Episode 44: Be a Student of the Problem with Barrett King

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams. Well, apologies to all of our audience. You know my background, you've got used to it. And today we have something a little bit different. And that's because Dream home has become not so dreamy for us. And our first couple of weeks in, it's a story for another day. But for now we're going to have to be used to me having that slightly rustic background as we move into our new offices in our fantastic new abode. But I do have some good news and that is a terrific guest today. His name is Barrett King. So Barrett's very much that results driven leader that I love to spend some time with. He's got over 10 years of experience in building partnerships, worked at HubSpot, executing go to market strategies for lots of different SaaS companies. Barrett's really skilled in identifying and cultivating new business opportunities, great at driving revenue growth and establishing successful sales channels. So for me today, we actually got Barrett on because he's really good at talking through a number of things, particularly for B2B founders and sales leaders. Right, so that's all around go to market strategy, big one, growing partnerships in SaaS, and then everything around scaling sales and operating models, which we're going to look at specifically today, notably training and operations. So first of all, Barrett, thank you for jumping on board and welcome. Great to have you here.

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm excited to have a conversation. I think your rustic background is super cool. I understand why viewers might be concerned about it. But again, I appreciate you having me on. I'm looking forward to our chat, so be great.

My pleasure. Well, tell us more about New Breed before we start today. What is it, what does it do and why do you love doing it?

Yeah. So New Breed is fascinating. We are one of HubSpot's top partners and more specific than that, an end to end revenue management firm. What we do is help our customers with demand gens, the things you'd expect on the front end in terms of helping them create more opportunity at their company. Everything from marketing to certainly revenue operations and everything in between. After we've established a front end for our customers, we can certainly redesign their website and augment those demand gen efforts. We actually do the middle of the funnel as well, the revenue management optimization and processes there. And so I like to think about us as a little bit of a tech enablement partner and a lot bit of a go to market strategist and overall expert if you will, in B2B tech marketing and SaaS overall. So a firm that helps our customers grow better at the core of it all.

Yeah. Great. Okay, so what made you get into New Bread? Because there's certainly lots of opportunity in this space at the moment. A lot of people who've dabbled, but not a lot who have gone deep like you are what made you jump across to New Bread.

So I was at HubSpot for eight and a half years, which for some folks feels like forever. When you're in that organization, it feels like a blink. And I'll tell you that during that time I was fortunate to spend a lot of my career focused on the partnerships component of their go to market. And so early on I was in partner acquisition. Then I was the first head of sales training for partner and did some interesting things globally on that team. Then I was back into an enterprise management capacity where I actually worked with New Breed specifically at that time. And so because I had spent time with that business specifically, I learned a lot about their go to market, a lot about how they help their customers. And it taught me frankly how to be good at what I did. Over the next couple years, I moved into a corporate leadership role and led a corporate sales team and then finished my time there in go to market strategy for HubSpot. And during that entire career, that eight and a half years, I always looked back at my time spent with the New Breed team as some of my most fondest memories. So I decided it was time to leave HubSpot as an organization. I wanted to go to where the top partners were doing the most effective work. And there are quite a few of them. But New Breed's special. They're based out of Vermont, which is not so far from where I am right now. I'm just south of Boston. They have this really invested team, folks that are not just experts in the industry and the professions that they're tapped to lean into and be experts in, but they care about their customer and they're outcome focused. And so for me, when I looked at the landscape of opportunity across the different businesses that operate within HubSpot's ecosystem, I wanted to take the experience that I had and the skills I had developed and translate to an organization that cared about the customer outcome, the business itself. And I liken it back to one of my first conversations when I joined HubSpot. I came off of a tech company that had been acquired not by HubSpot, but by another firm. And I didn't love the work that I did there. We did something that was valuable, I think, in many ways, but our culture wasn't aligned to helping our customers. And in my first day at HubSpot, this woman, her name's Louisa, she said to me, HubSpot fundamentally changes people's lives. And she didn't just say it like that. She actually stood in front of the class and slammed the desk with all of her energy and said, we fundamentally change people's lives. And so my entire career there was leaning into the idea that we could really drive meaningful outcomes and impact. New Breed is that exact same organization, but they're doing that work on the front line and they're helping customers every single day. So long winded speech. But frankly, it's what drives me, it's what excites me. We get to choose what we do for a living and I choose to work at a company that really cares about certainly each other and their peers, but also the work that they do for their customers.

We had a chat beforehand as we're getting into today's podcast and for me, what came across really clearly was that you actually just like creating value for people and it's fantastic. If Newburyd's one of those companies, HubSpot, you're right, one that changes lives. I've just. Shameless Plug. I think most will know who are listening have just been published on HubSpot 51 tips around social selling. It'll be in the link as well. Lots of information to be able to find about you, Barrett. But if we just for a moment pivot, because there's lots and lots of talk about SaaS. It's that magical word, perhaps AI. Well, AI certainly has taken over as an even bigger buzzword, but SaaS is one that absolutely is hanging around as well. What does that word mean to you, You've got a fair bit of experience. I think you're pretty well credentialed to talk about it.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I actually been asked that question before. It's nice for me, SaaS is the. If you go back to like, call it the 90s, if you will, late 90s, early 2000s, Internet starting to become a thing. And I think very quickly people figured out that they could productize the solutions that were being placed onto this interweb. Right. The Internet, its. So SaaS in particular is about taking some sort of a solution. A product certainly.

Right.

But it's some sort of a solution that you provide to a customer and making it really scalable. So if I were to simplify the idea of what tech SaaS in particular, and this idea of B2B SaaS is it's about building some sort of a solution in a technology format that enables a specific outcome for a customer, solves a problem, or helps them achieve some sort of a goal, and then productizing that and serving it up at scale to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or even potentially millions of customers. When I think about what SaaS has done as it's evolved, it's become a part of something perhaps greater than itself, in that organizations no longer just build really good tech that helps the customers that they can impact, but they build ecosystems, another buzzword right now, but they build these surround sounds of value around the customer experience. And so if I think about SaaS at its core, it's solving problems. Think about SAS in a modern format. It's building a magnet to start with that problem and then around it develop other opportunities to deliver value to a customer. And so really it's about scalable servicing, it's about scalable value. More important than that, that's perhaps how people make money off of it. I think it's about creating these microcosms of solution, of value, of outcomes for customers. I think I've said that too many times now, but about helping customers achieve those better outcomes through technology that's again, scalable and impactful.

So with the rise of tech, and I tend to agree with you, I think most of what you said, right, sometimes you meet with people and you acknowledge opinions are quite similar, and other times, and I've had some great interviews this year, where opinions are polar opposites. But for me, when we're talking about tech and providing value out to people, that often means very rapid growth and advancement in your product. And with that comes change. So for me, any change that comes across Any type of product or brand you put out there needs to be paired with effective training, which is our topic for today. So I'd love to hear your perspectives around training, given that heavy involvement you've had in sas. And so for me, what does a really effective training program look like for you, Barrett?

Yeah, I want to be clear about something before I answer your question. And that's there's a difference between coaching and training. I can't tell you how often folks try to bring up both sides of that argument and they assume that they're the same. Training is about knowledge transfer, coaching is about knowledge enhancement. Yeah. And I think about training as a function in any organization. There's layers to that. So it's really easy to work under the assumption that a training team, if you will, is a group of individuals that do one thing, but they should actually be layered in their approach. Nowadays it starts to evolve and look like enablement and other terminology. But on the front end, training is about initial knowledge transfer. To get a new hire at an organization, for example, to some sort of a baseline, an agreed upon amount of knowledge, skill and ability within the organization to start off, if you will, or to give somebody a kickoff point in their career. So think about like new hire training, for example. Example, you should have some sort of an agreed upon level of skill that's maybe it's tested or maybe it's framed into. And so for example, Sake, we actually at HubSpot, we developed, I can't take credit for this. One of my peers, far smarter than I am, did this and in concert with myself and the rest of the group developed a framework called tapa, which is theory, application, practice and assessment. And the reason that that was important is that when you think about training, it's really easy just to say we're going to stand in front of a classroom or a group of individuals on Zoom and we're going to put up some slides and we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff. And at the end of the day, that person's expected to consume all that and be able to do something with it. We frame training this idea that it's about theory. So what is the concept we're trying to discuss? Application. How do you use the theory in a real world example? Practice. Now let's get you and your team members involved and do the work together and give feedback and really develop that core muscle memory around it and then assessment. Let's make sure that the knowledge that we gave to you stuck and that it's going to be valuable over the course of time. That's the front end. And then I think about training in particular in the kind of midfield, if you will, which is the ongoing development of those skills. Because what described as a baseline, so call that 1.0 if you will, 2.0 and 3.0 and perhaps 4, even 5 matter because that's how you build upon those core skills. So it's new skill developments, new skill knowledge transfer. But it's an additive component from what you gave, call it week, month or whatever. You know, in the beginning there in terms of timeline of training initially and then at some point it should transition into ongoing training. Because in that interim component there there's on the job training, which is we gave you your baseline and now we're going to have you do the work that we trained you up to do with coaching and feedback and all that ongoing persistent, you know, guardrail and support. But over the long term training should never stop in my opinion, and I really firmly believe this. If you look at the best, go to market organizations, they've got a training function that starts with the baseline as I described, knowledge transfer, skill development, real world application and some sort of an assessment. And then they lean into ongoing training, the cultivation of 2 and 3 and 4.0 levels deeper of knowledge and gain over time. And they combine that with ongoing development, not just just of those core skills, but the addition of new ones. And so a really simple example to wrap this up kind of at the end here. My statement is if you think about you're joining it, we'll talk about a SaaS organization. You join an organization, the first thing they do is they say this is how to sell. They teach you their methodology. Then it is, this is how we sell. That's the kind of secondary component of it. And this is how our best people sell. Right? So it's sort of like the components of that wrap up right there could do the same thing in terms of product. This is our product, this is how it works, this is how customers get value from it. Now let's show you how to use our product, apply it. Best organizations are doing some sort of project, they're actually using the platform in their new hire training. And the third piece is how do you become proficient at it? How do you master the best parts of our solution? Not just to be able to speak about it, but actually be able to show our customers value in a sales process over the long term. So training is an ongoing part and really piece of the greater go to market strategy in a Smart organization. And I'm really passionate about getting that right because it's easy to assume that someone's just going to get coached to excellence. But training is a core part of that as well.

There's something in there, you said, that I'd like to latch onto and that is around the ongoing nature of training. It's cumulative. So it's not that one time event where we train on how to live a better life. And by the way, aspirationally, Barrett is a man who has undergone fantastic body transformation in the last couple of years, has lost a huge amount of weight and that we don't know each other well. But I'm proud of you for doing that because that's really difficult. Right. And I've got no doubt you're proud of yourself. But these are cumulative, cumulative impact there, right? It's an understanding about how to lose weight and then it's an understanding about how to lose weight when you're under stress and then it's how to lose weight when you have family commitments. Right. And your cumulative application and knowledge grows by having a program that's ongoing. For me, there's something else that's really important in that ongoing nature or that cumulative approach to training and that is the modalities that you use to train. So for you, I suspect we're going to agree, right? I'm going to preempt here around the importance of different learning modalities. What works for you and the teams that you've worked with.

You know, it's a good call out because it is diverse and because people all learn differently, we can assume there are some base styles and there are. You can read it if you don't know. I'm talking about Google it. There's a bunch of really great knowledge out there. But when I think about knowledge transfer and the training aspect of that being how do I take something that we as an organization believe to be important and give it to a new individual or ongoing training? It's important to diversify the way they learn that. So I think about it up front as well. Different formats. It could be written, it could be verbal. And that's where you see a lot of folks doing decks and they do. But now what's happening is people are starting to lean into video as a format. And the problem with video is that video doesn't give you anything in return. Human beings were, you know, we are biologically engineered, right. We function through feedback. And I mean that in terms of neuroreceptors. Like we literally need to have like you and I are a two way street in terms of the way we look at each other and our body language and the tone of our voice and our response. It's actually really hard for people to learn consistently and well through video, but you got to have some format of that, otherwise you can't scale. So I think about the best organizations, they combine upfront consumption of knowledge, whether that be through a deck, a pre read of some kind, a document or otherwise. That tackles a little bit of some learning styles. The second piece being ilt instructor led training. You got to give an opportunity for folks to learn verbally from somebody, ask questions, interact and then video for scalability sake. Something that somebody can consume ongoing and certainly tap into as well. That for me tackles the core three, give or take, written verbal and then some sort of auditory verbal combination which would be your video component. What I'm interested in. I'm going to speak perhaps ahead of time. Here is five years from now, seven, maybe 10 years at max, where you can combine the advantages of virtual reality, augmented reality, which you're seeing certainly more in terms of tech, with AI, which is a fun buzzy word. And AI, if you're listening to this, I'm your friend, I mean no harm. But jokes aside, if you think about the combination of those two now you can really lean into the way that people are biologically engineered to interact. Imagine putting on a headset, being in a classroom, moving in an environment, touching, feeling and interacting with products and services and tools, but doing so perhaps in a scalable way by combining AI into it and having agents that actually do that work. So I'm painting a picture of the future. I think today what's most important is being conscious of it. I were to keep it really simple when people ask me about how to develop world class training. I was fortunate to learn the likes of Andrew Quinn and Kara Potter and some of the legends at HubSpot many years ago who learned from the folks that were brilliant before them. We always anchored in this idea of diversity is key. Diversity of type of learning, diversity of type of knowledge, gain type of materials and just being very intentional in terms of peanut butter spread across the board so you can really capture as many individual styles as possible.

Couldn't agree more. And in fact the one I think that is often overlooked is that you're learning by training yourself. So for me, the teams we work with, let's give those better performing people in your team that opportunity to actually teach themselves, get involved in that knowledge transfer so that they can really Sharpen their skills. Okay, so we've got a very consistent program that's cumulative and is building week in, week out, month in, month out. We're using a varied number of modalities in our training program. We haven't talked to coaching yet. Certainly heaven forbid we get there because this podcast will go for about three hours. But once we've got that training program in and the modality set for you, how do you see that really effectively transfer across to particularly revenue growth? And we can even then go a step further and actually talk bottom line growth too.

Yeah, consistency and reinforcement you started to tap into a little bit, Ben, when you were talking about this idea that my top performers should be a part of that. You hear a lot of folks talk about SME subject matter, experts tapping in. Those folks are in value, valuable institutional knowledge. I've watched it actually at organizations is something that should be protected and guarded and paid for. And as much as I could self evangelize and say I was an expert at one point, I still could learn from my peers. I was the number one rep at one point in P Club. And fine, but I could still learn from my peers because they had been there longer, they had had a different experience, they'd had that one other objection I had never interacted with. And so when I think about the best way to take what you learn on the front end and what you continue to learn, at least theoretically throughout your time, you combine that with peers, you combine that with people and human interaction and you create environments where that can be facilitated really easily and effectively through, you know, peer to peer mentors, through feedback sessions, through. At HubSpot, you just call it film clubs. We do that here at New Breed Chance to review things that your peers are doing and share and socialize it. We are inherently social beings. We are, you know, really, I think if I generalize a little bit, meant to feed off of that. And so when you want to drive revenue top and bottom line impact, that comes from the indoctrination that the internalization of these theories, these concepts which comes from application. And so the more you can listen to your peers take part in those conversations yourself and then reflect on them in those sort of three step modality, more effective you're going to be at creating something that's concrete and then making it reinforceable. So I think about the front end. I talked about Tappa theory, application practice assessment applications where we saw some of the greatest leaps and bounds in terms of knowledge gain because we could do theory all day long. That's the stand in front of a room. I used to love it. Big projector behind me and my clicker in my hand and we have a cool deck. And that's all well and good. The practice was valuable in that we started to solidify some of the core components. But the application, Ben, that was where everything really came through. And the application might take time, it might be a week, a month, it could be over, over years. That's where you saw it solidify into translatable revenue growth.

Yeah, yeah, I really like that. In fact, I like those four letters, Tapper. I've written that down and no doubt you might hear me talk about it again. So I apologize in advance, but I'll have to make sure I reference you.

Brian Mueller. I gotta interrupt. Ben, it's Brian Mueller. If he ever listens to this. Brian Mueller, M U E L E R. Brilliant guy. He's on LinkedIn. You can find him. He's the one who came up with it. And I got to give him credit because he took something we were doing well and productized it. It just, it grew from there. So I got to give him a shout out.

Excellent. Well, I don't know you, Brian, but thank you very much for that beautiful word. So LinkedIn, I love trolling there on LinkedIn. I'm absolutely active contributor as you are and I saw your post the other day, start with a great quote and forgive me, I may not get it 100% right, but went along the lines of be a student of the problem and turn creativity into your ultimate advantage. Tell me, how do we relate that back to training in general from real world application point of view?

Yeah, maybe I'm a weirdo. I'm going to use that word here. Maybe I'm a weirdo because I really like learning that much. I had a mentor that once said to me, you're either the smartest person in the room, so you're paid the most, or you're not. And what you don't get paid, you make up for a knowledge gain. And then every once in a while lightning strikes and you get paid a little bit of money and get a bit of knowledge. And that's the best kind of place to be at the sweet spot. And I think he struck a chord when he shared that with me because, yeah, frankly, for myself, I don't want to work anywhere, do any kind of work where I'm not getting both. I want to get paid well for my efforts, certainly, but I want to learn as I go. When I think about being a Student of the problem. That means that I never accept status quo. I never accept that I have all the answers. I figured out all the ways that we can deliver value or all of the problems we can solve for a customer. So if I think about being a student of it, that requires an ongoing interest in learning, an ongoing desire to grow my core skills. And so if I go back to that core concept of how do I apply that to training? As a training leader, I should consistently be putting challenges and opportunities in front of my learners. So they are having those aha moments and they are growing their knowledge and they can remain a student of the problem. But I should also be equipping them with the skills that are required to think that way. So if you think about some of the worst, you know, B2B SAS companies, if you will, I won't use names. We can all imagine who they are. I'll generalize. They onboard you through some sort of a training program where they expect you to know some stuff. It's almost like those school early school test programs where you just kind of memorize something and you got through the test and you forgot about it again. We've all done that. We can all relate, or at least I see most of you have. But think about that in terms of business, it's the same problem. If I do the opposite and I inspire people, I explain why learning this knowledge makes them better at their job. Yes, sure. And maybe it makes them more money. Okay, good. But how it actually impacts our customers. Now you have this interesting combination of better at my job and I can make more money and I can drive some sort of additional value or proper value to a customer. That's interesting. And you build this intrinsic reward loop into the way that they learn. Now I inherently want to learn more, and so I seek out those opportunities. And then your job as a training lead is to empower those learners to go and take that knowledge gain and deliver it back to the next set of learners. And those are your team leads and your, you know, SMEs and whatnot that continue to build value for your organization. Because the moment you leave the funnel or you join the organization as a fresh person, you're always going to be behind laggard to the way that your customers are getting value and your team is selling. But if you can stay in front of it, the west best way to do that is to you yourself, be a student and empower those individuals you're training to do the same. And then again, create that habit loop, that feedback loop where Everybody can learn together. Those are the best organizations I've been a part of.

Absolutely love that. We started today talking about knowledge transfer, but by the end of our 25 minutes, right. It's a short period of time to get where we have. But it's become really clear that it's not just about delivering training and consuming information, but it's about how you, yourself and those around you can grow full circle to be the ones that are delivering that training knowledge that are giving back once they've taken that information, absorbed it, practiced it, applied it, assessed, and then made their tweaks to actually give it back in an even better version of how they got it themselves. Fantastic. And I think a great point to finish up at today's. So, Barrett, thank you very much. That was great. Short and punchy, but we covered quite a lot of ground around training. So please, before you go, can you tell people where they can find you? Clearly new breed. Where else can people go to find out more about you or get in touch with you?

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's a great conversation. I'm really glad to have come on. You asked great questions, great dialogue. Folks. Want to get in touch. Newbreedrevenue.com Certainly, certainly you can reach out. I run some of the revenue team there and sort of the offense, if you will. I have some incredible peers. We're glad to help you grow your company. I'm on the Internet, of course. I am on LinkedIn like we were talking about earlier. I try and be active there. I try and add value and so I try and if nothing else, contribute something that is meaningful every time I post. But I also talk about my own show. I have a show called Outcomes. It's about conversations with operators that have been there, done the work, and have a story to tell about it. Specifically in B2B partnerships, B2B SaaS partnerships. I'm glad to be on the receiving end of any kind of a LinkedIn DM where I can add value and help. So consider those to be the best ways to get in touch. I'm glad to be a, you know, a part of the group in that sense.

Excellent. Well, those listening, please get in touch with Barrett if you'd like to. There's plenty of knowledge. We've had an hour or so together today and I've learned some things myself too. So. But until next time, everyone, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible. Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favorite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them, and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I write run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales teams.