Stop coaching your sales team to the goal

you bet. I love talking business. So glad to be here.

Yeah, one of the things that that I found through all of my stops around my career is is that if you can develop systems that are ethical, repeatable, and effective, then you really have an excellent chance of being successful, whether that's in sales, whether it's in customer success, service delivery, any stops along the way of the customer journey, it it are usually heavily dependent on running the play the right way, right? And and in order to do that, you've got to you've got to document what good is, you have to hold people to a standard, you have to practice those skills, and then you have to evaluate along the way. And and as I stepped back from from an organization and thought, you know, how can I take this concept and apply it across multiple customer bases, it really developed an interesting opportunity there for me.

Yeah, out outside of onboarding, you know, when you're onboarding a new rep that that has its own challenges, which we can discuss if if we get to. But but ultimately knowing what to do doesn't necessarily mean that people can do it consistently in front of customers or in in a live scenario, right? And that that gap between the training has happened and now you know, a few weeks or months have gone by, has the training stuck, is is is frankly It's there in every business I've ever seen. you're never gonna retain a hundred percent of a training, but what are you doing to practice those skills and to keep up on whatever it is you're trying to get better at rather than just having it be a one-off initiative that somebody pushed on you?

Yeah, I think the inefficiency typically shows up in the execution part, right? So inefficiency is the biggest barrier to sales. Call it an objection, if you will, that is self-controlled, in my opinion. there are there are other objections that are hard to get around, whether it's price or timing or whatever. but inefficiency in your own processes is self-inflicted and therefore has to be eliminated as best as possible. And I think those opportunities when when you look at them on how can we be better at this, how can we do that better? how can we ask questions better, how do we listen better, all of those things really provide opportunity for the the seller and the sales leaders to maximize their at bats, to maximize their time on task when it comes to the things that need to be done to truly move sales forward.

Yeah, that that was an interesting eye-opening experience for me. The what I had intended to build and what came out of it, or at least the the byproduct of what came out of it, was was greater than I had even intended. What I wanted to to do ultimately was to just get a good idea of who's good at what. everyone knows the final number. We know whether you're 110% a plan or you're 90% a plan. Everyone sees that. But there are all kinds of underlying details behind that, and these are all lagging indicators, but they're all Underlying details as to maybe why one person would be at a higher number than the other. And the real learning experience for me, when I developed took all of their orders and compared them against each other, the learning for me was this. It was that comparing everybody against the goal, if people aren't hitting the goal as a team, makes the goal a discussion point that the team won't listen to necessarily. Whereas if I compare them to each other, Then the goal somewhat becomes irrelevant, at least for the purpose of this particular coaching conversation. And now we can have real conversations. That might sound like this. I I understand that that Julie isn't hitting the goal either, but you're 30% behind Julie's productivity in this particular area that's really important. So let's stop talking about the goal and we need to close this gap. And it removed some of the defensiveness and excuses that. could come out of some of those conversations because you've taken away the well, no one else is hitting the goal either. You're taking that card out of their deck. And that made it incredibly valuable because then they would actually stop and evaluate how do they improve on this particular area.

Yeah, I think two two main things. I I've my the people that have worked with me for a long time have have heard me say this ad nauseum. There's the art and then there's the the science. And sometimes they do this and sometimes they do this, right? But the art to me is the human side of things. And and we can't r no re regardless of how much AI we have, we cannot take the human element out of a sales interaction. You can't take the teacher out of the classroom. You can't take the doctor out of the surgery the surgical unit, right? Like you just you're you're not going to do that. But so that that part of it, we need to make sure the human beings are as good as they can be. They're asking the right questions, they're listening, they're showing empathy, they're applying what they learn to the customer's needs, not their quota. And and that part of it is the art. The science then is what's the data? What are the what are the AI data points? What are the the triggers? Who should we talk to when with what message? those two things, when done really, really well, will give you the best chances. Because the tricky part in sales is you hold a hundred sales calls and you do everything right, you're still only gonna get a X percent success rate. So you have to maximize your success when when you have the opportunity. Excuse me.

Yeah, that that's a that's a great question and a scenario that happens all the time. And and one of the things that we've taken is kind of an approach that's a little bit more like athletic training than maybe a a corporate training, which would be typically people are working hard because they know that that is table stakes. It's it's not negotiable, right? But if they're working on the wrong things, then then they're not getting anywhere. And if you're not practicing, if you're just doing whatever comes next from above, that that's not Strategic, right? So the idea then is well, let's look at where the biggest gaps are. And that obviously involves a discussion with the sales leader on where he or she thinks those biggest gaps are. We can help identify them if if need be, but usually the manager knows. And then secondly, figuring out how do we want to address that? Is that through a new training? Is it through a refreshment of an old training? Is it a training that has nothing to do with anything that they've ever done before? Is it not training at all? It's a policy or it's a system, right? What is the fix? And assuming that it's some sort of enablement, how do we want to deliver it? And then again, the the key behind that is how do we continue to practice it so that it sticks the most? And and and that's where we would really work with the manager to say, listen, there there are multiple prongs to this. Your role in this post-training continued rollout is X, our role is Y, including AI interfaces that allow you to practice in a safe environment. With that doesn't involve the manager, because the manager's busy, as well as takeaways, tools for the enablement team, all of that type of stuff.

yeah, really good question. And and it the answer is is complicated and it's also simple. If what you're working on is not revenue generating, then you really need to consider how much time you're spending on that task, regardless of what the task is. Now, that doesn't mean that 100% of your time is always going to be revenue generating. Sometimes you have to do trainings, you have to fill out paperwork, you have to go to team meetings, you have to do all this stuff that takes you away from talking to customers. But you want to make sure that you're doing only the required amount of that stuff. I've seen people Do planning sheets. They had the best planning sheets I've ever seen in my life, yet they didn't knock a door. And and it it just doesn't matter because you're not knocking any doors. So so the first thing is for us to and the manager to truly understand what is revenue generating. And that's usually not complicated, by the way. And then do a little bit of a discussion on how much is your team actually spending doing those things. We have a really simple method for that, is you put it on your calendar. If you're in front of a customer, you you market green. If you're planning on being in front of a customer or doing proposals, that's yellow. Everything else is red. And it doesn't mean you'll never have red time. It just means you want to make sure that most of that calendar that you're looking at is green. And that's a really simple way to focus people on like you know what actually brings in sales. And doing proposals kind of brings in sales. But if you just write spend six hours a day writing proposals and two hours a day knocking doors, it's not gonna work. I'm sorry.

for me the line kind of goes back to what we just talked a little bit about, which is if it's not revenue generating, I almost need you to prove to me that it shouldn't be done by AI rather than it should. or or by a system. It doesn't have to be A or AI driven necessarily, right? Like if we can automate it, then we should. Now I I also am not a big fan of just automating things for the sake of automating them. But if if the task, let's say it's it's entering stuff into your CRM, that That used to be hours of work. And now typically you can do it in minutes if you have the right AI setups. I don't want that hours of work filling out the CRM contributing to the red time. Like I want to replace that. So I would say it's it's things like that that the human doesn't need to do. there are, I would say, 80% of the research now can be done by AI lookups. You still need to validate. You need to figure out how the the information that you've got. Is relevant to the call you're about to have. That's again the science and the art meeting. but that's where and that's frankly in our business where we where we use it is a lot of a lot of research, a lot of, hey, we have an idea. What haven't we thought of yet? What are the angles on this person we should be leaning on? But once it comes time to talk to that person, it's gonna be me or my business partner and not AI that's having that conversation.

Yeah, we're we're excited about about quite a few things. we're we're building out our catalog. we we have a decent a decent amount of sales training right now and and some leadership courses that we're putting up. we're we're we have a a a roadmap of dozens of leadership courses that we're gonna put out and they're not they're they're pretty robust in and of themselves. And then secondly, behind that, what we're really excited about getting out the door here in the next probably month or so. Is is more of this practice. You know, what when we talked a little bit about the athletes versus the corporate training, if you think about most athletes, they play a game or a match or whatever it might be one or two days a week and then they're practicing four or five days a week. In a sales environment, you're selling seven days a week and practicing zero days a week, in my experience. And that needs to change. So the ability for us to deliver more practice opportunities for people is is really an exciting one for

yeah, don't worry too much about your hair because it's not gonna go, it's not gonna be around very long. That would that would be one of the first things. and and second would be default to action. just in life, this is not just business, but if you're not sure, just go. Just do it. yes, you you're gonna make mistakes by taking that that that approach, but I would rather make a mistake going 100 miles an hour than make a mistake being passive. And so I I tell my my two children, they're young adults now and and many people that I've mentored that if if you make an error with the best of intentions, you know, going hard, I can defend that in front of the the CEO of the company if I have to. If you make a mistake being timid, that you know, or or being off of the plan or off of the playbook or something like that, it's it's much more difficult for me.

That's right. completely agree. And now having said that, right, there there is there is has to be time for for thought, right? Like what when the time comes for me to move next, what am I going to do? Like you can't be making the decision and then acting all the same. Like you need to have thought about this ahead of time. but but in general, move toward action.

Yeah, next playsales dot AI is our website. I'm on LinkedIn at Doug Ruth. you'll see a beautiful picture of me. And and we are also on all of the other platforms, YouTube, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. Like we're we're we've got that part blanketed. but that's the best way to get in touch with us, yeah.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure talking to you and good luck to everybody out there.