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Why product training hurts your team.
Why product training hurts your team.
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Friday, November 12th, 2021
Why product training is not the right approach and what you can do to help your sales team.
I’m out of the country right now working with a small group of salespeople on their mindset and some sales approaches. One common thread that salespeople are struggling with - how their employers are letting them down by insisting they focus on traditional product training. In this week’s newsletter I go deep on why that’s a problem and what to do about it. Enjoy this week’s email …. because who doesn’t want a bluebird every week…
#1 - Something to help your team be more effective
Most product training is hurting, not helping, the sales team. How many times do we see leaders, by default, push for product training if there is a focus on sales teams increasing their sales or a change in their product? Commonly, this means that someone who's very knowledgeable about it will tell us all about the product. All the new things and features sales should be emphasizing. How amazing the whizz-bang widget in the bottom left corner is. We fill the minds of our sellers with product-orientated information, and naturally this is the topic area they focus on.What’s wrong with that? It’s the wrong narrative to focus on. It’s about them and not the most important one, the potential customer. The prospect’s starting point is:
their own challenges
their priorities
their problems they're trying to solve right now, not our product.
We have to meet them there, from the start. If we don’t we will continue to hear our prospects say, "Oh, all they do is pitch the product." or "All they do is tell us about their product."And we will miss opportunities.
What should we do?
We should fill our minds with knowledge about our prospects first, second and third. THEN we can fill in the gaps with product information. That's how we're going to redress the balance.
idea to change #1 - have specific training on personas and have it all the time.
Often sales playbooks are focused on use cases. It's the idea that the product will actually help our customers with these use cases. And we train the sellers in the use case, and we explain what it's all about. And somewhere in that document is going to be a list of personas that care about that use case. The trouble is that salespeople don't meet with use cases. They meet with people. If your playbook is based around use cases, you are asking your sales team to then translate that information for the person they're about to meet. This is just wrong.
What should we do?
Instead, the playbook and training should start with personas. Do all the training around the persona, and part of that will be use cases that persona cares about. The more we understand the persona, the more we can empathize with the people that we talk to. We can ask better questions. We can offer better solutions. We can connect better with them as humans. All of this leads to more useful and valuable conversations. Here are some examples of persona first training:
A day in the life of the target personas
What do they do?
What does their general day to day look like?
What are the demands of them?
What sort of reports do they have to run?
What security alerts do they have to look for?
What happens around them?
Do they work nights and weekends?
What external factors impact their lives
How are they measured?
What matters to them when they are prioritizing their time day to day?
Have a defined structure for a persona-based playbook. It might include:
What their activities are in their role
What kind of fears and frustrations they experience
What are competing demands of their time
Who are they in conflict usually inside the organization?
What are they usually frustrated about in terms of our product area that we might care about?
Good opening questions. Value-based discovery questions.
Understand the different roles in the teams you work with
If you're going to meet the head of the SOC, it’s useful for the sellers to understand not just what the SOC leader does, but the different roles underneath them.
How do they structure their team?
What do the different teams or individuals underneath them do?
And how are the roles and responsibilities divided up between them all?
idea to change #2 - start every training with your target persona
This is especially relevant for sales kickoffs. We’ve all been onto too many SKOs where the presenters are out of touch and spend too much time boring us with company-specific information. Don’t let this happen at your next one!
What should we do?
Demand that all product training delivered by people on your team has to start with the persona. Set your expectations with all presenters ahead of time and make it clear that failing to meet these expectations will result in termination.
If you tell presenters that the first 20% of their session at any training has to start with the orientation of our prospects. Then, you can begin to change how they think about enabling the team.
For example, if there's a new feature being released soon, the presenter could say, "You know when the SOC leader told us that they struggle with A, B and C. and it's impacting their team in XYZ ways as well as the overall effectiveness of their programs? Well, our new release coming up has a new feature in it that's going to provide a solution for that."
Even just that simple reframing is going to really help the sales team.
idea to change #3 - immerse the sales team in the persona
Set expectations with the sales team that they should be immersed in the persona. Their activities in their territory or with their target accounts means that they're immersed with their prospects.
What should we do?
Once a month on your team call invite a customer to talk about their role and how you help make their lives easier
Use snippets from the interview on an internal podcast
Attend industry events such as ISSA meetings
Meet with people socially or informally
Hold a “Champions Day” every 6 months when the decision makers of your customer get together to discuss how they are transforming their programs using your product
Make win wires REAL. From start to finish, describe the main interactions with customers. Maybe invite new customers to a call where they can share feedback on what they were doing before buying your product. Describe the problems you will solve for them.
CISO podcasts
CISO youtube channels
These are 3 ideas to move away from harmful product training to helping your team understand their target persona.
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1 more thing from me
Bite Size Sales podcast
“As leaders, building a really effective culture is being interested vs interesting”
-Dan Parelskin
We all know culture can far outweigh other variables when it comes to your team’s performance, their individual well-being, and overall success at your company. We also know that throwing a happy hour isn’t exactly a sticky solution. So what actionable, impactful, long term steps can you take now?
Listen to what Dan has to say….you won’t be disappointed.
Something for job seekers
Wiz is on a rocketship trajectory right now as they change how organizations do cloud security. They are attracting amazing sales talent and have openings across the board right now - BDR, enterprise, mid-market, sales leaders etc… Openings >>>
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Dad joke of the week
What did one eye say to the other eye?“Between you and me, something smells.”
Wishing you growth and accomplishment next week,
Andrew Monaghan
Chief Bluebird
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