When did reps forget how to speak?

This is the TitanX newsletter, where GTM is built on conversations, targeting, and, of course, Phone Intent™ - Read more.

Sales today has a “Wild Child” problem. What is the “Wild Child” phenomenon?

Glad you asked:

Past a certain point, the human brain cannot learn a language fluently. 

No one knows exactly when, but there are many documented examples of this “Wild Child” phenomenon.

It happens when a child is neglected and barely spoken to, typically before the age of 10. It’s incredibly tragic.

And it certainly is too extreme to compare this phenomenon to the last ten years of top funnel sales, but I’m going to draw a parallel here:

You need ‘fluent’ sellers on your team.

Those who can converse freely about the needs, interests, problems, priorities, and strategies of your ICP.

But sellers today are often in-seat for months before their lack of fluency becomes apparent, or attended to, or addressed meaningfully.

It’s easy to guess that most of your reps are not fluent. A few can write decent sequences, one or two can write scripts, but almost none can freely converse with your ICP as if they were one of them.

But as we all know, training and coaching reps into this kind of fluency takes an overwhelming amount of work. And the ones who reach it often find they can do it anywhere, so they pick and choose their place of work.

That said, there is a first principles problem here:

How can your reps ever reach sales fluency for your organization/product/service, if they only have 1-3 conversations with prospects a day?

Some even have zero.

Since joining TitanX, I’ve heard multiple stories of teams of SDRs who refuse to pick up the phone.

In one instance, Joey offered cash - live, on the call, with a group of SDRs - to the first SDR who made a cold call…

No one raised their hand.

How did we reach this weird point in time where “sales” as a profession is often viewed without the drive to create conversations between humans?

You’d think we weren’t asking them to cold call. You’d think we were asking them to join the Hunger Games.

This is crazy. For so many reasons.

Foremost of which: Your buyer is ultimately a human budget-owner. There are no robot bank account handlers (yet).

More than that, they need to be skilled in the ways of your business domain.

How? More conversations. 

It’s that simple. Mastery comes from practice, exposure, immersion.

The human child forms linguistic capacity and then fluency only by an incredible mix of speaking, listening, and watching.

So do we, as professionals.

Lately we’ve been on a hot streak closing deals. In some part, this is due to the fact that Joey has us posing this question to potential buyers:

Then our team does the math for how you can get there. In almost every case, there is no way the current tech and data can get a team to a sufficient number of conversations every day. Help is needed.

Obviously we are focusing on cold call conversations, but it is helpful to ask it generally, to indicate the problem of asynchronous sales channels (email and social). They do not reliably produce live conversations on a daily basis.

And you could ask the same of any stage of the pipeline. Said another way, it boils down to how many “customer-hours” do you need your reps to put in and maintain to reach fluency?

Pilots need 40 flight hours before they get a license. Project management pros need 4,500 hours. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters - 8,000 hours to reach journeyman status.

So how to combat the “Wild Child” problem?

This is, after all, how we ramped our 2 new SDRs in September. They’re good conversationalists - that’s why we hired them - but learning the nuances of any new employer’s ICP is not automatic.

Between the two of them, they have had 772 conversations in September. They completed 386 pitches. They booked 30 meetings.

And we expect that to get better. Compare that to what’s typical.

Follow Cathy and Reese to continue to watch their stats. Since their salaries are public, it’s worth noting that for the ~20K of cost in September, that’s a $667 cost per meeting - underoptimized. I’m a demand gen marketer: I would kill for any channel that could pull off those numbers in its first month.

But they’re so far along toward fluency.

As our CRO Rob Anderson put it “competence breeds confidence. I used to be the guy who was terrified to cold call on the sales floor. And you don’t get competence without practice.”

Joey shared this competence-confidence quadrant concept with me as well. It seems most reps are in the “unconscious incompetence” quadrant when it comes to talking on the phone. (“Unconscious competence” is fluency - you don’t think about how you speak your native language, you just do).

How do we move teams to “conscious incompetence” without firing a generation of sellers, and provide structure for them to learn to talk to strangers on the phone?

A lot of folks lean on AI to do the work of training, which is unfortunate. It’s cheaper, yes, and maybe ok as a backup, but learning how to talk to humans requires talking to humans.

Rather than unpack the training curriculum we all need to give our teams, let’s close with this question:

What does it take to learn your business and your buyers well enough to speak fluently with them? The jargon, the pain points, the lingo, the seasonality, the conferences, the big influencers.

No cold call makes anyone angry when the person on the other end of the line sounds like they had your job in a past life.

Check out Joey’s recent post - a deeper look at Disposition Science:

Thanks for reading,

Evan Dunn (LinkedIn)