Built around your business — and your people

I don’t arrive with a generic presentation and force your people through it. Before I design the session, I want to understand what the business needs and what the people in the room need.

We start with a briefing call with whoever is commissioning the training. We’ll clarify the learning objectives, what’s happening now and, most importantly, what you want people to be doing differently afterwards.

Then I ask the people attending. Before the workshop, everyone has the opportunity to tell me what they want help with — the conversations they find difficult, the situations they’re facing and what they’d like to get from the programme.

That gives me two perspectives: what the business needs them to walk away with, and what they need the training to help them do.

I can then design the session around both. Before delivery, we have a final briefing to pick up anything that has emerged from the team responses — including challenges, themes or issues the business may not have been aware of — and clarify anything I need to understand before we walk into the room.

The result is training built around your people, your customers and the conversations actually happening in your business. Where it helps, we can also weave in your existing processes, documents, forms, call structures and work instructions so people can immediately see how the learning applies to their role.

Your people shouldn’t have to work out how to translate the training into their job afterwards. We should do that before — and during — the training.

First, change the way they think about the conversation

Before giving people techniques, Anthony uses early exercises to challenge some of the assumptions they bring into the room.

That might be how they feel about selling, picking up the phone, dealing with objections or what they think needs to happen for somebody to take action. By changing the perspective first, the techniques that follow make much more sense.

Emotional intelligence and understanding sit underneath the training. The objective isn’t to teach people how to pressure somebody into doing something. It’s to help them become better at understanding the person on the other end of the conversation — what matters to them, what may be holding them back and what needs to happen for them to feel comfortable taking the next step.

From there, we introduce a practical five-step structure that gives people something they can understand, practise and make their own.

The 5 Conversation STEARS

The 5 Conversation STEARS give people a structure for understanding what makes conversations work and how to get people to take action as a result of speaking to you.

Rather than handing people a collection of clever lines to memorise, the STEARS help them think about the person on the other end of the conversation, what they’re trying to achieve and how to move things forward naturally. They learn how to

• Recognise when somebody is ready to listen and engage
• Build rapport so people feel comfortable talking to them
• Establish credibility so people trust what they have to say
• Create urgency or an easy next step that keeps things moving, and
• Prevent pipeline constipation or delays, by making sure the next conversation actually happens.

The techniques can be applied across sales, business development, customer service, account management and leadership — from opening conversations and asking better questions to handling objections, finding opportunities and knowing what to do when a conversation doesn’t quite go to plan.

People become more confident because they understand what they’re doing — not because they’ve memorised what to say.

Get an early win

One of the first practical exercises will often involve making a couple of relatively easy calls to existing customers. Rather than throwing somebody straight into a difficult prospecting call, we give them an opportunity to have a positive conversation and build some momentum.

One exercise Anthony regularly uses is asking existing customers for testimonials. Apart from producing something genuinely useful for the business, there’s an unexpected benefit when a room full of people starts hearing customers tell them how good they are.

Confidence goes up. Picking up the phone starts to feel different. And suddenly the business has fresh customer proof it can use when prospecting, include with proposals and quotations or use to open conversations about additional services with existing customers.

One exercise. Better conversations, more confidence and new ammunition for the business.

Work on the conversations they actually find difficult

Once people have some confidence and a structure to work with, we can start troubleshooting the conversations that aren’t going so well.

That means getting into the real objections, sticking points and situations people raised before the workshop or have encountered during their work. Instead of treating objection “handling” as a list of stock responses, we look at what may actually be behind the objection, how the conversation reached that point and what might move it forward.

We can pull apart difficult conversations, explore different approaches and help people work out what they could try next time. That means the training starts solving their problems rather than somebody else’s hypothetical ones

From conversation skills to Conversation Design

We then introduce some of the principles of Conversation Design with a simple mapping exercise, helping people think about the route a conversation could take rather than relying on one perfect script.

This also gives us somewhere to incorporate the organisation’s existing forms, processes, questions, work instructions or other internal requirements. Instead of treating those as something separate from the conversation, we can look at how they fit naturally into it.

For clients who add Conversation Cards to their programme, this mapping exercise becomes the first step in developing a practical tool their people can use after the training is over.

Then we make some calls

Learning something in a training room is one thing. Using it when there’s a real person on the other end of the phone is something else entirely.

Wherever practical, the training moves into a Live Call Clinic, giving people the opportunity to try what they’ve learned in genuine conversations while Anthony is there to support them. He can help with pre-call strategy, provide spot coaching between conversations and help people work through what happened while it is still fresh.

There are prizes, challenges and a bit of healthy competition to keep people focused on implementation rather than observation. The energy changes when somebody gets a result — and it changes again when the rest of the room realises they can do it too.

In the vast majority of sessions, people don’t leave talking about what they might try when they get back to work. They’ve already started.

The training doesn’t finish when Anthony leaves the room

At the end of the session, everyone shares the useful ideas or “gems” they’re taking away and commits to a level of activity, target, goal or result they intend to achieve afterwards.

Then Anthony comes back.

The follow-up session gives people accountability for what they said they would do, recognition for those who have put the learning into practice and somewhere to troubleshoot what happened when they tried it in the real world.

Because that’s where training becomes useful: not when somebody understands an idea, but when they actually use it.

Learn it. Try it. Bring it back.

For businesses that want the learning to continue beyond the workshop and follow-up, the Assassins Academy gives individuals access to practical training, the 5 Conversation STEARS and invitations to join two group coaching calls with Anthony every month.

That means people can keep putting the techniques into practice and bring back the situations that arise afterwards — a prospect who responded unexpectedly, an objection they keep hearing, a customer conversation they’re not sure how to approach or an opportunity they don’t want to get wrong.

The Academy gives them somewhere to learn, practise, troubleshoot and improve while they’re actually doing the job.

“Over a year later, I still hear phrases being used in the office that came from Anthony’s workshop” – Sales Manager at Handicare

Who is the training for?

You don’t need a room full of traditional salespeople for this training to be useful.

It works particularly well for people whose results depend on conversations: sales teams, business development, account managers, customer service teams and people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as “salespeople” but still need to create opportunities, influence decisions or help customers take the next step.

It can also help experienced teams who already know plenty of sales theory but need to improve what actually happens when they pick up the phone.

If better conversations would produce better results for your business, we have something useful to work on.

What could your team do with better conversations?

The objective isn’t to turn everybody into Anthony Stears. It’s to help your people understand conversations well enough to become a more confident, effective version of themselves.

We’ll start with what the business needs, find out what the people in the room need, build the training around both and then give them the opportunity to put it into practice.

They’ll leave with a structure they understand, techniques they’ve tried, real conversations they’ve worked on and a clearer idea of what they’re going to do next.

And ideally, a few results before the training day has even finished.

TALK TO ANTHONY