Increasing Training Engagement with your Sales Reps - Outside Sales Talk with Stephen Rhyne

It's huge and I think it's one of those lost opportunities. The way people in training have typically done feedback is they separate doing the training with the feedback. And I think that they lose a lot of fidelity in their feedback when they separate on it or when they have a slow timeline between the two. This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for Outside Sales people. I'm your host Steve Benson and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game. Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today I've got Steven Ryan with me and we're going to talk about increasing training engagement with your sales reps. Welcome to the show, Steven. Thank you for having me, Steve. Absolutely. Just by way of introduction, Steven is the CEO of ConveyYour.com. And for the last 10 years, he's been helping out companies like LG, CY Power, Vivint, Cutco. And what he does for them is he helps them recruit onboard train and retain more reps. Steven has 22 years of experience in direct sales, recruiting onboarding, training and repretention. His platform Convey Your helps with all the back office and administrative items need to grow that type of door-to-door sales team. In today's episode, we'll be covering how to have better engagement with reps during sales trainings, since that's one of his areas of expertise. So first question, Steven, one of the biggest challenges would you say that companies face when they're trying to keep reps engaged during a sales training? Yeah, first challenge is there's, it's just shifted over many years or many generations, which is I think companies rely a lot on training to be like it's just assumed that you're going to be engaged in the training because you're going to be at a location in a brick of mortar where there's that conformity. Like we're losing all that conformity. Where you're going to, first conformity came from the fact that people kind of believe that they're going to be at the company for a long time. And 10 years have gone down and down and down. It's not the 30-year Boeing retirement process anymore. And so with that said, the company sometimes doesn't understand that they actually need to sell and position their training first before they even get into the what. So the why and the what's in it for me is more and more important and the hook. Like you got to develop a hook. So I think sales and training people are getting more, they're rising up to this that everything is about the attention game and that they're fighting for the attention, especially if they're field-based or one app over, which is, you know, their Instagram or their or whatever. And so they have to really focus on you know, anchoring their training and what it's in for them. And that looks like, you know, hey, understanding your stakeholder, understanding, like don't turn it into like this is what you need to learn this because this is what how it's going to help this objective with the company. It's like, no, no, no, pain in the picture of the pain that's going to be caused by, you know, for you if you don't understand this. So let's say it's a teller at a bank about something like simple as explaining an overdraft fee. What you can explain is like, you know, kind of go over their head around how this is going to help the company, you know, talk to more people at the bank, the location more quickly, or you could make it about the customer, but really you need to be like, do you know that stress of what it's like to be trying to talk to a frustrated customer as they come to the front of the desk? I want to help you get through that process faster. That's what's in it for them. And I think that owners of companies kind of, because we're so used to, like kind of eating glass, is they forget that a lot of the thing that drives someone to learn is reducing their anxiety or the pressure or the stress in the role. And so that's the first thing that is challenging that they need to get right. The other one is just not explaining the process. So nowadays, you know, generations don't like pick up the phone, right, because there's some kind of thing they don't know on the other end of that call. They want to read reviews. They want to know all the information first before they jump in. Okay. They have so much information that they're used to information. So explain your process. Like explain how initial onboarding is going to go, initial training is going to go. You're going to go through this, then you're going to know this. This is how you're going to get transformed. You're going to know you're going to be this. Once you come through, you're going to be awesome at this. It's going to take this long. This is how many units there are. It's just like a video game. So if you start a video game, we remember like Mario back in the day, it showed you the whole map. Like you didn't get to go to the whole pieces of the map, but it showed you the whole map. And I think customers, or customers, we've talked to like don't get that sometimes. They jump them into level one without explaining even letting them see level nine. Like what level nine is going to happen. And so those are two challenges just in summary, like, help the rep understand the whole process. You don't have to get too deep in it. And then go into level one. And then two, sell them on what's in it for them. Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking back to how dull my trainings were. So I started my career at all state. It was my first job out of college. And then IBM. And I'm thinking back to like how those trainings were. Like at all state, they like walked me in this little like closet like place for like two weeks. So just like it was like a stack of VHS tapes of like, you know, it was like, it must have been 80 hours of trainings on VHS tapes. And me and the girl who had just just been hired, we were just supposed to sit in the room and watch them. And I do not think you could get someone in the TikTok generation to do what they made us do. It was like tests on those. It was like so, it was so dull and dry. I don't know if I could get someone these days to do that. It was so bad. But yeah, there has one shift. Yeah. Why did you do it? Like, first, you didn't have the, you didn't have any anchor in outside of that. The really, it's like, besides books, right, or a whole full length movie that said, this should be faster. I should have the, this should be an email, not a meeting, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think it was a dollar world then for sure. I think it was a more yeah, I mean, compared to a book about the insurance industry, these tapes from all state were great. I think it actually didn't come with like a thick like, you know, like, but like plastic holding, but like between like the little plastic, wiery, but binder thing. I think it came with some books like that that went along. It was like a, it was like the worst college course you'd ever gone through. But luckily, I was fresh at a college and a lot of my courses are pretty dull. So I got through it. But, but certainly, I think that the tips and tricks that you're giving here are dead on. So let me just paint one more analogy to it, especially because we have the benefit of learning these hard truths working with contractors, whether it be, you know, technician contractors or sales people out in the field. And in contractors, the experience would be like you sitting in that room or that closet doing training and having three or four other companies coming into that room, getting your attention about another opportunity while you're doing training. So the and and you're a hot shot. So like you're a hot shot. You're put in through this boring training. You're not hooking me. You're not reselling me on why I should be at all-state. And then somebody else is coming into the room selling them like on a better. And whoever does that better, I was argue, what if you took like an insurance breath and all you did instead of training was just get them really excited about doing the job and learning, like being the consummate person. They go on YouTube to try to, they might not learn the way you do it, but they'd go and try to learn, you know, how it works, right? You get really, really excited about sass sales and the opportunity to have. They're going to just like go start listening to people like still you have to or something like that. You know, so it's more about positioning once in a prevent than it really is about the what? Absolutely. How can companies make these trainings feel like less of a chore and more exciting, more of an opportunity? Like how would you advise they capture that? Yeah, chunk it better. That's the first one. When we go, when we're stuck on the freeway and we're going 30 miles an hour and it's, you know, 60 mile an hour, miles per hour, we're like, it's awful. And slow and it's the same road. You get off and you're going to pass mile markers and you're going pass, we're on a rural road. You're going 30 miles still, but you're still making way more progress. It feels better. Okay. And it's because it's not mundane. It's not the same. And so chunking and pacing, we've heard this pacing in this social media world is really important with content. And so people make these really big, like, you know, old school scores. courses where they're just really long and there's these big long videos and there's no interaction. It's a VHS, it just keeps going. There's no back and forth at all. There's no engagement. And of course, like people are going to be like, this is awful. You know, there's no, I don't get like a trophy. I don't get anything. I don't get a digital like you did it. You know, at any point, take a game like Halo. If you didn't have like actual campaign points where you had a spot where you get to see the, you know, the video come on and like, you know, you, you know, Cortana shows up and everything and you think like that. And which is constant, barrage, like it wouldn't be as fun. And so chunking is really important. And that's where you say what you're going to do, explain them in the process. And then you show them that you that you actually are going to do the process. So the way that looks applied in our platform is we typically tell customers make like lessons that are seven to 15 minutes for the content. Just a good little 15 minute conversation of video, maybe a few quizzes, you know, a file. And put it all together. Like tell them something, engage them and ask them for feedback all at once. It's a conversation. Then take those little Lego bricks and build out like the Lego spaceship with that. But do not make these giant one size fits all courses where you're talking at 30 minutes. And how can you deal with the way different people learn differently? Like if you were hiring me and you were hiring at 23 year old, I read a school today, we're different learners, we're different people, we had some backgrounds, you're hiring us both. And do the same job. How do you, how do you deal with our age diversity and other types of diversity and gender diversity and all the and just learning diversity that kind of different people just learn so differently? How do you, how do you, how do you make your your courses or your trainings fit everyone if you're a, if you're a company, trying to teach that is better. So one thing I will say like the whole concept of blended learning, learning as we completely different, different people has been debunked by science in terms of like the concept of LMS, you know, blended learning. What is true though is that a really common problem is like I call the lowest common denominator training, which is I'm not saying people don't like some people see better auditorily or here, you know, like learn better auditorily or you know better visually and things like that. I say put all of those in there, make it audit, you know, make it high fidelity with audio, video, quizzing, feedback, all sorts of stuff. But the biggest challenge I think beyond just like how people think is actually, I call it learner trust and this lowest common denominator problem. So what happens in companies when they're trying to train on something, I'll give you a sitting area. Let's say you've got 100 people out in the field, 20 of them are like super veterans, 20 of them are for and spanking new and then like, you know, the other, they do my math right, 60 are somewhere in the middle. Okay. Well, the biggest problem isn't so much like I'm more auditor, like that's all very nebulous. What's really the biggest problem is you're gonna, you put out a lowest common denominator training and it's gonna make your veterans roll their eyes and be like, I already know all this stuff, right? Or they think they know it. And then the new people are gonna go, I don't even know what you're talking about. I have no anchors. I don't know what you're talking about with this new product update. Like so in software, we have a new feature and it changes things and settings changed and everything, right? Change management. Everybody needs to know about it. So what you do is you actually, this is what we approach, is you build a, kind of like a little game where you use it with workflows, is you launch out something where you are going to say first before we do any training, I'm gonna throw hardball questions and softball questions and I'm gonna build a profile on you. I'm gonna build like a little, how much do you really know about this concept, especially even the veterans? It takes a few minutes and the veteran that thinks that they knew about it, that wasn't paying attention to three previous updates gets like, oh, actually, I don't know about this. And you take them into the brush up section and they go into the brush up section for a minute and then you jump them to the new new. So you do basically a little kind of workflow, little, if this didn't work, or you're giving them a score. If they, they're, they just got trained on the new stuff and they're in the middle in that spectrum, they might go straight to the new and just get the new thing, the new policy that changed and they had, they were good, they had all of it in their mind already. The new people, they need the brush up to understand the whole concept completely and the veterans just need like the middle before they get pushed to the new. So it be as if you had someone going around and tapping everybody's shoulder in the office and saying, how much do you know about this? Great, let's start here. How much do you know about it? Great, let's start over here. And you can do that at scale. Like we've had people do this for thousands of people and it's so much better than that like lowest common denominator because what it does is it builds learner trust. So learner trust is like a, when I get something from the training department, like I know that they're not going to waste my time. They're not going to give me like this thing that is either too confusing that I don't know anything about it or is you know way over like I already know about it and I'm just going to not look at it because I'm a veteran. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And how would you think about making if you were a company that wanted to have more creative ways to make your training more interactive, more engaging to people that you were concerned might get bored with your training? How would you go about that? What are some some things? Yeah, some ways you could approach that. Yeah, so I'll give you some examples of how we've done that. So first is typically our platform doesn't fully replace like physical or web-based you know zoom-based training because maybe it's it's a brand new. You know they don't have, they make videos for all the content. So they'll do a training and then like hey by the way at the end of this webinar, we're going to have a dripped out challenge quiz right where every day you're going to get this little quiz and then after that we might have a little backfill on the right answer just to reinforce the learning and we're going to call it the 30-day challenge. In fact we started out our first product was helping speakers and trainers and thought leaders have a better experience after their speaking event. So people would join this and then for 30 days they're getting they're on a leader board and they're answering the questions and there's simple like multiple choice questions on topics that were in the content or in this scenario what would you do right and there's a leader board it's all gamified and at the end of the you know the session you've got your top winners for the people that like retained it or you know turned it into practice. So that's a great you know great way to make something more interactive. Another thing is really engaging is doing a better job of using your best subject banner experts internally. So I think I'm a big believer that an SME internal SME that is closer to your ideal seller profile is going to have way more pull than the person that's you know the ultimate veteran veteran or the owner of the company doing it right. So how that can work out is you can actually with our tool or other tools you can read you can send out a request to get somebody to do their best pitch or explain the best concept. Just give me five minutes or two minutes on you explaining how you get through this objection or how you do this technical thing and then we're going to take your content and we're going to we're going to highlight you and we're going to put it indoors. So instead of using corporate video use your people on your team and also use them to highlight maybe an objection and an answer to that. So one of my this goes back to the selling and positioning rather than just training but we had a tier one manufacturer car manufacturer who had high attrition on like day two and three of new factory workers like new factory line workers and the things they were they were they were leaving for were they were sore they're literally their forearms were sore and two they were anxious about how they were bugging everybody else in the line because they were going too slow. So what did they do they had they just took their self they just went around with their camera you know and like talk to people that had been around for only a couple weeks and just say hey tell me about you know what you were worried about like after day one and how you got past it like oh well I was just sore I was really sore but it went away like like the third day and I got used to it and I was really worried that people were going to get you know frustrated with me but they were all cool done and they sent that out after the offer later right after the offer they started a belief building campaign after that and it reduced the attrition so it's not even training it's just belief building and that is engagement so absolutely well that that's that's uh that makes a ton of sense and seems super important especially for almost every job has has its challenges and it's tough spots and the things that make it difficult and especially for people that are new to an industry that can be huge just to set the expectations right I mean that's always important with with with all the years. It's an expectation of The non-answered engagement is, I think there's a controversial answer, but the corporate arm's race of making bells and whistles and engaging training is actually a symptom of a problem of lack of engagement and buy-in. Okay, because like, let me do this. Do you not learn something on Instagram watching a little 9x16 video? Do you not learn from social media or YouTube or reading a little blurb on Twitter? You can certainly learn. You can learn complicated things that way. Do you need a dragon drop, you know, corporate e-learning thing for you to learn something off of, like, people are still engaged in social media, right? Okay, so you usually not because of trying to learn things, but. Yeah, you get right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. But do you get what I'm getting at? Like, this arm's race is coming from vendors, right? When it really is, it's really about the hook, it's really about the content. It's really about you selling, you know, selling the training and then, and then training it in the right pacing. Rather, that's what's engaging, what's not engaging is crappy content, poorly positioned with some cool, like, drag this over there to match up these two things together, you know, and so on. That's not engaging. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the dual-lingo always has those. I'm like, this is so stupid. It's like, match the word to the. I don't like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. And we do some of it. Don't get me wrong. It was like, they're good quizzing capabilities. And I do like, I do like engagement, but I used to be on the bandwagon and like, let's just keep making really cool, engaging formats. And over time, I've just been like, this is resolving them for the wrong problem. The problem really is helping our customers understand the psychology, you know, and do better psychology with people. Yeah. And I think competition gamification is particularly important with salespeople and sales. Yes. When you're training sales team, how important is that? What is the. What role does competition and gamification play in increasing engagement on your trainings? What you said? Yeah, so what we found is the gamification is actually very helpful early on when you can't rely on lag metrics. You can only rely on the metrics on somebody's effort. So especially when you're working with 1099, there's a lot of training. You just. Well, there's zero training. You can really tell people to do on 1099. You can kind of quote and quote, "This is required to do the role." But you can't really, you know, force them to do anything. So when you see a rep or technician engaging in your. You know, you're a collective content and playing the game, it really helps you know which for your managers who to focus on is someone who has earnest in doing the role. So early on, it's a really, really, really great way to identify probably the players that want to, you know, really play the game before they have any lag metrics, which is the number of installs, the number of sales, right? And it creates community, it creates, you know, good competition. Like, I mean, obviously it's for competition. But the points, it doesn't really matter. Like we, we have a. I have anybody, people create different levels of denominations. Sometimes they're like, Frank, like Swiss Franks, where it's like one or two points. And sometimes it's Zimbabwe and dollars. So it's like 10 million points for, you know, this, answering this one question. And then it's really about like what you do with that. So are you communicating to your field like the top winners? Are you sharing that out? Are you highlighting it? It means nothing if you don't do anything with it. But if you, if you do put some hype around it and you, you, you, you, for shadow it early on, that's where it gets, it really wins. So it's really just around what, how you hype it and how you put context around it. So I was amazing how, how hard people try if the winner gets an iPad. Yeah. That's true. In fact, that 30 day challenge I was telling you about with the, with this speaker, he had, I mean, like executives from like big companies, Coca-Cola and Marriott and like all these, all these companies like clamoring for the next, you know, the next question. I just thought that was so cool. You know, they're like, when's the next question? I think I got that one wrong. I accidentally hit this wrong button. Can you reset it for me? And so they were, they were stoked. So that's kind of cool to see it, it, it, it, competition is not just for entry level, competition, you know, it, people love it, at all ranks. Absolutely. And there's something to competition also. It's a, it's a feedback loop, right? You, you, you're competing. You're seeing how you're doing and, and you're pressing your, here's what are, what are the roles do feedback loops play? And, and just feedback in general, like direct feedback. How does, how can that play in really making it training successful, keeping reps engaged in the training? What's the relationship there? It's huge. And I think it's one of those lost opportunities. The way people in training have, have typically done feedback is they separate doing the training with the feedback. And I think that they lose a lot of fidelity in their feedback when they separate on it, or when they have a slow timeline between the two. So a lot of elements is just don't support this. So this is me being part of the arms race and saying this is should be done and it's our tech does it. It is that they, for example, you watch a little video, you answer a few quiz questions and then you give them an opportunity to provide feedback right then and there about how this went for them. So you give them a poll question, write them in there in the lesson itself. You make some match it and say, on a scale from 110, you know, how did you feel like this, you know, landed for you? Or would you do this? Or do you feel confident right now? You can ask the same question over and over again, right? Are you feeling like before and after? Are you, are you feeling more confident now that we've gone through this process? And what they do typically is they'll use something like, what's that one survey monkey or something? They do it like way after. They'll ask for a response way, way, way after. And first is lazy because you're asking them, you're taking more and more time, then they're having to recall back what happened when you could have just done it right at that vignette of time that you had with that person. And also it's slow for you because now you have to reconcile the results and figure out what the next thing is to train on, whereas with a right system that has automation, you could actually say, it was this enough training for you? If not, hit this button and we'll kick out a new course for you right now. That's your feedback. I want more on this. And we'll just automate it. That's we have people that have four people in their training department and are training 4,000 reps a year. You know? Wow. It's done through being able to feedback and being able to launch out stuff depending on how people react or what's in their profile. And being great at training is a part of scaling your business, right? I mean, you always have to turn over. If you're growing, you always have new people and this is important, right? To keep peace of it. What about retention? What are some ways to follow up and ensure reps retain what they've learned? Yeah. I would say focus more on the long tail. I'm kind of beating it out of horse here, but focus more on the long tail of training than the front end. So take more time. If I was going to train kids how to pick up, you have a three-year-old, right? I do. Okay, so when they start wearing socks, right? And six, seven, they're your own training. I'm going to pick up their own socks. We're not there yet. Yeah, not there yet. But at that age, would you, Steve, like put on a sock outfit and make like a whiteboard, you know, presentation and, you know, make a song, get AI to make you a sock, pick up your socks, song, and then present that to your child and then expect like to that land and make such an indelible mark that they would just pick up their socks forever. We do have a song about picking things up. Okay. Cool. But that's not socks specifically. That's just that stuff in general. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Don't keep us so specific. Like everything should be picked up. It's like clean up, clean up. Everybody, clean up. It's like, I don't know exactly what it is. We used to do that one. I like it. We need more of these parental songs that are like a mnemonic device that we can use to remember. Yeah. So song is great. And it sticks in your little brain. So like a like the state's song or, you know, other training songs. So songs are great. But my point though is that what's more likely is you can have a little explanation about why we clean up our socks. [BLANK_AUDIO] skip the presentation and then every once in a while you just be like clean up your socks. Clean up socks. Did you clean up your socks? Clean up your socks. And so many companies do the first thing, which is they build, they spend a bunch of money to make some crazy course to explain something and then they don't do any follow up. They don't create a drip email campaign or drip texting campaign or anything to keep that going. Like they just put it, it's just all up front and then they check a box and they tell a corporate that they trained on it and then it's done. So that's a long way of saying build and a drip campaign that quizzes them on the content, like brings it back up. If it's something simple, you know, you can quiz on and they just remind them and highlight how other people are doing with it. Tell them how then like if it's a number that needs to move, it share that number with them and build a campaign to sell them on why they need to keep this top of mind. And that's where I think most people need to spend their time. It's spending on how for the long run, how are we going to get from A to B and how am I going to remind you through the journey to do that. And so again, that comes with a gamification with, you know, quizzing on the content, asking them the question first, not telling them. So quizzing them, they are immediately, it's immediately evident that they did not retain the information and then you backfill. So if you just tell them, it's like, yeah, yeah, I already knew that. If you quizz them, then you're like, oh, whether they're going to ask me next, what else do they, I need to go review the initial training. Right. And so that's a, that's how we do it. Any examples of trainings that you've been involved in where you were able to really improve engagement or you got really great engagement. What would you say to specific changes you made in that circumstance where or what was it that made the engagement and what made the results? What got the kids trained? What would you say? What did you have an example that you've been involved in that really just nailed it? Just nailed it. Well, one was, you know, I can't name the company, but a very large company that had a very slow, slow conversion to fully compliant rep. And they were all slow in that the rep had to be fully compliant before they could hit the door to sell. And they would put off their training over and over again. And then right when they had to go out on the door, they would just jam through the training. Okay. And then they also would jam through the training and the way it was is pass fail. So they would jam through it and they didn't get the right answer. They had to restart the whole thing. Okay. And so it was this big brick of content, like compliance training, huge brick. Then they wouldn't get it. And then they'd have to restart the whole thing. And then they couldn't go out and sale. And managers were mad. And so what we did is we split it all up, like I said, created better pacing. And then we put in pass fails at each individual micro level. So if they didn't get the right answer or, you know, the right content on the early level, it would say, start over. And what it did is it changed the entire behavior. So the behavior now is I'm expecting that I actually have to lean in and actually have to listen to this because I can't wait till the all the way to the end to find out that I'm failing. All right. So just increase the feedback loop, chunked it down to smaller bits. They increased the share ability a lot. So by chunking down to there's another aspect that's really great, which is managers can take one tiny bit of the training and shoot it over to somebody. When you make it really big, there's no reference ability. It's like having like a little flash apps where you couldn't link to any one page, you know, in the application. You know, you had no routes. There was no routes to deep linking into a specific part of the website, right? And it's like that sometimes with training where they give this giant zip file, they upload it, and you can't get to one specific part of it. Okay. So by doing those things, Mike, making it smaller, adding more feedback loop and quizzing and pass failing, you know, to each individual item, they were able to get people started faster on the training. It wasn't so scary. And they were ready before they were out on their trip. That makes sense. Kind of a first lesson is an easy lesson and you get through it and you pass it and you're like, I get the, okay, first level, first level is easy. Got it. Yeah. That's more like how to shoot you got, you know, you know, to me, like level where, how to throw the ball, how to do this thing and you get your bearings and your car. Exactly. Totally. And, you know, what measurements or KPIs do you use to determine if a training program is successful or not? I mean, whether or not they pass it, attend it, did they learn the things? What do you recommend? Yeah. Especially if it's like a softer skill. A lot of Shenzhen sales training program. It's like, oh, we're trying to improve every week. We're having a challenge in the business with our margins. We're trying to improve everyone's abilities and negotiation. And it's just, it's very, you know, it's a softer skill. You can't be like, yes, no, do you know how to negotiate now? Exactly. Yeah. You can only train, right? So, on that, it's always like that, that is an age old question. And so what we do is, you know, you train as much you can on knowledge, like factual knowledge. You can get to the soft skill stuff. We use video coaching. So a rep uploads a video. When you before you ask for that video, you actually put in like a core competency rating, like how you're going to rate the video. They upload a video. You say, okay, I'm going to give them a nine on accuracy. You'll give them a seven on confidence. I'll give them this and this. And then you, you shit, you say, great job. You give them a little review. They get a, they get an email with their, in their star rating, right? And that's scored. And I actually say, you can't move forward until we, until we get you, get a video from you. It's like this score. So that's an email intervention. We want actually want to replace that with a little bit of AI. Like this is the best case scenario compared to this best case version. And just automatically grade it. That's what we want to do. But your question, you know, coming back to it was about, how do you rate, you know, actual engagement, like what metrics do you use? You know, there's a bit like, like, just go up the level, like the most difficult, like, easiest and most difficult completion rating. Outside sales leaders, are your conversations with buyers falling flat? Join us in a virtual forum, we're holding called the conversation is broken, where we're going to tackle the gaps between a buyer's need and what sellers deliver. This is an open discussion with real decision makers about what they want from sellers. Here from leaders in your buyer's industries is they share insights and actionable takeaways that you can use immediately. The virtual event is Tuesday, October 21st, 9 a.m. Pacific. You can reserve your spot today with the link and the show notes. Completing it. And next one to get is engagement rate. Look how deep, you know, are they starting in the course and then that's your funnel, your engagement funnel. So your first three lessons are getting completed. Do you have that? Like a lot of these courses don't have that, you know, these systems. So do you have just pass fail completion or do you actually know where people are dropping off in the course? Then the third one, I'd say, is actually doing some kind of manual invention like I was talking about with ratings and quizzing to see how they're doing on the completion, understanding and retaining the information. But on the soft skill, the really only thing you do is like connect your data back to a delta between the result that you want. So and that's so hard, but you can't be done. So like we have a system where you can send us outside data, outside like live data of sales or increase in referrals or whatever back to a reps profile. So you can start, you can say, like let's say in software, we have tools like Intercom or whatever. Okay, you have people that aren't using this feature, then you send out messaging. Okay, like what goal are you trying to improve? A number of people using this feature. Right. And so it's the same thing except the reps are the users of your company. So. Absolutely. Makes perfect sense. Well, next stage of the podcast here is sales in 60 seconds. So quick questions, quick answers. First question, what are some signs that a company's training program is failing to engage the reps? I mean, like, like, well, when it's required, it's hard because if it's required, then you don't know if they're just requiring, you're just doing it to check a box. But I would look at the difference between your required, absolutely hard training and your electric training. And if your electric training is completely abysmal, that means that you are relying 100% on a big stick. And that's it. And you don't have any other skill in terms of, you know, getting engagement. Have you seen a shift in how reps prefer to learn in recent years? I just feel like so much has changed in the way people are structured to deal with content in the last, you know, TikTok. It wasn't even a thing five years ago. And now it's huge. Things like, you know, just a short form video and super engaging content. Like to train myself, reps, to have to put on a speedo of dance or like, what's that? I want to see you. Come on. No, nobody wants to see that. What is, what changes have you seen and how can we deal with that? I mean, number one is whether the reps know it or not. Like, they're susceptible to a good hook. They're susceptible to the good, you know, first three or four minutes of a video. Like, you know, they might say, oh, it's business. I got to pay attention. But they're still have their brain like their psychology is used to something being more exciting. That's why we have fruit fly level attention span because there's people out there that are really, really good. If you were seeing one of these Instagram videos, we're like, 10 hooks you need to use and they work one off and explain this hook, right? And if you get into social media marketing, you start to see these. These things are the type of things that trainers need to learn and use in their training. So, biggest shift is the bar is going to weigh up in terms of getting people's attention. And you got to get good, you got to like brush up on your skills there. Don't start, when you start a video, start with what they get. Then unfurl. Don't start with a, you know, like an introduction in a summary and say, nine words that don't matter. Start with what they get. So that's a big, big shift. Another shift is that reps are just getting way more, like they're just expect. We're in the new wave of the second Google, which is just answering everything with AI. So we got the Google, we were like, yeah, mom, dad, don't worry about it. Google it later, right? If I don't need to know what my head, I don't know, I need to know where Portugal is. I can just Google it, right? So, right? And so we were like, of course you need to know where Portugal is because you might have been in conversation at dinner and you need to understand what it's like an 88. But now what is expecting is that reps are going to go, I don't need to know all of this upfront. Stop it. I can just ask AI between doors a question to get an answer. And you company better have a way for me to ask with AI. Because that's an expectation is going to come. So it's more like instead of teaching Amanda Fish, it's like, don't just give me the fish room and then we'll be in the boat with me and I'll ask them questions. That makes sense. Well, I just have the biggest mistake or mistakes that you see companies make when they're trying to teach their reps things and when they design their training programs or when they give their training programs. How do we screw this up? Again, biggest mistakes. I know I'm repeating myself, but again, lack of sales. It's just a lack of selling. You know what it is? It's a bigger problem. It's just treating your sales people totally different than you would at your own prospects and customers. If you apply what you do with your customers and your prospects and you treat your reps like customers, everything kind of like the psychologist has such a lineup. So, you know, if you're talking to a prospect, you're not going to say, you're going to start with what's in for them. You're never going to be like, well, let me make sure that you fit our ICP. Let's make sure that you have all of these things. No, like you're going to answer their questions first and make them feel comfortable and you know, get them. It's just chip on the shoulder that business owners have where they're like, I didn't get that when I was getting, you know, haze through all state, right? You should just have grit. It's not that the rep doesn't have grit. It's just they have three other opportunities where they figured this out already. So that's the thing that people aren't thinking about. Well, I read some some stat and I forget exactly what it was, but it was something like in Gen Z, like one, some it was a big number. It was like 60% of something. Enjoy watching Netflix and other streams while they do their jobs. And that's one reason why they're like, you know, working for home so much. It works really well with for them because they get to watch TV while they do their jobs. And that's how they studied. They what they studied. They're going to college like with in front of a TV and yeah, and now they'd like to do their jobs that way too. It's I'm like, you can't be doing as well with your day. If you're not focused, maybe they can. I don't know. I doubt it, but I'm totally disagree that they can. I think that that multitasking is a like total myth. I know that I know like lyrics like they study the even music that have lyrics can affect your your concentration level. Yeah, I can listen to music as long as there's no no lyrics and it also can't be that engaging. Like it can't be Beethoven has to be like boring. Even like good class viewers are going like, no, I'm paying attention to this. This is for us really interesting. So I need to like, you know, be be be zoomed in to just to you know, I could certainly never do that. But I have seen people that can function in that way, but I suspect they would be functioning at higher levels. They work doing things like that. But you know, I guess that's a big challenge, I think, is the expectation. You know, if I certainly couldn't have watched those really, really dry videos about the insurance industry for two weeks straight. If every, you know, 24 seconds, my phone was vibrating. One of my friends is texting me and I was texting my back or I was checking out a really cool. If while I was watching the dry insurance videos, I also was watching, you know, you know, I don't know. Some some great show on Netflix streaming. I don't think, but I do think that these are big challenges as we as we seek to teach people things is that they they have different expectations about how they should learn what's okay and just how, you know, remote and hybrid sales training. I think is that a lot of a lot of training gets done remote or hybrid or in a corner of the office where you can't really see them anyway. No one's watching them and they know, I mean, all state literally, I don't know if it was a room closet. It was like this. In my mind, it's like a six by room with bad car. But I mean, maybe it was bigger. I don't know, but it was like a little TV, like a 12 inch TV. Black and white probably. Yeah, yeah, a little yeah, like fuzzy. I don't, but like certainly like for if someone with your train is normally on your drive stuff and and they're also watching Suns of Anarchy on Netflix. It's it's going to be what is the best how would you advise people to deal with the distractions and also what are the best practices for remote or hybrid type sales training situations that you would think would make a company get get the results and get people to speed the way they want them to. Yeah, so one is something that I haven't touched on yet is try to make the hybrid or the the remote training feel more like a group of people is training you or that you are part of a group that you just can't see yet. And so this is like where you've seen a lot of a company or a lot of community base they do like Academy or cohort based on wording. So they'll say hey, you know, you are in a group that's going to get that's going to be put together. You're not launching individually. You can't just leave out of the group like you're going to be part of this group that's going to launch at this time. And so if you are hiring sometimes the best thing to do is even though your content might be evergreen make them feel like they're part of a group of a cohort that's launching together. Because then you get this you get to use third party and social proof as part of the way to increase that conformity. Okay, so you get that leaderboard that's just people that are like the list of people that were in your cohort and you care about those people, right? You know whether you've met them or not like okay now I know this person you've met them on the zoom you saw their face on the zoom and I can't hide right so I could I'm so that's a way that's a tactic that you can use to increase conversions and you see that in people building communities all the time. So that's that's a really helpful tip. And again like I said more touches more what's in it for them more more selling more positioning. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense but when I went through IBM sales training in this you know this is right after business school and they used to have this program it was like a heat you were you were basically a trained a sales trainee for a year and you were also working the sales job and I think you know it was kind of a they onboarded you during that time you were a full doing a full time sales job by the end but the first time especially it was like first I don't know four months or so it was probably half training half doing the job and and it just kind of the the training he's done with. course of the year, but it was a year-long program. And they would fly us to different, and it was, it was the way you were describing it, it was an OS, it was a cohort, and from all around the country, they'd fly everyone to some IBM office in World New York or down in Georgia or wherever. And you'd be there for a week or or as soon as two weeks, and just in classes during the day and doing trainings and learning about sales, learning different strategies, different things. And that was super valuable. I do think that as you're saying the cohort element was really important, like we all knew each other really well. You can come and write together about the hard parts and the challenges. Even the stuff you don't like, like it creates social capital, you know? Yeah, well, learning about servers was nobody's type of company, right? Speeds and feeds. It's never going to be exciting, but fortunately the cloud made it so we never have to understand anything about it again. Thank you. Thank you, Paisos. We appreciate you. We appreciate the class. But I think you're at your point, it's really important there. That definitely was true for me. I was going to ask you about the all-state content. I mean, how much of that all-state content did you use in the first month on a job? I think a lot of it was actually pretty valuable. They're a huge company and they have to teach everyone kind of similar things. And so I think they had invested in making these videos. They were very dry, but you know, you weren't trying to buy insurance, nobody. But you know, it was, I think they had done it. They were just for them. It wasn't like, you know, it was how insurance works at our company that you just started at. So the counter is a sickness, I will say. Like, Bart, it's a symptom of a problem that I can't put my finger on. But you know, back then, because you had the corn for conforming, because you had your attention, like you're going to learn it all. And you're going to learn stuff you didn't really need right away, but then you get to that point. You know, you probably, I remember that in that video, right? And then you have a bigger knowledge graph in your head. And people are starting now because we're having to make sure that we keep this attention. So attention, the fight for attention is killing the ability to create a bigger knowledge graph earlier before they even need it. So that makes sense. Now you have people like where they get stuck, like you're on a conversation and they just had enough attention to learn the bits to start the start the role. And I still advocate for that because that's the way the world works. But you know, at some point, they're going to go, Oh, I didn't take the time to fully understand this whole system at its core so that it can improv a little bit with this prospect. I can't, because all I know is what was on the nose in my little attention been yet. Yeah, well, as you say this, I just think you should be nice to high school teachers because I feel like they've got a really hard job these days. It was hard when I was in high school, but now I feel I feel like it's kind of harder. Yeah, it was a social video. This teacher going, you don't understand, it's like I'm talking to people and nothing's going through. Like I just, but I mean, that's probably a dual problem in every generation. I mean, my teachers probably felt that way too, but I didn't have a supercomputer in my pocket with every cool video I've remained on it. So I mean, passing notes, they have cell phones. Can you imagine you could pass notes with anyone in the whole school or you're firm that another school. It's a wild. It's got to be a wild thing right now. But I, well, less than we should, we should be appreciative for those people are doing because that's, we think we have hard jobs now that's a hard job. Like, it's like a person to interview right there is, you know, how does a teacher once and still teaching his sales, right? I mean, I think that would be a great training ground for sales being like a seventh grade math and science teacher. I mean, you know how to sell. You're saying you're like, it is my job to sell you on the concept of algebra for the next. Let me tell you how you're going to use this trigonometry. So there's triangles, right? And it's going to be super important in your life, the angles of these triangles. How I don't know. Let me, at some point, you're going to do something in your life where you have like a, you have two known constants and whatnot. You're going to figure that out. I have never understood why we teach trigonometry and not statistics. I use statistics all the time. And like, just the way I think about the world and just the business. And I have never once used anything I learned in trigonometry. Like, not once. I even calculus. I even calculus. I run into a couple times in my adult life. The trig, which comes first, never, never, never ran into that. Maybe I just don't build enough triangle. Yeah. My wife is an architect. She uses trigolatology. That makes sense. But does she or does the software do the trick for her? I met the software. Yeah. I've had kids doing this. She's not, she's not so good at telling. I call like the three four five rule. You know, like it's very, I call, I call bullshit on the Pythagorean. But now, you know, those algebra buffs are like linear algebra, you know, matrices, like building the eye stuff. So seeing, I don't like, I don't build it. I just ask you questions about, about how to, what temperature I should cook meat at. But, yes, exactly. So in your opinion, my action will take away. What could, if a company was thinking about their sales training right now, and you had one minute to give them one piece of advice, what would that piece of advice be given all your experience and sales training over the years? Yeah. Don't, don't just make training for the sake of it. Don't take any of my advice for the sake of it. Just look at, just take first principles problems. Just take it all in first principles. So all trainings should be, or don't make training for the sake of making training to check off a box or have a person that's like your CLO or whatever. Just start with what goals do we have as a business? And that's why a trainer should get involved at the, at the, at the, if they can, just be a wallflower on the, on the, the board meeting or something like that. Just say, what are we trying to accomplish here as a company? And how are the people that I train, part of that, get very clear on that and say, let's work backwards. What has to be true for these people to accomplish that? What skills, what competencies do they have to have and just work backwards, just like we would work on a sales number in terms of what you want to hit, right? Like we'll have to talk to these many people. Work backwards, build a model for what, what the, and then test for the gaps, just test for the gaps of the training and prove your hypothesis, right? And it's just really hard questions. I'm going to try to test on these concepts, or I'm going to do an interview and find out like they're lacking these skills. Then you've got your thesis for like what you're going to go do with somebody, or you know, go do with the group. You've got buy-in, you've got everything you need to get in your investment, because it's all what the company wants in the first place, right? Then go build, then go say, what are the objectives? Why would reps not agree to listen to this? What's in it for them? Build that out. That's your sales and marketing on it. Then tease it out. Don't even build the training. Tease it out and get a response and say, this is coming. Okay? Like product marketing. And then build out the training, launch it and set it like set it delta, like what the number was, and see if you move the delta on that number. That's what skin in the game training looks like. Versus the training I've seen a lot in corporations, which is my job is to train on these things, check a box and do compliance and say people like it. Yeah, that makes sense. When I was at Google, that was the training. Everyone in sales, they had do a presentation to the head of sales training. But like it was a presentation on all the products that we sold that was just like take them through and they would give objections and, you know, yadda yadda. So it was kind of a role-playing pitch situation that lasted like an hour, but it was very compliancey, right? It was just like, yes, they passed or they need more training and that report went to our manager. They're opinions on, look, we were good at, we were bad at that sort of thing. People in training are in a hard position because frankly, you have seen a lot of content and a lot of do this and make this and a lot of work on their end. And sometimes the things that they're doing in training aren't even connected to the goals that the company has for the quarter or for the year. And then it's like, and so you wonder why you treat me like a cost center versus an investment because nobody's like it's kind of set up to fail in some cases when training should really be like, no, if I'm really important, then I'm going to know what the goals are, the company and I'm going to be aligned with them. We're going to try to do that. train on that, not this thing over here that has nothing to do with the goals of the company. So, yeah. I mean, technically when there's a recession, training is the first thing to hit and there's a reason for that. Yeah, absolutely. All that's a great time to sharpen the sword because you may have to do less with more. Yeah. As we look out over 2025 here. It's April, when we're recording, it's April 2025. It went by so fast. Q1 was a blur going. Yeah, it was a blur. Well, I will try to summarize what you taught us today here in two minutes or so. So, companies need to sell their training more to their reps before they get into the training. They need to share the why and share the what's in it for them. At the start, you want to explain the whole sales training process and all the steps that the rest will go through so they can see the big picture. And then break up your sales training into parts and think about the pacing of those parts. Before you do any training, throw out some low-wall questions and some artball questions to see where different reps are at and customize their training based on their current knowledge level. See, everyone's engaged. This builds learner trust because they know their time won't be wasted, you know, training on things they already know, which nobody likes to do. I like your best reps on your team. To have them teach your other reps, use their understanding as an example and they can better relate to your team and people listen to them because they're in the same role and that can really increase engagement. Gamification can be very helpful early on in training to identify people who are really invested in the job. You put some hyper on the gamification and see when it makes it more fun, more engagement engaging. In general, feedback is huge. Take feedback during the process and then be able to act on it immediately. What a focus on the long tail of training. Make sure you don't only focus on the initial training, but instead follow up and bring up the training over time, weave it back in. This training should include a completion rating and also an engagement rating. Understand as you evaluate your sales trainings. Understand where people are dropping off because that's super important to know what needs to be improved. This has been super, super helpful. We really appreciate your time, Steven. Where could our listeners read more about your work? How do they reach out to you? I think it's no more about you and what you do. Yeah. I mean, the best thing is to check out conveyor.com. If you're interested in learning more about our processes, we have a guide there you can register for. So conveyor.com, click on get pricing and demo on the top and you can go through to learn about how we do things. That's the best place. Fantastic. Well, this has been a great episode of the Outside Sales Talk. If you've enjoyed this show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this. That's super helpful. If you work in field sales, you'll love to buy your map, helps you sell more, drive less. If you can think of any other sales reps that would benefit from learning more about designing training programs, other sales managers that would learn more or could use this, definitely forward this episode along to them. And take care until next time. Thanks for coming, Steven. I appreciate it. Thank you, Steve.