Morning all!
It feels nice to see 5.50 am on the clock as I write this!
Been a good long while since I was able to actually start writing before 6 am – that tells me that I need to up my game and make sure that I’m actually up on time.
What tends to happen is that the alarm goes off at 430am – but I don’t actually get out of bed until 450am – which of course sets everything back.
Anyway – this aside – today I want to talk about my sales training journey.
I wrote an answer on Quora about how I learn and thought I would share it here in more detail:
Essentially – I’m in the midst of building a sales team (on the outbound side) and it’s a hell of a journey.
And – I want this (coming up to 90 days) journey to serve as perhaps a reference point or baseline for how to learn something new – and do it quickly.
The Need To Learn Quickly
The need to build a competent team quickly (as well as train them up) has become mission critical.
I’ve had clients with expectations of results waiting to get them and asking us questions. This continual applied pressure has been challenging but also a huge growth opportunity for us at Pearl Lemon Leads.
With this need in mind – here’s what’s happened then:
Over the last 5 weeks I’ve listened to 6 sales books in full on Audible:
That’s 12 hours+ of content more or less.
Of course I made notes whilst I listened as well to ensure that the content I was reading ‘stuck’ in my mind if you will. 
Now, these books are focused on becoming a better salesperson alongside developing the proper mindset to be successful in this business.
But I also complemented this with some shorter listens via Blinkist – where I focussed upon book summaries:
As you’ll notice there are 15 Blinkists here – of which:
- The Power of Noticing
- Leadership Blindspots
- Superbosses
- Sales Management. Simplified.
- What Your CEO Needs To Know About Sales
- Coaching Salespeople Into Champions
Are all about the management of sales teams in one way or another. The other 6 are out and out summaries of sales books.
This morning I’ve just started a new audible which I’m around 20 minutes into:
Outside of this, I’ve also been training the team (this started a few months back) – and I’ve got to this number of training sessions:
This is just based upon actual cold calling and the technical elements of our system:
I’ve also been working with the cold email copywriting team to improve the quality of our cold emails:
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So – I think you’re beginning to get the picture.
There are other videos and training I’ve done outside of this, so not 100% of the content is in the playlists.
Overall then in the last 2-3 months we’ve got 6 books, 15 blinkists, multiple notes and 100+ videos recorded – and I’m still steadily piling through new books alongside all of the other things I’m working through to improve my skill level as well as the teams.
I wanted to share this with you to give you some level of insight into the applied focus I’ll make upon learning something new when pressure grants me with a gift.
Our clients don’t care about any of these details – they just care about results – and what’s wonderful about that is it puts you under alot of pressure to perform.
I’ve learned more in the last 2-3 months than I probably would in 5 years of doing this if I didn’t have the pressure that comes with client expectations.
Not every client unfortunately has ended up happy – but if I compare the ground I’ve covered and the team has covered in these last few months it’s phenomenal.
The key takeaway:
Learn to build applied pressure to your learning journey to really accelerate your growth. Absent pressure we don’t tend to learn as aggressively as we need to. Find ways to reverse engineer this such that no matter what it is you need to learn – you’ve got some kind of eternal force dragging you further forward kicking and screaming!
I’ve told the sales team to keep upping the ante and booking in deals – because give it another 2-3 months and we’ll be absolutely unstoppable.
