Many businesses are still operating with a remote workforce due to COVID-19, and the sales force is no different. To learn how virtual sales training and coaching can set remote salespeople up for success, we spoke with Mark Magnacca, co-founder and president of Allego.
Listen now to learn more on:
- The difference between virtual and in person sales.
- Developing agility in your remote sales team.
- The return on investment (ROI) of virtual sales training.
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Additional Resources:
- Agile Certification for HR and L&D
- The State of the Sales Training Market
- The Business of Learning, Episode 28: Moving Training to the Virtual Classroom
- Training Industry Magazine: Perspectives on Sales Training
The transcript for this episode follows:
Speaker:
Welcome to the Business of Learning, the learning leaders podcast from Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hello, and welcome to the Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo an associate editor at Training Industry.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
And I’m Taryn Oesch DeLong, managing editor of digital content here. Thanks for joining us today. This episode of the Business of Learning sponsored by Allego.
Speaker:
Are you a manager with a remote team struggling to stay on track when you can’t meet face-to-face? Take control with Allego. Allego is the leading workforce learning and enablement platform built for today’s distributed teams. Download Allego’s essential guide to virtual selling to keep your team running at full speed. Go to allego.com/selling to download your ebook today. That’s A L L E G O.com/selling. Don’t let remote work stall productivity. Check out Allego today.
Sarah Gallo:
As we record this episode, many businesses are still operating with a remote workforce due to COVID-19, and the sales force is no different. If your sales teams are selling online for the first time, and if you’re training them online for the first time, our guest today has some tips that will help you out. We’re talking today with Mark Magnacca, co-founder and president of Allego. Mark, thanks for joining us.
Mark Magnacca:
Glad to be here.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
To get us started, can you share a little bit about how virtual sales is different from in person sales and what skills salespeople need to work in this new environment?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, to give you some background, Taryn, I’m a person who’s been in sales most of my adult life. I’ve been in the financial services business. I’ve been in the training business, and I’ve been training salespeople for many, many years, even before co-founding Allego. And it was my work training salespeople in the instructor-led, non-virtual world that was really the catalyst for starting our company because we were trying to scale something that we were doing in the instructor-led arena to leverage technology to do it virtually. So to answer your question, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and really have had a number of different experiences that have informed my opinion. So with that, as a framework, what I can tell you is that there are many common denominators from the non-virtual world that certainly apply in the world of virtual selling, but there are several distinctions that are fundamental, that if you don’t get these distinctions, you are at a huge disadvantage if you simply try to pour over everything you did in the real world. Let me give you some examples. First of all, if you think about the rapport-building process, in the non-virtual world, you get to meet people [and] shake their hands, or at least we used to shake their hands [before the coronavirus pandemic]. You pick up on people’s energy and vibe, right? You have the sense, particularly when you’re in someone’s office, whether you call it out or not, you have a frame of reference of what’s important to them, right? If they have pictures of their family versus pictures of a fish on the wall, you kind of know what’s orienting the most important things, given that there’s only a limited display space. So, the first thing I would tell you is [that] there’s a lot of information that you can take in, in that capacity. What I can tell you is that the biggest thing I’ve noticed, and I’ve been working remotely really since the start of Allego …. I would go in two days a week and I’ve worked remote three days a week. So this has been the coin of the realm, if you will, for me for a long time, and what I’ve noticed is that the people who don’t do proper research on the people that they are selling to are at a huge disadvantage. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have to spend an hour doing a complete biography on every single person who’s going to be on the call, but minimally, if you don’t look at their LinkedIn [profile you’re at a disadvantage]. In my best practice personally and for our team, I will send a LinkedIn invitation — as I did for you — before I’m going to be on a call with someone and simply say, “In advance of our call today, I’d like to invite you to my LinkedIn network.” I’ll tell you that 90-plus percent of the time people respond. So, the very first thing I would [suggest doing as a remote salesperson] is the need to do more research than people did in the past. Now, some will say, “Well, wait a minute, Mark. They should have done that kind of research anyway.” Well, maybe they should have, but that just wasn’t generally the way it went, and if you talk to any sales manager, I’d be willing to bet you, they would say [that] on average they were on appointments with salespeople who were effectively walking in and winging it, and they were good enough on the fly that they could get away with that. What I’m saying now is [that] in the virtual arena, just looking at a blank wall or a virtual background behind somebody, there’s nothing for you to pick up on, to be able to get to a level of rapport and really start to build the trust that’s required so that someone will tell you the truth about what the issues actually are, because until you understand what the issues actually are, you’re on this [what] we call “search for the truth,” [where] there’s nothing really for you to do other than pitch a product, which just falls on deaf ears in 2020 and I think going forward.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Those are great points. I know I appreciated the LinkedIn connection before the call. It went ahead and started building rapport, like you said. So how can virtual sales training help get salespeople up to speed on those skills that they need now?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, what I can tell you is that the word virtual sales training …. I’m going to narrow down the definition a bit here because even that phrase can mean lots of different things to different people. So for example, some people believe that virtual sales training is literally doing exactly what they did [in] instructor-led [training], except using Zoom or WebEx or some other [platform] to present [information in] the same format, and I believe this is a huge lack of imagination, and I say that as someone who’s come from that business. So I have had this direct conversation with many of my peers with whom I have great affection, and I’ve said to him just bluntly, “If you think taking an eight hour class that you used to do in person at a live event, and all you’re going to do is switch formats and try to push eight hours of content and have people sit on Zoom and look at you for that period of time, that just doesn’t work in this time period.” That’s not to say that there can be no live element [to virtual training], like what we’re doing [by talking on this [podcast], but I think anyone who is [training salespeople virtually] needs to realize that the capacity, especially in this time where so many of us feel “zoomed in and zoned out,” [is limited]. There’s just too many of these [virtual] meetings. The capacity to get your message down succinctly, number one, and then number two, to recognize that using tools like Allego can really help you before the engagement, during and after [the training is key]. So, let me give you an example. Imagine, Taryn, that I’m your sales manager, and you’re getting ready to go out on a call and you’re going to be interacting with a new client of Training [Industry] Magazine with whom you haven’t met before, but your interactions are going to be virtual. I imagine if I said to you, “Hey, Taryn. I’d like to just see the opening conversation that you’re going to use and the answer that you’re going to give when they say, ‘Tell me a little bit about Training [Industry] Magazine. I’m not that familiar. How are you different from these other magazines?'” Now, I could send you an exercise, if you will, where I asked you that question in a short video and at the end of the video, it says, “Please reply.” You tap the button, the camera comes on, and you answer the question [by saying,] “Well, the main differentiators between Training [Industry] Magazine and some of our other journals in the same space are as follows….” Now, when I receive that video back from you, imagine that I have the capacity to provide what’s called point in time feedback, almost like I can put a little sticky note at certain points in your presentation. The beauty of this, Taryn is it’s on the fly, it’s ad-hoc. You don’t need to spend a lot of time rehearsing this because it’s literally [just asking], what are you going to say? And one of two things happens [after this]. I either hear what you said and say, “Taryn, that’s spot on, go with it.” Or I now have the capacity as a sales manager to say, “You know what? I think you’re missing one element that you may not have considered. Why don’t you try it again saying this….” Then I might even model it for you, what I mean when I say that, and then send it back to you [for reference]. Now, think about the impact on your confidence when you walk in and you’ve thought about what you’re going to say. Does that mean it’s always a perfect hit and you’re never going to miss? No, it doesn’t mean that, but it means the probability of your success is going up versus the person who gets on the phone and is winging it with an opening conversation that they haven’t practiced [or] rehearsed. That’s just one example. I could give you many others.
Sarah Gallo:
For sure. Going along with that, what are some of the unique challenges salespeople are facing in a remote work environment?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, there are many, many challenges. We just experienced one here a moment ago. I have two very young children. I have two older children, but I also have two very young children, and one of them was expressing their displeasure with something going on. And so, if you’re on a very important call and there’s literally screaming coming through the ceiling, that could be problematic. So, first and foremost, I think setting up a space that allows you to be at your best [is critical]. And I recognize that’s not necessarily easy for everyone. So, one of the things I’ve learned is that not every call requires a sort of perfect silence. In the case of what we’re doing right now, recording this podcast, I simply notified my wife and my children that, “Hey, I’m recording something right now. Would you please go outside right now so I can do this?” No problem. So, first of all, there’s the boundary piece that I would start with. The second thing that I would tell you is there are so many elements within Zoom, and I’m just going to use Zoom as an example, but I could tell [the same thing] for WebEx or for GoTo Meeting or for any of the other [virtual meeting platforms], [such as] the ability, for example, to simply rename yourself [on the platform] and ask people to do the same. I’ve done this on many, many calls now where I’ve had, say, 15 people in an executive roundtable, and what I’ve done is I’ve taken a screenshot of all of the LinkedIn bios of the 15 executives who are going to be on the call. I send out to everybody now. Why do I do that? And this speaks to my age, and this is maybe something would be beneficial for some of your younger salespeople. And by younger, I mean, under 30. A lot of people, even in my own company, when they saw it, they’re like, “Why don’t you just send the link?” And I explained to them, because for people my age, 50 or more, I don’t want to click 15 links. I really don’t. I simply wanted to scroll through the email and very quickly get a sense of who’s going to be on this call. I cannot tell you how many executives wrote back and said after the roundtable, that was terrific. I knew who was going to be on the call. I knew who they were when they were talking, which leads me to the second point. This is a simple little hack, but by telling people, “I want you to go into your Zoom box, click the blue button with the three dots and click ‘rename,’ and I want you to type your name, your title and your company.’” Why is this important? Well, when you’re on a call with 10 or 12 people, it’s very hard to manage who’s talking. Who’s making the point? And so you see their name. If you think about this, Taryn, if we were in the military, you and I would both have our name on our shirt, and we’d also have a certain stripes or insignia to indicate our rank. So [our names] self evident in many parts of the world, like in the military. And [in the military I can tell what your rank is]. So, I kind of understand, are you the general here? Are you the Lieutenant? Who am I talking to? We have the capacity to leverage that in Zoom and too many people don’t, and I find if you set the stage before the meeting by doing something like this, it goes a long way. One last example I’ll give you is the power of capturing a Zoom recording of a call, like what we’re doing [as we record this podcast], and then being able to repurpose it for other benefits. We have clients at Allego now, one of them is an asset management company in the mutual fund business, and so they have six portfolio managers, some of the smartest people in the financial services business who are all talking about what’s happening in the economy. They brought them all together on a Zoom call, sort of “Brady bunch style,” [with their] six faces, and what they realized is that the content was so good, what these folks talked about in terms of what’s going on in the economy. What does this mean? What does it mean to interest rates, stock market, etc. They were able to take that Zoom recording, drop it into Allego, chunk it up into some short videos that could be sent out, and then what their sales team was able to do is to send one of those videos directly to a customer or a prospect, and when the person clicks on that video, the sender gets notified that they just watched the video. So now what’s happened is, instead of what we’re going to call “stale content” that might be coming from a centralized training group that, despite their best efforts, can’t possibly keep up [with] all of the things that are changing in the business. So, our whole frame of reference is to say, “Look, training department, L&D, you don’t have to be the actor. You need to be the director of the movie,” and the director of the movie is not necessarily in front of the camera. The director is coordinating who’s going to do what, when. In the very best training organizations we work with, what we see again and again is their capacity to find talented subject matter experts, which in some cases, in the example I just gave, you could be economists, strategists, portfolio managers, but they could also be salespeople, sales managers, or subject matter experts who are really good on a topic. And the reason this is so important is because people know and respect these people. You see their faces. You know who they are. You know [that] they know what they’re talking about. It’s much easier to hear that message than just frankly, and again, I come from the training business, [having] a person in the training group who’s trying to talk about how to sell something that they may have not actually sold themselves, or if they did, it was a long time ago. So that capacity to pull in credibility is really, I believe, the biggest distinction in the realm of virtual sales training.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah. That’s all definitely important. So, we talked about setting boundaries and managing calls and recordings, [along with] the importance for maintaining credibility. These are all challenges for salespeople working [remotely] right now. How can virtual sales coaching help them overcome some of these challenges?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, I can tell you that what I know for sure now is there is a reason why the very best players in every athletic domain have a coach, and it’s true in sales, as well. The idea that any of us is so good and so self-aware that we can notice what we are not doing well [is untrue]. So, I’m directing this message to the top performers, as much as to the middle performers. The bottom performers, the bottom 20%, there’s usually a separate issue, but for the middle 60 and the top 20 [percent of top performers], this message is for you. The reality is most of us don’t know how much better we can be, but a great sales manager can often see that inside of you. When you think about professional athletes, almost all of them have a coach, even in individual sports, and when you think about in the game of football, or you think about in baseball, in hockey, [or] whatever sport you’re interested in, there’s a reason why coaches help bring out the best in people, and so what’s happened in many companies where there’s not a technology platform in place, like Allego, is coaching has gone by the wayside. What do I mean by that? Well, it was one thing in the ride along era, pre-COVID, where you would say to your customer, “Hey, Taryn, I hope you don’t mind, but my manager, John is going to accompany me on our appointment. Is that okay?” And the unspoken rule was, first of all, I’m not bringing my manager to somebody that I don’t have a good relationship with, and there was almost this agreement to like, yeah, we’ll play along. The rub, however, is that when you’re in a virtual environment, it’s very weird to say, “Oh, my manager’s going to join the zoom call. And he’ll just be here looking at us.” Or worse, “His box will be black with just his phone number, and he’s listening to what we’re saying, but he’s not participating. It just creates a weird dynamic. So what we’ve seen is that using a tool like Allego, being able to do what I mentioned to you earlier, to help reps prepare before the call and then using technology, like call coaching, which is another feature built into Allego where a call from Zoom, for example, can be recorded and then quickly annotated [and] transcribed, makes it very easy for the manager to listen and say, “Hey, Taryn. This piece that you did right here, this was magic. I want you to keep doing that. This other part, however, this is something we need to delete from your next conversation because this piece of information is no longer accurate.” The capacity to do that and have the feedback loop and develop the culture and the emotional muscle too [is key]. We all need coaching no matter who we are. [From the] CEO down the list [of the organizational hierarchy], everybody needs somebody with fresh eyes to look at what they’re doing to either help course-correct them or help them recognize [when] they have something inside of them that’s better than what they’re doing right now. So, I’m a huge believer [in coaching]. I have seen the adaptation that our clients have made, and I’m absolutely convinced that virtual sales coaching is the way of the future even as we start to go back to some level of in-person sales.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
So in such a difficult economy, like the one we’re working in now, our return on investment is more important than ever for professionals to prove, especially in an area like training where it’s one of the first places where budgets are cut sometimes. What return on investment do you see organizations seeing in their virtual sales training [programs]? How are they measuring that, and what success are they seeing?
Mark Magnacca:
Yeah, sure. I’m glad you asked because this is really the crux of the whole thing because in the final analysis, you’ve got to be able to measure a return on investment. The interesting thing is that’s actually the easiest part. Let’s just think about this for a minute. Let’s go back in time just one year [ago]. Almost everybody who’s listening to this either had some kind of live training event, some kind of live trade show, [or] some kind of live sales training [in their course [portfolio]. They did something where, by definition, they were having people come in on an airplane, stay at a hotel, [engage in] travel, entertainment, eating, the whole nine yards. So, we have a customer, for example, [with] about one hundred people salespeople all over the country, and they’re headquartered in Boston. They were spending $240,000 to fly one hundred people to Boston who were there for three days. And they were specifically there to learn how to deliver the new corporate message and be certified that they could deliver this. So, it was sort of like, “I want my eyes on how you’re going to deliver this message.” Well, what’s happened is in this environment, they recognize we’ve got two choices. We either don’t do the event or we’ve got to use virtual training, and what I can tell you is that this company has said in no to certain terms, [but] by moving this to a virtual training, right off the bat, they are not spending the $240,000 first and foremost. Now we’re talking [of] this exponential return on investment because they were already getting a return on investment related to best practice sharing, and now you layer in this whole certification process, and one of the best messages I got was from the national sales manager, who said, “I have to tell you that the team took this exercise more seriously. The sales management team was more involved with the kind of back and forth interactions that I was just demonstrating earlier with you in this virtual one than they even did in the live one” because, bluntly, a big part of the live [training] was also the social element and going out with everybody afterwards. Again, I hope that some of that will certainly be able to return, but when you cut right to the chase, the bottom line here is that they were able to do everything in terms of the certification and the coaching in this virtual environment at a fraction of the cost. So, I think the real question people need to ask, and just as a point of distinction, Taryn, what I would tell you is that on the one hand, it’s easy for us to think [in today’s economy] that everybody’s having a tough time. The simple fact that is a little bit hard to hear is what’s actually happening in the economy. If you look at the stock market, if you look at Apple, if you look at Zoom, if you look at Google, if you look at Microsoft, there’s a subset of companies who are doing enormously well in this environment, and then there’s a whole bunch of companies, like in the restaurant business and the airline business, that are really, really struggling. And then there’s a whole bunch of in the middle who are kind of trying to figure this whole thing out. So what I would tell you is the question that people need to be asking themselves is not necessarily just, “How do I prove ROI?” because I think that’s going to be very easy to do in many cases, when you compare it to what you were doing before. The real question is what is the cost of doing nothing as it relates to the onboarding experience, as it relates to the certification experience? What’s the cost of force-feeding people using some old tool or some technology that’s not designed to have people sit on it for six or eight hours a day, such that they’ve checked out. They’re not learning what’s happening anyway, and now you have people who are not only de-motivated, in many cases, they don’t even have accurate information that they’re out spreading to your prospects and clients. What’s the cost of that?
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
That’s great. So what advice would you give someone who understands all of that themselves, but they’re having a hard time selling that to the purse string holders about [the idea that] we need these new technologies in order to deliver the training remotely for the first time. What advice do you have for making that sell?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, I would tell you, I mean, I’ll tell you what my playbook is. I would look around your industry because in every industry right now, we have a primary focus in the financial services arena, in the medical device space and in the high-tech space, and the simple fact is this. I had a conversation with a particular company, and this was me directly having the conversation, and they basically said to me–this is pre COVID, “Hey, we have a culture. Our culture is totally focused on the in-person experience. We’ve been doing it this way for 20 years. The thing runs like clockwork. We get what you’re talking about. It’s just not part of our culture.” And, quite frankly, that’s one of those objections that I kind of dropped the bone and said, alright, you know what? I’m not trying to change your culture. If there’s not a problem here that you have, I don’t have a lot to add, and in my business, I said, let’s part friends. We’ll be happy to check in with you in a year and see if anything’s changed, or there may be some element of what you’re doing that could benefit from this whole virtual realm. It was literally March 15. So, we were only into this thing [the coronavirus pandemic] about a week, and I got a call from this guy who said, “Mark, remember all that stuff that I told you about in-person [training] only?” I said, “Yep.” And he said, “We now realize everything’s about to change.” And this was very early in the pandemic, but it was self-evident to them. And I said, “You know what? We’re welcoming you here with open arms. We’ll share everything we’ve learned. We’ll share how to get your program up-to-speed fast.” And what he told me was once we got to talking, his CEO called him directly, and his CEO had been on a call with several other CEOs, and he realized that they were so far behind. They were behind in getting technology to their people. They were behind from a network perspective in terms of being able to have capacity. They were behind in people being able to work from home. They were just behind in everything. So what I would say, Taryn, in that is you better think very carefully if you’re in the training group, and what you’re trying to do is just justify a spend right now, you might want to expand your vision to recognize there is a cost to doing nothing, and there are many, many great companies who literally have gone bankrupt because they did not adapt. So this process, in my opinion, is about getting to the right person in your organization and being able to validate [your request], which you can now do, and say, “Let me show you what some of our peers are doing across.” At least in the industries I’m in, unequivocally the most innovative ones are doing the things that I just mentioned, and then to be able to ask the question, well, what’s the impact for us if we don’t do this? So, I think the flexibility, Taryn, of being able to ask the question about ROI, but also think in terms of what’s the cost and the pain if we do nothing?
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, definitely. And Mark, as we’re moving into fall and the end of 2020, how do you see virtual sales training and coaching changing now and also in the future of work?
Mark Magnacca:
Well, I think one thing this pandemic has taught us is it’s really hard to make kind of long-term predictions, but I will tell you that what I’m hearing and we have a group of our customers that we interact with. We interact with all of them on, basically, a quarterly basis and then sort of a subset of different executives that I’m interacting with a much more frequently, and what I can tell you is, across the industries I just described, it’s pretty clear that little to no meetings will happen for the remainder of 2020 in terms of in-person meetings. It’s just not going to happen, and for a number of our technology companies, they’ve already declared that they’re not doing anything until summer of 2021. So, it’s basically a work from home environment. That’s number one. Number two, we’ve got some financial services companies that, depending upon their parts of the country, they’re realizing that they’re selectively going back to some level of in person [work], but that can all change. So I think the only quasi-prediction I would offer is that between now and, say, a year from now, [at] the end of 2021, I think we’ll go from completely virtual [work] to some level of in person [work] that will start to happen, … but I would be very surprised if that number gets anywhere close to 50-50 in terms of in-person and virtual [work and training].I think the other silver lining, Taryn, in this whole thing that it’s so hard for people to fully appreciate [is the value of virtual training], because only a year ago, I was on a call with a prospect in New York. So my sales team was on the call and they asked me to join the call because I was connected to the president of this company, and so we got on the call, and the president’s number two person joined the call, and literally like one minute into the call, he says, “I just got a text from him. He’s really sorry. He’s got to postpone the meeting. Can we do this again next week?” We chatted for about 10 minutes, learned a little bit more and said, “Yeah, no problem. We’re going to go ahead and not reschedule it.” And I thought this truly was no problem. It was no problem. I’m in my basement. I jumped on a Zoom call. We did our thing, right? The guy can’t be there; we’re going to reschedule it, but I have news for you. If I had flown to New York City, gotten a hotel the night before, taken a cab to be there, all of the stuff, time, energy, effort [and] money that you have to put in to show up at that meeting, and then have the person cancel at the last minute, that’s a huge drag. So what I would suggest is that the other thing that’s going to shift, regardless of [a] vaccine, and it’s going to take a long time to unwind some of the psychological damage that’s happened from this pandemic, no matter what. Even if there was a vaccine tomorrow, there’s a lot of people who are going to be uncomfortable because of their medical condition and other things to just sort of be jumping on airplanes the way they did in the past. So it’s against that backdrop, I will tell you that the biggest change that I see happening is people are going to ask themselves the question, “So I really need to do this in person?” And the answer in some specific cases is going to be “yes,” and if the risk-reward ratio works on both sides, [and] the company wants you to come in person [and] you want to go in person, if there’s a reason to do that, you’ll do it. But, the simple reality is [that] for a discovery [sales] call, for a first call, at least at our company, we are not sending people [on site] for in-person calls, a.) because we don’t think it’s in their best interest, and b.) most of the prospects don’t want them to do that anyway. So I think the takeaway message is this is a medium that you need to master. You need to make it the coin of the realm, as I call it, that this is something you’re fluent in using, and that you’re going to major in virtual selling. And you’re going to minor in in-person selling versus the reciprocal of that, which is what most people have done up until 2020.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Thanks. It is hard as you said to make predictions right now, but it certainly seems to be the way we’re moving. So, Mark, thanks for joining us today on the Business of Learning. Before we wrap up, are there any other key takeaways or tidbits that you’d like to leave us with?
Mark Magnacca:
Yeah. I had the good fortune of interviewing one of our customers who is the chief commercial officer at a company called Medtronic, which is one of the largest medical device companies in the world, and I asked him this question that I’d like to pass on to you. I asked him, “What do you think is the single most important skill that salespeople need to master in this post-pandemic world?” And I love the way he said it. He said, “Learning agility, the ability to have this agile mindset to adapt quickly.” That turns out to be, honestly, more important than IQ. It’s more important than what your GPA was because there was a lot of people who are very smart, but when it comes to being under pressure and having to adapt, having to recognize that you joined the Zoom meeting and the audio is not working, or you can’t present your slides, that capacity to adapt and have an agile mindset that truly is going to b [crucial]. I’m very confident of this prediction, that in the hiring realm of salespeople, more and more companies are going to be testing for agility, having people give examples of where they have been able to adapt in this kind of environment because that’s the skill that ultimately provides the company with a level of resilience, no matter what comes down the pike, and I think to the extent you focus on realizing it’s more important for you to be agile than for you to be perfect, your life is going to be much better in this environment.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
We’re certainly getting a crash course in that right now. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to channel what we’ve learned in this situation moving forward.
Mark Magnacca:
I think you’re right, Taryn. I think what most people haven’t done, they really haven’t given themselves any credit for what, in my words, has been the biggest vertical leap, literally in the history of corporate learning. At no time, if you go back even a hundred years to the start of the industrial revolution in the United States, and you look at all of the different things, even during war, Rosie the Riveter in the factory, learning how to put bolts on a B-17. At no time has what people needed to learn scaled as fast as it did from roughly March 8, 2020 to, say, June 8. In 90 days, the entire economy changed. Everybody who was used to doing something one way was appended, and they had two choices: Completely flame out or adapt, and the vast majority of people have done a remarkable job of adapting where they could. I think building on what we’ve all experienced and recognizing, [that] no one expected this thing. But here we are, and what have I learned about myself that I can use to help my clients and my prospects on a going forward basis? As you start to think about that, you begin to perceive your own value in a different way. So, like everything in life, it’s not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah. I love that. I think 2020, like you mentioned, has definitely been a whirlwind, and the training industry, like all industries right now, has had to adapt to remain competitive. Alright, well Mark, thank you again for chatting with us today.
Mark Magnacca:
It’s a pleasure, Sarah, and I will just end with this for you, that you’re exactly right, but what the training industry in general, in my opinion, having been involved with it for a long time, it hasn’t fully recognized, and I think the two of you and the work you’re doing could be a part of this, is to help people recognize that now more than ever, [you have to be agile]. I mean, almost every CEO that I’m interacting with is saying that the capacity for their organization to have this learning agility, the capacity to have a learning organization is now more important than ever, and that’s why, Taryn, when I said to you, this idea of walking on eggshells and kind of tiptoeing around, “Well, I don’t really want to ask for the money.” Now’s the time. Ask for the money. Have a plan. Be bold and be forward-leaning. This is not a time to be faint of heart. You have to be willing to say, “I’m ready to move forward, and we’re going to do this adapting.”
Sarah Gallo:
That’s some great advice, Mark. Alright, well, thanks again, Mark, for coming on the podcast today. For all of our listeners, you can find more resources on sales, training and coaching in the show notes for this episode at TrainingIndustry.com/TrainingIndustryPodcast.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
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Speaker:
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