0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, what a day. I’m so excited for this podcast today. I’ve been thinking about this. It’s one of my favorite things to do is record with you.
0:00:52 Ben Wright: Oh, I don’t know what to say about that.
0:00:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is it surprising?
0:00:56 Ben Wright: It’s like when someone says I love you and
0:00:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: You weren’t ready for it.
0:00:59 Ben Wright: If you have to say it back. Yeah, it’s like, wow, look, I do, I do enjoy this as well, but you’re just throwing me. No, I wasn’t expecting that from you today. No, no, I do, absolutely. I do enjoy it. There’s no way are we going to be six months in and we’re going to be painfully doing these every couple.
0:01:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Of weeks, pulling nails and being like, oh, she’s back again.
0:01:18 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have you in our house, right. You spend time with my family. These are pretty private thing that you don’t always, always do through business.
0:01:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: But we’re friends, right?
0:01:28 Ben Wright: Yeah, Friends of business. You’re exactly right. Yeah, yeah. What else was happening?
0:01:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: I had a really big day yesterday. Had a really great day and we had a really, really fun night. Hanging out with your family last night. And then I jumped in to come into the office this morning to come and do a bunch of work and you were like out the door at 6:00am where were you off to? It was even before 6:00am where were you off to?
0:01:48 Ben Wright: You know, it was 10 to 6 this morning. I left. I’m really enjoying training at the moment. I’m not training as hard for an event as I was when we first started. I had something I was really focused on. But I really like training for two reasons. One is I like training. When you get to learn new things now, that’s probably not so much what I’m doing from a sporting point of view at the moment, but I like training when you do things repeatedly because what happens is you either remember things that you’ve forgotten or you really consolidate what you’ve learned.
0:02:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, for sure.
0:02:18 Ben Wright: That is super important in any training Program, because the stats are clear, is that most training’s forgotten in short periods of time. You can go and look online. There’s lots of studies that give you lots of different stats. But the macro, keeping it very simple here, the macro synthesis is if you train and then you don’t implement, it’s gone.
0:02:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: One of the classic moments of this is I always really like the idea of you only hear the thing when you’re ready.
0:02:40 Ben Wright: Oh, yeah.
0:02:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: You only hear the thing when you’re ready. And so occasionally we need that reminder for that thing to happen. And I remember one day doing a coaching, I run intensives for the visibility lab and we had everyone, like all of our clients in one room, and we do these kind of, as you know, the big intensives twice a year. I have all of my clients in one location in Sydney. And I ended the summary by saying, and I know you’ve heard me say this, I know all our listeners have too. Where is your ideal client spending time and where are they spending money? This could literally be my epitaph, my gravestone. And I’m not joking. One of my clients, who had been with us for probably two years, came up and she said, finally get this understanding of what I’m meant to be doing with the media stuff. And I looked at her and thought, and so sorry. She goes, why didn’t you ever teach me that before? That just makes so much sense. And how could we not have had that discussion? This is just. It’s absolutely going to change my business. And I grabbed Matt as he was walking past and said, hey, Matt, come here. And I said, I’m just gonna ask you a question. How many times have you heard me say, where are your clients spending time? Where are they already spending money? And he said, minimum, 2 to 300, minimum. And she started laughing and she said, I’d never heard you say that before. And I said, I just don’t think you’re ready. I think sometimes with training, we need to have that repetition for those things and we can hear it when it’s time for it to be implemented.
0:03:54 Ben Wright: Well, why don’t we deep dive into training?
0:03:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay. It’s a relevant segue.
0:03:58 Ben Wright: Love it. Relevant segue, yeah. In fact, what you’ve just spoken about is one of the things I want to talk about. We’re going to frame this around the 5 C’s of training you and your fives.
0:04:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love it. Love it.
0:04:11 Ben Wright: I stand by this. When you build frameworks that are logical and simple, people tend to follow them and work around them.
0:04:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: I Will say, and I am reluctant maybe to agree with this, to tell you how much I now agree with you on this, but I recently wrote a PowerPoint and I had four things and I thought, unacceptable, we have to have three or five. And I went, okay, I’m. Yeah, I’m spending too much time with Ben. This is good. And I changed it up and I think it was actually a better presentation for it. There you go.
0:04:43 Ben Wright: Right. Well, look, the way I work is not the only way, but it works. So, okay, five Cs of training. Number one program needs to be customized to your team. So six or eight years ago, I was running training programs for my business and I was using Canity C A N I T Y. Feel free to go look it up. I don’t actually know if it’s still around.
0:05:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’ve never heard of it.
0:05:03 Ben Wright: Essentially it was a program that had bite sized video chunks to train my team.
0:05:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Great.
0:05:10 Ben Wright: They were 20 minutes each. You’d run the video and it was fantastic. And it was cheap. Like we had a team of 22 people and I think it was costing us $1,000 a year
0:05:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: To hold all of your training programs, all the people going through. It’s incredible.
0:05:24 Ben Wright: What I learned quickly was that the impact was much more limited than I would have liked because it wasn’t customized to my industry. So it spoke about closing, objection handling, needs analysis, asking good questions, lots and lots of things. But unfortunately it didn’t then take the context of my industry or the context of my team. And I think we got about eight weeks in before my team said enough. Yeah, they actually asked me to stop using it or to reduce the frequency. And I think we might have used it another five or six times for the rest of the year. So I think in reality what Canity became for us, and like I said, it’s a great program. This is nothing on Canity. It’s fit for purpose for certain things, but it ended up being a program that we used once a quarter.
0:06:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, okay.
0:06:11 Ben Wright: Or something that we used as supplementary for training if people needed a little bit more help. A customised program is critical because it allows you to focus specifically on what your team needs. And in there I will generally ask teams to roll their training around sales skills, business skills and technical skills. We won’t go through them today, but there’s three categories we’ll build a training program on. I work off a format, actually. It takes teams I work with about an hour, just an hour to build out their full year training program. It’s pretty neat. How we just go boom, boom, boom and we select from some dropdowns and it’s done. But the point is make it customised for your team.
0:06:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:06:44 Ben Wright: Right. Now when I say customised, we’re talking 10 to 20% needs to be customised, but that makes all the difference. C number one, we’re mirrored. C number one consistent.
So the program needs to be consistent. You spoke about talking through know your ideal customer and where they spend their money two to 300 times. Consistency is really important here. We need to make sure that we have a program that’s set so we know what time it’s at, we know when it’s at, we know who’s attending. Right. And we have the same broad structure.
0:07:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:07:16 Ben Wright: Now that’s not content or modality, that’s structure that we run every time. I’m a huge advocate of weekly 45 minute training sessions that have up to 30 minutes of content, 15 minutes of Q& A. Right. In the mornings, generally on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Right. Try and avoid Mondays unless you have short sales meetings or team meetings or business meetings. Try and avoid Fridays because you don’t always get share in mind. Right now most teams I work with actually do fortnightly. They don’t like the weekly bit, but there’s some really compelling reasons why I like them being weekly. Number one being you get more in. Number two being I learn more as a leader.
Training sessions are when I get to pick up right then at the moment feedback from the field, from those who are customer facing, from those who are dealing with problems behind the scenes from regulatory changes. Right. All these impacts. I get real time information when we’re training weekly.
0:08:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: So rather than having to wait to review periods or having a quiet word by the water cooler or we actually have a designated time that not only the staff can be established in and you can really do that. You’re upskilling and changing things for them. You’ve also got then leaders who are actually taking more of a hands on approach, being more accessible, which we know is really important, especially with developing those same relationships. And we have now real time feedback loop. That’s incredible.
0:08:37 Ben Wright: Yeah, exactly. Right. So that being there, number two is. It’s very consistent. All right. Number three is all about having a concise training program.
0:08:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. So get to the point. Death by PowerPoint. So we’re saying don’t do that.
0:08:51 Ben Wright: Well, you know what, Jemimah, it’s actually. That’s not quite what I meant on this one here. Concise. Look, it is a part of it, but Concise is your outcomes.
0:09:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Love that.
0:09:03 Ben Wright: So it’s when we get to the end of a training program, we’re really clear on what the team need to take away. Because sometimes good training isn’t concise. It allows you to explore an issue. The conciseness is how we wrap it up. For me, that’s really clear. No more than three outcomes. So the team walk away knowing they don’t need to worry about any more than three things. Ideally even less ideally one or two things to practice that might move the dial a little bit. Lots and lots and lots of times. Or it might move it once in a big period, but you don’t do it that regularly.
So for me, the tip here is to make sure that when you’re approaching the end of a session is you make sure that those who are taking notes are very, very clear with action items, who’s responsible. And we spoke about two episodes ago about making sure that you know what success looks like. So we’re talking then back about episode 21. I think we’re looking at. If my memory is correct
0:10:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: You are the king of knowing what the episodes were. You could ask me recorded a week ago, and I go, we were there. That was fun.
0:10:10 Ben Wright: Yeah. Numbers, right?
0:10:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Numbers aren’t my thing.
0:10:14 Ben Wright: So, okay, so we have a very concise outcomes from our training program. So number one was all about being customized. Number two was consistency. Number three is all about being concise. Number four is it needs to be compelling. This is where we talk about how you deliver that program. Is it instructor led? Is it peer to peer? Is it a workshop? Is it done by video? Is it one of the leaders in your team? Is it from someone who’s a technical expert? Is it from a supplier? Is it a role play driven training? Is it done through a video course? Right. Is it out on site? There are so many different options. We need to vary that modality and also pick the modality that works best for our team because everyone learns differently. Generally, the statistics say that when you are teaching is when you learn the most. So when we can get people within our team to stand up and teach a topic. Right. We have team members with varying skills. We talked, we spoke about team step back in episode 19. Right. When we spoke about that being really focused around having the right talent in the team who have varied skills, take those varied skills and get people to deliver the training sessions because they’re going to be more compelling.
0:11:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:11:26 Ben Wright: You don’t want to hear from your sales leader or your business leader or your functional leader every single time. And then also make sure that we’re taking into account that some people learn by doing, some by watching, some by listening, some by talking it through. We need to vary those modalities. And for me, the great training sessions might have a face to face element. They’ll have something to watch, they’ll have something to listen to. You look at multiple different resources. Podcast here is a perfect example. We have show notes that you can read, we have audio that you can listen to, we have video that you can watch with subtitles, but they pair together. Right? And then a lot of the time we will have resources that you can reach out to to learn by doing. Right. And then look above all of that, we’re both available to then learn by that face to face.
0:12:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: We’re a little findable.
0:12:10 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely findable. So that’s number four, which is be compelling.
0:12:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:12:16 Ben Wright: Last but not least is we must, must, must. And we’ll get to a little bit more about this in future episodes. But we must have a coaching program that supplements our training program. Training is all about knowledge transfer. Coaching is all about knowledge enhancing. So the example I will give you here is that we can train our team on a delivery method within our business. So, team, we need to make sure that we set up in our project management system touch points for communications with all of our customers. And whenever we have an issue that comes in. All right, we are clear on when we’re going to get back to the customer. Right? So I actually jumped across a few things here. Let’s make it really simple. We can train people on problem solving. When we have issues coming from customers, when the problem comes in, we acknowledge the problem. We confirm when we’re going to come back with a solution, we run through what the solution is, and then we check that that problem’s been solved. Right. That’s your training piece. Bang, bang, bang. Four things. Oh, wow. Four things.
0:13:16 Ben Wright: Always better when they’re three or five. Right?
0:13:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: But four things, I was so quick on it. I was like, all right, let’s see you recover from this. Excellent.
0:13:22 Ben Wright: So now this is an example, right? So we keep it nice and nice and free flow.
The coaching piece comes in to say, okay, so when the problem comes in, how do we work with that team member to remind them to acknowledge the customer, to then help them confirm with the customer when they’re going to come back to them with a solution? If it’s not what the customer wants, then how we help them work through what the solution is and then how we set up systems to make sure they’re checking that there’s an outcome from it. Right. The coaching piece is all about enhancing that knowledge and that’s the practice. There’s some great coaching frameworks out there. I work off Sir John Whitmore’s coaching model, which is called the grow model. Learned it from a great mentor of mine, Josie Thompson, and love it for a model around coaching. But what’s really important is that we have a model. Yes, there’s lots of different coaching models out there. There’s ones about pirate shifts, there’s all different types of different things. But it’s really important that we get the coaching program to supplement our training program. We’ll often do that through one to ones, but in fact we’ll do a podcast on the four teams are meeting. I love the four way of effective teams meeting, but we can do that another time. So that’s five things.
0:14:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, Incredible. I will say one of the things when we were talking about this, I thought, you know, I run a weekly training for the visibility lab and there’s always outcomes, there’s always, you know, it’s extremely customized because we only talk about visibility stuff. And one of the things I’ll say here is that it’s always just an education. We’re going to teach you how to do this. Today is a media kit. Today is how to pitch to sauce bottle. Today is how to write a keynote. The coaching aspect solidifies. It is when they have that one on one session, they’re like, well, now we make it relevant to you and it just slits in. It slots into place so beautifully, people go, ah, I get it now.
0:15:03 Ben Wright: Yeah, you personalize it. Love it. All right, shall I go through the five, please?
0:15:07 Jemimah Ashleigh: I need those five again because I’m going to put my silver bullet.
0:15:09 Ben Wright: Customized.
0:15:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:15:11 Ben Wright: Consistent. Concise, compelling and coaching. So customize. It’s relevant to the the team that you’re working with. It’s not generic, Consistent. We constantly have a program. Everyone knows when to expect it and they’re there. Right. Nice and straightforward. Concise. We have no more than three outcomes. Compelling. We’re varying our modalities so that everyone gets to learn. And last but not least, coaching. We’re supplementing with the coaching program.
0:15:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: My silver bullet for this would definitely be coaching. I think that the training is brilliant, but if we aren’t putting it into that personalised approach, we don’t have that support coming in from management, from leaders, from coaches to come in and assist you in real and our teams understanding this I think it’s really, really, really important. So I think the coaching is definitely my silver bullet. How about you?
0:15:53 Ben Wright: I think I’ll add to that because coaching, I think, is very much one of the top ones for me. I think where I’ll add to that is to actually try to build out a training program. Genuinely teams I work with, we do it in an hour. We have a full year program built out. Doesn’t mean all the content’s ready, but we work out how to share the load. And within such a short period of time, we take something that generally does look, it strikes a little bit. I’m gonna say the word fear in leaders because they don’t know what they’re gonna train on. It’s so simple once you follow a preconditioned format. So that would be mine to add to that.
0:16:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that.
0:16:29 Ben Wright: Nice and easy.
0:16:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that. What an incredible process like this for me. I’m a little bit blown away by this process. It’s actually really good. I’m gonna go home and have a look at all of my notes, my training. Thank you.
0:16:39 Ben Wright: Excellent. Well, that is another great episode wrapped up all together as one. I mean, we have really stuck well to this format of giving chunky advice. We’re going to make sure we keep doing it. So please keep listening in. We’re your friends in business until then. So bye for now.
