What my Army Sargent taught me about Sales Management (You can't HANDLE the TRUTH).

I was in the Australian Army for a few years as an Assault Trooper in the 2nd Calvary Regiment, in my early twenties. When I joined I was super eager and ready to learn and do whatever it took to be a top-notch soldier (Trooper). As I look back now, I can see I was almost the perfect student, all you had to do was simply tell me and show me what to do and I’d gladly give it a go, always at full-speed and full-effort. I just lacked any natural talent. But, with the help of my Sargent, I made it anyhow.

One of the things which have really remained and resonated with me over all the many years since my time in the ARMY is the teaching and training style the military used with new recruits and just how successful it actually was. They were able to take almost anyone from ‘civi-street’ (civilian life) and turn them into a very good soldier, all in just 12 weeks, with a completely repeatable and scalable process.

If I think about what a lot of my current clients are trying to do in the business sphere, it’s exactly the same. Just replace the word soldier with sellers and it’s the same sort of training problems and situations. Leaders are trying to create great soldiers sellers, specific to their situation from their batch of incoming recruits. Yet, to be honest, most businesses are only a fraction as successful as the Army. So, the question begs, what are the secrets that we can take from the military and then replicate in the business sphere?

Let me answer that by using the real-life example of how I and my platoon learnt the obstacle course as new recruits in 1987.

I’m sure you can picture the situation already, barbed wire with soldiers crawling underneath, pushing their weapons through a muddy, wet pit. Unable to stand up because they are squeezed ever-closer to the ground by the tangled barbed wire roof.

There is a reason why they train soldiers to crawl under barbed wire you know, it’s very important in the scheme of things and if you’ve not been in the armed forces it may not be immediately apparent, so here’s why it’s so important.

You see in battle, NO ONE gets up and runs across the battlefield like you see in the movies. It’s a sure-fire way to get shot, very quickly. If you get shot, and you’re lucky, you’re dead. If you’re only wounded, then it’s going to take 3 or 4 other soldiers to get you out of the battlefield. This is the best-case scenario for the enemy, 5 soldiers out of the action for the price of 1. Of course, if you’re dead OR wounded, you can’t help anyone else on the battlefield. In short, YOU CAN NOT DO YOUR JOB. So, in order to do your job, the number one thing you need to do first, is to NOT GET SHOT. Just to be clear, as a soldier, your number one priority is to not get shot.

By training us, very early on, to crawl very low under the barbed wire the sergeants are teaching us the #1 critical skill we need to do our job. How to move around the battlefield and NOT get shot. Because in the battlefield, under fire, you crawl everywhere, quickly. Only then can we do whatever ‘soldier task’ we’ve been trained to do to support the mission. Such as blow something up, fire a machine gun etc.

This is important information for soldiers, but the real value for us as sales leaders and sales managers is in the way that they teach their recruits and obtain such a high percentage of good quality soldiers at the end of the process.

Think back to the obstacle course with the barbed wire. On our very first pass under the wire, it’s actually set quite high, let’s say 800mm for example. It’s dry, no mud, we don’t take our guns or rifles, certainly no backpacks and even though it’s pretty easy, many of us still catch our shirts and mostly our backsides on the wire, ripping our clothes and our skin.

We get yelled at a lot, mostly things like ‘Hurry up you squeezers. Your Mother’s not here to look after you now. Get a move on McInnes”. Not terribly supportive, this is true, but certainly creating some urgency for us to ‘act now’.

Two days later we do the obstacle course again, only this time we are timed, and the wire is a little lower, say 650mm high. And so it begins. We do the obstacle course on the way back from rifle practice, on the way to lunch, on the way back from a 20k march or on the way to PT (Physical Training)?. Basically, lots of obstacle course practice. At regular intervals, the wire gets just a little lower and the level of difficulty gets increasingly higher.

Before you know it, we are doing it, in the mud, in the wet, in the dark, tired, complete with our backpacks, webbing, rifles and even people firing rounds across the top of the wire to simulate battle type noises.

Let’s stop for a second and just imagine if, as brand-new recruits, we had been placed in this situation on day one? For sure someone would’ve panicked and tried to stand up and ended up caught in the wire (and shot if it was a real battlefield).

What I find amazing is that the Military’s training success rate remains the same regardless of whom they are teaching, city kids, country kids, big kids, small kids, smart kids and not so smart kids, all trained in the same way and yet, out pops the same battle-ready soldier, almost every time.

If we think about training in business (or in the military), I know people generally want to be successful, people want to do well. They just need the information delivered in a way which will help them make the transition from where they are now, to where they need to get to. If we want our sellers to be great, we need to chunk our training down, break the learning strategies around selling into pieces where we get to practice and slowly increase the level of difficulty, incrementally. Making it easier for people to succeed. Just like my Sargent did on the obstacle course.

We all know or heard of those horror stories about the first day seller who starts at a company, they get ‘on boarded’ which really means, here’s the HR manual, there are the fire stairs, here is our 17 principles of leadership perfection and then told to hit the phones, the social, the street, or whatever. Only to fail desperately after 5months and go to another employer. Self-esteem smashed and both employee and employer are the losers. #nowinners

I see it all the time. Sales skill development is not a one-time skill session thing. You can only learn a very small piece of the puzzle in one given session, regardless of how long it is. Yet time and time again I’m asked to give a 4hr or 1-day workshop to help sellers up skill their sales or their social skills. Sure, I can give you an overview in 4hours, I can agitate the need for change, I can even provide some actionable strategies or motivate the team to need more, but transformational change doesn’t happen over lunch. (Unless you’re talking about a stroke or a heart attack, these two afflictions seem to make people instantly change their behaviour. I'd try to avoid these if I was you).

Recently, I ran a session for a small start-up with about 6 execs. The CEO kept questioning the social strategies saying, “yeah, great, but how can I scale that”, “How do I give that to my team in the Philippines to get 10 x activity”. I’m saying hang on a minute. You haven’t even tried these strategies as yet and you’re already trying to find a shortcut? How can you possibly shortcut something when you don’t actually know how the process works yet?

This is one of the real challenges in today's’ B2B sales space, it’s ‘cool’ to be an entrepreneur, the language is all ‘scale up’, ‘10X Activity’, ‘Hussle’.

Here’s the truth.

1 – You can’t scale up authenticity if you can’t create it one-on-one in the first place.

2 – Taking time to learn & master a skill will pay you back 10X. That’s the real 10X. When you reach out to 10 prospects and they all reply – that’s 10X. sending 1000 messages at a measly 3% response rate is still 970 people who think you’re a jerk. This is why automation SUCKS for 99% of the B2B sellers out there. #Avoid.

3 – Train the way we learn. The 70:20:10 learning principle works for tradespeople with tactical, tactile skills. Sales is the same. After all, typically us sellers are not the smartest people on the planet. #notrocketscience

4 – To create a real change in your selling style or your sales team you need a sales transformation PROGRAM. Not a once of sales chat, a keynote or a motivational speaker.

5 – You cannot 'HUSSLE' poor performance into great results, no matter how hard you try or what time you get up #5amClub.

Figure out what your seller's core activity is, (the sales equivalent of not getting shot on the battlefield) and get really damn good at it really quickly, by simply building a system of regular practice, call it role-play, training, rehearsal, call it whatever you want. #justdoit.

If this training process can get young men (& women) to run headlong into gunfire across 80meters of no man’s land, then I’m confident it can teach someone to improve their outreach strategy, or teach them to make 30 calls a day, or build out a social strategy, or handle objections, or whatever, I know this because this is what success looks like.

Lastly, DISCIPLINE it's a dirty work in today's, I want it now, do it later, ‘nimble it', everyone's a winner, society and yet that’s exactly what will make you the star performer. Being contrary, going the extra mile, working late on real stuff, getting in early and doing the numbers and practise, practice, practice. It’s an unpopular piece of advice, I know, but if you want to be rich, successful and popular, these are the keys. There are NO shortcuts. #10XSUCKS

As well as being a sales execution coach and trainer to Australia's corporate sector. Mark is the #1 Ranked Linkedin Social Seller in Australia. Contact Mark via Inmail message or [email protected] for a discussion around sales growth, coaching, social media, golf, cycling, AFL and sales effectiveness. 

Twitter: Mark McInnes @mamcinnes

Blogpage and more info: www.salesleader.online