The Neuroscience of Teaching and Coaching
MANY YEARS AGO, I heard Pam Gordon speak. She is an award-winning former principal and expert on adult learning. She shared great insights around the adult learning model to help speakers and trainers avoid the curse of, “That was a great presentation. Too bad none of the participants will remember or apply anything you said.” Information and knowledge are power, but only when applied.
As I listened to Pam, I experienced another one of my “duh” moments. “Duh, this is why sales managers have trouble transferring the knowledge that made them so successful. This is why really good salespeople often don’t make the leap to sales leadership.” Successful salespeople often fail in their new role as sales manager because they’ve never learned the fundamentals of teaching, which is an essential skill for developing salespeople.
As the late, legendary basketball coach John Wooden said, “Don’t equate your expertise with your ability to teach.”
Think about it. Professional teachers attend four years of college in order to learn how to teach their future students. Professional coaches attend specific courses to earn their coaching certificates. Where do sales manager earn their teaching degrees? The University of Hard Knocks and Headaches.
Effective sales managers know how to transfer the knowledge, habits, and skills that made them a top producer. A sales manager’s goal is to not be the smartest guy or gal in the room. If you are, then you can look forward to being the full-time chief problem solver and/or closer at your company.
The Neuroscience of Sales Mastery
I addressed the concept of neuroplasticity in my first book and it’s important to revisit. Without this knowledge, sales managers become frustrated, wondering why their sales team isn’t executing the knowledge and skills they are teaching.
For many years, the belief in the scientific world was that the brain was fixed, having a specific number of neurons performing functions in a set way. Research now shows that the brain is capable of learning new ways of doing and being because it can form new neural pathways. The process is called neuroplasticity. Hebb’s law describes this process as, “Cells that fire together, wire together.”
Repetition is the key to forming these new neural pathways, which allow new ways of thinking and doing. However, practicing a selling skill one time will not create a new set of connections in your salesperson’s brain. Study masterful people in any profession and you will find the common denominator is the amount of time devoted to practice.
Mastery of selling skills and emotional intelligence skills should be simple, right? Practice and repetition are totally within a salesperson’s control. So why are so many salespeople and sales organizations stuck in their old ways of doing things?
Be Aware of the J Curve
If you’ve been in sales management long enough, you’ve observed the J curve. You teach your sales team a new selling skill, one that will positively change the outcome of sales meetings and sales results. This new skill is a very different approach than the one the salesperson has used for the last five years.
However, your salesperson is open to learning and is enthusiastic about applying her new skills at the next meeting with a prospect. As she applies her new skills, she stumbles in the execution—words coming out of her mouth are jumbled. She feels awkward using this new approach. Your open-to-learning salesperson is not so open anymore. She flees back to the comfort of what she knows, even if that approach produces less-than-average sales results.
I’ve heard and seen pushback on adoption of new skills more than once in my career as a sales leader and sales teacher.
“This won’t work in our industry.” (Note: The salesperson has never tried the new selling approach but is convinced the new approach won’t work.)
“My old way is working . . . why do I need to try this approach?” (Maybe because you are writing more practice proposals than signed agreements.)
Welcome to the J curve. This theory was developed over one hundred years ago as a way of describing the economic behavior of nations. The premise is that, during periods of major change, things tend to get worse before they get better. This model has been used to describe the process of change, ranging from economics all the way to the learning performance of students.
Many sales managers don’t know how to help their sales team navigate through times of change. They haven’t learned how to lower their sales team’s resistance to new ideas to avoid settling and status quo selling behaviors. As a result, they end up pushing, cajoling, and convincing with little or no change.
Take a look at the model below. The beginning of the letter is where your sales team’s current selling and mindset skill sets are. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t good enough to win in an increasingly competitive business environment. When you teach your sales team new selling skills, there’s a very good chance they will get worse before they get better because they haven’t logged enough hours of practice to form new neural pathways. In the early stages of learning, their neural pathways look more like jumbled-up balls of string than the desired T-1 line of mastery (see Figure 19.1).
FIGURE 19.1
They start moving toward the bottom of the J curve. Here’s where it’s important to tune into your salesperson’s emotional state. Take into account the salesperson’s reptilian brain. This new approach is different and unknown, possible danger. At the bottom of the J curve, the learning curve, the reptilian brain kicks in and says:
• Danger . . . you don’t know how to do this. You could fail.
• Play it safe. Your old approach to selling isn’t that bad.
• Danger . . . you haven’t mastered this skill. Don’t do it—you’ll look stupid in front of prospects and clients.
• Danger . . . this new approach looks like it is going to take a lot of time to learn and you are already swamped with work.
Sales leaders have to be aware of their own negative self-talk and poor impulse control at the bottom of the J curve. “It would be easier to close this deal myself. I don’t have time to get this salesperson up to speed. This salesperson doesn’t want to get better.”
Don’t give up. Keep reinforcing new skills, habits, and behaviors. Your hard work will pay off as you see the salesperson’s skills improve and move up the other side of the J curve. You’ll hear their self-talk change from, “I’m never going to get this,” to “Hey, I’m getting good at this. Why didn’t I learn this approach sooner?”
Mastery doesn’t happen with one, two, or three repetitions. Depending on the complexity of the skill to be learned, new habits must be practiced and repeated daily. Research from the European Journal of Social Psychology shows that habit formation can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. Then and only then has the new information landed in the long-term memory area of the brain, the basal ganglia.
Learning and mastering new skills and habits is hard work. Dr. Tara Swart, a senior lecturer at MIT and author of the book Neuroscience for Leadership, shares that the “brain is inherently lazy and will usually choose the most energy efficient path if we let it.”
The brain is the most energy-demanding organ, using half of all the sugar energy in the body. When a person is learning something new, the brain becomes an energy-sucking machine. No wonder salespeople quit at the bottom of the J curve and continue to use old, outdated approaches to sales. It’s much easier to be average than excellent.
Sales managers, apply your delayed gratification skills and avoid the pull of instant gratification and “one and done” sales training. You know what I’m talking about. You invest in one sales training course and now your sales team is trained—for the rest of their lives!
Revisit your coaching and training calendars. What selling skills have you practiced with your sales team on a daily or weekly basis? Have you reinforced desired selling behaviors with your team for 18 days? 254 days? If you aren’t reinforcing new concepts long enough or frequently enough, your sales team will wallow at the bottom of the J curve and be highly tempted to run back to comfort zones and “good enough” selling skills.
Teach your sales team the concepts around learning and the J curve. This knowledge normalizes the natural challenges that accompany mastery. Instead of feeling like losers, your sales team will learn that struggle and discomfort are a normal part of up-leveling skills and knowledge.
Normalize Failure
One of my favorite stories around mastery and the J curve comes from one of our clients, Charles Avila. He had just graduated from Stanford University with an engineering degree and was hired by a firm selling test equipment for engineers. While he definitely had the Sales IQ down, he also had high self-awareness and self-esteem to recognize he didn’t know anything about sales. He enrolled in one of our sales training and coaching programs and was a great student. One day he called into our office, and reached out to Gail, one of our sales consultants. Gail thought Charles was calling to report the good news of landing a big account or exceeding his sales goal. But Charles was excited about something else. “Gail, I’m at the bottom of the J curve!” He was excited because he knew the only direction in his level of selling skills was up. He wasn’t experiencing self-doubt or worry because we’d normalized the process of failing while doing the hard work of learning new skills. He understood that sometimes you get worse before you get better.
Sales Physiology
When people are learning new skills, the brain’s hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing, and recalling information—is necessary for declarative memory. Salespeople can try multitasking and learning but the retention and recall factor goes down. New information doesn’t get cemented into long-term memory. As a result, the salesperson and company waste time and money because they can’t recall or apply the new learnings.
Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology, coauthored a study with the National Academy of Sciences on how multitasking affects learning and retention. “Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”
It’s the paper, rock, and scissors game again. This time the rock is multitasking and the scissors are learning. If your sales team is multitasking during training or coaching sessions, the rock of multitasking will always smash learning. A salesperson won’t be able to recall the needed information on that next critical sales call and will conduct an average sales meeting. If you’re going to allow multitasking during sales training and coaching sessions, don’t bother investing the time or money. You’ll get a higher return on investment taking your sales team to dinner. It’s up to you to model the discipline required to achieve sales mastery.
The Myth of Age and Attention Spans
We work with PopSockets, based out of Boulder, Colorado. It’s a true global success story. The founder, David Barnett, started the company working out of his garage. Many of you reading this book have this innovative product on the back of your smartphones. I have to admit I was a little skeptical about how this group of millennials, working in the tech space, would respond to our no-tech rule. To my surprise—and delight—this sales team was terrific. They didn’t engage in the stealth, looking-at-the-phone-under-the-table behavior. (What is that about?) They paid attention even though their phones and computers were blowing up with customer requests, orders, and questions. When I sat down to review the engagement with Bob Africa, their chief of staff, I kiddingly asked if he had threatened the team if they got distracted with technology during the training. He laughed and said, “No, I told you when we first met. This young sales team is really eager to learn. I simply asked them to give full attention to the training and they did.”
So much for the arguments around age, paying attention, and multitasking.
Keep in mind that the mega tech companies of the world aren’t helping sales managers. They have neuroscientists on their teams who know how to manipulate the brain and program technology to feed the cycle of addiction. They understand that when a person checks a text or email, it releases a bump of the feel-good hormone dopamine, which activates the reward center of the brain.
Learning and developing new neural pathways is hard work. The J curve is uncomfortable. Practice can be tedious because, in the learning phase, there’s no reward. It’s no wonder sales managers and salespeople default to checking email and texts. Those behaviors are rewarded with a nice dopamine bump!
My personal philosophy is that I refuse to be a lab rat for these companies. Our sales and management training workshops are technology-free zones. We know the power of being fully present in order to learn new information. We are highly focused and passionate about salespeople learning concepts and skills that will position them as a trusted advisor rather than a run-of-the-mill transactional salesperson.
Do the hard work of learning.
The Sales Checklist Manifesto
I’ve always been a fan of studying other professions to gain new insights on how to improve sales and sales management skills. One such profession is that of medicine and the work of Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.
“Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty,” Gawande says. “It’s also with complexity: How much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.”
Gawande introduced his two-minute checklist into operating rooms in eight hospitals and immediately saw better results by catching basic mistakes. Doctors and nurses are human, and as a result, can miss things or make mistakes. Surgery and medicine are complex, with a lot of moving parts and a lot of information to keep track of.
The practice of medicine sounds like the practice of sales. Salespeople are human and can miss things or make mistakes. Sales is complex, with a lot of moving parts and information. A checklist helps all salespeople be more effective in sales, regardless of the number of years in the business.
Checklists also help combat the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Coined in 1999 by then-Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this is a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. In very simple terms, we are all guilty of thinking we are doing something better than we actually are. (I still think I should be onstage singing somewhere.)
More than one sales manager has worked with a salesperson who truly believes he is running an effective sales call. Telling the salesperson how and where to improve is going to fall on deaf ears because of the salesperson’s false belief around his ability. Apply principles from the adult learning model. People believe their own data, and a checklist is a great way of providing objective data by which the salesperson can check if he is running an effective sales meeting or not. A checklist helps a salesperson determine if she asked all the questions to complete a selling stage.
A common area where I’ve consistently seen salespeople suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect is in diagnosing a prospect’s problem or real goal. Many salespeople hear the presenting problem but don’t ask further questions to learn the implications behind the presenting problem.
For example, a prospect shares the presenting problem of, “We need better quality.” With a strong sales checklist, a salesperson is able to see if she uncovered the true implication of poor quality or settled for a superficial sales conversation. A checklist could include:
• Financial implication questions
How much is poor quality costing this prospect?
And because of this cost, what other areas of the company are being affected?
Is dealing with poor quality and redos causing budget overruns? How much?
• Strategic implication questions
How is poor quality affecting the prospect’s reputation?
Is poor quality affecting the company’s ability to scale?
How is this problem affecting your initiative to move into new markets?
• Personal implication questions
How much time is the prospect spending on issues related to poor quality?
What’s not getting done because of the time that is being spent on fixing quality problems?
What kind of pressure is the prospect feeling from his boss or customers?
Checklists take away the cognitive bias of “I did a great job on this sales call.” Checklists force objective measures, which in turn forces the salesperson to examine if she actually did say and do what she was supposed to during a sales call.
We’ve created a variety of checklists for clients that range from prospecting activities to detailed questions that should be asked during each qualifying stage of the sales process.
Take a look at your sales team’s recent sales conversations and outcomes. How many could have been improved by incorporating the power of sales checklists?
Stories and Skill Building
Study great teachers and influencers, and you will find that they’ve mastered the power of stories. We’ve all heard a great speaker at some point in our careers. And I bet you remember the stories told, rather than the facts and figures shared.
The brain is wired for stories and effective sales leaders use this tool to teach, inspire, and motivate their sales teams. Stories activate chemicals in the brain that improve awareness and help people feel good, inspiring them to take action.
Great teachers have the ability to make information stick and use stories to teach and motivate. It’s easy for sales leaders to miss the power of storytelling and default to PowerPoint presentations or sharing of facts and figures. The concepts presented are great. The delivery . . . not so much. The sales team checks out and the sales manager is stuck teaching the same concepts over and over.
Incorporate storytelling into your daily training and coaching processes. With every sales skill you teach, I challenge you to accompany the teaching of each selling skill with a story.
Sales Coaching through Stories
One of my clients uses a great story to demonstrate the formal and informal process behind a company’s decision-making process. It would have been easy for this sales manager to be the sage on the stage and teach his sales team terms such as economic buyer, user buyer, technical buyer, and influencer buyer. Blah, blah, blah. Instead, he shared a personal story to illustrate the importance of identifying all the buying influences.
“I started my sales career with a small company that was doubling revenues year over year. Our IT systems were bursting at the seams and it was time to install a new ERP system. We paraded very smart consultants through the office and they met with all the obvious decision makers: the CIO, the CFO, and the CEO. If you had a C in your title, you got a meeting!
“All the consulting firms did a good job of writing comprehensive recommendations. They were likeable and polished at presenting their recommendations. But we ended up choosing the most expensive consulting firm because this was the only firm that uncovered the HDM: hidden decision maker. Her name was Terri and she was the customer service manager. She’d been with the company since the beginning. Terri managed the order entry department, worked closely with the warehouse, and knew everything about everything. Terri was loved by her team so if Terri thought something needed to be done, that was good enough for her team.
“Even though Terri had a C in her title, it wasn’t a big enough C to warrant a meeting with most of the consulting firms, except one. The consulting firm that won the project uncovered the HDM by asking one question: ‘Who’s the person at the company that I should know, but I don’t know?’ The consistent answer was, ‘Oh, you need to meet Terri.’ The winning firm conducted that interview, and as a result, gathered additional intel that was important to the success of the new system.”
That’s a great story and a great teaching tool. This story demonstrates the importance of uncovering all the decision makers and the true decision maker. It creates positive stress for the sales team, making them wonder who is the hidden decision maker in their current sales pipeline. The brain likes stories. Help your sales team learn and apply more information by incorporating storytelling into coaching and training sessions.
Great sales leaders know how to transfer the knowledge, habits, and skills that made them a top producer. Learn and master the skills of teaching and coaching. Learn how to be a more effective sales leader.
Sales Leaders EQ Action Plan
1. Learn and study the principles of adult learning. Understand how to transfer the knowledge that made you successful.
2. Teach your team the J curve. Normalize the difficulty of sales mastery.
3. Stop multitasking to ensure that knowledge can be learned and retrieved. Make a decision where you want to be.
4. Create a checklist sales manifesto for your various selling stages and skills.
5. Incorporate storytelling into your sales training and coaching.