¶ Operationalizing Sandler Training for sales success.
Hey everybody, welcome to another how to succeed that podcast. This is the show that helps you get to the top in that stay there. And this week we're talking about how to operationalize your Sandler Training and get your sales operations up to speed with Dino coo. He is from revenue reveal revenue revealed that SCO is the website. He's the founder there but he has been involved with Singler over 10 years have been in sales operations and all kinds of interesting roles as
well. So we're going to talk about how he applies it and how we can help you apply it and how we can make a difference. That up this revenue generating machine for your company here. With podcast this week is brought to you by Sandler, the worldwide leader in sales management and customer service training with over 200 locations more information@sandler.com
Here we go. All right, Daniel, tell me a little bit about your experience with Sandler and how you figured out how to operationalize maybe the behavioral and communication processes that we teach in our training.
Yeah, I stumbled across Sandler around 10 years ago, I actually used to work at a sales training company called sales relief. With a guy by the name of Jamie Shanks, his whole big thing was enabling companies sales reps on social selling, getting active on LinkedIn. And during that time, we hired a sales trainer who was a big believer in or Sandler, he knew everything from offering contracts to paying funnel laying and staying behind the pendulum. And he gave me this
book. never teach a kid how to ride a bicycle or something like that.
You can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seven Yes, it's
somewhere in the back. Actually, I need to reject my memory. I read that book. And I was like, wow, I knew everything I knew about sales was wrong until that moment. And that's where I dived into the funnel of learning everything about Sandler listening to podcasts, watching videos, watching old clips, getting into the different books. And throughout the years, I met a guy by the name of Chris Kelly, who's our sales trainer in Toronto. And every sales team
I've built, recruited. We've all always gone through his training. And he's been a big proponent of me and my Sandler journey, learning everything from crafting a cookbook for myself, to training my team on how do you do an upfront contract as well. So I'm I bleed Sandler. So let's say, I
love that. And I appreciate you taking some time to talk about it with us. Because I think when we talk to clients on this podcast, it's really interesting. I think a couple of good questions to start with in the attitude bucket is what were some of those common myths and misconceptions that you found in the bike book and then learned that you needed to change in your your sales or your sales team from Sandler? Or maybe what was something you wish you had
known sooner? Either in operationalizing Sandler or in your sales career that could have really changed the game for you?
Yeah, I think the biggest learning for me in the attitude bucket is I always assumed everyone just came to their job with the right attitude and behavior. I thought, you know, most folks were motivated, they wanted to hit their quota, they knew exactly what it took to have the right attitude. They studied, read books, focused on self development, and really motivated. It was until I became a leader and a sales manager where I realized, yeah, that's
not the right way to think about it. Not everyone comes into it, having the right attitude. And so a big thing I learned was, well, how do you operationalize your team to have the right attitude? It was about, you know, whether you're starting from scratch and hiring a team? How do you get them to realize, hey, if you don't have the right attitude, this is not the right
role for you? Or even the first two weeks? How do you set the upfront contract for this role and talk about here are the five or 10 attitude behaviors you need to be successful in your role. And more importantly, we're going to check in on a one on one basis, it's going to be part of your reassessment reviews, we're going to listen to calls to make sure you're showing up the confidence in the right attitude as well. And so there's different touch points to make sure your team is
following the right attitude. And that was, that was the biggest learning where yeah, not everyone potentially has the right attitude. But most folks have the right intention. They
¶ Sales coaching and attitude, with a focus on emotional steps and buyer psychology.
just need a bit of coaching enablement and a bit of help us well.
I guess if you look at those individual salespeople, do you think that there is a particularly big myth or misconception that you have to maybe put in those upfront contracts in the onboarding? You spent most of your time in SAS, so maybe I can narrow it down there too. Is there something different about selling SAS that people get wrong?
I think with selling SAS I look it as regardless of your selling SAS or financial services, or manufacturing, selling or selling, it's emotional steps you, there's some buyer psychology and you're trying to align your sales process with a person's buying journey. I think the nuances in SAS is that SAS is cool now. So there's an influx of talent into SAS. And sometimes we get an influx of talent, there's a gap
between a top performer and a laggard performer. Right. And with the laggard performer, you have to get them out of the organization, or have those hard conversations about what is the right attitude for being successful in this organization. At the same time, it's a it's a conversation about whether it's effort, knowledge or skills, are they putting the right effort in meaning, for example, on the prospecting side? Are they having the right activities? Are they asking for referrals? Are
they doing cold callers? On the knowledge side? Do they have the right knowledge, maybe there's a gap in what they learned, and they just need more coaching and enablement from that aspect. And then the skill side, hey, maybe the knowledge isn't translated, they haven't built that skill, or they haven't had reps yet. So you can spend a lot more time on coaching through that process, or even spending time and roleplay. Right? How do you set
up an offering contract? Or how do you ask question down payment funnel? I like to look at it from that standpoint.
Now, I want to ask you about revenue reveal, because you do some interesting things. And it might take us right into the B havior. bucket here. But also from an attitude perspective. What can you set up and measure? And what part is sort of the soft skills, leadership? People side of things? Because I find it always an interesting question, that today with AI and everything, people are trying to measure everything and quantify everything and create robots
that can do your cold calls for you and stuff. And then there's also some just Heart to Heart people, things you know, somebody's having a bad day or a bad breakup or, or something. And like, that's just going to need a human manager. How do you think about things when you're thinking about operationalizing? All this stuff?
Yeah, how I've looked at it is I think there's, there's two things, the one is for the leader, and the second is for the rep for the leader, I've always followed a cookbook of things I need to do on a weekly basis to instill the right attitude. So every Sunday, I would say for rep named Bob, a rep named Sally, I would say, I need to provide one affirmation, or I need to review one cold email or one cold call or one discovery calling, give two pieces of feedback, but also
three pieces of positive reinforcement for them. And then that creates a consistent flywheel of listening to calls providing feedback, helping them get into the right attitude. For the rep itself. I think once you start getting into the motion, whether you're succeeding or not just building the repetition. And sometimes it's just a numbers game where you get the right attitude, you get the win, and it instills that confidence.
Yeah, I think with sales, you just have to ride the momentum when you have it, how you quantify attitude, whatever, then you have to be human, right? Everyone's gonna have a bad day. I always just say, hey, whatever your vision is, let's just work towards it. You're not going to be at your best every minute, every hour. But on the long run, as long as you're striving for that's, that's all that matters to me.
¶ Operationalizing Sandler sales methodology using data, metrics, and tools to improve efficiency and win rate.
Oh, I love what you said there. It does take us to behavior with cookbook that we can set some goals maybe and reminders to reach out to our team. But maybe we shouldn't automate the reaching out parts, right, that doesn't create human connections. So tell us about what you do with revenue reveal and how we could maybe operationalize or cookbook or get the data and dashboards in front of us to to make better decisions and develop this engine machine.
Yeah, so I'm basically distilling everything I learned in the last 10 years in SAS, from leading business development to field sales to revenue operations. And a small stint as a CEO went through two acquisitions in the past couple of years as well. And what I realize is most sales leaders, most sales teams don't really know how to operationalize their revenue operating system. A lot of it is Hey, throwing things on a wall, see what sticks, right? Without the data to put it in?
How I view it is, revenue should be like Moneyball, you have a set of playbooks processes, data systems, a sequence of movements and steps, kind of like a dance of sort of moving towards the right direction. So that, you know, hey, based on the problem I have, how do I diagnose the revenue issue I have, how do I break through this growth plateau I have, or how do I just set a standard operating procedure for my team to grow
right there. And so a lot of that is human intervention. You need humans to help with the skills aspect of things following the process building accountability, but I think AI and all these other various tools can certainly accelerate the process or maybe enhance what humans are doing. Maybe not replace them just yet, but certainly enhance them.
Can you take it another level more detail there maybe give us an example of like, how the Sandler philosophies get embedded into the tools of the measurements are how you kind of combine, like a company sales process with the methodology with the technology?
Yeah, that's a good question. I'll dial it back to how you measure that as well. So something like clients, what they've done is they've changed their discovery call. But one of the questions that I'll ask is, well, how do we know the reps are adopting this new discovery framework? And how do we know it's successful? For one, we have to measure it? So how do you measure it, there are various conversation intelligence tools out there, like grain Gong, or chorus. And
in those, I usually set up trackers. So for example, not for a contract, you have your appreciate naturally, obviously, and typically. So I'll set trackers around appreciate you making the time. Naturally, you have questions for me, obviously, I have questions for you, typically at the end, or things like next steps. If it's a pain funnel, I'll track things like tell me more about that, or variations of those questions to
tell me which reps are actually adopting this methodology. And based on those reps adopting that methodology, how is that impacting the conversion? How's that impacting their win rate, back to the behavior aspect, if you know reps aren't adopting it, and you know, the reps that do succeed, you now have data to go back to your rep and ask them, Hey, how can we have you adult this is back to an effort thing, a skill thing or a
knowledge thing, because we have proven success. And the other aspect, once those calls are recorded, you now have these soundbites of best practices which you can put into a resource library. If you're hiring new reps, great, you have a great foundation to build things off. If you need to coach these reps, maybe they don't want to listen to their leader manager. Well, you can listen to your other reps doing best practice as well.
And then I love that the so seconds all of that that was perfect. What about the sales process itself? How do you identify gaps and bottlenecks in where people are getting stuck? Or their their revenue engine is selling out? Yeah,
I think you've got to look at it foundationally. As you know, what is the go to market strategy look like from anonymous prospect to close one? Right? What are the steps in between? How do you actually convert one to the other? What's the exit criteria? For example, maybe from discovery to demo, you need to identify the business or technical pain? Well, let's put that and put that in Salesforce. That's a
question the sales reps have to answer. Because if they don't know how to answer what the prospects pain is, you cannot move them to a next step. You're still stuck in that current step there. And even looking at like moving from demo to proposal stage, have you quantified the pain, justify the impact, or the outcome of that investment in buying your SaaS solution, or some other solution? And then after that, once you've figured out the proposal, what are the steps in the decision process?
Who needs to sign a contract? Who needs to be involved? How long does this actually take? Let's mandate that in your CRM or whatever tool you have. And more importantly, let's layer the coaching aspects. So they know what questions to ask before it's too late. And you're waiting six months for a deal when your rep says that deal was supposed to go close two months ago.
Yeah, and I guess my next question kind of went wide with a sales team, if you're the leader, or the person trying to decide how to do this, or how to track it? What kind of information do you look at as a leader, you've been a CEO or an operations, person sales ops. To know if the team is doing well or for forecasting, we're gonna hit our quarterly number and stuff. Have you gotten into that before? Yeah,
I think if you're asking around metrics and what to track, I usually boil sales or revenue metrics down to three categories, volume, velocity conversion, at each stage, do you have the right amount of leads per volume? Velocity, how quickly are the leads moving at each stage and conversion? How
many leads are converting at each stage? I think once you figure that out, and and have a benchmark, you know, if a deal forecasted, will close or what your win rate is, if you know your deal cycles, 90 days, but that deal has been sitting in stage discovery for 120 days. My question is, well, let's be honest. Is this a real deal or not here? Should you close the losses and move on? You'd like to check right? Yeah, I
think so. And that, that makes a lot of sense. I like those. Those metrics extent especially the velocity one, people don't seem to watch that as much. But if you're starting to get longer sales cycles, sometimes that can be a symptom of some other things happening, whether it's qualification or, or other technique problems. Which brings us to our last
bucket here. So I imagine with operationalizing Sandler, we've talked a lot about some of the techniques that you're using, like CRM, or call recorders or onboarding, training and stuff.
¶ Operationalizing sales process with playbooks, testing, and team enablement.
But what comes to mind for you about how we actually pull this off?
Yeah, I think foundationally you need to go to market strategy, meaning you've documented your buying process and your sales process, you've actually spoken to customers and validate some of those ideas as well, rather than gut intuition or potentially gut feeling of, you know, I think this is right, then you got to based on that sales process and buyer Foundation, build the playbooks. So from discovery, what are the questions you need to ask? What's your offer on contract
for discovery as well? What are the top three to five pain funnel questions, you need to ask? What is your upfront contract for the next call afterwards? I think most buyers, if you're selling something new or innovative, they don't know how to buy. They don't know what the next steps are, they don't know how to allocate budget for some flooring, because they don't know who to speak with. So you kind of have to figure that
out and guide the buyer in that standpoint, as well. And then once you have those established steps in the sales process and playbooks, I look at it from an enablement perspective, that your team has the skills to actually guide a buyer through that process. Do they have the right tone in the recalls? Do they have the right behaviors on the calls? Do they know what to say? Or how to say it on their calls as well? Do they have the scripts or the frameworks to do so? And then a layer below that
as the technology? Right? Is everything being tracked? Is it being reinforced? Are all the things collected just so you can make those judgments on? Hey, we need to improve the team on discovery process or potentially, we need to get more volume of leads at the top of funnel, because they're absolutely killing it for what their win rates. So at the layer
after that is just the data Foundation, right? Just making sure you're tracking volume velocity conversion, those you can then break down from, you know, book meeting booked to meeting show, right? That's your conversion, that's your velocity as well. So you can get bit granular on that. So that's how I think about operationalizing, the technique aspect, because a lot of that has to sit into a CRM or other tech as well.
Yeah, you mentioned playbooks, and I found a lot of people have used a lot of different techniques for this, but how are you collecting, testing? You know, figuring out the plays that need to be in there? And then how are you organizing them and distributing out to the team to make sure that they can, you know, find the right place at the right time?
Yeah, with the playbook aspect, there's always a metric you're trying to improve. What for? I'll give you an example, one client I had where they're booked meeting to show rate for is now 55 60%. They want to get the 70%? Well, there are a couple of things we can test in that playbook. For one, they booked a meeting and never followed up and expected folks to show up on a call. Well, the one thing we test is, well, let's just add a follow up email. Thank you for accepting
this meeting. And really looking forward to this meeting. Oh, and here's the agenda, the three things you want, we want to talk about during that meeting as well. That way they can have an expectation to show up. Let's test that for two weeks. See how it improves, you're not? Well, 10% increase? Great. Let's add that to the playbook. Now let's test the next thing where we're
adding a questionnaire to that follow up. We want them to input answers to the top 10 questions we want to ask to contextualize the discovery call a bit of homework correct Sandler methodology? Yes. One it qualifies the buyer to see if they're a legit buyer or not. And two, it gives us a lot more ample information to use in that discovery call and hopefully help them through that process as well. If that works, great.
Let's add that to the playbook as well. So we're choosing the one metric we have have a hypothesis on what works or what doesn't work. We set the variable on what to test. And we set a timeframe how long we're testing. And after that timeframe, let's let's look at the results. And all these learnings before they're in the playbook itself. We want to make sure we disperse the learning across the team. That way if
they have ideas they want to add we can certainly adopt them. Or if they want to debate an idea or add something else we can adopt or challenge that as well. And then once you have the playbook, let's mandate it across the sales process. One what's trained a team on what is the new way of doing things versus the old way of doing things? What the results were so they can buy into this new behavior rather than blindly going into it. Let's mandate this behavior mandate, this
change in our technology stack. Let's put it in all our Google Drives, sales, new libraries, just so it's accessed and everywhere. And let's just set a cadence, you know, once every week or bi weekly for the next two months, let's make sure this behavior is being adopted across the team. That way, we can see a real change and make the real impact.
¶ Sales techniques, growth strategies, and personal development with a Sandler trainer.
Great stuff there. I mean, really good. I would encourage everybody to think about that and how you're improving your revenue generating machine here. Daniel, I wanted to ask you before we get to learn more about you and have some fun with this. I'm interested in your Sandler techniques. Have you found in selling SAS or in your career? One technique that jumped out that's more powerful than the others? It sounds like you shouted out upfront contracts. Several time there.
If I was gonna guess what you're gonna say I would pick that. But anything else that you would say as far as like, Sandler techniques?
Yeah, it's interesting. You picked up the offering contract? I would say beyond that it's painful. Just the the simple process of the open ended questions you asked to get to a concise and targeted answer of what are the top three to five pain points, or problems that if someone's going through, there's such a strong fundamental aspect where if you don't have pain, there's no sale. And you're wasting cycles trying to chase the prospect who will likely ghost you because
they don't have pain points of solve. The folks that do have actual pain. That's where you prioritize. And that's where you double down on because there's something you can solve. There's something you can qualify. And I found painfully once you do it, right. Once you go through the motion, contextualize the questions you ask for your company or your role. That's such a powerful thing I found throughout my career.
Good stuff. Again, we're talking with Daniel Kuh, founder of revenue reveal, check them out at revenue reveal.co. And I wanted to get to know you a little bit more. And just, you know, we've shared a little bit about your career, but how do you define success for yourself at this point, you've been successful already. And you know, 10 years and Sandler, I think it's interesting to kind of reset what the next level is for you.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider my success myself successful. I think success is a continuously moving milestone, you kind of chase every year start the year by doing a 135 year plan of what success looks like. And so I always define what are the things I need to do physically, mentally, emotionally, relationship wise, career wise? I think for myself, the big definition of success would be how do I do, which is revenue reveal the company has started once, say, 100 120 days
ago? How do we grow this to be the go to expert in building a revenue operating function? How do we make this the standard of what revenue and success looks like? How do we support organizations who either want to exploit their growth or have hit multiple growth plateaus? And just want to get past that? How do we give them that that confidence? And aha moment of oh, yeah, we felt this. Like that, to me is the success right now. And that's what I'm striving towards.
Nice. And what about the flip side of that question? Was there a biggest failure or lesson learned along the way? That was a particularly hard hurdle to get over?
Yeah. The one thing that has always stood out to me is I'm a classic introvert. If you look at the disc, DISC profile, high C, mild D, so I tend to be a bit analytical. And so I think, for me my biggest failure or potentially if you want to flip failure to opportunity to learn and improve it. I've always been someone who is quite reserved a conservative and don't speak up enough, or don't share my opinions or have the conviction, whether it's in boardrooms with my team or with
other executives and the companies I've worked with. So I'd say that's one thing where I've always tried to get past a hurdle. I guess it goes back to the adds to that aspect of things as well. Just having a confidence to speak up. Toastmasters has helped an improv as well as certainly helped me speak up in front of my peers. So yeah, trying to figure out there.
How long have you been doing improv or did it?
I did a I think it was a three month course every week for three months. A lot of guests and things. A lot of you know just getting out of your comfort zone.
Good. That's awesome. Do you have a favorite Sandler rule quotes or lesson that you try to remember?
Yeah, I guess given we spoken a lot about discovery, pain funnel, everything. My favorite Sandler rule is people don't argue with their own data. The goal is to ask them the right questions so they can self discover themselves or the answer or the pain point. So that has always been something I think about
good stuff and surprising. The Hi C likes the data. I appreciate you taking the time to share with us again Daniel CU, revenue reveal that CEO if you'd like more information on Sandler, you can find a local office like Chris did with or sorry Daniel did with Chris Kelly. In Toronto, you can go to sandler.com. Click on Find a training location. We also have an enterprise team that works with large international
organizations to figure that out. And if you want to share this episode with the leader that you think needs to hear it that would help us out a ton. Give us a five star review or make sure you're subscribed to the podcast if you aren't already. Until next time, whatever you are big. The podcast brought to you by Sandler, the worldwide leader in sales management and Customer Success training all around the world more information@sandler.com Goodbye everybody.