One of the first things long-tenured, successful reps will tell me is how well they know the industry they work in. They’re proud of their professional tenure, and they should be.

By itself, tenure doesn’t teach much. Some folks have twenty years of experience, while others have lived the same year twenty times. Those things are not the same.

Most industries have a particular way of doing business, and a dialect of their own that can feel foreign to outsiders. Someone who’s been at it for years knows the inside jokes and the references that a rookie wouldn’t, and sometimes that’s the difference between being invited into the rooms you need to be in, and feeling like you’re stuck on the outside.

That’s what people mean when they refer to their experience. They’re members of a club with a secret handshake. But that doesn’t mean you can’t induct new members, and sometimes you need to.

So how do we break down what it means to know the industry? How much of it is true black-and-white mechanics, and how much of it requires you to have “been there, done that” in order to succeed?

There are some things about an industry you just need to know.

The formative part of my sales career was in medical devices. I sold to surgeons, and quickly realized there was a lot more to the sales process than the end user. I also had to talk to the hospital or surgery center about getting the product on the shelf, which usually led me in two more directions: the person who actually did the ordering, and the department responsible for paying the bill. Politics, leverage, contract cycles… I wasn’t exactly selling pens.

Knowing that all of those dynamics exist is pretty important (surgeons like spending money more than paying bills), and you approach the sale differently as a result. It’s industry knowledge that matters, but in fairness, I also just taught you most of what you need to know. The hard part is actually getting in front of all those people, and I’ve written about that elsewhere.

What’s harder to learn are the inside jokes and jargon, the stuff you only pick up when you’re steeped in the culture. That’s what most people mean by industry knowledge, but the jokes are the easy half of it. A rep’s real value comes from what they notice.

I have a client that sells restaurant equipment, and their sales force includes a lot of former kitchen managers and chefs. Those folks can trade some war stories, and that builds immediate rapport. Their strength as sellers is in their ability to walk through a kitchen and see yellow flags before they become red ones. When your sales rep can help you avoid a health code violation, they become a real asset and a resource beyond next-day delivery.

It’s one thing to know to walk through the kitchen. It’s another thing to know what to look for, and why it matters.

Most veteran reps believe that the war stories are their biggest asset, but that’s not really the case. That might get them invited into the kitchen the first time (which is important!), but the war stories only prove you’ve been there. The walk proves you’re paying attention, and that’s the thing the chef’s actually buying.

The main reason we can’t fast-track a new rep is that nobody’s given them a checklist of what to look for.

I can see you shaking your head right now. That checklist would basically be the health code manual, right? Nobody wants to read that, but hear me out…

A veteran might have 20 or more thoughts in their head as they walk. For a rookie, you could boil that down to the 5-10 “usual suspects” to look for, and a brief on how and why those things happen. You’re building a mechanical understanding of how a kitchen works along with some real-world empathy.

Now a new rep can walk that kitchen with some cursory knowledge… at least enough to show their customer that they’re thinking about the right things for the right reasons. They’re on a fast track to expertise that would take months or even years to figure out on their own, and they’re dangerous enough in the field to get into rooms they wouldn’t get into without it.

It’s simple, and it’s way less common in onboarding programs than you might think.

Think of the best veteran on your team. What do they see in thirty seconds that nobody else on the team sees, and where is that written down?

Alex Murphy. I got to know him the way most of you did, watching him grow up in front of us in a founding AE role at 30 Minutes to President’s Club.

What reeled me in was how comfortably he broke complicated things into simple steps. He’s a former teacher, so maybe that’s no surprise. But the real kicker was how easily he gave it all away. No pretense, no withholding. “Here’s how I did it, here’s how you can try it.”

Building authority is hard for a lot of people. I spent years trying to sound smarter than I was. Alex just shows people how he does it and tells them to go run it themselves. He’s moving on to a bigger position in a new company now, but he’s always going to be OG 30MPC to me, and I’m grateful to have him in my network.

Thanks for being with me this week. I’ve been writing a lot lately for a big project, and I’m excited to share more with you in the coming issues.

Cheers,
JB