From Chapter 11:

Leveraging Training Systems

AS A NEWLY minted US Marine, I was stationed at Camp Lejeune on the coast of North Carolina.

In a post 9/11 world, the Marines around me understood we would soon find ourselves in deserts, jungles, and mountains engaged in actual combat. We saw others cycling back from combat operations overseas given a few weeks off, and then saw them placed into instructor roles to ensure the rest of us would have the most up-to-date tactics and strategies to ensure our return home as well.

If this type of training occurred within sales teams, it would look like having top performers regularly train junior salespeople on exactly what is, and isn’t, working.

Why would military leadership take their most experienced Marines, Green Berets, Navy SEALS, and Air Force pararescue forces ‘off the line’ and put them in instructor roles?

They understood a critical lesson that Bulletproof teams regularly put into practice:

It’s better to bleed in training than on the battlefield.

Anthony Iannarino says it in a much friendlier way when he refers to the mindset necessary to overcome the inevitable challenges salespeople encounter in their careers: “If you want to ruin your career in sales, simply say, ‘It can’t be done.’”

Sales managers preparing their salespeople understand the power of training for scenarios ten times more difficult than what their folks will likely encounter. Being prepared for a scenario that’s 10X more difficult than what they’ll likely encounter ensures success in environments that are always unpredictable and rapidly changing.

While preparing Marines could have been done in a classroom setting, instructors understood it would be better to mirror the actual environments those Marines would be operating in. Instead of classrooms, we trained in simulated cities, complete with multi-level buildings, blind corners around streets, and plenty of positions where a sniper could hide and do a lot of damage. Instructors wore the same clothing as the civilian populaces we’d encounter on deployment and acted as they’d just seen the civilian and enemy populace behave while their ‘trainees’ patrolled the mock city streets.

Using the systems described and the training system we’ll go over in this chapter will allow you to create some of the highest-performing salespeople in any industry. How?

Few organizations take the time to systemize their pipeline flows, outreach cadences, and the campaigns those systems live within. Fewer standardize their templates and call scripts. Fewer still integrate those tools into training designed to prepare their salespeople for tougher conditions than they are likely to experience with prospects.

The Prepping for Tough Prospects System

Trigger: When onboarding new salespeople and/or getting existing salespeople spun up in use of call scripts, messaging templates, and campaign systems.

Bulletproof Impact: Training that mirrors and even exceeds the worst conditions ensures that when salespeople do encounter stressful situations, they will be able to execute. Applied to sales, this means salespeople have already faced the worst attitudes, objections, and toughest prospects in role-play before revenue is on the line with actual prospects.

How do we prepare our salespeople for tougher conditions than most prospects will present?

As part of my ‘spin-up’ in preparing to deploy, I accompanied Marine infantry units on pre-deployment training missions. Often these missions would involve sending whole platoons of Marines to facsimiles of Middle Eastern cities erected on military bases. The Marines set to deploy would start by watching a team of experienced instructors enter one of the buildings, clear it of enemy combatants, and exit cleanly. These instructors not only worked together like a well-tuned watch, they were like engineers that build watches.

The Marines in training would then attempt to mimic their instructors’ every step, hand signal, team movement, and vocal cue. Eventually, they would be able to perform the same movements in the same amount of time as they navigated through the buildings. Only then would they be inserted into a building whose layout they didn’t know, and that would require them to improvise based on the scenarios they’d already dealt with. These final scenarios would force them to innovate, basing their behavior on the systems they’d been taught.

This type of ‘forced innovation’ was a regular part of training. How was innovation forced in these scenarios? Instructors would plant mock improvised explosive devices in cabinets, hide in rafters, and even act like hysterical civilians just to get close enough to the Marines to do damage – all tactics they’d seen used again and again on their recent deployments.

How does this type of real-world, progressive training differ from the training most salespeople receive? I’ve actually seen salespeople handed a product manual, a group of ‘leads’ on a card, and sent on their way to sell. Basically, they were just left to their own devices. There’s a better way to train than hoping our salespeople figure it out on their own.

Systemizing Success with Prepping for Tough Prospects

Whether you are training a new salesperson or getting veteran salespeople spun up on Bulletproof selling, walk them through this training regimen:

1. Review the pipeline and objectives of each vertical

While it would take specific knowledge to explain how to use your particular CRM, it’s imperative that you and your salespeople understand your prospects’ pipeline flow, as well as how to access and launch the campaigns that comprise it. When prepping our clients’ salespeople for success, I take the time to walk salespeople through the structure of their pipeline verticals and what the defining characteristics of prospects are in each vertical.

For instance, salespeople should be able to describe each of the following stages of a prospect’s buying journey when prompted with the deal stage and be able to share what moves a prospect closer to becoming a client:

Cold Outreach: In this stage, we don’t know who the decision makers are. When we find a decision maker, they move to the Decision-Maker Identified vertical.

Decision Maker Identified: Here, we know the DM (decision maker) in these accounts, but they haven’t been qualified for budget, challenges that our product or service solves, or buying timeframe (if that applies). Once we find out their budget qualification, challenges, buying timeframe, and decision-making criteria, we can move them to Pre-select if we can’t drive a sale or meeting today.

Pre-select: These high-value accounts have been qualified for budget, decision maker(s), buying timeframe, decision making criteria, and challenges they’re experiencing that our product or service solves. Basically, we’re waiting for a budget to become available and know when that will likely happen. Prospects leave this vertical either by us driving a meeting or by moving backward to the DM Identified vertical if a prospect becomes unresponsive.

The test: Once salespeople say they understand the structure of the pipeline they’re managing, ensure they can tell you what qualifies an account to be in each vertical and what account activity – or lack of activity – moves them forward or backward in the pipeline.

2. Walking through each campaign’s steps

As you walk salespeople through each campaign’s outreach cadence, ensure they see you or their trainer execute each campaign task within your CRM and enter a record of the task having occurred. Walking salespeople through a campaign’s steps while they watch means launching each campaign on a ‘test prospect,’ then marking call tasks as complete. It also means locating email templates within your CRM when prompted to send a particular email and accessing, customizing, and sending email and social media messages from within the CRM or transferring those templates to direct messaging platforms on social media.

The test: To ensure salespeople properly manage campaign tasks during this kind of training, I have them ‘fire’ a campaign on an account and walk me through each task as if they were actually performing it. While the cadence of a campaign system may have weeks in between each contact point, I have trainees complete one task, assume the time has passed in the campaign, complete the next task, and so on until the campaign has run its course.

3. Conducting outreach and using the call script

As part of training client’s sales teams, we have salespeople roleplay phone calls. As the trainer, we play the role of the ‘prospect’ and present objections clients’ salespeople often hear, including expressing annoyance at being interrupted. We do this a half dozen times or until we’re comfortable with salespeople running the script without needing to read its opening questions verbatim.  While it’s not necessary for a salesperson to be able to recall all objection responses from memory, it is essential they can show us they know how to access them while on a call using the search function available in any online word document. 

The test: In the course of call training, give salespeople an objection you know is addressed in your script. See how well they can locate the objection and respond while maintaining conversational flow, while also using it in a way that doesn’t sound like they’re reading it from the page.

4. Model success

Next, have salespeople listen to you or your senior salespeople make actual calls to prospects while using the call script. Your salespeople, even those with didactic memories, will need to see you use the call script in action to ensure they understand how it works to guide the flow of a conversation as you confirm or discover a decision maker, uncover needs, etc.

The test: Have your salespeople track the questions and micro-objectives you or the senior salesperson used that moved the account forward in your pipeline, verifying with you whether a decision maker was confirmed, buying timeframe uncovered, budget qualified, etc.

5. Force Innovation

At this point in training, salespeople should have a foundational understanding of how to launch campaign systems on a prospect account and execute outreach tasks. Now have some of your senior salespeople play the role of ‘hammerhead’ prospects and throw the toughest objections and personalities at your salesperson-in-training on a mock call.

The test: Can your trainee leverage the script you’ve created even in a stressful conversation? Can they still achieve some micro-objectives on the call even if a sale wasn’t possible? Did they innovate any objection turnarounds on the ‘tough prospect’?

6. Operate on their own

Next, have your salespeople make calls to prospects while you listen to the conversation and take notes on what the salesperson misses or blows past, as well as buyer information they stumble upon. If you notice a particular type of personality or question is tripping up your trainee, take the time to dry-run those questions and prospect personality types until you’re confident they can handle them on the next call.

The test: At this stage, your salesperson should be able to ascertain decision makers, buying timelines, budgets, challenges, decision-making processes, etc. and flow through objection responses. Once a prospect call is complete, salespeople should know where the account needs to move next within the pipeline and when the next task is set to fire on the account.

The above system may take 20+ hours for a minimally viable salesperson to be trained in the use of campaign systems, scripts, and templated messages. Why, with the high turnover rate among many salespeople, would a manager take that much time to onboard a salesperson who may not work out? Great training is one of the inescapable elements of great organizations, so let’s address this important question.

There’s a famous quote that even Richard Branson loves to use but couldn’t properly attribute, so I’ll mention it here without attribution as well. Two business leaders are chatting and one asks:

“What happens if we invest all this time into our people and they leave?”

The other replies, “What if we don’t, and they stay?”

Let’s pause and look at how far you’ve come with your sales team or in standing up a Bulletproof selling system in your own organization if you’ve been following the steps we’ve outlined so far. You’ve defined a pipeline made up of the stages your prospects move through, stood up a CRM or more effectively utilized the one you have, created campaigns with systemized, omni-channel outreach tasks, templated messages to standardize best practices in communication, and outlined commonly heard objections. With those elements in play, you’ve built a sales machine that’s previously only been available to the largest and most advanced sales teams on the planet.

Before using these systems with prospects, it’s imperative to establish the check-in points that ensure your systems are being used and updated as your prospects, customers, and market change. These check-ins ensure everyone on the team is a better salesperson than they were the previous week.