In the summer of 2023 we ran a weekly session called the preaching hour. Somebody senior took the floor and taught the team something: the art of giving and receiving feedback, the checklist manifesto, whatever the presenter had been reading.

In August we cancelled it and introduced the thinking hour, described to the team as dedicated time for brainstorming and sharing experience. A year later it had become the development hour, which is what it is still called today.

Both renames were corrections, and both were right.

What each name was hiding

Preaching was honest about the format and wrong about the direction. One person talks, everyone else receives. It works when the person talking knows something the room does not, and it stops working the moment the room has experience of its own, because the best material in a sales team is sitting in the heads of people who are being asked to listen quietly.

Thinking fixed the direction and lost the edge. Brainstorming is pleasant. It also has no output unless somebody owns one, and a session with no deliverable slowly becomes the meeting people skip when they are busy.

Development is the version that survived, because it has both: somebody prepares properly, and the topic is tied to a skill the team is being measured on. In recent months that has meant tactical empathy in sales, presented by one of our own managers, and value-added sales prospecting, presented with slides that took a week to build. Materials go into a shared space afterwards so a new joiner in March can read what the team learned in October.

The rest of the week

The development hour is one of four rhythms, and they do different jobs.

The product hour is per account. A quiz on the product, a short presentation by one of the reps, and an objection workshop built from the objections the team actually heard that month.

The development hour is for the whole company and is about the craft rather than any client's product. It is the one that makes a rep better everywhere rather than better on one account.

The weekly one to one is where coaching actually happens. Not a status update. A single skill, named in advance, worked on with a recording: account research this week, cold call openings the next.

The bonding hour is the one that looks like a luxury and is not. It is where farewells happen, where the end-of-year awards get decided, and where a team spread across several countries becomes a team rather than a group chat.

The scoreboard

Alongside all of this we keep the Hall of Hustle, which is a board of records and the people who set them. New categories get added when somebody does something nobody has done before. One of our reps booked a meeting on his first ever call, which did not previously have a category, and now does.

It is deliberately unserious and it works for a serious reason. Outbound is a job with a poor ratio of reward to rejection, and a scoreboard that celebrates specific, verifiable, small achievements gives a team something to win in a week where nothing closes.

What we would tell someone building this

Do not start with four rituals. Start with one, give it a deliverable, and let the name change when the format outgrows it.

The mistake we made for a while was treating these hours as culture: nice to have, first thing cancelled in a hard month. They are not culture. They are the mechanism by which a team of ten people learns from one rep's bad Tuesday instead of each person discovering the same lesson separately over six months.

Cancel them and the learning does not stop. It just stops being shared.

book_a_call