You are about to go hire a stranger instead. NEXT is the training the next ups don't get: the rep who will run the team, the manager who will run the region, the founder's first seller. Most training excites people and changes nothing on Monday. So we work your real calls instead of a slide deck.
The next ups
You promoted her and handed her a process document. That was the whole plan.
Every team has them. The rep who will run the team. The manager who will run the region. The founder's first seller. The clinician who now owns the practice. They get a title, a quota, and a process document. What they don't get is anyone teaching them the conversations the new job is actually made of. So the company waits, decides the promotion didn't take, and hires a manager out of another company who shows up with three to five years of somebody else's experience and no idea how your business works. You pay the recruiter and you pay for the ramp. The person who could have done the job was already in the building. That is why this is called NEXT Up Leader.
Why the training didn't take
You already paid to fix this once. Go listen to a call from last week.
Your training didn't do three things. It never named the specific skill. It taught a process, and a process names the steps; it doesn't give anyone a mental model for the conversation inside each step. It never tracked the competency. Nobody can tell you which of your people can open a price conversation and which one folds. It never reached the day to day. The workshop was Thursday, the deal was Tuesday, and the feedback arrived a week after the sentence that lost it. Skills are caught, not taught. So we run a dojo instead: your real calls and real deals are the curriculum, drilled live. Reset. Reposition. Try it again. Do it this way. The correction lands mid-sentence and the person redoes it right there, so the skill is caught the same way it gets used.
A manager delivers about 36 minutes of coaching per rep per week. The dose that moved performance in the Challenger research was three to five hours a month.
Sales Management Association, Research Brief: Supporting Sales Coaching, 2015; Corporate Executive Board research, via Challenger Inc.
How I work with a team
We start with calls your people already made.
I listen to their real calls and grade them, and every person gets a starting level on named skills. Then they drill in pods of three to five, on their own live deals, every week. Once a month I sit with the manager and we read the scoreboard together. The first cycle runs a season, and by the end your managers are running the drill themselves, in the same language. I'm not trying to become a line item you renew forever. Transference, not dependency. People stop performing the process and start running the conversation in their own voice, and the models stay after I'm gone.
The rooms
Come with a real one, dated, with a name on it.
I don't lecture at these. Everyone brings a live conversation they have to have this month and we rebuild it in front of the room, on the board, with the actual words. Half the room learns more watching someone else's get rebuilt than working their own. Most of the teams I work with met me in one of these rooms first.
The Minute It Turned
One sentence off one real call, every week.
I take the sentence, name the move, and hand you the words that were sitting right there instead. No guest, no interview, no intro worth skipping. Seven minutes. If you want to hear what a correction sounds like before you buy anything, start here.
Who is talking
I've coached debate for twenty years, three of them with the prison team at the Huntsville Unit, and spent twenty more on both sides of the table negotiating and closing multimillion-dollar deals.
He sells
He coaches