Evan Bartlett

Tips on developing a learning mindset

2023-02-03T19:19:30Z

Over the course of my career, the single most impactful skill I’ve had to develop is a learners mindset. It took me a long time to come to this conclusion, but learning is a skill, and being able to learn independently is invaluable in the work place as well as in your personal life. In this post I wanted to explore the different elements of learning, and break down the approaches that have worked for me.

Learning by passion

One of the biggest mistakes our education system makes is not learning to harness the power of personal interest and passion. We are taught to read by going through a list of books that may never appeal to the individuals in the class.

My number one learning recommendation is; if you are trying to learn a skill, then start by finding a project or a topic related to that skill that really personally interests you.

Example 1: learning to code – if you’re going to learn to code, what’s an application of coding that personally interests you? Make your mission for learning to code about that project. If you’re into skiing, then code up a project related to skiing. If you’re in sports, then make the project sports related. When you hit the inevitable road blocks that you’ll come across while learning to code, that passion will help you power through.

Learning by doing

This method and tip is all about jumping into the deep end of the pool to learn to swim. Nothing beats real world experience, and some concepts are extremely difficult to comprehend until you’ve lived them.

I’ve tackled skills like learning languages, photography, kiteboarding, and none of them really stuck till I got out into the real world and tried them and made mistakes! Yes, making mistakes is part of the process, and the more you learn the more you’ll start to accept mistakes as part of the process. Eventually you’ll even start to embrace making mistakes as forward progress!

unsplash-logojonathan romain

Theory based learning

On the opposite end of the spectrum is learning through consuming the theory first. People who naturally tend to learn this way tend not to like the “learning by doing” mentioned above, and people who learn by doing tend to dislike theory based learning.

The pro tip here is to combine both methods of “learning by doing” and “learning by theory” in order to learn faster. I’ve always learned at an accelerated rate by reading about the theory, then throwing myself into the deep-end, then going back to learn about the theory to see what I was doing wrong.

The other real break through is the power of the internet. You can find incredible high quality content on just about any topic for free at the tip of your finger on your phone. Put in the time to find that content, and you’ll have a cheat code to acquiring new skills.

unsplash-logoPatrick Tomasso
Micro Learning

The top 3 types of learning tend to be more interesting than this last category. This category is for those situations where you’re doing something that you don’t deem particularly valuable. It might be repetitive, or it might be the type of work that you dread doing.

The point being, look for micro opportunities to learn in order to turn the bad situation into a good one. I once had a internship in the Information Systems department of the Human Resources org of a large chemical company. Needless to say, I knew immediately that I never wanted to work in this type of environment again (its probably why I spent the next 15 years in startup). My job was to do data input / data clean-up on a bunch of boring reports, but I ended up making it interesting by teaching myself VBA and learning how to write macros in excel to do all that work for me.

I wasn’t motivated by the work itself, but I was drawn to picking up a new skill that might be valuable in another job. Yes, programming isn’t a micro skill, but it is an example of finding learnings within the situation.

A better example of micro learning is one that many sales people face. Calling on new potential prospects who don’t know who you are can be a daunting task that leads to high levels of rejection. This in and of itself is not super motivating. The micro learning opportunity is to treat it situation where you do actually get to speak to someone as an opportunity to do research on your future client. Each conversation, however short, is an opportunity to learn something about their business, their industry, their mind-set as a business owner , etc. And then the more calls you make, the more you learn and become an expert.

How to introduce process into a sales team

2023-02-03T19:19:53Z

<here, on the Building the Sales Machine blog, a community and blog for sales leadership>>

I like to joke that sales teams have their own laws of physics. In the real world, what goes up, must comes down, that’s gravity. On sales teams, most sellers believe that any semblance of process is just busy work getting in the way of making money.

The reality is that when it’s done poorly, the criticism leveled by sales people is spot on. Bad process can be a huge barrier. So let’s take a look at how to do process correctly, and why it tends to get overlooked

Why many sales teams get duped into avoiding process

Many CEOs or first time sales leaders get tricked into believing that sales is an art, and not a science. They’re uncomfortable with sales, and when they look at what their teams are doing, if they see that it is working, they don’t want to mess with it.

Yes, many leaders get tricked into thinking sales is magic, so they stay far way. Inexperience sales leaders start to believe that process is the enemy of revenue, so process gets avoided by the plague.

Where should you start?

Well, the best place to start is to do the exact opposite. If your team is telling you that sales is magic, or it’s a black box of secrets, lift up the lid and shine light inside.

The easiest way to avoid this trick is if you start by selling the product yourself. As the CEO or the first VP of sales, then you should be the expert seller, and then everyone else after you should be doing some variation of the process that you figured out. Lead by example if you’re starting out from scratch.

For someone who joins a company that’s further along, and won’t have the opportunity to sell first, things get trickier. In this case it’s your duty to pull back the curtain and figure out what people are doing. Listen to sales pitches, shadow 1:1s , take a look at what types of emails your team is sending and which ones are working. The key here is digging in deep, and getting to the bottom of what’s actually working, and what’s not. The catch-22 here is that a sales process and metrics would be the precise toll needed to help figure out what’s going on.

How to get people to believe you?

So now that you’ve seen what the team is doing, you probably have an idea of what’s working and what’s not. At this point you probably want to introduce some process to assure that the best practices are happening systematically, or you might just want to put a sales process in place to start measuring things.

Here’s where you need to realize that leading sales teams is an exercise in managing belief systems. No one is going to listen to you just because you are the boss. Sales people are the ultimate skeptics, and they need to be really convinced before they try something. If they believe process is a waste of time, you’re going to have to sell everyone on the idea. Here are a couple of quick steps, or you can read more about a full blow strategy here.

Figure out what’s in it for them, try to find something that has really short term benefits
Approach the influencers on the team first, they may be motivated to learn something new, or prove their leaderships skills
Do a pilot and show that process can be successful.

Patience is key

By definition process is a long ball strategy. You don’t this if you’re simply trying to juice short term results. But you should rollout process if you want to build a consistent, reliable, reproducible revenue model.

In the previous step, set expectations correctly so that people understand that things won’t happen over night. After that, aim for a pilot project that will deliver some tangible results in a shorter amount of time. But in the end, get comfortable waiting. It takes time for a team to learn a process. It then takes time to gather the metrics based on the process, or to go back and spot-check the data to make sure it’s correct.

Never forget to prove that it worked

Last, once you’ve put in all the effort selling people on that fact that it’s worth doing, and you’ve had the patience to wait it out, its time for victory!!

Here are the steps:

Show everyone the before and after numbers
Take the time to explain the progress to each individual involved, speak to the benefits for them as an individual
Ask questions, help your team engage with the results by asking them questions to see what kind of ideas the new data inspires!

My favorite format for script / pitch one pagers

2018-03-13T17:30:19Z

<<< This post was originally published on Oct 11th, 2017 here, on the Building the Sales Machine blog, a community and blog for sales leadership>>

To follow up on my previous posts about scripts, I wanted to touch on useful ways to make these scripts easier to apply for your sales team. Obviously you can just hand people a paper with the script typed out, but I think slightly more structure can help.

In the situation where your team has a deck, you can use the format below to clearly communicate which points are important to convey during which slides, and then in the far right column you can show specific scripting lines.

The advantage of this format is that as the sales person gets more comfortable with the material, they can simply glance at the talking points for reminders of the main topics for each slide.

Outline:

Slides	Talking Points	Scripting Lines
Slide 1	Talking Point 1 Talking Point 2	Scripting 1 Scripting 2 Scripting 3
Slide 2	Talking Point 1 Talking Point 2	Scripting 1 Scripting 2 Scripting 3
Slide 3	Talking Point 1 Talking Point 2	Scripting 1 Scripting 2 Scripting 3

To get more tactical, lets use a real deck. Thank you Peter, who let us use Talentbin’s deck as the example. You can find his new project here on Founding Sales, and his talk on sales decks here. We’ve broken the slides from the deck into each step, typed up short hand talking points, and then provided full scripting in the right hand column:

Slides	Talking Points	Scripting Lines
Slide 2	Intro Who’s in the room?	“I’m Evan, and I’ve been with Talentbin for 3 years…” “Could we go around the room and do introductions?”
Slide 2	How the world is changing Monster used to be the single source Then Linkedin	“Clearly we’re all here talking about recruiting software because the world got more complicated and there’s a lot of differnt options out there.” “It used to be that people only used Monster.com, we would submit and wait” Then the world moved to a more engaging /dynamic professional social media platform, Linkedin” “Now….”
Slide 3	Not all candidates are the same The promoter candidate The passive candidate	“Wouldn’t it be great if every single candidate was like me, I’ve put x, y, and z on my linkedin profile” “My colleague Bob, he’s an engineer, and he doesn’t even have a photo on his linkedin profile, in fact, he never checks his profile”

The Sales Machine Guide to Role Playing

2023-02-03T19:20:37Z

<< This post was originally published on Nov 10th, 2017 here, on the Building the Sales Machine blog, a community and blog for sales leadership>>

In a previous series of posts, I spoke about the benefits of scripts when used in moderation. One key to making scripts productive is pairing them with a wide variety of “Role Playing” situations.

One thing I found interesting is that there were a lot more articles out there on role plays than there were on scripts. Everyone seems to think that it’s a good idea to practice before you get into the live performance. A great example in sports is a story about Malcolm Butler, a cornerback (defense) for the Patriots who intercepted a pass from the Seahawks in order to win Super Bowl XLIX. The play in which Butler changed the fate of the game was actually one that they had practiced previously, and he knew exactly what was going to happen.

“I was at practice, and the scout team ran the same exact play…. And I got beat on it at practice because I gave ground.” – Malcolm Butler

Gareth Goh, on the Insight Squared blog says it best, “This lesson – that hours of practice and preparation will pay off when it counts – is something that sales reps and managers should heed. And in sales, practice typically boils down to one exercise: Role-playing.”

So let’s assume we all believe practice makes perfect, and let’s run through a variety of different ways you can help your team practice the skills they need to win.

Straight Through Role Play

The goal here is to get the team member saying the words that were in the script, or firsthand use of the best practice script. To do this while building confidence, it’s best to let them role play straight through and not introduce any objections or hang-ups.

I’d recommend that you let each person do the script “Straight through” at least 3+ times before they start trying to apply it in more realistic situations.

Objection Role Play

In the real world, people ask questions, people challenge assumptions. This makes getting through a script/pitch more challenging. This is the perfect skill to be testing in a role play environment. Start off with some softer questions, and then slowly dial it up to the tough objections. Don’t stop until the sales person is comfortable deviating from a script, handling objections, and then getting back on the path.

Discovery Role Play

As your sales team gets more and more comfortable with the basics ( script / objections), then they should start to free up some of their attention to focus on the prospect on the phone. This focus typically takes the form of asking questions to learn more, or doing a discovery.

Role play a combination of the scripts above, and have the salespeople start to introduce discovery questions.

Peer Role Playing

To spice things up, I wouldn’t have the manager be the only person who does role plays with the team member. Peer role plays help get the salesperson a different perspective, and often it’s a perspective they trust more. Have more experienced salespeople role play with your new team members.

Group Role Playing

To keep spicing things up, introduce role playing in a group setting. You can “hot potato,” where each person has to do a line of the script and then points to the next team member to keep the script going. It can be awkward at first, but ultimately it helps build a culture where everyone understands that its OK to practice and make mistakes.

Pitch Sign-offs

This is the option for those of you who want an official pitch-sign off and a formal grade. It drives urgency to learn new material, and helps you put hard numbers to each team member’s progress.

To start, you want to create a grading rubric, and you want to train your graders to use it in a sign-off setting. The hard part is to make sure that one of your graders is not setting a higher bar than all of the others. Then you have the team member sit in one room and call into the grading team that’s sitting in another room. Typically, it’s best to have one person doing the role playing while another grader takes notes. Another option is to record the conversation so that you can listen to it with the salesperson afterwards.

Tape Review

In the pitch sign-off above we covered potentially recording the role play. The goal behind this is that most people can’t “hear” themselves. Either they “black out” while they pitch and can’t remember what they said, or the pitch lasts so long they can’t remember all the intricate details of what happened. The issue with this is that if you don’t know what you did on a call, it makes it hard to improve. Having recordings and being able to review tape with a salesperson makes it much easier to hear what they are doing correctly or incorrectly.

Many times, you can use the tape review session to have the sales person coach themselves. They’ll often identify the areas for improvement without the trainer / manager, and they’re more likely to make improvements if they believe that its an issue.

Sell Something new

How do you ensure that what was learned in the classroom will be executed on the sales call? The key is to role play frequently, relentlessly and thoroughly. When role playing, have salespeople sell products that they don’t currently sell. This will ensure that they stay focused on asking questions of the client to understand their issues.

Tony Cole expands on this idea here in a post on Sales Gravy, “The key is to role play, frequently, relentlessly and thoroughly. When role playing, have salespeople sell products that they don’t currently sell. This will ensure that they stay focused on asking questions of the client to understand their issues.”

What do other People think?

I’m not alone! Other people also think role playing is important!

WHAT THE @#$@$% IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? Personally, I feel that role-plays are the most under-utilized, as well as the most under-appreciated, sales training tool in the entire sales industry. – Marcus Sheridan , The Sales Lion

Really. If you are able to prepare for what you’ll say, and then edit, practice, and fine-tune it, why wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t turn in a rough draft if you were going to write a very high-profile article in your industry publication would you? – Art Sobczak, Smart Calling

Reps need to learn to sincerely understand the prospect’s problem, ask for more information, and offer clarity to help the prospect overcome their objections. You should do extensive role play and training to help prepare your team for this. Zorian Rotenberg, Insight Squared

We coach and train sales on everything else — the demo is no different. The starting point is to have structured training on giving the demo including role plays based on the answers the fake buyer gives in the opening phase of the conversation. Then, managers need to listen and watch their reps do their demos and provide coaching. Craig Rosenberg, Funnelholic

The advantage of role playing is repetition, creating something similar to muscle memory. In our inside sales department, two different approaches are used each morning or afternoon during role playing. One approach is calling each other on the phone; the other is face to face. Jessica Winn, InsideSales.com

SalesSchool is in Session

2010-12-09T04:32:21Z

In case you guys missed it, Sean Black from Salescrunch (the company behind SalesSchool ) lead a great panel last night on Building a Sales Machine.

What did I learn?

NYC really really wants to talk about Sales!

Startups in particular turned out in force to talk about the “four-letter-word” that so few seem to understand. Sales, revenue, inbound marketing, conversion metrics, and comp plans where the topics of discussion. This is just the tip of the iceberg, so I’m looking forward to future events!

Highlights:

1) Relationships are still important

As the world puts more and more emphasis on technology its easy to forget there are people behind the scenes making decisions. Especially in enterprise, the customer is more often then not, still the same.

Greg Coleman ( Huffington Post ) – “relationships matter more today than when don draper was taking people out for cocktails”

2) Sales 2.0 – Interruption based sales is DEAD

The modern sales person is expected to do a lot more. Â They need value like-a-consultant to convert prospects into customers, while extending their reach via the web. Hubspot makes their sale people blog as part of training!

For startup sales the talk turned to market research, and sounded a lot like understanding Customer Development….

3) Comp Plans – BE CAREFUL

This will have to be a follow-on post, but the short version was – “Money drives behavior, be careful what you ask for”. Sales people will exploit your comp plan to max it out, make sure that the exploit generates money for your company!

4) Hiring

Avoid the big sites like monster, network like hell and pay referrals, don’t be afraid to use recruiters as long as you cut them off when they don’t deliver.

5) Traits of Successful Sales people

– genuine curiosity about clients and solving their problems
– highly organized (metrics driven)
– keep the ego in check, this is about the customer

Here’s what ShackNation and Kate Huyett thought about the event.

The Sales School Meetup page can be found here. Â Looking forward to the next chat.

Foursquare vs craigslist?

2010-03-04T13:51:29Z

You know you have a sticky service when your users start using it for things it wasn’t intended to do…

What better way to find real estate than to look next to your favorite bars, cafes, and restaurants?

Heck, I’d pay foursquare to see those ads for the month or two I was looking for an apartment!

( I know it’s in French, but here’s the “tip” on foursquare for an apartment)

Persistence, apps from anywhere

2010-02-17T12:22:49Z

One of the greatest indicators of whether or not I end up being a long time user of certain piece of software is PERSISTENCE.Â Is this piece of software accessible everywhere I want to be?

These are the places I spend my time, and these are the places I need to access my apps

web
mobile (apps & web apps)
desktop
email

Example 1: Evernote

They’ve got a web app, an iphone app, a blackberry app, a bookmarklet to clip content from the browser (firefox & safari), and desktop apps for mac and windows.Â They are covered from almost every angle, and for those moments in between I can still send in notes via email.

Example 2: Posterous

For Posterous, publishing directly from their web app was almost an after thought.Â They know its a lot to ask to require someone to come to your site just to create content, so their main focus is e-mail.Â E-mail is a shortcut to accessibility, and saves them the time and effort of creating apps for different platforms (even though they have a great iphone app for posting pics)

I can create posts from Gmail, or from my mobile phone, and then I have the option to send these posts to any of the services that you see in the list here on the right.Â You can set it up to auto post for to every service in your list, or you can choose on the fly by indicating the destination in the email address you use ” flickr+twitter+vimeo@xxxx.posterous.com” or “posterous+flickr@xxxx.posterous.com”.

Not only is Posterous accessible from almost anywhere, but it actually increase your reach by tying into all these extra services.

Example 3: Remember The Milk

RTM ( Remember the Milk) is a todo or task application, and what makes it so great is that I have access from anywhere. Â Not only can I view my todos from their iphone app, mobile web app, web app, and even a few 3rd party desktop apps, but I can also add tasks via email.

No matter where I go, I know I can quickly jott (yes, they integrate with jott too, so you can create tasks via voicemail) down reminders to do things, or look at my list of todos, which is what makes RTM so sticky. Â If i needed to jot something down, and i wasn’t able to get access to the app, that would be the first step in making me into a non-user.

So how are you making your apps accessible from everywhere? Â Is this tough to do with a small team because of the resources required to build for so many platforms?

Buzz: public invades private

2010-02-12T15:22:27Z

The last thing I needed was another distraction, but google didn’t give me much choice. Â They dropped this little buzz bomb right into my inbox.

First off, buzz is a great idea, and I can already tell it’s going to get massive traction just because of it’s location. Gmail may be the only thing I use significantly more than Facebook, so anything you insert into Gmail is going to get some eyeballs.

It’s biggest advantage is also my biggest frustration. Besides being a distraction to my already growing inbox problem, it also presents a clash of my public and private worlds. Up until now gmail has remained a private safe haven. Conversations with any new acquainances take place on Twitter and Facebook, but only progress to gmail once they’ve reached a certain threshold ( yes getting someone email on Facebook or Twitter before moving to gmail can be a barrier). Point being, buzz blows my private gmail world wide open.

The default settings for buzz are SUPER public, and the options for private sharing are confusing at best:

—

Even if I did want to make a post private, how would I choose who to share it with? Â Why isn’t it an option to share with just the people you follow? Am I really going to put in the work of going through my gmail contacts to break them up into subgroups based on location, interests, or each person is a work friend, highschool friend, etc? I’ve been down that road before on Facebook and it’s a mess.

To make matters worse, I can’t seem to separate buzz from my public google profile and I can’t seem to turn the profile off either. Â In the end, I would have preferred a buzz that operates much more like the old Facebook, just for the people I accepted as friends. Then they could have given me the option to go public with certain material, a la Twitter.

So who do these 3 stack up? Facebook, buzz, and Twitter?

Facebook is clearly in the lead. As I recently overheard someone say; “Facebook is the new cell phone, you can’t have a social life without it”. Facebook has a strangle hold on users, and they are not leaving for any other services anytime soon… Except buzz.

By catching users at the one place they go before Facebook, Google has a chance to siphon off a bunch of activity, and become an equally critical platform. Â The uphill battle both of these services face is whether or not people will trade their privacy to help bring in ad revnues. Â Will the new public default scare away more people than they could have gained by keeping the warm and fuzzy “friends only” settings of the early facebook days?

Twitter chose to “go public” from day one, so they don’t face these privacy issues, but I don’t think anyone can make the case that twitter carries the same value to individual users, or is growing nearly as fast.

Will public win or will people find some other refuge to have their social chats in a more private setting?

Google is really good at UI

2010-02-10T23:31:23Z

The new Buzz mobile app trying to “sneak” it’s way on to your iPhone. Pretty smart!

The slow content movement

2010-02-09T14:54:24Z

We all know what fast content is, right? Status updates, tweets, and up to the second reporting on blogs like Techcrunch and Huffpo. Content produced so fast that you can barely skim it fast enough to keep up. Â Not only can you consume this content, but with todays media you’re expected to participate, it’s a two way street. You need to reblog or retweet the article, and then write something smart in the comments ( if you have time). This is the world of “fast content”.

The problem is time. Â We don’t have enough of it, and eventually we get sick of all the low quality crap. Â You can conginue to run the rat race, or we can start making the effort to take more than a few minutes to enjoy all the slow content out there.

So who else cares about slow content? Marcos Arment , creator of Instapaper, made a stand when he launched his simple reading tool encouraging people to spend more time consuming long form high quality conent. Check out what he says in the Instapaper FAQ:

What does Instapaper do?

Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we donâ€t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when youÂ do have time, so you donâ€t just forget about them or skim through them.

Why?

From a personal perspective,Â I appreciate great writing, but Iâ€ve become frustrated with the quick-consumption nature of many devoted blog readers. Authors are encouraged to cater to drive-by visitors hurrying through their feed readers by producing lightweight content for quick skimming.

Thereâ€s no time to sit andÂ read anything when youâ€re going through 500 feed items while responding to email, chatting, and watching bad YouTube videos….

This is a great tool in fighting the addiction of multiple tasking and RSS feeds full of posts. Find a few well written articles, click the “read later button” and then set aside some time later in the day just to focus on reading.

Another big player in this apace is the kindle ( which actually plays quite well with instapaper). As I’ve said in the past, the kindle OS really was designed to replace the book. It’s too slow to do much else, making it the device of choice for the slow content consumers. Whether you’re reading a novel or articles you’ve carefully currated via instapaper, the kindle is a refuge from all the distractions.

On the production side we’re also seeing some tools to help slow things down (not that I need tools to write blog posts any slower). Rather than encouraging content farms through hyper speed publishing, writing apps like Focused and WriteRoom strip away everything but the text and encourage publishers to focus more on what they’re writing.

Since leaving San Francisco for Paris, I’ve been enjoying the break from the center of the web world, and I’ve been slowing down my content consumption. Â Before I used to just blindly read feed upon feed of news trying to keep up, now I’m spending more time on the good stuff. Â Anyone else?