[00:00:00] Hey, it's Andrew. And just quickly before we start this episode, I want to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts. It's the Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax Podcast. Not only does it have a great name, it also has a really good format that's interesting. The two hosts are both named George. That's not what's interesting about it. It's that George K is on the vendor side and George A is a CISO on the customer side. And they have real conversations, sometimes with guests, about the world of vendor customer

[00:00:29] interactions. They're not afraid to call out bad behavior on both sides and talk about the weird and wonderful nature of this world of ours in cybersecurity. Recent favors of mine are the one about building trust called taking a flamethrower to FOD and buzzword mumbo jumbo. And also the one with someone who's a field CISO and advisor to startups called how security buyers think and go to market strategies for young companies. I'm not getting paid for this promo. I just really enjoy the show that two Georges

[00:00:59] is put on. Check it out. It's the Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax Podcast. Now on with this episode. In the last episode, we talked how Cyber Donut has to change how they sell in order to hit their targets for the year. But getting seasoned sales reps to change how they do things, I mean doing things for a long period of time, is really hard. You know, companies spend billions of dollars every year in sales training, but many of the programs fail because the sales team doesn't actually use what they learn and change

[00:01:29] what they do. So how do we help the sellers of Cyber Donut be more successful and make the changes that we need? This is the question. And it's why I invited Jonathan Mahan to join us today. He is a former cybersecurity seller, actually, and he now has his own business called the Practice Lab. And he spent the last few years learning and figuring out how we learn and how we change and then applying that to sales teams. He's truly an expert on bridging the gap between knowing

[00:01:59] and then using it effectively and then using it effectively and then using it effectively with a prospect on a live call. If you or your team want to be more successful and want to take on new ideas, you don't want to miss this episode. I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is the Cybersecurity Go-To-Market Podcast where we tackle the question, how can Cyber Donut get to $10 million in ARR by the end of 2024?

[00:02:32] All right. So Jonathan, here we are in the Cyber Go-To-Market Talk Podcast and we're all about saving Cyber Donut. We need to get the company to $10 million in ARR by the end of this year. We're now in 2025. Now, just quickly to tee this up, we released an episode last week where I talked about some of the focus areas for the team to get better at as they go into this year so they can have a chance of hitting that $10 million.

[00:03:00] And just really quickly, what we talked about is the need to standardize on answering the question, well, what do you guys do? Too many times we're all over the place on that. Secondly, we're doing a lot of situational and surface level discovery and not really getting to impact and deep metrics, things like that.

[00:03:19] Secondly, we're differentiating on features right now, not values. So we need to think about in this very busy, noisy world, how would we get asked the question, how are you different to this competitor? Give the answer that's strong and oriented in value, not just features. And then finally, the last area is setting up our unfair advantage so that we're teeing up our conversation so people actually want to have the things that we're good at, which our competitors are less good at.

[00:03:47] So we've got a bit of a laundry list here, four things really to work on with the team. And, you know, the CEO and the new CRO are obviously a little bit concerned that we want to train the team in how to do this, but we want to make sure that it actually changes, you know, behavior changes. And we've all been there when we've done sales training before where things don't change that much.

[00:04:10] So first question for you, Jonathan, you know all about this, you know, about behavior change, you know, about working with sales teams to help them do something different than before. When you try and put your finger on why does some sales training fail? What do you immediately think in your mind? So when it comes to analyzing any sort of, you know, behavior change, I think there's three reasons why behavior change might not happen, right?

[00:04:34] One is a knowledge thing. People might just not know what good looks like, might not know what's expected of them, might not know, you know, how to do their job well. Most sales training fixes that concern. That's usually taken care of if the sales training is any good. The second reason why behaviors don't change is because people aren't really motivated to change, right? Maybe it's like a broader, you know, cultural level issue where they're just not motivated in their role at all. Or a lot of times that's not it. A lot of times it's just more of a more zoomed in issue of that particular thing you taught them.

[00:05:04] It's going to help and make that much of a difference. So they aren't really motivated to go through all the effort that it takes to try something new, take a risk, because they just don't think it's going to work any better than what they're currently doing, right? So the motivation gap is the second one. A lot of sales training kind of misses the mark there, right? It just teaches them, here's how you're supposed to do it. In the meantime, reps are watching, they're going, says who? Bullshit. I don't believe you. That's not going to work. That doesn't work in our business. That doesn't work with our buyers. That doesn't work with our customer, right? And they aren't bought in. They don't really believe this training is going to make that much of a difference.

[00:05:32] So they really just don't want to put in the effort to change behavior. I think that's a great point on it. I'll tell you, you know, it's really interesting. And I encourage people to go out there and look at this. You know, we talk about in sales how we need to uncover problems and help people solve problems and things like that, right? If you go look at how many sales training companies talk about what they do, it's not in the aspect of solving seller problems.

[00:05:57] It's about a methodology or come and learn this or come and get good at the pain funnel, come and get good at this stuff. It's not about, oh, you know, when you struggle with this and you're trying to look for a better way and overcome that thing. Well, here we have a way to actually do it. So I think it's a really, really good call out to say that is that sometimes in our industry and the industry I'm in, you know, people don't do a good job of learning about what really motivates people to learn. No seller ever walked into their job one morning and says, oh, thank goodness.

[00:06:27] I'm getting some sales methodology training today, right? That's never happened. Well, they do go in and go, oh my God, we're getting killed by our competition. I wish we could get trained on how to handle that better, right? That's really the thing. So anyway, I cut you off. Such a good point to make. For sure. A lot would change in sales training if sales trainers applied the same principles of selling to their own programs, right? And selling reps on this stuff that they're training. So that's the second gap.

[00:06:54] I will say, though, that like there is a lot of sales training that is good at that, right? That starts with why that brings people along that really, you know, gets people bought in and excited and wanting to do the stuff that they've been taught. I personally have been through many sales trainings and I left there just like chomping at the bit like, this is amazing. Put me in, coach. I want to do this stuff. But what seemed to happen just so consistently, and this happened when I was a rep taking the trainings, this happened when I was a manager running the trainings, is that after the training's done, you go hop on your call.

[00:07:23] Suddenly you got a live buyer in front of you, right? You got six different things running through your mind. The pressure's on. Money's on the line. You got no time to stop and think. And suddenly your brain just goes blank and you just kind of like forget what you learned. Or maybe you remember it, but you just can't for the life you figure out how to apply it to this situation. One way or another, what ends up happening is you basically just run that call the way you've always run calls. And people would be hard pressed to find a difference between a before call and an after call, right? They just look the same.

[00:07:50] And that just frustrated me so much when I was a manager running the trainings, like, oh my God, I'm leading a horse to water and watching them not drink. I'm telling these reps how to do it and they're agreeing with me and then they don't do it. But then as a rep, I also experienced the same thing of leaving a training feeling this is amazing. I love this. I want to do this. And I'm getting on a call and shoot, wouldn't you know, I just kind of fell into my old patterns and again, mostly ran the call the same way. So how do we get someone comfortable to actually at least try the stuff they just learned, right?

[00:08:19] I mean, that's the first step. At least try this. I'm not saying you have to be perfect on day zero, but, you know, at least take the first step into the abyss and give it a go. How do we help people make that change? Yeah. So I think really the key here is you have to address the skill gap. So that's kind of the third gap where I mentioned there's three reasons behavior don't change. One, they don't know what good looks like. They aren't motivated to try it out. The third reason is they don't have the skill to pull it off.

[00:08:46] And specifically, they don't have the skill to pull it off under a time of stress, pressure and emotion, right? When they got a lot on their mind. And that really, I use the word skill for that. I know a lot of people use the word knowledge and skills interchangeably. But to me, there's a wildly different, a huge difference between knowledge and skill, right? Knowing what good looks like versus being able to do it yourself and do it under pressure. So you need to approach training in such a way that you're recognizing all three of those gaps. Yes, people need to know what good looks like. You got to cover that in training. That's obvious.

[00:09:13] But you also have to cover the motivational piece to make sure they're bought in and they want to do it. And you also have to cover the skill piece and equip them with the mental abilities and the skills they need to actually be able to pull it off. And what's interesting is that the more I kind of dove down this path of, you know, getting into the learning science, the more I realized that the way you close the first gap of knowledge is entirely different than the way you close the second gap of skills.

[00:09:39] The way you train the brain to know is entirely different than the way you train the brain to do. It's not just a matter of like, you know, when they know it, when you do a little training, they know it and you do more training than they can do it. It's like, no, it's entirely different types of training you use. And we see this in other disciplines too, right? So, you know, if you're in any sort of music, you're going to have a music theory class and you're also going to have hours and hours of practice and instruction time where you're actually applying the theory and doing it yourself, right?

[00:10:07] If you're in a martial arts class, there's going to be a part of the lesson where you learn new techniques and learn the theory about, you know, how the body moves and leverage and force and all this stuff. And then you're going to have a boatload of time spent actually practicing doing it yourself. And the way they train you on the theory of understanding it and the way they train your brain to be able to do it in a split second under pressure are entirely different mechanisms of training, right? You got your education-based training, your knowledge-based training, you know, slide decks,

[00:10:34] stories, analogies, acronyms, frameworks, group discussions, et cetera. That gives you the knowledge. And that's what most sales training is built on. But then you need the practice component of actually doing it. And specifically, there's an approach to practice called deliberate practice, which we can get into later that really makes a difference in helping rewire the brain with the skills and the circuitry needed to be able to actually do what you know. So just in terms of how to make it happen, just the first step is recognizing that knowing and doing are different things and need a different approach to training.

[00:11:02] And that doing requires a more practice-based approach. Now, when you say practice and sales training, the first thing that comes to my mind is role plays, right? And, you know, I've done a lot of role plays as a seller. I've done a lot of role plays as a trainer. And, you know, you get different reactions from people about what they think role plays is all about, what they think of how effective they might be. How do we start thinking about a practice or a role play to actually be more effective?

[00:11:32] And where do people fall down when they roll out role plays? Yeah, no, it's an interesting question. Um, it's so the business that I run now, right? The practice lab, we use role plays a lot. Um, despite that though, what's interesting is that for most of my sales career, I was very staunchly in the anti-role play camp, right? It was like my, my, my talking points were this isn't realistic. I could become an absolute master of this role play and still fall on my face on a real call because my role play partner doesn't behave the way a real buyer does. So what's the point at me becoming a master at running conversations with this guy?

[00:12:01] He's not who I'm selling to and he doesn't act the way people I sell to act, right? That was my number one argument. The other one was just, it was really awkward and like, I hated doing it and didn't want to do it. Right. Oh, really awkward, right? Yeah. Super uncomfortable. So, uh, what's interesting is that those kind of provide clues as to maybe what's off about role play and about what needs to be done differently to do role play better. Right. So the first thing you got to focus in on is the, I guess, transferability of does getting better role play actually mean you get better at the real world? That's the first thing to look at.

[00:12:31] And then the second thing is, okay, what about the experience of the people in the role play? Right. Most role play is awkward, it's uncomfortable. It's not very psychologically safe. So how do you create a more psychologically safe environment where it doesn't feel so dang uncomfortable and people can, you know, if not totally enjoy themselves, at least feel pretty neutral about it at the end, right? Rather than actively disliking it. And that's kind of what I've been spending the last number of years looking into, right? Is different approaches to practice. Cause here's the thing.

[00:12:57] There is a massive difference between just kind of simple repetition based practice and the kind of advanced deliberate practice that you see like professional athletes and musicians using. I'll use an example of this to kind of highlight the difference. So when I was learning to drive, I use simple repetition based practice. The idea of simple repetition based practice is the more often you do something, the better you get at it. So go do the thing and do the thing a bunch of times. And that works to an extent, right? So when I was learning to drive a car, I never got any sort of lessons or did any sort of deliberate practice. I just hopped behind the wheel and figured it out.

[00:13:27] And the more often I drove, the better I got proving that it can work. But when you start to look at, you know, professional athletes and musicians, that's not how they practice, right? You don't see a major league football team showing up and saying, okay, folks, this half of the field, your red team, this half, your blue team, go play a game of football. Good job. All right, come back tomorrow. We're going to play another game of football tomorrow. And just doing the thing over and over again, assuming the more often they do it, the better they get, right? That's not how they do it at all. And what's interesting about the driving analogy is that it also highlights another point about simple practice.

[00:13:57] Okay, it does work, right? From age 16 to age 20, I got a hell of a lot better driving. And all I did was just had lots of repetitions. But also notice between age 20 and age 25, between 25 and 30, between 30 and 40, 40 and 50, people don't get better at driving over time, do they? From probably age 20 or 25 onward, they just kind of plateau. And it doesn't matter. You can spend hundreds of hours, thousands of hours behind the wheel. And at age 42, you're probably just as good a driver as you were at age 32.

[00:14:25] So the point to be made there is that simple repetition-based practice, which is what a lot of role plays are, it's actually good for getting people like the first leg of the journey, right? From I've never done this before to, okay, just bare minimum competency. But actually really won't ever take you further or it'll take a really long time to take you beyond that, right? It's not going to turn you from, you know, novice to intermediate to expert. To make those improvements, you need to use deliberate practice, right? The kind of practice professional athletes and musicians use. So let's, I'm intrigued by that, right?

[00:14:55] But rather than talk in generic terms, let's look at what Cyberdonut has to do. Let's pick one of their things. So the statement from the head of sales was we need to be able to get into deeper discovery than we're doing right now. Too often what we're doing is asking the, what do you have? How's it going? How does that work? You know, what about this? What about that type questions? We're not getting into the big why. Why is this a big problem? What's the impact of the problem? So we want to help the team be comfortable.

[00:15:25] So competent and confident going deeper into discovery. How might we differentiate between the repetitive practice that you were talking about and the deeper practice you mentioned? Yeah. Yeah. And let's talk through some examples. So let's start just by talking through some simple practice, right? Some repetition-based practice. In the episode, right? And by the way, if anyone listened to this, like definitely go listen to that episode. Andrew shared it with me in advance of this and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like the stuff you're talking about, Andrew, was really freaking good.

[00:15:54] And it's exactly what my old cybersecurity company that I used to work at absolutely needed. And I was craving for that as a rep and no one ever gave it to me. So really good episode. Folks, go listen to that. But in that episode, you talk about, you know, going through this process with reps of helping them to identify really good questions, giving them guidelines and frameworks, letting them come up with their own questions and kind of creating sort of like a database of really dang good questions to ask during discovery. So let's say you've done that, right? To do just simple repetition-based practice here would be really easy.

[00:16:24] And I don't mean to like discredit this because this is more than what most teams do. And if this is all you ever did, you'd be ahead of your competition and you'd be in a better place. But simple practice here would simply be, all right, folks, let's do a role play. You're the seller, you're the buyer. You know, buyer, here's your persona, here's your ICP, or, you know, here's your persona, who's your acting out. Seller, your job is to use as many of these questions on the list as you can. Have at it. Maybe you keep score, maybe you have a competition, maybe you don't. But it's as simple as that.

[00:16:52] Just role play discovery call and use as many of these questions as you can just so you can get comfortable spitting them out and not sounding like an idiot with a mouthful of marbles as you do it, right? And just that is, again, better than most folks do and a great start for practice. If you're lucky enough to have like an AI bot at your disposal, you can set up the AI bot. Similarly, you can teach the AI bot, here's a bank of questions. You can tell the AI bot what kind of a buyer to be. You can have your rep do a role play back and forth. Tell the rep in advance your goal is to use as many of these questions as you can.

[00:17:20] And then the AI bot will square them at the end on how many of those questions they answered. And it'll probably give them some general feedback as well about, you know, you talk too fast or something like that. And again, this is good. I don't mean to say this is bad by any means. Most teams don't do this. And if they did this, they'd get a lot better results out of their sales training. They'd get a lot better performance, give a lot better buyer experience. So that's simple practice. And that will take your reps the first leg of their journey, right? The first, I don't know, we'll say 30% of their journey from I've never heard this stuff before to, okay, I can ask these questions and not sound like an idiot while I'm doing it.

[00:17:50] And if that's all you want, you can probably stop there and you're okay. Most sales leaders I know though, why they'd be happy with that. They do want more out of their team. And in particular, when it comes to discovery, one of the big gaps that I see is a lot of times when you run a sales training, even if you, on discovery specifically, even if you do get adoption in terms of reps do what they were told when they're on their calls, it generally feels a little off, a little formulaic, a little rigid, a little inauthentic, a little bit like reps are trying to force a square peg in a round hole by like asking these magic

[00:18:20] questions they were taught at not quite the right moment or with not quite the right wording or connection to the conversations being had. When I'm wearing out there, it just doesn't feel great for the buyer. So you're ending in this interesting place where like, yes, they're asking better questions, but also the buyer's getting a little bit more defensive, a little more wary because something just feels off. And in the end, it's hard to say, are you really any better off? Yes, your reps asked medic questions, but now you have a buyer with their guard up. So is that really worth it? Right?

[00:18:45] So when it comes to taking reps beyond this baseline proficiency of I can ask the questions I was taught and really into like true masterful selling. One of the big differences is can you take what you learn, the tools of the tool belt, the questions, the techniques, the framework, can you take those and you can, can you weave them into a conversation in a way that feels natural, in a way that feels human, in a way that feels like you're not running people through a sales process and a framework, but rather just feels like you're having a conversation with them. This reminds me, I don't have this analogy to help other people, but I like to think of it in this way.

[00:19:15] This reminds me of poetry. All right. Poetry has rules and guidelines and frameworks and meters and parameters and structure, right? There's all sorts of poetry theory out there. But when it comes to writing a poem that really moves people to feel things and to think differently and to take action, right? Real powerful poems. You don't get the power of a poem just by following the rules. In fifth grade, I wrote poems that followed the rules and they were trash. The power of a poem is when you can follow all these rules and it doesn't feel like you are.

[00:19:44] It just feels like you're vomiting and gushing from the heart, right? Words stealing out of your soul and nobody can tell you're following iambic pentameter or something. I just feel like you're talking. That's when poetry really hits. So it's similar with discovery. Yes, you can have your reps go through the motions of a sales process. You can give them an acronym of information to uncover. You can give them a question bank to ask. But the power of discovery that you want doesn't come when they just go through the motions. The real impact of discovery comes when they can follow those frameworks that it doesn't feel like they are.

[00:20:15] It just feels like they're having a conversation. I mean, that's an awesome spot to get in, right? When you've been doing this in a way, in a manner where A, it comes naturally. You don't have to think about your structure and whatever. You're just in that moment of just going with it and realizing you're doing all the right things. But not easy, right? I mean, I don't know. I think for me, probably tenure was a big thing, right? Selling something for a long period of time, you just get good at it.

[00:20:41] But we don't have the luxury of time in many sales teams. You can't take a year of ramp up and get good at this. So how can we use role play and practice to help someone get to that level of competency? Yeah. No, that's a great point. So the kind of simple practice we just described will basically never get you there. Put a little asterisk by never. Give it 10 years to look at you there. But to your point, Cyberdonate doesn't have 10 years to wait, right? They need their reps doing this well in the next 90 days here.

[00:21:09] So traditional simple role play, simple repetition-based practice won't give you that level of mastery. It really won't. To do that, this is where this deliberate practice comes into place. And one of the first things you do when creating a deliberate practice program is you actually analyze the skills you're trying to develop or the behaviors you're trying to change. You actually break them down even further. And for every what you want reps to accomplish or every what you want reps to do, you got to ask the question of how. Okay, but how are they actually supposed to do that?

[00:21:38] How is that actually supposed to happen, right? Okay, great. We want people to go away from the surface and get down to impact. How are they supposed to do that? Well, we want them to use these questions. We want them to use these questions in a way that feels really natural and smooth. Okay, but how are they supposed to actually integrate questions in a way that feels smooth? What do they need to actually do that, right? And you can usually take this down a few layers deep of every time you get a, here's what I want them to do, you ask a layer deeper, oh, how are they supposed to do that? And usually what you find is that, especially with discovery, but in most sales areas, some

[00:22:07] of those foundational hows, those like prerequisites that are needed before anything else they've been taught can be used. A lot of times boil down to things that aren't even specifically sales skills, right? They're just mental abilities. They're human skills. They're communication skills. They're emotional intelligence skills. And that usually is what's needed to take a framework and bring it to life in a way that feels natural and human. I would say the three that usually come up the most often when I'm doing this exercise with folks is listening, empathy, and curiosity, right?

[00:22:35] With some honorable mentions to things like staying calm under pressure or reading nonverbal cues, controlling your own nonverbals, right? Stuff like that. These are universal human skills, universal communication skills, but if you don't have them, or at least if you don't have them in strong supplies or, you know, ample supplies, you're going to have a really hard time bringing any sort of sales methodology to life in a way that feels natural. All right, Jonathan, well, let's learn a bit more about you.

[00:23:01] Believe it or not, I've got 49 questions on my list here. The good news is I'm only going to ask you three, and we're going to pick those three by spinning the magic wheel. This wheel is designed and audited, actually, by one of the big four auditors to make sure the questions we get are completely random. There's no fixing of these questions whatsoever. We can't possibly have that. So let's go ahead and spin the wheel.

[00:23:32] All right, question number 31. How did you make money as a kid? Oh, man. You know, in addition to, you know, the general odd jobs around the house my parents have paid me for, for a number of years, I actually like had a paper route and like delivered papers to people's doorsteps around my neighborhood, which felt so common, like at the time is so normal at the time. But I feel like now nobody younger than me will have any idea what the hell that is. That just doesn't happen anymore, I don't think. But yeah, I would go out with my brother every week and, you know, toss the papers on the

[00:24:01] doorsteps for, I don't know, a number of blocks. But, you know, that was our way of making like 14 bucks a week, which was just the most amazing money ever when you're eight years old. It's a lot of money when you're eight years old, for sure. That's awesome. All right, let me spin the wheel again. Get our second question. Ooh, number 17. What's an embarrassing or memorable moment in your sales and marketing work life? You know, two kind of come to mind.

[00:24:30] They're both, both very related. Early on until, to still to an extent today, but especially early on in my career, I had this tendency to really focus on like whether or not I was right in what I was saying and ignore how I was delivering it, how I was communicating, how it might be perceived by the other party. So in both these cases, you know, in one case I was working for Verizon. They made some change. They did something which really negatively affected me that I felt wasn't fair and wasn't right. And I just wrote the most scathing email, right?

[00:24:59] Just blasting them for it, thinking they would, I don't know, come back and say, oh my God, you're right. We'll change it. Like, I don't know what I was expecting, but that wasn't great. And then similarly, a little bit later on my career, I was at a software company and they just made that dumbest decision. They were asking us to make this change, do something differently. And it was a total train wreck in the making. So I set up a meeting with my manager and I just kind of logically laid out for him all the reasons I wouldn't be following along with this change and told him what that was going to be, which is not the approach, right?

[00:25:26] When talking to your boss and that, you know, kind of backfired and didn't work out so well for me either. So both of those were like painful, costly, embarrassing lessons. And eventually I got to the point where I realized, oh, wait a minute. It's not just the rightness of what I'm saying. It's also how I'm communicating too, but hard-earned lessons. It's funny, the confidence of youth, right? You know, myself as well in my twenties. I thought I knew a lot more than I think I know now. Well, that's part of it too.

[00:25:54] After a few years of running a business, it definitely has given me a lot of humility for like, you know what? Nobody really knows the answers. We're all just doing the best we can here, you know? Yeah, for sure. All right. Let's get the third question here. Oh, question number two. What is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity? So interestingly enough, when I got into cybersecurity, I wasn't looking to get in cybersecurity.

[00:26:24] Didn't have a background in cybersecurity. Didn't even really have much of an interest in cybersecurity, but I was looking for my next sales role, right? And I came across this leader and like a community we're in and he was hiring and I had a few conversations with him. And like, it was one of those things where like, I didn't really want the job that much. I was hoping to work in a different industry, but I still met with him anyways. And I just loved him, right? I loved his style, loved his approach, loved talking to him. And I realized I really, really wanted to work for a leader like that. I still said no, because I wanted to find another industry.

[00:26:52] But after like a few weeks went by and I wasn't getting a lot of traction, I was starting to run out of money. I was like, you know what? Maybe industry doesn't matter that much. And I ended up joining a cybersecurity company just because of the sales leader that I really wanted to work under. And he actually turned out to be every bit as good as he seemed on the surface, right? I worked with him for, I don't know, a year or so. Before he moved on. And he, to this day, remains the best leader I ever worked with. So that's how I got into cybersecurity. I was really going after a leader I wanted to work with. Well, that's a good reason, though. I mean, they say that, you know, a lot of people leave their jobs because of the manager

[00:27:21] that they work for. And I'm sure good leaders attract great people as well. In fact, I know people that I'm working with right now who you say they're great leaders and they're attracting some great talent into the company, people you've often worked with before. So it's a big asset to have. So it feels like then we need to go back to the core of the team, think about who we're hiring and see if we can hire for those three elements, right?

[00:27:49] The listening, the empathy, and the curiosity. Yes. And also, there is not enough reps like that to go around. So unless you're paying far and away the best OTE and have far and away the best culture and benefits and reputation as a company, you're going to have a hard time getting reps like that. Because here's the thing. Almost every sales training company, at least for the last 10 plus years, probably longer, has not trained on those things. Just assumed everyone already had those things and just trained on process, maybe techniques, methodologies, et cetera.

[00:28:19] So you have a whole generation of salespeople who really only have the human skills, the communication skills that they've just kind of stumbled upon accidentally throughout their life, right? No one has ever gone to go on intensive, focused, deliberate training and practice to sharpen these parts of their brain. But these are the skills they need. So I would say, step one, if you were to take a deliberate practice-based approach to this, and this certainly isn't the whole picture, but it's a piece of it, is that you

[00:28:44] would want to make sure you incorporated practicing some of those foundational core skills, like listening, empathy, curiosity, reading body language, staying calm under pressure, stuff like that, right? You wouldn't want to skip those. Those are kind of like a foundational piece that have to be in place first. Otherwise, everything else you give them, again, it's going to come out a little hollow, a little fake, a little bit insincere. So that would be like a starting point to start with those skills. Now, when I hear people talking about curiosity, you know, I'm totally on board with it.

[00:29:11] I've heard people debate whether you can really train curiosity, right? If someone's either curious or not is one of the things I've heard people say. What do you say about that? Yeah. So a lot of people believe that. And I would say for good reason, because in the grand history of sales training, I've never personally gone through a sales training that did jack anything to improve someone's level of curiosity. However, that doesn't mean it can't be done. Again, the reason it doesn't work is people try using the tools of the education world to teach people what curiosity is and how important it is.

[00:29:41] That's not what's needed. We need to rewire the ability center of the brain, right? Believe it or not, here's some interesting brain science I learned along the way is that the part of your brain where all of your knowledge and understanding lives is a different part of your brain than the part of your brain that calls the shots and drives the bus during times of stress, pressure, and emotion and dictates what you do, right? It's like you got your knowing brain and your doing brain and they're literally different parts of the brain. So most people, what they need is the doing center of their brain to get rewired to be more curious.

[00:30:09] And the approach they try taking is stuffing the knowledge center of the brain with ideas about how great curiosity is. So if that's the approach, then yes, you can't train curiosity. You just have it or you don't. However, if you take an athlete musician style approach, you can train curiosity just like you can train balance or hand-eye coordination or any sort of mental skill. And specifically, in my work, I found that when you want reps' brains to be more curious, there's really one fundamental shift you have to help them make.

[00:30:35] Because a lot of times when a rep hears a new piece of information, they take that information, they look at it, they make note of it, they write it down, and they feel satisfied with it. A curious brain, whenever it gets a new piece of information in, immediately realizes two or three things that it now realizes it doesn't know related to that new piece of information it does know. And that is the motion you need to practice in your reps' brains. New information comes in, don't stay satisfied. Get hungry. Look at that new piece of information and say, okay, given this, what are the blank spaces in the narrative?

[00:31:05] What are the things I now realize I don't know related to this? That is the essence of curiosity. So what you want to do in practice is go through various different exercises and activities to train your reps' brains to no longer be satisfied when a new piece of information comes in, just writing it down. But to look at that new piece of information critically and go, okay, if this is true, what else might be true? What else might I need to know here? If you can train them to simply make that shift of not being satisfied with new information, but rather using that information to spark something else, then you're going to have more curious team.

[00:31:34] And you can train that ability in the brain. You can train that reflex. You can train that habit through practice, through repetition, right? Again, you just got to practice it differently than a traditional mock discovery call. If I'm the sales leader at Cyber Donut, what might be an exercise I could run with a team to try and start fostering that then? Simple idea here. Have after a training where you've taught them all sorts of theory and ideas about discovery, do a role play in front of the whole group. You play the buyer, get a volunteer to play, pardon me, you play the seller, get a volunteer to play the buyer.

[00:32:04] Do a role play with them. You ask them some kind of opening question about, hey, what piqued your interest? First buyer gives some kind of answer. And then once that answer comes in, pause the role play right there, turn to the group and say, put in the chat right now three things you now realize you don't know related to that piece of information we just learned. Go ahead, put them in the chat. We know X and Y and Z. That's what we heard in the answer. What are three things you now realize you don't know related to X, Y, and Z? And then, you know, from the suggestions, take a suggestion and say, I like Alex's suggestion here. I'm going to use that one.

[00:32:30] Resume the role play, ask a question, get an answer back, pause the role play. All right, we just got some new information, folks. What information did we just get? Yes, we got A, B, and C bits of information. Put in the chat, what do you now realize you don't know related to that piece of information? Just this simple activity. Again, there's different flavors of that, but that's general essence of training the brain to think in two columns, right? Column A, here's what I know. Column B, here's what I now realize I don't know. Keeping those two functions running simultaneously, listening to what's there while also monitoring for what's missing.

[00:32:59] That's what curiosity is. And again, you can practice that in isolation. And once your reps have that ability, then they'll be ready to use this methodology, use these techniques, and again, make it feel natural because they'll see the openings that they didn't used to see before. They'll see the opportunities to naturally pivot the conversation that they used to miss. So let me try and apply this to Cyberdonut then. We've got this challenge where two circles that we want to go deeper. We might do, let's call it traditional type repetition role play just to start getting used

[00:33:29] to asking the new questions you want them to do. Maybe we'll use an AI bot. I'll come back to that in a minute with you. But then what we can do is start running drills like you were talking about. Okay, let's break it down a different level. Let's involve different people in and come and give ideas and have them having to actively listen, I guess, maybe a lot deeper than they might usually do. And then have a different thing they're listening out for. Like, okay, I'm not just listening for what they say. I'm listening out for what they say and then what that might mean for what I don't know. Right?

[00:33:58] And then what you'd run that every week. We could run it every so often, right? To keep fostering that curiosity. Is that right? Yeah, 100%. So there's one piece. And again, we're only a little bit other way through it. But that's one element of a deliberate practice program. With a deliberate practice program, you don't ignore those core skills. You give some time and attention to those core skills. Then once those are in place, you can start to ladder things up and maybe start to implement some of the specific techniques, specific frameworks, specific questions from a question bank, right? It's like each individual tool in their tool belt, you can help practice those.

[00:34:29] And something that I always keep in mind when I'm building out practice programs is a lot of times we end up in situations where we give our reps cheat codes, easy buttons, frameworks, question banks, but we know those won't work all the time. Sometimes they're going to have to just improvise. And I imagine in your case, it's similar, right? You have people go through creating all these great dream questions, but you probably can't get the discovery call asking only those. You're going to have to improvise a lot of questions too.

[00:34:54] And whenever you have a situation where sometimes reps can use the easy button, right? The pre-baked question, the simple framework, and other times they're going to have to just improvise their way through it. I like to follow a principle that I just kind of lovingly refer to as pencils before calculators, which is simply if people have to be able to do things the manual hard way and the easy simplified way, have them practice the hard way first. Because once you teach them the easy way, there's no going back, right? There's no going back and having them practice the hard way again.

[00:35:23] They'll probably just ignore your instructions and keep doing the easy thing you taught them. So in your case, right? You give them this nice question bank they helped develop. I would actually advise first having them practice getting to impact without those question banks. Let them see how hard it actually is. Let them develop the skills they need to improvise in the moment and help them get at least okay at that. Then you roll out this question bank, this process, these frameworks, and then suddenly their mind is blown and they're like, oh my God, Andrew, you just made my life so much easier. Thank you.

[00:35:52] And the advantage of doing that is twofold. One, they'll actually learn the hard way because remember, they do need to be able to do that. So they'll actually learn the hard way. But the second advantage of doing it that way is you get so much more adoption on the easy way. Because now rather than just being something some sales trainer told me to do, they've had to spend a couple of weeks doing it the hard way. And now suddenly you give them a cheat code and they're going, oh my God, thank you so much, Andrew. That's so much easier. That's so much better. I'm a huge fan. Now they actually legitimately love this thing you taught them. And now you've got that motivation piece in place, right?

[00:36:21] I remember I mentioned at the top, that's one of the barriers. Now you've got the motivation piece in place. So that would be something else I'd say. If you're going to do really advanced practice based on what you shared in that episode, start them off trying to get to impact the hard way. Then walk them through those frameworks, do those trainings, have them develop those amazing questions in that question bank and let them experience how easy it becomes after that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. It's such a, I think a lot of people really don't realize when they talk about, I don't

[00:36:46] know, let's enable the sales team or let's train the sales team is that the, you know, at the end of the day, sellers are humans with complex brains and just doing a one hour training. Let's just do a one hour training on the new features or something like that. Usually what that means is a product marketing person stands up and has 15 slides and they just roll it out. Right. That, that doesn't really, it's not going to hurt, right? It's not going to hurt the sales team, but it doesn't actually help them in terms of how

[00:37:15] to sell the new stuff or whatever might be better differently going forward. It really is a lot of depth to this. Oh, for sure. For sure. Something else I'll toss out too, you know, we just talked about like, you know, practice to help you go to get, get good to each individual tool in your tool belt. Right. So whether that's a specific tool, like an exact question, whether that's a flexible three-step framework, or maybe that's just like a universal conversational technique. Like Chris Voss's mirrors and labels are great examples of just like techniques you can use in a conversation.

[00:37:42] Once you've gotten to the point where your reps have practiced each of those things to the point where it's become second nature, it's become easy. They can spit off labels and mirrors in their sleep. Then there's another phase you have to take people to before you can really start to see lots of behavior change. And to understand this difference, we'll take it back to a martial arts analogy. As a martial artist, there's two general buckets of things you have to be good at. And, you know, this, obviously I'm making this up as a non-martial artist expert here, but from my understanding of martial arts, you got to be good at each individual move, technique,

[00:38:11] motion, maneuver, whatever lingo you want to use. Okay. Each punch, each kick, each dodge, each takedown. You have to be good at it. You have to be so dang good at it. Your sensei could wake up at three in the morning and you could do it flawlessly. There's another thing though, which is in the middle of a match, your brain has to be good at recognizing in the moment which technique to even use. Right. They're swinging at me. Should I block it? Should I dodge it? Should I just take it? Okay. It's my turn, right? I got a chance at opening here. Do I throw this punch? That punch? A kick? A combo?

[00:38:39] And your ability to make decisions in the moment about which thing you're going to do actually matters to your success every bit as much as being good at each individual thing. So it's the same thing in sales. Yes, you can give a question bank and get them really dang good at asking each question smoothly, but are they going to know when the moment has come to ask that question? Or are they going to try to force a square peg in a round hole and ask, ask a question at not the right moment? And that ability to recognize, okay, it's my turn to talk. Gee, I got so many options here. Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that?

[00:39:08] And to make that decision is actually every bit as important as, again, the skill of, you know, using each technique. And the reason I bring this up is that the way you train the brain to be good at each technique is different than the way you train the brain to be good at making choices about which technique to use, right? Probably don't have time to go into too much detail here, but at a high level, when you're training each technique, you're very prescriptive when they go into practice as to what exactly they're supposed to do. When you're training decision-making, you actually aren't prescriptive at all. You just give them an outcome they have to accomplish.

[00:39:35] You remind them of the tools in their tool belt and you let them decide moment by moment as they go through the exercise, which technique they think goes where and what combinations they want to use and what frequency they want to use each one. But you're very hands-off in terms of what they do. You just say, hey, make sure you accomplish this during the conversation. Remember, here's what you got at your disposal. Have at it. So you almost have like three phases of the program, right? First, you get the foundational skills in place like curiosity. Then you get really dang good at using each technique, the harder techniques first, and then the cheat codes later.

[00:40:04] And then you give people kind of a third phase to try integrating everything they've done together seamlessly weave between different techniques, call on different skills, keep multiple things running through their head at once. And again, that's a different mode of practice. And you won't get that level of skill just by running people through, you know, mindless, repetitive, endless role plays. Well, I think also what tends to happen is people jump to that third level without going through the previous two levels. They go, here's how to do a discovery call for 45 minutes. Now let's just practice it.

[00:40:32] Let's, and they go straight to like practice a discovery call, right? It's like all the way through. It seems like they're missing a whole bunch of things in the middle if they're expecting to get some behavior change there. 100%, which again, goes back to what I started at the top with for every what you want your team to accomplish, you have to break down the how. And you're right. A lot of people skip right to the end level. What? Just do a discovery call and get all of medic. Multi-thread. Uncover urgency. Tie strategic priorities. How?

[00:40:58] Because if you don't give people the how, that's when it tends to turn into just an interrogation where they just kind of do it, but do it in a really awkward, unfluid, weird way. I think it's also common, Jonathan, for earlier stage companies who don't have much in the way of resources, right? It often falls on the sales leader or someone else just outside the sales team to do some of this training, right? And they have the curse of knowledge and experience in probably being reasonably good at what it

[00:41:24] is they're training on without realizing what it takes to get someone who doesn't have that to the point of their competency as well. And it's a tough, tough thing to ask them to do is just go train these people as if it's somehow easy, right? Oh, 100%. A lot. And even a lot of times if you hire a sales trainer, right? A lot of times sales trainers or sales managers are people who are just really dang good at sales, whose sales always came naturally to. And in some ways they're the worst people to train it because when answering the question,

[00:41:51] how do you know the right moment to their answer is always, you just kind of feel it out case by case basis. You know, you'll know when it's the moment's right. And it's like, okay, well, you know when the moment's right, but they don't know when the moment's right. So you generally need to, again, take things a little deeper, pick things apart a bit more and really get to the level of, okay, what precisely can reps do differently to achieve this better outcome? And don't just say it's different every time, figure it out. Right. And that can be difficult. Actually, a lot of times when I work with companies, we spend a lot of time picking apart. Okay. You want multi-threading?

[00:42:20] What exactly has to change for that to happen? Right. What exactly do reps need to do differently? And it's usually hard for them to iron that out. I'll toss one thing, one more thing into as a consideration. I know we're running a little short on time here. So the other thing you need to do in these practice programs, especially with deliberate practice, because as you can tell, deliberate practice involves a lot more repetitions. You don't just show up, do it once or twice and go home, right? There's many different pieces. You practice one at a time, then you practice bringing them together. You're going to need a lot of repetitions, but you cannot let it feel repetitive.

[00:42:49] A, reps will just, you know, stop showing up to the sessions and it feels repetitive. But also the brain just likes, when you run the same exercise over and over again, the brain just like learns almost like shortcuts of how to get through the exercise, check all the boxes and not actually do any of the mental hard work, which means it's a pointless exercise, right? The mental hard work is what you need them doing. So one of the things you can do is, oh, there's a lot of different ways, but you want to make sure you introduce a lot of variety. And one of the modes of ways you can introduce variety is by actually alternating what type of practice you're using. We've been talking about role plays this whole time.

[00:43:18] I use role plays heavily, but they're not the only way to train the brain, right? They're not the only way to rewire people's abilities. So I'll toss out just a couple of examples here real quick. One is real life conversations. Remember I mentioned a lot of the skills your reps need are core universal human skills. That means you don't have to be in a make-believe sales call to practice them. Curiosity, right? That tendency to not be satisfied with a new piece of information, but to always look to that information to inspire your next question and recognize all the things that are missing

[00:43:47] that you still don't know, you can practice that in any context, dude, right? You can have a real life conversation with someone about it. You can watch like, I don't know, lawyer TV shows and like listening to witnesses being interviewed on the stand. You can listen to anything and just get in that habit of saying, okay, I know this, but what do I still not know? Similar things with like the ability to read body language and control your own non-verbals. You don't have to be in a role play to practice those. So you can have a real human-to-human interaction where nothing's made up.

[00:44:15] And a lot of times that helps bypass some of the realism issue that people have with role plays of like, look, this is all real. And it's a chance for you to practice your true fundamental human abilities in a real context. So there's one mode of practice you can use to alternate. Another one that I love to use is using recordings of real buyers talking. Again, people have an issue with role plays because it's not realistic. The stuff that comes out of my practice partner's mouth is not the stuff that comes out of real buyer's mouth. And that's fair. So you can augment role play by doing exercises that involve a real buyer.

[00:44:46] So heck, let's just stick with the theme, right? This curiosity thing. After you've done a real life conversation, after you've done a role play, then maybe the third exercise you do with your team is you play a recording of a real buyer talking. When the buyer's done, you pause and say, what are three things you now realize you don't know related to what they just said? Or let's say you had just been training your team Chris Voss' mirrors and labels. Similarly, you'd play a real buyer talking. You'd pause it at the end and say, okay, what would sound like? If you were to do a mirror here, what word would you mirror back? If you were to do a label here, what would that sound like?

[00:45:15] But you can take real buyers and give your reps a chance to apply this new set of skills they have to that moment in the call. So just a couple of examples of other modes of practice that aren't even role play that you can use to train reps' brains. Yeah, I think variety is so important, but those examples are so powerful, right? And not that difficult to run with a team, right? If sales leaders out there are trying to figure out how can I help my team, these things are reasonably simple to go do. You just, unfortunately, they don't know some of the ways to do it.

[00:45:44] So it's truly effective. Jonathan, listen, this has been a great conversation. I think the Cyber Donut sales team is going to be better at absorbing these new skills and knowledge that we're going to be training them on by some of the techniques that you've given us today. So thanks so much for becoming an advisor for Cyber Donut. If someone wants to get in touch and say, that sounds like the sort of thing I need to get involved with my team, what's the best way for them to reach out to you? Yeah, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.

[00:46:13] You can also go to the website. The website is just www.thepracticelab.co. It's actually not .com. That's a totally different business, unrelated. So thepracticelab.co. You know, there's a contact form on there, of course. Or again, you can just hit me up on LinkedIn and send me a DM. But this is, you know, what my company does, right? We take this deliberate practice approach that goes so much deeper than traditional role play. And we help companies use it to make sure that the very skills your team most needs,

[00:46:41] the very methodologies you want them to follow, they actually aren't just things your reps know, but the things that actually your reps can do and that actually show up on sales calls. So happy to talk with anyone further who's curious and exploring this. Awesome. Well, thanks very much for joining us. It would mean a lot to me and to the continued growth of the show if you'd help get the word at.

[00:47:10] So how do you do that easily? There are two ways. Firstly, just simply send a link to a friend. Send a link to the show, to this episode. You can email it, text it, Slack it, whatever works for you. And it's easy for you. The second way is to leave a super quick rating. And sometimes that can seem complicated. So I've made it as easy for you as I can. You simply have to go to rate this podcast dot com slash cyber.

[00:47:37] That's rate this podcast dot com slash cyber and explains exactly how to do it. Either of these ways will take you less than 30 seconds to do and it will mean the world to me. So thank you.