Unlocking Sales Excellence: Lessons from Top Gun Academy

Blue team vs Red team: Top gun and the Vietnam war

In 1968, during the Vietnam war US fighter jets were starting to struggle against the Vietnamese air pilots. After a period of winning two thirds of their dogfights, the balance shifted below 1 to 1 in favour of the North Vietnamese. The navy had to do something. Something that most sales leader can get inspiration from for their sales organisation - without the F-18 needless to say -.

The 3 Mars 1969, the decision was made to set up the US Navy Fighter Weapons, what would be known as Top Gun School. The program that the Navy designed had many key elements :

• Firstly a rigorous selection to pick their trainers, the top 1% of the entire Navy. They knew that training their fighters had to be made by the best pilots, called the Red Force. These were given planes similar to the MiGs to replicate real dogfight conditions as closely as possible - yet replacing canons with cameras -.

• Then, the "second best" fighters were recruited to be students, referred to as Blue Force. The selection was rigorous to say the least. The US Navy understood the critical importance to put in place a strong selection process ahead of training.

• During the program, the Red Force stayed in the academy while students' classes changed regularly. This led naturally to, overtime, the Red Force dominating the dogfights against the Blue Force. Though what mattered was what happened after. Students were grilled during “after-action reports” about their performance, what worked, what didn’t, why it happened, what they could have done differently. Trainers were offering suggestions of what to do differently and how to react and think differently. And these were followed by more fights to put the learning into practice.

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This approach led to the fighters of the Blue force gradually internalising the learnings and starting to ask themselves the right questions. And then, once turned into the best pilots that the Navy had had - outside Top Gun Red Force -, they headed back to their units as squadron training officers to pass on their expertise.

The Top Gun results? Efficiency and efficacy.

Following the development of the Top Gun academy, the US Navy saw drastic improvement. Whilst initially the US were loosing one plane for each enemy plane they shot down, they were far more effective and went on shooting down 12.5 North Vietnamese fighter plane for every US pilot lost in combat. In terms of efficiency, by the end of the war, US pilots shot down 1.04 opponent per encounter when the average during the war was once every five encounter.

Of course, war is a sad state of affairs. But when it comes to the development of sales expertise, what are the learnings that sales leaders could extract from mirroring the Top Gun approach to help their teams improve not only their effectiveness but also their efficiency?

What sales leaders can learn from Top Gun approach?

• First, the importance of selection. For both the trainers - Red Force - and the trainees - Blue Force -, the selection process was rigorous. Flying a jet is tough. So is selling. I would argue it’s actually the toughest role in an organisation. There are dynamics faced by sales people that no other function faces. Rejection, lack of control, competition, hostility, etc.. Sadly, when it comes to the recruitment of sales people, too often organisations apply the same generic approach they have for the other roles. Not something that is dedicated to the selling profession. I simplify but it's CV based, filtering made by HR who rarely understand the complexity of selling, testing culture, human led approach that is fraught with bias (see examples here), etc… Sales pros "unique animals" and applying a generic approach leads to KPIs which the US Navy wouldn't accept - and that sales organisations shouldn't either -.

Recruit your sales team with rigour, as if the life of your organisation depends on it. Because... it does.

The solution: A robust process fronted by a predictive assessment that helps determine not technical skills but mindset. It's not because people can sell, especially in another organisation however similar to yours that they will sell in yours. You can download examples of various assessments by clicking on this link. Or, if you identified the recruitment strategy for your sales team as not just a simple sourcing need but more of a strategic part of its success - and consequently yours - or if you have noticed too much turn-over in your teams or poor recruitment experiences that has cost you too much (time and money), let me know, this is something we can talk through.

• Secondly, the importance of developing skills. Again, selling is hard and unique. There is a wide range of situations which prospects throw at sales people. Two sales conversations are never the same in the same way as two dogfights aren't. Sales people need to overcome various hurdles to develop a trusted advisor relationship with their prospects that goes beyond simply articulating features and benefits. Yet, sticking to the Top Gun analogy, they often get shot down “mid air” with prospects throwing a range of "objection", they have to deal with evasive put down such as “send me the presentation” then nothing and a range of similar frustrating situations… To address these issues, most of the time, sales organisations focus on passing knowledge to their sales people with a range of one-off training or seminars and hoping the sales person will apply the newly acquired knowledge.

There is a tendency in the business world to focus on acquiring knowledge at the expense of acquiring skills.

The solution: An approach that helps build skills rather than just acquire knowledge. Sales organisations need to put in place what sport people, military or any dedicated organisation that really care about success does: deliberate practicing.

Deliberate practice is not regular practice. Deliberate practice is an approach that is purposeful and systematic. It requires commitment and attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving a specific performance. And ultimately helps sales people build a muscle known as “adaptive thinking” that helps them to adapt to various situations, all unique, and manage them appropriately.

The most effective methods for deliberate practice, supported by scientific research (ask me) are the likes of role play, hands on training, 1-2-1 debrief with expert, coaching from the sales management, group discussion. The less effective approach are the likes of seminars, lectures, one off trainings and similar. A very interesting book digging deep in the topic is "Peak: How all of us can achieve extraordinary things".

Recommended reading on the topic of deliberate practice.

So what could you be doing to help your sales organisation and sales team best succeed?

1- First understand the strength and weaknesses of your sales people. This is quite simple and can be done with a straightforward assessment to help you understand their willingness to sell and the possible headtrash they have (here a white paper about sales people self limiting beliefs).

2- Build a robust sales playbook and sales process. A sales process has to be specific, a series of 4 / 5 steps with underlying milestones that your sales people need to stick to. Too often, these processes are not detailed enough. The data varies but a real sales process improves sales efficiency by a minimum of 15% (here is a question to help you decide if implementing a solid sales process is an exercise worth doing: in your world, what would 15% mean in actual revenue).

3- Implement a dedicated sales training aligned to your organisation strengths and weaknesses. I recommend to evaluate these before any training to understand where these weaknesses are (see below an example of the evaluation of the sales capability of a sales team).

Yet, the issue with most sales training is they put the sales team under a firehose of new knowledge. People learn slowly. So training helps the team to be exposed to an appropriate way of selling, the “big picture”, but training alone won’t suffice.

4- Implement sessions with a range of reinforcement, role play, one to one, coaching practice on specific skills which they struggle with. Adapt the one to one to the weaknesses individuals need to improve upon. There will be some weaknesses which the team as a whole need to build some muscle for, some for which individuals need to work in more details. This approach helps to make sure that sales people don't practive in front of a prospect, the same way the US Navy didn't ask pilot to practice in front of North Vietnamese Mig-17 …

An error too often made: practising newly acquired skills in front of a client rather than in a safe space.

5- Supplement feedback and coaching sessions with dedicated time that the sales person commits to do. And organise a follow-up.

The take away ?

There is no skills that are critical in our life which is learned in a jiffy. This truism applies to the world of sales. And the best approach in developing a sales team should be similar to the one that "Top Gun" implemented, centrer on deliberate practicing.

Practice doesn’t make a skill perfect but permanent. Deliberate practice with built in feedback and personalisation truly helps to get better.

Deliberate practice is focused, personalised and with built-in feedback. If you wonder whether your sales team could benefit from rolling a similar approach, get in touch.