Building Blocks, Close Up: Spotlight on Sales Talent Development

Hello Enablers, and happy Friday! Here is our next edition of Building Blocks, Close Up!, with a spotlight on Sales Talent Development. There will be multiple building blocks at play here, including systems. This is a great way to connect the dots and make the blocks actionable. Let's dive in!

One of the things that resurfaces frequently for me is the difference between education, learning, development, training, and coaching as they relate to Sales Talent Development and organizational learning strategies for Sales.

Why? It's because of the number of conversations I overhear or am part of, on the topic of "talent development" (TD) for Sales, with various company leaders (C-suite, sales, or sales training/enablement), where the thinking about TD is so limited. So many organizations are just one step beyond, "Leave 'em alone and let 'em sell," by thinking, "We trained 'em, so we're doing talent development."

And then, even with those who want to get to a higher maturity level for talent development, I see these terms getting jumbled and mixed up all the time, with very few organizations addressing them all. This leads to some conflated and confused development strategies. Which then – along with frequent poor implementation – do not yield the results they should. Which then – when times get tough – leads to downturns and layoffs. It's a vicious cycle, and it could easily be a virtuous one instead.

• DISCLAIMER: For clarity, I'm not suggesting that outstanding talent development practices are the only solution to all business problems nor the only factor in improving performance or avoiding layoffs. I'm not (quite) that na?ve. I do, however, believe raising the bar on employee engagement and performance, through effective talent development practices, can be a significant factor in resolving those problems. High performance and profitable revenue solve many problems.

So, in this newsletter, I’ll define the terms – Education, Learning, Development, Training, and Coaching – as I see them, and share how you can create strategies for each, as applicable for your business, to improve both learning effectiveness and sales results.

Let’s start with those definitions.

The Definitions

Education

From Dictionary.com:?https://www.dictionary.com/browse/education

Education is generally longer-term learning, for some future purpose. It shapes what you know (acquisition of knowledge), influences how you think about things, and often readies you for what you are preparing to do as a career. You receive Education primarily through schools and colleges/universities.

I’ve always liked the quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein, although it’s more of a loose paraphrase:?

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

In my experience, few people have ever been “educated” into better on-the-job performance, unless that education also included skills training (as it does in the?Sales Education Foundation’s?university programs, with practice and role play competitions, or hands-on experience using software programs). That aside, education is not always role or task-specific. Tuition reimbursement and supporting employee's education pursuits can be a good strategy here.

• SIDEBAR: The above SEF programs, vocational schools, and medical education are exceptions, preparing students with real-world experience through practicums, clinical rotations, apprenticeships, internships, residencies, and other job-specific training and work experience to prepare them for technical jobs or skilled trades, rather than providing academic education to pursue careers in a professional discipline. As a sidebar, perhaps something that should be done more often for our sales profession, or even enablers.

Learning

From Dictionary.com:?https://www.dictionary.com/browse/learning

Learning is the act of acquiring new knowledge and skills -- and hopefully, for work-related learning -- applying what was learned).

The term has risen in popularity in recent decades as a departmental/function name (often moving from “Training and Development” or “T&D” to “Learning and Development” or “L&D”), with some espousing the mantra that you teach people and train animals. I find that distinction clever and well-intended, but not really accurate. (Sorry, friends.) Whether you train a dog or a person, they learn. The motivations and methods may be different (let’s hope, although, hey, everyone likes treats), but both learn, and both can be trained to perform a specific task. This is why practice and role play are so important. I refuse to make "training" a bad word.

To me, learning is an over-arching term — it applies to education, training, and development. How people learn is studied and researched, leading to evidence-based methods. It influences how we design instruction and learning experiences, and how we train. Whether you’re being educated, developed, or trained, you are learning (hopefully).

Learning professionals have likely heard about?70:20:10, so that theory is worth mentioning. While the?origins are difficult to track down and specific data on the 70%, 20%, 10% split are elusive and likely invalid, the general concepts seem to make sense.

To learn a specific job or to reach mastery in it, advocates of 70:20:10 suggest that:

• a small amount of learning (the 10%) comes through purposefully orchestrated and structured training (formal learning)
• a slightly larger amount of learning (the 20%) comes from other people, informally through exposure or collaboration/sharing (informal or social learning)
• the largest amount (the 70%) comes through personal, on-the-job experience, through day-to-day experience (experiential learning).

Will Thalheimer, a learning researcher, consultant, speaker, and founder of?The Debunker Club, has poked into the 70:20:10 theory, if you’d like to read more, see:?https://www.worklearning.com/2019/04/19/the-70-20-10-framework-gets-its-first-scientific-investigation/

I’d suggest that you set the specific percentages aside but keep the concept in mind. I’ll address this again when I elaborate on organizational learning strategies.

Development

From Dictionary.com:?https://www.dictionary.com/browse/development

Development is a targeted form of personalized learning to foster growth. Sometimes it is generalized; sometimes it is targeted at individual needs. It might include shaping your views toward diversity and inclusion, adopting a more successful mindset, controlling stress, benefiting from assessments or executive coaching, working with a mentor, preparing you for another role or a career change, or it might be part of an overall “developmental plan” to close a competency gap (in which case it would also involve skills training and coaching).

Note: For clarity, I’m not using developmental plan as a euphemism for corrective action or a Performance Improvement Plan. I differentiate between Individual Development Plans (IDPs) and Performance Improvement Plans (PIP). You should, too. See this post for more.

Training

From Dictionary.com:?https://www.dictionary.com/browse/training

Training is job-related learning about?what, why, and how?to do something (or multiple things), to be successful in a specific role. If the nuance exists, it may include?when and where?to do these things, as well as?how much or how often?to do them. This is role-specific, competency-based, performance-oriented learning that should result in on-the-job performance at acceptable levels or improve performance to even higher levels.

Training is often misused to attempt to address performance problems it can't solve. When someone doesn't know the what, why, or how to do something, training works wonderfully.

The simple Tell, Show, Do, Review model with understanding checks at each stage is a simple yet powerful and effective model for training. And for skills training, there are few things more powerful than practice, or role play done right.

Coaching

From Dictionary.com: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/coaching

We can always debate this (and I’m sure someone will – even I see both sides), but I don’t really see coaching as a separate learning strategy. To me, especially for learning skills, it’s something that’s embedded, which happens as part of those other strategies. If you want a sales rep who has been?trained?on a skill to achieve mastery, then reinforcement, practice, feedback loops, and skills coaching will be required. If you want someone to?develop?a growth mindset, counseling (which I consider to be "coaching for mindset and beliefs" versus skills) will surely be needed, over time.

Coaching/Counseling should be embedded. It should be a given. I know it's not, always, but it should be.

Now, that said, I'm still including it here because it is a clear differentiator in Talent Development (and Sales Performance Improvement), and not everyone sees it as embedded and therefore may miss or skip it. It's simply too important to allow that to happen. The rest is just semantics.

Goals of Organizational Learning for Sales

Let’s start with a list of the types of organizational learning that you should have in place (or should consider, based on organization size, resources, and budget) to support sales employees.

[Note: Sales Talent Development starts with effective Sales Hiring. Different topic, but so important. A fish and a bird both excel at what they do. Try to teach a fish to fly and a bird to breathe underwater and see how that works out. High-performance in selling requires the right blend of nature AND nurture.]

• Sales onboarding for new sales reps and new or promoted sales managers
• Ongoing competency development for sales and sales management
• General management and leadership development
• Specific sales management methods and sales coaching
• Ongoing product updates (preferably scenario-based solution training)
• Developing business/financial acumen
• Deepening customer/buying acumen and domain expertise
• Developing a growth mindset
• Developing general “success skills” or business skills (communication, problem-solving, organization/time management, decision making, etc.)
• Supporting the successful implementation of a new [product / process / methodology / software / tool]
• Supporting a sales performance improvement initiative (from incremental to transformational)
• Supporting strategic business objectives and tactical plans
• Supporting ongoing career development (including rotational or temporary assignments)
• Supporting promotions (preferably “preparing for” but also “post-promotion”)
• Supporting Performance Improvement Plans
• Supporting work-related formal education goals
• And, in our world of systems thinking, to connect other dot, some of this is already represented in our sales effectiveness models...

The above list is primarily aimed at frontline sellers (such as sales development reps, business development managers, inside sales, field sales, account executives, sales engineers and technical SMEs, and account managers) and their frontline sales managers (sales managers who directly manage those sales reps), but may also include management and leadership development for all levels, including senior and top sales leaders.

Depending on your company’s organization design, management and leadership development for sales leaders and executives may be part of your responsibilities or may lie elsewhere, in HR, OD, or Talent Development. In some organizations, I’ve been responsible for management and leadership development. In others I’ve been responsible for only the sales-specific portions of leader/executive development. And in a few, I’ve had no responsibility for leadership development beyond the frontline sales managers. In all cases, I still recommend cross-functional collaboration.

The Strategic Application of Learning Strategy by Type

For sales organizations, I strongly favor training and the related coaching. I’m sincerely pleased for people to have opportunities to continue to learn and develop or be educated in new things and develop general business skills or further their career. That’s a wonderful talent development practice, aids retention, increases employee satisfaction, fuels employee engagement, and produces a better-educated, well-rounded workforce. I fully support this.

At the same time, those practices rarely move the needle on organizational performance in a big way (aka, transformational sales results). That’s the angle I most-often come from for sales enablement (and for all performance improvement initiatives). Please don't misinterpret this as not believing in other talent development avenues, or not wanting to develop people and support their overall growth. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, however, always laser-focused on what is going to move the needle on the metrics that matter most.

That said, we are discussing organizational learning strategies, so it makes sense to move beyond my normal, purposefully-myopic approach toward improving sales performance, to address the talent management needs across the employee lifecycle (or "talent lifecycle," if you prefer).

I should note that these practices?can?have impact – especially improving discretionary effort – so even from a purely business-oriented angle, they do make sense. It’s also the right thing to do, and part of creating the right environment to support high performance. When budget cuts are imminent, however, executives are not always concerned about “doing the right thing” for employees, so it’s wise to tie these efforts to company performance, whenever possible.

Let’s look at the sales employee lifecycle, through the talent development lens.

Sales Employee (Talent) Lifecycle

This is a gross oversimplification, for sure, and is also not “built to scale” from a timeline perspective, but it does follow the path from joining the company to leaving the company. To call it out, the Ongoing Development should support Career Pathing, as well.

In general, a new employee is recruited and hired (hopefully very well) and placed into a role in which they can succeed. They pass through pre-boarding, new-hire orientation, and sales onboarding (role-related training designed to ramp-up the employee to acceptable levels of sales production in the shortest time possible). Then the ongoing elements begin, along with good performance management practices, all of which should continue until the employee's exit, in whatever way it occurs.

The Sales Training System

You knew this was coming, right? ;-) To ensure maximum effectiveness, I recommend using a?Sales Training System?that has been proven effective. The one I built over the years and recommend highly, is:

More About The 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change

Sales onboarding is a large and critical topic with a scope beyond this newsletter edition. See the additional content in the Resources section. For this newsletter, I'll just add that both your onboarding strategy and tactics and your ongoing skill development efforts should provide support for the?5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change, which is part of this?Sales Training System.

1. LEARN: Knowledge Acquisition (in the most efficient, effective, well-designed way possible, validating that learning has occurred)
2. REMEMBER: Knowledge Sustainment (just because they learned something, doesn’t mean they’ll remember it)
3. PRACTICE: Skill Development (just because they know what to do and remember, doesn’t mean they can do it)
4. APPLY: Skill Transfer (just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they will)
5. MASTER: Coaching to Mastery (just because they learned, remembered, practiced, and applied a new skill, doesn’t mean they did it well enough or will continue to do it)

• SIDEBAR: For a solid primer about the need for change management in enablement, check out my partner Felix Krueger 's discussion with Del Nakhi , here: https://www.goffwd.com/change-management-with-del-nakhi-interview/.

Sales enablement without change management is like building a gasoline-powered race car and putting water in the tank. It might look good, but it’s not going anywhere.

~ Mike Kunkle

Back to talent development. After onboarding, if hired, trained, coached, and supported well, the new rep should have achieved their learning and performance milestones, be certified (if you do validations or certifications) and be performing at acceptable levels or better.

In the next stage of their lifecycle, they’ll receive:

Ongoing Role Support

This includes software and technology tools, workflow performance support, job aids, policies and procedures, and anything that supports work performance in their current role.

Ongoing Training

This includes ongoing training that is related to their current position, especially the assessment and closing of competency gaps. This includes vehicles for feedback, ongoing coaching, peer collaboration, reading assignments, or other means that are targeted to improve work performance in the current role.

Ongoing (Career) Development

This includes ongoing employee development and education, which may be non-skills training or other learning related to their current role, but is more likely employee development (other general work/career skills) or career-pathing toward a new role or promotion. Many organizations don't do enough of this, and it's a missed opportunity.

Pro Tip: If you develop competencies for each role, and designate the level of each that is required for success in the role (especially if the job descriptions/titles are progressive), you can use competency assessments to identify someone's fit or readiness for other roles, and offer a developmental path to progress toward the role they desire.

Performance Management

This includes periodic formal feedback from managers on work performance. It may involve (but is not limited to) goal setting, goal tracking, periodic performance appraisals or other feedback mechanisms aimed at documenting, rewarding, or developing the employee’s mindset, behaviors, and competencies that impact their work performance.

70:20:10 Revisited

As mentioned earlier, advocates of 70:20:10 suggest that there are three buckets that describe how learning occurs in organizations:

• Formal Learning:?a small amount of learning (the 10%) comes through purposefully orchestrated and structured training
• Informal Learning:?a slightly larger amount of learning (the 20%) comes from other people, informally through exposure or collaboration/sharing (also referred to as social learning)
• Experiential Learning:?the largest amount (the 70%) comes through personal, on-the-job engagement, through day-to-day work experience.

While many of us in the learning profession challenge the exact split of 70:20:10, a friend of mine and well-known HPT and performance improvement expert,?Guy Wallace, suggests “most 10, before most 20, before most 70” as a guideline to make this concept workable. I especially believe this is true for sales.

As a part-time curmudgeon and full-time cynic, I believe that even social collaboration, informal learning, and experiential learning are most useful when purposefully orchestrated or at least guided. This is not to say that good things won’t happen on their own, if you foster the right environment. I just don’t like to leave a lot to chance, when sales performance (and my opportunity to fuel it) is on the line.

For example, here are some ways you can promote and support informal learning:

• Use a “Buddy System” (where mentor buddies are prepared and guided)
• Foster sharing between colleagues, top producers, SMEs, executives, sales enablers
• Moderate to safeguard that peer advice is sound (and especially in regulated environments, that it’s legal) and to ensure you don’t have “the blind leading the blind”
• Source, organize, and disseminate “best practice” content and “top performer practices” specifically
• Encourage employees to periodically reflect on their own experience and sharing what they’ve learned
• Try?structured OJT?to drive better experiential learning

Sales enablement software excels at helping with all of this. There are many good ones on the market and I prefer those with a broad base of functionality to reduce the vendor footprint and number of apps/logins for your sellers. At my employer, SPARXiQ, we use, partner with, and resell Allego. They are very impressive today and have a strong roadmap for the future.

Competency Development via a Sales Coaching System

Once you have all of this in place, there is still a huge opportunity in almost every sales force to upskill over time to develop true sales mastery. This is where a competency development framework?comes in, based on the foundation of sales competencies and supported by a Sales Coaching System.

The premise here is simple:

Inputs:

• Teach the competencies and associated sales methodologies
• Use competency diagnostics, either rep self-assessments combined with manager assessments of their reps and/or other competency-based psychometric assessments, to determine competency gaps
• Combine with other sales analytics to pinpoint developmental areas that when competencies improve, will move the needle on the metrics that matter most

People:

• Get reps and their managers engaged and working together. The reps should ultimately own their development, but should receive support, guidance, and coaching from their manager to get to skill mastery.

Process:

• I recommend the?Diagnose/Plan/Do/Review?model, which I write about extensively in my eBook on?Sales Coaching Excellence and in this post on Distribution Strategy Group.

Results:

• When you achieve the Results you were striving for, you go back to the beginning and start again. This is an ongoing, looping process, that when done well, will produce excellent performance improvement, in areas where higher mastery will significantly lift results (due to the analysis in the Diagnose stage). The loop creates a cadence and culture of coaching and continuous improvement.

Hopefully, these ideas about building a larger Sales Talent Development framework will help.

RESOURCES

• Slides: Sales Hiring System
• Slides: Sales Onboarding System
• Field Guide: Build Your Sales Talent Roadmap
• eBook: Sales Training That Sticks
• eBook: Sales Coaching Excellence

Posts About Role Play / Practice

• https://www.mikekunkle.com/2018/04/08/sales-leaders-its-time-to-get-serious-about-purposeful-practice-skill-mastery/
• https://www.mikekunkle.com/2018/07/21/maximizing-the-power-of-role-play-and-sales-simulations/

Determining When Training is or Isn't the Right Solution:

• Performance Analysis Flowchart (Robert Mager & Peter Pipe)
• Solution Chart (Adapted from Ferdinand F. Fournies for Sales Coaching Excellence)

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR...

Felix Krueger says...

"Sales Enablement is no longer optional."?

Considering the recent layoffs, a lot of business leaders don't seem to agree with this statement.?I talked with many to find out why...

To earn the oft-quoted seat at the table with senior executive leadership, sales enablement leaders have to create and communicate tangible business impact.?

That's why Mike Kunkle and I will soon host a webinar to share the proven approaches Enablers can use to become more relevant in the job market and to establish their teams as an invaluable function within the business.?

7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact!

WHAT

Some of the topics we'll cover include how to:

• Understand the maturity level of your sales enablement function
• Use a simple framework that will help you identify current shortfalls
• Get more done with less by effectively managing stakeholders
• Select the sales performance levers that will help your sales force the most
• Formalize a plan that delivers results and helps you gain momentum fast

WHEN

• US: Feb 2?at 1 pm PT | 4 pm ET
• UK: Feb 2 at 9 pm GMT?
• AU: Feb 3 at 8 am AET
• Duration: 60 minutes

COST

• FREE for the webinar and content - you invest an hour of your time for your career.

If making an impact with enablement is your priority in 2023, you do not want to miss this event!

>>> REGISTER HERE:

https://bit.ly/3CJWGT4

_____________________

That's it for this week! Did you learn something new reading this newsletter? If you did, or if it just made you think (and maybe chuckle from time to time - bonus points if you snorted), share it with your favorite enablement colleague, subscribe right here on LinkedIn, and check out?The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience.?Felix Krueger?and I are both Building Blocks Mentors for the weekly group coaching sessions, and we hope to see you there!?

Until next time, stay the course, and?#MakeAnImpact?With?#Enablement!