From BDR to AE: Coaching Empowers Reps During Their Transition with Saad Khan

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You're.

You are an ae or an AE one Junior ae, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. But when they qualified for the promotion, they went into a closing boot camp, right? Because just because you were a great SDR doesn't mean you'll be a great close. So talk to me a little bit about how to help them with that transition, because I think that's a very classic. And I can say this personally, because I was an SDR2 at one point where I'm going, oh, just give me that. I could have closed it.

Yeah.

Oh, I could have closed that instead. And there's always this idea that they could do it. A lot of times they do fail in that transition. So talk to me a little about the training, they're getting to be a good ae.

Thank you for asking me that. So something that I'm very passionate about, and I know you are too, is the. Is coaching and training your reps and not being a super rep, not being a super leader, not being. Oh, I'll close this for you. I'll convert this for you. You can scale that. I also think that's what creates the hiring and firing model is. Hey, okay, let me just say this. This is probably all a lot of my friends, but not all great reps can be great coaches. Even in sports. You know, Jordan is not going to be the best coach. Now again, it's not an absolute. It's not black or white, it's nuanced. But a very basic example is the other. So I personally was not a great rep to start with. I had to build up to a certain level. I had to learn break process and stuff like that. The other day I was in a meeting with one of my reps. I'm a tab hoarder. I love tabs. I like, I treat them as tasks. I cut them off. We were on a call. He closed the page, opened the page again and then went back. I was in. It really just tweaked my. I was like, why would you do that? Let's close. Open three tabs and close. Just, just close them one by one. That's a micro example. But now imagine leaders that don't understand their rep struggles that haven't been through that struggle. I don't know, sometimes something has to be there. I'm just going off of what I personally experienced. So what I believe in is this. There's a difference between training and coaching. Training could be. And Steve Schmidt said this, he's a title and this is not my original thing, but just click. Training could be just show people how to use a tool, how to use Salesforce, how to use dually, what to do on a day to day coaching is you're on the trenches, you're on the field with them. You're working on plays every single day. You're executing plays. I do call blitzes with my team almost every day. So I'm using the same talk tracks they're using and we're optimizing on the call. We have a three. So I'm a firm believer in Sandler. So we do three layers of pain activity that a pain point is built off of three layers AKA the business. The technical layer which is hey, Salesforce is messy. The business level they Salesforce messy is impacting the team, closing deals and capturing data. And the personal level is that because that is happening personally, the BDR manager is stressed out, the VP is stressed out, stuff like that. Because one of my reps asked me, how do these pain points fall into one? I was like, you need to understand this for yourself. So we do that activity. I don't do role plays. I give them scenarios. I'm like, fill in these on a sheet. I'm like, fill these in. Come up with your pain points yourself. So I always been told that the way you become a great AE is by being very good at discovery is finding pain and you solve problems you don't solve for feature requests and stuff like that. So that a lot of call reviews, a lot of weekly training. Now kudos to Michelle. She treats the AES like she treats the BDRs like AES. So you know that psychological thing that she'll monthly when she's messaging people, hey, what's in your pipe? She'll mess BDRs as well. So she's making them feel like they're AES and not just BDRs. She's asking them, hey, what are you committing? What's in your pipeline? I want them to talk a certain way, I want them to think a certain way. So I put them through an initiation. In my initiation is I talk about three concepts. The first is give and get. People are always going to have objections. You can address an objection, get something else in return. Very basic example. Somebody says at the end of a call, hey, just send me something. Okay, hold on. What can I send you that's not going to get deleted? How can I stay top of mind without being annoying? Get something in return. Hey, if this makes sense, I'll share this with you. Like just to make sure this is appropriate to you. Whenever I share things, they create more questions than answers. So let's just put some time tentatively to make sure we address those things as well. This way, I've given you everything and anything you need to make informed decisions. So it's a step in the right direction, not a jump. First, give and get. Always think that way. Second, how to turn I conversation into an R conversation. Mirroring Chris Voss labeling. Somebody's always on the other end of the mirror. Like find a way to just, just, just, you know, even if you have to pretend to be a little dumb, like get them to open up and like really be a part of this conversation and really address what they're talking about, what you're thinking about. I went on a bit of A ramble, but talking to the reps a lot, actually taking that, putting a lot of attention onto their coaching. And this is where I take responsibility. I'm not calmed on meetings booked, I'm calmed on close one revenue. So when they're acting as AES, I'm the sales manager. So it's, it's, it's the right, I would like to think it's the right behavior. And then I would hope the way it's helping our VP is when there's board meetings happening, there's additional logos and additional ACU that was unaccounted for. So when I say we don't do role plays, you can call it a role play. But what it actually is going on is this. We have three, four Personas. One is rev ops, one is talking to AES, one's talking to sales leaders. I'm not going through like, hey, pretend like you're calling an ae. What we're actually doing is like, hey, think about the problems that the AES is going through. I'm not going to pretend like I'm an A on the call, but how would you call an ae? What would you talk to them about the problems that duly solved for. And how in that moment would this problem go from the business level like, hey, salesforce is messy to an AE just being like, oh wow, my, my butt could be on the line right now. So instead of creating scenarios where you're calling somebody, I'll just start off with like, hey, you're about to talk to an AE right now. Why would an A want to talk to you? Why wouldn't he want to take a meeting? And they go through the full pathway of. You know, when people say jargon terms like hey, my salesforce is messy, I just go like, okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? Keep, keep going. What does that mean? What does that mean? Like, make it so simple for me that a five year old can understand it. The reason why I say that is this. We're creating a new category for dually. There aren't budgets for dually in the industry, but there are budgets for Salesforce optimization. There are budgets for moving your deals along, for note taking, for efficiencies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not getting them to call people and talk about the pain. Duly solved for. I'm getting them to call and talk about the pain that's already there. For example, six hours back to back calls, man. Like my manager tapped me on the shoulder. This happens. That happens. Et Cetera, et cetera. What is the impact of that? What. How is that actually affecting you? So the coaching and the training that we're doing, maybe it's pseudo role play. Pseudo. It's not what I'm doing. Focusing on to get out of them is like when you talk about duly the actual problem, not its features, it just hits. It just resonates. We sell to sale leaders. So the way I think about it is this. If selling is a video game, then sale leaders are the final boss battle. We can't master all tactics. There's so many out there. You have to master relevance. You have to master problems that already exist. How can you say this in one sentence or 2? 3 lines, and the other person goes, okay, you know what, there's something over here. And then you continue to drill on it. So you know the buyer's consideration journey. People say the buyer's consideration journey is made of three phases. Awareness, consideration, purchase. I disagree. I think there's one other phase which is the unaware phase. The standard model suggests that the awareness phase is where people are downloading blogs, webinars and articles. I disagree with that. If people are aware, awareness to me is that you're not just aware that my company exists, you're aware of the problem that is solved. For if you were actually aware, you'd be mtla. So we're treating those unaware leads as basically ways into the door. Like, hey, they're not ready to use the same thing that we did. I kind of did at Clio. We're not ready to buy. This is not about the product, but this is about a topic. Hey, how to ramp new reps faster. Okay, Katie, why did you attend that webinar? How to help your manage your team's time? Katie, what prompted your interest? Why did you want to. Why did you want to attend? And then in conversation you can just, you know, you can find things pain points and, and hopefully move things along. So making those conversations easier for them by providing them those kind of leads is also helping us keep the activity going. It's not role play, but it's like it's conversational play. I don't know exactly the word for it. Like, why when you call somebody, what would hit. What are you going to say that's going to hit? What's going to resonate? I don't believe in it. I should be careful. I believe in personalization, but I think personalization could be done better. Personalization cannot scale. Relevance can scale what? If you can talk with mask relevance. But problems that just resonate. So we do that in the morning, and then right then and there, the very next thing is the one hour call Blitz, and I'm dialing with them and we're on the Zoom call together. Just go. Just do it. Fail if you have to. It's fine. And within that, we're optimizing the top tracks, we're just getting into it.