In this episode of Connect & Convert, hosts Dave Salter and Dennis Collins discuss the lessons small businesses can learn from Top Gun training for salespeople. Collins explains how Top Gun pilots use "deliberate practice" to rapidly improve specific flight maneuvers. This involves breaking skills into chunks, intensive repetition on weaknesses, constant feedback, and pushing past comfort zones.

The hosts outline how business owners can implement a "Top Gun training" approach with their sales teams. This includes identifying skill gaps, focused practice sessions, measurement of progress, and coaching. Examples are provided of how elite athletes use purposeful practice, such as Joe DiMaggio's baseball training rituals.

Collins emphasizes that skills require rigorous, intentional development - people are not just "natural" experts. The key is practice at the edge of your current competence. Listen now to learn how to empower your salespeople and boost performance through Top Gun-style training.

Hi, I'm Dave Salter and you've landed on Connect & Convert, the

podcast where we share insider secrets for small business sales success.

I'm joined today, as always by Dennis Collins, our resident

sales training expert.

Dennis, good to see you this morning.

How are you, Dave?

I'm doing really well.

Thank you for asking.

And are right.

You're

gonna stir it up today?

I'm gonna stir you up real right off the bat.

All right.

Crank me up here.

Come on, let's go.

I don't know if you're a basketball fan or at all, but

Yeah, slightly.

It wasn't too long ago, so I, I.

Confession.

I'm a, I've been, I don't watch the NBA much anymore, but back in

the day I was a big 70 Sixers fan.

Okay.

Yeah.

I was too.

So they had this youngster named Alan Iversson.

Wow.

And Alan Allen was infamous for not practicing very often.

There was a particular instance where he was in a press conference after a

game that they had lost, and a reporter asked him about his lack of practice and

it's a fa like you could Google it now.

He said, "practice?

We're talking about practice?"

and he.

O on this reporter about, his feeling that practice was not very significant to him.

Whereas as a coach, I would argue that practice is.

Pretty important not only for the individual, but also for the team.

And also, practicing with a purpose.

And so today we're gonna talk a little bit about practice and you've

also got some lessons you've learned from Top Gun that relate Yeah.

To practice, haven't you?

Did you see those movies, Top Gun movies?

Both of them.

What do you think of those movies?

Aren't they something?

I'll tell you what the original, when the original's

on regular tv, I always watch it.

Yeah.

Always.

Yeah.

It's I've seen both of them multiple times.

I don't know what it is, the fascination, maybe it's my secret

desire to be a navy naval fighter pilot.

I don't know.

But never made it to the Navy fighter pilot school.

But anyway.

Let's, how does this relate to business?

We're supposed to be talking about business, right?

Here's some news.

If I were to visit your business today, and I did an observation of how your

team is practicing, if they've prac, if they practice at all, how they are

practicing what they learned, I will bet you a lot of money that they're either

not practicing or practicing incorrectly.

Incorrect practice is almost as bad as no practice at all.

What is practice?

I don't know.

What were you told Dave?

I was told repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition.

Just do it over and over.

What does it make a difference?

How and how often and what you practice?

Probably does.

I, I coach basketball, so I'm always telling my girls,

basketball's a game of repetition.

It from a skill standpoint, but.

I just actually went through postseason meetings with my players

to give them specific practice instructions for the off season,

because every player has a different responsibility and or a different

skillset that they need to practice.

Then you're already pretty much ahead of the curve

of most small business owners.

Here's the deal.

If you're training, if you're doing training either personally

or professionally, and you're not seeing any improvement,

you are training the wrong way.

And I will ask our small business owner listeners, who, how many training

dollars are being wasted because the training is never installed.

You either forget it very quickly, as we've talked about in other podcasts,

or it just never gets installed.

It never gets internalized.

Billions of dollars, Dave.

60 billion wasted per year.

So Dennis, I want you to do a quick breakdown cuz you've done

you, you've explained this to me.

Those dollars get lost.

So there's a lack of a sale.

There's there, there's a couple different places where that money

get that training money gets lost.

It's too, it's a double barrelled problem.

Number one.

According to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, as you may have

heard in previous podcasts, you're gonna forget what you learned today

in 24 hours and 90% in one week.

Okay.

How much does that cost you in training?

I would suggest if you spend a hundred thousand dollars a year in training, that

$90,000 of that is probably wasted on unless, unless you do some interventions.

That's what we wanna talk about today.

So tell me a little bit more about this Top Gun style of training.

You and I, neither you and I are both beyond the age of being able

to be a naval aviator, but we can certainly apply this to sales training.

We can, The movie certainly dramatize

what goes on in Top Gun, but.

Yeah, the movie's cool and great to watch, but I'm not talking about the movie here.

I'm talking about what actually goes on in Top Gun training.

As it's a real thing.

It's not some fictional thing that the movie's made up, and here's

some of the myths and the problem training and thinking about training.

One of the things I was told, you just need to try harder, son.

To get better.

You just need to put more effort in.

Ever heard that?

Absolutely.

And here's another one.

If you do something long enough, you're just gonna get better.

Yeah.

I wish that were true.

We spend too much time, Dave rehearsing and practicing stuff that

we already know and not enough time on things we need to know, but don't.

I'll give you a personal example, tennis.

I love to play when I have various coaches over the years and guess what?

I preferred to hit the forehand cuz I hid it well.

Okay.

I wanted to hit my forehand.

My back hand sucked.

Okay?

But cause it was painful, I didn't do it well.

How many of us in sales training do the thing that's easy for us, the

forehand and skip the stuff that's hard.

All of us.

That's human nature, right?

Seems to me.

How about, here's another one.

Stay in your job long enough and you'll become an expert.

I met a lot of people who had 30 years of experience one year at a

time, if sales training, Dave, and I was a consumer of sales training for

many years it's focused on knowledge.

Okay, that's cool.

You gotta have the knowledge, but what is it that you're

trying to train salespeople for?

For skills.

Okay.

And then there's the old 10 hour myth.

I don't know who created that.

Somebody wrote that in a book somewhere.

If you do something for 10,000 hours, you're an expert.

I'll agree with part of that.

Becoming an expert requires time.

It require, requires time to do it, but I don't agree with the rest of it.

It's what you do with that time.

It's how you spend the time that makes the difference.

I'm talking about here, deliberate practice.

That's the kind of practice Top Gun uses.

They practice with a purpose.

It's all about doing work, but it's all about getting out there and flying

the plane, making mistakes, making mistakes, getting instant feedback.

Making corrections and perfecting a specific skill.

There's more to that story though, because in the movie and in

real life actually, Top Gun aviators are all already the best of the best, so

that's how they got chosen.

So the Top Gun School takes the best and makes them even better.

Makes them...

Well said, Dave.

It was it was founded as the United States Navy Fighter Weapon School.

That was the official title.

But it became, nicknamed the Top Gun.

Okay.

Here's why they did it.

The Naval Aviator aviators were losing too many dog.

Or in the mid sixties, right?

They were doing pretty well about a five to one kill ratio.

Five of theirs for every one of ours, which is not great, but not bad.

But in 1968, all of a sudden it went down two to one.

We were losing one of our planes for every two that we shot down.

A guy named Captain Frank Alt, a Navy captain was said, fix this captain.

That is how Top Gun got born.

What's the concept?

Train people who are already trained and you said it Dave, they're

already trained on the job, but they were not properly trained.

What happened was that the naval pilots were trained to use missiles

and technology, and in the Vietnam War those were ineffective.

Correct.

They forgot how to dog fight.

They forgot how to go head to head with a Russian mig and win that battle.

Right.

So Top Gun School was created to give

them very quickly that skill.

Yeah.

That was not and if I remember the movie correctly, it was only, it's

only like a five week training program.

It's not a yeah's very, it's very brief.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not a, it's not like going to college for four years.

It's a quick, a very specific set of skills they want to teach you,

and a very short amount of time.

It's basically based on continuously pushing

yourself your current ability.

Okay.

If you some of the videos from that, even though it's a movie, but wow,

these guys were told and taught to do things they didn't think they

could do to an airplane, right?

And they didn't think they could do to themselves.

They pushed themselves past their own ability.

Push yourself.

Landing on your butt a hundred, maybe a thousand times.

They had a red team and a blue team.

The red team were the trainers.

These guys were even better pilots than Top Gun pilots.

The blue team were the Top Gun pilots.

For the first two weeks, the blue team lost.

Dog fight, the red team outfoxed them, the trainers outfoxed them in every dog fight.

That's humiliating to some of the guys who think they're

the best pilots in the world.

That's where it started.

They made mistakes.

It includes elements, as as tactics against realistic training scenarios.

They actually used some real Russian MIGS in Top Gun training.

So they made it as realistic as they possibly could.

So the,

one of the things that you didn't gloss over, but it, so this requires

a mentor mentee approach, right?

So you've got this really elite world class aviator who's.

Now the coach, if you will, to this up and coming guy that's, he's got lots

of skills and ability, but isn't at the level that they want him to be at.

So talk a little bit about that, that mentor relationship, okay.

And getting that, that all-star to be a superstar.

There's a couple elements in Top Gun that I think we can take a

lesson from in business number one.

It's designed to improve a specific performance.

So they outlined exactly what they wanted these pilots to do, and

it's designed to make improvements.

So they take the baseline and then they measure improvement.

Secondly, it requires a mentor, a coach, a okay, outside eyes, unbiased.

We just can't evaluate ourselves very objectively.

It needs another perspective.

And a lot of people say, I don't need a coach.

Newsflash for you, the world's best in anything in athletics,

in fighting in, the Navy.

All of them have coaches.

The world's best have coaches.

Push yourself to practice the thing that you can't quite do.

That hurts.

That's why we don't do it.

That's why so few people do it.

Sure.

We don't practice at the edge of our competence.

We usually practice what we've done over and over again.

Tiger Woods, it's reported.

There's so many stories about Tiger Woods.

I could do a whole podcast on Tiger Woods, but one of the stories I like

is he would take a golf ball, okay.

And he'd go into a sand trap, he'd put it down in the sand and he'd step on it.

He'd push it down into the sand and then he would try to hit it.

Okay.

Maybe he'd hit it a hundred times, 200 times.

How many times in reality did he ever have a shot?

Just like that?

Probably one or two times in his whole career.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He practiced that to the point of he was totally competent at doing

it.

Yeah.

You'd have to do, you'd have to do the Tiger Woods thing on your own.

I'm a Phil Mickelson guy, but that's okay.

Okay.

There, there's a guy mentioned in Colvin's book.

Talent is Overrated.

Great book, by the way.

Jeff Colvin.

The guy's name is Professor Noel Titchy, t I c H Y.

He came up with an idea of three concentric circles.

Okay?

The inner circle is your comfort zone.

The middle circle is your learning zone, and the outer

circle is your panic zone, okay?

And he says you must get into the LZ or the learning zone to get any kind of

learning that will stick high repetition.

In the learning zone, the panic zone.

Obviously no learning.

The comfort zone you don't even wanna learn.

Constant feedback.

That's what Top Gun people get.

They got on the planes, they had videos of everything, and they

had radar tracks and everything.

They'd come back to the classroom and say, okay, Maverick, how did you do?

Well, sir, I, oh, okay.

Is that your assessment?

Or you're wrong?

Let me show you the video of where you screwed up.

Okay.

And let me show you the radar track of what you did as opposed

to what you should have done.

Okay.

How do we know that Top Gun training works well?

Metrics, the kill ratios before and after they went from 2.1.

And when these pilots went back into battle in Vietnam, 12 point 12 to one,

two, to one, improved to 12 to one.

You talked a little bit about this, but talk if you could

reference the talent code a little bit because there's there's a disparity

obviously in skills and talent bet, with salespeople as well as naval aviators.

And there, so obviously we need to overcome that challenge before you

can start elevating your performance.

The talent code speaks to the chemistry of how we learn something.

There is a coating called myelin, which coats our nerves endings

and connection to the brain.

According to Daniel Coyle, that myelin is what makes us remember.

And re-fire those nerves when needed very quickly.

The more myelin you have surrounding that particular nerve, the quicker it fires

and the better it remembers how to fire.

So every time you do deep practice where you practice at the edge of your

competence, you look for your mistakes, you correct the mistakes, and you

practice that builds myelin very quickly.

And so Coyle's point is that's one of the ways that deep practice works.

Dennis, let's bring this back.

Now, if you're a small business owner, how does this, compare

to traditional sales training?

How can the Top Gun concept be applied to sales training for a small business owner?

It won't be as fun as applying a a Navy jet at

supersonic speeds, but what's going on in your business?

Do you have any practice sessions?

If so, what do they look like?

The Top Gun concept can be applied in this way.

The first lesson of Top Gun, the first lesson of deliberate practice is chunking.

Chunking.

Don't try to learn the whole thing at one time.

They chunked their skills.

Today we're gonna work on X.

So the first recommendation I have is, let's look at a sales process.

How many chunks are there?

Hey, there's the opening of the sale, there's rapport building,

there's a sales call agenda.

Okay.

There's needs identification, there's handling objections and questions.

There's options review, there's closing there's buying signals, recognizing

and responding to buying signals.

I could go on.

I just named on about 10 chunks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yet some of us practice those as if they were one chunk.

My suggestion to small business owners is take one of those.

Take opening the sale and break that down into a further chunk and say, today

we're gonna practice opening the sale.

Opening the sale.

Yes.

That is the chunk we're gonna practice until we are perfect at opening the sale.

So you're, you're scaring me a little bit cuz you're

talking about chunks and we also talked about golf, so I'm reminded

of my golf game when you're talking about chunking and golf, but anyway,

well, golf is a fun, I can't play golf.

I admire you if you can.

It is the most.

Exercise for me that you can possibly imagine.

But I did overhear a story once on the golf course.

This coach was working with this this guy, and he says, Hey the

coach said, what are you doing?

He said, Hey, coach, it's not practice with a purpose.

Yeah.

Practice with a purpose is, like we've said, chunk

it down, set a specific goal for improvement, make mistakes, get

feedback, and make a correction.

You've got another great example from an all time

Hall of Fame baseball player.

Tell me about that.

You must be talking about the one and only Joe DiMaggio.

Yep.

The Yankee Clipper.

Played 13 seasons for one team.

Had a 3 25 lifetime batting average.

At one time, he had a 56 game hitting streak, 56 games.

That's unheard of.

Okay.

One of the best hitters in the game.

He had two things that he did for batting practice.

He a journalist came over to his house one day to write an article about

him, and he was interviewing him and he says, tell me Joe, how does it

feel to be a natural born hitter?

And Joe sat back and he says, don't ever say that to me.

Come with me.

He took him down in his basement and down in his basement, he had a

baseball bat, no balls, and he was just swinging shadow, swinging this bat.

But he did something.

He called out a pitch.

He said, okay, that's low and inside that's a fastball up, that's a slider out.

He would call the pitch and he'd swing as if he were hitting that pitch.

And then the guy turned on the lights and Joe turned on the lights.

And in his basement there were thousands of marks of tick marks about how

many times he had actually done that.

He said, wow.

Don't ever say ever again that I'm a natural born hitter.

Wow, that's not true.

Okay.

And we could go on and on.

There are thousands of stories like this.

Deliberate practice works.

It works.

DiMaggio also had a secret for his outfield play as well though.

He did he did things that other players didn't do.

Okay.

He had, he was a center fielder.

He was, had exceptional skills as rigorous practice.

Before each game he would go out there and practice fielding balls in the

outfield, but he paid close attention to the way the ball moved on the grass,

the way it bounced on the ground.

He practiced with intention, he practiced with purpose.

Okay?

He didn't just go through the motions.

I'm sad to say that it took me many years of life before I ever realized this.

I wish I had known this sooner, right?

You got to practice with intention practice at your edge, not at

what you're really good at.

And that's the, and that's really the Top Gun training concept that

we've talked about today is practicing with a purpose trying to practice

on your weaknesses to improve those weaknesses so that you can be elite.

And this, Dennis, you, I'm sure you would agree this applies

to any part of your life.

Any part in your life.

You can apply Top Gun type training to anything you want to do.

A lot of times it's applied to music.

And sports.

Those are the two that are the most, and there's millions of examples of musicians

who learned how to play difficult pieces in a very short period of time.

Because they use deliberate practice.

They practice each part, each chunk, until they got it just right,

and then they moved then and only then they move on to the next one.

Awesome.

Really good stuff today, Dennis.

Thanks for your wisdom and insight today, folks.

That wraps up another edition of Connect & Convert, the podcast that lets you

behind the curtain with some insider secrets for small business sales success.

This is Dave Salter and Dennis Collins.

Thanks for joining us next time.