curve and the future prospects of our sales team in particular.
So, as we do that, I’d like to quickly explore the key ways that people learn. This is really important as a leader to understand how people within your team learn most effectively. The good news is it’s really easy to work out, but we’ll come to that in a moment. But understanding how different people learn can be super, super impactful to speeding up their learning curve.
And let me give you an example. If we have a person who really prefers to learn by doing versus a person who prefers to learn by listening. There’s two important things to consider here. The first one is that someone who’s going to learn by doing, we’re going to need to put them in the right situations to learn again and again and again and again, right? So, the downside here is that can take some time. So, the first piece here is by understanding how someone likes to learn, we can determine where we might need to supplement it with something else to help really speed up that journey. But if we talk about someone here who likes to learn by doing versus someone who likes to learn by listening, we need to be really mindful that a listener is going to prefer if we put them into situations where they can clearly hear others doing what they do best, so they might be mimicking others in meetings versus someone who learns by doing. We’re going to want to put them in charge of Running those meetings and perhaps pairing them with someone who can guide them along that journey. Two very different styles of learning that can be very easily allowed for in how we’re training that person. Someone that likes to listen. Great. We send them out with someone else and they listen rather than do. Someone who likes to learn by doing great, we send them out with someone else and we get them to lead rather than listen. Now, of course, we need to make sure that we’re particularly those that are learning by doing that we’re couching what they’re learning in the right way and we’re not going to put them in situations where they could do damage to the business or really knock their confidence. But most importantly, if we’re able to ascertain how our team members learn right, we can then pair the ways that we allow them to learn or the ways that we teach them with what their preferred style is.
The second piece to this is we can also understand where we might need to supplement, right? So, learning by listening or reading style is much easier because we compare them with people with lots and lots and lots of sales calls. For example, with sales buddies, we can give them lots and lots of reading material to look at versus someone who’s going to need to learn by doing well. That’s going to be that slower grind or that slower uptake of learning that I spoke about before. So, they’re ones where you might need to supplement and say, okay, what else is effective for you and how you learn? And the learn by doing person, I often find, is effective when they learn by teaching. So, we might give them something within the organization that they take the lead on, which ensures that they’re obviously teaching and leading others so they’re able to try and pick up new concepts, new topics, sharpen their skills, sharpen the axe, as we say, in a more effective manner.
So, knowing the style of your team members is super important when it comes to starting how you’re going to learn. It is the absolute place that I would recommend you begin when you’re looking to build out your L and D plans for your teams. Know the individual.
So, just to quickly cut through what those learning styles are, I’ll be nice and quick and brief in those areas, but I think they’re worth doing is the first one is teaching, right. Very, very common way where people like to learn. In fact, a lot of studies out there will say it’s the most impactful way of learning, is to learn by teaching. And ways we get those type of people involved in learning is to get in leading training sessions is to get them teaching others is to get them leading working groups or even leading meetings, right? Is to getting them to pull together data and presenting back to you to help you understand or further your knowledge in a topic. So, we have learn by teaching.
We have cognitive learners who tend to learn when they understand concepts. And I’d have to say that I’m probably more often I would fall into the learn by teaching and learn by concepts, right? The cognitive type of learner. And these are the type of learners who will pick up something quickly once they understand the concept. But until they understand that concept, their learning journeys will be a lot slower. And a terrific example here is someone who might need to understand a framework. I talk a lot about the 3 Ds, deliverables, decision makers and deadlines, right? Once someone understands the concept around the 3 Ds, they tend to be able to learn and pick that up versus someone who you can just say, hey, I want you to think about deliverables, decision makers and deadlines, right? Forget the framework, forget the concepts. You just need to learn that. So, someone who’s a cognitive learner and learns by concepts, we need to spend extra time with making sure they understand the baseline theory to really make sure they’re base is big so they can hit higher peaks. Think of the pyramids, right? A cognitive style learner will need more time early to pick a concept up, but then their ramp up will generally speed up once they know that.
Next type is what you’d call a kinaesthetic learner or a learn by doing type of person. Kinaesthetics are very technical term. I prefer learning by doing. These are very, very common, particularly in salespeople are those people who learn by doing it themselves, right? You give them the sales process, but they learn by rolling it out, by making the mistakes, by seeing what works, by trialling different things or AB testing as you’d like to call it. These are the people who we need to throw out to the wolves. They will sink or swim, right? And really give them that opportunity to hone their skills by doing. Now of course with these people, guardrails become really important. As I mentioned earlier. However, I find a really effective way to do that is by buddying. I’m learning a new tool at the moment. I’ve spoken a lot about Icana’s call coach that I’ve become a part of that business. And at the moment I’m relying heavily on the MD of that business, Eric, to help me really Learn by doing, because I clearly learn by teaching and by understanding concepts. But for me, I’ll have him in the key meetings that I need where I know my knowledge isn’t strong enough. And other times he’ll lead. But my focus there is to obviously be out in front of as many people as I possibly can, right. To allow me to learn at that faster pace.
So, we have people who like to learn by teaching, we have cognitive learners who need to understand concepts, kinaesthetic learners who are all about doing. And then we start to move into some of your more traditional learning styles. So, there are those who like to learn by listening, listen to podcasts, listen to others, talk, listen to training sessions. They’re very much driven by audio cues, and that’s how they’re most successful in learning. We have people who like to learn by visual cues. Right. So that’s reading, that’s watching. They’re certainly more visually driven than they are from their ears. And we’ll know those type of people pretty easily. When we start to talk to them, we see their distraction falls away pretty easily. But whereas when we show them a video or give them something to read, they tend to stay a lot more focused. And there’s lots of different learning styles, I should add, but these are the most common ones that I’ve seen across sales teams in particular, over the last 20 years.
So, if we’re a learn by listening, then clearly podcasts and meeting with other people, you know, buddy style meetings is fantastic. For those that are learning by visual, it’s where we need to be providing them lots of things like YouTube links, books to read, training courses to watch, materials, brochures, case studies. Right. Anything that allows them to visually take on concepts is going to be really impactful for them. So, they would be the five most common, I think, styles of learning that I see in sales team members. That’s learn by teaching, that’s learn by doing, learn by concepts, learn by listening, and learn by watching. And what I’d really encourage you to do as a sales leader is to try and determine where or who within your team fits into each of those briefs. And I mentioned earlier that this can be quite straightforward to work out. And the way I see it done really successfully is to ask, as a leader to ask your team member, what’s the way they like to learn best? Because when we know how they like to learn best, we can then tailor our learning programs around them. Now, what that doesn’t mean is we’re creating different content for these People. But when we’re picking a topic, let’s say it’s needs analysis, right? Learning how to better qualify our customers, we will be able to, for each of those five segments, think about how we’re going to help that person learn. And for leaders, I’d really encourage you to use your people and culture teams if you have them. Use any external resources if you have them. Right? If you have sales consultants or strategists in your business, use Google AI. Lots and lots of tools out there you can use to help you drive improvements into your team’s learning. But for me, the most important first step is to understand how they learn.
Okay. The next step here is to start to think about ways where you can set up a structure that they’re going to learn and in a better or faster fashion. And for me, the most successful way that I see sales teams learn faster ramp future prospects is all about making sure they have a focus on being better every day. So, these are lots of short, sharp pieces of training that allow teams to build on a cumulative level rather than simply do a big session of training, nothing for a month or more. Big session of training, nothing for a month or more, right?
So, the first point I’ll start is to make sure that we have lots and lots of regular sessions around learning and the ways we do that is we have set times around learning, right? I love teams that train every week, 45 minutes or 30 minutes each and every week, bang. Teams are in there. The speed of learning for these teams, and I’ve run teams where I’ve done this is significantly greater than those teams who rely on either semi regular training, right. Unstructured learning, or it’s left to do themselves. So, with that focus of being 1% better, we want to be having set times for our teams, right? We want to be making sure that we’re removing distractions whenever we have a learning focus. So, if we’re out with buddies, right, and we’re doing sales calls and we’re learning by doing, right. Then we’re really clear that there’s no distractions in that meeting. That’s easy, right? But when we have people that like to learn by watching or listening or understanding concepts, that’s when things like phones can really get in the way, emails, right. People walking around them. And we need to be really conscious of making sure that we’re removing distractions. Same thing goes around making sure that we’re setting up times to learn when the teams are actually going to be less distracted. I love seeing teams that set training sessions up to be first thing in the morning so the phones are less likely to be ringing or around customer dead times, right? When we’re far less likely to have customers ringing us. I love it when we can see teams that adopt training into dead time. So, for me that often falls into personal time, right? So, I love learning when I’m exercising, right? If I’m at home, I’m on the bike, I’m sitting on the wind trainer. If I’m doing a gym session, sometimes even if I’m running, I love being able to have an opportunity to listen to podcasts. Yes, listening is not my preferred way of learning, but I take the opportunity when I can. If you’re walking the dog, if you’re driving right in the car, if you have some spare time and you want to get on the phone and pick others brains, right? Learning how we can use dead time to help us grow our skills again really ramps that learning curve faster. So, I’m hopefully as you’re going through here, you’re picking up as a leader some ideas around how you can be helping your team learn faster, right? Clearly the first one’s around diagnosing the best way they like to learn, for lack of a better word. But the second one is around setting up a structure and that’s having a focus on lots of regular repeated sessions, removing distractions, encouraging the team to be using their dead times.
And I think the last piece that I’ll say around here is really making sure that we’re not only prioritising the training, so that’s picking the topics that we know are going to be most impactful right now. And I’ll give you some examples. As we lead into end of calendar or financial year periods, closing out deals becomes a real priority for a business. So, the six weeks before that having a focus around training sessions on closing become really evident. When we’re in the starter periods, particularly around the new year, some focus on time management, right? How we can be more effective or more efficient becomes really relevant. When we have new products being launched, we can have some sessions around lead generation, right? When we’re launching new products, it’s a great time to get out and talk to new customers. So, for me, it’s being really mindful about what’s most important to your business that then allows us to prioritise where we’re training and to be fair, that might even include things that we’re performing poorly at that we start to prioritise.
And then the last piece on this or part two of that is that whenever we are training, we have really clear action items for teams, right? It’s great to have the impact event, as I’ll call it, where we jump in, we do something really cool, everyone works out going, yeah, I’m in, let’s do it happen, right? Because there’s no action items behind it. So, we need to make sure that however we’re training people, the tail of implementation is really evident and consistent. For any training programs I’m running with teams, we’ll have the impact event, but I will work with those teams for sometimes 12 months or more to implement what we’ve agreed on doing. Because if that support structure around implementation falls away, teams tend to divert to their default behaviours. It takes around about three months, three lots of 21 days to embed a skill to make it move from something you’re thinking about to something that becomes subroutine. So, if you’re not around for that three-month period to be making sure they’re practicing it, they’re using it on a daily basis, then it’s very hard to embed into your team. There’s a reason that two out of three change management initiatives fail. And for me, the most common reason I see is that the implementation program following an impact event isn’t strong enough.
So, we talk about having a focus on improving better, which means we’re doing lots and lots of regular sessions, short, sharp, and we’re making sure that they’re super impactful, we’re removing distractions, we’re getting really, really clear on trying to utilise some of our dead time to help us learn. Those times when we’re doing something that could be supplemented by learning, but we’re getting really clear on priorities. What’s most important to the business now to make sure we’re training around those areas and we got a nice long tail of implementation that comes after we do some training periods. Teams that are doing that and leaders. As you’re listening, I hope you’ve picked one or two or three things there that you might be able to do differently. The one I think is my favourite is helping your teams learn in dead time. Followed very closely by implementation. Implementation is the most important that we’ve got, a tale of implementation. But I love sitting down with teams and saying, okay, how can we learn more? In some times when you’re walking the dog or you’re at the gym or doing what you need to do now, for some that time they need to unwind so it won’t work, but for others it is the perfect time to be learning.
Okay, so we’ve spoken about how you can really hasten the speed of learning, right? Improve future prospects for teams by firstly identifying what their best ways of learning are and then tailoring your programs around that. And secondly, by setting up these scenes, right. The frameworks for your team to be able to learn really better. The third thing I’d like to cover today is how we can use AI or AI tools to help us also speed up that curve of learning. And I’m going to go through five or six things now that I’ll leave you to think about. I won’t dive into the practical as to how you make them happen, but certainly most of these can be done through a Gemini or a ChatGPT premium style of membership, right. $20 a month doesn’t cost a lot, right. Co-Pilot, even in Microsoft might be able to help with those. I haven’t, haven’t tested specifically this, but there’s a lot of tools out there that are going to be able to help with hastening the speed of learnings of your teams.
So, where I’d really suggest you start to think about with AI is drawing some materials, right? Building out study plans or sourcing materials for you. So, you use your AI tool to determine or to set up how often you need to be studying a topic, right? To give you time to analyse your calendar and find times to be studying and also then creating some materials for you. So, if you’d like your team to be learning around, let’s stick with needs analysis. You can use AI tools to get out there and find some of the best frameworks around needs analysis, for example. Now, I always put a word of caution with this because for me nothing replaces using humans to set up training, but certainly to supplement key periods of training. I think AI tools around materials are great and particularly to implement key areas around training, right? If we’ve identified a need, we’ve done some base level training on it. Using an AI tool to then make sure it’s implemented well can be really impactful. So, we’ve got study plans, materials, quizzes. You can use AI tools to set up quizzes for your team, type in topics and get some quizzes to come out of it. You can use AI tools to summarize notes, right? Particularly if you’re in visual. You learn by reading, for example, you can be putting materials that you’ve read into your AI tool and get it to summarize notes, right? So, you can write obviously your own points as you’re learning or reading, Right? But you can also use an AI tool to go and summarise those notes and give you something more impactful to refer to. We can use AI as a research assistant, right? So, we’re asking AI to go out into the web and this is not about creating materials, but go and do some research around what are the most progressive sales techniques around getting through to customers who don’t answer their phone. You can go and find some ideas around that. What are some of the most progressive techniques in the sales world around handling objections, Right. So there’s nice little areas of pockets of gold you can use AI to help with. You can use AI to set topics for training on or even determine your sales training calendar. Might give it a brief on what your team, who your team are, what they do, the types of areas they focus on and ask AI tools to actually set out that calendar for you can certainly work. Use AI to create presentations. If you’re going to learn by teaching, I can use it to set up. Okay, here’s the topic I’m training on. I’m going to be training today on how we ask for the business. Go and plug into AI tool. Can you please give me 10 slides on how to ask for the business? For a B2B focused brand that deals with transactions mostly between 1 and $10 million across a six-month life cycle with six decision makers involved, getting your brief of your AI agent, if you like, really clear is super important to get great results from that presentation. But certainly, we can be using AI tools to be creating presentations for us. And last but not least on how we can use AI to help our teams learn faster is to deploy it as your coach. So that’s using AI tools to analyse. Analyse recorded conversations and provide coaching materials out of it. There’s lots of tools that are popping up around it. I speak about Icana’s Icana AI. I speak about our call coach regularly. It’s one, there’s lots of others you can check out there.
You don’t need to look at only that. But certainly, using AI tools to help your teams implement the learnings that you’ve done. So, if we have a focus on the team around closing out deals at the end of the calendar year, we can use an AI tool to really analyse performance around closing, provide coaching and give the team lots of closed loop feedback.
Okay, so there we have it for today. When it comes to really ramping or hastening the speed of learning of our teams. And increasing their future prospects, improving their engagement with the business, improving business results, decreasing turnover. Lots and lots and lots and lots of benefits from learning. The three areas I’d really encourage you to focus on are, number one, how does your team or individuals within your team like to learn? Pick those ways they like to learn and cater to them. Number two is set up the right environment to be learning in. And number three is use some AI tools to help you to really hasten that curve. Again, for me, it’s not about one over any of the others. We actually need to get all three right. But if you don’t know where to start, start with number one, right? Understanding how your team learn, moving to number two around setting the environment up, and then last but not least, move into using AI tools to give you some support.
So, that’s it for today. Before we leave, a little personal health and fitness and wellbeing tip for me. I mentioned it at the start. I find that I am a better person when I’m succeeding in business. My family’s winning, right? Or I’m learning. And for me, when I’m down, when I’m struggling and it happens, I have to say earlier this week I had a couple of moments, had a couple of days where I was really struggling is I like to try and get myself really focused on how I can drag myself out of that little slump by finding areas that I can win, finding little pockets within my family that are going well, that I can celebrate exercising that little bit harder. Or for me, I often go to learning something and I’ve found this week what’s pulled me out of it. Hence the topic for this podcast is, is that I’ve learned a few really impactful things around my craft, not just sales training and strategy. I’m constantly trying to learn here, but also around some of the other roles that I have in my life, such as Icana in particular. So, for me, I encourage you out there, if you are in those slumps, to really try and identify the things that get you out of them. Write them down so you’ve got them for next time, but then go and find one and work like crazy to go and implement it. That’s it for today. Until next week, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
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