PODCAST 173: Training Leaders Who Create Leaders with Keith Daw

In this episode of the Sales Hacker podcast, we have Keith Daw, VP of GSD and Trainer at McDonell Consulting Group, where he ‘Gets Stuff Done’ and teaches the Sandler Training methodology. Join us for a great conversation about how training has changed in the current landscape, overlooked but essential qualities of leaders, and how to apply the four S’s in training.

If you missed episode 172, check it out here: How to Build Out Your Upmarket Strategy with Ryan Staley

What You’ll Learn

  • Know why you’re training your team before you start
  • Keep the four S’s in mind when setting goals
  • Create a personal, customized learning path
  • Look for leaders with vulnerability and professional humility

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

  1. Keith Daw & McDonell Consulting [3:21]
  2. Training during the last 15+ months [10:43]
  3. Dos and don’ts on training the 4 S’s [14:04]
  4. Key ingredients for great leaders [20:17]
  5. Paying it forward: shout-outs [25:14]
  6. Sam’s Corner [28:12]

Show Introduction [00:09]

Sam Jacobs: Before we get there, we want to thank our sponsors. The first is Outreach. Outreach has been a longtime sponsor of this podcast, and they just launched a new way to learn. Outreach on Outreach is the place to learn how Outreach does outreach. Learn how the team follows up with every lead in record time after virtual events and turns them into revenue. You can see how they run account-based plays, manage reps, and so much more using their own sales engagement platform. All you have to do is head to Outreach.io/OnOutreach to see what they’ve got going on.

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Keith Daw & McDonell Consulting [2:15]

Sam Jacobs: Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast. Today on the show, we’ve got Keith Daw. Keith is the vice-president and a trainer with McDonnell Consulting Group, an authorized licensee of Sandler Training with a state-of-the-art training center in Towson, as well as full virtual training capabilities. He places his focus and energy on amplifying professionals, teams, and organizations in the areas of leadership, sales, strategic customer care, organizational excellence, and especially, that human communications thing where many sometimes struggle. For nearly nine years, Daw has served a dual role of both producer as well as practitioner and intentionally incorporates many of his own lessons learned into his talks and trainings. Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Daw: Thanks for having me.

Keith’s Baseball Card [3:30]

Sam Jacobs: We like to start with your baseball card. You’re vice-president of GSD. What does GSD stand for?

Keith: Well, if I’m keeping it PG, I will say, Get Stuff Done. I am a very actionable, results-oriented, process-oriented person. And I think that’s one of the things that the clients and others appreciate, it’s one thing to go to a training or listen to somebody and hear some stuff. It’s different from, “How do I actually apply this to my real-world jobs and get results?”

Sam Jacobs: McDonell Consulting Group, tell us a little bit about that. And as a licensee of Sandler, tell us what you do. Give us a little bit of context. Obviously, we’d love to learn about your background.

Keith: Many people know of Sandler sales and sales leadership training. The authorized licensee, essentially a franchise in those brick and mortar training centers

around the country, around the world, their focus is going to be leadership at all levels.

Right now, there’s a lot of companies that are in that startup to scale-up mode. And they’re thinking, “Okay, I’m proficient at this but I don’t know the first thing about that. Might need some assistance.”

Next gen leaders, that’s the biggest thing. You’ve got a lot of boomers and other seasoned pros, they’re looking around their organization trying to figure out which of these knuckleheads might be able to run their company and not tank it. And proactively, what might I need to provide for them, so that they’re set for success?

I’ve written articles equating it to how major league baseball teams have their farm clubs and their systems to know if you’re going to go down from the first one, when, and if you’re going to get to the major. Building those kinds of processes and then developing that training.

In sales training, no matter how great and awesome it is, if the leadership is defunct, or it’s broken, chances are the sales training won’t work.

I think given what’s gone on over the last couple of years, in particular the last year, more and more people are recognizing it’s a lot cheaper to keep clients than it is to go get new ones.

But when you look at the customer service team, sometimes the people with the least amount of experience who get paid the least amount of money and get the least amount of training are spending the most amount of time with your valued customers and clients. So what could possibly go wrong there?

Communication is at the core of everything. David Sandler recognizes people buy for a reason. There’s a psychology on why people buy or don’t buy, how do you create a conversation and communicate on a level that’s relatable and personable to ultimately build that trust and then stand a better chance.

As long as you’re technically proficient, you stand a better chance of closing that deal and beating your competitors, without having to give up margin in the process.

Training during the last 15+ months [10:43]

Sam Jacobs: How did you all respond to COVID? What’s been the experience for your business over the past 15 months? Obviously, I’m assuming it’s moved to all digital. I would also imagine that COVID was a potentially positive thing for your training business because so many people needed to invest in training given that they couldn’t see where their employees were all day.

Keith: All of the above. Because of the nature of what we do, sales or leadership training, not everybody might be geographically convenient to drive to the training center. There are times when we have leaders and salespeople that are in different regions around the country. We already had virtual capabilities, cameras, and monitors, front and back, we already had these things set up.

We might have 30 people in the training center on a Tuesday morning for sales mastery. And there’s eight to 10 that are joining us virtually, then we needed to transition for a period of time where everything was 100% virtual. The technology was there, the familiarity of dealing with it was – however, there also needed to be an adaptation on our part.

You can still make it entertaining, but you’re missing a certain vibe, you’re missing those little cues that you might hear when you’re in the training center when somebody’s struggling. You can’t necessarily do that over zoom, particularly since some people aren’t as comfortable being on camera. You can’t see that facial expression, that they’re clearly hating that thing that you’re mentioning or confused on how to implement it. So we’re spending a lot of time behind the scenes afterward to make certain that it’s a flawless experience.

The perception of virtual training prior to Covid was “my person is going to sign up for a webinar or have somebody talk to them, they’re gonna play solitaire, play on their phone, not have their camera on, not be engaged, but they check the box and get their continuing education credits.” It was our biggest thing to overcome.

We put out a lot of complimentary informational workshops on how to manage and sell appropriately given the considerations. That generosity had people realize, whoa, wait a minute, I can do a breakout session, have working sessions and meet other peers. And so it changed.

There are a lot of companies that realized that they’ve been putting training on the back burner, and now they need it more than ever. The biggest hesitancy that some had were cash flow, and I’m furloughing some people. But we did see a rise in interest, a lot of questions, some of our largest clients we’ve had over 13 years came on during COVID.

Dos and don’ts on training the 4 S’s [14:04]

Sam Jacobs: You have a point of view on this thing called the four S’s: strategy, structure, staff, and skills and how so many companies get it wrong. Walk us through that general framework. Specifically, what do most companies get wrong? You deal with a lot of companies and scale-up mode companies, and a lot of companies are flush with money, and they need to grow. When you see companies doing the four S’s, right, and the company’s doing it wrong, what separates them? Give us an overview, the framework, and then the best ones versus the ones that need help.

Keith: I’m putting on my business doctor hat to say, a lot of people want that kind of training but could be for completely different reasons. Let’s talk about your strategy. If your plan is to grow and be efficient, or you just want to sell this thing, the focus of how we implement the training and what our end goals could become vastly different than somebody that says, I think I’m on to something amazing and I want to build this over the next 15-20 years. The same core training will be involved in both scenarios, but how it’s delivered and how it’s used would be completely different.

The four S’s are my guideline to make sure I don’t miss anything important, and then have an embarrassing moment that I should have seen coming six months down the road when a company has made a huge investment in time, money, resources. Understanding that strategy helps them make sure they’re aligned internally, and that helps make sure that we’re working with the right goal in mind.

The structure could be a hierarchy, could be how they go to market. Are you working through channel partners? Are you B2B? Are you direct to the consumer? Are you a very flat organization? Are you geographically decentralized? There’s a lot of these things, both from logistics, as well as getting to that end goal, I need to understand as though I’m a dotted line on your org chart.

Then the next thing is we’ll move over to the staff. I’m sure they’re brilliant. I’m sure they’re amazing human beings. But I don’t know who’s trainable, who’s not. I don’t know who’s going to automatically be the hostages in the room, and who are the ones that can’t get enough. In some cases, we might need to evaluate their skill sets.

Jim Collins mentions in one of his books, make sure you have the right people on the right seats of the bus. Sometimes people who got you to where you are may not necessarily be getting you to that next level, at all, or even in the same role. You have to evaluate what they can do for your organization. Maybe there’s additional skills that they might need in order for them to go for that next phase of their journey in the company’s journey.

When we get to the skills, this is pretty much all laid out, these people are going to be leaders, here’s the things that they’re going to need to know, let’s put that into the training program. Everybody’s going to get some core things. At the same time, everybody has a learning path and a journey through this training, so it’s as applicable as possible to them, and they’re most likely to pay attention, and they know how to actually use it for the results. It’s having the strategy and building your game plan, instead of just going out there into your car, putting the GPS on random, and hoping to get there.

Key ingredients for great leaders [20:17]

Keith: The things that make great leaders are probably the things that aren’t taught until we learned it the hard way. I think vulnerability and professional humility are two that don’t get spoken about enough. There could be pride issues or ego issues, I don’t want to have someone think I’m weak, those kinds of head trash.

Those leaders that are most approachable, they’re genuinely curious. I do a lot of sessions identifying your team’s personal motivation. Because once you understand the personal motivation it’s a lot easier to build dual goals to get sales or leadership, whatever those KPIs or metrics might be.

That leader who can create other leaders, instead of looking to just have a bunch of followers and doers, they tend to be the most successful. I think those who are in their late 20s and early 30s, with aspirations to be a leader, tend to be the ones that embrace the training the most because they recognize the leaders they definitely do not want to be when they grow up. Makes a lot of sense.

Sam Jacobs: We hear about Sandler all the time. There’s people that know it’s a training framework, but they don’t know much more than that. How would you summarize, what are the key elements in your opinion, specifically around sales that Sandler represents?

Keith: I think a lot of organizations tend to look at the training of any type as an event, as opposed to an ongoing process. David Sandler believes in the power of reinforcement, just like a professional athlete, they go to practice every week, they go into the weight room every week. That way, they’re ready, they studied the playbooks, they’re ready to execute at the highest level. Even the most seasoned people with all the championships still go through those core things.

Understanding the methodology and that we get consistent results, measurable results, shorten sales cycles, and better performance. I’m in leadership training every week, every month, I’m in sales training every week, every month, whatever that case might be. It’s reinforcing those skills. It’s making sure that the things you should say and do are top of mind for when you go into the call with your team member, your prospect, or your client.

Paying it forward: shout-outs [25:14]

Sam Jacobs: One of the things we like to do at the end is paying it forward and talk about people, books, or ideas that have influenced you, that you think we should know about. Who are some folks that have played a big role in your life? Or however, you want to frame it, where we can follow the breadcrumb trail and get more ideas and more insights.

Keith: From a leadership standpoint, one book that I absolutely love is called Extreme Ownership. It’s by Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, and he tells a story of what they faced when they were on a mission and then goes into some of the business applications. It’s giving you real tactical advice on what to say and what not to do. I’ve got multiple clients who have utilized it as part of their communication, and not just from a leadership standpoint, just personal responsibility – how to make certain that if I said it, I did it. I delegated it, it didn’t work, I own it.

In sales or leadership, we all tend to have some egos that we carry around with us. Scott Lease just put a brand new book out that’s literally a playbook for anyone who is a VP of sales or who aspires to be or even someone who’s curious about it. I could look back on both of those and get a little validation of what I did right, and a lot of gut checks about things I did wrong or tragically wrong or could have done better.

Sam Jacobs: That’s a great recommendation. Jocko is also a great Twitter follow, an always enjoyable social media presence. Keith, if folks want to reach out to you, they want to talk more, learn more about some training, or understand more about what’s possible, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Keith: The easiest way would just be to hit me up on LinkedIn.

Sam Jacobs: Keith, thanks so much for being on the show today. We’ll talk to you on Friday for Friday fundamentals. It’s been great having you on the podcast.

Sam’s Corner [28:12]

Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, Sam’s corner. great conversation with Keith. The key point that I took from it is before you sign your team up for “training,” let’s figure out why you’re doing it. Let’s figure out what your goals are. So many bad corporate decisions are made because there’s a foundation that is lacking, you don’t know why you’re doing something or you haven’t explained the context. As a consequence, all of these bad decisions flow from that.

Keith talked about strategy, structure, staff, and skills – the four S’s. Going in that order helps you understand where everybody needs to fit in, what their goals need to be, etc. There’s so many great concepts that can come from really understanding what your strategy is, what you’re trying to accomplish. Understanding people’s personal motivations before you put them into training, and figuring out how you create a personal learning path that’s customized and dedicated.

Before we go, let’s thank our sponsors. The first is Outreach, the leading sales engagement platform. Check out how Outreach does outreach by going to Outreach.io/OnOutreach.

The second is Pavilion, my company. Get more out of your career – unlock and achieve your professional potential. The doors to your success are open. Come on in at JoinPavilion.com.

And finally, Blueboard. Treat your reps like the rock stars they are. Blueboard is the world’s leading experiential sales recognition platform that offers top reps their choice for hand-curated experiences. If you go check them out, you’ll see all of these different experiences that you can get, everything from whiskey tasting to yoga retreats to courtside seats at your favorite basketball game. It’s really cool and better and more interesting than just cash rewards. Check them out podcast.blueboard.com.

By the way, if you’re not part of the Sales Hacker community yet, give it a shot. Go to saleshacker.com. Thank you for listening.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me, Sam@joinpavilion.com. I’ll talk to you next time.

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