Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
87. Results of 2024 State of Enablement Survey with James Pursey
James is the founder of Replicate Labs and they recently released a "state of enablement" survey. The results were wild. We dig into some key areas in this episode.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host Coach CRM Co-Founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Enablement Survey Report. The analytics are out today and I've got Replicate Labs Co co-founder, james Percy, here to talk with me about the survey. They've done hundreds of folks to really dig into what's going on in the enablement world. James, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm very well. It's great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1:All right, I'm going to start with a shocking stat. We don't need to talk about this one too much. But I want to look people in. 25% of senior leaders managers believe that rep performance would go up if all aspects of enablement were shut down.
Speaker 2:That's shocking. It's pretty extreme, right. I think like what's interesting about it it's not even the team of enablement, it's like all aspects of it. So no feedback, no coaching, no cool reviews, no methodologies, nothing. They think performance would go up. It's wild. It means that they think it's actually a detractor versus just something that doesn't work. What do you think's causing it? I think that people get very like light at the end of the tunnel, excited about if I train my team, I can improve deal qualification, I can improve win rates, I can improve average qualification, I can improve win rates, I can improve average order value, I can decrease discounting and like. They expect all of these phenomenal transformational things, but then they don't build the infrastructure to support it. And when it doesn't work, rather than thinking my approach doesn't work, they think enablement doesn't work like as a whole, as a function. Yeah, and then kind of yeah, react like that it was. It's very honest answer, right, because that came from the leaders themselves right, it's like I'm getting fat.
Speaker 1:I go to the gym.
Speaker 2:Therefore, the gym doesn't work yes, yes, lots of gym comparisons in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely that's wild man. Okay, let's uh, I want to touch on a few of the points in here and then we can kind of chat about them. So this, this one was interesting Coaching who should own coaching people, managers or enablement and the thing that I found interesting wasn't necessarily who said what. It was that the majority response from enablement people, from managers and from leaders was both. I've never seen something that multiple people own that actually works out long-term. That's wild. You can't have co-owners of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually a really good observation. I didn't call that out in the report.
Speaker 1:I like that. Oh well, my second point. I actually got some some street credibility with james over here.
Speaker 2:Let's go yeah, we'll amend the. We'll amend the report. Um, we'll credit you, but uh, yeah, I think it's. It's a really good point, like I. I'd imagine what it stems from is managers want to own. Anything related to their people Makes sense, but they also admit right. I think it's like 55% of them say I don't know how to do this, I don't have enough time, I don't have the coaching on how to do it, and rather than thinking let's go and find the time and let's get the training, let's get really good at it, it makes more sense to just turn to this other function over here, like that would be my kind of immediate thought on it is there has to be a both, because I can't do it on my own, but I don't want to give it up.
Speaker 2:So why don't we just team up, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and the problem then becomes that nobody owns it. And so what does team up mean? And the power dynamics are interesting. I think, when you have different people, let's call it different departments, because enablement and frontline management sure it's under the sales umbrella, but it's two different roles, each one of them have their own goals. And it's funny because a frontline manager is focused almost purely on this quarter, focused almost purely on this quarter. Enable it, folks, especially if you're towards the end of the quarter, if you're in the last month of the quarter, nothing you do is going to have an impact. This quarter Maybe, but that's a stretch. So you've got folks that are working on two completely different timelines, that co-own something that won't work. So who has a door? Who actually owns it and is directing it? That's the question who actually owns it and is directing it?
Speaker 2:That's the question. And also when you have that confusion over ownership, which is what that is right. There's no org chart that says this is a joint responsibility. There's no enablement playbook that says this is me and you right. Nobody's actively trying to deploy in that way, but that's the internal opinion, right? Is I should own it, I should, should own it or we both should.
Speaker 2:And what happens when you have that kind of clash is you also have clash of opinions of what it is and like this was one of the things that I found most interesting is there's this stat that at first sounds like an attack against managers. It says 27 of reps say they get zero coaching, never get any coaching coaching right. But when we asked managers the same exact question, 0% said that. And at first you can read that as like the managers are not admitting that they're not doing the task right. Like you could view it in a kind of negative type way.
Speaker 2:But in so many other areas of the report they hold their hands up to various faults. So my kind of takeaway from that is they hold their hands up to various faults. So my kind of takeaway from that is they have a different definition to each other as to what coaching is, yeah, and in feedback, right, the actual alignment between rep and manager is much closer. So I think that, like, because managers haven't been taught how to give coaching which is something that comes up in the survey they confuse feedback of something that's happened before with coaching of how to give coaching, which is something that comes up in the survey. They confuse feedback of something that's happened before with coaching of how to improve, moving forwards, and they think they're coaching around the clock. But the reps are like you're not really, you're just kind of telling me what I did wrong last Wednesday at 10 am, right, like, um, and, and I think that that is a direct function of that misalignment between actual ownership.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the definitions confusion and real quick. If anybody out there is struggling with how to coach email freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom, we've got a free 90-minute course. We usually charge 500 bucks for it, but hey, since we're a software company now we can give it away for free. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. See, james, I said no long ads, I didn't say no ads, right?
Speaker 2:That's a very good ad.
Speaker 1:And here's the other piece, the enablement definition of coaching or success. So let's say success, enablement definition of success and management definition of success are different too right, because I imagine for the most part, the management definition of success is quantitative Did this person hit their number? How close to the number to this person get it? Whereas the enablement definition of success is more qualitative, which is, they came to the session and they did great, or now they're able to ask pain-based discovery questions and set next steps and do demos in a good way. That's compelling and engaging and drives conversation. So the mixture between it's like oil and water here, with this quantitative and qualitative definition of outcome, and you're telling me these people co-own something. What's going on?
Speaker 2:I think that enablement wants to be quantified right. They want to be able to prove that program X led to result Y. But the way that that's commonly done is the program is evaluated through sending a survey. How confident did you feel before and after this session? Like the most biased exercise of all time.
Speaker 1:Right to your friends, um but then I wish, I wish I had sound effects so I could do but then even on the quant side, they go often, often it goes too big.
Speaker 2:So you go to efficiency metrics makes sense, right, like you build frameworks and methodologies and approaches and tooling in order to drive predictability. So efficiency is an obvious area. But efficiency, like win rate, is not the right metric because there's A, there's a thousand other things that contribute to it, but B, it's so lagging that what happens is three, six months down the line from the trainings. You see win rate go up, you go, that was me, I did that right. You see it go down, you go, had nothing to do with us, it was these other five things right like so that there's there's like plausible deniability, right, and I think that there's there's so many kind of tactical reasons why that is the way that it is and ways that it can be solved but isn't widely accepted right now. But it means that there is this misalignment.
Speaker 2:Even, you know, conversion of lead to pipeline right like if you, if you're thinking like sdrs, right is the only people that care about those metrics are the leadership team and the enablement team. The reps themselves only care about hitting the number. Right like if I have 500 opportunities and I close one, but that one hits my number. I've smashed it right, right, but exactly but enablement have like epically failed and just yeah, just like that definition of coaching which you're hinting at, like there, what what the survey kind of really overwhelmingly says is like hierarchically right, top down and laterally between functions, like there is zero alignment on anything. And if that's the case, like you can't build a process, you can't build a process, you can't build a machine, you can't effectively measure it right, like it's just completely. I don't even know if you can say broken, because that implies it functioned before. Um yeah, like it's, it's brutal. But you know, these, these aren't my takeaways, this is, this is from the people that did it yeah, and there might be correlation, but there's notality.
Speaker 1:Let me toss out one metric to you. Tell me if you think this is something that people could align on Stage duration, number of days in stage two and three. So let's say that stage one's discovery, stage two is needs analysis, stage three's proposal. And let's say that little Timmy has 30 days in stage two, 30 days in stage three. He does some training, he compresses stage two down to 20 days, compresses stage three down to 15 days. That seems to be something that everybody can rally about, because A little Timmy can pull forward his deals into this quarter. Good, he can get his deals done faster so he has more bandwidth to work on more deals next quarter and then enablement can say look, no-transcript. Is that something we can align on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a really good example of we call it the input and output KPIs. Right, like the input KPI is something that's immediately quickly measurable. Right, like you know, stage duration is a really good example. Stages that connect to the next logical stage in the process is another really good example. I looked at this a lot in my my last job right when I ran enablement at similar web, is what percentage of deals that move from, you know, um like engagement to proposal to like champion, exception to whatever, actually follow that sequential process versus like jump around and go back and forth and like show a lack of discipline. Um, and that can very easily be backed into things like um, like actual end performance and revenue and stuff. Um, and then, yeah, your output is your, your big numbers.
Speaker 2:Like, if you think about something as simple as a cold call, enablement probably can't materially in a short period of time.
Speaker 2:Impact, like the actual number of meetings that are coming in, because there's so many other factors in that. But, and also like there might be a bit of a lag, especially with like conversion to pipeline. But if you start breaking it down to like the longer I can keep someone on a call, the more likely they are to eventually agree with me. The more questions they ask back right like um, the more the higher percentage of calls, like a perfect example, is the percentage of calls that get past the opener right. It's just the very first thing I say what percentage of calls keep talking to me like these are things that you do a training, you do some practice, you do some role play. Whatever you roll it out the next week, you're going to get this instantaneous indication of success and that comes back to the rep piece. Right Is reps will hate enablement until they think enablement makes them more money yeah, right, and that has to be quant, right, like.
Speaker 2:But like anything, if you're trying to learn to ride a bike right and you fall off every single time and you never experience the satisfaction of riding a bike, you're gonna hate bikes, right. But the second you move a couple hundred meters down the road, that's pretty fun and it makes you want to do it the next time, even if you're gonna fall off right. So you need that positive reinforcement at some stage, not these empty promises of well, this survey said that we smashed it Right, like, yeah, it's, it's just not the same connection.
Speaker 1:Well, let me frame this up with a bike example. So imagine that you're a kid and all your friends ride their bikes and you don't. Ok, you're in some pain there because you're excluded from a social circle. And then you recognize that you can't ride a bike. And then your neighbor says hey, I can teach you how to ride a bike. You're immediately looking up to that person because the problem has been framed because you're excluded from the social circle, because you're not riding your bike. You know you can't ride a bike. The neighbor kid can ride a bike and can teach you how to ride a bike, so that person is coming in as a hero. But if the enablement isn't positioned that way, then you end up in a position which you described, which is oh, you got to go to this session and listen to this thing. Oh, and, by the way, I know your last company enablement sucked and so we promise it's different this time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have a good MPS school.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not starting off from that hero position. I think that's. You and I were talking a little bit before. We pressed record, and I am just more and more convinced by the day that the two key skill sets that are needed from enablement practitioners are analytical skills and change management skills, change management skills and and so the the idea of defining what the actual problem is that we're trying to solve before we do anything. And I know that we've all seen people just put programs together and start doing stuff. Well, if the, if the individual coming through the program doesn't know the current state and the desired future state and why it matters to go from the current state to the future state, then why would they think any differently?
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, it's, it's ironically, it's like selling right. Like you, you need to understand the the current challenges of your buyer and you need to connect that to pain and you need to then, you know, turn up and be like look at this, we can help you, and I think you've nailed it Like we don't do that enough. And I think that that means that you know, of course, that there are all these challenges and nobody wants to sit in a webinar and we don't reinforce things and we don't measure things, things that happen after you've started, but a lot of the problem, which is what you're getting at, happens before you've started on, just like, what are you going to do, why are you going to do it and how are you going to go about it in that kind of planning phase? And to your point about like enablement need to be very analytically driven, is this fascinating stat I'd like to call out from the report that said um, when, when enablers say that they plan off of data, when that's like the main input, 85 percent of the data that they use is quantitative. It's actual data, right, but enablers have this strong opinion that they're actually dictated to by the senior leader, right? And that the senior leader is making up what they want them to focus on. So we asked the same question to them to see how true that was.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting is, 60% of senior leaders say they use data. But then when we ask them what kind of data they use, we categorized it all on our side and it's qualitative Like 70,. What's the metric? It's 77% of the data that leaders use is opinion-based, versus 85% for enablement. And because you're rolling into that CRO or that VP and they have the power, they end up telling you what to do, right. So I think that again, it comes back to that.
Speaker 2:I keep hitting the same point, but it comes back to that alignment thing is, even if you have this world-class enablement team that's super analytical and data driven and want to do the right thing for the right reasons and motivate the team and execute it the right way, the leadership team need to get on board or they need to step back right and actually say you own this thing. But what's happening and it's like overwhelmingly clear in the report is leadership go. Oh well, I've got this feeling that you know we need to introduce a value selling methodology, so we're going to go and spend a hundred grand to do that and we're not going to give any thought into how we're going to actually reinforce it. And then when it doesn't work, I'm going to say it's because enablement doesn't work, and I might lay you all off right, and like that sounds brutal for me to say right, like that sounds like an attack on leadership, but this is literally like leaders wrote that they do that in this survey that we're just just spinning back in the report and it's let's.
Speaker 1:It's utterly bizarre I've got an idea of why this happens. I want to. I want to throw it out there to you. I also want to get to the value selling thing later, because I don't understand what value selling means. It's wild and and people are probably shaking their head around why I'm saying that. But trust me, I've thought about this a lot.
Speaker 1:Okay, first thing is, with what you just covered, with this disconnect between enablement and leadership, the qualitative analysis versus the quantitative analysis, the thing I'm hearing and I'm sure people listening to this might be hearing this as well is a challenge when it comes to how the leadership has established the job description for the enablement person team and how the enablement people are managing up. What you just described sounds like a complete and utter failure to manage up to me. And so when we think about somebody coming in and saying, okay, so I've got a boss out there, and the boss comes in and says I just listened to this call and we need training on objection handling, okay, well, I know why they're doing that. They're doing that because they listened to the call and it was terrible, and they're worried that the CEO is going to listen to the call and it's terrible, and then there's going to be a crisis. Okay, so that's a reasonable approach to take, given the scenario.
Speaker 1:Well, the question then becomes what have we done around recognizing what our potential breaking points could be with the sales team? Have we defined that? There's this competency matrix. There's this rubric that we inspect periodically around. People need to set agendas, they need to uncover pain, they need to be good at objection handling. They need to do demos that are engaging and compelling. They need to set next steps. Do we have something that's just five or six things that we expect people to do? Is it well communicated up and down the chain and do managers, reps and enablement folks periodically inspect for it? And if the answer is no to that, then the enablement folks have basically just said look somebody else, just take the wheel and you're in charge, because I am advocating responsibility away.
Speaker 1:So, however, imagine this. This scenario comes up and you say if you listen to little Timmy's call and he sucks at objection handling, okay, can I show you the data that we gathered from the team as we've been doing our quality control across the team's calls, and you'll be interested to find that Timmy's at the bottom. He's actually on a pivot. He's probably not going to be here next week. Can I share that with you in 15 minutes in the next couple of days? Oh, wow, that's a completely different conversation and that's called managing up. So I think that's what I see, just tons. When it comes to this relationship between senior leaders and enablement when they're straying around, who does what and what I'm curious your thoughts what and what.
Speaker 2:I'm curious, your thoughts. Yeah, I, I think it's, I think it's valid, I think you know one, one big debate which is outside the scope of the time that we have is like who and?
Speaker 1:then we got 28 minutes. Brother, we can do a lot in 28 minutes.
Speaker 2:Let's go but like who enablement role too, because I think that in a lot of cases enablement from a competency perspective is like a director level, like position in a lot of cases, but enablement tends to roll directly to the CRO and that's going to create the managing up dynamic in some areas, right, because you don't have that senior management VP level experience to know how to handle those conversations. So maybe that's a factor, but then also it's a logical place for it to roll. So maybe that's a factor, but then also it's it's a logical place for the role. I think that you know one one thing that that we did when I was was in the in the gig, um, my role was a bit different because I managed to quote a karen client facing team as well, right, so didn't have a lot of that kind of um nuance that we were talking about earlier, but we created. It was cheesy, but I think sometimes these things are important. It was this kind of like enablement charter almost that basically said this is how we're going to work with you, right, and we required not just the cro to agree to it but all of the other vps and all of the line managers as well, and we went like extreme with it. We made everybody write on a piece of paper and say out loud on a call, I'm in, right, but it drives that kind of general alignment. And then the way that we operationalized it was you can bring your qualitative information to us, you can tell us your opinion and we can have that discussion as a group, backed up with some people from ops, right, or whatever data that we're pulling from various places. But then the really important thing is, once we collectively agree on what we're going to focus on and why you're going to, let us decide how to do it right. And that, that, I think, is a really big factor, because the amount of, like, the friction that I face and, um, the, the cro that that I I roll to was amazing. It's become a mentor for us, for our business, like probably the best manager I've ever had.
Speaker 2:But to your point, revenue leadership care primarily about this quarter, right? So that example you gave of little timmy sucking at objection handling, it's like this hair on fire moment of. We need to pull everybody next monday into a mandatory webinar where product marketing are going to give, give them an faq, right? Yeah, that doesn't matter how many times you run that play. No one's going to open that document, whereas actually saying, you know, having the, the confidence and the knowledge right to say no, we're going to do it this way. We're going to roll out this program with a certification, with high context role plays, and then we're going to have a monitoring period in the field and then we're going to collect all of that actual, hard, factual data and tell you for a fact did they improve internally? Did they take that to the real world? Did it make a difference?
Speaker 2:Which is kind of the trio that enablement should focus on um, then that's a totally different story, but it's it's a really good point. I think it is. It's a symptom of two things. It's a totally different story, but it's it's a really good point. I think it is. It's a symptom of two things. It's a symptom of bad Well, one thing, it's a symptom of bad leadership, but to your point, that goes both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, here's the interesting thing If, if you look at most sales orgs, they're comprised of folks who have a some kind of degree some kind of bachelor's degree, usually non-quantitative and some kind of degree some kind of bachelor's degree, usually non-quantitative and then they were an SDR, and then they were an AE, then they were a manager, then they're a VP. Where along this career path, do you expect someone to and I'm not prosecuting you, just the Royal League where along this career path, do you expect somebody to develop exceptional leadership skills? That's a real question. Yeah, because you're going to get copy and paste from people. If you do that, you're going to get copy and paste from people you're around oh and, by the way, all the work from home people out there you're only around people that are on your exact direct team. And so, hey, tom, the VP of product is the most amazing leader in the company. Guess what? You're never going to actually see him. The VP of product is the most amazing leader in the company. Guess what? You're never going to actually see him. So all of those great attributes, all the great ways that Tom rallies, his team leads, his team, deals with conflict, recruits, promotes, you're never going to see any of that from your bedroom Not going to happen. So that's really interesting.
Speaker 1:And so I think the challenge then becomes how do you get those leadership skills? And I'll tell you how you don't get them. Given somebody 1400 bucks to go to a three-day conference, that ain't going to happen. That's not going to fix it Right. So so this is I've just. I think there's this big rebellion against that. I'm not saying you should have an MBA, I'm not saying you shouldn't have an MBA, but there's like this big rebellion against MBAs and business degrees in tech over the last 20 years. And I think it's coming home to roost now, because it's really easy to complain about leadership skills. But where are people going to get these leadership skills unless they themselves had amazing leaders? And then the question is where did those people get their leadership skills from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it's like, even if you take that one step further, right, like we all, regardless of what your role is in go-to-market you work in sales. It doesn't matter what your actual functional title is One of the largest professionals in the world. Very few places will teach you how to do it in any form of formalized setting. And even when you join, onboarding is then learn about my product and a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with why we exist or who your buyers are.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I think, like a management is like the really big step, which is where because, like, a good leader should have fundamentals in not just the planning but like the coaching piece themselves. Right, like you have the cro telling everybody to coach more where they they don't know what coaching is and that's going to trickle down right that when you're on that path up, right of like ripping through an organization hierarchically, it's that step. There's two key steps I certainly experienced, right, because I went through that journey. The first is when you move from individual contributor to manager, because you were good at an individual contributor job. Right, like that is the the biggest, like both fly or die and sharpest um learning curve you'll ever experience in your life um because you have precisely zero transferable skills from being a president's club winning rep right to to being a line manager.
Speaker 1:You look like me carrying a number.
Speaker 2:It's, it's like it's, it's very hard. And then you turn to everybody around you to ask how do I do this? And everybody around you just went through the same thing a couple of years before. Right, like the biggest source of sales management is promoted reps by an absolute mile. And then you try and peer learn and you're just kind of propagating that situation. That's happened before. And then the next one, which is where you shift from just a coaching problem into the planning problem, is when you transition from a line manager to a leadership position, right like that jump into a director or vp level role, where suddenly you have all this strategic responsibility and then you're in the same exact scenario, right of like, like you're not being told if this is the way, you're just inferring from how people around you that went through the same jump have done stuff, and then that that leads to it. So it's, it's a good point, like.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I found kind of most enlightening about this whole report is we expected, like the three pillars of you know our own point of view as a business to be quite prevalent, right, we expected to see that reps don't practice.
Speaker 2:We expected to see that the training format isn't well liked, right, and we expected to see that roi is typically a function of surveys and lagging kpis, right, um, and we got validation there. What I thought was I wouldn't say surprising, but kind of damning, was just how broken literally everything seems right and like all the topics like we haven't had a happy topic, right, we've been talking about this for for half an hour. That hasn't been well, this was a great stat go team right, like that doesn't exist in this report and it wasn't that there wasn't opportunities for that to come up, and I think that, yeah, I think your perspective is really interesting. Like is it a function of this development pipeline that we're building that goes up doing things the wrong way, so then, when they're at the top, they go down, like like they push down through an organization telling people to do things the wrong way, and then you're just in this like vicious circle that doesn't work. It's and it's not a reset.
Speaker 1:You're wrong, I'm not saying they're trying to do it wrong, it's just in the absence of other direction. You think about how many times a doctor does practice surgeries before they do an actual surgery. So one of the things that I saw in here was 67% of reps never role play with their manager. That's wild yeah yeah, yeah it's extreme craziness.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, so I've got some thoughts on this. I know you have some thoughts on this, so let's, let's talk about this role play thing for a second. So one reason is people don't like it. Well, I don't like vegetables I don't like running but I like living.
Speaker 1:so you know there's certain things that you do. You eat vegetables and you run a little bit so you live, can live a little bit longer. It's science. Well, if somebody doesn't like role-playing, there's reasons why they don't like it. They might be doing it wrong. So here's the other question.
Speaker 1:Okay, we talked about how do people establish leadership skills. How do people establish role-play skills? Because if the person that's on the other side of you, so if you're the sales prospect, do they have a scenario, do they have a goal? Do we have little snippets of information that they're supposed to either withhold or? I remember I did negotiations training in college and we had these three page documents that we had to learn that we're going to use as part of how we played the role of the person that's negotiating, whereas a lot of sales teams I know say, hey, go, practice, you're the buyer, you're the seller, seller, go and, and in the absence of a sales methodology, the seller doesn't have that either, and so then it's just a bunch of chickens running around in the in the coop. So how do we go from 67 percent to 100? What's the move there, man?
Speaker 2:I think the first.
Speaker 2:So um sorry it's from 67 percent not doing it to zero percent not zero yeah, there we go so I had some very strong opinions on this because it's it's a large part of like what, what our business does. But I think that there's there's three things I'll call out. The first is the same group of people that have said we don't do it right, who have validated a lot of the factors as to why it, why it sucks right the environmental factors, the context, that kind of stuff that we'll get to in a second that same group of people 60 of them said that even in that defunct, broken, bad format, they still viewed it as a useful training exercise, right. So they're saying like, even though this is effectively awful, right, um, we still feel we should be doing it because we still get value from it, despite all the the issues.
Speaker 2:So once again like the yeah, yeah, but, but once again, like the other issues, that there's some kind of like alignment, expectation, operating rhythm type problem there.
Speaker 2:But let's, let's part that, because we've talked about that quite a lot, I think. In terms of role play specifically and and we we've met with probably a couple hundred people about role playing in the last few months, and every issue falls into one of two categories you have your environmental factors, right, which is how awkward, um, how uncomfortable, how in some cases, depending on your relationship with your manager or their particular style, can be kind of emotionally not the most safe environment, right. And then you have context, and context is what you, what you were hinting at, right, which is the person playing the buyer is not. The buyer has never been the buyer and doesn't have the level of depth of knowledge of the buyer to be able to accurately represent them in a role play. Fascinating, you said you. You were given these large documents to, to learn in order to effectively do that. That's really cool, but in 200 conversations about this, I've never heard someone say anything remotely close to that so that was your way ahead of.
Speaker 1:That was at an ivy league university.
Speaker 2:There you go to your point about the lack of MBAs. So what happens is when you get into a role play and the reason for role plays is yet another issue but when you get into a role play, you're either feeling this is unsafe or this is a waste of time, or both right, which is obviously a pretty bad place to be. And then, on top of that, role plays are typically not deployed as a tool that managers use to get people practicing things. They're deployed typically to tick a box at the end of an enablement program that says yes, this person's certified Really, yeah, yeah, like I'm going to tell you, the biggest craze right of the last couple of years is let's roll out Medic. Medic's going to solve everything. Medic's going to and I have nothing against medic, but like I do, I do, but not nothing that exists.
Speaker 1:I have lots against medic.
Speaker 2:I have more against medic than most people but, like the, the general point is like there is no silver bullet right, like you can't just spend more money on ads, you can't hire more sdrs, you can't introduce the sales methodology and suddenly, overnight, everything changes. But Medic is a good example of something that's very misunderstood, in my opinion. It's an internal checklist that takes some buy side requirements. It is not go and ask your buyer, go and ask your customer. So, incidentally, who is the economic buyer? Not a question that you should ever say out loud, at least not with that exact terminology.
Speaker 2:But what happens is because it's so prescriptive and what it is, everybody thinks well, I'm going to do a webinar.
Speaker 2:A webinar, um, we're going to tell people to pass an e-learning course and then they're going to role play with their manager, where they're just going to ask these seven questions in this order, and the manager is going to give the answers and then they're going to go tick, you're allowed to go out into the field and use it right, and there's so many issues with that, but it's happened so like prevalently over the last 12, 12, 18 months in particular.
Speaker 2:But, yes, a role play not only is uncomfortable, not only lacks context, but also is often deployed in a way that is never designed to actually help you improve, whereas, like, the question we always ask people is what in your life have you learned, whether it's professional, whether it's hobbies, whether it's personal, what have you ever learned that you haven't had to do multiple times to get better at? Yeah, right, like literally nothing, unless you're that kid at school that just can can kick a football for the first time and become incredible. But those people are few and far between um, and it's just bizarre that, as we said earlier, like one of the biggest professions in the world, practice is not a component that is used, it's just. It's also like using the thing you're trying to learn is a major factor in learning it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's a huge reason it doesn't work in school. All the kids that did well, we read the book the night before the lecture, we went to the lecture, we did the worksheet, then we had a quiz at some point and then we had a test and then we had a midterm, then we had a final and then it was reinforced in the next level of biology 2 versus biology 1. That's the way people learn. Hasn't changed. Nobody's ever learning theoretical physics off of a powerpoint slide.
Speaker 2:It's not going to happen okay, you said and the test. But it's important, the test that you're doing in that schooling environment is using the thing that you're trying to learn in the context that it's meant to be used. Right, yeah, so learning something in a in a webinar, being taught something in a webinar and then passing a quiz on an e-learning is not using it in context. Right, because you got to know things and do things.
Speaker 1:So in sales, you got to know things and do things, and so the challenge with this knowledge thing is yeah, you can do knowledge certifications. I'm the biggest fan ever of knowledge certifications because I firmly believe and I don't think anybody can debate me on this All these dorks online starts. There's one guy named I'm not going to say his name because I'm not trying to be a joke he's like you don't need a certification, you just need to do it. I've worked with 60 fortune 100 companies. I'm like cool dude, sounds cute story. If you don't know something, you can't do it, period. And if you're a manager and you're unclear, if people on your team know something, then how the heck do you know that they're doing it? That's that's the thing with knowledge certifications, but it doesn't get you to doing so. You've got to cross this cap chasm between knowing things and doing things, and that's where that's where the role plays come in, and I got to say this you said you didn't have anything, it's medic. And then you went on a two minute rant around.
Speaker 2:Medic doesn't work and I'll just, I'm just going to sum this up for the audience real quick, the adoption of it.
Speaker 1:Want everybody listening to this to just think about this for a second. With Medic, how does Medic help you set agendas? How does Medic help you set next steps? How does Medic ask the questions? Yeah, sure, there's a pretty quick line for what you need to uncover to the questions that you ask. But how does Medic do objection handling? How does Medic do proposal presentations? How does Medic land and expand? How does Medic handle customer escalations? How does Medic cold call? How does Medic demo? How does Medic do PowerPoint presentations? It doesn't do any of these things.
Speaker 1:It was built so you can have a consulting firm come in and charge you $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 to manually build out all the stuff that I just said. How does Medic do pipeline reviews? Well, that's pretty straightforward. So you can get your deals understand where your deals are at and you can do your pipeline reviews. Awesome, all this other stuff. Eh, wild, I have a Use triangle selling. There's your ad. Okay, so go back to this role play thing, cause this is great. So they, they don't know, the context is different. So you're doing training, trainings, wrong. And another stat that I want to call out from your survey was that uh, do you agree that 90% of sales trainings is never used in front of clients? 73% of reps said yes. 61% of managers said yes, 55% of leaders say yes. So reps say 73% of reps claim that 90% of what they learned in sales training is never used in front of clients. That is insanity.
Speaker 2:Do you know what the origin is of the 90% comment?
Speaker 2:No, it's from a principal that's super commonly cited in a name, one called the ebbing house, forgetting curve yeah, um, and what's fascinating about that and it shows just how um bad the world of sales training is is the ebbing house forgetting curve, which says you forget 90 of what you're taught within 90 days if it's not appropriately reinforced. That principle was created in 1885, and if you think about all of the technology or the understanding, all of the resources right at our disposal just the enablement tech stack right, your conversational intelligence tool, your cms, your e-learning platform, your maybe role play platform, like you think about all of the stuff that you have at your disposal, your sales methodologies, all of these things that have been created for one purpose, which is to change your behavior in the real world. Despite all of that, the vast majority of both reps, managers and leaders still believe that the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is the reality of their situation. It's crazy, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think this goes back to an early point, which and maybe this is what we're talking about before we hit record, so I'll quickly refresh it that a lot of times people don't want to be in these training sessions. People don't want training. And if you don't really define what's the problem that we have, what are we trying to accomplish and how we get there, and why does it matter that we go from where we're at to where we're where we need to go to, then they're going to show up with bad attitude and maybe the training's not good, maybe the person training doesn't. You know we're talking about all these fundamental principles.
Speaker 1:Do we understand Bloom's taxonomy? What are we trying to? What level are we operating at today? Or, if you use Kirkpatrick model or whatever, whatever you're doing, do we have a fundamental understanding of what the heck we're doing? Do we know specifically what the current state of what we're trying to accomplish is, what the future status? No, now we're using medic. Now we're using medic on our own enablement programs, right? So it's wild that this stuff again, just it's. There's a lot of stuff, but it's just really not that hard. No component of it is hard. Pc there's a lot of stuff, but it's just really not that hard.
Speaker 1:No component of it is hard piecing it together becomes challenging, especially when people have different time horizons and different personal goals and, like you know, at the end of the day, everybody's real goal is just to make sure that they can pay their mortgage, their car and their kids school payment.
Speaker 2:That makes things even harder I think the like from a rep's perspective, right, which is the other interesting thing about the answer to this 90 question is, whilst all of them, a majority, agrees with it, it does cascade down. So 73 percent of reps agree, 61 percent of line managers and 55 percent of leaders, and that shows, like the, the lack of understanding as you go up through that hierarchy of like, the reality of the effectiveness of this stuff. But yeah, it's, it's like a um, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right is because and you mentioned it before like because you've associated, this stuff is not helping you. You're less likely to engage with it in the right way when you're forced into that situation which ends up with, regardless of how the program is defined, right, which often ends up with you not learning anything.
Speaker 2:And it's an interesting question of like is it a function of our own embedded experiences of the ineffectiveness of this driving the wheel right, the hamster wheel? Or if you put a hundred people that were like super eager, super happy to learn into the same exact scenario, would they also forget 90 of it like so there's definitely some environmental stuff there, but like the, the enablement adage, right is, even if you solve every single problem in this report right. Even if you have complete right environment, right alignment within all the teams, all the right methods, you've got high context, you're actually using the thing right, you're measuring, you're proving roi like you've solved every single issue that exists, it still won't work if the people showing up don't want to do it, and and and. That, ultimately, is true. I mean, it's true of anything, but I think that that's why I mentioned before to me, my take is it needs a reset button, because you don't just need to reset the process and the alignment, but you need to reset the expectation.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, you'll be fine, and I think here's the thing that jumps out at me around that which okay. So this is the last thing I'm going to quote from here. And then, what resistance have you encountered with sales and sales training initiatives and how have you managed it? The number one resistance is reps know better, they think they know better, and so let me let me get some flavors that I've heard. I know you've got some to add, which is this would have been helpful when I started. You'll hear that from people that have been there for four weeks. I'm like when I started, this would have been helpful. Or I've got this. I've been here for two years or whatever it is, and I think it's.
Speaker 1:This again goes back to if somebody is in an enablement role, their number one skill set should be this analytical skill. So cool Reps know better. How do we position it? Not convince them, not ram it down the throat, not force them. How do we do it Just? How do we sell them? How do we do some discovery and how do we present our findings? Tell them understand. Well, wait a second.
Speaker 1:So our goal right now is to have an average contract value of 30K. It's at 25. We want to have a win rate of 35, it's 25. We want to have a sales cycle length of 60 days it's at 80. We need to compress these metrics. I dug into the calls a little bit and what I found is we don't ask for next steps 50% of the time. Calls run over 20% of the time. We don't get clear agendas 20% of the time. So now what I've done is I've gone through understanding. What are we trying to accomplish, what do we do on a daily basis to drive towards those accomplishments, and where are the gaps between where we are and where we need to be? Oh, okay, so what we're going to do is put a training program for this quarter around addressing some of those observations that we came up with, with the goal of increasing everybody's quota attainment through hitting those incremental metrics a little bit better. Cool, if somebody did that, I don't think you're going to have this. Reps, no better problem. I don't think people do that, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think just the slight extension of that right is within that program. We're going to get you using the thing that we're trying to get you to do alongside the help and support and feedback and coaching and advice that you need in order to actually get better Right. We're not just going to scream at you, go and do this thing and then leave you alone. So I think that it's yeah, that after piece of like, how you actually put this into practice is just as important, if not more, than the staff. I think the positioning is a really big thing. I agree with everything you said.
Speaker 2:The one thing I would just highlight is that's the highlight is that's the uh, yeah, the what resistance, if you're encountered, is the opinion of leaders. So if we think right back to the start of the conversation, the whole hamster wheel starts with leaders semi-randomly deciding what they want people to focus on, based on qualitative information, right. So when people then don't adopt or use that thing that wasn't properly thought out, planned and framed whether that's stakeholder management, managing up whatever right in the way that you just did, um then that relates in probably an acceptable willingness thing. But the yeah, the thing, I would add, is the one thing that that do think is true is that leaders are much more likely to blame reps' attitude for the lack of success of their dreamt up enablement activity than they are to blame the enablement activity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, dreamt up enablement activity.
Speaker 2:And it comes up in a couple of other questions in the same report. Right, and the 90% thing. When you look at the breakdown of, like we asked why, why do you think this is the case? When you look at the breakdown of it, desire to use as one and leaders are two and a half times more likely to blame reps than even the managers of the reps are right. So there's definitely some kind of bias point there. But I do agree, though, with the practical side of what you said.
Speaker 1:I love it. All right, we got two minutes left. I'm going to do a 30 minute monologue on this and I'm going to kick it to you for plugs of what you want people to look into. Focus what do reps want training on, was the question. 80% said value selling. Nobody knows what that means. Go ask five people on your teams what value selling means. You're going to get seven different answers.
Speaker 1:It's a wild thing, and the problem is that it can be perverted to think pleasure, reward, all of these types of things that don't close deals. So if you're like me and you think that a salesperson's job is to go out and uncover pain points that are meaningful to somebody of power that they can sign a contract and solve for, value selling is the antithesis of that. So don't worry about how we can create more value for the prospect. That's not a thing. Uncover what their pain is. Understand what is your target market you sell into, who are the personas, what pain points does each persona have and how does your product solve that? Uncover the pain points during discovery. Do your demos to show how your product solves for that. And if you're struggling to do that, I've got some good content that I can flip over to you. Shoot me a note. Free stuff at coach crmcom. Free stuff at coach crmcom. James, how can folks get in touch with you? What do you want to plug today?
Speaker 2:um, I mean firstly, um, what I would say is that the thing I would really agree with what you just said is understanding your buyer is the most important thing, right, like whether that's part of a framework, a process, whatever. The the most important thing in sales is know who you're selling to and know what they care about and and the pain that they're experiencing from from the things that they care about. So if you're not doing that and if you're not getting that value right from your business, you need to be hand raising. Like we talked a lot about managing up. I think that that goes including reps, like it goes throughout an organization. Knowing your buyer, knowing your persona in a way that isn't linked in a static PowerPoint slide that was made five years ago and made up by marketing, is the most important thing that you can master right as a skill.
Speaker 2:In terms of what we want to plug, we really want to get this report out there. So if you go to our website, which is replicatelabsai, there's a big banner at the top that will tell you to go and get the report. That's the main call to action If you want to know more about what we do. We haven't mentioned it at all here, but it's related to a lot of these problems that we're talking about, then you can see that on the website as well.
Speaker 1:But the report is the thing.
Speaker 2:Tell us in 15 seconds what do y'all do we? We help you understand your buyer, so we build AI representations of your buyer personas that you can interact with, interview, research, understand their pains and challenges and then go and practice in a role-play environment on demand, Sweet.
Speaker 1:Love it. Thanks, man, Thanks everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Sales Management Podcast. You.