Juliana Stancampiano, CEO of Oxygen, and author of Radical Outcomes: How to Create Extraordinary Teams that Get Tangible Results, joins me on this episode.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Training is repetition. Education is perspective, knowledge, and wisdom. Oxygen modernizes corporate education. CEOs see no ROI in sales training. What’s the potential value?
• Is sales enablement necessary for the experienced salesperson who knows the product and the prospects?  Juliana compares sales enablement to a musician’s jazz lead sheet. You improvise from it and build on it.
• Salespeople don’t always come with critical thinking skills. Andy breaks sales into four core skills: Be human, Ask great questions, Listen slowly, and Deliver great value (BALD). A sales process without sales skills is ineffective.
• If you’re stuck for more than 15 minutes, turn to someone and ask for help. Don’t spend hours on a problem beyond your experience. Work in an iterative and agile manner.
• Juliana talks about making progress incrementally. She defines progress in her book as a 5% difference, on a day-to-day basis, toward a chosen outcome.
• Companies spend on the wrong kinds of training. People who don’t go through education get atrophied. Andy wants people to invest in their own development.
• Ask questions with a curiosity to know the answer. Ask how things get done, and what are the barriers and accelerators to doing them. Some companies teach questions but should teaching questioning skills.
• Companies are afraid to invest time in educating people. Andy’s book club program takes reps 20 minutes a day to read an industry book and journal their ideas from it.
• Satya Nadella is moving Microsoft from a ‘know-it-all’ culture to a ‘learn-it-all’ culture, going out and being curious and look at places where they haven’t looked before. That has had a hugely positive revenue impact.
• Companies with missions to disrupt markets, ironically use rigid, conformity-based selling processes. Automation in sales has automated bad practices. Geoff Colvin says the key differentiator is the ability to be human.
• Juliana recently presented a webinar about authenticity and social selling in a large company. An attendee came up to her for help with no clue how to initiate customer engagement. Juliana gave her an hour of role-playing.
• LinkedIn surveyed people in the first 10 years of their careers. 75% of them thought the way to succeed was to master the hard skills. FYI, it’s the opposite. It’s your human ability that sets you apart.