Al Kinnear
On today's episode of Return on Intelligence, we speak to Hamish Knox, sales trainer and coach with Sandler Calgary and the host of the podcast Full Funnel Freedom. We discuss the importance of role play using a crawl, walk and run approach, and how critical coaching and reinforcement is to the learning culture of a business. Welcome to the Return on Intelligence podcast.
Al Kinnear
Today's topic will be closing the learning and development gap and integrating sales enablement training in a traditional land strategy. I'd like to welcome today's guest, Hamish Knox, sales trainer and coach at Sandler Calgary and the host of Full Funnel Freedom, a podcast for sales leaders and entrepreneurs who want to create consistent, repeatable, scalable funnels. Welcome to our podcast, Hamish.
Hamish Knox
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Al Kinnear
So let's let's just start with your introduction and background. And how did you how did you get involved in sales training? Hamish. And then I'd love to share a story of how we met.
Hamish Knox
Yeah, absolutely. So, way back when, I was working for a company called Canada Newswire. They're now part of Cision, and I was visiting with, a couple of partners, you know, a PR agency, and they said, you know, we'd really love to be able to do what you do. And I said, well, can you please define what you think it is that I do?
Hamish Knox
And they said, well, you know, basically it came down to sales. And so in the back of my mind like, oh, maybe there's an opportunity here. So I, I created my own sales training company. It's actually the name of the incorporated company that I, that I operate my Sandler business through. And it wasn't really going anywhere. I, I was doing a lot of great things over Canada Newswire.
Hamish Knox
And then one day, I was in Montreal for, for meetings. And my, my last sales manager's name's Gord. We both randomly decided to have dinner at the same Portuguese restaurant, and I walked in and said, table for one. And they said, go stand at the bar, lose or something in French. And, Gord was there and we sat down, started talking, and he said, he stopped me.
Hamish Knox
And he's like, have you ever heard of Sandler? And Gord has worked for Bell, Rogers, IBM, Xerox, like he's done lots of training. And I said, no. And he says, it's really how you think and talk and act. And I said, thanks, I think. And that night I couldn't sleep and I googled and, I found an article by my colleague Bill Bartlett, and, it was like I walk into a church and God spoke to me.
Hamish Knox
So I was like, how do I. And so I filled in a form, my wife gave up a trip to do, Vegas over Canadian Thanksgiving, back in 2010, to go to Baltimore in November for, what they call Discovery Day or so. You want to be a Sandler trainer? I signed to, papers to join Sandler January 1st of 2011.
Hamish Knox
And because I thought it was symbolic and, literally the day I landed in Baltimore for my initial training was the day that bin laden was killed. So, I thought this will be an interesting ten days on the US East Coast. And it's been an incredible journey since then. I've, had an opportunity to publish a couple of books through Sandler.
Hamish Knox
I was the first Canadian recipient of the David H. Sandler Award. And, I've got to work with some absolutely amazing companies, leaders, sellers, and I just absolutely love what I do.
Al Kinnear
That's awesome. Well, I hope you include absorb with, some of the fantastic, experiences you've had because we met through an introduction, from a gentleman named Muni at at kudos, who encouraged me? Muni and I used to go for coffees, and he encouraged me to discuss, you know, sales enablement with you. And I remember it must be 2018 or so that that we brought you in for a couple seminars to talk to our sales executives.
Al Kinnear
And then, honestly, like, for me, it was all about rolling out some sort of program to bridge our gap and absorb between what we had in our land for sales, which largely at that time was procedural. How to build a quote, you know, how to do Salesforce hygiene, my expectations on interaction and activity, timing with with prospects. But what we didn't have was a strategy for sales enablement.
Al Kinnear
And so, you know, doing some research, I thought at that time I'd probably been the sales leader for ten years. And, and I felt like a coach who was out of oxygen, if you know what I mean. And, and, it was really helpful to work with you and, and, bring you in as a third party to kind of begin our journey into and with sales enablement.
Al Kinnear
So we didn't just focus on the Sandler trainings, but we we kind of included you as part of the fabric of that land to bridge our gap. and I mean, we'll talk about this more, but, you know, we we eventually rolled out Sandler to our, our the program, to our sales executives, solutions engineers, and stars to begin with.
Al Kinnear
But then I realized, if we can extend this to the entire client facing team, you know, we can have a strategy which I referred to as one site, one sound for sales communications. And honestly, that was a game changer for absorb. we'll talk about some of the activities we did culturally later on in this in this episode.
Al Kinnear
But, you know, game mesh, is that the experience that you have with many of your clients or, you know, were we unique or just let's just talk about the the the ways you go to market and work with people on, on, you know, sales enablement.
Hamish Knox
Absolutely. So there's there's really three ways that that, that I'll engage with, with someone. The first one being informational, Sandler's got a lot of content, out there. It's pretty easy to find. And, we have, we have, some content behind a paywall for, for an easy explanation. So there are people out there who are like, listen, I just want self-directed.
Hamish Knox
Give it to me. I'll go run with it. And great. We're happy to support them that way. we also have, companies who want to engage with us on, occasionally. So usually that's, you know, they do a sales kickoff event, they bring us in for a keynote or a day or whatever, and then we we back that up with some recurring, and, sessions on reinforcement, through, through our learning management system, through in person facilitator led.
Hamish Knox
And then there's the organizations that are transformational. And that's really where we ultimately got to. And we're very crawl, walk, run with our clients. Like especially a company like absorb. Could we push everybody in the pool at the same time? Absolutely. Is it going to go sideways? Probably. So we really want to stage that engagement to make sure that we are doing things at the right time with the right people for the right reasons.
Hamish Knox
and so that transformational side, that's really shifting to a sales focused culture. So there is a common language across all client facing team members in their leaders. There is a consistent, repeatable, sustainable, scalable, sales funnel. And then ultimately for some of our clients, they can eventually exit for their number instead of the number that they're told to take.
Al Kinnear
Right. And so when you're speaking with or like, if we're speaking to an LED leader, who's you got more more of a traditional lab environment and they're looking to bridge the gap and become a sales focused culture with actual sales enablement training. We should just back it up. Where do these folks start? Like, what would your advice be for someone looking to plan and integrate sales training?
Al Kinnear
Not just Sandler, but any sales training and sales enablement into their learning and development culture?
Hamish Knox
Yeah, it's, it reminds me there's a Sandler rule that says the problem, the prospect brings you is never the real problem. and it's kind of like, you know, when you go to, to, an account and you say, I want to save money on taxes. And they're like, okay, great. That's an outcome. Walk me. Let's dive deeper into this and really actually understand what's really going on here.
Hamish Knox
And so the number one thing that we encourage anyone we speak with, whether we end up working with them or not, is to do an assessment and, and really gather some data, some leading indicators about where, where is the client facing organization right now. And if you want to break that down into eight years or stars or whatever, you can get more granular and then establish where do you want to be ideally like what is that?
Hamish Knox
And then and then get a gap. Really. That's that's what we're looking for because no matter who we work with, ultimately we're working with them to close a gap. And we need to understand first what what the gap might be. And so some in some cases, our initial engagement with a client is actually doing that gap analysis with them, not for them, with them.
Hamish Knox
so that we can both be aligned on what is the current state, what is the desired state, as is, versus to be, as we often see in our leadership training and then spec out a crawl, walk, run approach to close those gaps?
Al Kinnear
Got it. And when you speak about gaps, can you talk about, you know, for the benefit of the learning development, viewers who are watching and trying to integrate sales enablement, what are the common gaps that you've seen with different organizations? And maybe let's talk about small business versus enterprise, because there would be a difference. Yeah.
Hamish Knox
There's certainly a difference. And and so, you know, if we if we stick on sales for just a second, you know, we, we have heard, we don't have enough qualified leads in the funnel, like, okay, fine. And that can apply enterprise or small business. Oftentimes what we discover is the sellers don't actually have an idea or a plan for what proactive prospecting activities they actually need to do on a weekly, monthly basis.
Hamish Knox
And you know, that from Sandler is a cookbook, for success. So, and oftentimes that not enough qualified leads sometimes gets foisted on marketing unfairly. and then marketing has certainly a role to play. ultimately, though, I'm very big on proactive and proactive activities. another one, that that we hear often is, oh, they're not closing enough.
Hamish Knox
Hey. Okay. Fair. what it could mean is they don't actually know how to qualify properly. and the and what they're doing is they're forking proposals or doing demos for anybody who pops up and says, hey, I saw you existed. Can you give me a demo? And the seller's like, absolutely, I can. And that ultimately ends up as turning the funnel into more like a stomach in an antacid commercial, which for the leader can be really, really frustrating.
Hamish Knox
So those are a couple of sales examples on the on the leadership side, we will often hear about turnover. Right? I have too much turnover in my in my sales team. And a lot of times what we discover is it's the hire and forget model. Right. So hey Hamish, welcome aboard. Go sell stuff like okay, boss, what am I supposed to do with that?
Hamish Knox
And then ultimately they leave for an organization they feel are going to support them. So there's not really a coaching culture, there. And then also we might hear, yeah. We're just we can't find the right people. And very similar to, to not qualifying on the sales side, what we often find is that especially in the SMB side, there's a lack of structure around ideal candidate profiles.
Hamish Knox
Like what does a successful seller look like in this organization? And often that's because the founder entrepreneur owner has been doing it themselves. And then when someone walks in and goes, I can sell for you, they're like, sounds good to me because I don't want to do that anymore.
Al Kinnear
Totally. So we've talked about strategic sales ops, right. And some leadership. Can you talk to me a bit about the communication gaps? You see, because to me that that is an important piece of of sales enablement training is proper go to market communication. And not only that communication within teams from leadership etc.. just touch on communication. For me.
Hamish Knox
I love that because ultimately whenever we are communicating with another human being internally, externally, professionally, personally, our number one goal is to create clarity. And especially I say this to the leaders we support on a regular basis. If your people don't understand what is expected of them, that's on us. As leaders, we need to be able to to to create clarity.
Hamish Knox
So very big believer in checklists are superior to scripts. And that can be a checklist for an SDR like the SDR gets the inbound lead. What are the boxes that they need to check to qualify that to shift it over to an A? If we're talking about like an enterprise environment and like I had some experience with a company who was very big on scripts, and they had an inside sales rep who was drilled in the script.
Hamish Knox
And the first day that they were allowed to be on the phones, they were overheard to say good morning. Name? Like they didn't last. I'm just going to put that out there. So then also, how do we bridge the gap between sales and delivery in terms of communication? So when I sold SAS, I messed up because I would say, yeah, al, looking forward to working with you.
Hamish Knox
Somebody in our onboarding team will be in touch with you to schedule training. And I have yet to meet an organization that employs somebody, a company name. and so two weeks later, I'm getting an angry phone call from you going, Who is Catherine and why is she harassing me? It's like, oh, Catherine's the head of our implementation team.
Hamish Knox
I could have done a warm handoff between you and Catherine to smooth the process of implementation. and that's that's my fault. So ultimately, having that common language that that one language, that one go to market from marketing all the way through implementation, delivery and then account management is crucial to creating a sustainable sales organization. So from an Helena perspective, what is the messaging that we want each of those groups to know and to be able to access easily?
Hamish Knox
Because we got a lot of stuff to keep in our heads, and we're not going to remember all of it. So if there's not a place where someone on the client facing team can easily access content, that's a gap that that can be filled by and to support the sales organization.
Al Kinnear
so true. Right? My first boss in Calgary was Greg Stabby, and, he's the owner operator of a really large retail paint and decorating, independent store. And he believed in one site, one sound for sales communication, and he preached it. And this is 1998, 1999. And and Greg's mantra was, it doesn't matter who the client visits with in our store places, we need to have the same communication and the same client expectation of our staff.
Al Kinnear
And so and was really important on the retail sales floor, as you can imagine. And I'm sure you, assist in. And so, yeah, I completely subscribe to that belief and, and, it it's not just for retail. One site, one sound needs to be across every sales organization and sales operation, right from Stem to stern leadership all the way down to supporting roles.
Al Kinnear
I think it's critical to the success. And that is, you know, it was kind of the magic sauce that absorb found, through dealing with with Sandler and through developing our own sales enablement strategies that worked in our SAS industry. And so, that's just an excellent point. You'd mentioned turnover. And I think in these challenging times, there's also the flip side of that is retention.
Al Kinnear
And so what conversations are you having Hamish currently? You know, dealing with retention or that kind of gap with with sales leaders?
Hamish Knox
I love these conversations. And as one of my clients says, Hamish makes it sound really easy. And yes, I do. It's not simple though, right? So it may sound really easy. It's ultimately not simple. The one overarching belief that that I have and that and I can play it out in my own career and that we share with our leaders, is our team members do not work for us because they love us or they love our business.
Hamish Knox
They work for us because in some way, they believe that working for us is going to get them closer to their personal goals faster than working for somebody else. And whenever a team member leaves and they're going to say, probably more money, or they might say more flexibility, or they might say a bigger title or whatever. It's all code for.
Hamish Knox
I can go to this other organization and get closer to my personal goals faster. So number one thing that we ask all of our leaders to do is understand the personal goals for each member of their, of their team, whoever reports to them directly and then tie success of their personal goals to success of their corporate goals, whatever those goals might be.
Hamish Knox
And it does require a little bit of vulnerability, because we actually suggest that the leader shares their personal goals with their team member first because of reciprocity, because they go first and the team members like, well, boss shared theirs, I should share mine. And there was a client, of Sandler's out in, out in the east coast of the U.S, sales leader had 300 people in their in their organization.
Hamish Knox
They posted their personal goals every quarter on the company intranet and gave permission to any member of their organization to hold them accountable. And they were a road cyclist. So as a road cyclist, you got to be putting a lot of miles on your bike. And they they shared, with us one time that they were walking out the door and they were trying to sneak out.
Hamish Knox
They were they admitted they were trying to sneak out so they could get a row right in. And the person at the front door said, hey, have a great ride. Out of curiosity, have you? And they reference one of their weekly personal goals. And this leader turned around and say, I, you caught me. You know what, I haven't?
Hamish Knox
And I was trying to sneak out. They went back and it was like a 20 minute thing, right? They got it done. They walked back out and they said, I'll see you tomorrow. And they went and had a ride. And shockingly, their team consistently crushed their targets because of that vulnerability of that leader that rolled down all the way to, the front lines.
Hamish Knox
So from a retention standpoint, do you understand the personal goals of each member of your team? If you don't, I'd encourage you to do that, because when our team members believe that we truly care about their personal success, they will support us in creating success in our business.
Al Kinnear
Yeah, that's true. Awards were never spoken. I think, you know, the the we're currently what we've been referring to, in several conversations in a post-pandemic rebound. and retention is part of that. Can you touch on how the pandemic impacted Sandler and yourself, your training programs, and what have you learned from that? Like I'll use your term.
Al Kinnear
What were the moments that you learned during the pandemic that you're now applying to greater benefit to yourselves and your clients? Kind of in this post-pandemic rebound?
Hamish Knox
Yeah, thanks for asking. Well, so, we seamlessly shifted over to, interactive remote learning. So, I appreciate that for a lot of professionals, when they hear video training, that's code for, oh, that's a webinar. They're going to turn their camera off and they'll be on their email or whatever. For us. There's no hiding in our sessions.
Hamish Knox
And you got to experience that, as well. It's, we call people out, respectfully. and so what we learned is, we are really giving the individuals that we support sellers and leaders primarily a safe place to commiserate and celebrate and cajole and work together, that we are continuing, to, to leverage as we, as we have come out of the pandemic because sales is tough.
Hamish Knox
We all know that leadership is tough. We all know that because oftentimes we feel completely alone. And what we can get in a room full of individuals that all have the same problems, we just happened to call them different things. That alone can be really powerful from a learning perspective, because if we don't feel safe, we can't learn anything.
Hamish Knox
We're in survival mode. And so what we really learned, our big was we are providing mental and emotional support to two groups, to two primary groups, sellers and leaders that really cannot find that unless they're sitting on a couch and paying someone with a lot of letters after their name, to, to talk to them. And then further to that, what we are discovering is our learners love the video because they can access it from anywhere.
Hamish Knox
It can be part of in their role. They can be if they go on site, they can be sitting in the parking lot in front of their buyers, building, and they can click in, they can get a quick hit, some insights, and then they can go in and have a more successful meeting. and there is a point of in-person there is that energy that that happens when people are all pulled together in the same physical space.
Hamish Knox
And I remember a couple of the workshops that we did with, with your team, now that we had everybody in the same room and just the level of energy really, really elevated the learning opportunities. So video, interactive remote learning, super critical. We've got to make it engaging. That was the key learning that we had. I tell my team that we are putting on live theater every week.
Hamish Knox
That's what we're doing. We're putting on a live theater. And if our learners are not engaged in the play, they're not coming back and we're doing a disservice to them. Also, we need to give our learners an opportunity to engage with us in the same physical space, because that actually enhances the learning.
Al Kinnear
Got it. And so we've got LMS, you've got classroom event based training coaching and your on demand resources. Do you have an ultimate blend like when you're talking to one of your clients or an lab leader? How do you how do you discuss the proper blend and does it change over time? Oh, and also is there an impact of small business versus enterprise this what are your thoughts there.
Hamish Knox
Yeah yeah. And there's no there's no magic formula. It's not like 25%. There's 25% that so there's out of roll and then there'll be enroll. That's kind of how we, we classify it. So out of roll goal is we're literally pulling people out of their role, whatever that role might be. to be in a, an instructor led or facilitator led session.
Hamish Knox
Now that could be in the same physical space. And then you've got, time investments and travel investments and all that. Or it could be on video either ways. Fine. and then you've got enroll and enroll is. I've got a meeting in 15 minutes. I need a thing to help me out. And that's where LMS comes in.
Hamish Knox
That's where playbook comes in. and that's also a little bit where coaching comes in, where if we have someone that can support us, whether it's a peer or our leader with a quick role play, I'm a huge believer in role play, improv based role play, especially because improv is about staying present and actively listening, which are two really good skills in, in sales and leadership.
Hamish Knox
So ultimately we need some kind of, I kick off, in in medical terms, they call it a bolus, which is like you take an extra helping of medicine right up front to kind of kick the medicine into your system. And then you, you moderate it over time. So we do some kind of a I kick off whether that's, two day thing or we spread it out over a series of weeks and then we go into some kind of a reinforcement.
Hamish Knox
And that reinforcement is really going to be designed around the organization and what their cycles are. So in an SMB space, they can typically afford to have some kind of an ongoing, regular, you know, engagement, whether that's weekly, bi weekly, whatever in the enterprise space, because of the number of people and B, the, the type of selling that you're doing and the complexities oftentimes that there's the kickoff and then the reinforcement is a little less regular in terms of instructor led.
Hamish Knox
And it's much more driven by the LMS and the playbook with resources assigned, tracked, etc., etc.. And we're really comes in a importance here. Is are the front line sales managers reinforcing the content because if the sales managers, the front line sales managers, and then of course, the next level up of sales leadership, if they're not reinforcing the content outside of the instructor led sessions, it becomes flavor of the month.
Hamish Knox
And so that's why we really believe that in anything that anybody does from an LED these perspective, leaders go first and leaders need to be actively involved in the sessions. And because if it's not, the sellers are like, this is a flavor of the month thing, this too shall pass. And then all that time and money that was invested in setting up the program, delivering the initial engagement, etc. etc. all goes to waste.
Al Kinnear
Got it. So you you, brought up role play and you know, you also brought up vulnerabilities earlier on. And if I was to share a vulnerability of my own, it's I'm just not comfortable doing role play. And and it's it's so critical to include that in the LND from a sales enablement perspective, how do you help someone such as myself who just doesn't feel that comfortable?
Al Kinnear
I like I would do it in your sessions, but it's hard for me to do that with my staff members. So what are your tips and tricks there? Because it's critical. It's easy for sales leaders to gloss over it like that word doesn't exist. I'm just going to pretend it didn't tell me to do that and I'll ignore it.
Al Kinnear
But I shouldn't. So how do I overcome that?
Hamish Knox
well, it's, you know, it's not going to happen overnight, right? Humans are not light switches. so it ultimately comes down to practicing in a safe place. I believe the hardest four inches to move in our life is brain to mouth. Like, it's all well and good to sit in a session or watch a video or whatever and be like, that sounds like a really good thing to say to one of my team members, or say to a buyer, I'm never going to do it, but it sounds really good coming out of their mouth.
Hamish Knox
So we we need to make it safe. I, I, I had bad will play actually it may still exist online. I wrote an article probably 15, 20 years ago, called, Role Plays useless. And literally that was the headline. And it was because I had bad rule play done to me, which is the leader walks in and goes, let's role play.
Hamish Knox
you you're my, victim. Well, they don't say that, but that's what happens. And then the leader's like, plays the boogie prospect like that person who doesn't exist in the real world. And then the the seller who they're role playing with feels like they're getting beat up. They don't feel supported. They feel like they're getting a butt kicking.
Hamish Knox
And so what we encourage is, number one again, improv. Right. So there's no script. There's no script. Right. So we have a platform. Where are we in the sales process. Right. Is it an initial contact or are we like half. Are we into our fourth meeting, whatever it might be. so we have to set a give ourselves a setting.
Hamish Knox
We also want to thin slice the role play. So, Anders Erickson, who wrote the book peak, that's where the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell was quoted comes from. all professionals in slice their practice. So, like, someone in an orchestra. I like a violinist in orchestra. Doesn't try to play all of a Bach symphony at once.
Hamish Knox
They pick one section and they do it over and over and over and over again. And, you and I have a, a shared passion of lacrosse out. And so, you know, I'm not going to go and shoot, you know, try to hit every corner of the net. I'm going to pick one corner of the net, and I'm going to shoot 100 balls at that corner until I can nail that corner.
Hamish Knox
Every single time. So we really want to thin slice it, and then we want to show our sellers that we've got it. So this is where the anxiety sometimes comes in for leaders, because we say that the leader has to go first because adults learn by imitation and repetition. And so if the the leader goes first, they can demonstrate what behavior or how they want our buyers to engage in that, you know, one site, one message.
Hamish Knox
And then we ask them to debrief. So we run a rule play and I go, hey al, how'd that sound to you? You're my seller. And you say, you know what, Haymitch? That was pretty good. They say, you know what? I'm glad to hear that. You know what? That was how I would do it. How would you do it?
Hamish Knox
How would you say the things that I said? And then you say whatever, and I say, great, let's do it again. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to role play using your words, because humans tend not to listen to the words that they say the first time they come out of their mouth. So when I feed you back your own words in a respectful way and I go, hey, al, how'd that go?
Hamish Knox
You're like, man, that was really good, right? Because it's your stuff. And then I say, great, al, I've gone twice. I only need you to go once. How about we flip the roles and then we flip the roles? And again, I can't be the bogey prospect, so. And then we. And then we do that very gently, very easily.
Hamish Knox
That's that what I just talked about. You can do in 20 minutes or less. So the best way to get over anxiety, like with a rule plane, it's kind of like if anything you just got to do it. And so maybe you pick one of the people in your sales team, or maybe to Peter. Right? Maybe. Maybe you go to your lab, pier and you say, hey, can I role play a scenario with you?
Hamish Knox
I want to get more comfortable with it. And of course, because they want to hold you safe, they want to support you. So you do a couple of practices, and then you can go out to your team and say, all right, guys, we're going to role play. This is what it's going to look like. And then you just rock and roll from there.
Hamish Knox
And that is going to massively accelerate your team.
Al Kinnear
Well again Hamish, that's excellent advice on role play and something I personally need to work on. And one day I might commit to doing so. excellent. I want to talk to you. Now, you've mentioned cultural culture several times in our discussion here. And yeah, what is the role of the sales culture in the plan of your sales enablement?
Al Kinnear
And, and, and, you know, earlier in our podcast we spoke to Aaron's. They created this award winning land program that that it became a cultural moment in their business. it moved the needle on their sales floor. But it's it it really assisted with retention and, and just the communication throughout their kind of hierarchy. So, you know, I have to ask, like in your experience, what is the role of sales culture and how aware should the leader be?
Al Kinnear
Well, they're, you know, creating this new sales enablement facet in their program.
Hamish Knox
I'm so glad you asked that out. so as as you know, I am a behavior guy, right? I don't really care what people say. I really care about what they do. and so, stepping back, I've written about this a bunch. Corporate culture is the behavior that is approved implicitly and explicitly. That's it doesn't matter what fancy things we've got or whether, written down or the what have we done the offsite, our corporate culture.
Hamish Knox
And I'm going to tie this to sales culture is the behavior that's approved implicitly, explicitly. So we look at sales culture. Is the sales culture one that, sellers are allowed to sandbag. Right. They're allowed to, to, to, to puff up what their, their funnel looks like. And then come to the end of the quarter like, sorry, boss.
Hamish Knox
yeah. Stuff got pushed and, and the leader's like, yeah, okay, I guess that happens. Or does the leader actually require that anything that goes in the funnel is actually qualified is actually a real opportunity. So from an Airbnb, professional who is looking to design a successful sales enablement program, that's a really key thing. What is the behavior that is approved from the sales leader all the way down through front line sales managers to those front line sellers, implicitly and explicitly, through the rockstars get to show up five minutes late for meetings with with no penalties.
Hamish Knox
Like, what is that all about? Because the success or failure of a sales enablement program is going to be built around the behavior and the commitment to not only being fully present and fully engaged in whatever, learning is going on, whether it's out overall or enroll. Also implementation, because everything works out like everything works. So you go to any Ted talk or whatever, it all works.
Hamish Knox
But if it all, it just stays up in our brain and it never comes out of our mouth, or it doesn't change how we interact with our buyers or our team members, it's all it's all useless. So, the other thing to remember is humans are not light switches. I mentioned this earlier, right? We're we're we're creatures of our comfort zone.
Hamish Knox
And so if there is not an ongoing reinforcement component to the sales enablement plan, our sellers and our leaders are going to fall back eventually to what made them, quote unquote, successful previously, which is everybody marching to the beat of their own drummer. It's not creating that, online or that that one, communication style going forward. also, sometimes, Uncle Hamish has to come in and say things that Mom or Dad has been saying for for a while.
Hamish Knox
So from an indie professional perspective, looking at who is going to be that uncle or aunt coming in to reinforce what mom or dad has been saying for a while. And in fact, you know, pre-COVID, we were doing a session, and, as seller in the front of the room asked me a question. Yeah. I can't remember what the question was.
Hamish Knox
It was something to do with engaging with a buyer. And I said, well, you know, here's a couple of ideas. And, and I said, well, what do you think about that? Like, oh, those are great ideas. And in the back of the room, I saw their sales manager literally put their their face in their hands. And so at the break, I walked over to them.
Hamish Knox
I said, was I offsite? Did I say something that was was inappropriate to your seller? They said, no, I've been saying that exact same thing to them for seven months. So occasionally what is being said by the leader is not resonating with the front line, and we need to bring in someone, whether it's an internal resource or an external resource, to reinforce those messages so that the sellers in the front line sales managers go, oh, I get it now.
Al Kinnear
Yeah, I think the challenge is a sales leader is that you've only got so much time, but you've got a lot of verbs and nouns that you are presenting to your team. And so somebody gets lost in translation, you know, and by bringing in a third party to reinforce and message on those, it can be critical to the success.
Al Kinnear
So I, I firmly believe that there's a role for outside third parties in a well crafted strategy. because as I, you know, I, I use it all the time. But you, when you run out of oxygen as a coach or as a sales leader, well, your career is not over, right? Your sales team might not be as reactive as they once were, but you can still reinforce the activities you need and the the outcomes you're looking for with the the, you know, the help of a third party such as Sandler or, or, you know, interesting speakers to get it done.
Al Kinnear
So we worked with Sandler on our sales executives solutions engineers, rolled it out, you know, made it client facing across the company, and then Covid hits. And we were challenged to try and figure out, well, how do we keep this momentum going? Because, you know, the pandemic created a lot of sales activity for a learning management company. And it was it was some days it was terrifying.
Al Kinnear
Everyone needed product and they needed it yesterday. And we still need it to be engaging with our sales teams to make sure that that we were doing the proper job of the buyer's journey. Right. So you and I came up with these lunch and learns and and I think this was a cultural moment at absorb for our sales team.
Al Kinnear
essentially we were having one hour meetings, I believe it was every three weeks, and it was across the board, everyone who could make it from executives down to support staff through every department, the entire hierarchy was invited. And then Hamish would actually break us out into rooms up to ten. Sometimes I don't remember how many folks would be in each room, but it was 4 or 5.
Al Kinnear
Sometimes. And I have to tell you that when the CFO and an SDR and a solutions engineer get to talk and discuss a topic that you were challenging them with for role play, etc., there are so many barriers broken, and I really think it's hard to put into words, but I will tell you that the the feedback we receive from those lunch and learns where it was just group sessions, we had people from three continents joining us, Australia, Europe and North America.
Al Kinnear
I just have to say that that that was our cultural moment. But it's important to find one, I think, to make sure that the accelerator is still on. You know, you're you're you can't just flavor of the month is a very good comment. It you have to keep momentum in your learning and development when it comes to sales enablement, because people will just stop attending.
Al Kinnear
So you have to tell stories, do role play, you know, and really find a cultural moment to hang your hat on for the moment, to keep the gas, you know, the foot on the pedal, right. And do you agree with those comments?
Hamish Knox
Yeah. It was it was really amazing because I remember I remember hearing that, because during Covid also, I recall that absorb rapidly expanded their sales group and their client facing group. And I remember some comments about we sometimes we're just building rapport because we've literally never met each other. And like I remember a couple of times, you know, we go or we just do a quick whip round and I say, oh, I have, you know, have I met you before?
Hamish Knox
Nice to meet you. And, tell me a bit. Oh, it's my second day on the job. I was like, well, you're getting sort of the deep end of the pool. Hi, I'm Hamish, get ready. and and it was really powerful to see. And also, it highlights a really important point to, reinforce for the people is over time, we need to adjust the topics that we're talking about because.
Hamish Knox
And go back to things that people think that they quote unquote know, we have, we've been fortunate in Calgary to work with several individual sellers who are self-funding. So they're taking after tax dollars out of their own pocket to better themselves. And there's one seller in particular, I will remember this forever. They've been with us for four years.
Hamish Knox
You know, we've seen us pretty much weekly in our sales group for four years at another client. Ask a question. I again can't remember what it was about. And I said, oh, you know, a couple of bits of information to what do you think about that? And on the other side of the room, the seller puts their hand up and I said, yeah.
Hamish Knox
And they said, I'd never heard you talk about that before. And in my head I was like, I can show you the prep notes for like 12 sessions where I've talked about that. Now, I didn't say that because that's not a good way to keep rapport with a client. What I did say, though, was, I'm so glad that you got to hear that now when you needed it, instead of us doing a bootcamp four years ago and you never would have forgotten about it, and you got it.
Hamish Knox
You you got supported on that today. So we have to have this blend of quote unquote new stuff or stuff that's in the moment. But then also so bringing back things that the client facing group might think that they've already got. Because as human beings, when we think we've got something we usually don't. And so from an LRT perspective, we want to make sure we have this nice blend of topics that are critical in at the time and also are reinforcing what has already come before.
Al Kinnear
And so when you talk about reinforcement, I would imagine this is where you lean on coaching. This is the role of coaching, in your belief of of the proper approach.
Hamish Knox
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very very much so. So if we look at you know we've talked about like doing the kickoff, we've talked about engaging with a piece of content in an LMS. leader best practice leader role plays once a week individually with every team member. Again it could be less than 20 minutes. based on what we talked about.
Hamish Knox
and then eventually transitioning to something like an office hour type perspective. That's for the for the client facing team. For the leaders. they need their own coaching. They need their own training. And so to make that part of the sales enablement. So the, the, the leaders have a structure to coach by because a lot of times when someone gets promoted into a sales management role or sales leadership role, they haven't had proper training on how to coach and how to hold people accountable and how to do territory management.
Hamish Knox
So what it amounts to is either like buddy buddy, like, hey al, how was your weekend? Okay, go, go sell stuff, champ. Or it's hey al, my tummy thinks that you're not performing and my tummy is not a good judge of performance. So we need to have real data and we need to have a structure. So the coaching is not an event.
Hamish Knox
It becomes an ongoing part of that reinforcement as well.
Al Kinnear
Right? Okay. So you know we've really talked about assessment filling gaps. Once you read that assessment you know communication is clearly key to an LED strategy when it comes to sales enablement. And then we work on coaching and reinforcement. Yes. Is there anything we're missing from the overall plan if we're just building a thumbnail sketch here for, sales enablement and what have we missed?
Hamish Knox
So the the big part these days is that in role, development. So that's definitely where an element or a playbook comes in handy. That's where there's, companies out there that have got like AI avatars that we can role play with in certain scenarios. So it's how can we support the learner, whatever role they are in the organization, how can we support the learner with access to content on demand that will support them where they're at and get them to where they want to be in that moment?
Hamish Knox
Not necessarily over time, in that moment. So if I'm a leader and I need to go have a performance improvement plan conversation with one of my team, is there a resource on demand that I can watch or engage with so I can go in there to have a more effective human to human interaction on a on a buyer front?
Hamish Knox
if I'm going into my first, demo with, with a, with a big company, I'm good down here. But once I get into that elephant whale category, that's a different beast. Are there resources on demand that I can engage with to prepare me to do a successful demo with a large buyer? So that's the other really key thing for professionals is all of the human to human stuff is very important.
Hamish Knox
That sort of out of role staffing and the coaching that the leader's going to do. There's also got to be an enroll on demand component, that sellers and managers and leaders can access. And that might sound like a big lift. I get it. The key thing is just start, just put one thing in and then build it up over time.
Hamish Knox
If we try to wait to build out a whole thing, it becomes like Wikipedia versus Microsoft Encarta, like Wikipedia just started. Microsoft spend however many years building out their encyclopedia, and by the time they launched it, it was out of date anyways.
Al Kinnear
And these on demand resources like they live in the LMS, right? And it's important to start your content library with very powerful information and nuggets of advice, because then people become prone to returning to it a lot different than to me, a SharePoint resource which is just full of links. And, if you've got a very prescriptive resource area in your LMS, that's where that on demand stuff can live, and it'll prove powerful.
Al Kinnear
So that's great advice. finally, I would love to wrap this episode with a story of client success. Like what is the best piece of advice you can give to an LD professional looking to spin up their sales training, fill those gaps for the first time, and impact clients, employees, and you know, success in a company.
Hamish Knox
So the the thing that I love about what I do is it's ultimately about supporting our clients as whole human beings. So we've had clients who have, successfully found personal partners, using, you know, quote unquote sales training techniques because it's all human to human. we've had people who have, you know, gone from I've never been in sales or around salespeople.
Hamish Knox
I'm an ops person. oh, crap. I'm now the sales manager. I've got three direct reports, and within six months they were managing a team of 15, and they had increased their sales funnel by 78% of qualified leads. and so from an Allen perspective, it it comes down to identifying again that that as is versus to be and understanding that the organization is going to get most of the way there already because they've got momentum, they've got processes.
Hamish Knox
They're already awesome. It was you described, you know, we engaged after I think you had been in a sales leadership role for like ten years, and you guys were crushing it. And so it's what what is that what is that gap that, that we can we can close by leveraging, internal resources, third party support and make it sustained.
Hamish Knox
Well, so the the failure of a lot of sales enablement programs come from an event. Hey, we brought in a speaker in January to pump the team up. Hey, we brought a speaker in in September to motivate the team. So they hit their targets for the rest of the year. But anything that is an event is quickly forgotten, especially in the pace of, change that we're going in today.
Hamish Knox
So how can as an indie professional, we can map? Where are we today to where do we want to be and meet our learners where they are instead of where we think they should be, is a really key component of that. if we try to match where we think they should be, that's kind of like a football coach coming in and saying, well, I know I've got a great quarterback and great wide receivers, but I'm a running guy, so I'm going to run the ball.
Hamish Knox
It's like, great. You're completely ignoring the talent you have on the team, figure out where your team is, and then we can successfully design a path to get them to where they want to be. That's great.
Al Kinnear
Well, Hamish, thank you so much for, you know, joining us today. And I I've completely enjoyed this conversation, as I always do with you. And just wish you best of luck in the future and, look forward to speaking with you again.
Hamish Knox
Thank you Al. I had a blast.
