Most Sales Teams Are Practicing on Their Customers. Here's How to Fix It.

Marcus Sheridan started his career as a pool guy who got publicly humiliated in a showroom and decided he'd never be caught flat-footed again.

That moment, when a frustrated prospect asked, "If you can't answer any of my questions, why are you even here?", became the catalyst for his book, They Ask, You Answer, and a 26-year obsession with effective communication. It's also the clearest possible illustration of a problem still plaguing sales organizations today: most reps learn on the job, in front of real prospects, with real money on the line.

Marcus joins Jake this week to break down what separates high-performing sales cultures from everyone else.

Less Than 3% of Sales Teams Train Weekly

Here's the number that should surprise you: fewer than 3% of sales organizations run a genuine sales training once a week.

Not a pipeline review. Not a product update. A real training where reps work on their communication skills, do role-plays, and actually practice the craft of selling.

The rest? They're holding sales meetings. And there's a world of difference.

"They're practicing more on their customers than they're practicing on themselves," Marcus said. "We have to stop practicing selling on our customers and start practicing on ourselves."

The reason this problem persists, according to Marcus, comes down to leadership. Sales managers who are uncomfortable failing in front of their team don't run role-plays. And when leadership avoids role plays, teams learn to roll their eyes at them. The attitude of a sales team toward role-plays is a direct reflection of the leadership above them.

The highest-performing sales cultures Marcus has encountered share one defining KPI: at least one hour of genuine sales training per week, plus a 15-minute daily huddle where reps practice one skill with a teammate.

What a Real Sales Meeting Looks Like

If you want to overhaul how your team trains, the formula is straightforward, even if the execution isn't.

When Jake asked how to actually fill that time, Marcus broke it down in detail.

Weekly training (60 minutes):

• 75% skill building, 25% pipeline
• Start with two questions: What was your biggest communication win this week? What was your biggest communication struggle?
• Celebrate the losses as loudly as the wins. They're where the real learning lives
• Run two to three role-plays tied to real situations that came up that week
• Save pipeline reporting for beforehand so meeting time isn't wasted on status updates

Daily huddle (15 minutes):

• Pick one skill
• With a teammate, each person does one round
• Feedback only when asked. The person who did the role play goes first

The goal isn't to script your reps. It's to teach them how to think. "If you teach a salesperson how to think, they're magical," Marcus said. Scripts break the moment the conversation goes somewhere unexpected.

How to Actually Change the Culture

Mandating training from the top rarely works. Marcus has seen it fail countless times. The approach that does work: start with a beta group.

Identify the managers who want in. Let reps apply to be part of the initial program. The act of applying creates FOMO, and suddenly, something that would have been forced on people becomes something people are competing to be a part of.

Jake pressed Marcus on this directly, asking how a VP of sales with 20 managers and no real training culture should actually make the shift. Marcus's answer: don't roll it out company-wide. Start small and let momentum do the work.

1. Run the beta group, build momentum, collect stories
2. Report those stories to the broader team: close rates improving, shorter sales cycles, reps feeling sharper
3. Let demand build before expanding to the next group
4. By the third or fourth cohort, develop a train-the-trainer program so the system lives inside the company
5. After 6–12 months of real data, build a video certification series for onboarding

The mistake most companies make is trying to bottle the system before they understand it. You don't have a sales system until you've run it for at least six months. Only then do you know what it actually is.

The Misalignment Problem No One Talks About

One of the more revealing patterns Marcus sees when working inside sales organizations: reps giving completely different answers to the same question.

Ask one rep what the biggest benefit of their product is, and they'll say ease of use. Ask another, and they'll say cost savings. Ask a third, and they'll describe a feature their colleague never mentioned. (Marcus' own example: ask two pool salespeople about fiberglass pools, and one leads with maintenance benefits while the other leads with surface feel.)

Every inconsistency plants a seed of doubt. When a prospect hears one answer from the person who takes their call and a different answer from the rep who shows up to close, trust erodes fast.

"People think company messaging is all about what the marketing team is saying," Marcus said. "Your most powerful messaging is coming from the salespeople, the boots on the ground, talking to customers every single day."

Without a system to surface these inconsistencies, they stay invisible. You can't fix what you can't hear.

Game Film Changes Everything

For most of Marcus's career, he was working with eyewitness testimony: a rep's recollection of how a call went. Turns out, that recollection is almost always inaccurate.

Reps forget the exact words they used. They misremember where the conversation shifted. They can't always identify the moment things went sideways because they weren't watching themselves from the outside.

That changes when you have the transcript. The exact words, the specific moment, the precise turn in the conversation: all of it available for the team to learn from. Role plays get sharper when you're reenacting what actually happened, not a fuzzy version of it. Patterns become visible across hundreds of conversations. And the questions tripping up every rep, the ones nobody's been taught to answer well, finally surface.

"For the first time in the history of the world, we can have extremely accurate eyewitness testimony," Marcus said. "That's a glorious thing if you're really into training."

One Technique Worth Stealing: The Pushback Pivot

When a prospect pushes back on price, on timeline, on fit, most reps defend. Marcus puts that number at around 90%.

Elite reps do something different. They take the exact words the prospect used and reflect them back as a question.

"More expensive? Please tell me more about that."

That's it. No defending, no pivoting to features, no attempting to overcome the objection before understanding it. You let the prospect define what they actually mean, which is almost always different from what you assumed.

Marcus calls it the pushback pivot. It's a small move that requires real discipline, and it separates reps who react from reps who listen.

Wrapping up

The gap between good sales teams and great ones isn't talent. It's training frequency, self-awareness, and the willingness to look honestly at what's actually happening in conversations.

Most organizations don't have a talent problem. They have a practice problem. And the fix is showing up every week, drilling the fundamentals, and building a culture where failure is something you share, not hide.

That's where the growth happens. And now, for the first time, you can see exactly where to find it.

Transcript

Jake:

I'm Jake Cronin, the founder and CEO of SIRO, the AI platform for in person sales teams.

Today's conversation is about something deceptively simple. It's how small moments, a few minutes a day, the right questions can completely change a sales organization's trajectory. Our guest is Marcus Sheridan. Before he was a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and advisor to companies around the world, Marcus was a pool guy in Virginia, and that's where he learned the most valuable lesson in his career. More on that shortly. You also probably know him as the author of They Ask You Answer and Endless Customers, two of the most influential books in modern sales and marketing. And he's the co-founder of Question First Group. I hope you find the conversation valuable. Please comment your questions or takeaways to help out the next person. Let's jump in to how Marcus got his start.

Marcus:

I decided to move back to where I grew up, which is called the Northern Neck of Virginia. And my two buddies had just started a swimming pool company and they said, "Hey, we don't have anybody to run the store. We need to be installing swimming pools. Can you manage the store?" And I said, "Yeah, I can absolutely do that." Well, a couple of months in, they said, "Hey, could you be a business partner?" And so I thought about it and I ended up becoming a business partner and it's really had a big impact in my life. But can I share with you, Jake, the most powerful sales lesson I had as what was a hot tub and swim pool sales guy?

Jake:

Yes, please.

Marcus:

This story here is, I think, so symbolic of just life and sales in general. So I had my job for a couple weeks. I knew a little bit about the product. I didn't know a lot about the product and I don't know if I was really working hard to learn about the product yet. One day, I'm the only person in the showroom. Somebody comes in to look at hot tubs. Now, quickly, I realized with this person's questions that he had owned a hot tub previously. And he asked me a question that was a little bit technical, let's say, and I didn't have an answer for him. I said, "Well, I'm not sure about that. I can certainly get back to you, though." And then he asked me another technical question a little bit later and I didn't have the answer. It happened a third time, Jake.

And on the third time he says, "If you can't answer any of my questions, why are you even here?" And I was like, "Wow, that felt good." Because he left, didn't make the sale. I was embarrassed. I was humiliated. He had hit me with the classic two by four of truth right in the mouth. And in that moment I said, "I am going to learn more about hot tubs than anybody on the planet." That all started because someone came in and humiliated me and I realized I was ignorant and I never wanted to appear aloof or ignorant again.

Jake:

Did it actually feel good at the time, the humiliation?

Marcus:

No, probably not. I've always been the type that recognizes good pain, like that David Coggins approach to putting yourself in these very uncomfortable positions, because that's the only time we grow. And as you advance in your career, it's really, really important to stay on the edge of discomfort. And a lot of folks don't. And what happens is your skill level, this is especially true with communication. I mean, we call it sales, but I'm obsessed with effective communication. I spent my life my last 26 years really pondering, teaching, learning about effective communication. And you're never neutral in terms of your skills. You're either advancing or you're going backwards. This is also why folks that are listening to this that are sales professionals, there's been times in your life where you were reminded, like you went to a conference and you were reminded of a good practice, a best practice, let's say, a technique, whatever it was, you're like, "Heck on, I used to do that. What happened? Why did I stop?"

And this is because in the industry, we have a serious complacency problem. We have a training problem. I do think it's good to get punched in the face in a metaphorical way so that we can get humbled, we can get hungry, and we can get back to the basics. And that's what happened to me.

Jake:

Yeah. I find it mind-blowing how so many people in sales are athletes and especially a lot of entry-level roles, you get someone who might be fresh out of being a college athlete, high school athlete, and they're not getting better. And it's like, "Okay, are you practicing?"

Marcus:

Just across the board as a whole, we find that less than 3% of sales professionals have sales training once a week. Less than 3% of all the organizations that I've worked with, that I've pulled, that have been in my audiences, et cetera. So a lot of people would listen to that and say, "Well, we meet once a week." Yeah, sure. You meet once a week, but there's a big fat difference between a sales training and a sales meeting. And of course, the difference is in a sales training, you are working on your communication skills. You're not just discussing pipeline or CRM or any of these other things that are the bright and shiny objects that so many have gotten accustomed to talking about if they're not doing real role plays, and we call them real role plays, then they're falling backwards. And what happens is, because they're not having these sales trainings, and this is where it gets... It's like the tragedy of it all, Jake, is they're practicing more on their customers than they're practicing on themselves.

I would submit that we have to stop practicing selling on our customers and start practicing again, as many did in the past, on ourselves. The question is like, where did this go? What happened? I'll tell you what happened is because as a society, we have become just a bit more fragile. People don't like to fail and don't like feedback. Most sales leaders today don't want to fail in front of their team and don't want to have their team see that they are imperfect with the very things that they're trying to get their team to do.

And so because of that, they just don't put themselves in the line of fire. Because of that, there's no sales trainings. Because of that, we have sales meetings and we have sales managers, but we don't have sales trainers. I have walked into organizations before where they had extraordinary sales training cultures. And the one single metric, KPI that defines this is how often they're doing real role plays. People in the industry, like across the board, they roll their eyes when you say role play, which is a tragedy. The reason why they're rolling their eyes is because the leader is a total slacker when it comes to training and role plays. The leader has taught them that, "Come on, we don't need to do this. This is kind of cheesy. That's not how it works in real live." BS. That is 100% false. And it's a reflection.

The attitude of a sales team towards role plays is 100% a reflection of the leadership they have within that sales team. We're seeing this a lot. So unless you have these real role plays where you say, "We're going to treat this conversation like it is real." The weight of a deal is on our shoulders right now. You're 100% present. You're not using sarcasm that you wouldn't use with the prospect in real life. So if you wouldn't do it with the prospect in real life, then you shouldn't do it in a real role play. The highest level sales cultures that we find where people are just superstars, they have at least a one-hour sales training a week and the salespeople have what would be a sales training huddle for 15 minutes a day. And this is where you just pop something out real quick. You practice a thing, you practice a response.

I don't want to teach salespeople exactly what to say. I want to teach them how to think. And if you teach a salesperson how to think, then they can learn what to say. The problem with scripts oftentimes is as soon as you have a strong variance from the script, what happens is the person falls apart. Whereas if you really teach someone how to think, they're magical.

Jake:

I want to go back to those rituals you were saying, the 15-minute daily huddle and the sales meeting. How should you run those? If I was listening and it's like, "I wanted to do that huddle, that sounds like a great idea." How do I fill that time or rather, not how do I fill that time, what do I fill that time with?

Marcus:

Our general opinion is that 75% of it should be spent on improving your skills. 25% of it should be spent looking at pipeline.

Jake:

Even in the daily huddles.

Marcus:

This is for the weekly meeting. We'll talk about the huddles in a second.

Jake:

Perfect.

Marcus:

But you should be, for the weekly meeting, 75% should be spent on working on your communication skills. Also, one of the things that we've observed is that many of these sales meetings, they are not sending out an agenda beforehand and setting the conditions so that it's really like... What you don't want to do is you don't want to be covering things in your sales meeting that you could have covered in an email beforehand. So for example, it doesn't make any sense that the salesperson comes and they report their pipeline in front of everybody else. That's a waste of time. They report the pipeline beforehand. Then everybody sees the pipeline and one fell swoop when they're sitting down together. And now there's not this waiting of like, "Okay, so tell me, who do you have now?" It's like, that should already be done. What we want to do in that sales meeting is we want to always, and this is not rocket science, we say, "What was your biggest communication win this week? What was your biggest communication struggle or loss?" And we celebrate, by the way, the losses.

We celebrate the failure when people talk about it. Another indicator of a great sales culture is when you, let's say, in your Slack channel, you have a salesperson that sends a quick video to everyone that says, "Hey, I just had a sales call, went sideways. Here's why it went sideways. Here's where I screwed up. I'd like to work on this in our training on Monday." That is a sign right there, bro. We see that consistently because that's what our team creates and that's very, very possible. A lot of people look at that and say, "How could that happen?" Well, one of the biggest ways that it happens is you have this fail forward culture within the company where everybody celebrates the openness of failure because what that does, it creates very high level of self-awareness. One of the most fundamental skills that a salesperson can have, if you want to make someone a great salesperson, if they don't have self-awareness or if they can't develop it, they're never going to be great.

But if they have self-awareness and all of a sudden we can work magic. I mean, we can mold that person into anything. We want to, when we look at those two primary subjects, which is what went well and what went poor, we do it in a very detailed way. So in other words, if someone says, "I had a really effective conversation with XYZ company, we want to know what made it effective." So the job of the sales leader there and really the person that's reporting is to give as much detail as to why it was effective. You also have to have enough self-awareness to say, "I really crushed the opening five minutes on this call. Let me show you exactly what I did and why it was so effective."

And that's the type of conversation you should be having, not just from the sales leader who's giving you feedback, but you should be able to look at it yourself and say, "Ha." At the same time, you should be able to look at your sales calls and say, "Gosh, I got a terrible resting B face. Got to work on that." It's like, "I'm not smiling nearly enough. Body language isn't right." We're usually doing two or three role plays in every meeting of what went poorly, plus we're just working on a general, let's say, framework or technique or general principle. So that's how we're usually doing it. So we might say, this week we're going to work on, let's say the honest agreement for 15 minutes, and then we're going to spend the last 30 minutes just doing role plays on some of those areas that popped up this week where it might've gone sideways.

And the most important thing with those is we want to reenact the scene as well as possible using the specific words. This is why a tool like SIRO is so fricking phenomenal because you can get the exact words. The problem is when somebody says, "Yeah, I had a conversation, didn't go well, and I kind of said this and they responded this way." You actually don't have a freaking clue what happened there because you're not seeing the exact words. Once you see the exact words or hear the exact words that were used, now this is again why with these return and reports, once AI allowed us to return a report with the very specific words, now in these meetings, you can have the salesperson come and they'll even say, "I actually was reviewing my call recording. Here's the exact words I said. Here's what they said. This is what I want to play back today." It's like that sales meeting just went to a level 10 very quickly because there is no misinterpretation of the past.

And I can promise you, most salespeople quickly have forgotten what went wrong. And so for years, I mean, I've been doing some type of sales training to a degree for about 20 years now. And for 20 years, I've been getting eyewitness testimony that was inaccurate. So now, for the first time in the history of the world, we can have extremely accurate eyewitness testimony. That's a glorious thing if you're really into training because now we can pick up on things that we could never pick up on before. The amount of times I've had someone tell me over the years, "Yeah, but I said that." It's like, "No, you didn't. Let's go back to the game film. You didn't say that. Here's what you said." And people don't understand the power of one or two words or deflection in which it came out, the tonality, the spacing, all these things make a difference. So that's what you do for that once a week training.

For the huddle, you work on one skill and you do it with a teammate and you both do one rep with it. So you might say, for example, what we call the perfect agenda. "I'm going to do a perfect agenda and you're going to do a perfect agenda and then we can give quick feedback." And by the way, when we give feedback on it, we always have the person that does the role play. They're the ones that gives feedback first, and then their partner gives feedback once asked. The general rule is you're not allowed to give feedback until you've been asked to give feedback. This is one of those things that you want to establish as just like a cultural norm.

Jake:

How many minutes is the perfect weekly sales meeting?

Marcus:

I think it's an hour. And I think it's a good idea once a month to potentially consider making one longer. You might do one that's more like 90 minutes, but once again, the majority of the time is spent really into role plays. The big problem is, Jake, most organizations have one to two sales trainings a year, and that's a disaster, right? Maybe you've got a sales kickoff SKO at the beginning of the year. Maybe you've got something later in the year, but even those oftentimes are a bunch of product updates. There's things that could have been handled with a video. Instead of doing the thing that they need the most, which is learning new skills. You got to continue to sharpen the sword because otherwise it will get dull and suddenly you're either not doing the thing or you're just not doing it well anymore.

Jake:

Yeah. Cobwebs build up real quick. So if I've got a team, VP of sales, XYZ company, and I've got 20 managers, and we don't do training. We do meetings, but we're not doing training as you're describing. How do I switch the culture? How do we start implementing training? And I can tell people, I can mandate it. Everyone, you're going to do a 15-minute huddle every day. What is it? 8:00 AM, 9:00 AM. And then once a week, everyone comes in 60 minutes training. I can set that mandate. What do I do though to make the culture shift so that folks are role playing the right way and getting the sales training out of these meetings?

Marcus:

Great question. Not going to say this is going to be easy for anyone to pull off, but there's a couple things that you're going to have to do and a couple pills that you're probably going to have to swallow. First thing is you're going to have to get your managers catch the vision of where you want to go. Now, from the managers, you're going to find which managers want to be a part of the beta group. So you do not start with, if it's that size, you're not going to start with every manager at first. So you start with a beta group of a few managers that want to really get into this. Now, depending on if you have an outside trainer that's going to be working with the managers, with their teams, or if the managers themselves are going to have to do this, that's going to affect some things here.

But we always, when it comes to sales, leaders and sales teams, you get your champions first, always. Salespeople tend to be very change resistant and they tend to be very competitive. If they see other people are doing things and they haven't been invited to the party, that is much more attractive than being force-fed something. So when you start a new, let's say, initiative with the sales team, first you want to get your influencers, your champions within the leadership team, and then you invite some leaders or champions within the sales team to be a part of it. And oftentimes what we have found that's very effective is that you send out an invite, you make people apply. You make the reps apply.

Jake:

Make the reps apply or make the managers apply?

Marcus:

It can be both depending on the size of the company, depending on the size. So if it's like 20, I'm going to probably have an application for some of the managers at that point in time, right? Whereas if it's three, probably not so much. You know what I'm saying? It's a different game, but we always want the salespeople applying and now all of a sudden there's this sense of FOMO and I want to be more a part of it and not everybody gets accepted into the program. So we typically try to create an initial program of champions where we've got a few leaders involved and you've got the salespeople involved. Now, normally how it has to work because the leader doesn't have the foundational skills yet is you have a couple of leaders that want to be in the beta program and a group of salespeople that want to be in the beta program, they are the first group.

Oh, by the way, this tells me a ton about the culture of my people and about their love of personal development. I mean, you just learn a lot by doing something like this. And once this happens, the key is you start recording the stories that come from the trainings that you're having. So quickly, you're going to have momentum that come from stories. These stories then go out to the rest of the sales organization so that you heighten the amount of FOMO that is happening so that everybody's saying, "Whoa, so what's this system that you all have been learning? How did you do that? How did you turn your closing rates up to... How did you turn them up like 7%? And lead to sale for this one department is now like three weeks less than everybody else. Well, what is going on here?"

That gets people fired up. Then they want to be invited to the party. But what you don't do is you do not roll it out to the entire sales team in one fell swoop. That's almost a guarantee failure every time. So you got to have your beta group, your beta leaders and your beta group of salespeople, create champions, create stories, report those stories to the entire organization, let the momentum build and the demand build with it, and then you can have the next group. And then once you have the next group come in, by the third or fourth group, you start working on a train the trainer program.

And the train the trainer program is now, maybe you don't work with that outside company anymore, but they train a group on the inside how to do this. And so now you've got some serious momentum. And the last component to this, by the way, to make it all come together, because we implement these programs with pretty significant organizations in terms of number of people and whatnot. And the last thing that we always want to do is once you've gone through this for 6 to 12 months, now you really got a well-defined system for that company and for their buyer, for their customer. That is when you create a video certification series that is your baseline. So now when any salesperson is onboarded, instead of them having to go through the program, like wait to go through the program, they get initial dose of the program.

They could get certified right away with what you might call the basics, but at least they get certified. It's part of their onboarding by watching the video series. There's some interactive components that could go into that. But the mistake that we see companies make there is they try to do that before they really have their feet under them. You think you might have a sales system in place, but you don't until you've been running it for at least 6 to 12 months. After 6 to 12 months, then you start to see what it is and what it's supposed to be.

Jake:

To give a sense of scale, can you help me understand how many companies you've directly worked with on things like this? And then how many companies, as well as the range in size, be it like fewest sales reps to largest number of sales reps to get a sense of where this has been applied.

Marcus:

I've been speaking professionally for 15 years on sales, marketing, communication that went to trust. So this has taken me on a journey to many different companies around the world, some really big ones, a lot of SMBs, everything in between. So for my first many years of doing this, I did not have a sales training company. It was just me. And so I would go into the company and I would do some of these things. And you're limited when you're doing it that way. But even then, there was times when we would do an implementation across, let's say, 20 different countries, but we would start with one or two champions within each country, and then they would have to branch it out to their unit or their area, whatever that was. Now that I have Question First Group, we're able to do this really properly now and take an organization and pull this off.

And so normally what you're going to find is there's a limitation with how many people you can train at one time effectively. And what is that? Well, the most ideal number when you're doing in-person training is 25. Anything more than 25 starts to have diminishing returns. Now, can you do more than 25 and can they still be effective? Yes. So this doesn't mean you shouldn't. It just means if you want to have the most optimal, you're going to have less than 25. That's generally how it works. And so when you're planning for your champions group, you can't have a group of champions more than 25. You just can't do it because otherwise it doesn't tend to work out. So for example, you know how this works with SIRO. When you have a company that comes to you at the beginning and they say, "Hey, we have some sales deficiencies." There's a story there.

That freaking story changes once you got the game tape. Once you got the game tape, it's like, holy cow, there's this mountain of data issues, underlying problems, like deficiencies that we now notice. And not just the negatives, there's all these positives too, and there's just a lot of patterns. And patterns is the big key to really revolutionizing a company and an industry and the way you sell within that industry. And this is where AI speeds it all up. This is why I'm so passionate about what I can do as somebody that's obsessed with delivering transformation with the way people communicate today versus what we could do five years ago. Five years ago, we didn't have that same call recording capability like we have now. Now we can do incredible things and we can do in the field recording, whereas we couldn't really do that before.

That just was unheard of. And still for many companies today, they're thinking, "What? Field recording, ride along all the time. I can do that?" Yeah, dude. Yeah, you could do that. And instead of doing one ride-along per person, per year, you can do 200 ride-alongs with one person per year. That's actually possible today. But point being, going back to my original, get 6 to 12 months worth of conversations of role plays, of having salespeople say, "This worked, this didn't work, this blew up my face, this is where I'm falling short." Now you can do a much better train the trainer, but if you come out the gate doing that, your trainers are probably going to fail. Put a caveat here, and this is not me just throwing love at SIRO. If somebody's been using SIRO for six months, my ability to create an immediate training program is dead on the money because now I have the six months worth of data that I wouldn't have had before.

Jake:

The nuance, the patterns.

Marcus:

The nuance. That's right.

Jake:

Yeah. You start discovering all these patterns. We call it, you're turning the light on in the basement. It's like, oh my gosh, look at all the garbage that's built up. Look at the spiderwebs.

Marcus:

Yeah. And when you talk about spiderwebs, do you know one of the biggest spiderwebs that we see? Reps giving very different answers to the same question. In other words, misalignment of doctrine. Companies ideally should have very similar doctrine. If you ask one salesperson a question, assuming that there is a right answer here, okay, there should be a similar response. So for example, as a pool guy, if you go to my sales reps and you say, "What's the biggest benefit of a fiberglass pool?" And one person says, "Clearly it's maintenance." The next person says, "There's no question, the surface is much easier on your feet to play in the pool." Messaging's off.

Jake:

Yeah.

Marcus:

People oftentimes think company messaging is all about what the marketing team is saying, but your most powerful messaging is actually coming from the salespeople, the boots on the ground that are talking to customers and prospects every single day. And what we see is massive misalignment of messaging, a lack of true doctrine. And you can't fix this when you're not consistently hearing all the answers that your team is giving. And that alone can really create a tremendous amount of doubt. It plants major seeds of doubt, especially, and you've seen this before, Jake, plenty of times with some of the data you all get back. When you have a situation where, let's talk about even SaaS for a second or anything like that. It doesn't matter, but when there's an initial fielder, let's say for blue collar for a second, there could be the person that fields the call, the call center person or the person that fields it, they answer a series of questions a particular way, and then the sales rep comes in.

And when you have a different answer given for the same question, this happens a lot. Immediately, seed of doubt has been planted in the mind of the customer, the homeowner, whoever that person is. We see that a lot. And that's one of those big surprises that people have is the misalignment of company doctrine. The other thing, of course, that we see, and some of these are very predictable, but we see that there are certain questions that nobody answers well because they haven't been taught how to answer it well.

There's certain doubts, concerns, worries, issues that customers have, prospects have in every industry. And for those, unless you've really spent time teaching your sales team how to think about those and then respond accordingly to those doubts, concerns, worries, issues, fears, frustrations, then there's a very good chance that you're not going to have good answers and things are going to go sideways. So we see a lot of conversations going sideways with these red button questions that cause the salesperson just to go off the rails. So they exist and every company you should know what yours are. You should have a list of those questions. You can't do that unless you got the right data. So I would suggest that if you don't know what those are, you better get your dang house in order and find those.

We also find that there is a major problem getting to level three questions. So level one, our surface. Level two is more like mid-ground and level three is core. And most conversations, especially during sales discovery, don't go much past service because you don't ask more than one question, sometimes a follow-up question-

Jake:

Wise.

Marcus:

... but you stop. All right, really big problem. Most salespeople don't know how to go to that third level. Until they get to that third level, you don't have major breakthroughs, you don't have major light bulb or aha moments with the prospect. And you don't create that extraordinary connection that's possible with the prospect. So these are things that you should be paying attention to. And again, we have the ability today to pay attention to it, whereas we couldn't do it before. So those are the majors that you want to look out for.

Jake:

One that I see a lot is it's very simple, very basic, just skipping a step in the process, like skipping an offering. It's like, "Oh yeah, I didn't offer them the membership because they didn't seem like they wanted it." "Obviously, they didn't want it, so I didn't offer it to them." But the amount of times that I've been surprised offering someone something I didn't think they want and they get it, it happens a lot. I want to get into the lightning round. First, what is your second favorite sales book?

Marcus:

Second favorite sales book. Oh, dang it. I would say Tom Hopkins, I think it was called The Art of Selling from the early '90s was one of the first ones I read after How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is my number one sales book. And that one has stuck with me over the years. It's a little bit too traditional for today in some ways, but still it's got some pretty good meat.

Jake:

What's a recent TV show that you've enjoyed?

Marcus:

You know, man, I've been going... I'm embarrassed to almost admit it, but I mean, going back, I've been watching Survivor again. And just the reason why I appreciate Survivor is the nuance of tribe communication. It always comes back to communication for me. Why do some people win trust and other people lose trust so quickly? Like what are the things that they're doing? If you want to learn sales better, look at Survivor from a sales lens and you're like, "Holy son of a gun. I see what's happening right there." It's really interesting, man.

Jake:

What's your favorite sales tactic?

Marcus:

It's what's called the pushback pivot is what we call, some people might call it mirroring, but this is an advanced form of mirroring. Pushback pivot is whenever you receive pushback, can you pivot the pushback so as to allow it to build the conversation? And the way it works is you take the negative word or words that were told to you, you repeat the exact words. You don't make up your own. You repeat the exact words. And then you just simply say, "Could you explain that please? Or can you tell me more?" So for example, if somebody says, "Jake, I love CRO, but I got to be honest with you. It's just more expensive than I thought it would be." You say, "More expensive, please tell me about that." That's it. And you say it with the right energy and the right smile, and you don't say it in a defensive way.

Now, mirroring means you just say right capabilities. That's it. But what we have found, what's more effective is you add the second part to it. And you do this in the right way with the right energy, but the amount of salespeople that get told, "Hey, I'm worried that you're more expensive," that immediately defend would shock you. It's somewhere around 90% that start defending versus the elite level immediately say, "Expensive, please tell me more about that." And you allow the person to define what they mean by expensive. Now, this goes for any refriction point or resistant point, but it's called the pushback pivot. It's part of our Pathfinder system.

Jake:

Amazing. Marcus, thank you for the time. That was a lot of fun.

Marcus:

Yeah, I loved it. We got a couple free books that you can download on our site. Just go to questionfirstgroup.com, check it out. You'll enjoy them. And thanks for this opportunity.

Jake:

Thanks, Marcus. It's our pleasure. And thanks for watching. We're here to help you level up as a sales leader, so please tell us what you would like to hear on the next episode. And if you do have an in-person sales team, be sure to check out siro.ai. I'm Jake Cronin, until next time.