Super hackathon: Denver recap
Submitted by Chantae Sheetz in August 2024
What’s a Super Hackathon?
Picture a room buzzing with energy, filled with passionate professionals eager to collaborate and innovate. The Enablement Squad hosted an electrifying "Super Hackathon" sponsored and led by Jonathan Mahan from The Practice Lab.
Ever heard the expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”?
Well, in enablement, we lead a lot of horses to water, just to watch them not drink… or rather; lead a bunch of sellers to [exactly what they need to do differently to succeed], just to watch them [keep selling the way they’ve always sold and get the results they’ve always gotten].
It’s painful, it’s maddening, and it’s almost universal across every sales team out there.
So what gives? Why are people whose income depends on performance so hesitant to implement training that would improve their performance? And what can you do about it?
The goal of our 3-hour session was to hack behavior change for our sellers! We learned a bit about brain science and 5 different practice modalities and walked away with a full 12-week behavior-based skill program that we could implement immediately, aligned to the key stages of most sales cycles: cold calling, discovery, demo, and negotiation.
Setting the Stage: A bit of Brain Science
We began by learning why our sellers struggle to retain or implement the sales training they receive. This is because everything they’ve ever learned about how to sell better is stored in the front of their brain (the prefrontal cortex to be precise), yet during times of stress, pressure, and emotion (such as a sales call), it’s the deeper, more instinctual regions of their brains that take over and “call the shots”.
Meaning that that new methodology or framework we rolled out to them last quarter is being stored in a part of their brain they have a hard time accessing…(wait for it)…during sales calls. It’s no wonder the behaviors don’t change!
So how do we implement effective and lasting behavior change on our teams?
It’s quite simple actually, allowing more practice so that the new skills we’re helping them develop get baked into the “muscle memory” in their brain and become second nature. Similar to athletes, olympians, and musicians who put in HOURS of practice before stepping foot on stage, the field or to perform, sellers also need that chance to practice what they’ve learned before being asked to execute it under the pressure of live calls.
(btw, you’re about to hear more about what this looks like and how to do it yourself, but keep in mind The Practice Lab’s sole reason for existing is to help sales teams implement effective practice based sales training that leads to lasting behavior change. So if you want to do this on “easy mode” give Jonathan a shout and he can walk you through your options; which range from done-for-you outsourced practice programs to 1:1 consulting to help you integrate more practice into your existing programs).
Let’s Understand the Building Blocks
In order to create a practice program you need to first get crystal clear on WHAT you need to be practicing. An easy way to think about this is in terms of 4 different categories of what you could focus on with your team. These 4 categories form the building blocks of your behavior change program:
Skills: The foundational communication skills and mental abilities that salespeople need to perform at their best, regardless of the particulars of the conversation they’re having. Things like active listening, staying calm under pressure, and being highly curious are good examples of this.
Techniques: These are changes a seller can make to their communication that will make them more effective throughout the conversation. A couple of examples: summarizing what they heard, using mirrors and labels to keep the buyer talking, and using a “Humbling Disclaimer” before asking a direct question.
Moments: A moment is exactly as it sounds, a true moment in time during a live customer interaction that tends to have an outsized impact on the success of that call. In the world of negotiation, a pivotal Moment might be what the rep does immediately after hearing a potentially deal-killing objection; in discovery, how they open the call could be a pivotal moment worth practicing.
Outcomes: The conversational milestones you want your reps to accomplish during the call (not necessarily the end goal for the whole call). For example, on a cold call, the end goal is to set a meeting, but a key Outcome of the conversation might be to get the buyer talking about their current process.
Once we understood the 4 building blocks we broke out into groups by the 4 stages of the sales cycle mentioned above and we discussed for our current teams what those building blocks would be. For the rest of this share back, I will be doing this through the lens of the Negotiation Stage.
Some of the Skills we identified for the Negotiation Stage were: Active listening, comfortable being direct, staying calm under pressure, and reading non-verbal cues.
Some of the Techniques we identified for the Negotiation Stage were: second-level questioning, replacing concessions with exchanges, reframing problems/pain, and the use of mirrors and labels.
Some of the Moments we identified for the Negotiation Stage were: responding to objections, prepping a champion to sell internally, asking for the deal, and proactively surfacing objections+concerns at the end of Disco/Demo calls.
Some of the Outcomes we identified for the Negotiation Stage were: Uncovering who the competition is (and what their offer is), Identifying which objections are “smoke screens” and which are “deal breakers”, gaining access to the economic buyer.
What happened next?
Once we identified as individuals and as a group the building blocks and actual skills, techniques, moments and outcomes we were looking to drive for our sales stage came the fun part, we learned FIVE different forms of practice!
FIVE forms of practice, say what?!
Then we dove into why practice matters, the data and science behind practice, and most importantly, the types of practice and when/how to use which one. Since we talked a bit about the data and science earlier, we’ll keep this section dedicated to what the practice modes are and for which building block they best align.
Traditional Role-Play: This is what we’ve all done, been a part of, or created as enablers. It is that typical 1:1 or 1:some role-play with a “mock-scenario.” It is repetition-based practice, effective early on (think onboarding), but the downside of this practice is that it tends to see quick plateaus as it's not the most relevant or applicable since it's a “fake” scenario.
An example would be a mock call for certification.
Deliberate Practice: This form of practice is similar to how my nephew is going through tennis practice. It’s a chunked practice style that equips you with skills that build on one another.
For example, in his tennis lessons, he first had to learn some fundamentals, such as how to swing his racket, before he ever actually hit a ball with it. That didn’t come until weeks of practicing the basics one piece at a time.
Challenge Role-Play: This type of role-play is best aligned with outcomes as the key focus is on what outcomes you’re trying to achieve (rather than on what techniques you use).
An example of this would be linking surface symptoms to strategic business priorities, similar to traditional role-plays, the downside of this format is that it also leverages a practice partner who’s pretending to be a buyer, so it’s not completely realistic.
Real-Life Practice: This is a great practice to help your reps develop the foundational communication skills and mental abilities on your list. You simply replace a made-up role-play conversation with a real-life conversation where one party (or both) focuses on practicing the foundational skills they need to be great communicators and sellers.
Time-Travel Practice: I am biased… CI is my favorite tool, and this is my favorite form of practice! Until Jonathan and The Practice Lab gave me language for this practice, I called it many things but not what it actually is, which is Time-Travel practice.
This practice is where you take a real-life customer interaction and create a clip/snippet of the customer monologue and bring that to a team meeting, 1:1, onboarding, etc, and ask your reps to share what they’re hearing, not hearing, what they’re curious to learn more about, questions they might ask as a follow-up, etc.
Whoa, that’s a lot and also makes so much sense, as all good enablement programs do; this workshop followed a flow, built on itself, and now comes the juicy part… the 12-week program!
Bringing it all together!
Once we had all of our building blocks complete, we aligned the practice modes that best aligned to each category, and from there, we started to build out our 12-week program:
Phase 1 is all about laying the foundations by equipping your reps with the communication skills and mental abilities they’ll need in order to smoothly execute everything else you’re going to have them practice in the following sessions. You can think of this phase as a “hardware upgrade” before you ask them to start running newer, more advanced “software”.
Phase 2 is focused on practicing each individual element of a great call one piece at a time until each one becomes second nature for your reps.
Phase 3 is your reps’ chance to bring together all the various skills/techniques they practiced in isolation and begin using them in combination with each other in order to accomplish the specific high-value Outcomes you identified.
This was by far one of the most impactful events I’ve ever experienced in my enablement career. I got more out of three hours than I have from full three-day conferences because we walked away with something we can actually implement to drive change TODAY.
Thank you, Jonathan, The Practice Labs, and all attendees, for an event that will continue to be felt and seen by so many organizations!
