Ep5 The Evolution of Sales Training & The USA School System

Welcome to the Inside Sales Enablement Podcast, Episode 5

Everyone agrees sales training is important, so why the friction between Sales and L&D?

In this episode, Scott Santucci & Brian Lambert discuss the role of people. Sales Enablement is a people profession and sales enablement leaders are focused on human behavior and skills of sellers (or as CEOs often say “manufacture their reps.)”

The challenge for many “classically trained” L&D professionals lies in balancing the hyper-specialization and needs of the seller with the desired by executives to run as a shared service function. Sometimes the L&D function and people within it aren’t often set up to support Sales.

This creates a fundamental question: Why is so much sales training outsourced? Why are sales processes off-limits to the training function? And when sales enablement equals training, why is it considered tactical delivery?

If training organizations aren’t comfortable engaging strategically on developing talent, or aren’t deemed “valuable” by executives that’s a problem. Brian & Scott talks about his journey to tackle this gap and enable the trainers to close the gap to sales teams through research, processes, and outputs. Why terms like ADDIE and rigid L&D approaches don’t resonate with other groups including the CEOs view of “training.”

Join us at https://www.OrchestrateSales.com/podcast/ to collaborate with peers, join Insider Nation, participate in the conversation and be part of the continued elevation of the profession.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Nick Merinkers 00:02

Welcome to the inside sales enablement podcast. Where has the profession been? Where is it now? And where is it heading? What does it mean to you, your company, other functions? The market? Find out here. Join the founding father of the sales enablement profession Scott Santucci and Trailblazer Brian Lambert as they take you behind the scenes of the birth of an industry, the inside sales enablement podcast starts now.

Scott Santucci 00:33

Hello, I’m Scott Santucci.

Brian Lambert 00:35

Hey, and I’m Brian Lambert. And we’re the sales enablement insiders. Our podcast is dedicated to asking the big questions that you may be wondering about sales enablement. Are you frustrated that maybe something’s not quite right? Do you believe that sales enablement should be adding more value than it really is? In this podcast? We’re going to talk about today, something that’s very near and dear to my heart and that’s training and learning. So, Scott, what do you have for us?

Scott Santucci 01:01

Thank you, Brian. And as always, we try to frame out the topic that we’re discussing by bringing other examples to the table so that we have better insights and better perspective to discuss it. I have the great fortune, or if I were a 12-year-old, rewriting many, many, many reports over and over and over again, the misfortune of having an educator for a mother, and my mom has worked in developing curriculum and learning for many years and has all kinds of masters and in training, and she’s an educator, through and through and through. Well, one of the things that’s interesting is we all know, the curriculum for students, and the curriculum for adult learning has gone off into different different branches. And one thing that’s being exposed to all of that information, you know, you hear a lot of things. And one of the things that I’m particularly attuned to, is this whole idea of the K through 12. state of educating our children. In the United States, we spend the most more than any other industrialized country in the entire world on spending per student. Yet if you look at Test Scores and results, we’re down towards the bottom. So, the question is, what are we getting for all that money? And where is it going? And that tends to be a hot topic and a lot of different reformers and perspectives about how we improve education.

Brian Lambert 02:38

So, Scott, that’s great, as usual, great facts. Great story. But, you know, in the corporate world, I don’t have very many high schoolers that that work here. So, what does that have to do with sales enablement?

Scott Santucci 02:51

What is that? Right? So I love that question. And what does that have to do with anything? Why are we talking about that? Well, the reason that we’re talking about that is often get the opportunity to have one on one conversations with CEOs. And the reason that I’m they’re having that conversation is, of course, they’re concerned with the productivity of their Salesforce. So, my first question is, well, how sure are you that it’s the effectiveness or it’s the quality of the reps? Have you looked at, say your products and services? CEO answer is always Well, we’ve done a lot of research into that. That’s a good question. We’ve gotten Bain McKinsey or some external person to validate their their corporate strategy. We’ve got great feedback about our products and services. We feel we feel fantastic about it. It’s not our products and services. like okay, well, maybe it’s have you thought about that. It’s your messaging and marketing. Well, we actually did a brand audit, the branding that we came out with is it brand new and we really like we really like where we are with our branding and positioning. Our marketing department is generating tremendous amount of leads and those leads aren’t getting followed up by the Salesforce. And it’s very frustrating. We’ve got a lot of metrics and indicators from our marketing department about what what kind of messaging is, is involved. So, we’re pretty certain it’s the Salesforce. So, then my next question is, okay, well, if it’s the Salesforce, then Have you been hiring the right people? Maybe maybe what you’ve been doing is been hiring the wrong people all along. So, the answer is, well, of course we hire the right people. We always, were really good about hiring best in breed, we hire with competitive salaries, we’ve got a great hiring process in place. And then I asked for sort of a follow up question around that which is, are the people who are still involved there two years ago. So, in other words, all of the new recruits that you have that comprise them the bulk of your Salesforce, are they all the same people? Yes. They’re the all, they’re the same people. So basically, my summary of that Brian is, and I say this to CEOs as well, let me summarize what I’ve heard. Your products are great. Your branding and positioning is great. You’re hiring all the right people, yet somehow you have the wrong Salesforce today. Is that correct? And the CEO says yes. And then my question back to him is, are you looking at what you’re doing? Because it seems like you’re manufacturing the wrong reps? And then I’d be quiet. And then when, when that happens, it’s always Uh huh. I never really thought about that. And we have a completely different question. Rather than launching into what kind of sales training program Do we need to put in place or how do we hold salespeople accountable, etc.

Brian Lambert 05:59

Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s an interesting way that you put it here. Are you manufacturing the right reps? So, I have a, I have a people background and that concept of manufacturing reps is is something that the traditional l&d folks might rail against, but what do you, what do you mean by that? And what, what kind of dialogue do you have about this concept of manufacturing reps?

Scott Santucci 06:25

Well, really what I mean by that is just like, there are people who are really looking at how do we improve the overall school system? Maybe the system that we have for sellers is is antiquated. And that’s really the point. And what I don’t mean to say, what I want to make sure is really clear to everybody listening. I’m not anti-sales training. I’m extremely pro sales training. I’m extremely pro skill development. I’m extremely pro seller. I think the question that I’m that I’m trying to ask is, is the sum of the parts Working, and what does it look like? And I think in order for us to really examine that question, I think nobody would be better to help us explore that, then then you Brian, if you don’t know, Brian, one of the things that you may notice is when you look at his email it says Dr. Brian Lambert. So, what are you a doctor in and how do you go about getting a doctorate?

Brian Lambert 07:24

Well, to answer that, specifically, on the transcript, it says, PhD in organization and management. And when I started that, what that was was organizational design, organizational teaming, operating models, etc. But I was a practitioner at the time, and I looked for a degree program where I could study sales. So, I wanted the context to be sales. So, as I went through the entire five-year process, as you know, when I had my my ethics class, I did sales ethics. When I did marketing, I did marketing plus Sales when I did my management content, it was about sales management. So, I studied sales the whole time. And as you may know, Scott, there really are no PhDs and sales. So, I tend to think that I’m probably one of the few that’s actually studied at the PhD level this thing called professional selling.

Scott Santucci 08:18

Excellent. And for those of you who don’t know, what I want to do is also put this in context. I’ve had myself a tremendously huge learning curve on all of the sales, training and learning and development, vernacular and terminology. I myself have been a consumer of sales training courses, some of which I’ve hated, and some of which I’ve liked as a salesperson. I’ve been a purchaser of sales training, to sales training programs as the VP of Sales and Marketing, some of which I’ve liked, and some of which I’ve hated. And now I’m in the business of actually designing some sales, sales training programs of which I don’t really follow the tradition. No playbook. But what’s important is let’s start to understand a lot of these terms and where do they come from these disciplines, how they’re being applied today in this in this in this modern world. And I think a great setup for that is before Brian joined the team at Forrester. So past podcasts we’ve talked about that. Brian actually was in a role at at the time it was called, I think it’s ASTD. And now it’s ATD. What is ATD? What is that?

Brian Lambert 09:32

Yep. It’s a great organization. It’s the world’s largest professional society for training development professionals. So, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, they have an annual conference where they routinely get 10 to 15,000 people. It’s the the Association for for trainers.

Scott Santucci 09:51

And that was started with like in the 40s. Right?

Brian Lambert 09:53

That’s correct in the 40s. And as you know, Scott in the 40s, there was a lot of work to industrialize. Training and Development. And so, it is born out of that industrialization, standardized testing, etc., and moved in through a series of steps through, you know, skill development competencies testing, etc. and then into workforce planning, workforce development, workplace education, and now what they’re calling talent development.

Scott Santucci 10:20

So, when you worked at ATD, what was your role? What did you do?

Brian Lambert 10:25

I had two primary roles. The first one was looking at the strategic direction of the organization, how could it better serve? What was becoming more of a segmented view of the quote unquote, trainer? So, what did that look like? What type of communities would be established etc.? And then with my background, I was a seller I’ve been in sales management, sales training, I stood up what is now the sales enablement community of practice, which was the first one of its kind in the organization,

Scott Santucci 10:57

So, I need to understand this a little bit more that’s a that’s a that seems like a lot of inside baseball for me at least. Maybe the rest of you who are listening can really understand it. So first you said as somebody who only really cares about sales training, I gather that there are other kinds of trainers in in ATD helped me understand that a little bit.

Brian Lambert 11:22

Right. So, this is this is a it’s a great question. First, when you look at the umbrella of training, it’s this idea of helping individuals get the right skills and knowledge to be successful. When you work, look at that. And juxtapose that against today’s workplace. There are many different specialties and at the time, you know, this is 15-20 years ago, workforces and workplaces were becoming more and more specialized. So, what I was doing, in essence was looking at the different types of audiences that different types of quote unquote learners and looking at There’s specialized needs from a, you know, job skill perspective. Traditionally, l&d people trainers tend to not engage sales teams. And in fact, one of the things that I had begun prior to that was this idea of I want to be the the trainer to the sales trainers. I don’t want to necessarily be a sales trainer. I want to help those who do it because why is it that internal to most organizations, the sales training organization was outsourced to vendors. Why wasn’t training supported by these folks called trainers that tend to work on leadership development, for example, or customer service, or soft skills or all these other things, but selling and that’s, that’s where I went to,

Scott Santucci 12:48

let me break this up a little bit, because I’m trying to track so for our audience members for myself, trying to learn about where all these different sales enablement functions report to sometimes they report him to l&d functions. Sometimes they don’t, sometimes they’re in competition, finally competition with the learning and development organization. So, part of the first thing that I want to understand is Brian, are you saying, am I understanding you correctly by saying that where the learning and development space started out sort of the legacy was there’s a central learning and development function that provided adult learning to all functions like a, like a service, the shared service group, that the learning and development function would provide it to manufacturing, to marketing to sales or what have you? Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 13:42

Yeah, that’s correct. And it’s ebb and flowed and became a from a centralized to federated model and then back and forth. Sometimes it gets distributed into the operations. Sometimes there’s a centralized leadership development function and organizations since the 1940s. have been trying to crack that code on how do they make their learning development teams more relevant to their-

Scott Santucci 14:04

The second thing that I heard you say, was as a representative for an entity that’s focused on learning and development professionals, you were curious as to why so much of the sales, sales training was being outsourced and by being outsourced, I’m assuming you’re meaning it’s companies or contracting firms like Sandler or Miller, Heiman or Richardson, or whomever to come in and do the sales training for the Salesforce. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 14:42

Yeah, that’s correct. And because of that, they the the trainers that I was working with the l&d professionals seem to want to abdicate that responsibility to to these vendors. And I couldn’t quite understand why that was.

Scott Santucci 14:56

Gotcha. So, at that point in time, what I understand that your your telling me is that what you did was started to say, Hey guys, let’s start to build some competencies around what it would take to bring in house more of this sales training. So as a result of that you did a lot of surveys, you got a lot of research, you collected it because you wanted to be more or less the trainer of sales trainers. Is that correct?

Brian Lambert 15:24

That’s right. And the fundamental problem I was trying to solve was to, to bring more relevance and impact of this this thing called Learning development slash training to the customer focused revenue generating employees of an organization. In other words, I had heard, and I believed in that, that trainers and l&d professionals could have a strategic seat at the table. But the only way to me that they would be able to do that would be to drive revenue and not be so much of a cost center but an investment in where the organization needs to go there by linking people, salespeople to the business strategy. And if we didn’t go there as a profession, I don’t know what we were doing.

Scott Santucci 16:09

But this is pretty insightful. For me. One of the things that I have been exposed to is prior to prior to join Forrester and some of the work that I’ve done in the past would be you know, working with a big company like Unisys, and Unisys having a university function of which underneath it had a dean of a sales University. And what they would do is offer ASTD. This was at the time ASTD certified people to work with us on training programs. And the difficulty was, they had very rigid approaches of how to go about building those training programs that didn’t map to the business requirements that we were we were trying to do. That was my my personal experience. What experience? Where does that come from? What what’s what’s really the goal here? And where did these tools I think the I think one of the methods they were referring to is ADIE, what’s ADIE? And why was why was that being discussed with me in the sales leaders at at Unisys.

Brian Lambert 17:19

So ADIE is an acronym for a traditional fundamental workflow, that corporate l&d professionals would go through to build custom training. So, it stands for basically, an analysis, you analyze the job and skills, you just find something, you develop something you implement, and you evaluate. So, it’s kind of a, you know, continuous improvement model. And a lot of, you know, trainers are taught that there are also other versions of it, but the point is, is that there’s a, basically a challenge that needs to be addressed and you would go through and build stuff to support it. So that’s, that’s ADIE. So, to add answer that question specifically, the the challenge is that ADIE and all of the models for l&d are kind of predicated on two fundamental principles of adults. One is that the jobs are clear. Right? So, if you have a clear job, you can go out and build skills to it. So that’s the one fundamental thing. The second fundamental thing is that because the jobs are clear, the the scope of those jobs are well known to everybody else. So, you can build skills, and everybody knows what these people are supposed to be doing, whoever they are customer service, whatever. And so, what I was really perplexed by in my own work was, well, the sales role, it appears to be clearly defined, but boy, it’s not the more you understand it. And also, we are going through a transition in business and in the broader landscape, that roles are evolving, and it’s good required if today are not the skills required if tomorrow so now what are we going to do? And, you know, by the way, shouldn’t CEOs be expecting that the l&d function be able to help the organization evolved to that? So how does it help you do that? When it’s when it’s, you know, grounded on these two rearview mirror hardened principles that no longer exist anymore?

Scott Santucci 19:23

Yeah. And to be fair, to the to the trainer, who at the time, made me and the sales leadership extremely frustrated. Because the questions they were asking weren’t at all aligned to what the goals were. To be fair, what’s very common is there’s a lot of actually it’s a term I picked up from you, Brian role ambiguity within the Salesforce. And it’s not so much that your sales roles tend to be defined more around sets of activities so that you can get a comp plan, uh, comp plan going, but there’s not enough descriptors in there about exactly what is the nature of the job at hand. So, are we asking ourselves to be more consultative, or more transactional? those differences aren’t placed into most job descriptions today. There’s just a lot of details in there about attributes or competencies or things like that, but not enough about how they get their work done. So, I think that’s, that’s something that we’re seeing a change of, but when you have a functional group that’s built, been built up since the 40s. With a lot of existing infrastructure, it might be very difficult for those, those sales trainers to get outside that box and actually question or even think that they can question what the scope of a role is, is that right? Like what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing Brian, with regards to these, these emerging sales trainers?

Brian Lambert 20:55

Yeah, so the concept of analysis for example, a traditional approach to an analysis of a role could be a research project, or it could be a series of interviews, but it’s fairly quick. So just the concept of an analyzing roles and selling. You know, Scott, I don’t know about you, you know, we’ve been working together now 11 to 15 years or so. I don’t think our analysis is quite solidified and is complete as a trainer and we’re still doing analysis today after 15 years. You can’t do a needs analysis on a Salesforce in 30 minutes by answering a bunch of questions, for example. So that that’s one of the challenges that sales trainers inside of companies have today and back then, that was one of the things that I was trying to illuminate was the cross functional nature of the internal navigation. This idea of spanning corporate boundaries, being out on a limb etc. These are attributes of a role that require higher level skill sets. And more of about a way of thinking, not a way of, you know, completing a task, right? And that’s, you know, that’s the and this is why, you know, it’s sometimes I don’t tell people I have my PhD, I got a pink, a pink on LinkedIn, hey, you had PhD on there and he took it off, then you put it back on, then you took it off. It’s my own internal battle. Because a lot of these concepts have have academic background. And in the research is required to understand, you know, the Brain, Brain Science, the evolution of a workplace, there’s a lot in the academic space, but the the translation of that into execution is where I spend my time and I just felt like it was important to understand the totality of what was going on from a human perspective. And I still use those those things today, but I don’t, I don’t necessarily believe I should lead with it. Because the world is changed and it’s more about having an impact in a conversation today than leading with a professional stand. etc. So I know I took us a little bit off topic here.

Scott Santucci 23:05

That’s great color. I really think that in a future podcast we should get at the reactions that I had when you would introduce a lot of that terminology. And our research meetings when we first started working important.

Brian Lambert 23:21

Yeah. And we’re still friends after all this time, but boy was interesting. And yeah, we should, we should tell day the life of Scott and Brian back then, boy, we would go at it. But we were both trying to understand each other was the thing. Yeah.

Scott Santucci 23:35

So, what what I’d like is, you know, sort of wrap up on the ATD experience. You produced a lot of reports and did a lot of analysis. What were some of the reports and research that you did at ATD

Brian Lambert 23:49

At ATD, I led a, so I swung my PhD research into, which is basically salesperson skills, or we call them competencies. There’s a whole series of attributes of competencies, and I swung my PhD research into a research project globally, where I basically built the first sales enablement competency framework. So, it included sales operations, sales management, sales, trainers, salespeople, and sales trainers as an enablement function. So that was it’s called World Class selling and had a bunch of tools in there where you could go out and assess the attributes of your sales force, etc. But even in that work, which is one of the best sellers at ATD, it’s really easy to go into an aggregate view of the sales team. Now, you know, and, and that was the thing there is, I wish I would have been able to help folks tailor it more to their specific portfolio sales forces. But I also wrote a bunch of books I wrote, I have two domains, I had the sales domain. So, I wrote a book called 10 steps to successful sales is for entry level salespeople. And then on the other side, I had this l&d background, so I did a lot of certificates. I learned human performance improvement. I learned things like this ADIE model that we talked about. So, I have a heavy l&d background. And I think that set me up well, when I joined Forrester to have a foot in both of those domains.

Scott Santucci 25:13

Yes. And I think that that background is important for us to understand it. One of the things that I’d like to point out is, you know, our goal on this podcast is to talk about inside sales enablement. And one of the challenging attributes about this rapidly growing role is what is the scope of it and ATD now has a sales enablement community. So, the the point there is, what is the scope and what is the byproduct of of that community? And from from my perspective, I think that sales enablement is an inclusive function. I’m I’m all for any function that’s going to work to make the make the job of sellers easier to drive to make the revenue growth more enabled. So, for me the scope of sales enablement, is inclusive of trainers but not absolute to trainers. It it’s includes marketers. It includes the finance department, who has analytics or other process steps. It includes the administrative functions that exist that create policies and procedures that sellers need to it here, it may include some elements of the compensation setting process, and not all of it. So, the way of all the groups that it’s inclusive is important. And what are what are some of your thoughts of this grounding nucleolus of the ATD sales enablement patch?

Brian Lambert 26:52

Yeah. And just building off of what you said when I was when I was going through and I was a seller, I said I want to go work. On the sales profession, not in it. And I didn’t know what it was. And so, I ended up through my research into this, this skill building and ATD. When I did that, me personally, it became that this enabling sales forces needs to be done through skills, and it’s all about the people only. And I became very exclusive in my design, in my approach to things, and I, and I wish I would have been a little bit more open minded to your point, Scott. And now where I’m at is if you just if you take all those people that you just mentioned all those functions and put them around a conference room table, and I’ve literally done this, you know, I’ve had operations marketing, sales, sales training, have had external vendors, we’re all sitting in a room and the amount of energy that’s spent convincing one another, who’s right is ridiculous. And I just want to, I want us to think about stripping that away and saying, you know what, look at each other in and I’ve done this, look to the person on your left, look at the person on the right. And you know what, tell them they’re right. Because they are right. And everybody’s right in their own way. This is not about right and wrong anymore. And that’s my own personal evolution. I thought I was 100%. Right. If everybody just did what I said, we would be good from an l&d perspective, but it’s not there’s one aspect, one component, one pillar and everybody’s right now what? Now, the now what of that is incredibly challenging, because you have all of this, this hardened view, and an isolated view, including, you know, my own background in l&d. I was extremely biased and rigid. So, everybody’s right now what and in that view, how do we move forward and then what’s the role of folks that understand how humans learn how behaviors or competencies or skills need to be built and how to model you know, somewhat of a reality in a safe way, so you don’t have to practice on customers, you know, and let Can we just focus on that

Scott Santucci 28:55

right session. So, we’re at the point now where we we wrap up in two Should each of us share our takes. Let me share with you what and our listeners what I get out of this conversation every single time. For me, the primary role or primary duty of sales enablement is to simplify things. And to your point that you articulated really well, we have lots of cooks in the kitchen. And let’s just take the talent flavor of sales enablement, there are other flavors where it’s not got into marketing and content or anything like that. So, let’s let’s go back to the first area that we talked about, which is the conversation with the CEO and you’re manufacturing the wrong reps. Today, there are so many different individual people involved in that hiring process. So, the way that I like to think about this is a hire to retire process end to end. And one of the things that I like to do is I like to look at a talent spec. And what’s interesting is very few companies actually have one talent spec. I’ve seen some groups and learn learning development create these very rigid criteria of what they hire to. Most of the time sales trainers are not privy to that information. So, they train on something, something different. That spec goes out and gets broken down. And then there are other people involved. Maybe the hiring manager is responsible for writing out a job description. Then there’s other people within the group recruiting department that write job descriptions that are promoted, there are recruiters involved. So, there’s a whole bunch of people just involved in just the recruiting process alone, step one. And then you go to the onboarding process, which there’s a whole bunch of other cooks involved in that kitchen. Then you get into the coaching part, which we can do a deep dive into about how messy messy that is about what the actual role of frontline frontline sales managers are, then we get into the development process, which is the, you know, the training and all the different factors of which sales training is only a small piece of all the training sellers get. And then you get on to how you evaluate performers. And when you do that inventory, just the sheer number of people inside your company with their own versions of ADIE that they’re looking at through the lens ID is massive. So, the first thing that I like to do is find a way to simplify something end to end. And that for me means taking an inventory of all all all the people so part of what Brian’s telling me helps me get more knowledgeable or empathetic about these individuals so that we can bring them along and empathize with them. That’s that’s that’s one point. Any comments on that? Because that was a lot of a lot to share.

Brian Lambert 31:54

Well, I think that that’s your take. Well, that’s one of your takeaways mine to counter that was in Not counter it. But to add on to that is one of the things that is a takeaway for me, is this idea of the CEO view of this, you know, there’s so clicked up that they tend to think in terms of a quote unquote, system view. And are you manufacturing reps, and then click you know, Scott, you click into that with this hire to retire. And I think our listeners have a choice to make in this right because in your defense, you know, sometimes people are like, well, Scott makes it so complicated, you know, to me, you know what, Scott, you’re not the one making it complicated. Our companies are you happen to, you know, as the father of the profession be able to say, here’s, here’s what it is, it just is what it is. And and, you know, when I when I looked at it, that lens, I had a choice to make, and it was the do I go towards this and want to explore this in my role in the value add in that or do I want to just shut it down, and it comes down to me, you know, that scene in The Matrix, red pill or blue pill and everybody has a choice to make on what pill they want. And, you know, through this podcast series, we’re going to offer the reality pill and you got to you got to swallow it. And if not, you’re not going to listen anymore because that’s where we’re gonna go, we’re gonna go into that rabbit hole and and you simplify the rabbit hole. And it allows me to be clear on the value that l&d could bring or the value that that my flavor of enablement could bring to the cause so that we’re additive so that the sum of the parts is is greater than the whole, but we can’t, we can’t stick our head in the sand.

Scott Santucci 33:32

Excellent. There’s another lesson that I learned is one of the things that I’ve learned from you, Brian is the whole idea of justifying or not justifying providing measurement of completion or the value of training. By the way, people complete scores like did they complete their their test assignments, so very similar to how whether my son has completed physics, he got a 90 on it, then we judge him as you know, he’s good at physics. Similar thing. Somebody’s gone through some sales, training curriculum, they’ve gotten a grade. Now the manager thinks that they have those competencies. But as you and I both know, sales is a performance based role, not a, did you do it the right way roll like a finance person might be. And given that, that learning actually comes from doing it. And I think one of the things that whereas businesses get more metric driven, we haven’t created enough space to create the evaluation of talent by doing and what I’ve noticed is as a sales leader and a sales professional, the idea of doing a roleplay, which used to be commonplace, is now really upon, or that’s not really scientific, or there’s a whole bunch of excuses or reasons why role playing isn’t, isn’t a great thing. And I’m a huge advocate of bringing experiential learning back into, into the curriculum into the course. So that was another lesson learned. And what I’ve found is that when I include after we’ve deconstructed with a learning and development professional, the capabilities, saying, I’m not asking you to apply your frameworks, but you have a lot to give a lot to help make this more, more constructive. Watch how we’re doing these things and help us learn how to make them more repeatable. That is a fantastic use of a learning and development professional in my opinion. The challenge is how do we balance the hey, here are my needs for me as a businessperson? And then how do I convey them to somebody so that they can put away some of the structure and, you know, just start getting real of what their capabilities are. So that was that’s another takeaway that I’ve had from this, from this conversation, my exposure with you.

Brian Lambert 36:01

Yeah. And I think, you know, I know we have to go. One of the things that I appreciate about our work together is that you’ve always seen the value of you know, l&d training, etc. and wanted it to have the impact. And, you know, while l&d can help scale these examples or create ways to replicate across the organization, there’s some, there’s some very tactical areas that l&d can move into building off what you said, Scott, and that has to do with, you know, helping salespeople not feel so exposed in these training environments, and then also helping them with the concept of getting getting feedback. I deal with a lot of entry level and new salespeople and the idea of being out in front of somebody freaks them out from their internal peers. And then when they get feedback, they shut down, even if it’s constructive feedback. So, there’s a I don’t know if it’s generational or what but to me an LED thing is, is how do you help people and soften the beach for, you know behaviors behavioral based learning, or process driven or learning by doing, because the learning by doing is not taught in schools today. So, they come out and it just, boom.

Scott Santucci 37:15

Yep, we’re going to cover different kinds of and what we’re learning with regards to experiential learning and help making that pain go away and increase the rep productivity time through experiential and situational learning. But that’s a different. That’s a different episode. Yeah. Thank you very much for your time, Brian, that was great insight. I really loved loved your stories, which we’re asking you to do. As a listener. Please share with us what you took away from this. What lessons learned? How does inside sales enablement podcast help you rethink and re re envision how you’re how you’re working? Drop us a line at engage at insidese.com. Tell us a story. Give us a scene give us any kind of feedback. We’re very encouraged. by some of the initial responses of our initial podcast, our goal is to create a learning environment. And part of that learning environment is to share some of the inside stories and lessons learned from many different people in many different perspectives. Brian, do you have any other any parting thoughts before we wrap up this episode?

Brian Lambert 38:18

Nope. I appreciate everybody’s feedback. It’s been great. Thanks for the time.

Scott Santucci 38:22

Excellent. So, thank you and join us next time. And our next episode. See you then.

Nick Merinkers 38:29

Thanks for joining us. To Become an insider and amplify your journey. Make sure you’ve subscribed to our show. If you have an idea for what Scott and Brian can cover in a future podcast or have a story to share, please email them at engage at insidese.com. You can also connect with them online by going to insidese.com, following them on Twitter, or sending them a LinkedIn request.