Practice Coaching Sets the Tone for Better Sales Conversations with Jordana Zeldin

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset, goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Vidyard. If you aren't using video in your sales process, I promise you, you are leaving money on the table. I personally have been using Vidyard with my teams for years now and we use it everywhere. Top of funnel to book more meetings via email and LinkedIn. Middle of funnel to improve show rates, to demos, post demos to do proposals and follow up and close deals faster. Using video allows you to connect better with your prospects, bring your personality, energy and enthusiasm across every single time, and they have a much more impactful and memorable experience for your buyer. So again, if you're not using video, you need to be. And if you are using video, you should be using Vidyard. Check out vidyard@vidyard.com and with that, let's get back to the show. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host, Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. It's a classic interview with Allen Iverson, right? This practice, not the game practice. But this is quite possibly my favorite topic in sales because it's also one of the most underutilized tools that we have in sales practice. We are blessed to be in a career and a role that we can practice. We can do it by ourselves, with a teammate, with no fear, no failure. You can't practice being a nurse. You can't practice being a lawyer. Like, you have to go to school for 12 years to do that. But in sales we can practice, but most people don't. And I think there's two core reasons for that. One is the mindset around it and two, how practice is actually done. Which is why I'm so, so excited to have Jordana Zelding with me this morning to talk practice. She is the co founder of a company called Practice Lab, the founder of spring training that teaches people the core of how to sell and how to sell right. And we're going to talk about how to sell right, but also how to practice right today. Jordana, welcome to the show.

I am so glad to be here. Thank you.

Long time coming. And that's my fault. I'm just dropping the ball on, like, staying in touch with things. But thanks.

That's okay. You've had a lot going on.

Just a little bit. Just a little bit. But the reason why people love this show is we get right into it. No backstories, no. No nothing. Let's talk about practice. Right? And I'm going to start with kind of a heavier question here. Why don't you think more sales teams practice as much as they should?

It's such a good question. And if I can just for a moment get a little bigger picture and just kind of get people to realize how crazy it is that as salespeople we are expected to absorb information about how to do something right on podcasts or LinkedIn or books or training or whatever, and then are expected to then just figure out how to do it in absence of practice and then deliver results with those newly learned sales skills in the moment where the stakes are highest. Right when we're on the phone with prospects with revenue on the line. And that is crazy, right? And what's so interesting is that that is the status quo, right, in our industry. And I'm not sure exactly why kind of sales can't, like, as an industry evolved in this way, but there's always been this, like, sense almost like, I don't know, from the 1940s, 50s, that you just like got good from doing it, like from the act of selling without a lot of consideration for, like, what are the behaviors, what are the very specific skills that make for really effective selling and how do we break those down just like athletes and musicians right into practiceable pieces and do them? And. And I think as an industry, that's just not how we've thought about sales skills. You kind of either have it or you don't. And then managers, I don't think in my, you know, in my travels really have been equipped to know how to effectively practice coach, which is different from like coaching with a capital C, you know, question based, reflective and all of that stuff.

So we're going to go down some rabbit holes here real quick because this is the question that's top of mind for me. And I was actually dabbling with this right before COVID jacked Everything up. The difference between a manager and a coach. And I was actually dabbling with the idea of like, well, what if I had managers and I had coaches? Because finding a manager that can also manage and coach is really hard. Those are different skill sets. Right. So what do you think separates a manager from a coach?

That's a great question. And I want to make the distinction between like again, coaching, what I call coaching with a capital C. Question based reflective, where you don't have the answer but you're kind of guiding the person that you're coaching to figure it out for themselves and practice coaching, which feels fundamentally different for me. If we think about like the great sports coaches, right. They're not saying like, so what was it that you think you did there? Right. And how am I? Right? They know exactly what great looks like. They have the answer and they're making small like tweaks and corrections to get the seller to do that thing. Right. And they're doing it through demonstration. Right. It's not explaining. And we really need you to, you know, find a way to get your prospect to open up more. It's like, no, I'm noticing that you are asking a lot of closed ended questions, right? How can we turn this question and open it up? An example might be this. Give it a try. Right. So we're following. I feel like I'm just like, I'm.

So fired up by that answer. Because one, like, I never know how these interviews are going to go and every once in a while I'm in an interview where they're saying things. I'm like, no, that's not really how that works. But like what you just, I mean, we should pause the entire episode right now. And if you just said that over and over again because what people read in the books and what's put out there, right. Is like, you know, you got to ask those questions. So why do you think this happened? No, and that's, no, that's not how great. Look at any great coach. They don't come up to the player and go, so why do you think you missed that shot?

Nope. They say turn your heel out, right?

Exactly. Your heels out, your elbows flare. He must bring you in here, get you up like this. They give them a cue and they stop them. Right? So just.

Jordan, that's what I do want to say though is like the coaching with a capital C is transformative and powerful and has changed my, my life and the lives of many in a myriad of ways. However, what I think we are talking about is Skills coaching. Right. Coaching for behavioral change around selling skills. And that requires the approach that we're talking about.

So let's, let's define this. When you say coaching with a capital C, what does that mean?

So when I think about coaching with a capital C, I really think about kind of traditional, kind of inquiry and question based coaching where you as the coach acknowledge that you don't have the answer that the person that you're coaching probably does. Right. And that you're asking really kind of thoughtful and powerful and pointed questions to help lead them to an answer that they will arrive at practice. Coaching is where the destination is known, where you do a quick explanation. I have a framework, actually that I teach managers here. You do a quick explanation of what it is, but the magic comes in your ability to demonstrate and show them what great looks like. Right. So the explanation comes, the demonstration comes, and then you throw them into practice, into reps, right. And the process is they practice. You give quick, pointed, focus, feedback, maybe with demonstration, and then throw them back into practice again. Right. So you're going through this cycle where you're both in a way getting, getting in your at bats, but you as the manager who does know what great looks and sounds like and is able to show them, is leading with demonstration and those quick kind of pointed adjustments. And that to my mind is the most effective way to practice coach for skill development and behavior change.

I love that because so much of this does come down to skill development and also the ability to recall. Right. And that was something I spent a lot of time on. It's almost three years ago now, really trying to study the art of learning. Like how do we learn? Because you kind of said this at the beginning. If you think about how much we expect reps to remember, it's comical. Like I do this exercise with my managers and the companies that I work with and like consult on. It's like, let's write all this out. What are all the things that a rep needs to be able to remember? Recall and execute with. And it turns into like two pages, right. Of competitors, product knowledge, benefits, sales, processes, tech, like all these different things. And it's like, but how much repetition are they getting? And that's kind of like the next part I want to go with is like repetition are like, how often should people be practicing?

Every day, Multiple times a day? I mean, the best, it's interesting. Like the best sellers that I know are the best practicers and the healthiest and thriving and highest performing teams that I have witnessed as a sales Coach and been a part of as a seller. Like practice is just embedded in, in what they do. You know, like team meets kick off with like a quick speed drill or lightning round on. I don't know if it's objection handling or whatever the skill is. Right. Or, or you know, the new feature that you need to talk about or like how to ask better open ended questions. Right? Whatever, whatever the skill that the manager wants to focus on that you know that round is. But it's happening all the time. I mean even so in the practice lab. And I know we'll, we'll be talking about that in a minute. Which is the new, the new kind of practice based sales training community that I co founded with Jonathan Mahan. Like we'll even share with each other recordings of ourselves practicing into our phones, let's say a great agenda in advance of a call and then we'll share with each other how that call went.

Ah, so what I love there too is like, man, y', all, oh, I hope y' all are listening to this. Okay. She's talking about sharing practice. Not even like the recorded call necessarily of the call. Like sharing how you're practicing with somebody I think is great. And you just mentioned this and I want to talk about. And maybe this is the segue kind of into some of the things you're doing with practice lab. But let's talk about the different ways you can practice. Right? Because they're not all the same. You mentioned speed route. You mentioned like a lightning round. Let's talk about some of the different ways you can practice a skill.

Okay. So there are a number of ways that you can practice. One of the things that I don't think that a lot of people realize is that many of the skills that we think of as sales skills are also just human skills. Right. So there's of course a place for role play which can be super effective. And I know you're, you're a big fan of KD and so am I. But there's also an opportunity in like discovery. And this is something that we do in the lab where practicing a certain level of listening, practicing curiosity. Right. Is something that you can do outside of the context of a role play. So we have an exercise called Motivate Me where we break into pairs and you are talking with your partner about either a change they want to make in their life and buying is change. We always have to remember that as sellers. Right. Or maybe a purchase that they want to make. And it is your job to a give your prospect or give your partner the experience of feeling deeply seen, heard, and understood, which we often don't think of as an important skill in discovery, but it's. But it's powerful for growing a relationship. Right. But also to gather as much information as you as you can about their present circumstances, Right. Where they want to be so you can locate the gap, et cetera, et cetera. But what's so powerful about taking it outside of the roleplay context is that it takes the performance aspect out of it, but still allows you to practice that skill of, like, asking great questions, gathering powerful information, listening, making your prospect feel seen and heard and understood. And what sellers say after that exercise is often, oh, my God, that felt nothing like my discovery. I want to make sure that my discovery feels like that.

Wow, that's awesome. That's so good. And like, I wanted to ask you, I'm going to take a step back here real quick. Is there something that you've been saying a lot throughout all this that I don't think people may be fully understand is notice how often she's saying, practicing the skill, working on the skill. She has not one time said, practice the call, practice the demo. So let's talk about the difference here, because I do, like, because most people, when they do, they think, okay, all right, cool. Yeah, Jordan, I'll go practice. And they practice the call, and they do the full thing and then go from there. Let's talk about the diff. Like when you're saying, practice the skill, practice the skill, practice the skill. What does that mean?

So. So we often forget that selling is comprised of, like, a gazillion skit. Right. It's made up of all of these skills that individually can be developed in practice. And when each one is executed really well, that's when you get, like, really effective and powerful selling. Right. It can often feel very unwieldy to, you know, if someone is practicing their entire demo or practicing their entire pitch call what pieces, like, what the focus should be, what pieces of feedback to share so that the seller can, you know, become all the more effective in their overall selling. That's just. It's. There's. There's. There's too many areas to focus on. So what I found to be the most effective, and this is true of how athletes practice as well. It's like just practice your swing. Right. So in our case, you know, if you're kicking off a meeting, we have an agenda framework in the practice lab that is designed to set the stage for conversations that feel open, transparent, and Collaborative. That is a skill, right? And actually, if you. If you break down the agenda framework that's comprised of a number of different skills as well. But it's like we're just practicing our agenda, right? For two weeks, we are practicing how to set the tone for better sales conversations, right? From there, we build. Right. We actually move on to. We have this incredible guest facilitator called Chris Williams, and he does something called Listening Fest. Our next module is solely on listening and the four levels of listening. And we spend two weeks developing awarenesses of the different levels of listening that we can do as sellers and that we can give our prospects to make them open up. That is a major, important sales skill that no one really talks about practicing, right? Then we move into motivate me. Right? Discovery.

Right?

And we build a shared vocabulary around each moment in the sales conversation, right? And each set of skills that are required to really carry it off effectively and in a way that feels good. It's like a built. You know, we're building a tower, right? And then in the end, once we've chunked it down as an opportunity for us to try to put it all together, do a kind of cumulative review, and then pick out the pieces of the skills that we've learned where we can continue to improve. But at least there's that shared vocabulary in terms of what the roadmap of these skills should be and sound like.

I love that, because I think one of the phrases I used with my managers often came from the old Mel Gibson movie the Patriot. And at one point in the movie, he's talking with his sons while they're hunting. He says, aim small, Miss small. Right? Where it's like if you aim at the entire deer, you're gonna miss by a lot. Whereas if you're aiming at, like, just a speck on the right shoulder, you're gonna miss by a little. And that's kind of what you're describing. When you practice the whole call or the whole demo, it's too much versus we're aiming small. We're gonna work on this skill. Agenda. Not even disco.

Nope.

Agenda. And then we'll move. And that allows you also, y', all to get way more repetitions. Cause when you practice the whole call, you maybe. Maybe get two in 30 minutes. More often than not, it's one. It's one call with feedback, and then it's over. Versus the repetition of just chunking. It was a word that you use, which is what we did internally, too, is you chunk it like that. Repetition. Now they get hundreds of repetitions instead of one. Now the skills, you kind of dabbled on it and it's on your LinkedIn as well. You talk about the core skills of selling. What do you believe some of those core skills? So people are listening, they go, okay, yeah, I'm buying into this. What would like, where would you start in terms of the core skills that you believe turn someone into a world class seller?

So it's interesting that kind of goes back to like big picture. What is my and our position on what makes for great selling? And I've always been someone who has said, you know, no matter what kind of seller you are, if you're challenger relationship based or whatever, like what you are in with your prospect is a relationship with another human being. And it's really important to attach tend to like the fundamental needs that any human being has in relationship, in or out of selling. And to my mind, a big part of that is making our prospects feel seen, heard and understood, right. So part of what we're weaving into every moment in the selling conversation is, is sending those signals, right? So when we think about the building blocks of like a traditional disco call, let's say, right? Maybe you do small talk, maybe you don't, whatever, you know, I know that there are a lot of schools of thought, but in thinking about the agenda, right? What are some of the specific ways that you can start to signal to your prospect that this is going to be about them and their needs and a collaborative conversation to help get them to where they want to go, Right? What does that mean? You can say, oh, come up with a collaborative agenda practice, go. No, we have some guidelines for specifically what that could look like. One, you know, your purpose, your purpose statement that really the purpose of the meeting today is all too often sellers make it about them and their purpose. Yes. The most important question sellers can ask before formulating agenda, an agenda which we encourage people to think about and prep ahead of time is why is the seller showing up at this meeting, right? What's in it for them? And making sure to weave their likely purpose into our purpose statement. That's the first signal that, that we're paying attention to you, right? This meeting is we're here to serve you two. One of the most common phrases that I hear in an agenda KD is like, I want to do this, then I want to do this, then I doesn't matter what you want, like what would be most helpful, right? From there, you know, we can, together we can determine, right? Really these conversations are best served By Right. How are these agenda items laddering up to what will make for the most successful conversation? So we work with sellers to try to eliminate. I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to. Right, because it doesn't matter really what the seller wants to do when they're set up a meeting. And even further, I'll often hear sellers resist the idea of doing an agenda because they're afraid it's, like, too formal, too rigid, or too driving. And the solution for that, we've noticed, is that sellers will often say, we will do this, then we'll do this, then let's soften up the language a little bit. Right. It might be helpful, too. From there, we can all of those different elements help to signal that this is a dialogue, a collaboration. It's not this thing that's set in stone, it's flexible, and that we're going to be prioritizing your needs and your outcomes.

This is so valuable to do. And again, back to the idea of skills and chunking it down to work on these things. Now, how often do you come back? Right? So, like, because also this. I mean, I made this mistake so many times in my sales career. Like, you train on it and you practice it, right? Like, okay, good. Then we move on and then never come back to it. Like, how do y' all weave in some of that, you know, that forgetting curve that, you know, you let it get away and come back. Like, how do y' all come back to some of these topics?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we're in the very first. Well, we did a beta of the program this summer, but we're in the very first official cohort. And right now, the way that we're focusing on reinforcement is having the lab itself, where they learn the skills in advance via lab prep video. Right? So we're not. We're kind of the antidote of a like training as explaining where training is doing. So the explaining happens in advance of lab.

Right.

They jump into lab with a shared vocabulary and familiarity with the skill so that they can dive into practice. And what's interesting about these practice sessions, because you asked, what does good practice look like? Or what are the various ways that people can practice? Neuroscience has shown, and you know, the talent code, right. That the most powerful practice happens just at the edge of our current abilities. Right, right. Where it's awkward, where we're stumbling when it doesn't feel smooth. So, you know, part of what we work to do with each practice round is ratchet up the difficulty of the skill and the focus to keep people there. Right? And that requires vulnerability. Right? And, you know, we have ways of helping to build the community, to send signals that this is a place where we can screw up. Right? Where when we're screwing up, we know we're. We're on the right track. And then the following week, in terms of reinforcement is open lab. And that's an opportunity to revisit the skill, explore some. Some different aspects of it that might kind of take it up a notch and give people that opportunity to get in another hour of practice. Now we're in the place now, Katie, of figuring out how often do we want to rerun the scale over the course of a year. And that's something we're really thinking a lot about.

I like that because the foundation with my teams and the companies that I'm working with is I tell them you have a core set of four skills generally for your org or for your team that you think are foundational. You should never stop practicing those, ever. It's not about, like, you know, in sports or music or even art, right? It's like, oh, I know how to do a scale now, so I'm just never going to do it again. Like, literally never stop doing scales and never stop doing breath work, right? And it's like, if you think about some of those core skills, they should be on repeat. Practice them always, right? Objection. Handling question asking, right? We called it like the connecting of the dots. Can you take what you heard and apply it? Can you take what you heard and apply it? And then like, the values and benefits of, like, what we do. But that should be on repeat, right? It's not like, oh, I did it in onboarding. Because that's also too. By the way, I want to touch on this next is like, people practice in onboarding, and then it's like, never again. You know, like, okay, so true. I made it through onboarding, so now I'm good, right? So I think actually the way I want to phrase this question then is, you know, where. Where should a company start? Because this is one of those topics where people hear it and they go, well, yeah, duh. Oh, yeah, this is great. But then they still don't do it because it's like they look at, like, a blank sheet of paper and go, okay, well, now what? They talked about the skills, they talked about repetition, the practice, and the ratcheting up of difficulty. And it should be daily. How do I do this daily? I don't have time. I've got 14 reps like how can someone start to integrate practice into their Oregon team?

Really important question, I would say to start, if teams are able. It really begins with hiring. Yes, that's really important because, you know, one of the challenges of being a sales trainer who works with teams to help them to create some of these cultures of practice is you can meet a lot of internal resistance because you don't have the people on the bus who are willing to be uncomfortable. Right. And learning requires discomfort. Right. And vulnerability and awkwardness and realizing it's like that it's conscious incompetence. Right. And that's a space no one likes to be. But there's actually a way to hire for that. And I know we kind of talked talked about that when we first kind of came together. And that's a place that I really encourage sales teams to focus if they can. And I work with a lot of high growth companies who are, you know, scaling their teams, you know, sometimes by 100% a quarter, which I always feel a little worried about, honestly, when, when that's, I mean it really that sometimes I encourage them to pump the brakes. But in terms of hiring, like, there's an opportunity to embed practice into your hiring process in a way that a lot of people don't think about. Like, and I know we talked a little bit about this, but if you do role play in hiring, you can listen out for something so much more powerful than can they sell the product that we sell? It's not about that. It's. Are they game to do something risky? Are they game to give it their all and probably screw up? Are they game to take feedback from you, try to implement iterate and make it better? And if you have someone like that who's able to get through that process in the interview stage, you're setting the stage to have a team that's more open to practice.

I think that's huge. It's just, and we talked about that, you know, it's like people put, you know, role plays into their, their hiring process to see if someone can sell their product. It's like that's not. No, but they shouldn't be able to sell your product yet. But do they take feedback? How quickly can they apply that feedback? Do they listen? Do they absorb it or do they push it away? Do they get defensive or do they get excited? Do they thank you for that feedback? Right. The ones that like there's a couple like hard stops in my hiring process that are like immediate hires. One of them was if they asked for feedback oh, yeah. So, like, we do the role play and there's like, all right, thank you. And there was a pause, right? I would just pause, like, thank you. I appreciate that. The ones that asked for feedback, the ones that said, well, how do you think I did? Or could I get some feedback? Was almost immediate, hard stop. I'm a hire this person. And, like, without fail, I literally have not had one person that did that that didn't end up being phenomenal at their job, because it was a signal of, like, they want that feedback. Like, they're looking for it and they want to improve, which I think is huge. Right. And so the hiring is big. I do want to take the next step, though. Like, okay, but I have a team now, right? I have a team now. Maybe I didn't do all that, Jordana. Like, yeah, I'm going to start doing that. I got a team now.

Yeah.

How do I start to kind of create that culture of practice, Right? Like, what are some baby steps? Because it's also too. And I've made this mistake personally. Like, just full overhaul, right? Like, all right, y' all role plays on Tuesday, micro training on Wednesday, call review on Friday, and you do too much, and it just freaks people out. What could be some baby steps for people listening to say, okay, here's how I can start to integrate practice in and build up to what you're talking about?

That's a really important question. And I think one of the things that I've noticed is that the companies that are able to most successfully adopt practice cultures or shift their culture towards increased practice, if not an entire overhaul, is making sure that the leaders are practicing with the team. That's probably the most important thing. When I first joined I the sales gym, which was my. My first sales training job, we were like a practice company. And not only was I trained up as a coach via practice role plays, I was like, you know, mock coaching for two weeks before they ever got, you know, let me get in front of a client. But we were, like, doing daily lightning rounds as a team, practicing the skills that we were teaching our clients. And some of these were, like, you know, big clients in the Fortune 500. But we were also teaching. Practicing, like, our own coaching skills, right? And I remember KD showing up to.