Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Mental Selling: The Sales Performance Podcast is a show for motivated problem solvers in sales, leadership and customer service. Each episode features a conversation with sales leaders and industry experts who understand the importance of the mindset and skill set needed to be exceptional at building trusted customer relationships. In this podcast, we get below the surface, tapping into the emotional and psychological drivers of lasting sales and service success. You’ll hear stories and insights about overcoming the self-limiting beliefs that hold salespeople back, how to unlock the full potential in every salesperson, the complexities of today’s B2B buying cycles, and the rise of today’s virtual selling environment. We help you understand the mental and emotional aspects of sales performance that will empower you to deliver amazing customer experiences and get the results you want.
Welcome to Mental Selling!
[00:00:03] Hayley Parr: This is Mental Selling the sales podcast for people who are dedicated to making a difference in customers’ lives. We are here to help you unlock sales talent, win more relationships, and transform your business with integrity. I’m your host, Hayley Parr. Let’s get right into it. Welcome back to Mental Selling, the sales performance podcast. I’m your host, Hayley Parr with Integrity Solutions. This episode is going to be a little different from what you’re used to hearing, but don’t worry, I promise you’ll still get great insights about how to improve sales performance. We recently did a webinar about the five traps that can quietly derail even the most well-intentioned sales training programs. Our guest for this webinar conversation was Shawn Young, Senior Director of Global Training and Education with AtriCure and a longtime Integrity Solutions partner. Shawn has spent more than two decades helping teams sell with purpose, discipline, and care in one of the most complex industries out there, medical devices.
[00:01:14] Hayley Parr: So for this episode, we’ve pulled together three moments that really capture the heart of that webinar discussion, starting with the first pitfall, momentum killers. Let’s go ahead and get started with our first pitfall, momentum killers. Here’s how each of these are going to be set up, what to look out for, symptoms, how to pivot, and then your takeaway that you can bring home today to apply to your own sales training program. So from a training lens, when we think about momentum killers, what we’ve seen as one of the fastest ways that sales teams tend to lose momentum is when strategy and execution just don’t line up. And a clear symptom of this is inconsistent messaging. So what I hear a lot is, what does good look like? And there’s not often alignment on that. There’s confusion. When the frontline isn’t clear on this, there’s no amount of activity that’s going to move the needle. So at Integrity Solutions, we always stress the importance of anchoring training to business strategy and culture, not just running a program in isolation. I’m going to repeat that. Anchoring training to business strategy and culture and not running a program in isolation. Shawn, I’m going to let you bring this takeaway to life. The momentum killers you’ve seen and how you’ve best found to align enablement with strategic outcomes and not just strategy.
[00:02:54] Shawn Young: In any business that you have a really great engineering department, which we have the best in med device that I’ve worked with. They consistently bring out new products that create the situation where you’ve got to get a different focus on board and people are really distracted by new product launches, and the worst ones are the ones that are new product launches that are going to happen in six months and the reps are out talking about it. So I saw the sales executives and frontline managers that are all going to sit there and say, this happens all the time. And the problem is that when you step away from your current strategy, and that’s what they’re using to answer their “what’s new” call, that question comes up almost every single day in hospitals with our reps. That surgeon walks by, “Hey, what’s new? What’s new?” And it’s so easy to start talking about a future something that it pulls you away from what your current strategy is.
[00:03:52] Shawn Young: Literally last week, one of my field trainers talked to me about—they were out riding with the rep and he said the rep got asked that question and the first thing the rep said was, “Everything’s great. Not a whole lot new.” Well, just two weeks ago, we passed the largest cardiac study that’s ever been done in cardiac surgery, 6,500 patients. We thought it would take four years to enroll. We were done in two and a half years. If that’s not one of the best things you could talk to, completely on strategy, completely talking about cardiac ablation for those patients that need it. And it’s just like, how do you allow this just, “Oh, I’ve got a new clamp coming. I’ve got a new device coming,” whatever the case may be, a new product. For those that aren’t in med device, you’re coming off your strategy. So I always say that people need to really be focused on what their current strategy is. And where training can come into play there is just making sure that you as trainers or you as designers are continuing to focus on those current strategies. And though we have a tendency ourselves to talk about what’s new and where it’s going to fit into our training, it pulls people away from what is really important. I think as we get into more of these pitfalls, that word strategy is going to come up quite a bit.
[00:05:12] Hayley Parr: What you heard Shawn say in that first section really hits home for any leader or enablement professional. Clarity and consistency fuel momentum. When training isn’t anchored to strategy and culture, it becomes activity for activity’s sake. Strategy is the heartbeat that keeps your team aligned when everything else feels noisy, not a one-time plan. And speaking of noise, another challenge we often see is what we like to call flavor of the month syndrome. You’ve also seen it before—think a new initiative, a new slogan, a new program that tends to fade before it ever takes root. Here’s Shawn’s perspective.
[00:06:26] Hayley Parr: Moving on to pitfall number three, something I like to call flavor of the month syndrome. Sometimes it’s not just the volume of the change, but the type of change that holds teams back in our experience. And that’s when initiatives start and stop and they don’t really have any staying power. In my experience, what we’ve seen is this tends to be a bit of a credibility killer. So every time a new initiative comes and goes, there’s no staying power. It can train a team to believe or not to believe in the next one that’s coming. The advocacy just doesn’t stick. The symptoms of that—cynicism, disengagement, lack of adoption—which makes a lot of sense. So as a training partner and within our own systems and processes, we encourage teams to go deeper with fewer initiatives and supply your people with the enablement, the resources, and most importantly the cultural reinforcement for this initiative, whatever is at hand, to last with long-term support and sustainment. The follow-up, that consistency, then beats novelty. And Shawn, you’ve had to balance a lot of innovation with consistency. How have you seen this flavor of the month syndrome play out and how do you keep your teams believing in the process instead of tuning out when new initiatives are introduced?
[00:07:46] Shawn Young: It does kind of go back to that new product piece as well. It’s the greatest gift. It can be the thing that really keeps you from being consistent in your messaging around what you’re really trying to get after. And our mission—obviously we have a couple of different looks on things. One is around pain management. We have a novel way to treat pain. We have a cardiac side of the business that does ablation and left atrial appendage management called Epicardial. And so the concepts by what we do are not novel, but the ways in which we treat them are, and we are constantly learning as well. So it is easy for somebody to bounce around and do different things.
[00:08:20] Shawn Young: One of the ways that we—and I have a business partner on the physician education side that he and I started a podcast. It’s not novel. I mean, everybody does podcasts. But for us it was something new, something we wanted to do. We get people asking all the time, “When’s the next episode?” We are just doing a terrible job. I’m putting it out there in the public that we are not being consistent enough with it. It’s great because we have physicians telling people exactly why, when they treat different ways, that they do. And it’s just really difficult to be consistent in it. You do one every other week—is that every other week?
[00:09:10] Hayley Parr: We roll out an episode every other Thursday. I was just putting in the chat plug for Mental Selling podcast by Integrity Solutions.
[00:09:18] Shawn Young: We’re just trying to do one a month. We’re not doing very well.
[00:09:21] Hayley Parr: It’s difficult. It’s a lot of content.
[00:09:23] Shawn Young: It is. And we have somebody that manages post-production. She does just the most amazing job with it and she’s just always sitting there going, “When are you guys doing an introduction? When are you getting us these things?” So I think that part of it for us is we found this would be actually an answer to being able to help people out month to month and stay on strategy in our conversations. We’re not talking about products that are not out there yet or procedures that aren’t out there yet. We’re talking about real life things, but we’re just being really inconsistent. And you’re exactly right. It just becomes like, well, if I’m not going to get it every month and at a certain time, I’m not going to look for it. I have too much going on in my life in sales to be waiting to hear two guys riffing on a podcast.
[00:10:10] Shawn Young: I’d like to believe it’s great, but you’ve got to be consistent with that. I would say is something too with the sales program. I mean, we had a way of selling here at AtriCure when I first started and I brought Integrity to the table and people were like, “Oh, we have the AtriCure Way. We have the AtriCure Way.” As I learned the AtriCure Way, I’m like, no, you do have the AtriCure Way, but you just don’t realize it’s actually Integrity Selling. However you all have gotten here, you have gotten to the core of the way that I like to teach reps to sell. Flavor of the month is a real thing. It’s just that constant drumbeat that is hard because people want new stuff, but you’ve got to stay consistent.
[00:10:51] Hayley Parr: And it’s also important to know what you have to say no to. And if it’s something you can’t be consistent with, then being honest and candid and knowing where to specialize and what might not be within your area of expertise, what you might need to turn down—those are hard decisions. I really loved how Shawn connects this idea of consistency to credibility, because when it comes to growth, novelty can be tempting, but consistency is really what builds trust. Whether it’s a podcast, a training program, your sales process, people don’t just buy into what’s new. They buy into what’s proven, what’s repeated, what’s reinforced over time. And that brings us to the final snippet of this webinar—training that fails to stabilize in uncertain times. As markets shift, teams start to feel the pressure. The real test of leadership is how we show up to help people stay grounded. Here’s what Shawn shared about training that creates stability and how preparation can become a mindset.
[00:11:53] Hayley Parr: Pitfall number five, training that fails to stabilize in uncertain times. You’re spot on, Shawn. So finally, to your point, even with the right tools in place, training itself could become a bit of a stumbling block if it isn’t designed to truly stabilize teams in uncertain times or without the right enablement in place. That’s pitfall five in a nutshell. So skill training alone—it’s not enough in volatile markets. I think it’s fair to say we might be in the middle of a bit of one. Something we’ve been talking about a lot at Integrity Solutions since the spring is that without values, without mindset, in a long-term sustainment plan, training simply does not stick. And in our experience, the clients that have seen the most success, the organizations that tend to thrive, those are the ones that are using training as a cultural reinforcement tool. So they’re picking the right methodology. It’s something that builds resilience, it builds purpose, no matter the market conditions. And Shawn, you’ve been in the trenches during uncertain times. We’ve had numerous conversations. Do you mind sharing with some of the folks on the call how you’ve seen training stabilize teams and how that shook out?
[00:13:24] Shawn Young: This is one of the best things about being in med device, which is going to sound very cliché to some, but I do believe it’s why I had success as a sales rep and all the way through to being a manager, being a trainer, delivering education, is that we really are focused on a patient outcome. And I’m very fortunate to work for a company where we have three pillars inside of our company that are at our core—education, clinical science, and innovation. And all of those have to answer the question about the mission. It has to be about patient outcomes. I already mentioned the study we had done—very focused—and we always go back to that. I had actually the ability to have lunch with my CEO yesterday. We talked about this. There is zero tolerance for unethical behavior in our company. There’s just no tolerance for it.
[00:14:19] Shawn Young: It’s got to be focused on patient. And we do that. And I think with that clarity, it keeps us there. Now, sure, no means no mission, right? So you still have to meet your quotas, you have to meet your goals in sales, but we don’t ever want to do it in an inappropriate way. So training-wise, one of the things we just make sure that we do is we just spend a ton on education and the science. And so when our reps enter the classroom with us, we talk to them. And most of my training team are clinicians, and so they talk about what’s really going on with patients. And what we tell our reps is it’s really about education. It’s not as much about selling a product. In fact, in our whole first week of training, we do not talk about our product. We do talk about anatomy, procedures, the disease states of atrial fibrillation, those kinds of things.
[00:15:17] Shawn Young: It is about that and continuing to go back to that. I have a really cool example from this weekend though. I was telling my CEO this because I thought he’d be happy to hear it too. So my son and I got invited by one of the race teams at IndyCar to go and observe. My son wants to be in racing as an engineer down the road. He’s got a mentor that works in IndyCar. We get to go to races and he’s learning from them. Well, the race team had just been bought by an individual in Indianapolis and I got some time with him this weekend. And just to see the culture change that has taken place over the last few years, they were just doing things different. And I could tell because I’ve been able to go and just observe. I’m living inside of my kid’s dream, so it’s kind of fun, but I just literally observe.
[00:16:05] Shawn Young: I watch what’s going on and it was just different this weekend. Well, as it ends up, I said to Ted before we went out to take the cars out to the racetrack, I said, “Ted, things are different. Your culture’s incredible. You can tell people are really focused.” And then they hadn’t won a race since 2021. They won the race this weekend. It’s values and it’s mission. And you can just see it—that he believes in his team. I got a really nice message from him. He believes in his team. He loves the support that people have given behind the team. They’re a small team. They’re not the big race teams. And it’s just really cool to see all of that actually put into place. You bring it back to values and your mission and big things can be accomplished that way. And I know we all as trainers know that, but you have to be so supportive of the people in the field that they’re out there for a reason.
[00:16:54] Shawn Young: They get their teeth kicked in every single day. And so when it’s uncertain, you have to be that stability to them so that they know who to turn to. I don’t like getting calls that they’re having a bad day, but I like the end of the call when they’re going to have a better day tomorrow because they’re leaning back on the training team to get some clarity, to get some stability. And that’s what we are as trainers. And anybody that’s on this call that knows—that we don’t like the call, but we love getting the call. We know we’re helping someone out.
[00:17:25] Hayley Parr: As you and I were preparing the content for this session today, the word preparation came up a lot in being a bit of an antidote to pivots and pitfalls—and forgive all of the alliteration here—but you gave this fantastic quote. I’m going to let you speak to this a little bit so I don’t trip over my words. Talk through this quote and your thoughts on it here.
[00:17:51] Shawn Young: It’s a take or a riff or whatever you want to call it. I’m not that up to speed. My son could probably help me out. But I said, preparation prevents pitfalls. I remember when we were talking about this, and it allows you to pivot. And that is very true. My big example of this is that when I did a redesign of training at AtriCure, I built it very modularly. And I built it off that my children went through Montessori education from the time they were two and a half up until eighth grade before high school. That’s one of the ways that we’re doing it. It’s actually very good for adult education—the Montessori way of training. It’s very active. It is people that have learned it training other people. There’s a lot of really cool things in it. I’ve learned a ton from that pedagogy. But what my son’s karate teacher used to say was, “Hey, getting ready for a belt test,” they would be like, “Hey, preparation prevents a poor performance.” So I was just thinking through—preparation does prevent the pitfall. If you’re planning for these pitfalls, they’re going to happen, so plan for them. But it also allows you to pivot. And because we built our first class—our first training class started in January of 2020—and I think anybody on the call that was active and alive at that time—
[00:19:09] Hayley Parr: That line still sticks with me. Preparation prevents pitfalls, because it captures the spirit of this entire conversation. We don’t want to avoid change. We want to anticipate it, prepare for it, and equip our people to handle it with confidence. If this conversation resonated with you, there’s so much more in the full webinar session. You can access the entire Pivots and Pitfalls: The Five Sales Training Traps Holding You Back webinar on demand at the link in the show notes. I’m Hayley Parr, and this has been Mental Selling with Integrity Solutions. Thanks for listening and remember—preparation prevents pitfalls. Thank you.