Improve your sales results with deliberate practice and effective discovery

 Welcome back to the Thoughts on Selling podcast. It's my pleasure to welcome Jonathan Mahan. We are both big fans of Discovery. Believe that discovery is really important in the selling process. Before we get too deep into the details, Jonathan, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. Who is Jonathan?

Hey, Lee. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm the co-founder of the Practice Lab. I spent about 10 years as an individual contributor in sales. I noticed a lot of things that were missing in the training that was available to me, and I started to actually look outside the world of sales into other disciplines like sports and music and acting, and figure out how did those people train, how do those people grow their skills, and how do those people improve their game time performance?

And I started at first like a personal regimen for myself to sharpen my own skills as an individual contributor. Over time, it. Grew and grew, and eventually it turned into a side hustle and then it turned into a business. And now I run a business taking a lot of these techniques for training that, Olympic athletes use and bring them to the business world for sales teams to use to grow their skills.

So you, you mentioned Olympic athletes and where are you located? 

Colorado Springs, specifically 

Colorado Springs is home in addition to the practice lab. What else is it home to? 

Mostly the practice lab is what it's known for, but additionally, the United States Olympic Committee is housed here.

So there's a lot of Olympic athletes training here at any given day. 

Right? There you go. Colorado Springs a hotbed of neuroplasticity. So I found you on LinkedIn because I just ran across this statement. Training company for sellers and teams. Ready to develop their skills like athletes, performers, and musicians.

And I'm fascinated by that because it's my firm belief, and I have a soapbox labeled this. We do training all wrong. Most training is watch a video. Take a test. That's not how people learn, right? 

Yeah. Yeah. Not to mention it's not how people learn, but that's not the level of competency you need people to have.

I might actually even, maybe I might even push back on what you said, Lee. I might even say that is how people learn. That is how people acquire knowledge, right? So if learning it means acquiring knowledge, acquiring understanding, maybe even retaining knowledge, retaining understanding, that actually is pretty good.

A lot of the sales training that I've been through. Has been pretty good about training it in a way that's engaging and interactive and having an assessment at the end to gauge where the gaps were and having a reinforcement plan afterwards to keep bringing it back to our front of our minds.

But it was all focused on knowledge and understanding. Making sure we understood what good selling was and what our role was, and could identify what good looked like. If the end goal is just comprehension, then actually the way we do it is pretty good. The problem is to actually see behavior change on real sales calls under pressure.

You don't need comprehension. You need skill. You need mental agility. You need the ability to take all this theory you've learned and figure out in the moment how to apply it in the situation you're in. And that requires a level of skill and capability that is far beyond what could ever be achieved through simply knowledge transference and gaining understanding.

The way we training is good for simple learning, but it's not good for actual behavior change under pressure. 

Yeah. I don't give a shit whether my sellers are book smart. I want them to be able to figure out what to do at 3:00 AM on an ultra marathon. When they're, when one of their shoelaces breaks and they're 10 miles from the next aid station, can they continue moving on?

The same thing happens on a sales call, right? You can't expect to go back into your memory and go, okay, if the customer says this, what should I say next? As you mentioned, we are modifying behavior. We're not creating book smart people. 

Yeah and book Smarts entirely lives in the conscious mind, right?

Where the ability to respond quickly under pressure to unpredictable situations and nuance situations, that a lot of that actually comes down to the unconscious mind. Because I know a lot of times when I'm on sales calls, particularly when it's a sales call, that's getting a little bit weird, getting a little bit dicey when the buyer says something.

And then it's my turn to respond. A lot of times, whatever I say isn't something that I spend a lot of time thinking through. It isn't something I chose from a library of 20 different options. Just something sprung outta my unconscious mind, hit my frontal cortex, and I was like, okay, yeah, that sounds good.

I'll say that. It's almost like in those moments of pressure, your brain turns into this like black box where most of what's happening is hidden to you. It just like spits out suggestions to you of, Hey, you could say this, or you could say this. Sometimes those suggestions your brain spits out are good, and sometimes they're total crap.

A lot of that has to do with, again, the level of skill you have and the wiring of your unconscious mind, not just, again, the book smarts that live in your memory somewhere that you could use to pass a test, right? There really is no value to having those book smarts in the moment when the pressure's on.

It's all about your instincts. It's all about your level of skill, your level of mental agility, right? That's what really matters. That's what companies really need their sellers to have, especially for something like discovery. Unfortunately, the most companies are going about it entirely you the wrong way.

That's what they want is the mental agility. The unconscious competence, and what they give people. It's just more and more book smarts, more and more conscious of knowledge that's not what you need. Why do you keep giving them more of that? 

I have an answer for that last question You posed. Most of the companies that we have worked for or work with were founded by engineers.

Many are managed and run by engineers. Some are still owned by engineers. And the engineering mindset is there is a logical way for us to solve any problem. And we're talking about wetware here. We're talking about people, and as you mentioned, we're talking about actions and reactions. We're talking about the subconscious mind.

We're talking about customers that may not be thinking logically either. The latest research I've seen is most customers get stuck in the, I don't know how to make a decision mode. There's no logic that can help talk a customer out of that. That's a feeling situation, not a logic situation. So let's talk about discovery.

What do you mean by discovery? Jonathan? What's your definition of discovery? 

Discovery is the motion, right? And I say motion, not phase. 'cause this is a motion that can happen during any phase. Yeah. Let's be real. Typically, this motion happens most in the early phases, but it doesn't always have to be that way.

It's the motion you're in when you're learning about the buyer and their situation and their world and their needs, so that you're able to, a. Make a good recommendation of what'll actually help them be able to build a strong business case of why they should take action at all. Business case for change, and then also a business case for why you should be the solution if in fact, you are the right solution for them.

It's in that phase when you're gathering all of that insights that you can then use to create a Cham compelling business case for change, a compelling case for why you're the right solution to create a really effective, accurate diagnosis. One key word that I just used there I just realized is when I said.

You can use too. I think a lot of times discovery people are in this mindset where they're like I need to ask questions because that's what discovery is, and then they ask a bunch of questions. They gather a bunch of information, they write it down to crm, and they never use that information again.

For anything that is a waste of everybody's time. I think that's the discovery that makes. Buyer's board in ANSI where you're just like ask them question after question, and they're like, they can already tell you're not gonna do anything with this information. You're just collecting it because you were told by your manager to collect this information.

Real discovery is where you're gathering information that you can use for your diagnosis, right? For your case, for change, or for your case, for your solution. 

Real discovery is a significant component. It's a mandatory component in value selling. Value selling is a mindset. How do we understand what a customer is facing?

Sometimes even when they don't actually know what a path looking forward could look like. So value selling is all about creating a business value hypothesis. How can we help the customer do things differently? Financial hypothesis, what's the value? What's the financial impact of them? Taking that alternate path without a strong understanding of what's going on in that environment and who's affected and what the possibilities are, you have no value selling basis.

So discovery is a foundational building block. Maybe the foundational building block of value selling. From your perspective, Jonathan, who conducts discovery and when does it start? And by the way, I'm doing discovery here. I'm asking you a bunch of questions, so I apologize. This is a conversation, but I'm curious to get your point your perspective on some of these.

Yeah, for sure. I think depending on how you treat the words discovery and qualification determines that a little bit. I think really high level discovery should start with the person who's setting the appointment on a cold call. Most people would consider that qualification, so if that's not discovery, then we can say it starts with AE on the very first call they have.

If you consider the high level stuff just to make sure there's alignment, discovery, then it can start with, the BDR who sets the appointment. Really, it's something that starts from the very first conversation and ultimately continues throughout. If not the entire sales cycle, at least pretty damn near the end.

'cause again, you need to have a real diagnosis of what's wrong and a prescription of what they should change and you really need to get information to do that. You can come in with a hunch that maybe you know what's wrong and maybe you're the solution. But to do real discovery, you need to really understand what's wrong and to be able to competently say, yes, we're the solution, but that's not it.

I'll make a little bit of a. Go down a bit of a rabbit trail here. A lot of times people use the analogy of sales and doctors and salespeople should be more like doctors. And you need to be able to ask questions to properly diagnose before you prescribe something. And that is all true. But it misses a really important point, which is that doctors are actually freaking terrible at motivative motivating people to make a change.

And that's what a real job of a salesperson is. Not just diagnose and prescribe, but to actually motivate people to make a change, right? Doctors are terrible at that, right? Yep. They have a terrible track record. People have open heart surgery because of poor eating habits, and the doctor sits 'em down, has a talk, shares some information with 'em, then they go on their way and nothing changes about their lives, and they keep eating the same way they always ate.

Very large number of people who have gone through open heart surgery don't make any meaningful changes to diet or lifestyle. 

From my perspective, discovery is a process that happens through the entire engagement, and in fact starts before someone ever talks with a customer. I start discovery when I look someone up on LinkedIn, when I listen to their earnings calls, or read their earnings calls, transcripts when I visit their website, when I conduct my own SWOT analysis, and that's helping me to create a series of hypotheses around how should I engage with this customer?

What should I say, who should I engage with? Where do I wanna lead them? And then, so I have these hypotheses and I wanna go test those hypotheses. And the process of testing the hypothesis is further discovery. In my world, discovery happens throughout the entire selling process. 

I like that. Yeah, no, you're totally right.

It can start outside the call. I think the main point and the main focus is that discovery information is used for something. And what it's used for is that diagnosis and prescription. Those kind of are paired together. In my mind, that's the early phase where you actually figure out.

Are we even a fit? Should we even be pursuing this opportunity? So that's for step one. Yeah. But then even after you know you're a fit, and even after your champion agrees you're a fit, discovery doesn't stop. Because the next task on your plate and your champion's plate is to build a compelling case for change.

Why the business should do something different at all, and then build a compelling case for why you are the right solution that they should choose. Again, you generally need discovery in order to build those cases and get the approval. 'cause there probably was a time back in the day and even for some companies, occasionally still now, there was a time when a lot of companies were selling just like point solutions to point problems to people in the organization who were very close to that problem.

And for people like that, you might not need to build a really strong case for change and a strong case for why you're the right solution. You can probably just show up to 'em and say, Hey, you have this problem. Yep. Here's a solution. Just take care of your problem. Yep. Great. Here's what it costs.

You wanna buy it? Sure. Sometimes it's that simple, and I, again, I think it might have been that simple. More in the past, maybe when VC money was flowing a bit more, and lower level managers were empowered to make decisions on their own. 

Because again, when you're really close to the problem, you don't need a sales person to spell it out for you.

In a business case, you just feel it viscerally in your gut and you know that, yes, this can't go on like this, but the problem is. When, for whatever reason or another, whether it's a changing economy or 'cause you're moving up market or you're selling a more complex solution, whenever you have to start selling to people who are a layer or two above the problem, now suddenly you have to get really detailed and granular in that specific business case.

Now you don't have that gut visceral feeling from someone who's close to the problem saying, oh hell yes, this can't go on like this. Then you've gotta build the case, and again, to build the case, you gotta do the discovery in a way that maybe didn't used to. So unfortunately there's a whole generation of SaaS sellers out there who actually were able to get by without doing great discovery and still hit their numbers and still do fine, and now suddenly they find themselves due to changing economic headwinds and even like consolidation in their companies to the point where they're selling more complex solutions than these to sell.

They're actually finding themselves in need of these discovery skills they just don't have, and all the knowledge in the world. All the willpower in the world doesn't change the fact that in the moment during a live fire call when the pressure's on, they don't have the mental skill, the mental agility, the communication skills needed to run a really damn good discovery call.

In my experience, discovery looks like a branching tree. The more you ask people questions, the more and provide guidance, the more questions come about. So for instance. You might identify a new stakeholder in the relationship map, or you might identify a new set of influencers who need more information, or you might identify an evolving business focus or business pressure that you didn't know about before.

And so discovery isn't a linear sequential process. It has many branches and some branches prove fruitful and others do not. To make sure that your recommendations are powerful and can be trusted. You need to understand the full environment. 

Here's the added challenge too. Imagine that tree, right?

Where every new piece of information you learn, if you're good at being curious, sparks four more questions. Each of those four questions, once you learn the answer to it, probably sparks four more questions. So you have this tree pattern. In order to explore every branch of that tree, in order to ask every question that could be asked, you would probably need 25 hours of your buyer's time to sit 'em down and ask 'em all these questions.

They're not gonna sit through that. You have to make the choices in advance without being able to really see too far down the line which ones to follow. Because this happens to me a lot in discovery. I got a very curious brain, a very thorough brain. So every time someone's talking, it's every sentence they drop.

I got two questions that I wanna explore, and then they drop four sentences in a row and I got eight questions and I gotta make a choice in the moment based on everything I heard a bit of a gamble. Which path do I go down? Which question do I ask? Because sometimes you can ask one question and then go back and say, okay, backing up a back, another question.

Sometimes you can do that. But you can't do that every time for every question, every area. There's just not time for it. It's really interesting. Again, this comes into the skill side of it. You need to be able to like really read the situation, use your intuition, use your ability to like, even read body language and pick up vocal cues to really get a hunch for which of these potential paths might be best to go down and you won't get it right every time.

But the best sellers get it right far more often than they get it wrong. In this tree analogy, I'll bet you three quarters of those branches are grayed out because they're questions you never got to ask. Avenues you never got to explore. Only maybe a quarter of them are like filled in black because you actually went down that path.

And again, unless this is maybe if it's an enterprise sale for millions of dollars, maybe they will give you 25 hours of their time to get it right. But for most people selling up $20,000 solution, no one's gonna invest 25 hours of their time and discovery with a seller to make sure they get it right.

They'll sit on one or two discovery calls with you, lets you ask him a couple dozen questions, and at that point it's I'm not giving you any more of my time, dude, make your recommendation. I'll decide 

right. 

The art of selling is, again, you don't get to ask every question that comes to mind.

You have to use your gut, your instinct, your intuition, your level of skill to make decisions about which path to go down in the moment. And again, that requires lots of mental skill and agility and emotional intelligence. And if you don't have that, it becomes very difficult to run a great discovery call.

Even if you sat through some sales training companies presentation about what makes your great discovery, it's not gonna change the fact that in the moment you don't have the mental agility to actually do it.

I wanna make one more comment about discovery. The importance of discovery. And by the way, you and I talked about whether or not we should cover the importance of discovery, and I think we have done a pretty good job of actually delving into it.

One of the values of discovery is gaining additional time and access with the executive and then with other members of that person's team. And you may request additional time and access with someone on the team to go down a one of those branches, which might not require that executive. But might be something that you need.

And so having the credibility and being in a position to say, in my experience the marketing operations manager should be involved in this, would you introduce me to them? 

No, that's a huge point. Yeah. And to your point, if the discovery that you're doing feels like an interrogation, it feels like you're not really listening.

It feels like you're not really credible. It feels like it's a waste of their time and they're dis Im for it to end. How are they gonna react when you ask for an introduction to their colleagues so you can run your colleagues through the same ordeal? There's no way. And how they're gonna do that?

Partially 'cause they value their colleague, partially because they value the reputation and relationship with that colleague. They're not going to give you access to those people. They're gonna intentionally set themselves up as a buffer to protect their colleagues from. You. Exactly. And that's exactly a lot of times when you run into multithreading issues sometimes 'cause reps aren't asking and aren't, trying to multithread, but sometimes reps actually try to multithread and a champion's Nope, no, we're good.

I'll I'll pass the information along to them. That's a sure sign that your champion isn't actually having a great time on the call with you. They know they have a problem. They think you might be the solution. So they'll endure it. They'll keep showing up the calls with you, 

right? 

But they're gonna insulate their colleagues from you because it's not a good experience being on those calls with you.

Yeah, 

and again, that's where it comes up to skill. Again, you can give someone a checklist of questions to ask. You can give them a bunch of mandatory fields in their CRM they have to fill out. But if someone doesn't have the level of skill to touch on all those points and a really natural, authentic, curiosity driven way, the buyer's not gonna have a very good time on that call.

And again, they're gonna limit your access. So yeah, great. Call out. Another reason discovery is so important. 

I'll share a positive experience I had, I was part of the sales team calling on Nomura Securities at Oracle. I was chartered with helping to make sure that account was successful and that it grew.

Got an introduction through a former coworker from IDC to the head of risk management, and I stepped off the elevator and I walked into his office and I said, hi, your brother Don introduced me. We did a little bit of back and forth. How do you know Don? Et cetera, blah, blah, blah. And then the head of risk management said to me, and he an English sheepdog would do, he started hurting me towards the el back to the elevator.

And he said, if you're here to talk about technical stuff, you know about Oracle databases and things, I'm really not the right person to talk to. His intention was to get me on the elevator and press B for basement and send me down to the DBAs. And I looked at him, I said, no, I'm here to talk about how you manage risk.

And he said, sit down. I made it very clear. I was prepared to talk with him at his level about things that were important to him, and an hour and a half later he said, wow, that was a really helpful conversation. So the seller needs to be provocative, needs to be prepared, needs to be ready to have the level of conversation with whoever the stakeholder is at their level.

 Let's talk about how we build those skills, Jonathan, because that's your wheelhouse, right? That's what your company does. Let's talk a bit about that. So where do you start? If an organization came to you and said, we think we have a challenge with discovery, what are the diagnostic tools you use? And then what do you do to help them improve their discovery capabilities?

Because I don't think it's about skill per se. It's about capabilities. The skills is a piece of it. 

Anytime anyone's looking to change behavior on their team, I always say the very first place to start is to actually identify what is the gap that's holding your team back to begin with. 

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes it's a knowledge gap.

They actually don't know what good looks like. They don't know what's expected of them, and they don't know what a good way to navigate a sales process and run a discovery call is. In which case, if you really, truly think you have a knowledge gap on your team, traditional training fits the bill. Have 'em read a sales book, do an internal training, hire a nSight outside sales training company to come talk to them, but one way or another, get 'em to the point where your team understands what good selling looks like and they understand what they should be aiming for in a call and what a good call looks like.

I would say though, for most teams, they've probably already covered that. That usually is already taken care of. So it's not usually a knowledge gap in my experience. Sometimes it's a motivation gap, maybe. 'cause the sales team just doesn't think there's a problem. Or more commonly they don't think the thing they're being trained on is actually the solution.

That's probably the most common one where a sales enablement team or will roll something out. Or again, they'll hire a sales trainer come in and they talk to the team about how to do selling and the team looks at it, listens and says. Nah, I don't think that's it. I don't think that'll help.

In which case, it doesn't matter what kind of training you do, it doesn't matter what kind of practice you do, they're never gonna change their behavior 'cause they don't actually think that's gonna help. You wanna isolate those or identify those. If those two things are at play, nothing I'm about to share in the rest of this podcast, we'll do you one lick of good.

You've gotta get the points rep where they know what good looks like and they agree that, yes, that's what I want to be doing. That's how I wanna sell. I wanna sell that way. Where the skill piece comes into play. 'cause that's the third gap that could be causing the lack of behavior. Change is a skill gap, and that's where your reps know this is what good selling is.

This is where your reps agree. Yeah, that's the way I want to do it. But damn, in the moment under pressure, they got six different things on their mind. There's money on the line. Ugh. All of that training is just gone. It's just not even available to them. It's locked away in a part of their brain. They can't access under pressure.

The only thing they can access under pressure. It's their habits. Those defaults, those most deeply dug grooves in their brain that have been growing there over the years. Those are still accessible under pressure. All that stuff they learned in the training is gone locked away. 

That's usually the biggest gap for most teams.

Usually sellers who are paid commission wanna sell better. Usually they know what good selling looks like, but. Dang in the moment, they just can't pull it off. So assuming you have a skill gap, that's what you wanna focus on is how do I increase the level of skill in my team? And I like to think of this in two general categories.

There might be some exception exceptions to this, but generally there's two things that you need there. One is like foundational mental abilities and communication skills. The other one is very specific patterns or habits or techniques you want the team using. I'll give some examples of this. An example of a habit you might want your team to get in a really simple habit is every time the buyer asks you a question on a demo, can your solution do this?

Before you answer it, you ask, why do you ask? Really simple habit to get into, or a slightly more complex one. Every time you're on a discovery call and the buyer brings up some kind of surface level frustration they've been dealing with before you dive into solving it, slow down and start asking more questions about how did you notice that was a problem?

Who on your team brought to your attention? How long has that been an issue? What have you tried to solve it so far? Just that habit of not diving right into solve mode right away, but rather slipping into curious mode first to ask questions. That's just a habit that you wanna build into the brain. The point where every time someone hears a surface level frustration, they can't help themselves but respond with curiosity.

It's been just baked into their brain so much. So those are habits and those are specific techniques and behaviors, right? So how someone opens a call might be this. How someone responds to a frequent, a common objection, how someone talks about their competitors. Here's another really bad habit you wanna change.

Most reps have the habit of during a demo, after they've talked about some of their features of pausing and then asking any questions and then moving on. That's a very unproductive habit. You wanna grow a new habit there of after they've shown a feature, asking some real meaty questions that get the buyer to process what they just saw and think about what's happening.

Those are just some examples of habits you might wanna change.

Right. Any questions is a yes, no question. It's a closed ended question. A question instead asking. How would this particular feature change your workflow or your work processes to, to better capture that information about your customer or your selling process or whatever?

Yeah. The goal of those questions during a demo is a, so that you as a seller, get some more insight into how they use it so that you can use that in building your case for change or business case. More importantly, the purpose of those questions during a demo is to give your buyer the moment to process what they just saw, to make connections between what they just saw and their world, and ultimately to figure out for themselves why they should care, and why their boss should care about this.

The real marker of a good question isn't just, was it open or close ended? The real marker of a good question is did it lead to the buyer to a fuller level of clarity and re and realization about the value in front of 'em than they had before you asked the question. That all starts with changing that habit.

'cause again, most reps have the habit of saying any questions in between features. You gotta rework their brains to have a new habit where they can't possibly ask that question anymore. It just feels so wrong in their minds. They have to ask something a little bit more deep 'cause that habit has been built.

 What you describe suggests a branching of responsibilities with regard to discovery. You've got the sales person that is conducting overall discovery on appropriate fit, financial impact, stakeholder impact stakeholders themselves. Who are people involved in the decision making process, who are the people affected?

And then there's the second part, which isn't at the same level. It run well. It runs in parallel. And that is the technical engagement and then the discovery that a sales engineer takes, which is really powerful. It may well be the opportunity for the sales engineer to plant the seed of. Wow. This particular feature is really important, and I'll give you an example.

I do some work with a company called RPDO, which is in the account-based selling business. We co-wrote an article about the impact of account-based selling platforms to value selling. One piece they left out of the discussion was the metrics available to gauge how well things are going, and I pointed out to them, if you're talking with an organization, one of the key stakeholders will be sales operations.

You have to be able to call out how sales operations is going to leverage those metrics to make decisions about effectiveness and impact and ROI. That potentially is a technical conversation that a sales engineer would be having with a sales ops person, and when they show that management dashboard, they can say, here's the dashboard, any questions, or Here's the dashboard.

Would you like to see how you can monitor variations in performance across regions? And the ladder is going to create that implanting of that seed. The former is just a lost opportunity. 

One of the ways I like to think about it. So earlier in this conversation, we used the analogy of a branching tree, and I made the point that you can't follow every branch to its end.

There's not enough time for that. A lot of times the pattern that works really well for sellers is during the discovery call, where that's just about all you're doing is focusing on them in their situation. You establish where all the main branches are, where all the main vows are, here's the main needs, the main goals, the main value propositions, the main pain points, but that's usually all you have time for.

During the demo, when you go to solve each problem, that's when you get to explore some of those smaller branches. Yep. So we talked about habits. There's actually two habits I recommend teams focus on building during demos. The first habit is the habit of never showing a feature without first priming the buyer's mind for what they're about to see.

Sometimes you prime their mind with reminding 'em of something they shared with you earlier. Hey, earlier you mentioned you guys are struggling with blank. Sometimes you prime their mind with a short little micro story. Hey, I was working with a company a while ago. They said X, Y, and Z. Does any of that resonate?

Other times though, my favorite way to prime someone's mind for what they're about to see is by asking them questions that get them talking about their current way of doing things, the current limitations they face, the headaches that it causes, the impacts of those limitations who's struggling with them.

These are basically discovery questions. But they're really the detailed, granular discovery questions. Who on your team struggles with this? What would it look like if you went to do this? How is that impacting you? And you're really taking one of those branches and you're going all the way down to the conclusion at the end of it.

And then you show them the solution to that problem and which wouldn't, when they see the solution to that problem. After spending two or three minutes talking about that problem and how it affects them, it resonates so much more strongly with them. And then the second habit, as we already discussed, is after you've showed the feature, then you give 'em a moment to process what they just saw.

Connect it back to their world. So those are two really powerful habits you can build in someone's brain to the point where they almost can't help themselves. They can't just jump from feature to feature. Something in their brain is screaming to them, prime their mind first. Provide some context first, or help them process what they just saw and make sense of it all and connect it back to their world.

Takes some time, but you can build those habits through the right force of practice. When we're talking about a financially engineered sale. Where it's a simple substitution, we're placing Canon laser jet printers with HP laser jet printers, or one infrastructure cloud with another infrastructure cloud.

Then it's, okay, what's the cost per month or what's the cost per unit? What's the, so that's financial engineering. But if you're talking about a situation where the customer's never bought this thing before, whether they've, if they've never bought predictive analytics before and they don't know how they're gonna connect the marketing data with the sales data, they don't know the questions to ask.

They don't know the workflow, they don't know who's gonna be negatively affected, and it's up to the seller to take them through that process and upfront justify the conversational track. So I would say, I'm gonna ask you some questions now based in part upon my experience in working with companies similar to yours of adopting a predictive analytics platform.

Here are the questions they're gonna ask, and some of these may not have occurred to you, and I apologize in advance if you've already considered them. I wanna make sure that you are thinking about them too. Part of discovery actually involves education for the customer because we want to educate the customer in a pointed way, right?

We're not gonna be completely objective about education. We're gonna educate them so that we are likely to win if it's appropriate for us to win. 

No, and that's again another habit you could form. So that's half the equation is forming habits. Yeah. 'cause again, those habits can actually be available to reps under pressure, unlike knowledge.

The other piece too that is worth looking at is the foundational brain abilities piece. Because this is where, 'cause everything I just mentioned before are kind like predictable moments of the sales process, right? How you open a call, how you talk about your competitors. Yeah. How do you get people talking more during a demo?

Pretty predictable. But of course, a lot of what happens in selling, specifically what happens in discovery calls is wildly unpredictable. You can't build a specific trigger based habit where it's like when X happens, you do Y, because you don't know what all the things are that are gonna happen that you're gonna have to respond to.

So you can't predict in advance, you can't form habits in advance of whenever this happens, I respond this way. There's just so much unclear, so many one-off things that happen in selling. So that's where you wanna rely more on the foundational brain abilities. You wanna have reps whose brains are really good at thinking clearly and managing their own emotions under pressure.

It doesn't matter what situation they're in. That brain ability will help. You wanna have reps who are really good at reading the room, picking up nonverbal cues, reading body language that's gonna serve them no matter what's going on. You wanna have reps, deeply curious, whose brains are always keeping a running tally of all the things they don't yet know, but wanna know.

All too often reps, all they can really handle in the moment is paying attention to what's being shared. And even that's hard. How many times have you watched recordings of reps and realized they weren't really listening to what was being said? They weren't paying much attention to what the virus was selling.

So even listening, paying attention to what's there is itself a really deep skill that's hard to master. It's one of those foundational brain abilities you really wanna grow. Listening is all about paying attention to what's there. Curiosity is noticing what's not being shared, noticing the gaps in their narrative, noticing what might be relevant to the situation, but hasn't come up in conversation yet.

So you get in this place where in order to do really damn good discovery. The rep's brain needs to simultaneously be doing a whole bunch of kind of difficult cognitive tasks. So they have to be listening deeply, paying attention to everything that's being shared. They have to be being curious, notice what's not being shared.

They have to be paying attention to body language and reading the room and picking up cues from the nonverbals. They have to be planning out the arc of where they want to take the conversation. They also have to be adaptable and agile in the moment to. Throw that plan out and take a new plan if it needed.

They also need to be thinking up their own questions that they wanna ask. And then of course, they have to think of a good way to word the question, because of course, a poorly worded question can really leave a sour taste in a buyer's mouth and cause defenses to go up and report it go down. So they gotta be planning out, how am I gonna word this?

So that it's like direct into the point. But no, not in a way that's confrontational or not in a way that seems inauthentic or salesy. They also of course, have to be monitoring their own nonverbal cues. I know myself, I have a terrible case of resting bitch face if I'm not paying attention to it and people think I'm angry at them when I'm just thinking. So I gotta be consciously worried about, okay, monitoring my own nonverbals, 

resting bitch face. 

Yeah. It's made up condition I've, there you go. Seen reference on the internet a few times. It always makes it look like I'm grumpy about something. 

What you describe is something that gifted salespeople make look so easy.

 Yeah, I'm thinking of a few salespeople I've worked with over the years, key account directors. There's that, that are just fabulous at doing this. And at first blush it, it does look really simple and you know that above the waterline, everything is calm and serene and below the water line, they're paddling like crazy.

They've done their preparation, their minds are warring away. Their eyes are casually going through the room. I've had some salespeople say to me. I knew the tone changed when he crossed his legs that way. The 14th person in conference table, I couldn't even tell if he was wearing pants or not. The rep picked up the crossing of the legs and boom.

Then we were done. A good rep has those skills and they are unconsciously competent at them. Yeah. They just they do them without thinking because they've put in the work, they've done Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours, they go out and they hit the golf ball every afternoon or they practice, they do that research.

They pay attention. One of the recommendations that I make to salespeople is to take 10 minutes of reflection at the end of each day and reflect on what happened today, what could I have done differently? And that few minutes of reflection creates awareness of things that happened in the moment that they can change.

And I think that's a first step. It's not up to the level of building significant muscle memory that we'll talk to in a minute. It's a start. And that self-awareness of what am I seeing, what am I missing, how can I do things differently, is a good place to start. But let's assume that a rep or a sales executive wants to improve their team's abilities.

Talking about a couple of different levels, you talked about their skills, then you talked about the native muscle memory. What do you do? What do they ask? What do you push back on in your discovery? And then what does your organization do? 

As the name of my company, the Practice Lab would suggest, and as anyone who's ever learned an instrument, played a sport that involved in theater or comedy or anything like that, we'll attest.

The answer is practice. That is how you grow that connection in your brain. You grow those skills in your brain. You dig those new grooves, you form those new habits, and again. Form habits and skills that can stand up under pressure. It's through the practice. You mentioned, Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours piece.

There's obviously a lot of repetition involved in practice. I will point something out though that's interesting. The average American, by the time they turn 65, actually has 10,000 hours spent behind the wheel. Which according to 10,000 hours rule should mean every 65 plus year old should be an expert driver, masterful driver.

And of course, that's not true, right? There are no better drivers than the rest of us. Many times worse, despite having all the repetition. So one important element to point out is that repetition alone is not what grows the skill. Those 10,000 hours are 10,000 hours of mindless repetition.

Yep. It's 10,000 hours of intentional, focused, deliberate practice 

with feedback. 

We probably don't have time to go into all the details, but there are specific ways that deliberate practice is structured that's different than maybe a more traditional role play your first manager made you do when you first got into sales, right?

A traditional role play is good for getting your mouth around the words to make sure you can say it and not have it sound weird. So if you wanna practice your cold call opener or practice a freak answering or frequently asked question, traditional role plays are fine for that. It can be used and it can be helpful, and I found that those traditional role plays are actually pretty good at taking people about 20% of the way to the level of skill they need to have.

The very first time you do any sort of role play, you generally see some benefits from it. Those benefits quickly plateau, and after a certain point, all that happens is people become better at role players. They become better at checking all the boxes and the assessment and passing the role play, right?

You get on a real call and they actually still fall flat on their face because guess what? The real buyer. They aren't acting and behaving the same way their practice partner acted and behave. So they can get really good at practicing in a fake environment, but you put 'em in the real deal and they still crumble because again, it's like the rules of the game are different.

You can become a master of one and still struggle with the other, right? So traditional role plays have some value, but are quite limited. The deliberate practice piece is a way to structure the role plays to help minimize those limitations. And get you to the point where you can grow skills much more closely approximating the skills you need in real life.

We use some role play in our programs. The other piece too that's really important, especially for discovery, is to recognize that to grow these foundational brain abilities, you don't need to be selling anything, and you don't need to be pretending to sell anything to grow these foundational brain abilities.

Interesting. 

You can actually. Make more progress faster by stepping away from the context of sales altogether. Getting into a real life situation where your brain has to actually operate in this way and your brain will grow the skills needed. And then when you step back into the world of sales, oh, guess what?

You still have those skills. Here's some analogies to help with that. In the NFL, there are a lot of linebackers who in the off season we'll train as boxers. Not 'cause they're gonna throw punches on the field. It's 'cause when you're a boxer, the neural connections between your hand and your brain get stronger.

So you have faster, stronger, more accurate hands, which is exactly the foundational ability they need to have as linebackers. Similarly, Kobe Bryant famously trained as a tap dancer to help his footwork on the court. He found he could actually improve his footwork better by stepping outside the context of basketball for a while before stepping back in.

Similarly, salespeople can grow these foundational brain abilities of. Listening, curiosity, empathy, reading, body language, thinking on the fly, managing emotions, reading emotions, all of these things, they can grow those skills outside the context of selling. It actually works better because you put them in a real life situation where their brain has to really do those things rather than putting them in the pretend situation where they can usually find a way to get through the exercise without doing all that mentally exhausting work.

But that's the other element of practice. Some examples of this one that we don't even offer at the Practice Lab, but we're a huge fan of is to have your sales reps take an improv class. Improv works the same muscles in the brain, the same networks in the brain that you need in sales of remaining calm under pressure, and adapting to the situation and thinking on the fly, and trusting yourself and not going into panic mode.

All of those same things. Here's one that I actually did that helped me a ton as a seller, which I'm sure will resonate with you, Lee, is that I hosted a podcast. Every single one of those foundational brain abilities of listening and empathy and making choices and that analogy of the tree. And you can't go down every path, so you have to just kinda make a gut feeling about which path to go down.

Same thing as a podcast host. Yeah. So you can strengthen your brain elsewhere In the practice lab, we do a lot of work with real human to human conversations. We've found the mental abilities needed. To deep listening and get curious and help tap into a business's motivation to make a change are actually the same neural networks and foundational abilities, you need to be good at talking to an individual about a change they wanna make.

Obviously there's differences there, but there's quite a bit of similarity between those two environments. Yeah. In either case, you gotta train your brain to get curious about. Where did this come from? And why was this an issue and how did this issue come to your attention? You gotta train your brain to get curious about what happens if you do nothing and what's, what's unacceptable about the current status quo.

You've gotta get curious about what are the other ripple effects we haven't covered yet, and how it might affect other areas of your life. There's foundational things that are the same between those two scenarios. So you can have people train their ability and a real human conversation and actually grow skill a lot more than having 'em go through a make-believe conversation.

'cause again, practice partner never behaves like a real buyer does. Your brain can actually get through the exercise without doing all those difficult mental operations it needs to do in a real exercise. 

So you build the neuroplasticity in environments that are real, but low risk relative to customers and prospects. 

Real low risk, and where there's a, there's the opportunity for a lot more intention. So one of the concepts of deliberate practice is that you need to be very clear going into it, exactly what you're aiming for, because the goal of deliberate practice is to actually make a different choice and to handle things differently than your default is to come up to a fork in the road.

Realize, I usually go down this path, but this time I'm gonna use some intention, some efforts, some awareness, and I'm gonna go down a different path. In order to do that, you need to be clear going into the exercise exactly what needs to be different. Not just, hop in there, have a conversation and be done.

You're clear going into it. Here are the skills you're working, here's the techniques you're gonna use, here's the outcome you're aiming for. And then even during practice, you give people the space and flexibility to slow down if they need to pause, think through their options. If something comes out wrong, back up.

Try it again. All these things you can't do in a real conversation. One other thing, which we love doing. It is a way to completely bypass the issue that role plays have of not being realistic enough. And let's even back up a little bit just to make sure this is clear. When you're doing a role play, what's really happening is that you are using a practice partner.

To feed you prompts, to feed you stimuli. To feed you information your brain has to then take in those stimuli, that information, those prompts, your brain has to think about what I just heard, make observations, draw out meaning. Then your brain has to think through a variety of options of where you could take the conversation next.

Then your brain has to make some choices about where to take the conversation next. That's what's happening in your brain during a role play. The problem is the stimuli, the prompts, the input, your practice partner feeding you are never realistic. So we've developed a type of practice that uses recordings of your company's actual sales calls and actual buyers to feed you those stimuli, feed you those prompts, feed you those inputs.

Nice. Then we have your brain go through that mental process of paying attention to what it's hearing, drawing out meaning, thinking through the options, making a choice mentally. The same things are happening in your brain as if you were the real rep in that real call. But of course you aren't the real rep.

That's, that's a, that's not a live call, that's an old call. Completely bypasses the issue of not realistic stimuli, not realistic inputs, because you're using the recording of a real call to do your brain training. It's not just role plays. We do use role plays, and again, when structured well, you can actually get a lot of skill growth and you can get a lot of habit formation with role plays.

Earlier in this episode, we spent a lot of time talking about habits you might wanna form. Typically role plays are actually a pretty good tool for forming those habits. Those simple. Prompt based scenarios. When X happens, respond with Y. Role plays are pretty good, but for those foundational brain abilities, listening, empathy, curiosity, managing emotions, reading the room for those role plays are terrible.

That's where you wanna use. What we call skills practice, which again, is taking people outside the context of selling. That's a great tool for the job or this kind of practice. Using call recordings is a great tool for the job. In that case, the takeaway message there is that you aren't limited to just role plays.

There are other ways to train someone's brain outside of just a role play. 

Oh, that's very cool. And Mr. Miyaji didn't tell Daniel to fight. He told him to wax on, wax off. He taught Daniel various motions individually so that Daniel then had the muscle memory so that eventually he could put it together in a real world situation.

And I'd say that's probably the last element, and this can power part can be a little tricky to work in. It's been actually the hardest part for us to bake into our programs. There are different layers of competency you wanna get people to. Of course, the first layer of competency is just understanding and knowing, and that's what traditional sales train does so well.

The 

next layer is being able to actually do the thing when prompted, when someone says, here's your prompt, can you respond with the agreed upon response framework? The next level is being able to do that under pressure. 'Cause of course, doing it in a role play is different than doing when there's money on the line.

Beyond that, there's other layers of competency. 'cause at that point you're still just doing a single motion. And there's a big difference, we'll use the karate analogy. There's a big difference between being able to throw a perfect kick, a perfect punch, and being able to win a fight. Winning a fight involves a lot more than just being able to throw a great kick and throw a great punch.

So similarly in sales. Winning a deal is a lot more than just being able to use a technique when prompted. There's the situational awareness of what move to use in what moment. There's this ability to improvise different combinations of techniques and moves based on what feels right? There's this adaptive intelligence.

You need to be able to say, here's my goal. I'm an unpredictable environment. I'm gonna use a variety of different techniques to get me to my goal. That's more like winning a fight. That's more like winning a sale. That's far beyond the simple, Hey, role playing. When I say X, you say Y. And again, to get to that level of expertise of that adaptive intelligence, situational awareness to improvise on the fly, that's where you typically need to bring in foundational brain abilities rather than just simple, pure habits of when X happens, respond with Y.

And that's like the, that final frontier of competency is being able to do that. One of the things that we've done is actually early in our work with teams, we give them very simple, prompt based role plays. I'm just gonna say X, you respond with a framework that hits these three points. Simple as that.

But as we move through the program, we start like giving people wider and wider parameters, and eventually we give them no parameters. All we just give them a destination and say, all right, you're in a role play. You goal is to make this happen. During the conversation, you figure out how to get there.

We spent the last 10 weeks with you teaching you different techniques, tricks, instilling new habits with you. But you gotta figure out in the moment. What technique do I wanna use to get me from here to there? In an ever changing dynamic situation, those are the role plays that really count when you get to that point where you can just set a destination and let people find their own way there.

Using the techniques and tools they've been trained on. That's really is. Although, ironically enough, you don't wanna start your practice there. That's where you wanna end. 'Cause first you do wanna establish those foundational skills, those wax on, wax off moments. Then when you kind, it comes time to bring 'em all together, that's when you do those role plays where again, it's more openness to how they're gonna handle themselves and conduct themselves.

There's less guidance on what to do. And say 

you start with the Vince Lombardi, this is a football, the field is a hundred yards long. There's a line every 10 yards. You don't start with a play ball. You start with the basics and you build it there. Jonathan, this has been a fabulous conversation. I have one more question for you.

How do you maintain that level of heightened ability once your initial engagement maybe is done? How do you ensure that sellers continue to hone their craft and don't revert back? 

Great question. We actually do recommend teams continue using the materials we gave them to keep practicing at least once a month.

In some of our work, we give them materials for the whole team to practice together. And some of what we do, we give them materials for one individuals to practice one-on-one, peer-to-peer practice. In either case, we recommend those continue at least once a month because there's never a time when the practice ceases.

The other piece though is that once you've gotten to that level where you have new foundational skills, you have new habits, once you've gotten to that fourth level of competency where you're not just like a parrot, regurgitating a prompt, when you're told to, you actually have the adaptive intelligence and situational awareness to decide what to do in the moment.

Once you've gotten to that level, you can actually start to use real calls as skill building practice opportunities. And I want to make it clear that. Early on in the journey, that's not a good added way to do it. Early on in your journey, basically, whenever you practice using real calls, all your brain ever does is basically whatever its current level of best is.

So using calls to practice is actually a valid strategy for maintenance. Of what your current best is. However, using calls to practice is not a way to improve what your current best is and become better First. You gotta take people through a quarter or a year of growing their skill to get to the point where they actually are at the level of skill you want.

Then you can use practice during real calls to maintain it. And what that looks like is just creating the habit of, before going into calls, clearly setting your intentions of what you wanna accomplish. After each call, reflecting back on what went well, what went poorly, which techniques you use correctly and appropriately, which techniques you use maybe at the wrong moment.

That weren't great or maybe the missed opportunities where you could have used a technique and you missed it. That type of stuff is a great approach for maintenance. And usually that's best done with the help of a coach or a manager. You don't need to do this for every call, but I'd say at least pick one call a week.

That going into it, you have crystal clear intention of which techniques you wanna use, which skills you wanna flex. Yeah. And then after that call, you look back and say, okay, how did I do? Where are the spots that I'm rusty and maybe where are the spots I need to continue practicing for the maintenance phase?

There's a lot more in-call work, less practice. But there always doesn't need to be practiced even in the maintenance phase. 

That's wonderful. That's a great recommendation, Jonathan. Unfortunately, we're outta time. I have a couple of takeaways. I just wanna highlight number one, and these aren't in a specific order and there are others key topics we discussed that I won't call out just in the interest of time.

Know what good looks like, identify the skill gap, understand where the salespeople are. And help them get to what good looks like. And then some of it is the base knowledge of what to do, and then some of it is the, or the bigger piece is the habits that help them to actually use that knowledge.

Knowledge without ability is useless. We talked about demo questions and demo questions can be closed ended, which aren't useful to the customer. They're just more discovery or open-ended that allow you to take the customer where you want them to go. So there were some other really good recommendations about demoing Prime before showing.

For instance, we talk about foundational brain ability, that you want the salespeople to be deeply curious, to be listening carefully to what customers are saying, and be aware of everything in the environment, not just what they're saying with their words, but what they're saying with their body language.

And then practice improv class. Every time Stephen Colbert does something on stage, he reminds me that he's an improv master. I love the idea of going to improv and doing this work with this deliberate practice. Anything important that I missed in that wrap up? 

I think that's good. I might just toss in some of the points we closed on, which is that there's a difference between really well structured role plays.

That really builds skill, follow the principles of deliberate practice, and then the awkward, uncomfortable role plays most of us have been subjected to. And then of course there is again, other ways to grow skill outside of role play, such as improv, such as real human conversations. Such as well used call recordings. 

This was a conversation with many branches, Jonathan, where can people find you if they wanna follow up with you? 

Pretty active on LinkedIn. I'm sure you can find the link to my profile in the show notes, and I talk a lot about practice there. The website for us is the practice lab.co.

And really in a nutshell, everything I've described over the last hour, we spent the last three years building, we have available right now to run with sales teams. So specifically we have a quarter along program on discovery related skills such as one we talked about. Using all the forms of practice we talked about, we got a quarter along program around demos and how to hold more effective demos, incorporating a lot of the habits and, question types that we talked about.

And then we even have a monthlong program around objection handling since that of course is a moment where people need a lot of skill to respond well in the moment. So if any of what you said or what I said and what Lee and I talked about sounds appealing to you, of course you can go try to do this on your own and probably make some headway.

But if you have the appetite for outside help. Go to the practice lab.co. We got a for a contact form there, as you can imagine, and we'd love to chat and see if anything we've developed can be a good fit for your team. Jonathan, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Lee. Thank you, Jonathan.