✓ You: a sales leader or enabler who cares deeply about your people
✓ You: want them to have the skills they need to grow and succeed
✓ You: train them on those very skills - yourself or with outside training support
✓ You: aren’t seeing those skills showing up on real sales calls 🤦♀️
But Good News: It's not you
(and it's not them)...
Get In Touch
Because wouldn't it be great if your reps were doing all that great stuff you want them to do?
Don't worry, we won't ever send you annoying spam.
Welcome to The Practice Lab.
The first sales training company to bring the science of deliberate practice to sales teams so your sellers can turn what they know into what they can do.
Because information ≠ skill
When was the last time sitting through a slide presentation about how to do something was enough for you to be able to do it well? If behavior change and better performance is the goal, even even the best information shared with the most willing team is just the start. Practice builds skill.
Because every opportunity is precious right now
Gone are the days when reps could do surface-level discovery and feature focused demos and still hit their numbers. If your team is going to compete in this challenging economic climate, they need their skills to be at their sharpest. (And fortunately, your team's level of skill is one of the few things you can control right now).
Because decades of research tell us it works
Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out what separates top performers across all disciplines from everyone else. In every discipline studied — from sports to music to acting — deliberate practice emerged as the most effective and quickest method for developing skill and improving performance. After over three years of working with sellers from top companies across the B2B landscape, we've found it works for sales too.
Scott Leese
6x Sales Leader, 3x Founder
The Practice Lab session Meyah and Jonathan ran for my community blew my expectations out of the water. The skills and behaviors they focused on were exactly what I've found separate great sellers from the rest, and even more powerful than the training was the live practice my members got to experience. I saw skills and confidence grow on the spot and within days, members shared wins from doing what they'd practiced on real sales calls. TPL is onto something. See for yourself.
Some Questions We Think You'll Want Answers To
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TPL is primarily for teams of B2B tech sellers in closing roles (most often referred to as Account Executives) ready to master the universal skills that make for the most rewarding, highest-performing selling. We work with sales orgs with and without existing in-house Enablement teams and find that teams of 10 or more sellers get the most ROI and skills momentum from the facilitated peer-to-peer practice TPL brings.
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Ugh, we know the frustration well of setting up role plays with the best of intentions, only for everyone to dread them and see little improvement for the time spent. Sellers typically feel role play is awkward and uncomfortable, pressure-filled and not very realistic.
Deliberate practice differs from traditional role-play in a few key ways, the most important of which is that it's designed to foster the psychological safety research has shown is required for quick and enjoyable learning. Permission to fail and experiment are paramount as is focused, iterative feedback followed by immediate and rewarding opportunities to try again. To date, over 95% of participants in our team sessions have shared via survey they want more practice as a regular part of their sales training.
Deliberate practice differs from traditional role-play in a few key ways, the most important of which is that it's designed to foster the psychological safety research has shown is required for quick and enjoyable learning. Permission to fail and experiment are paramount as is focused, iterative feedback followed by immediate and rewarding opportunities to try again. To date, over 95% of participants in our team sessions have shared via survey they want more practice as a regular part of their sales training. ion text goes here
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Glad you asked.
Before we say anything about specific skills we'll cover, it's important that you know something about how we think about all sales skills:
We believe that the most effective sales skills just so happen to be the most effective human skills.
You won't find any yucky or manipulative approaches from TPL but instead, skills that give your sellers permission to sell like the people they are in a way that feels good them and their prospects both.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way...
The skills we cover serve sellers at every stage of the sales conversation, from kickstarting a discovery meeting to handling late stage objections. In addition to tactical frameworks for specific moments in a sales cycle, we also offer practice-based training for vital soft skills like listening and curiosity that serve sellers in their selling and in their lives.
Get in touch at hello@thepracticelab.co for a complete menu of Skill Labs. -
It took us two years of testing and refining our practice-approach with sellers at top companies across the B2B Landscape before we felt the results were solid enough to bring to teams. Check out some of the testimonials below as a start and we'd be excited to share more about the impact of the approach on a call.
Like any good Lab, we've tested our approach.
And the results are in:
When thinking about how to make our Sales Kickoff for 2023 impactful we thought why not take a chance on the Practice Lab to get our teams excited about leveling up their skills in the wake of a tumultuous economic environment for sales. Honestly, we couldn't have made a better decision! The TPL session brought to light all the little things we know we should be doing as sellers but that we often don't do due to lack of practice. Not only was our team engaged but they made many great strides from just one practice lab. With the help of Meyah and Jonathan, we are hoping to do more labs on a regular basis to invest in our team and bring out the greatness we all know is there!
Malvina El-Sayegh
Director of Sales Enablement @ Reachdesk
In 2 weeks, The Practice Lab changed my cold calling skills more than what I've tried to do in my whole year as a BDR figuring it out on my own. My conversion rate literally doubled.
Kairo Dilla
The session with TPL exceeded all expectations: our team was super engaged and rated the session higher than any other internal training we’ve done at Bullhorn. I’d highly recommend checking out TPL to any sales leader or team looking for innovative approaches to training & upskilling their sales force.
Keith Weightman
I’ve listened/read through Chris Voss’ “Never Split the Difference” twice but never in my 6-year career of SaaS sales have I taken the time or had the space to actually practice the skills in that book of tactical empathy and deep listening like I have had a chance to do in The Practice Lab. The program has given me real space and time to practice and apply skills in ways that seep into discovery and every part of the sales cycle. The takeaways have been invaluable: I’ve learned to be a more measured, thoughtful, and empathetic listener to my wife and kid and my peers and prospects... and I’ve made a number of new friends along the way!
Matt Lozada
Enterprise Account Manager @ Similarweb
If you struggle with getting your reps to do high quality, curious, and empathetic discovery - you have got to check out The Practice Lab. We recently worked with them to help our reps refine their soft skills such as listening, empathy, and curiosity and it had an immediate impact!
What stood out the most was the emphasis on practical exercises throughout the session, which went beyond traditional role plays. The team actively engaged in various forms of practice that genuinely helped them hone their skills. Even those who were initially skeptical (including some of our more tenured reps) came away from the session impressed. Since then, I've had multiple reps share that there's been a noticeable shift in the quality of conversations they're having on their discovery calls!
Deborah Hartman
VP Revenue Acceleration @ Bishop Fox
I brought TPL in to help me embed some deliberate practice sessions into a quarter-long skills training program with one of our sales teams and was immediately impressed by the thoroughness of Jonathan's process for helping us really understand the skills that were needed to improve performance in our team. Through our work he provided me with several practice exercises that were easy to use that helped me create fun, fast-paced sessions that the team loved (I had numerous reps and managers tell me that those sessions were their favorites of the whole quarter long program). Beyond that we are seeing improvements in the quality of our customer conversations and increases in pipeline as a result of this training program and TPL's contributions really helped me achieve these results.
Chris Nowacki
Sr Manager, Sales Enablement @ Workwear Outfitters
The Spekit team is fresh off our three month engagement with The Practice Lab and I have to share the news of how impactful this training was for the team, and subsequently, our prospects and customers. The topic? Demos. Specifically, how to transform them from feature-heavy monologues into actual conversations where we get prospects and customers talking about all the stuff that matters: their challenges, the value they see in what we're showing them, and even, how we could help them achieve bigger org-wide priorities. Let's just say the before and after recordings we've captured from the team say it all about how awesome and effective the training was not just in teaching us the concepts, but in laying the foundation for actual behavior change. TPL might not (yet!) have the name recognition of the Sandler's and Winning by Design's of the world, but as far as I'm concerned, this program should be the gold-standard for any team wanting to seize on their demos as the powerhouse sales moments that they are.
Christina Brady
SVP of Sales @ Spekit