[Sales] The Anti-sales playbook

I mean, this is a good one. I mean, you want to talk about a myth? Open rates matter. That's a myth for prospecting. Open rates don't matter at all whatsoever. Stop tracking them. I turn them off. Click rates, same thing. If you're tracking open rates, what happens is it puts a little pixel, so a little image goes into every one of the emails and when the recipient receives that email and when they open it, it tries to load that image, load that pixel. When that pixel gets loaded, it sends a message back to your sequencer tool that says, this message was opened. Great. In theory. Theory 10 years ago worked amazingly today. Now everybody that has an iPhone, all of those emails are all opened automatically. So every email that comes into the mail app is automatically opened in the back end through a proxy. And so you're going to get all of these images are loaded automatically. So simply by just sending emails, you will get some of them opened and they will look like they're opened. Hey, welcome to another episode of the sales community podcast. We got a fun one. Today we are going to talk about the anti sales playbook with Jess and Nick and myself. Jess is going to take us through a bunch of different topics and we are going to share our opinions on what we think is the common misconceptions, the ways that people are perhaps doing things incorrectly, ways you thought are accurate, maybe not so accurate. Then we'll actually share some of the best practices, things that we see actually work.

I think we get told a lot what to do, the things that we should be doing, but no one really tells you what not to do from their own experiences. So I think it would be nice to run through some of that and try and keep it a little bit structured. So I was thinking we could go through, you know, start let's do, let's do prospecting, go through the kind of different myths and mistakes that people tend to make around that, and then maybe move on to pitching and closing. And then we can go through some bad things that people do when training their teams as well, and then maybe cover some things on events, because I think there's some interesting things to talk about there. So if we start with prospecting, what is the worst opening line to an email that you've ever seen?

I have to say the worst is probably where you just cuss somebody out. That's obviously not going to probably work. However, I think the most commonly used one that is completely pointless and just takes up the most important real estate of the email is, hi, my name is Harrison with succession Like I can literally see your name in the inbox. I can see it in the signature. I don't need you to explain who you are in the first sentence. And then it just takes up the most important real estate of trying to get your email opened which is like.

That preview text and the follow on piece for that is I'm your local rep, blah blah blah, no one cares. Like are you going to be able to get me the thing I need that's more important than where you are?

Yeah.

I'm surprised neither of you said hi, I hope you are doing well.

So that also sucks. But like most of but like this is nice, right? I think at least that is like a hey, hope you're, hope you're well. Like I hate it but it's still better than hi, my name is. Unless you're like Slim Shady. It doesn't like are we singing again?

That's how we started.

I always get the urge when people email me like I hope you are doing well to be like, oh, I hope this email finds you. I was like, you know, actually no, it doesn't find me well.

Some of the, some of the best like LinkedIn posts I've done are just like about I hope this finds you well. And people just like hating it so much and laughing about it. And so yeah, there's clearly a adverse reaction to that.

Okay, so we've done the most important one which is first line. Everything else doesn't really matter. I think one of the things that we spend a lot of time on probably on our every single day is trying to figure out who we prospect to. Right. What is our ICP and who are the different job titles that we want to target. And I think in the past for myself and also I see quite a lot of other people do it is they're sending what they think is a really targeted, really personalized message in terms of like therapeutic area or modality or like the features and the outcomes and benefits that they think is right for a particular company based on what they're working on. But I don't think people treat like different seniority levels differently enough. I think people assume that like scientific leadership are going to care about the same cold emails that your bench levels scientists are and you've got so little words to put into that email. And so people just are like, okay, they're working on this target and you know their problems are going to be this but they don't segment that out enough. Do you guys have like any thoughts on that in terms of how to make sure that you're hitting the right things for the right person.

Or if you are personalizing your message is great, like you're still better, you're doing better than most people. So I'm not going to be too hard on you there. But yeah, I think people just don't think about the recipient of their message is the biggest thing, whether it's their title, whether it's their role, whether it's their company. Most people are thinking about themselves when they're writing prospecting messages. It's like, hey, I need to tell them about what we do. I need to basically throw my elevator, pitch all the 17 bullet points that I've got about how we can help solve all of their problems. Actually, you're probably not even thinking about their problems. You're probably just talking about your capabilities and what it is that you can do. And I think that is like the common thread versus flipping it and thinking about what is it my prospect really cares about and like, what are their goals, what are their objectives? And then how do I tie back my solution to then help solve those.

Problems in the name of these being the anti playbook? That's great advice. But I think the thing that people are all doing wrong, and I've been guilty of this a long time ago, I don't do this now for any customers listening, but a long time ago, is that prospecting is a job to be ticked off.

Right?

I need to get prospecting done. Everyone says you have to prospect, so I've got to get this done and I need to get 10 out today. It's really low return. So it let's just send 10 job tick done. Right. And that's why it's more about the action of I have the prospects, I'm going to get it done than the things you said, Harrison, of how is this going to be received, how is this going to be read, who's it going to? And all of those important things about actually will increase the effectiveness of that effort. And it's not. So I think it's seeing it as an active thing you're doing rather than worrying about just getting it ticked off the list is really crucial.

Kind of a bit of a broader question then, like if we are focusing on things that you absolutely should not do, misconceptions, myths that people have, mistakes that people make, what do you think are your top ones that you see happening that irritate you and you want people to stop?

Almost contrary to what I just said, I might say the phrase no one cares Right. We've said this phrase and it's not, don't take it too literally. We do care. But people overthink the message. Yes. You need to think about the recipient, their job, their activity, their goal, how they're feeling. You need to think about all of these things. People care about your message. It does not matter if you open with I hope this finds you well or you would normally finish something, sir. And today, sincerely, and today you're finishing it. Thanks. Those tiny details do not matter. And people that don't want to respond won't even remember your message. So I think the overthinking part stops people sending good enough messages to get a response.

Yeah. Like, I think it's knowing when you, you should care. Right. Like, don't care about the stuff that people are going to forget about tomorrow, but care about the stuff that might actually interest them. Like your, you know, VP of a department doesn't care that you're, you know, whatever cells you're offering going to take three days less for the scientists in the lab. Like, they don't care that it's going to, like, save them a little bit of time. They care about, like, the overall impact. Like, put something in that someone actually cares about and worry about that instead of worrying about. Yeah. How you sign your email off, whether you've got the right sort of like, yeah, intro in there as well. As long as it's not. Hi, I'm Jess and I work for this company and we do this.

Or.

Yeah. Hope this email finds you well. I think. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

The other thing that I've, I think I've really noticed the last couple of years now, working with so many different companies, is that the only thing that matters is like, do people actually want what you're selling? Because you can't put lipstick on a pig if, like, people don't want what you have, doesn't matter how good your messaging is, doesn't matter about anything else. Like, but like, also if you have something that people want, if your messaging is bad, like, that's obviously not going to work. But the best campaigns, the best results all come from a hitting up the right person at the right time, where they kind of already are thinking them out or they may need the thing that you are offering. And if it's. That's like, people, people will. And I think this is where like, you can kind of get into this, like, misconception, like, volume doesn't matter because it does matter. Like, there's probably only like 3% of people in the, like, in your market that are, you know, looking for whatever it is that you're selling or whatever it is that you could offer. And so if you are only doing 10 emails a day, you're literally never going to find those people. Like, it's just not going to happen. And so it's going to take you, what, 10 days to like, probably get like one or two people to respond. It's just ridiculous. And so if you are, if you think that volume is not a contributing factor to Outbound, I would say that's also a misconception. So there's the people that say, like, quality only matters and like, that's just also false.

Yeah, we often talk about the list first and that's because your message has to matter, like you said, and your product has to matter to that person. So if you get the right people in that list, then it's easier to make it matter. What the challenge is though, and why the size of the list still matters is getting to enough of those people and also not the date. All of the data on LinkedIn and the Internet and all of these places you go is not 100% perfect. So there will be people that don't give you enough information to fit your icp, but actually are as well.

Well, I think even on that is like, as you try to build up the size of the list, like you're going to have, if you're trying, you could spend hours trying to make the list perfect. Right? Let's see if that list of a couple hundred people you could spend, you know, hours trying to go through and like, make sure everybody's an absolute perfect fit. You could make sure that like, you know, yet you have absolutely every variable dialed in and it's going to be absolutely perfect for how you're going to reach out to them. And, you know, I think that that is a use of time you can do that, but I think oftentimes it can be complete overkill. If you're working with lists of like, couple thousand people. Like, I think it's definitely overkill. If you've got like 20 people, then sure, like, you probably want to be very specific. But I think the common misconception is like, is that most people aren't going to even see your email. Most people aren't going to respond. And so you're better off just hitting send rather than trying to like, overthink everything. So you're better off just doing something than like getting stuck in like analysis paralysis.

Yeah, I think we talked about that when me And Nick did our podcast episode a few weeks ago is like, you don't just need to have quality or just need to have quantity. You need to find a balance between the two. And so many people spend so much time arguing about one approach or the other. But yeah, figure out a way to do both without wasting too much time and see what happens. And then, yeah, if it doesn't go.

Your way, I think the other thing that comes around to all of this is you're not sending to yourself. We've spoken about this before, so I won't go too deep on that. But essentially you are always. And I've been guilty of it, and I still am, and I have to check myself, is that you will write a message and be like, oh, that doesn't sound right. Because that isn't what would sound right to you. But what you're doing is, as a scientist, this is a numbers game. Right. You're writing a message that will resonate. There are some people that that is not the right way to write it for, but you are writing to a general audience, not to yourself. And that's what you have to remember.

Yeah.

And you all the time, where people be like, hey, I would never respond to that. I'm like, well, you're not your customer, so why don't we test it and see what happens? Because this does work. Yeah, this all the time. Especially from like, I think some, some clients is like, well, we'll put together some initial messaging. Or like, wow, this sounds like very direct. It's like, yeah, because that's what works. Like when you beat around the bush, you take up too much space. Nobody wants to read your stinking email. Like, you've got 30 sec. You don'. Have 30 seconds to catch somebody's attention. You've got like five. So if you can't catch their attention in five seconds, like, you're not, you're not getting a response. And I think, oh, that's another one I want to talk about. The way that you differentiate yourself in a call and a conversation with somebody is completely different than how you have to differentiate over email. Right. In an email, you got less than a hundred words to figure out how you're going to pique somebody's curiosity to get them to respond. Whereas if you got a call, you can easily ask a bunch of questions, you could dig into the details, you could talk about your differentiators, and that's just like, not easy to do in 100 words. Or it's a different process to think through. And so I think what people default to is they say, hey, I'm going to like put it all in this, like one email and I'm going to give you everything that I do, everything that we can do for you and then like, let you figure out what it is that you want to do and how you want to work with us. And I, you know, I just, it just doesn't work. Like, long emails don't really work well. Like stuffing too much information into them doesn't really work well. So, yeah, we're not doing a really.

Good job of telling people what not to do in clear sentences. I feel like we've got the myths are everybody fucking cares. Not true. Nobody cares about.

Nobody's going to remember, you know, about.

The surface level stuff we've got. You can bring the same information into an email as you can into a call. False. Help me out with the remembering.

Quality is always more important than quantity. Not always true.

I think the overview is that do not overthink it, but do not be lazy and just hit send. Do some due diligence, some interest and work on whether you can understand the pains and the problems of these people. Once you've got that clear and in a message, do not overthink the detail and send the message.

Yeah, find a balance. I think another one is you should treat, you know, email outreach and LinkedIn outreach the same, which obviously is not a good idea. Very different channels. And, you know, I see a lot of people, I mean, I get them all the time. Everyone will get them all the time. You get these big long LinkedIn messages that are just like paragraph after paragraph, which is kind of what you'd see, you know, in a, in a cold email. Not suggesting you do that in cold email either, But I think LinkedIn is such a personal thing, I think more nowadays than any other time where people have their own sort of personal brand. They're talking about personal things, they're posting about interesting stuff and they don't want someone to email them with all the details of their service or product or whatever it might be. They want to engage in some sort of interesting conversation. And I think that's still the goal of email. But you have an email channel to give people some more kind of like technical insight or try and, you know, get them engaged in some sort of conversation or call. But I think with LinkedIn you have to go a lot shorter. No one's reading LinkedIn like messages most of the time, like in work time. Sometimes I read them outside. They want a quick thing and go that's interesting. I'm going to respond to it. And I think a lot of people, yeah, don't differentiate there and then they end up just sending the same thing to both and it's sort of like a wasted use of time because why bother sending exactly the same thing? You know, utilize them differently and yeah, take advantage of the fact that they are very different channels. And I know we do that a lot with the clients that we have.

But yeah, I think even touching on LinkedIn. Yeah. Another thing I think I've seen a lot of people do on LinkedIn is they send a bunch of follow ups in the same way that you might in email where again they're two different channels. Email things literally get lost or they just get deleted before they're opened. It is very rare, I think that people are just going to not see a LinkedIn message and, or, or they just like physically have not been in their like messenger app or whatever and LinkedIn and like they just have a bunch of unreads. Like I could see that happening as well. But like if you're sending multiple messages in the same thread on LinkedIn, those are also going to be there forever. Like on email they're just gone. Like you can make a new thread, you can follow up separately, but if you ever want to message this person ever again, like in two years, in a year and a half, whatever, and there's like three other messages that you sent to them previously, those are all going to be there, like they're not going away. And so I think you also need to treat LinkedIn a lot differently in a sales capacity for the follow up that you do or the call. Like the lack of follow up is like if you send somebody and it's a very sort of like direct message, like, hey, is this something that you're interested in? And like you don't get responses like do not bombard them, like that's just going to hurt you later on in the long run. And I think that's where it's a different channel than email. Whereas email should stay top of a mind as much as possible for as long as possible because people are just going to, they're not going to remember you, you're not going to be the thing that's top of mind. But that message in LinkedIn is going to live there forever.

Yeah, I disagree.

They'll remember me.

Always going to remember me.

Those messages will come back to haunt you at some point. Especially like, especially think if you move jobs as well and you're like, oh, I need to contact this person again and come on somewhere. They just, they send a message after message and it's like a video and then you just like, I was not interested as the first one. But I think a good way to use LinkedIn as well though is you can send pieces of content that you wouldn't want to send over email. So like you get away with maybe sending an image or a link that you're going to end up in spam with most of the time on email. So yeah, I think just thinking a bit smarter about when you utilize what channel and how you actually use it and the messaging feel.

I mean this is a good one. I mean, you want to talk about a myth. Open rates matter. That's a myth for prospecting. Open rates don't matter at all whatsoever. Stop tracking them, turn them off. Click rates, same thing. We actually did a newsletter specifically on this topic, but the short version of it is if you're tracking open rates, what happens is it puts a little pixel, so a little image goes into every one of the emails and when the recipient receives that email and when they open it, it tries to load that image, load that pixel. When that pixel gets loaded, it sends a message back to your sequencer tool that this message was opened great in theory, 10 years ago, worked amazingly today. Now everybody that has an iPhone, all of those emails are all opened automatically. So every email that comes into the mail app is automatically opened in the back end through a proxy. And so you're going to get all of these images are loaded automatically. So simply by just sending emails, you will get some of them opened and they will look like they're opened. On the flip side, a lot of companies have hard security around will they load images. And so they actually don't load any images when you send messages. And so your email is, if they, even if they open it, they won't load the pixel. So you actually don't know that they opened it. So if you ever had a situation where it's like somebody responded to an email but they never opened it, you were tracking opens. Well, that's why visiting actually download the image. So you end up with false positives and false negatives. So the data is terrible, so there's no point in tracking it. And the fact that there is that pixel, Google and Outlook will pick it up and say this is definitely a marketing or sales email. So we're more likely to put it in spam folder or the promotions tab. So just don't do it.

You're not bitter about People tracking their open rates, though. You can't.

Hey.

Actually, you know, the more people track open rates, the more people that track open rates, the better. Right. Because that's just going to give us a better chance of landing in the inbox versus them.

Yeah. So everyone track open rates, but we won't.

Yeah. So in terms of scientific speak, too many false positives. Don't bother.

Yeah, Good summary. And so we'll kind of do like a bit of a subtopic before moving on to the next one. But I did want to talk a little bit about events and I just think in so many cases people go to events and just immediately think a booth is going to equal leads. Right. And there's just so much more that goes into it and you see people spending all this money, like thousands and thousands of pounds, dollars, whatever currency you want to use, and then they leave and they're disappointed and they sit there and wonder why they haven't got any leads. And I think one of the things which I thought about recently is like your outreach should not start like you're, you shouldn't treat an event as like the start of your outreach. It's sort of like somewhere in the middle of a kind of longer campaign really if you want to call it a campaign. It should be a way to kind of build on connections and like build like trust with people within the industry and you know, not really come with the mindset that I'm gonna leave, leave with, you know, X amount of deals I'm gonna be closed next week. Great if you do. But then I also think there's a lot around like preparation and then like post event follow up stuff which people tend to get wrong and yeah, wonder why. So yeah, interested to hear your thoughts on that. Either of you. One of you. None of you are. Just keep talking if you want.

Let's take a quick break from the podcast to talk about what we have going on over here at Succession. We work with 40 plus life science sales companies to help them find more opportunities and close more deals. We provide a range of services to support your sales growth. So whether it's increasing top of funnel opportunities with done for you lead generation in person or virtual sales training reinforced by personalized training plans, recruiting top sales talent or just building custom AI workflows to help make your team more efficient focused on selling. So if you're ready to transform your sales strategy, visit Succession Bio and schedule a call with Nick and I and see how we can support you. Okay.

I dabble bugbear about events because I've set many up as a sales leader and watch people turn attend. So in the aims of like do's and don'ts, I think it is don't see it as a standalone event. Like you said, there's pre work, there's preparation to make sure it goes well. Don't turn up and then don't forget about it afterwards. Often reps will be like these are my hot leads, I'll go deal with that. The rest of it's nothing, leave it. And then there's a big long list of people that spoke to you that never get touched or spoken to again. So don't ignore the follow up. But I have a very big list of don'ts for at the conference that I hate so much so that I started a new job and it was a small company and the CEO laughed and said like I thought I was the boss. And I said not here, you know, this is my conference. And I told him he's not allowed to eat at the booth, he's not allowed his laptop at the booth. I don't want to see him sitting at the booth. Like this is an active process. You're going to be engaging with people or you can go mingle. And luckily he laughed and accepted it because I've known him for a while. But I think there's a lot of that. You just go to a booth, you sit down and you wait for people to come to you. You don't really set yourself any other KPIs for at that conference. And I think that's something that has to happen. You, you need to engage with it as a process. You're a rep and you're there to do a job and it's like you said, it's expensive. So for example, I would set myself of micro commitment and getting people to commit to further you have a conversation. What's the next step? So I would have my calendar open on a booth and I would tell these people were great. Yeah, we're a great chat. When should we book our next meeting in here is. And I'd set myself a goal for how many of those meetings I want booked by the end of that conference. So yeah, there's a few faults from me anyway.

Yeah. What's the anti playbook? Right. The anti playbook here is if we schedule an event and we show up to the event, we will get leads. Right. That's sort of like the thought process to your point, Jess. Like the. That is just not really the approach that's going to get you the Best results, right? If your goal, and I guess it should also come down to like what's your goal of the event? Like if your goal is like simply brand awareness, if your goal is to actually get meetings and leads, like kind of depends on that, right? So have a pre event strategy. Who's going to be going to the event? Can you reach out? Can you book meetings while you're already there before you even get to the event? Then while you're at the event, can you go to talks? Can you go try and network? Can you go find other people? Like if you're truly trying to get leads, you can't just like sit at the booth either and like hope for the best. Like you have to like proactively go out and go find people, get involved in discussions, get involved in conversations and then event follow up. I think event follow up is something that people mess up a lot in that hey, we had a conversation at the event and they simply follow up with every person that they had a conversation with. The exact same way. They also talk to 10 people while they were at the event, 20 companies while they're at the event, whatever. And so if all those reps are going to follow up the same way now, they're just flooded with all of this crap follow up. And so you need to have a way to stand out. So find a question or something that you can learn about somebody as a person and then follow up specifically around that. Make a reference to the thing that you uncovered in your discussion. In order to do this, you have to take notes. You have to actually write this stuff down while you're at the event. Have a notes app on your phone or something where you can just type it in really quick. And then the other piece of a follow up is that people will wait too long. I'm a big fan of you're at the event. When you get home, before you're done, just follow with the people from that day. Like be like the first person to follow up with them. Be the most proactive, be like better than every other rep and like you're going to stand out, you're going to get more responses to that follow up as well.

So I'm at where people did it at the event. I've had it where people did it while they walk away from the booth and they send a quick follow up to be top of mind. Yeah, exactly.

Like I would just do that. And like you're going to be like it's going to be a lot, you're going to have a lot Better success. So it's like have a process pre event, have a process while you're at the event. Have a process when you follow up after the event. That's how you're going to maximize events. Not just like I'm going to pay the fee to show up, have my booth scans and badges, get some like leads and then you know, sending it the same marketing email blast so the.

Entire playbook is turn up to the event. Don't worry about it. Eat your lunch at the booth, be on your laptop when everyone's walking past because you've got some emails to get done and a quote to get out and just pretty much ignore the other people and don't take any notes.

Yeah, yeah, sounds like a great fun.

It's what a lot of people do. Even though they don't verbalize it that way. If you walk around a conference, you'll see a lot of it.

No, that was what you just said. Like with the getting meetings booked in was such a game changer for me. Like sitting people when you're having a meeting at a conference and like you talk to someone and just being like, yeah, so I'm free like next week on like you know, Wednesday, Thursday between these day and just making them put it into their calendar while they're sat in front of you. Because I think there's so many people that after an event, like some people go traveling or some people take a couple of days off or they're exhausted or they catch up on work that even in those first couple of days afterwards, even if you're quick with your follow ups, people just miss it and you actually had a really good conversation and it just gets lost in the noise.

He's also a great qualifier when they go, oh, I'm not now, not now. Oh, maybe another day.

Okay.

You'll be like, okay, so this isn't a priority for you. I'll follow up with you. Like you've qualified them out. Rather than being someone on your eternal follow up list, they become your nurture list. Whereas the person that actually cares and was as interested as they sound and they didn't just want your T shirt on your booth will actually schedule that call.

Yeah, and I think another one, like if you've put that effort into at the event, pre event, post event, you know, you've set good KPIs. I think particularly one that maybe like sales leaders when they're thinking about what their conference calendar looks like for the next year is they just go, oh well this conference has like our target Market app. So we're going to go to this one every year. But I've seen people like consistently not do well at events even though they're doing everything they can and then they just continue going back and spending money. And I think one way to get around that a little bit is extend what those like KPIs are like beyond the events and not just like okay, how many meetings did we get at the event? Like you said before, how many follow up meetings did we get? And then from those follow up meetings how many like POS did we get? How much like, like follow up business did we get from that? And I think we tie that back to a lot of other kind of I guess lead generation activities. But I think people going a little bit blindly with events sometimes just go, well we must, we must go to this event. It's great. But don't really look at what ROI they actually got on it the previous years, which is, yeah, I think we're done.

This is a good one. Yeah. Not tracking another good anti playbook.

Yeah. So that's events, I think maybe training next. We were up for a bit of training chat.

All right. Yeah, lead the witness.

Do you know that we also do training at succession as well as lead generation?

People know that but yeah, because we're trained them.

Others make. Yeah. Everyone else, yeah.

So lots of sales kickoff calls coming up. Let us know. That's the piece done.

Carry on.

In the, in anti playbook world, you know, in sales training is you give people some product training for a couple of hours, you throw them on it, you want to say something, you just are you gonna let me finish? You know you throw on a few sales calls and you know, people just learn on the job. Right. Like I've heard that so much and be like, yeah, you just gotta like learn, learn on the job. You'll pick it up. And they think that as long as they know the technical details, like everything else is just like a personality thing that will come naturally. That's, that's right, right. That's how people learn sales. Yeah, definitely. Cool.

Just.

Yeah, I think I should let Nick wait.

No, no. I was just thinking about something I was always told about training and I, I think it's an sort of adage that a lot of people say, especially if you're experienced and I think it's lazy and not correct and if this is your view, you probably shouldn't go to the training. And often you'll hear, well, if I walk away of learning one thing, it was worth the job. It was worth the training. And the people will say this when they're going to a two day training thing. And I think now if that's your, if that's your bar, go to the Internet. There's so many videos, there's so many trainers on there doing content, there's so much on LinkedIn. If your bars to learn one new thing you can incorporate, I think that's a pretty low bar. So that's my sort of anti playbook. Anti. So it's Harrison's Robin off and playbook. But the, the, the alternative is, is to do training that is actually effective and aligned with your company and that you walk out with multiple things that you put into a sales playbook that is now used across the team to bring everyone up to a correct level of training for your objective.

That in mind is that like, hey, we can do a training session and then everybody's going to remember the information and like that's enough to like implement this training across the team. Like that is, I think that's just like way too common of something that occurs where it's like training is thought of this like one and done activity. Like we're going to train the team and then they are now going to be able to implement what we just trained them on and it's just like fundamentally just not true at all. And this is for everything. This is for sales training, product training, how to use tools, how to use different systems, like all sorts of training whatsoever. It's like you only have so much capacity to remember something. Like there's this concept called the forgetting curve where like the first time you see something like you forget 90% of it within, like within a couple of hours, like it's pretty crazy. And so then, and you have to constantly be reminded about these things on a regular basis. So if you are going to roll out training or you are going to do training, there has to be like sets of practice, sets of conversations, like to call it enforcement if you want, but call it reinforcement. All the like additional practice, like training can really not be this like one time thing because it's just going to be so much information it's thrown at people, they're just going to forget it all. And so it really has to be, it's almost more important to think about how you're going to reinforce stuff and how you're going to execute. Like the training that you want is like the more important piece.

I hate when people use professional sports as an analogy, but I think in this scenario it's perfect because you don't say, oh, he's the best footballer in the world as well, or the best basketball player or foosball or whatever the American sports are. You don't say they're the best of that in the world. Don't go to training today or tomorrow or the next day or whatever. Just, just, you're the best already. You can just like just do your cardio. You don't need to do your skills activity. Whereas actually in professional sports and in many industries it's seen as a, a continual process that has to be constantly carried out. Whereas I think particularly in the life sciences as well, because we're very technical, it's seen as a checkbox often, oh, we have to do personal and professional development because HR says we have to do it. So let's do that. Rather than the fact this is actually going to impact my key objective this year of X revenue or X growth in key accounts. And I think that is the, the anti playbook is to see it as something that's a checkbox.

Yeah. And I think to add to that as well. And I'm going to continue the sporting analogy, but I'm going to show my boring side and make a Tour de France reference. So I was watching. I know, I know.

Let's all start injecting ourselves with oxygen. We'll be better at sales.

Advice. Get some sales. Performing enhancing drugs. No, I was watching the new. I call it Tour to Survive because it's the same people that make the drive to survive F1 Netflix documentary where they make everything really dramatized. But the top team is UAE Emirates. Right. And they have a cyclist called Tade Pragaccia. He's amazing. He doesn't take performance out to drugs. And what he was talking about, what made the difference for them when you won last year and then again this year was like the technology and like the bikes and like the nutrition. All these new things that they brought in that were not around when he won the Tour like a couple of years ago because they had the money to and they had the time and the kind of forethought to be like, if we do this, it's going to give us a fraction of, you know, whatever on performance. And I think even when teams have like consistent training in place, they have someone who's like, this is the way we train people, this is the way things work. And they don't update that as new things come out. And there's so crazy to me because so many kind of people in those leadership positions and the People that we work with and the people in industry, like, they're all scientists. Like, the whole thing about science is like, innovation and new things and discovering new ideas and data. But we don't apply that to the way that we run commercial teams very often. Like, how much stuff has come out in the past year that we're using, that we see other people using that people just aren't aware of. And even in the past, like, five years, people are doing it old school and it's hurting them because everyone else is moving on and trying these new things.

Well, I think as well, I think it's a boring but good analogy. So I think that, yeah, the. The point is, is actually probably sales is a competitive sport, and we don't see it that way because how many of our clients or how many companies out there have a competitor, right? So you can think, oh, it's just an incremental gain. But if that incremental gain is 1% over your competition, you'll start to win more deals. Right. So you have to be ahead of them, even if it's a longer road to be better. I'm not saying you should focus on your competition. That's a bad thing to do. But focusing on being as good as you can in your organization so that you're a step ahead of these people is going to win you more deals for sure.

You made a road, road ahead reference there. I feel like that was. That was still on the cyclist.

What?

So you use the word road. They're road bikes.

I change it for a different analogy, which is an old joke about two cameramen in the Serengeti. If you want, no lion appears. I'm gonna do it. A lion appears, and one guy starts putting on a pair of sneakers or trainers, and the other cameraman goes, you're never outrunning the line in that. He says, I've just got outrun you.

Exactly. You just got to do better than whoever's doing something similar to you.

Right.

And hopefully that should make the difference.

Yeah. I think the only other. The only other thing I would probably highlight here too, just around training, is that oftentimes, if we are doing well, we think that, to your point, Jess, is like, we don't need, like, we're doing well. We don't need to, like, continue to uplevel our skills. We don't need to continuously try to evolve. It's like, hey, I hit my code last quarter. I don't need this training. Or it's like, hey, I've done like 10 sales trainings before, like, why don't I need another one? And I think that's a common for more experienced people. I think it's a really common mindset and it's a reductive mindset versus, like a growth mindset. And I think having a growth mindset in life in general is just always better. And so if you come into situations with like a negative attitude, like, why the hell am I doing this? Like, you're just not going to get stuff out of it. And, you know, there's always. Every training we've ever done, ever, there's always somebody that's kind of like that, where they're just like, why the hell am I here? And, like, they're just not going to get the most out of it. And, you know, it's just not, you know, it's not a good mindset to come into a situation with.

But we practice what we preach there, right? We've been doing this a long time. We focus on sales training. We focus on sales skills. It's our life, right? So we're always looking for new things, but we go into a training session and we expect to learn from the audience as well as be teaching them. And then we take those into the next training. So we're not there, like, with the trainer. Listen to us. There's a lot of. A lot of people in the room that can share as well. And I think, like you say, that's that growth mindset, pushing that forward and learning from everybody.

Yeah, I think that that makes sense. I think we're training as well. I think. Harrison, you talked. I don't know if it was the two of you. I just saw your face on the clip in the. A recent podcast that you did about different personalities in sales. Right. And I am such a big believer that there is not one type of personalities. And I think there are personalities that are not suited to sales just because of who they are. But I don't think that there is only one, you know, set. It's not whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. I think there's different types of people that can do it in their own way. But I think when that comes to training, you know, different people's background, different people's personalities, it means that, what, like a one size fits all model for training or I think a lot of people will be like, okay, this is all, like, training structure. We're going to give it to any new reps that come in. They're going to learn stuff and everyone's going to perform exactly the same and to the level that we need them to with this same material. How do you guys approach that when training teams and what you've done in the past when you have different personality types and different backgrounds within that pool of people that you're training?

I mean I think one of the key parts is just like is if you can. So like a lot of the times in trainings the people that speak up tend to be the more outgoing types. So the people that are sharing a lot of the information tend to be the more outgoing types. And that's where I think when you get people into like smaller groups, you can see more of those like individual personalities come through. And I think that's where you can get a lot more of like the individual development can come out. If you just like keep everybody in a large group. But a pure introvert is not going to be like super excited to just shout out answers. And I think the small group focused discussions around very tactical real life use cases for that company is where the actual learning, a lot of the learning takes place is the application of what was just shared and taught. Yeah, I agree and I think too is like then if you want to think about like how, how to take a training program and make sure that it's applied to everybody effectively is it's not to think of it as this one size fits all training where I'm going to train everybody on this thing in this way. Coming back make another Dan of sports analogy. But you know, sales is very similar to sports in the sense that there are many micro skills that make up being a good athlete of let's say you're playing soccer or football, whichever country you're in. Like you need to be good at dribbling, positioning on the, on the pitch. You need to be in good conditioning, you have to be able to shoot, you have to be able to pass. Like there's all sorts of different things that you have to be able to do as skills. The same thing happens in sales. There's all sorts of different skills that you have to be able to have. And so when you're taking a training and trying to teach everybody the exact same thing in the same way, it's like it's just not going to land. And so in order to adapt different people's personalities and skill levels is you ultimately want to be creating training programs that are individual to those people so that they can up level their individual skills. If you've got a wreck who's great at discovery, we're doing awesome that and we have another rep who's not as good at it. Well, like why would you have them both be doing the exact same training? Right. So I think hopefully you, how you, how you structure that if you really want to make an impact in your training those are the types of considerations you have to make.

Yeah. Not to make it a pitch but in terms of how we often will solve that is that we look to do in person and group trainings that bring everybody to a level where is necessary for them to function in that particular objective. Right. So if that objective is key accounts then everybody has to have a similar sort of understanding of the core skills in approaching that objective. But then you have follow up with personalized learning paths or personalized one to ones with your manager that you dig into the areas that for that individual need raising to help them execute that company plan of key account management that has been presented.

Yeah, that's a good point. I think we're, we're like 40 odd minutes in now. So I will ask you a final question on training which is you had to pick one thing that people should stop doing when training their teams. What would it be? Tumbleweed.

That's all I've got on mine. One if I had to pick one thing for people to stop doing it would be to think of it as a check the box. I'm going to train the team and we're going to do this as a one time event. I think that that is the, the biggest excuse or like I would also say like the most common thing. It's like you may not actually believe it in the back of your mind. You may think you're doing something good but if again you think of training as like I'm going to do training at our sales kickoff at the beginning of the year and then that is going to make a difference. It's not like that is not like the sole purpose. Like you, you, you have to have more involvement across like actually getting that training to be implemented and used can't just be thought of as a one time event.

I also think that I agree with that and if I was going to add one thing it would be to see it as something that's optional. So people will often think well I don't know, we're writing a budget for a conference, we can afford X number of conferences but we can't do training this year because there's no budget for it. Whereas I think that actually it should be seen as a core component of success in your company and always factored in whether times are good or bad, it should be something you're doing. Even if you have to decide you're going to do this yourself and write it and build and do the training internally from the skills you have. It isn't something that's optional.

Okay, well, I'm gonna ask you guys whether you want to cover pitching, closing.

I'm aware of time. I think we're time, but we can always come back with another one. So if we like these anti playbook ideas, what are the common misconceptions? That's anti, not anti. And we can keep them coming.

When you have any new ideas, throw.

Them in and we'll do other anti playbooks.

Yeah, yeah, Sounds great.