There are a lot of different things that you can try when you need to make more sales. But one of the most effective things that you can do to become a great salesperson is work on your leadership skills.

Today’s guest is Deb Calvert, President of People First Productivity Solutions. In today’s episode, she’ll be talking about her new book, Stop Selling and Start Leading: How to Make Extraordinary Sales Happen. Listen to the episode to hear what she has to say about what buyers really want and how sellers can make sure that they deliver, and stay tuned for a special offer at the end.

Episode Highlights:

• Deb’s interest in doing real research into what buyers really want, and how that led to her new book
• The surprises that Deb found in the course of researching her book
• The importance of sellers establishing credibility with buyers by doing what they say they will do
• The backstory on the co-authors that Deb worked with when writing her new book
• The 30 behaviors that buyers respond to when sellers adopt them
• How the behaviors Deb describes in her book apply in different stages of the funnel
• Deb’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership that sellers can apply in their relationships with buyers
• How leadership behaviors can help sellers stand out from the crowd
• Deb’s online e-learning course, and a special offer for podcast listeners

Resources:

Deb Calvert

People First Productivity Solutions

Stop Selling and Start Leading

For free access to Deb’s online e-learning training course, Workplace Conversations, email a receipt for Stop Selling and Start Leading to Deb at deb.calvert@peoplefirstps.com

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. I’ve asked Deb Calvert, who’s the president of People First Productivity Solutions. You may remember her from a previous podcast we did on her book called Discovery Questions: Get You Connected and a lot of you are using her framework for working in the closet while working on together for questioning at various positions in the pipeline.

But we’re here today to talk about Deb’s new book called Stop Selling and Start Leading: How To Make Extraordinary Sales Happen. Welcome, Deb, to the podcast the second time around.

Deb: I am just thrilled just to be back, Marylou. As you know, I enjoy talking to you so much I could listen to you speak all day long.

Marylou: Thank you. This is an exciting book. I think we kind of go and laze on things but leadership, it’s always been of importance. But sometimes it’s get lost in the shuffle. Tell us the why behind why this book, why now, why Stop Selling and Start Leading?

Deb: That’s a big question. First of all, the reason why is because I kind of got tired of everybody saying buyers think, buyers want, buyers do, buyers don’t. Speaking for buyers and yet, I wasn’t really seeing a whole lot of research about things that came directly from the buyers. There were lots of studies that interpreted based on buyer behaviors, what buyers wanted, and I wasn’t convinced that that was everything that we could get. I wanted to conduct research straight to the source with B2B buyers and that’s what we started with as a research project. The book then became the natural outgrowth of that because there were some surprises in what buyers had to say.

Because of those surprises, what we did second was we went and talked to sellers. We collected stories from sellers and we looked for the matches. When people are at their personal best in selling, we wanted to see if they were actually doing what buyers said what they wanted to see from sellers. Once that connection became so apparent, I felt really compelled to write a book and let the rest of the sales world know about these findings.

Marylou: I love the word surprise. Can you tell us what were the top surprises that we know but haven’t really addressed? Or just brand new because of the internet or what is the context around these surprises?

Deb: I’ll talk about three surprises. The first one is that when I ask sellers what they think buyers prefer and what’s the most important to buyers and then when we ask buyers what’s most important to them, I’m referring to a framework. We gave both sets a chance to react to 30 specific leadership behaviors. We’ll talk about those in a moment.

But when we ask people to react to those, what sellers consistently pick out as being the most important to buyers, it is important to buyers but it actually falls at the bottom of the list compared to all the other things that sellers don’t even recognize at all as being important to buyers. That’s a very significant disconnect. I was surprised because I also guess that the one sellers think that is most important, I thought that that’s what buyers would pick too, but they didn’t. That’s the first surprise, we’ll talk more about that in a moment.

The second surprise is that the number one behavior that buyers picked, the thing that matters most to them out of the 30 choices we gave them, is that they want sellers to answer their questions in a relevant and timely manner. What that means, this is kind of scary, it means that we can’t dodge and deflect price questions. It means we got to say something. We have to atleast open up to dialogue and not do what we’ve been taught to do. I know, it gives me hype practically to think about talking about price before having value on the table. But we lose buyers fast if we don’t answer that question. That one surprised me and it still rattles me a little bit.

The third thing that I think that is very surprising is that over 33% of the buyers, when we just gave them free rein to give us any other comments that they wanted to give us, a full third said the same thing about what they wanted from sellers. That one thing is something that we’re all a little bit of guilty of in selling of not doing. It’s such a simple thing, such a simple thing that we could do and buyers wouldn’t be so irritated with us if we would just do it.

Marylou: What’s that?

Deb: It’s what I call DWYSYWD. That’s an acronym, DWYSYWD, same forwards and backwards, and it stand for Do What You Say You Will Do. Just do what you say what you will do. Buyers expresses their frustrations about things even as small as, “The seller said they were going to call me at 9:00 and they didn’t even call until 9:30.” I was like, “Why is this such a big deal?”

But as we look into that a little deeper, it’s because especially at the beginning, there’s nothing else for them to gauge their credibility, nothing else that will help them develop trustiness so they have that sort of superficial standard of judging whether or not they want to do business with us.

Marylou: That’s a great one. I remember two things about when I first started in sales, one was if you’re late, your product is unreliable. My boss always made sure that were on time for everything that we said we were going to be on time for. If we commit to 9:00, plan the traffic ahead of time because there’s a lot of face-to-face when I started selling. Plan for all those nuances that happen to get to that appointment on time. He said, I can’t remember the phrase, it’s something like, “You only know you love yourself and others by the commitment you make and keep.”

Deb: That’s brilliant.

Marylou: I don’t think that the love was in that but I think added that. But it really hit home. Those were the two things that I think about every single day besides waking up in the morning thinking what can I do to help others. I think about did I make some commitments? And if so, I got to keep them today and if I have any issues, let people know ahead of time. Yes, I agree with that.

I also love number two about the pricing, whatever questions they have, answer them. I remember a long time ago, we used to talk about giving them a range of prices rather than say, “Oh, I need more information before I can get you that pricing for you.” But we would just say the range of pricing that we fell into and then ask a question after that to get some type of closure as to whether that’s in the ballpark or if we’re playing outside of our league. I do like that one a lot.

Deb: Both of those responses that you gave, they are at least a little more tolerable for buyers than no answer at all. It’s the brush off that really upsets them the most. The sooner you do what you say you will do. If you say, “I will get right back to price,” you have to come right back to price.

Both of those things end up pertaining to our credibility. The reason credibility matters so much, talk about everything old as new again. But the reason credibility matters so much is that they can’t believe your message if they don’t believe in you, the messenger.

Marylou: Right.

Deb: We just forget that.

Marylou: That first one that you said, we think versus they want. Why is that still happening?

Deb: I think it is for a couple of reasons. I think that it’s much easier to talk about product and much harder to think about individual buyers and all the messiness of relationships and will they like me and will they even give me five minutes so I can get to my pitch that I want to make and all of the perceived obstacles we put them up. Buyers do somewhat but we put more weight on those barriers because of our perceptions and desire to launch into a product pitch or to try to race through whatever we’ve got to say because we’re assuming that they don’t want to meet with us. We’re not creating value, we’re doing all this other nonsense instead.

Marylou: That’s interesting. In the book, in Stop Selling and Start Leading, you have a couple of co-authors. Would you like to share a bit about their contributions or how you all worked together on this book?

Deb: Yeah. This is good backstory. In my career, I’ve worked in two different fields for a lot of years. I have always been in sales and there was a period of time when I was at a Fortune 500, in a corporate role, and I was also tasked with leadership development. I became very well seeped in both. When I went into business for myself 12 years ago, I stayed involved in both worlds. But I treated them like they were two completely different worlds like, “Today, I’m going to do sales training. Let me put on my sales hat.” The next day, “Hey, I’ll do leadership development workshop,” as if there were no crossover.

The leadership body of work that I primarily used, because it’s evidence based, because it’s foundational, just about anything you ever see on leadership involves it. It’s a body of work known as The Leadership Challenge-Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. They’ve been doing this for over 30 years. They’ve researched it with over five million people. It’s highly credible stuff. The more that I got to know that, the closer that I got to that work and I eventually wanted to become a Certified Master which is a very high standard, it’s a rigorous process to get that level of certification.

Barry Posner, one of the original founders of that whole movement, The Leadership Challenge, he was my mentor. He challenged that in so many ways. It’s like a two-year process.

Couple of years ago, three to four years ago, I was literally steeped in that, paying attention to leadership behaviors everywhere. It just hit me like a lightning bolt, and that lightning bolt was, “What if sellers adapted these behaviors of leaders? What difference would that make to buyers?” I just couldn’t let go of it, it just haunted me until I convinced Jim and Barry that we had to do a little research study and we did with buyers, we had a […] study with Santa Claire University’s backing. It was revealing. Then we did the seller side study and it all just kept making a lot more sense.

Those 30 behaviors of leaders, if sellers do adopt them, buyers respond. They respond very positively. They take more meetings with sellers to demonstrate those behaviors more frequently and they are more likely to buy from sellers who demonstrate those behaviors. That’s how it became the blueprint, “Hey, here they are, 30 behaviors. If you do these things, buyers respond.”

Marylou: Right. The 30 number is a result it sounds like of years of research and interviews. What is the process that you went through to glean these 30 distinct behaviors?

Deb: Jim and Barry, going back over 30 years, they have had the question. There’s all this stuffs out there about Leadership Philosophy and about Leadership Characteristics. But they want to know what do leaders do that make them more effective? Their original research was going to effective leaders and asking for stories like, “What is it that you are doing when you’re at your personal best as a leader?” They took story after story and they mined through these stories to pull out the behaviors that were repeated over and over again. They knew the 30 behaviors of leadership, they’ve tested those with over five million people around the world giving 360 feedback about leaders. I just asked them if I could borrow those same 30 behaviors, massage them just a little bit so they made more sense to the buyers seller relationship. Those were the 30 that we researched.

Marylou: Wow. In the book itself, you obviously listed 30 behaviors. Do you have a list of action items of how to apply that or is it more working through each buyer’s different, so understanding the characteristics of the buyer first and then applying the 30. How does that work?

Deb: It’s actually a little simpler than that, even. First of all, yes, there are actions. Every chapter has a set of actions that people could implement right away. But instead of giving 30 behaviors—which is a lot—we just use the roll up and the roll up is what I referred to a moment ago, the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Barry and Jim had done it that way in their work. Each of the 5 practices has 6 behaviors underneath it, so instead of having to memorize and know 30 things, we can just do 5, and that gives you a great start.

Marylou: Is this designed to start at top of funnel? Because my audiences, we’re starting conversations with people we don’t know and some of us are taking it all the way to close one, but some of us stop at the opportunity. At what point—if there was a physical position in the pipeline that you would pick—where do we start implementing this? Is it at the very tipy top before we even start the conversation, or is it somewhere after opportunity?

Deb: It is about the relationship. As any relationship is forming right there at the top of the funnel,as for those who worked with customers long term, as the relationship deepens over time, there are ways that you use any of these behaviors at each stage of your relationship.

Marylou: Put my thinking cap on, if we are targeting accounts that we want to go after from an outreach perspective, and we have certain buyers within those targeted segments that we’re looking at. Our content could essentially deploy these five behavioral practices as we’re writing to the potential prospect—they’re not a prospect yet, but we’re writing to them to try to get them to bubble up to the top of interest, awareness, whatever it is. We could certainly utilize these behaviors and start testing to see which ones allow is to bubble up fastest, I’m thinking.

Deb: You’ve got it. Remember, in our study, buyers said that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a seller who frequently demonstrated these behaviors. They recognize the behaviors right off the bat and respond to them.

Marylou: Are there certain words that each of the five practices utilize or are there certain sentiment behind it? How did you group them by five?.

Deb: This was something that Barry and Jim had done many years ago. Their book is a sixth edition, there’s a lot of history here. I didn’t have to make any of that up, they’ve already done the all the hard work. But let me tell you the five practices because I think you’ll get a sense that of what the flavor is. Also, remind me along the way here which one I thought for sure would be number one and turns out it wasn’t.

The first practice of exemplary leadership is to model the way. Modeling the way includes behaviors that are about knowing your own values, aligning your actions with your values, having standards that you uphold, and being credible. That’s to model the way.

The second practice is to inspire your shared vision. There’s a lot packed into that little phrase, inspire a shared vision. Inspire means to breathe life into, vision means some ideal that’s out there in the future, it’s aspirational, the state we’d like to get to, and shared. For a buyer to be committed to and bond into the vision, it’s not just a vision the seller went away and fabricated and brought back and said, “Poof, here you go,” but the buyer was sharing it right from the get-go. That’s the second one, inspire your shared vision.

The next is to challenge the process, an easier behavior about experimenting and taking risk and being willing to fail forward, to learn, pick up and try again, to know the small winds and to be always looking for innovations and opportunities and possibilities. Then the fourth is enable others to act. Enabling others to act is one that sellers often don’t even see how this relates to the work they do. What’s interesting about that is if sellers don’t see the value, that means that they’re not doing these behaviors and they ought to be because this is the practice that raced to the top, this is the one that buyers want most of all. Enable others to act, we’re going to collaborate and cooperate. You’re going to be involved as the buyer in co-creating and co-brainstorming the insights and the solutions. You’re going to get to participate in creating what you want.

Last but not the least is encourage the heart. Encourage means to pour courage into and the place we’re going to pour that courage into is the heart, there’s the emotional component. This one’s really important but also often overlooked but if you think about what happens after a seller asks the buyer to make a commitment, that buyer or the buying team, they have a whole lot of work to go and do within their own company. They have to get other people to sign off on of it, they have to say no to somebody else they used to be partnered with. They have to implement change, sometimes really significant change to be able to bring the life, whatever it is you’ve just sold them. There’s tremendous work and they need some encouragement along the way for them when the going gets tough.

Marylou: Wow. You said that you thought originally which one of these five would have been most impactful for the buyer journey.

Deb: Yeah. It’s not enable others to act, that’s what not sellers think anyway, although buyers do. A lot of sellers, most sellers like me assume it’s going to be inspire a shared vision. That’s the one that sounds the most like the work of selling. Maybe that’s why it falls to the bottom for buyers.

Before we start to inspire them, because they’ve been burned before, they think it’s just we’re painting blue sky and it’s not even true. Before we get to that, they want to have us establish credibility and trust, that often comes from model the way. They want us to be involving them, there’s the enabling them to act, they want to be encouraged, and then they believe, they have the ability to believe in anything that we’re going to inspire them to do, as well as be a little bit more comfortable with anything we’re going to challenge them to do.

Marylou: Right. You’re in the right to challenge is of what you’re saying.

Deb: Absolutely. Buyers are saying, I’m just […].

Marylou: Right. The other thing about inspire a shared vision, I think sometimes that gets muddled because the buyer can’t differentiate from one seller from another in many cases. They’re not seeing the real value and not really excited about what they have to say because they can’t differentiate their conversation against another vendor who might’ve called 15 minutes before and his vision.

Deb: Yes, and the good news is that if you’re using leadership behaviors, you can very quickly differentiate yourself and stand out. You don’t have to let your product be commoditized and you don’t have to show up like every other salesperson that they’re getting lumped in with.      

Marylou: The book is called Stop Selling and Start Leading. Deb, you have a special offer you want to talk audience about.

Deb: I would love to. We have a new program, it’s not new except that this version is new, it’s now available as an online e-learning training course, self-paced. It’s a program that’s been around for about a decade called Workplace Conversations. What’s unique about it is it is a blend of leadership development and supervisory skills. For anybody who’s inspiring to be in management or already is in management, or for anyone who wants to develop themselves as a leader, this is an e-learning self-paced course, 17 modules, it takes about six hours to complete. It has tons of bonus resources and skills practice associated with it.

We are introducing it at $257 as the online course. But Marylou, for your listeners, we’ll make it available free of charge if they’ll just email me a receipt that says, “Hey, I  bought the book Stop Selling and Start Leading.” You get the book and you get the training course.

Marylou: Wonderful. I’ll be sure to put that in the show notes for anyone who’s driving right now or not being able to write down everything that Deb just said. I’ll make sure the instructions of how to do that, how to take advantage of that self-paced course by purchasing her book that comes in both Kindle and hardcover versions and probably soon be release audio version, I would imagine, Deb?

Deb: Yeah. Publishers like to wait a few months. I’m jumping in to bit and do it but it’ll come.

Marylou: Yeah. It’ll come soon. This has been a great conversation.

I have one more question, some of our audience, not only do they do all sales roles and work for large enterprises, but they do have a good number of folks who are solo entrepreneurs. Is a book like this something that should be on the reading list? Is it important to know these things and apply them as a one-stop shop business owners?

Deb: Absolutely, here’s why. First of all, this is about leadership. If you want to be a leader in anything that you do, meaning you’d like others to follow what you do, this is going to be relevant. But as a solo entrepreneur or business owner, you are selling. Why not sell in a way that people respond to in a way that it just feels natural and good and then enabling as opposed to having to worry about all those stereotypical things that are icky feeling anyway. This is going to make you feel better about all the work that you do.

Marylou: Not only that, I think with the advent of all the tools that are out there now and the ability to start conversations by leveraging technology, we can certainly start those conversations using this framework, this blueprint, in a way that when we do get on the phone with them, there’ll be some rapport already established. Because we have anticipated what their needs are in the way that they like to buy. I think that’s a really important concept that we can utilize especially in prospecting to be able to have these conversations in a more meaningful way that allow the buyer to feel good about what we do request that phone call or that first meeting or that get on the calendar. They’ll be more apt to respond positively to our request.

            Deb, thank you so much for visiting and thank you so much for writing this book. It sounds like a big game changer. Can’t wait to dig in little bit more to it.

Deb: Thank you, Marylou. Thanks for everything you’re doing. I can’t wait to see you on stage again somewhere sometime really soon talking about the canvas of sales process and sales system. You are just masterful at what you’re doing and I appreciate it.

Marylou: Thank you. Take care.

You may not think of yourself a performer, but prospecting and performing have some important things in common. In both cases, it’s important to get yourself noticed and stand out from the crowd. Today’s guest is an expert in the art of getting yourself noticed.

Tsufit is a former lawyer who left the legal profession in order to become a performer. She has performed as a singer and a comedian, in the theater and on television. Now she is an author, speaker, and PR and marketing coach. Listen to the episode to hear what Tsufit has to say about getting noticed, attracting people, and the importance of a good story.

Episode Highlights: 

• Tsufit’s legal background and how it informed her work as a performer
• Where to start with getting noticed
• How communicating one-on-one differs from communicating with a room full of people
• The importance of being able to tell a story that interests people
• How to catch people’s interest during the first 30 seconds of speaking to them
• Why you should start in the middle of a story, rather than the beginning
• How Tsufit’s methods can work for enterprise sales
• The power of an authentic voice
• How you can create dramatic moments by doing the unexpected
• Why tone matters, especially when speaking over the phone
• Tsufit’s free tip series
• How a well-crafted email can make a big difference

Resources:

 Tsufit

Tsufit’s Website

Step into the Spotlight

Spotlight Secrets: Free Tip Series

Step into the Spotlight: LinkedIn Group

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. I actually met Tsufit, who is a guest on today’s show, a long time ago, it’s like four or five years ago. I saw her speak at an event and I was mesmerized. I wanted to get right into this conversation with her.

Tsufit is featured pretty much everywhere, she’s in Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. She’s the author of this wonderful book called Step Into The Spotlight, A Guide To Getting Noticed. A former lawyer, and Canadian. She has just a wonderful viewpoint on getting yourself noticed.

I asked her on the show today, without further ado, welcome, Tsufit, to the show.

Tsufit: My pleasure, I’m glad to be here.

Marylou: This is just an amazing opportunity, it really resonated with me when I listened to your 12 Speaking Mistakes. One of them just really, totally got me and that was the mistake number three, which is the 30 seconds in the spotlight, not knowing what to say.

Tsufit: Yeah.

Marylou: Even though I’m a process expert and I worked at top of funnel, we’re trying to get conversations boiled up to the top so people can start these conversations. But almost overwhelmingly, the questions I get from people are, “What do I say when I get somebody on the phone? How do I present myself? What’s the first thing I should say to them?” When I heard you talk about that, I think you said you created over a hundred different openers. I call them openers, and you call them mini shows.

Tsufit: Here they tend to call them networking infomercials or I think of them really like a mini show.

Marylou: Yeah. When I heard that, I thought, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got to get you on this show so you could talk to us about how do we get ourselves noticed when it’s such a busy world. We spend all this time and money trying to get people to start to engage with us, and then we bungle it in those first 30 second on the phone.

Tsufit: Yeah, it’s true. I don’t remember if you read my intro or not just to tell them my background but I was a lawyer for many years, a litigation lawyer. In that world, there was a certain way of speaking. You have to be “professional.” After about 10 years of being a litigation lawyer, I left the limelight to be a singer, actress, and stand up comedian.

Marylou: Wow.

Tsufit: I realized that I had learned some stuff that people in business just don’t know. People in business think it’s about being great at what you do. Being great at what you do gets you to ground zero, it’s important, it’s essential. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be great at what you do, but if you do think that’s gonna get you clients, not so much because there’s gazillion other people who are great at what you do and maybe they’re even greater than you at it, but you know what? Being the best at what you do is not really what gets you clients.

Marylou: That’s true.

Tsufit: Being able to attract people is what gets you at least to the top of your funnel, at least to the stage where you can discuss what it is you have and what it is they want. On discovering this, I started coaching people on what to say and it ended up, you talked about 30 seconds. I actually teach a four week course on what to say in 30 seconds. Can you imagine, I could have made it a 10 week course because there’s just so much.

Where you start, it depends who you’re talking to obviously, but you have to start with color, you have to start with flavor, you have to start with story, you have to start with why are you doing this? Why are you doing what you’re doing? By that, I don’t mean stand up at a networking meeting and say, “I’m a life coach because I’m really passionate about helping women break through the barriers.”

You can go to any 7:00AM networking meeting, those rubber egg, board of tray events and hear 95 life coaches say that. Then you’ll hear 17 business coaches, help you break through the barriers, make a transformation, get massive income. Then you’ll hear the financial experts tell you—it’s all the same. It’s all the same. We filter it out and we don’t hear it.

A realtor will stand up and say, “Now is a really good time to buy yourself a house because mortgage rates are low.” We don’t even hear that. They think they’re being so impressive when they’re not. How do you cut through that? You have to tell a story. You have to figure out who you are and what is interesting about you.

That’s why I was saying about my background before I wanted to answer this question because once people know that I was a litigation lawyer, I had four kids in four years, I left that to perform, I have a music studio, I’ve done stand up comedy on national TV, I wrote a book. Once they know some of that stuff, it’s much more interesting to them to hear what I have to say. But I still wouldn’t stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Tsufit, I’m a marketing coach, I’m a speaking coach, I’m a publicity coah.” All of those things are true but that wouldn’t get me any clients or any customers. I would have to stand up there.

Yes, it’s true. When I used to go actively to networking—now I do more online—when I used to physically go, I actually have a little recipe box. It took 4×6 index cards. Just scribble a little what I call infomercials on them and they’re all different depending on what I was trying to create that day. One of the things I would tell your listeners if you’re going to a networking event or if you’re going to a meeting with the prospector, whatever it is. It’s different if you’re talking to a whole room or if you’re taking one on one.

The program that I teach, 30 Seconds in The Spotlight, is not so much focused of the one on one if some of your sales listeners might be interested in, because one on one really has to be so interactive and so much focused on the other person. Whereas when you’re standing in front of a room full of people, like if you go the local Chamber of Commerce or the local BNI or whatever it is, it’s really more of a mini show like I said.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: It depends what you’re doing. But if it’s like a mini show, then you have to really figure out what one result do you want that day? Maybe maximum to like backup damsel version of that. But you don’t want to go there and say, “Hi, I’m a graphic designer. I can help you make your website or your brochure or your business cards or do layout for your book or I can help you in social media or whatever.” Because first of all, the audience doesn’t know what to do with that, number one. Number two, they’re filtering you out because it’s so boring they’re not even hearing you in the first place. How are you gonna penetrate if they can’t hear you?

What you do is you go there and you tell a story. The story might be based on your childhood, it might be based like I told you, litigation lawyer leaves law for limelight. I’ve had actually a newspaper article with that headline, Litigation lawyer leaves law for limelight, because it’s interesting to people.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: I’ll give you an example of you like, I have four daughters. I’m very blessed, they were born in four years, talk about empowering women. They were born into my business because I was a lawyer when they were born but I quickly became an entrepreneur. I would involve them in the business.

One day, my fourth daughter came and said to me, “Mommy, I just won a public speaking contest at my school.” I had heard this four times in four years from four different daughters. Within 30 seconds, I wrote an infomercial, I don’t remember if I was teaching a class of just going to a networking event. It took me about a minute to write the infomercial and half of that was getting her permission to do it.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: Because I didn’t want to invade her privacy. Basically, the infomercial was something like, “Four years ago my youngest daughter Viza won at a public speaking contest in her school. Three years ago, my oldest daughter, Daniela, won the public speaking contest in their school. Two years ago, my second daughter Paloma won the public speaking contest in her school. Today, my third daughter, Riviera, the shy one, won the public speaking contest in her school. I’m Tsufit, I’m a public speaking coach. Not trying to take my daughters’ triumphs as my own, but I think the fact speaks for themselves. Tufit, for when you’re ready to get noticed.”

They’re something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was. It just took me seconds to write it. It was based on facts, it was based on truths but it’s a lot more interesting than showing up and saying, “Hi, I’m a public speaking coach.”

Marylou: Most definitely.

Tsufit: I’ve never really called myself a public speaking coach and I never called myself a marketing coach and I’ve never called myself a business coach or a publicity coach or any of those things. I just get up there and talk about getting noticed and people figure it out for themselves.

Marylou: It’s funny because we do have a little bit of the wide audience effect. Granted, we’re using the emails that we send out to potential prospects to cast a wider net out there to a multiple number of people with the goal of getting them to bubble up to the top for a conversation. We also need to focus on that one on one conversation.

I remember a story a friend told me one time, he was sitting in his manager’s office and his manager was listening to voicemails. For every one of the voicemails that came in, where they said, “Hi, my name is Marylou Tyler and I’m from XYZ Company.” He hit the delete key on the voicemail. He wouldn’t even go past. There was only one he listened to apparently and it was starting with the story, it was starting with getting an end result. It had what you were talking about; it was strong, it had color, it had flavor and I’m not sure about the drama part but it definitely started differently. It got their attention.

Tsufit: That’s a good point. Actually, I’ve been critiquing people. In fact, I get brought into conferences and teleconferences just to critique people 30 seconds. In fact, that’s part of what I do in my business. One of the first critiques I give them is don’t start with, “Hi, I’m so and so…” because at the beginning, nobody cares.

Number one, nobody cares. Number two, nobody hears you because they haven’t decided yet whether you’re worth their attention. We live in an age where every time we turn around, whether it’s in the grocery store or on the floor, they trying to send us a message, whether you’re in a washroom in a restaurant, there’s a message on the back of the door, in the subway. Everywhere, there are messages. You go to see YouTube videos but first you got to sit through their little commercial.

Everybody’s trying to sell to us all the time. We’ve got this defence system where we don’t even hear it. If you start, “Hi, I’m Marylou Tyler,” or, “Hi, I’m Tsufit.” It’s like, “So what? I don’t know you and even if I do, who cares?”

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: But if you start with the story like, “17 years ago, I was sitting in the back of a taxi cab and Sister Mary Katherine was banging on the window.” If you stop me there, don’t you want to know what’s gonna happen next? Even if you’re thinking, “I don’t know who Sister Mary Katherine is and I don’t even know who you are.” But our minds, we’re curious, it’s an incomplete puzzle, you can’t just leave me hanging, okay I’m gonna listen long enough to find out why is Sister Mary Katherine banging on your taxi window.

The other thing I would tell your listeners is start in the middle. Don’t start at the beginning. “Hi, I’m so and so,” is starting at the beginning. You’re starting chronologically. Or even if you start a story, don’t start in the beginning. Start in the middle of the story. I didn’t even tell you why I’m in the back of the taxi cab or who Sister Mary Katherine is and why is she bangging on the door, I didn’t tell you.

Marylou: No.

Tsufit: It forces you to listen even if you’re not interested. You’re going to listen at least long enough to get that question resolved in your mind. Then if you want, you can turn the channel on me, but you’re not gonna do it before that.

Marylou: Exactly, I remember listening to you one time when you were talking about being up on stage. I think you had books, maybe it was your book that you were at the back of the room kind of thing. Instead of saying something to the effect of, “Hey, buy my book.” Or, “My books are at the back of the room.” You gave them two price points.

Tsufit: Yeah.

Marylou: You said, “$20 if I like you, and $30 if I don’t.”

Tsufit: It’s funny because here’s what happened, that was just something that came about once by chance. Usually I tell people, “Don’t be overly spontaneous.” Everybody thinks you should be spontaneous, you should sound spontaneous, but you should know what you’re going to say when you get there. Unless you’re really, really, really, experienced at this. Nobody would ever tell a ballerina to get on stage and just wing it. She rehearses. The more you rehearse what you’re gonna say or what you’re gonna do or dance or whatever, the more free you are to then improvise a little bit because you know basically what you’re gonna do.

I basically, usually, when I would go to a networking meeting, I would know what I’m gonna do. Or while I’m driving over there, I’d be saying, “Okay Tsufit, what do I want to do today?” It’s 6:45 in the winter in Canada and I’m sharpened to a 7:00AM meeting and I’m saying, “Okay, why am I going? What am I doing? What do I want the result to be?” Because if I don’t know what’s the result I want is, then how am I gonna lead them there?

Maybe the result is I want them to buy my book, maybe the result is I want them to sign up to spotlightsecrets.com for my free tips, maybe the result is I want them to hear me in a seminar, whatever it is. I first decide that.

Let’s say that day, my goal was the book. Maybe I’d say something about the book, but I’d never pitch it, I’d never come and say, “Come see me if you wanted it.” I’d never say anything about it.

But one day, spontaneously, I said something about the book and instead of saying, “Come see me,” Or, “I’ll be at the back room.” I said, “You know, I have a handful with me. $20 if I like you, $30 if I don’t.” It was just something I said spontaneously once.

The price of the book in the US is $19.95 and in Canada, I think it’s $21.95 plus taxes, something like $23.05. There’s no legitimate way for anybody to pay $30 for this book anyway.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: But I sort of said it as a joke. The result was people would line up at the end of the meeting with their wallet open pulling out money, sometimes $20, sometimes $30, and look at me sheepishly and say, “Tsufit, do you like me?”

Marylou: Do you like me?

Tsufit: What did I achieve in that? It doesn’t become a question of do I want to buy the book or do I not want to buy the book. It becomes the question of, is she gonna sell it to for $20 or is she gonna sell it to me for $30? I took away the question about whether they want it or not and made it a question about how much it is going to cost them.

It’s just like Billy doesn’t want to go to bed, you don’t fight with him about going to bed. You say, “Do you want to wear the blue pajamas or the red pajamas?” We’ve all heard that.

Marylou: Right. Right.

Tsufit: We gave him a choice. It worked. Actually, I once had the mayor of the local city come up to me and said, “How much for me?” I said, “You know what? For you, $40.” He laughed and then be bought the book. I didn’t charge him $40 but he bought the book.

Marylou: Right. Yeah. I’m sure some of the audiences are thinking, “Marylou, this sounds good but we’re selling to enterprise, stuffy corporations, is this something we can really experiment on in the corporate world?

Tsufit: That is such a brilliant question. One thing I will say, total transparency here, what can get you the corner office in the corporate world can also get you fired.

Marylou: Yeah.

Tsufit: You really have to decide am I gonna play it by the book and be a middle manager and I’ll never really get the corner office and I’ll never really get promoted but I won’t be fired, or am I gonna really be me and I’m gonna take that risk?

I say this from the point of view of having been a lawyer. Like I said, a litigator for 10 years, and I have to admit that I wasn’t the Tsufit that you’re hearing today. I did perform at night and I did comedy and I did sing. But when I was at work, I was not the full version of myself that I’ve been lucky enough to present for the last 16 years as a coach. They make you conform.

Marylou: Yes.

Tsufit: The same thing sometimes happens in corporate, but if you make a decision that you’re gonna be you regardless of where you are, the chance, especially now, because things have changed so much in the last 10 or 20 years, partially with millenials. Millennials don’t put up with this crap.

Marylou: Exactly.

Tsufit: They just don’t. I won’t say it’s entitlement. I taught my four daughters, yeah, no, you shine, you step into the spotlight, you go out there, you don’t have to put up with any crap, you don’t have to answer it. They would never take the stuff that their parents would have taken. But still it’s a risk.

I will give you an example, when I started networking, I would go to these networking meetings and I would wear something that stood out. I wouldn’t wear a gray suit like a lot of the other people wore. I would wear an asian silk top or something ethnic looking or just something distinct and colorful and I had these crazy red glasses at the time. People would say to me in the first few months, “Tsufit, you really should dress professionally and you really should speak the way they did.”

Six months later, within six months of networking which is totally new to me. I’ve never even heard of it, chamber of commerce networking means all these things […], never heard of it. Within six month of starting to network, they were putting me on stage as the speaker or on panels to teach them how to do it better.

For six months, they’re telling me I’m doing it wrong and then they notice that I get lineups and they don’t. They’ve been going for five or ten years and nobody ever approaches them. I started teaching them you don’t have to be that “professional.” I call it […].

To answer your question about enterprise and stuffy corporations, in those stuffy corporations are real people. A corporation is a body that is an artificially created enterprise but it’s made up of people. Even though people are trying to conform, on the way home, they stop for sa beer with their friends and they speak in real ways to their friends, in a way that maybe they don’t in the office.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: If you speak in that real way that they speak when they’re, let’s say, 10:00 at night and they’re putting up their feet and speaking to their best friend, if you speak to them that way, you may cut through, you may appear to be refreshing. Not to get political, I know that’s not usually a great idea but you guys over in America now have a president as a result of him saying, “You know what? I’m not going to speak the way the other 16 people on the podium speak. Whether it’s for good or for not good, I’m just going to speak the way I speak.”

I’m not suggesting that you guys emulate that example, definitely not, but there is a lesson there. People are craving an authentic voice so much that even if they don’t like that authentic voice, they are mesmerized by it, they can’t look away.

Marylou: You mentioned that we talked about the curiosity as being one of the triggers that in this 30 seconds in the spotlight, not knowing what to say. That may be a way for people to at least stop and notice. Are there other triggers that you use when you’re crafting these mini 30 second commercials?

Tsufit: Yeah, there’s tons of them. Once I went to a networking meeting, everybody stands up basically at these events. It’s your turn, you stand up, sometimes they give you a microphone, sometimes not, but it’s your turn you stand up.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: What is the most obvious thing you could do to stand out when everybody stands up?

Marylou: The most obvious thing that I could do?

Tsufit: If everybody stood up, before me was a realtor who stood up and then a financial advisor stood up when it was his turn and then a coach stood up when it was her turn and then it’s my turn. What would be a good way to get attention?

Marylou: Stay seated.

Tsufit: I actually did that. Hundred people, everybody one at a time stands up, stands up, stands up, stands up, it’s my turn I stay seated. What have I done? I’ve created tension in the room. Everybody’s, “What the hell, why is she not standing up? She’s seated, everybody else is supposed to stand up.” Then I start talking from a seated position, half the people can’t even see me. Like, “What’s going on?”

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: That’s annoying but it causes a creative dissonance, it creates tension. This is what this is about. What is drama? What is humor? What are all these devices? If you reached into the spotlight, you’ll see a whole book full of them. What are they? They create tension and they give you attention.

I stay seated, I start talking. Everybody’s craning their neck, they’re trying to see me. I have a good loud voice so they can usually hear me but they’re pretty agitated. Then in the middle of the infomercial, at a perfectly timed point in the 30 seconds, what do I do that’s dramatic?

Marylou: Stand up.

Tsufit: All of a sudden, I took something that 99 other people did. They all stood up but it wasn’t dramatic, was it? Because they were expected to at a certain time. Just by delaying my standing up by 10-12 seconds out of my 30, and then standing up at an opportune moment, I created drama.

It just shows you how simple it is. Maybe while I’m seated, I talked about the problem and then I stood up and I maybe talked about the solution or I’m in the middle of the story, whatever it is. It doesn’t even matter what I was saying if all eyes were on me, because they were looking for me. It’s like you watched a movie and you see a commercial for Sprite and they crack open the bottle and they pour it over the ice and it crackles and all of a sudden you’re dying of thirst. You didn’t know you were thirsty until you saw that. They didn’t know they were thirsty to hear me, until I made it hard for them to hear and see me.

Marylou: Exactly.

Tsufit: Then I stand up. That’s one device that creates drama. Another one is in the middle of talking to someone, I’m talking and I’m talking at this phase and all of a sudden I’m quiet for a seconds.

Marylou: Silence.

Tsufit: There’s a pause, there’s a silence. That became dramatic. Humor creates attention and stories like we said. Don’t do silly things. I occasionally sing something because I’m a singer but people who aren’t, they sing a silly little thing. I saw a realtor, she stood up and help up her realtor sign. There’s one guy, I think he’s also a realtor, he made a hat out of his business cards. To me like, hokey, silly. It might get you noticed but at what cause? Is that gonna make me hire you as a realtor, not so much.

You have to be careful what you do to get noticed, but there are really so many little tricks. The other little device that I used when I’m speaking, usually longer than 30 seconds, but I could have done this in 30 seconds. I’ll tell them to pull out a piece of paper and a pencil or a pen to write down what I’m about to say because it’s really important.

I’ll ask them what are the three Ds of marketing, let’s say. I’ll give them a second to scramble for their pen or pencil or their computer, whatever they’re gonna write this down on. When I tell them to, 90% of the people do scramble for a paper and a pen because they think that this is like the ten commandments, it’s gonna be so profound that it should be sketched onto a tablet. Once they have the pen, I’ve already made what I’m about to say more important because they’re poised with this thing.

Then I’ll ask them, “What’s the first D of speaking in public?” I’ll let them answer. One or two will say, “Good delivery,” that starts with a D. Or, “Be dynamic.” That starts with a D. I’ll joke off and say, “Yeah, those are good guesses, absolutely wrong.” Or make some joke, I get them to laugh. Then I’ll say, “You know what? The number one D, write this down guys, is don’t bore them.” Everybody writes it down, writes it down, writes it down. It’s so profound what I just said. Why is it so profound, Marylou? Because I created drama around saying it.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: If I had just gone straight and said it and not told them to write it down and not told them to get a pencil, they’d say, “Yeah, yeah, I know that.” Like, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know, that’s number one. Then I say, “Okay guys, what’s the second D of opening your mouth in public?” I’ll create another silence while they think and somebody else will throw out something, be dynamic or good delivery, whatever else they say. I’ll say, “Yeah, okay. I’ll say the second one is don’t bore them, and then number three is for god sakes, don’t bore them.” Then right away because of the rhythm in which I said it, the first one I said slowly, the second one I paused, and then the third one is I say it right away and I say it quickly and I say it with emphasis.

Again, I’m varying how I’m speaking. You can vary the volume, you can vary the speed. What I did was a trick, repetition, I could use literation, there’s so many of these. But the one thing that you have to keep in mind is you have to know your character before you step onto the stage. I know that my persona, when I’m in public, is with a lot of humor, irreverent, sometimes I’ll hold myself a little bit high. People take it because I use the humor but if I didn’t use the humor they’d just think, “Oh she’s full of herself.” But with humor people accept it.

Marylou: Right. Right.

Tsufit: You have to figure out what it is for you. You brought up a good point about “stuffy corporations.” That’s exactly what I say when I started networking. They’re not always so stuffy, they just think that you’re supposed to be that way but they don’t know any other way. If somebody eats broccoli everyday and they’ve never tasted ice cream, they don’t know that there are other foods there other than broccoli.

If you show them a taste of that and how you can still get business, the reason it worked, if I just went there and was a comedian and they all laughed and it didn’t result in anything, they’d say, “Yeah, she’s amusing but we’ve got to get serious, we got to get business.” But when they started seeing the line up to hire me or to speak to me or to invite me to speak and they saw that I was getting clients, then they had to take it seriously.

Marylou: Definitely.

Tsufit: The same thing in corporations.

Marylou: Such a great point on the tonality and varying speed, varying the way that you present your information. We have to rely a lot on the telephone for those first conversations. It’s not the words necessarily but it is the tone that gets us further into the pipeline and having further conversations with whoever we’re trying to influence or target or move through. That’s another area that I think we tend to be a little bit automaton, our delivery of how we speak to people on the phone and other one of those triggers.

Tsufit: Yeah. Let me tell you a secret, Marylou. What I just did, let me tell a you a secret. That’s a good line. Because the minute after I say let me tell you a secret or let me tell you a story. The minute somebody says let’s me tell you a story, they all of a sudden stop Facebooking somebody while they’re talking to you because they know they have to give you full concentration because it’s gonna be a story or it’s gonna be a secret or whatever.

The secret, there really is one. Robert Cialdini who wrote Influence and a bunch of other books and teaches about influence and what makes people pay attention wrote that a waitress can get a bigger tip if let’s say at the end when the waitress brings you the bill and she brings two little candies on the bill. Then she starts to walk away. There’s versions of this you can do on the phone but this is the example he used. She starts to walk away and then halfway while she’s gone, she turns back and she slips you two more candies.

If you do that according to Cialdini, your tip will be higher than if you don’t do that. It will be higher than if you left them four in the first place. It’s not about that you gave them four candies. It’s about that you gave them something extra, you gave them a special treat, you gave them special attention. The question for your listeners is if you’re doing most of your stuff on the phone or you’re prospecting on the phone or whatever, how can you do the two plus two candies instead of just two upfront or four upfront?

People try to overload with value or show them how good you are or to give them all four upfront. The four upfront aren’t as effective as two, “You know what? I’ll flip you two more. Don’t tell anybody.” You have to have integrity too. If everybody knows that it’s two and two more and don’t tell anybody, then you’ll get a reputation. You have to be cautious about having a bottom line. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be creative about making people feel that they’re special.

Marylou: Be authentically you in the process.

Tsufit: Be authentically you, yeah.

Marylou: The book is still on Amazon, Step Into The Spotlight, A Guide To Getting Noticed. I noticed a while ago, I don’t want to put you on the spot here. But a while ago, you had a free tips series that if my folks wanted to subscribe to your list, is that still available?

Tsufit: For you? For anybody else. But for Marylou’s listeners? Alright, yes. Go to www.spotlightsecrets.com, do it right now while you’re listening to the podcast. Marylou won’t mind, www.spotlightsecrets.com, put in your name and email. A second form will pop up because in Canada we have very stringent anti spam rules. A second form is going to ask you to give permission and also your country, enter a second time and you will be on the list.

I’ll tell you about that in a minute but the list started out to be a shortlist and people demanded more. Now, there’s ton of great stuff in there.

Marylou: I take lessons from this podcast for my troops for sure are to practice, because I say practice makes predictable. They all know it’s good to practice everything that we’re learning and doing and executing so that we can feel more comfortable, more natural on the phone. But these tips would be great because I think if we could sit down and write our hundred openers and have those, we would be so good at that initial call and get those butterflies out of the stomach and talk to the CEOs or those C-Suite people or whoever and get them engaged. That’s what it’s all about. We have something really important and good for our prospects that are just gonna transform their lives. Let’s open up that conversation in a way that gets them excited about it.

Tsufit: That’s exactly right. Even though these tips were initially made more for entrepreneurs in a live setting with the larger audience, you can definitely take those principles and adapt them exactly to the situation that you’re talking about and use some really to draw people in. Yeah, definitely check out that spot by Secret Series.

If you go to spotlightbook.com it will take you straight to the right place. In Amazon, where there’s even more tips about how to do that. I totally agree with what you said Marylou, it’s different way of saying what I’m saying earlier. A lot of people think that if you rehearse, if you practice, that you’re gonna sound robotic.

Marylou: Right.

Tsufit: It is possible to sound robotic, I’ve been in a networking meeting where you’re at the scrambled eggs table and you ask somebody, “What do you do?” They start spouting out this canned 30 seconds. You don’t want to be doing that. If you’re meeting people one on one or speaking to them one on one, it should just be a short little one liner maybe and then get them to talk first. Then once they said something, you can gear what you’re gonna say directly back to them. But you’ll still get some great ideas about the tactics and methods and triggers and all the things that we’ve been talking about today, humor, and just dynamic delicious devices to keep the people that you’re speaking to interested.

The other thing I would say, I’m sure a lot of your listeners make outgoing sales calls. The other thing you want to focus on at some point is changing, flipping that around a little bit so that the calls are more incoming than outgoing. What can you do to become visible, incredible in the market place so that people actively seek you out rather than you having to chase them. There are many, many ways to do that from speaking to writing a book–many, many ways to do that. But once people are coming to you, they’re more or less presold. You still have to make the sale but it changes the dynamic a lot. Some of the tips in the Spotlight Secrets can help you to flip that around so that they’re approaching you.

Marylou: Which is wonderful. I think we’re leveraging and using multiple levers, outreach is one, also referral engines are important to us. Warming up our clients that we’re gonna be asking them for referrals later on in our engagement together. Then inbound of course, it’s all related but we really need to master initially that cold to warm conversation to get people excited about who we are, why we matter, why this should change, why us and why now. Thank you so much.

Tsufit: That’s true, Marylou. I don’t make outgoing cold calls but the one area where I would do it is media. I don’t do it anymore really, but when I was starting, that’s an area of work because I wanted the inbound from the other people. I had to get influencers and media to put the word out, those calls were cold. All the devices that we talked about in the Spotlight Secrets can help you do that. If it can help you do that, it can definitely help with what you’re describing as well.

Marylou: Exactly, those multiple channels on the phone, email, direct mail even and then now video. Catching up to being speakers on video just to a mass level.

Tsufit: You are. Interesting you talk about email because when I was getting endorsements for Step Into The Spotlight book, I’m really blessed to have had some big heavyweight marketing and speaking endorsers and publicity. Generally, I was most comfortable on the phone because speaking is the most natural to me. I try to do that, but some people are just not reachable on the phone.

One of my endorsers, I got with a really well crafted email. It was doing all the things that we’ve talked about today and all the things that are covered in the Spotlight Secrets. It was using a joke. I had read the first few pages of his book and made some joke about something he said in his book. You know what the reply to my email was? It was the endorsement. He already gave me the endorsement right on the spot. You can absolutely do this on the multiple channels that Marylou has described

Marylou: Awesome, our time is up but I want to make sure that everyone knows where to go. I’m gonna put all the links of Tsufit’s page along with her bio. She has online classes. For those of you who are thinking, “I’m taking this to the next level.” I will make sure all her contact information is there so that you can start mastering–this piece in the funnel for us is the key that unlocks that door to more revenue.

Tsufit: Can I just mention one more thing, Marylou, if it’s alright?

Marylou: Of course.

Tsufit: I would like to cordially invite you, Marylou, and all your listeners to come join my Step Into The Spotlight community on LinkedIn. We have over 7,000 or 7,100 entrepreneurs, influencers, podcastors, media, professionals, and CEOs in that group. When you look at the list, you’ll be blown away about who’s in there, New York Times best selling authors. Go to spotlightgroup.biz and request to join. If I like you, I’ll accept you.  

Marylou: I love it.

Tsufit: Tell me Marylou sent you.

Marylou: Thank you again for your time. This is wonderful information. Everybody go out and get that book, it’s a wonderful book. I have a signed copy in my library. I’m very pleased about that. Thanks again, loved to have you on the show.

Tsufit: My pleasure, thank you for having me.

It’s important for prospectors to understand the entire funnel, not just the top and middle of the funnel. Today’s guest has a breadth of knowledge for the entire funnel and a particular focus on frontline sales, leadership, and managers.

Dave A. Brock is the CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a California-based consulting organization that focuses on helping clients develop and execute business, sales, marketing, customer service, and new product strategies. Dave is also the author of Sales Manager Survival Guide. Listen to the episode to hear what David has to say about frontline sales.

Episode Highlights:

• How Dave got started in the area of sales performance
• How too many apps and tools can be detrimental to sales performance
• Why the sales manager needs to be part of the plan when implementing a new tool
• A sales manager’s role, and how that can be leveraged to maximize the performance of each sales person.
• The qualities that make a great sales manager
• The importance of determining a process that works before bringing in automation tools
• Why it’s necessary to focus on fundamentals and the ideal customer profile
• Dave’s new book, Sales Executive Survival Guide, coming out in May

Resources:

David Brock

Dave on Twitter

Partners in EXCELLENCE

Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog

Sales Manager Survival Guide: Lessons From Sales’ Front Lines

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is really focused on frontline sales, leadership, managers. We don’t talk a lot about that in our podcast but it’s a very important topic. I’ve asked Dave Brock, who’s the CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE out in California. He’s the author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide. Look on Amazon, you can find that book, released in May 2016.

I’ve asked Dave to come on the show today because I really think what he has to say about this topic is of vital importance to all of us, especially if we’re looking at leading teams towards excellence in prospecting, closing, servicing.

My area is top of funnel, middle of funnel, prospecting, but Dave has a breadth of knowledge for the entire funnel so that if you want to go past opportunity, he’s definitely the guy to talk to. Welcome to the podcast, Dave.

Dave: Thanks, Marylou. I really appreciate being invited.

Marylou: Yeah. Besides being in beautiful sunny Southern California, what exactly got you interested in this particular piece of the puzzle for sales performance?

Dave: We’ve been working with a department of very large sales organizations for 20 years. As we started looking recently at things, we see, not only our clients, but we see organizations all around making huge investments and things like sales tools, sales training, sales enablement, marketing content, all of those kinds of things, yet the results aren’t coming to. We see year over year declines in sales people meeting goal, or in organizations meeting goal, and huge challenges in turnovers in sales organizations that we were trying to save [inaudible 00:06:28]. What’s not working? What’s missing in this whole thing? It turns out, at least according to what we believed, the missing link is department sales manager and the frontline sales manager working with their people on a day-to-day basis to maximize their performance.

Marylou: Let’s start there. I know that my audience–there’s a lot of tech people and tech community that they talk about the stock a lot and how that is supposed to take some of the burden off of having to do things manually over and over again and putting them into an automated environment.

But you’re right, what is that gap? Where is the missing link? In your discoveries, where would you begin to even diagnosing where the problems lie? If we can take top of funnel, that would be great, but if you wanna talk about any area in the funnel that you can see immediate wins or instant gratification of making changes, we can focus on that as well.

Dave: I think part of it, whatever part of the funnel you wanna address, if we look at top of funnel is, we innundate our sales people with all sorts of tools, with all sorts of content, with all sorts of programs, and scripts, and so on, to reach out to customers and prospects to try and engage them. But we kind of do that in isolation. We do that in just tossing a whole bunch of stuff at them by inundating them with it.

You find people are confused–what do I do? How do I do it? What’s the most effective? And so on and so forth, and they don’t really have any place to turn to get help on that. We find that into some degree we’re really loving our sales people to death.

I was meeting with a global 25 technology company the other day and they proudly proclaimed their sales stack is 19 apps. Think about it, think about the poor sales person that had 19 apps to think about, which app do they use, how do they manage the overlap and how they manage to be productive.

All of this is done in a good spirited way if we wanna help our sales people. We wanna help our sales people to be productive, we wanna help them perform, but again, it’s how do I, as a sales person, put that into context. What should I be doing? How do I actually perform and execute on a day-to-day basis? We leave them alone expecting that they’ll be able to use these tools and find the secret spots to close our qualifying business and closing them.

The sales manager is noticeably absent in this thing because we forgot the sales manager. We don’t make the sales manager part of our plan when we’re implementing a new tool, when we’re implementing a new training program, when we’re implementing a new marketing program, we don’t make the sales manager accountable and give them the tools to coach and develop their people about how to use these things, and how they can use these things to maximize their performance, or how they diagnose what they’re doing to improve their performance.

Marylou: 19 apps sounds just audacious. It just sounds like it would be very difficult. I’m thinking of coming out 1-2 years in sales, you come into a company, just top of funnel, you may not be as seasoned and you’re given these apps. Yes, it’s like spaghetti, you’re trying to figure out what to use, when to use it, and what case should you do one over the other. That’s just the usage and the user interface of the tool.

Tell us more about the sales manager. You said they’re not involved in the selection necessarily, they’re not involved in how to assemble, activate, or optimize. How do we correct that? Where do we start?

Dave: I think one of the things is you gotta recognize that the key individual in maximizing the performance of frontline sales people is their manager. All this stuff that we afflict on sales people regardless of whether it’s programs, content, training tools, or all those things, aren’t going to have the impact unless the sales manager is engaged in that process in helping show, in helping coach, in helping the sales person learn how to use this in the most productive way possible.

The sales manager–here I think a lot of the sales managers are confused about what their role is. We may have some of the wrong people in place as sales managers but the sales manager’s job is to maximize the performance of each person on the team. You do that through helping provide some of these tools and productivity games, but then coaching them on how to make that work with their customers, with their prospects, and the challenges they face everyday, and we aren’t doing that. It’s, I think, only been a recognition in the last 2-3 years that probably the biggest missing link is enabling the sales manager and getting them to step up to maximizing performance.

As an example, I was just on a call with another organization, we spend somewhere probably around $6-$7 billion a year in North America on sales training focused on the frontline sales person. We probably spend somewhere around $300-$400 million a year on sales manager training, giving them the tools, the skills, the capabilities to help their sales people. When you see this kind of disconnect, it jumps out at you that something’s missing in this equation and leveraging the sales manager to drive performance is I think one of the critical missing links.

Marylou: What about the situation that I seem to see a lot in that, we promote our high performers into management and they become a lead, and that’s a status, the symbol that they have essentially grown from one of the team members to actually the leader, that doesn’t mean they have leadership experience in order to do on a group level what they’ve done on an individual level.

There’s also an implied acceptance that the tool itself is self-training. The tool itself should be able to guide you with or without support as to when you should use it, how you should use it, how to maximize your return on effort. There’s an understanding when you buy a tool or when you’re working with the tool that there’s implied training in the tool itself. Is that the major reason why we forget about the sales manager, or is it a cultural thing, or is it a historical thing that we’ve been brought up to say, “Hey, if you’re great in sales, you’re gonna be a great manager, by definition”?

Dave: You’re really addressing a couple of several different issues, let’s peel them back.

Marylou: Okay.

Dave: One is, too often we take our very, very best sales person and we anoint them as sales managers. What we’ve done is we’ve created a double whammy. We’ve lost our very best sales person and we put them them on to a manager role.

Just because they’re great sales people, doesn’t make them great sales managers. We have to be very smart about what it takes to be a great sales manager. We have to understand what are the skills, competency, what are the behaviors, what are the attitudes that we need in great sales management, and who is the person that demonstrates those capabilities and move those people to sales management?

It may be one of your great salespeople who has those capabilities and has the desire and drive to recognize my job is different. My job is getting things done through people and not doing things for people, or being a super salesperson, or super closer, and so on and so forth.

It’s incumbent on senior sales leaders to say, just as we say this for our frontline sales people, what are the skills, attitudes, behaviors, competencies, experiences, and so forth, that make a great sales person in this role, likewise we have to do that, develop that ideal picture of frontline sales manager to say this is what a great sales manager is who matches those best and put those people in place.

Second, we have to be very clear about what their job is. I talk to a lot of frontline sales managers and they say, “What’s the job?” They say, “My job is to make the numbers.” Actually that’s not their job, it’s their sales people’s job to make the numbers. The sales manager is in place to remove all the barriers and to do the things to enable those of their sales people to make the numbers. That’s where we’re providing the tools, providing the programs, providing the coaching, and providing the leadership and guidance to help them, to help the sales people perform at the highest level. That addresses the, “are we putting the right people in place? Are we being clear about their role and our expectations of them and how they maximize the performance of the team?”

Second place is the tools being self-teaching. I think that’s wishful thinking. I think too often we provide tools as an excuse that we’re on a quest to find that silver bullet, that magical solution that enables us automatically to–if we implement this solution automatically, customers will pick up the phones and respond to us. They’ll be engaged, we’ll be able to qualify them and move them forward. We’ve abandoned our lost sight of a lot of the fundamental principles and the hard work, that is what selling is about. Rather than looking at tools to help facilitate that and showing people how these tools help facilitate those basic principles of selling, we’re just engaging in wishful thinking. Most of the analysis that we do is we look at are you getting the return on investment of the tools that you’re investing in? And you are.

Marylou: That’s interesting. Yeah, I liken this to–I’m a software developer–when we’re building products, we’d look at that very thing. We don’t look at the tool first, we look at the business use case, the business rules, and then, only then do we select the tool to fit the business.

I think a lot of what I’m seeing and I know a lot of what I’m seeing out there is that we’re buying tools, buying tools, buying tools, creating this stack of tools, and it’s not necessarily fitting with the sales process that we ultimately need to put in in order to generate predictable revenue. Also, as you said, we’re relying on these tools to do the salesmanship for us instead of us sitting back and really understanding how we communicate with our buyers at the various stages in the funnel in order to be able to move that person through the active pipeline in respect to the tool.

It’s the whole process of how do we engage them, when do we engage them, what do we say, how do we say it, how do we overcome objections. Then and only then, once you figured out that process, do you then look at tools to help you automate those activities where it makes sense, as opposed to what I’m seeing now is we’re trying to automate everything so that even the dialogue is done by the tool. We’re bluebirds taking orders, it just doesn’t work that way.

Dave: To a large degree, we’re using the tools and the technology to dumb down the sales organization. We’re losing the ability for sales people to figure things out. The real irony is every customer situation, every person that I talk to is different. They’re different from conversation to conversation to conversation. I have to be able to, as a sales person, to be nimble and adapt what I’m doing to try and figure things out to get the customer to respond to me to be able to help move them to their buying process, and so on and so forth.

The ability to figure things out, the ability to think critically is vital to our success, yet so much of what we’re doing in our tools and programs is to eliminate that and just say that the tool will do it for you. There’s a great misunderstanding about AI, even analytics technology, what it can and can’t do for you, how you do that. We’re becoming increasingly dependent on tools to displace that intelligence of the sales person and we’re not seeing the results.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago that says, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” Unfortunately, we’re developing a lot of tools in frontline sales people and making them execute that at the speed of light the tools.

Marylou: I’m sitting here, I’m sure the audience is sitting here thinking, okay, what are the markers? From a level of awareness, I know there’s a problem because we’re still not making quota. I know there’s a problem because we’re chunking through a lot of records and stuff isn’t happening.

How do I sit here and say, okay, what are the 3-4 markers that I know that I could point to we have this issue with our managers, or we have this issue with our training? Is there a method, a process, a system that you go through with clients to ascertain where these gaps are and the severity of the gaps? Because right now, it looks like one big gigantic cloud of a mess. How do you chunk that down into these five things, or these three things, or something we can watch over the next month, six weeks, quarter, regardless of the tool to see if we’re gonna need help with this or that we really need to focus on this next thing?

Dave: I think there are a number of approaches to that and not all are necessarily leading to sales management. I think we have to really focus on some basic fundamentals and we have to have the courage to do as leaders to be able to make some decisions around those fundamental [inaudible 00:23:37] fundamentals.

For instance, what are the problems we’re the best in the world at solving and who has those problems? Focusing viciously on those people. We can talk a lot about ideal customer profile and so on and so forth, but too often these days I find that we’re consumed by volume and velocity, and sales people to fill the top of the funnel start casting a wider and wider net, they get outside of their ICP. They’re calling people aimlessly who they have no business talking about so they’re wasting huge amounts of time, huge amounts of resource generating, huge amounts of ill will and not producing results.

Often, what we find is rather than casting a wider net, you become tougher, you focus more on disqualification, you become tougher and focusing on the narrow and narrow part of your ICP and produce far better results. We need to be much more thoughtful about it, and much more focused on really the fundamentals, and again part of that is what are the problems we’re the best in the world at solving and who has those problems, focusing on those and nobody else.

Then providing our people the training, the content, and the tools to be able to engage those people in meaningful and impactful ways, whether that’s again training your tools or programs that we do, or the sales manager working with them on a day-to-day basis. What you’re doing is producing the outcomes we expect, how do we change that, how do we improve that? Those kinds of things. It’s working in collaborative problem solving to drive performance.

As we start seeing indicators, I think we start seeing how in trying to drive performance we inflict all sorts of damage on sales people all in the spirit of helping them. We worked with last year, a very, very large organization, probably a global 50 organization and worked with their sales people. They have so many tools, so many programs, and so on and so forth, but we started seeing sales people had 9% [inaudible 00:26:10] for selling and start wondering what’s the other 91% of the time being spent on and the things spent on doing all these things internally?

Another large telecommunications organization, we found 72% voluntary attrition in the first year of being hired in the organization. That was costing them with my estimates is about $1.7 billion a year of revenue. The problem was the people couldn’t figure out how to be successful, they weren’t getting them right management correction, they weren’t getting right leadership, they weren’t being provided the tools that they needed to figure out how to be successful. We have to be attentive to some of those signals of are we overwhelming and overloading the people? Are we allowing them to be distracted with these tools and these devices rather than doing their job? Are we loving them to death by providing them too many programs and eliminating their ability to think critically to figure things out?

The best thing is we can’t provide all the answers to people but we seem to be on the path of trying to do that in the best way to improve performance is give them the ability to think and figure things out. Hiring the right people, coaching and getting them to think differently about whether it’s prospecting, whether it’s how they move a deal through the pipeline, and so on and so forth.

Marylou: Yeah, it’s funny. We call it sales enablement but we are becoming an enabling organization of people where we are really trying to give them everything at their fingertips so they don’t have to think, don’t make me think, that’s a disservice.

Dave: Yeah.

Marylou: I really think, for those of you who are listening, Dave’s book, Sales Managers Survival Guide: Lessons from Sales’ Frontlines is a great book to pick up. Inside of the book he’s got a lot of different ways that you can slice and dice where you are now, descriptively defining where you are today, where you wanna go, and then also prescriptively what you have in place that you need to help, to move, or change, or upgrade, or get rid of in a lot of cases in order to create the organization you’re looking to have.

Let’s switch gears a bit because I wouldn’t wanna leave without talking about the new book that you have coming out. Could you tell us a little bit about that? What was the reason for writing that book?

Dave: Yeah, in late May, Sales Executive Survival Guide will come out. I wrote Sales Manager Survival Guide really to address the frontline sales manager and really to help the frontline sales manager learn how to maximize the performance of individuals on their teams and their teams themselves.

I wrote Sales Executive Survival Guide primarily focused on top sales leaders to really look at the issues of how do we maximize the performance of the organization, of the sales function in our organizations. That really takes a broader look at things, of these issues of complexity and overwhelm of these things, of what’s the culture that we need to put in. We’re starting to seek talent. Talent management is being one of the critical issues facing sales organizations and sales performance. We’re starting to see the issue of complexity both at an organizational level and at an individual level becoming dysfunctional in the organization.

How do we start addressing that? How do we look at the desperate pieces, parts of the function of selling and start bringing them together to drive performance and performance excellence across the entire organization? They’re really complementary pieces.

The frontline Sales Managers Survival Guide book is on individuals and teams, Sales Executive Survival Guide book is on organizational excellence.

Marylou: Okay. You mentioned a couple of times the size of the companies that you work with, should, would, could a startup, someone who’s essentially starting with a product or service, maybe $5 million in revenue a year, would this also be a good time to look at these types of things that you specialize in? Or is it you need a couple of years under your belt, a little bit more revenue coming in to start correcting things?

Dave: Absolutely. My background was with very large corporations, our heritage was larger corporations. But as those executives went and became CEOs of startups and other companies, as we started working real closely with the venture and private equity communities, we do the huge amount in startups and there’s no better time to start putting in place the right culture, the right discipline, the right kind of thinking about how we engage our customers, and how we drive productivities through our organizations, than when you’re starting.

Marylou: Get out of the tool craze, folks, and really look at, holistically, the sales environment that you’re in, as David mentioned multiple times, the SWAT type of analysis of who you serve, why you matter, why should they change, why now? Really narrowing the segments of potential clients that you can go after so that your net shrinks in size but has more quality. Since you’re not turning over a lot of records when this is happening, tools become less and less the focal point.

As Dave mentioned before about just sending tons of messages to people that are in some ways a disrespectful way of hitting their inbox and focusing on taking those hundreds of messages you’re sending out a week and narrowing that down, it’s probably gonna be one of the first areas that I would guess that you will look at in order to be able to create a more holistic machine that is predictable in nature that allows you to have quality conversations with your intended prospects.

Dave, thank you so much for your time today. How can we get a hold of you to learn more about your work and also to get an understanding of your theories and your philosophies on this topic?

Dave: You can look me up and connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s Dave Brock, just search Dave Brock. I’m on Twitter, I’m @davidabrock, best way to get an idea of what we think. Also connect with me to my blog, partnersinexcellenceblog.com or through email at dabrock@excellence.com.

Marylou: I’ll put all these links on the show page for you guys so that you can be able to just click through and start learning about what Dave has done and his team. Again, the book, it’s a must read for those of you who are in management, thinking about going into management, you’re gonna be advancing into management or just managing teams, the Sales Managers Final Guide: Lessons from Sales Frontlines. Thank you again, David, for your time.

Dave: Thank you, Marylou.

Being an entrepreneur doesn’t always stop with creating one successful business. Some entrepreneurs make a business out of creating different businesses. Today’s guest is a serial entrepreneur that creates businesses and sells them.

Mansour Salame is an engineer by training, and he is currently the CEO and founder of a company called FrontSpin. However, Mansour says that he doesn’t think of himself as an engineer or a salesperson so much as he thinks of himself as a person who can find value for customers and clients. Listen in to this interesting interview to hear Mansour’s insights about growth and scaling. 

Episode Highlights: 

• Mansour’s first job out of college as a project manager, and how that led to his introduction to sales and startups
• The importance of understanding a client’s needs in detail
• How to put a process in place that you can scale to the level of growth that you’re at
• How process can be divided into two categories: search mode and scaling mode
• How Mansour is scaling processes at his current company now
• The importance of improving and tweaking the process to make it more successful, even when in scaling mode
• Why considering the customer’s process is necessary when creating your own processes
• How measuring metrics and benchmarks fit into both search and scaling modes
• How scaling without first figuring out the process can lead to low morale and other problems
• How sales messaging needs to change as you scale
• How a trend toward personalization affects production and scalability

Resources:

Mansour Salame

FrontSpin

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guests is very well known in the Silicon Valley area, he’s one of those, I guess just things he touches turn to gold all the time, his name is Mansour Salame. He is the CEO and founder of a company called FrontSpin. Some of you may not have heard of FrontSpin but I think you’ll soon be hearing a lot more about them because they have a really nice solution that’s built on the platform that I’m comfortable with and that I think is really foundational which is the telephone. We’ll talk about that later, I wanted to introduce Mansour to you and we’re going to talk about topics that are relevant for growth and relevant for scaling which is what all of you want to do. Welcome to the podcast, Mansour.

Mansour: Thank you, Marylou.

Marylou: Tell us about, first of all, you’re an engineer obviously, must be, and you came up to the ranks of engineering. How did you become now a serial entrepreneur who creates companies and sells them?

Mansour: Right, that’s a good question. A lot of people find it unusual. For me, it was a haphazard happening. Like you said, I was an engineer by training. It was actually my first job out of school. I was a project manager for a company called at the time Andersen Consulting and is now called Accenture. I was managing a project where I was implementing a technology for a large Fortune 500, Fortune actually 100 bank in the contact center. That technology was developed by a company out of Silicon Valley called Genesis. That’s how I first ran into, I would say, a startup.

Genesis convinced me to leave Accenture and join them as a project manager, they had a lot of projects. I was always trying to do the right thing by the client. They staffed me out actually on the first project at Wells-Fargo. We implemented this successful project to them and then they gave us an order for five times initial order that Genesis had. Genesis looked at me and said, “Okay, maybe you want to do something else other than project management?” Speaking French, they sent me overseas, and I started the Southern European office for Genesis, we ended up going public.

But I never really thought of myself as a sales person or engineer. I always thought of somebody who could find a solution that is valuable for a prospect, for a customer. I guess that’s the sales approach I would say that an engineer would have. That’s in short how I end up “introduced” to sales. We end up growing the Southern European offices, we end up going public. It ended up being the next, outside of the US, was the largest office that Genesis had.

Marylou: You’ve always had that flair, that unique combination of being very technical, understanding the bits and bites of things, and really getting under the skin of the client of what their need are and then translating that into, okay, this is an opportunity from sales marketing perspective that we can utilize to get more business.

Mansour: Right. It actually even translates more on one-on-one, sitting down with a customer or a prospect, understanding their requirements, understanding their challenges and solving those problems. Because at the end of the day, I think the best customers you have are the customers that after you solved their problem, they’re obviously delighted in using your product or the service you sold them. I’ve always approached it as let’s understand how can we add value to that customer, almost from an engineering or product perspective, how can we add value to this customer. Sometimes, the product is not a fit and just move on. But a lot of times, you can add a lot of value. That’s the approach.

Marylou: You’re coming from a process background. I really identify with that because of the work that I do. I’m also an engineer, software engineering though, I have a computer science degree. But I’ve always looked at sales as one big problem, a puzzle to solve and I like to apply process to things. I used to say this to my team, whenever we have to do something more than once, chances are, it can be programmed.

Mansour: Right.

Marylou: There’s a process behind it. Process is, for me, that overarching methodology that I really like to put into place. We were talking offline and I think the topic for today, that would be very interesting because I’ve just had a conversation with a colleague who went through this process of starting with a number of folks on his sales team, the product took off and then he had to scale very quickly, and they were finding that there was a lot of stuff that was broken in the process that they had. Thought was the wonderful process for a smaller team, but as they started growing and adding more people. more divisions, and then they went global, it just all kind of fell apart.

Luckily, he had a good sense to hire people who are self-directed and really helped by fixing some of these things. Could you talk to us today about process and how process is utilized? When you have to really look at it at certain areas or certain levels of growth and how that affects how well the process is run.

Mansour: Right. That’s a very good topic, Marylou. The way I look at process is in two buckets. I put in everything, it’s not just in sales or the sales process but it’s also the engineering process, the product process, it’s also a little bit of the marketing messaging which is also very important and it plays a lot into the sales process.

Two buckets are you’re either in a search mode or you’re in a scaling mode. When a startup, what we talked, this is my third startup. If you take a look at the beginning of last year, we were more in a search mode. We’re trying to find what is the right prospect, what is the right feature set, what is the right approach, what are the right value propositions that we match with prospects, we’re more in a search mode. The process had to have some volumes so we can validate some of those metrics. But it didn’t make sense to have 100 people in a room scaling it because if you are still in a search mode, and you try to over scale a process, you will end up scaling the wrong thing. Because by definition, when you’re in search mode, you don’t have something that works.

And then there’s the other aspect. Once you have a process that works well, then, you want to scale it as much as possible to get value out of the process, or if it’s a process that doesn’t need scaling, you want to make it as efficient and automated as possible. There’s these two buckets that I put things in; are we in scaling mode or are we in search mode? It’s never a black and white, at every stage, you go from one to the other, that’s I think a good framework of how we think about different processes.

For example, right now, we are scaling some processes, we’re actually increasing our sales team and increasing our SDRs. We’re actually adding a number of SDRs starting actually at the end of the month. That’s very exciting for us but that’s after we validated some of the process of prospecting and some of the process of qualifying and the messaging we validated.

What I think a lot of people do, not unlike the story you mentioned with your friend who ended up scaling. A lot of people ended up scaling maybe with a process that’s not fully figured it out.

Marylou: Exactly. I can remember sitting in a boardroom up in Seattle when I was working at the startup. The board picked what seemingly was and turned out to be a very arbitrary number of votes, 3X. We’re gonna go from $3 million to $9 million, or whatever that number was. I can’t remember the actual dollar value, but there were no basis for that, and of course the VP of sales bought into it saying, “Sure. We can do that. We just need to add more whatever, sales reps, AEs, servicing.” But you’re right, and it was a monumental, worst case scenario. Never met the numbers for each of the quarters because at the beginning of this whole process, we were probably still in search mode. We didn’t have the ability to really consolidate a process that was predictable and consistent so that we can scale.

Mansour: That’s very true and if you take a look at the processes, some processes had room and some reach capacity. For example, in my previous company, Contactual was acquired by 8×8 a couple of years ago. They had a number of different processes but they had reached capacity on the SMB, so they built this process and that’s it. They couldn’t buy more leads for the SMB. They couldn’t get more lists of target customers to reach. What they did is they built a mid-market team to go after mid-market. That mid-market team had a very different process than the SMB team.

And then now, the mid-market team grew and they went through their own search process and their own scaling process and then now they built an enterprise team. The interesting thing is you never stop searching. You could be maybe on a particularly great market that you have one process, you’ve figured it out, and for 50 years you keep scaling it but that’s usually not what happens.

Typically, what happens is you find a process occurs per segment, you scale that and then you look for the next segment. The segment could be either vertical or it could be also a size of a company. For instance, right now, what we have here at FrontSpin, we have, if you will, two segments. We have one which is more the segments that we can sell remotely and implement remotely. We have more of the enterprise which are larger customers or 100 seats and above or 100 customers and above, where we have to address their requirement, and their buyers journey in a very different way than the smaller guys which are much more cookie cutter. We are aware of that. We filter out the larger ones so it doesn’t slow down the velocity of, I would say, our bread and butter today which is more of the 100 and below customers.

Marylou: You mentioned within the two buckets, the search bucket and scaling bucket, there are certain parameters or categories that you like to look at. You mentioned that there’s a marketing and sales component, there’s the actual sales conversation itself, there’s developing unique selling propositions by product and probably by prospect. How do you go about defining what these things are and when you’re in search mode, are the same things looked at in scaling mode? Are you adding more things as you move into scale mode and newer processes as you move?

Mansour: Yes, for me you always are improving and tweaking the process, even when you’re in scale mode. In scale mode, it’s usually like more than half of the process is nailed down but you always want to improve things. And then at that point is when you spawn off different targets or different verticals you’re gonna go after or different markets.

But if you take a look at during the search mode is usually when you validate the vast majority of the messaging, let’s do different pricing. Should we do a transaction-based pricing? Should we do a fixed monthly fee pricing? Those are the kind of things that you validate, in my opinion, in a search mode. Typically, what happens is you will tweak them as you scale because you’ll see things that you didn’t see necessarily at the volume of search but you will have, I would say, most of the framework there.

What happens, this is important, that even if you go into scaling mode, that you always have one person or a couple of people dedicated for searching for the next frontier, whether it’s a different market segment or a different vertical. But one thing is clear is your customers or your prospects will tell you, if you listen hard enough, they will tell you what is the right sales process you should have and what is the value proposition they need. That is what you get out of search mode. Usually at a scaling mode, you don’t. For example, imagine, Marylou, you’ve got a lot of experience especially in call centers, but imagine selling a Fortune 500 and saying, “Oh no, you got put a credit card on the website, that’s the only way you can buy.”

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: That sales process may be great for an SMB, but for a Fortune 500, they’ll say, “Thank you. We don’t even have credit cards.”

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: The same things goes the other way. Imagine if you tell a SMB, “Oh, the only way we can buy is you got to put us through purchasing and you’ve got to give us a purchase order, otherwise we can’t issue an invoice.” And so forth. The whole processes are really the customer’s processes.

I think one of the things that we’ve always had in all the startups I’ve worked with or for, is we always try to focus on what is right for the customer. You engineer the product for the customer, you engineer the sales process for the customer, you engineer the customer support process for the customer after the sale, you engineer the customer feedback. You really are focusing on how can we keep adding value to the customer, so that relationship keeps growing and becoming more and more valuable.

Marylou: The other thing I wanted to ask you about search mode, I’m a big stickler of metrics, of benchmarks to generate consistency in the pipeline before we do anything upscale. Does that fall in here in search mode in some capacity or are you also looking for consistent benchmarks that you could, okay, now, we understand from the buyer’s journey where we should be, we pretty much have a good handle on the sales process and the sales conversation. Now, we need to focus on how consistent is this framework for us and can we fill pipeline more predictably? Is that something that’s also in the search area for you?

Mansour: Absolutely. It’s absolutely in the search area. Typically we have two or three people, if you take a look at sales, we have two to three people in sales and maybe one or two as you also support them, it’s relatively a small team. But basically, what we do is we validate how much does it cost me to generate a lead for them? How much does it cost me to generate the demo? And then, is this really how the customers want to buy? Can we get to a profitable model?

But even in search mode, we are measuring the cost of the demo, the cost of the lead, the cost of a closed deal, the number of deals each rep does. Because before we scale we have to validate that each rep can do, let’s say, four deals or five deals a month, we also validate the average deal size.

We validate all these metrics at a smaller scale and most of the time when you’re in the search mode, you don’t get it but maybe you want one or two months of consistencies if you’re doing what SMB and probably one or two of consistency if you’re dealing with enterprise.

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: But once you have these couple months of consistencies, you’re just replicating what you did. Part of search mode is getting closer to capacity, and then once you’re in capacity, you scale it and then you tweak it obviously, but you scale it.

Marylou: I think this is an area that I’ve seen over and over again that mistakes were being made. There’s just not a consistent amount of leads and opportunities in the pipeline, they’re guessing. It’s more like hope prospecting. That, “Okay, we’ve got enough momentum, so now let’s turn on the switch.” But really it’s doing a disservice by trying to do that. And then you end up hiring all these people when there is no pipeline. It’s a classic problem that still is in our space today and it was in our space in the early 80s when I started. Just now we have more technology to really screw it up.  

Mansour: The anecdote you mentioned about being involved with the startup in Seattle, the Venture Bank startup. A lot of it comes from the venture capital nature of the investment. They want to see, “Okay, you’ve made a few dollars, great, let’s scale it.” You may have made a few dollars with each sale having gone through a different sales process.

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: I’m just picking a number, let’s say like you said $3 million. You could have closed a $100,000 deal, you could have closed a $2 million deal, and $900,000 deal, and each one went through a different sales process. Now, on paper, on the spreadsheet, that might look, “Okay, this is $3 million. Let’s go and make them $9 million,” or whatever number they were asking without understanding the mechanics of it and without understanding how to validate these things.

I’ve been involved with a lot of these issue here and the VCs make the assumption that you figured it out and it’s up to the management to be strong enough to say, “Okay, yeah. We figured out the segments. So this segment, let’s grow it to $3 million and let’s see if there’s still headroom,” because very well you may be able to get leads enough from three to six but from six to nine, you may no longer have leads. Or for management to push back and say, “Look, we’ve done three different types of deals, one is a mid-market, one is an SMB, one is an enterprise. Let’s pick one of them, let’s figure out how we can do five of these or ten of these to make sure each one of these process is repeatable and then we can scale it.” Because there’s no point scaling it.

A lot of times, you scale it without having to figure out the process and also with having a lot of slack on your sales capacity. Their problem is, when you scale and you have a lot slack, it ends up creating very bad morale because the sales reps aren’t meeting target, everybody’s stressed out about it and so forth.

Marylou: Yeah, I think this comes back to our call center background because at the time, call centers, telephony day, you lived and die by the list. There is a lot of painstaking attention paid to what source this lead was from and what it ended up closing as. We had segmentation built in and lived by that for so long. I think when the internet came and you have a free for all of records and email addresses and what have you, there wasn’t that tight of control over the type account.

I mean, even today, when I talk to people about the sources of leads and what’s the mix, they look at me with just this like, “I don’t know.” They don’t know what I’m talking about. “What do you mean by the source of the lead? What do you mean by a mix?” It’s just amazing.

What you just said was, and which was a problem in Seattle, there was a total dollar amount that was generated with no concern about where it came from, how long it took to generate, and whether it was segmented or not. It was just a number that they decided, “Let’s triple it.” You’re right and it still happens today and it’s just amazing to me with all the data tools and just all the apps that we have to have more control over this.

Mansour: It’s the same comment I’ve seen from VCs all over the boardroom. But they seem to focus a lot on sales, maybe a little bit on marketing, more than engineering. They rarely do, they go to engineering and say, “Hey listen, you’ve got to make this thing go 10 times faster.” Or, “You’ve got to do this thing.” It could be because a lot of the startups start with some sort of technology they bring up which is already pretty impressive. They seem to not worry about the profitability, they seem to worry about, “Hey, let’s scale the top line,” and everything will be good without really understanding the mechanics of it.

They are smart enough to understand that they don’t understand the technology most of the cases, they don’t push the engineers but it’s as if they had pushed the engineers to say, “Okay, I need you by next quarter to make it twice as fast.” But if you understand, I mean, you’re a computer scientist, if you understand how hard it is to double the performance of a software program, it’s just as hard to double the performance of sales teams, especially if their process is not there.

Marylou: Right. The cure for us would have been, “Let’s look at the history of what closed. Let’s look at the type of account that closed, the people involved. Do we even have those people in our database?” There wasn’t even any research done on whether we were equipped, so we spent the first quarter trying to get names, because the people that we found closed weren’t necessarily represented in our database.

I just had this, my co-author on the new book, we went to do an immersion program together, we created the ideal prospect persona. Her name was Betty, she was the one who was gonna let us in the door, she was gonna champion our project, they were convinced they had a huge list, they are a publicly held company and there were enough Betties in there to satisfy the team.

We did a search in the database, we did a search on LinkedIn. LinkedIn was 10x the size of what we had in our database. Our database couldn’t feed enough of the people to be able to have these conversations based on our metrics. Little simple things like that just somehow, I don’t know, they’re just getting lost… or not understood but I think with your process of the search and scaling, there’s some checks and balances there, almost like a checklist. You cannot pass go, you cannot collect $200 until you do these three things to make sure that you have statistically relevant sampling of the type of account that is going to help you scale.

Mansour: Absolutely.

Marylou: Basic math.

Mansour: I was an investor in a company that got acquired and they had a great technology but every one of their customers was different. It was almost a custom project for every one of the customers. It was not a repeatable sales process but it wasn’t even a repeatable product. Again, that was hidden and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just different expectation. There’s nothing wrong with having a company that builds system software for people even if they have a kernel of technology and take it from there. There’s a lot of people doing great money this way. It’s just the set of expectations and what you want to achieve.

Marylou: Let’s go back into the search mode. I’m curious about the sales messaging. Have you been able to quantify instant fashion when your sales messaging needs to change in an automated pipeline and how that’s actually done.

What I’m asking is if we breakout the pipeline, initial conversation, they let you in the door and now you’re determining fit, and then from there you’re going into some kind of qualification or disqualification process. I’m assuming that you have sales messaging that’s supporting that conversation. When do you start taking that and tackling that in terms of getting it ready for scale?

Mansour: I think you want to do it and there’s different messaging at the top of the funnel versus I would say in the middle of the funnel. The top of the funnel, you want to position so that people understand the problems you’re solving. I would say more in the the middle of the funnel, when people are comparing you to alternatives, you want to position how different you are and why that’s important for the customer.

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: Especially if you’re going after a given segment with a given persona, why what you do is different than what the other people are. You always have to validate this. I think you have to validate the top of the funnel and then middle of the funnel messaging and these are done very differently. The top of the funnel is how many demos you get, I would say, maybe a metrics measure. However, in the middle of the funnel it’s how many deals you closed versus competitors, for these kind of alternatives and these kind of personas. Those would be I would say the two metrics you measure and those are very different positioning, but you’re always positioning your product in a very different way.

Again, what you’re doing, especially if you’re doing outbound prospecting, you only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention. It’s probably not the right time to position yourself against competitors because they may or may not be looking at the competitors. The important thing on that point is the positioning of what is the problems you solve for that particular persona. Once they’ve engaged with you in the sales cycle, they’ve done a demo, and maybe even before the demo you do some research so you’ve earned the right get feedback from that customer to understand the problems and how your product can solve them or your service can solve them, and then you position how you would be a good fit for them maybe against the competition.

Marylou: Okay, because in the search mode, one of the things I’m seeing a lot of that is proving to be very difficult is this concept of hyper personalization and in that search bucket, that’s where I would experiment with what I call three levels of personalization which is mass personalization, data driven, which it has some knowledge, it has to have a richer database in order to know more about the prospect from a prescriptive analytic point of view, and then hyper personalization where they’re actually physically editing everything that they do and sending out the emails, or whatever, their voicemail scripts, whatever.

In the search mode, that I think would be a perfect place to start validating whether this hyper personalization craze is really helping or hurting production. Because I think if you move the hyper personalized approach that’s at a smaller scale to a larger scale, it just brings on a whole slew of new problem.

Mansour: Oh yeah. And then the question is, like for instance now, if I’m gonna prospect to you, Marylou, next month, I can probably hyper personalize it. But how scalable is that?

Marylou: It’s not.

Mansour: It’s within my network, but then beyond my network, I probably won’t be able to hyper personalize it. That’s also something to take into account.

Marylou: Definitely. In my world, I can hyper personalize because working with end in mind, my goal for opportunities is very low because it’s me. I don’t have a team here of people that I’m feeding to make sure that we get enough opportunities in. I can because of my overall record size, my overall universe, but I still use templates. I still start everything with templates that has my value proposition, why me, why now, why this type of scenario of putting into sales process. Then I customize as needed.

But for the most part, I rely very heavily on data driven personalization because I think, if you wrap up your calls, if you are just going back to the telephony side of things, if you wrap up your calls, if you’ve had conversations with personas that look like the one you’re going after, you’re gonna have a better idea of how to frame that conversation for the next time you have this role that you’re working on. Since I have three roles in my world, I pretty much understand what the logical progression is of urgency in solving problems and which problem’s probably left at the top, even at what time of the year they bubble up. Usually, it’s crazy around here fourth quarter or the third quarter, because people are trying to make their numbers and think we could just rack this and put in the process that works.

Mansour: Right.

Marylou: That would generate two, three X. I have that said, it’s all rhythmic but it’s all using data to do that and still have that authentic approach.

Mansour: I think you always have to be authentic. It’s a combination of how do you use data and stay authentic and it sounds like, from your engineering perspective, very structured.

Marylou: Yeah.

Mansour: You’re absolutely right. Some things, I don’t know if you want to put it in the personalization bucket, if you even use the same vocabulary of certain people. For instance, one of the things that we do and we’ve done in the past is we used to convince CFOs to pre-pay a couple of years in front in exchange for a discount. Basically, we talk about the IRR, the return on this investment, how much they could get in the bank.

Marylou: Sure.

Mansour: At the time, they’re getting like, 0.1% in the bank and, “Hey, what if we give you 10% discount. Is that better than keeping it in the bank?” For Fortune 500s, it was a no brainer.

Marylou: Right.

Mansour: But again, that message would have totally flown over our end-user.

Marylou: Yeah.

Mansour: I do agree that there’s a level of personalization for personas and there’s a level on a personal level even more if you can get that. I think we see a lot ot AI happening right now that are doing top of the funnel personalization sometimes in emails. You see products a bit like from Versicom that automate email at top of the funnel. I think, they’re gonna be somewhat successful there at the top but I think the middle and bottom of the funnel is really where humans will excel. This is what we’re doing at FrontSpin, we’re building tools for them to be as productive as possible and in that part of the funnel.

Marylou: Yeah, I agree. Getting back to we call that language, we house language, the way they spoke to us, the pain points that resonated, positioning where those pain points entered in relative position in the pipeline, where we had the first call, where we had the brief, pre-conversation level. All of that data that we can store in our database helps build the correct sales conversation, and with tools like, Conversica, that are gonna come in and take that and actually frame it out even more so for us. The phone is gonna become extreme, and is still extremely important with those one-to-one sales conversation. But that’s a topic of another podcast, I’ll have to have you back on.

Mansour: Thank you, Marylou.

Marylou: We’ve already gone over our time but I wanted to leave the audience with, I’ll put on the topic page for this podcast, your connection information to FrontSpin. I recommend that people take a look at that product because it really is an amazing product that helps you have better conversations. Just so you know, their metrics are double what Aaron and I did in 2011 with Predictable Revenue. We were hoping to get three to five meaningful conversations in a two-hour call block and Mansour’s company blows that out of the water. It’s worth taking a look at that. How else would you like people to get a hold of you, Mansour?

Mansour: They can look me up on LinkedIn, on the podcast you put in my name, they can look me up on LinkedIn. Be glad to connect. Obviously, on our website, www.frontspin.com, there’s a number of ways to get a hold of us. If you want to take a look at the product and see if we can be helpful or even if there’s any questions you guys may have, will be glad to have my team route it to me or address it directly.

Marylou: Great. Thank you so much, this has been very enlightening, I think a lot of people really need to think about this whole process of scaling. Next time you’re sitting in a board meeting and there’s a number thrown out, you have the ammunition to give them all the reasons why you need to take it back, do some analysis and research before you agree to that crazy number that they’re putting up there.

Mansour: Absolutely.

Marylou: Thank again, Mansour.

Mansour: Thank you, Marylou.