Run ongoing daily and weekly training for sales reps

1. Why a team sells badly

The cause given is training, and the ways it falls short come in this order:

• Not enough times. You are not training enough times. This one is called number one.
• Not often enough. The word for it is frequency.
• Not fast enough. The feedback you give comes too slowly.
• Not long enough. That means continuity: you do not keep on training.

That, bluntly, is why your team is bad at sales.

Recruiting is not the fix. Most of you hire salespeople with the idea of working through people until a good one turns up. The view here is that anyone can be turned into a good salesperson, if you have the know-how to train people in sales. What it really comes down to, in this view, is how much training you are willing to put in: you could take literally anyone and make them excellent at it. All that is left is whether it is worth doing, and that is left open.

Section 7 of SOP 243 — Control the conditions, keep every step congruent and clear, holds the same view that selling is trained rather than born, and sets the worth of the training apart as its own question.

2. Training carries on after onboarding

Once a new rep is up and running, at 14 days, one team moves them onto ongoing training.

A great deal comes before that point. In that team the new reps do nothing but train for those 14 days; from day four to 14, a rep who passes the test works half days; full days come only after they hit their KPI; once there, they are, as that team puts it, functionally out. The phases and tests inside those days belong to SOP 255 — Onboard a new rep in phases, with a test to pass each.

Flag: which comes first, the full calendar or the target. Here full days come only after the KPI is hit. SOP 255, section 8, gives the full calendar while the rep keeps doing well, and has hitting the target move them to closing. This page does not settle which reading is right.

Where most people stop. Most people then decide they do not want to keep training sales, because they are unwilling to give up an hour of a rep's day, or 30 minutes of it. The answer here is a sports comparison: a famous player who, reportedly, was more likely to skip a game than a practice. What follows, in this view, is that a team needs a culture of ongoing training, kept up on a consistent basis.

3. How a rep's day is laid out

A normal calendar day for that team's reps runs as follows.

Why a calendar. The point of it is that every part of the day tells reps precisely what they should be doing. In the past, that business has had teams that did not know what to do, and so did nothing at all. The calendar is their guide to what to do and what to hit.

The blocks, in order:

• Notes. The first thing reps do on getting into the office is review their notes and make new ones. That is their prep for the calls they have that day.
• The priority list. From there they go to the priority list, which asks whether the rep has nurtured every lead, covered all their pipelines and all the follow-ups that are due, and got their outbound done. Any time a rep is without a call, they go down that list and make sure each piece is covered.
• Close calls. When calls are on the calendar, closing them is the most valuable thing a rep can do.
• The training block. This is where the role plays happen.
• Outbound blocks. These come round through the rest of the day, and the pattern repeats.

Stagger the outbound. As you scale the team, it is important to stagger those outbound blocks, so that you do not wipe out all of your availability in the same window.

Every day, then, a rep comes in knowing exactly what to do and works through the blocks. If they have nothing else on, they work the priority list.

What prep involves, and one team's timing for it (the night before, or that morning), is in section 4 of SOP 248 — Prep every call with notes and proof matched to the prospect. Blocking out a whole week on the calendar, hour by hour, is a different routine, SOP 137 — Run the weekly time-blocking ritual.

4. The one excuse for being late to training

The point to take away: each rep gets through the priority list and the morning notes, and whatever time remains goes to close calls and outbound. The rule: the only thing a rep is allowed to skip training for is a close call that runs long. Close calls cannot land in training time, because it is blocked off. A call from earlier in the day that runs over is the one time a rep may be late to training.

5. Daily team training

The daily session: 30 minutes of training each weekday, from Monday to Friday, whether reps are on-site or remote.

Shout-outs. That team opens with shout-outs. The reason given: they strengthen the team and the right behavior, since the aim is to hand reps status when they do the right things. That, in this view, is how you create culture.

Customer testimonials. Then come testimonials from customers, because the aim is conviction. If you want to really fix people's tone and have them sell the right way, the number one thing, in this view, is getting them to believe in the product, called the easiest route. And that belief comes from proof, so give them proof. Just as you have to sell your customers, you have to sell your team, and you have to do it every day. Belief, in this view, is something that gets used up, so it needs refilling.

The script. Next they train the script, broken into four parts: intro, discovery, offer and looping.

A Friday hot topic. On Friday, if they have something they are struggling with as a team, the manager takes that as the day's topic.

The culture those shout-outs feed is for SOP 257 — Name the rules your sales culture reinforces and tolerates. Praising the reps with the best show rates, and asking them what they did, is among the rewards without money in section 4 of SOP 88 — Pay and rank reps on show rate. How to run a role play, stopping the rep and modeling the line, is in sections 4 and 7 of SOP 250 — Memorize the script, then drill it in role play; its section 5 rotates through the parts of the call, which it lists as intro, discovery, pitch and close.

6. Weekly team training: game tape

Once a week that team holds a 60-minute session, a lot of it built around game tape: recorded sales calls, played back to learn from.

It opens the same way as the daily session, with shout-outs that reinforce the behaviors they want. Then comes the game tape. Apart from role play, that team rates it the most valuable activity there is. The steps:

• Pick the calls. Take the three to five newest.
• Name the target, and the reason. The manager tells the team both before anyone listens. This matters because nobody should sit through game tape mindlessly and come away with no takeaway: "Here is what we are looking for, and here is the reason."
• Listen. The whole team observes the call.
• Model it. The manager shows the proper technique: instead of doing it this way, next time do it that way.
• Role-play it. The team goes round, each member practicing it, until everyone nails it.
• Recap. Say what the takeaway was.
• Repeat. Do the same with each call, three to five a session.

Team game tape in section 5 of SOP 157, on the sales function of a growing business, runs another way: the rep speaks first about what they could have done better, and the rest of the team then names what they did right. A weekly meeting where sales, marketing and customer success watch one recorded call and commit to one fix is SOP 135 — Run the cross-department call review. Why the calls a rep studies have to sound like the script is in section 10 of SOP 250.

7. Weekly one-on-ones

Start with the person. The manager opens by asking how the rep is doing: how they feel on a scale of one to 10, where they are at, how life is going. The reason given is that sometimes a rep is not closing deals because a relationship has just ended. So they check in on the rep as a person.

Then goals, short-term and long-term.

A single skill for the week. The short-term goal is about the sales skill itself. Having listened to game tape, the manager picks out where the rep has the most leverage, the largest constraint in their sales process, as that rep's single focus for the week. The rep puts it on a sticky note, placed at the front of the desk where they see it constantly. It is the main thing they are working on, and the biggest unlock they can get in their selling.

Long-term goals, later. Long-term goals matter a great deal, in this view, for keeping reps. At the very beginning that team stays away from them until the rep becomes proficient. Then it starts talking about the rep's long-term career goals, and about helping to move them forward.

A rep aiming at management. Let's say, in one example, a rep who has been with the team a while wants to go into sales management. The question becomes which skills they need to build. Coaching, in this view, is a large part of managing sales, and being a great coach is the core of the job. So that team might hand some of the morning meetings to that rep. They take the lead, give the feedback and run the role play, and afterwards the team gives them feedback on that.

Not for a rep below standard. If a rep is below standard, the long-term goal is not the focus: they might not stay. That team also does not want to dilute the rep's focus. It wants them nailing their core job first; after that, it looks at the different skills, where it can develop them, and how to grow them into a leader.

The manager's job seen as training sales is also in section 8 of SOP 250. The rungs of a rep's career path, and why management need not be the top of it, are sections 6 and 7 of SOP 251 — Set sales comp and a career path for reps.

8. With three reps

Asked how to do all this with only three reps, the answer is that it is the same thing:

• a weekly one-on-one, one 30-minute meeting;
• a weekly meeting of 60 minutes, which makes 90 minutes in total;
• a touch base each day, in the morning or, if you want, at midday, depending on when the peak time for sales calls falls for your market.

One team holds its touch base in the middle of the day. Its mornings are very heavy on calls, so midday is the best time; that holds for that team.

Those are the only requirements that involve the manager. Everything else falls to the rep, so, in all, it is three things.

A daily huddle and a weekly one-on-one, once a team settles into maintenance, are also the rhythm in section 5 of SOP 157.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• Whether training everyone is worth it. The question is left unanswered. Not established on this page.
• Enough times and often enough. Both are named; whether they are separate reasons or the same one: Not established on this page.
• When a rep counts as proficient enough for long-term goals. Not established on this page.
• What the Friday hot topic replaces in that day's session. Not established on this page.

10. The checklist

Step	What to do	Given as
1	Once reps are through onboarding, move them onto ongoing training and keep it going	the view here
2	Give each rep a calendar: notes first, then the priority list, close calls whenever they are on the calendar, then training, then the outbound slots; the priority list any time there is no call	one team's day
3	As the team grows, stagger outbound blocks so availability is not wiped out in one window	an instruction
4	Keep close calls out of the blocked training slot; only a call that overruns excuses lateness	the point to take away
5	Hold 30 minutes of team training each weekday, Monday to Friday, with reps on-site or remote: shout-outs, customer testimonials, the four-part script	one team's practice
6	On Friday, a hot topic if the team is struggling with something	one team's practice
7	Once a week, 60 minutes: shout-outs, then three to five recent calls; name the target and the reason, listen, model, role-play round the team until everyone nails it, recap	one team's practice
8	Each week, a one-on-one: the rep as a person, a single skill for the week on a sticky note, long-term goals left until they are proficient	one team's practice
9	For a rep aiming at management, you might hand over some of the morning meetings (leading, giving feedback, running the role play), then give feedback on it	an example
10	With three reps: a weekly 30-minute one-on-one, a weekly 60-minute meeting, and a daily touch base timed for your market	the answer to a common question

11. What this page does not cover

• Getting a rep ready. A new rep's first 14 days, the phases and their tests are SOP 255.
• The drills themselves. Memorizing a script and running role play are for SOP 250.
• Culture. The rules behind shout-outs and the team's habits sit with SOP 257.
• Hiring. Finding salespeople is SOP 252 — Market for salespeople the way you market for prospects; interviewing them in groups is SOP 253 — Run a group interview for high-volume roles.