Last night the Founder/CEO of a Series A hyper-growth startup called me and asked why his salespeople aren't getting better. It took 1 minute to diagnose. 

I don't care how much training your VP Sales or Sales Trainer provide to the team, there's one thing that's always most important, yet often missed. 

That's Peer-to-Peer training (I call it P2P for short). 

P2P training should become your greatest knowledge sharing practice on a weekly basis.

This makes sense when you get to the point of scale where you have top reps on the team who are crushing it. At a certain point they'll ultimately know more than your VP Sales or even trainer, because they're on the front lines every day. 

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Here's how it works (super simple):

1. Schedule weekly team meetings that have only one item on the agenda; Peer-to-Peer training in open dialogue format

2. VP Sales, Director, Manager, or Trainer should host the session but the real magic is coming from the team

3. Everyone prepares in advance by bringing 1-3 scenarios to the table that they either need help with (or) want to teach to the team

4. Each rep shares their scenario (describes it, or plays a video, or shows the email dialogue) and either teaches the team what worked (or) asks the team what they would do in this situation 

5. An open dialogue takes place, some debating, and eventually some consensus (if no team consensus, the leader provides it) 

6. The VP Sales (or whoever runs the meeting) documents the agreed upon best practices and distributes to the team afterwards by updating scripts, objection playbooks, etc. 

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By taking a proactive approach to facilitating P2P conversations each week you enable a massive amount of knowledge sharing that otherwise wouldn't happen.

By requiring everyone to bring 1-3 scenarios to the table you push salespeople who would otherwise be less inclined to ask for help (or offer it) and the culture of the team becomes one of growing and learning together. 

As a sales leader, you'll be absolutely shocked at how productive these sessions become and how much YOU actually learn from your team.

Don't just wait for questions to come to you... you have to facilitate these conversations on a regular basis.

This is EVEN MORE important for remote teams who don't have the luxury of asking the person sitting next to them for help.

How many of you have participated in sessions like this?

If not... suggest it to your leader today. 

It's the one team meeting that's actually worth having on the calendar.

If we don't facilitate these discussions, the only topics that reps seek help on will be the big ones and a large majority of the major wins that take place each week will only be known by the person who took part in it. In order for the team to learn and grow, we must enable Peer-to-Peer knowledge sharing.

Get this on the calendar ASAP.

If you already have too many team meetings, replace them all with this one for the next quarter and you'll have no regrets.

Happy Selling,