John Barrows' Advice After Training 100k+ Sales Reps

Are great salespeople born, or created?

Is it natural talent? Perseverance? Hard work? 

It’s hard to disentangle nature from nurture, but if anyone would know, it’s John Barrows.

With 25+ years of sales under his belt and over 100,000 reps trained, John is the ultimate sales evangelist. He’s worked with some of the world’s most explosive companies to teach them what it takes to sell a product in the age of self-guided buyers who have less time and higher expectations.

I’m Karli Stone and in this issue of Meet the World’s Best Sellers I’m bringing you the distilled wisdom of the founder and CEO of Sell Better by JB — one of the most admired names in the game.

Practice What You Preach

“I don’t like trainers,” said John Barrows, straight-faced.

I blinked. 

John Barrows, world-class sales trainer and founder of a mega sales training company, doesn’t like…trainers?

He went on, “Most sales trainers are either failed salespeople or professional presenters. I never wanted to be that guy.”

You see, John was (and has always been) a battle-tested, boots-on-the-ground salesman. 

He cut his teeth selling tools out of the back of a Dodge pickup truck for Black and Decker. At Xerox, he sold copiers to the government in a less-than-ideal territory, where closing deals took an enormous amount of building trust. Even as the VP of Sales at ThriveNetworks, a start-up IT services company, John never quit the daily sales grind. 

SPIN sales, Miller Heiman, Saylor Academy, targeted account sales (TAS) — any sales tactic he asked his reps to do, he did it, too. Under his hands-on leadership, Thrive reached $12M in revenue and became the #1 fastest-growing business in Massachusetts for two consecutive years.

So, when he started Sell Better by JB, he set out to be more than your run-of-the-mill sales trainer — he was going to lead by example from Day 1.

People Love to Buy, But Hate Being Sold To

After 10 years of coaching, 2 million miles traveled, and 100k reps trained, John understands the state of sales as well as anyone.

From the surge of AI to the increase in self-guided buying cycles, he’s watched the world catch on to traditional sales tactics — and he doesn’t think sales organizations are prepared.

As the old saying goes, people love to buy, but hate being sold to — and hate having to dig for answers and wait for solutions even more. Studies tell us that 43% of today’s buyers want a rep-free experience. 

Yet, what we see in modern buying cycles, is a massive shuffling of prospects throughout the buyer journey — from SDR to AE to Sales Engineer to CSM and back again. According to John, the  “Predictable Revenue model” of highly segmented sales roles is no longer aligned with what people want from a buying experience.

“No customer wants to be handed off 5x before they actually talk to someone who knows what they are talking about, someone who gives them value.”

Don’t be fooled, the solution isn’t a completely rep-free experience. John shared that buyers who purchase rep-free see a 23% higher purchase regret rate.

Which tells us that sales reps still have a critical role to play — we just need to redefine what it looks like.

So, what’s John Barrows’ definition of a progressive and responsive sales organization?

John describes a team of full-cycle sales reps, empowered with the technology and skills to be the single point of contact for customers through all stages of the sales cycle.

The ultimate customer-centric approach.

How to Create the Full-Cycle Sales Rep

The sales rep of the future is, in many ways, a return to the past.

Back to the tradition of all-encompassing sales expertise, where every salesperson builds personal relationships with buyers to manage the entire sales cycle from end to end.

John trains reps to do this in a few ways.

It all starts with getting the rep completely bought into the product and mission on Day 1.

One of John’s onboarding strategies is to give reps a blank org chart, have them meet with internal employees for interviews, learn what they know, and come back with a report.

“I want them to find the connective tissue of the product and of the company.”

When it comes to movement within the org, John suggests promoting SDRs not to AE, but to account managers or customer success managers, deepening their skills across the entire buying cycle.

“It will help gather use cases and hear first-hand customer stories, while also helping them learn how to close in a safe environment. ”

(Note: Avid World’s Best Sellers readers might remember Kit Chandra transitioning to a CSM role after failing as an AE then coming back to sales better than ever.)

Sales development should center on teaching reps how to be genuinely curious, creatively solve problems, improve business acumen, and heighten emotional intelligence.

And for the rest, empower your reps to do it with world-class tools.

Automated lead generation and list building, sales sequencing and email outreach, CRM enrichment and gap analysis — the right tech stack offloads these tasks and allows full-cycle reps to be everywhere all at once.

“Allow tech to do all the heavy lifting,” John says, “Let the sales rep be ‘the last mile’ to humanize the interaction with the client.”

Don’t Tell People What to Do — Show Them

John’s never stopped learning.

He’s spent the last 25 years in sales with his ear to the ground. Listening for upcoming trends. Identifying modern buying behaviors. Experimenting with new solutions.

It’s how you successfully train, lead, and inspire a team of winning sellers.

“The #1 competitive differentiator that anybody can have in today’s market is to be agile,” says John, “If you’re stuck in the ways of what you used to do to be successful – you’re already dead.”

In the early years of Sell Better, he trained using the “Why You, Why Now?” email framework (an email personalization strategy that scored John personal email responses from the CEOs of Salesforce and HP).

“At the time, it was worth spending 15 or 20 minutes writing these emails because you were getting a 30-40% response rate.”

But, after a few years, open rates started to drop, responses became less frequent, and more emails were getting marked as SPAM. Buyers were catching on.

Like any sales leader worth their salt, John pivoted.

But how do you know which direction to go?

John says it starts with your customers.

“If I were a sales leader right now, I would talk to as many customers as I could  to try and understand the real value of our product or service — what they liked about the sales process, what they didn’t, where we win, what language they use.”

With real-world insights from your customers, you can create messaging and then  dive into experimentation. A/B test subject lines and email intros, try out different call scripts and opening lines.

“Sales is far more a science than an art, so treat everything as an experiment. There’s no longer a set strategy. What worked 6 months ago is just not working anymore. You have to be agile”

Some of your sales efforts may fail, some may work, but John has a single mantra when it comes to testing: There is no failure. It’s only a failure if you don’t learn.

And, ultimately, the best way for sales leaders to continue to learn is by staying in the game.

“How do you keep yourself from becoming the out-of-touch trainer that you never wanted to be?”, I asked John.

His response was simple: “I sell.”

After nearly three decades, John still carries his own quota. 

He makes his own sales calls, writes his own emails, and closes his own deals. Because, in John’s eyes, if you’re not selling, you really can’t tell people how to sell.

“You shouldn’t tell people what to do — you should tell people what you did and why it worked (or why it didn’t).”

So, sales leaders, pick up the phone! Test a new sales sequence, manage deals hands-on, and share your results with the team. 

Just never stop selling.