An outsourced sales team has a structural problem that an in-house team does not. Our reps have to sell a product they did not build, to a buyer they did not choose, for a company whose office they have never visited, and they have to sound like they have worked there for a year.

The product hour is how we solved it. One hour, once a week, per account, and it is one of four weekly rhythms: the product hour for the account, the development hour for the craft, a one to one for the individual, and a bonding hour for the fact that these people work in four countries and have never met.

The three parts

It runs in the same order every time, and the order matters.

A quiz on the product. We built these in Kahoot because a leaderboard makes a room of salespeople competitive in about forty seconds. The questions are the boring ones: what does it integrate with, what does it cost to run, which version does the customer need, how long does implementation take. A rep who cannot answer those on a call has lost the meeting and does not know it yet.

A short presentation. Ten minutes, given by one of the reps rather than by a manager, on one part of the product. The person presenting learns more than the people listening, which is the point, and it rotates.

An objection workshop. This is the half that matters.

Where the objections come from

Not from the client's battlecard. From our own call recordings, that month.

Every rep on the account brings the objections he actually heard, in the words the prospect used. We collect them, put them in front of the room, and argue about the answer until there is a best one on record rather than a private one in each rep's head. Then we write it down.

The difference between that and a vendor-supplied objection list is the difference between a rehearsal and a fire drill. A vendor's list contains the objections the vendor finds interesting. Ours contains the three that keep killing meetings in Riyadh this month, one of which is usually about something the vendor considers solved.

For a learning-platform client we ran this every week for eight months. The objection that dominated was never about features. It was some version of "we already bought one of these three years ago", and the answer we settled on was not a rebuttal at all. It was a question about when the contract renews.

What it costs

An hour a week per account, plus preparation. On a five-account team that is a meaningful slice of a manager's month, and it is the first thing that gets cancelled when a quarter goes badly.

Cancelling it is a mistake we made twice. Both times the pattern was the same: the team hits a hard month, the product hour is dropped to free up dialling time, and six weeks later the meetings that do happen convert worse, because the reps are improvising answers to objections that were solved in a room in March.

What it became

Two things grew out of it.

The objection library stopped being a document and became an asset. When a new rep joins an account now, he does not read a battlecard. He reads what forty prospects actually said, and what we found works.

And the format turned out to be the thing we needed when practice moved to machines. A role play with a colleague is limited by the colleague's patience; there are only so many times a teammate will pretend to be an irritated procurement manager. A rehearsal that can run twenty times, at eleven at night, using this month's real objections, is the same idea with the ceiling removed. The material did not change. The library we built one Tuesday at a time is exactly what the practice runs on.

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