Episode – Page 13 – Marylou Tyler

Episode 86: Applying Account Based Marketing – Brandon Redlinger

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 86: Applying Account Based Marketing - Brandon Redlinger

00:00 / 00:00

Account based marketing or ABM is an alternative to B2B. It’s a strategy where an individual account is treated as its own market of one. Brandon Redlinger manages growth at Engagio which provides software products for account based marketing and account based sales.

Brandon is going to share his experiences and strategies working in this funnel. I’m hoping that you will come away with some key takeaways and educational points that you can apply right away. Brandon also shares how account based everything may be more appropriate because bigger companies are now pushing account based success in all aspects of sales and marketing.

Episode Highlights:

The account based approach is strategic marketing that is personal and relevant coordinated between different functions.
It can be used in the top of the funnel to open doors or lower in the funnel for account expansion, upsells, and more.
This concept is similar to strategic selling targeted at a smaller set of accounts but at bigger deals.
Technology is enabling marketing to help sales open doors by using intelligence, predictive modeling, and engagement scoring.
Casting a wide net with marketing, inbound, content, demand generation, and ABM.
How account based marketing helps in all five levels of awareness.
Large companies have global accounts with many divisions. This is why working with relationships within the accounts is important.
How engagio allows tracking with a different customer touchpoints like SalesForce, Marketo, your CRM, or Google Apps.
The importance of retention and how many VCs are looking at these numbers over growth numbers.
How a lot of people will jump into ABM and get it wrong. How important it is to look at if it is right for you and fits within your business model.
The importance of not executing before you have a plan.
The co-founder of Engagio was actually the co-founder of Marketo, and he left because he feels that account based marketing is the future of B2B.

Resources:

Transcript:

Marylou: Good morning, everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today I have Brandon Redlinger from the San Francisco Bay Area. He manages growth at a company called Engagio, and without taking away from his thunder because Engagio is a company that we’ve been watching for quite some time in terms of the new way of looking at selling, account-based I think they call it, everything is account-based.

Brandon: Account-based marketing, account-based everything, yep.

Marylou: Brandon is gonna share with us his experiences in working in this funnel, again, top, a little bit of middle, top funnel which is where we wanna focus. I’m hoping that you, by listening to Brandon, you’ll come away with some real key takeaways and some educational points that you can apply right away. We’re ending 2017 right now, going into the glide into 2018, I call it the glide path because it’s the time to reflect on what we did well in 2017 or what we wanna do for 2018.

I wanted Brandon to come on because I know that there’ll be some nuggets of information that we can internalize and start incorporating into our planning for 2018. Welcome to the show, Brandon.

Brandon: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.

Marylou: You have been at the beginning of all of the hype around account-based marketing, account-based selling. When you envisioned account-based marketing, selling, everything, what is it exactly that you envision? What is it exactly that definition of this term?

Brandon: We call it account-based everything, we also call it account-based marketing. I’ll start off with giving a little bit of a reason why we actually say account-based everything as well as account-based marketing. Account-based marketing, it really is a strategic business initiative. It’s not just for marketing even though it has marketing in the title. A lot of times, a lot of people will say, “It’s just for marketing.”

Let’s broaden that a little bit. Let’s call it account-based everything. Whether you wanna call it account-based marketing or account-based sales, account-based sales development, even success these days, customer success and account inclined management, with these bigger B2B deals, these bigger companies in the enterprise, they are going account-based. We’re seeing companies these days pushing account-based customer success.

We call it account-based marketing or account-based everything but essentially, to us, it really is this strategic approach, it’s coordinated between your different functions and it’s really personalized and relevant. Rather than one size fits all messaging, it’s gonna be really specific and targeted to the person on the other end. You can use it to, at the top of funnel, open doors or you can actually use it lower in the funnel or even for account expansion, upsell, cross sell, that sort of thing.

Marylou: I’m an old timer, you probably know this. In the olden days, we used to call something like this, or maybe it’s not, I want you to correct me, we used to call it strategic selling where we would have our dream 100 accounts. For instance when I was in sales, I had six accounts, period That’s all I sold into with the $2 million quota. Those would be my strategic accounts. I would map each out individually, of course this was pre-internet so we had the phone, we had the mail, and we had face to face.

I had accounts all over the country though so face to face was a little bit tough. What I did was I strategized on each, we coordinated afterwards between the team, you personalized all of the communication because we probably have six accounts. We made it so that it was relevant. Is strategic selling, or the old term strategic selling, similar to account-based if you are to put things in a bucket, or is it because now with the technology, making things more specific from a generalized nature is what constitutes account-based?

Brandon: A lot of the principles, you’re right, absolutely, 100% the same. It’s targeted, it’s a smaller set of accounts but bigger deals, more complex sales cycles. We’ve seen this explosion in the last five, seven years, is that marketers did what they do best and they really took this idea and started to promote this idea. Before, sales in the enterprise, absolutely, they were always strategic, they were always account-based.

What we’re really seeing these days is marketing is getting involved, marketing wants a seat at the table now. Marketers are really taking more revenue responsibility. When you’re in B2B, when you’re selling enterprise deals, it has to be that way. Now, we’re seeing marketing stepping up and taking a little bit more ownership. They just coined the term account-based marketing and did what they did in marketing and started to market the term itself as well. That’s my take on it, at least.

Marylou: Similar nature, we have a lot more tools at the stack, it is more involved now than it was back in the day. We still have our dream accounts. Account-based selling is strategic selling in a lot of ways. Account-based marketing is where the marketers are getting involved to help us get better at that sales conversation. I like to think of it as strategically placing conversations, snippets based on behavior which we can track now and also based on a relative position in the pipeline so we know who to talk to, what to say, when to say it and how to get them to move from position to position based on the buyer behavior.

Brandon: What I love is these days, with all this technology, marketing really is able to help sales open the doors at accounts a lot more effective because they have all this intelligence, or they’ll able to use some predictive modeling and engagement scoring to figure out what are those accounts that we should be going after in the first place. With all this technology that marketing has at its disposal is really helping sales. Sales should definitely be as excited as anyone for it, call it ABM or ABE.

Marylou: The other thing is, with the alignment of marketing and sales, sales is still responsible for the conversation, what I call belly to belly, you’re across the table from your guy or gal and you’re having a conversation. You as a sales person are wrapping up that conversation and that intelligence that you gleaned in that conversation can now be fed back to marketing so that marketing can take that and run it against their analytics, their what if scenarios, and make sure that the next time you have a conversation, not only have you warmed it up because you prepared the prospect but you’re gonna have a more in depth and probably more relevant conversation as the result of you sharing information back and forth between sales and marketing.

Brandon: Yes, absolutely, 100%. Sales, they’re nose to nose, toes to toes with some of their customers. It’s a big account there, hundreds of people within that account. Some people might come inbound, some sales rep has no ideas even on the radar. They come inbound, marketing says, “This is already a part of this account. Let me actually reach out to Rick over here. Hey Rick, guess who just came inbound? He’s actually one of your target accounts, he’s one of your ideal personas. Here’s the content he’s been engaging with, here’s all this relevant information. Maybe you should look at it.”

You’re right, marketing gets to be able to help sales have those more relevant conversations. Marketing is actually getting involved later in the sales cycle as well. We’ve seen a big resurgence in things like field marketing. It’s no longer just this handoff, this lead, I’m gonna deem qualified or whatever that means. Now sales, it’s your job to close it. Now it’s like, “Okay, great. I’m on the line for more revenue responsibility. How can I help you down the funnel as well?”

We’re gonna do some field events for executives or executive workshops or any of these other things that will help this deal move along as well. Marketing is getting involved later but also sales is getting involved earlier. That’s why I love this, it’s this real team approach.

Marylou: Traditionally, the way we think of marketing is casting the wide net. I think even in Predictable Revenue, the book in 2011, Aaron and I mentioned it as casting the wide net but it’s really not that way anymore. There are segments, account-based marketing is a segment. I guess they do still cast a wide net for what I call the minnows to make sure they get awareness and build the things that marketing does traditionally. Now we’re getting and actually scaling that inwards so that we are getting more specific, more strategic to the actual account level.

From what I’ve been reading about Engagio, you can actually get specific specific, their own webpage kind of thing, to each account which is amazing, amazing advances.

Brandon: 100%, exactly. Actually, that’s a great distinction. A lot of times, people think marketing, inbound, content, demand gen is one thing and then ABM or a company’s strategy is something else, it’s one or the other. The way that we look at it at Engagio is you actually need both. We do wanna cast that really wide net and get people who we may not know should be even on our radar while still going after those people who we know we want, our key account, our key 100.

Marylou: The way I explained it to my folks is there are five levels of awareness. Account-based marketing really helps breathe at all of those five levels of the fact that they may not be aware of you, your product, they have a problem, all the way up to not only are they aware but they actually thought you out. Traditionally, marketing would go after those higher levels with the casting the wide net of people who are interested and ready to start executing the conversation.

We need those three lower levels of not aware, problem aware, and situation aware. They don’t even know they have a problem and to the point they know they have a problem but they’re not sure what the solution is. Having all those five levels covered allows us to not only reach more people but reach more people with value and then segment them in a way that the reps, sales reps, will have meaningful conversations with those accounts who are a high probability of closing, high likelihood of being a long time customer, which is really where we wanna get because that gets you the revenue you need.

Brandon: Absolutely, exactly. I love it.

Marylou: Let’s leave top of funnel for a while even though that’s my passion. You mentioned, which I loved this idea, you mentioned the cross sell, upsell. Tell us about that side of life and how this is changing now with account-based marketing.

Brandon: When we’re selling these larger accounts, there’s actually a lot of different buying units within a big account. If you’re selling into GE or Google or Dell, whoever it is, it’s not one person for the entire company. It’s a global account, they have many divisions that they’re selling into. Let’s sell our product to this one division and then maybe we can sell that to a different division. Now it’s actually a lot more working with relationships inside that account.

How do I manage? How do I navigate? How do I figure out this deal, it’s a really complex deal. How do I maneuver within that to build that relationship to expand? It could be the case that now I’m in, I sold our flagship product but now I have all these other products that I could be selling to. It may be still someone in Dell North America or Dell America or whatever it is.

There’s another team in there, in that Dell North America that could be using one of our other products. Let’s look at our intelligence tool. In our case, we use Engagio for this. There’s this other buying unit that is interested in this other problem that we solved as well. They might be in the same office as the person you just sold to. How can we leverage the current buying unit that we just sold to to break into this other buying unit?

There’s all these different buying units and really just account-based accounts management, call it strategy, it’s actually huge. When you’re selling to enterprise deals, you could send me plus percent of your business. It could come from expansion, it’s not gonna come from new business.

Marylou: The other thing is this also could help with once you have a product, I’ll mark you with the regional bank here locally, they’re trying to figure out how people move through their product suite. We’re using that intelligence to figure out not only how they came in the door, what product or service, but what’s the logical map of products that we can introduce to them in a very authentic and meaningful way so that when they’re ready, they’re gonna start embodying those other products to increase lifetime value.

Not only leveraging who to speak to within the other areas of the actual company but also what is the natural product progression life cycle of adding more products to the suite so that we maintain lifetime value.

Brandon: Another thing to mention too is Engagio is one of these tools that’s gonna give you this insight into the account. You plug it into SalesForce, or Marketo, or your CRM and your marketing automation system. You put a pixel on your website, you’re hooking up with your Google apps. You’re really tracking all of these different touch points that a customer has with your company.

You’re able to see the deal close and then they’re using this part of the product, your product, but they haven’t even touched this other side yet. This other side of the product is where a lot of people see value. Maybe our customer success team should look into that a little bit more or maybe they’re spending too much time on this one page and they’re stuck there so they haven’t progressed with the full onboarding yet. How do we get this account really successful so that they don’t churn because as you know obviously, in SaaS businesses, retention is a huge part of it.

Marylou: I don’t remember the number, you can correct me, it’s six times more expensive to get a new client than to keep an existing one or something like that. It’s a no brainer to invest in that side of things, it’s not my area of expertise. I have a few clients that are not even focusing on business development, they’re focusing on lifetime value, of continuing to engage the client with more products and services that are meaningful to them at the time they need them, that’s giving them a natural progression of being a long term client. That’s great, I love that.

Brandon: A lot of VCs these days, they actually look at growth less and they look at retention a lot more. What’s your growth retention and what’s your net retention? Are you able to actually expand into your accounts? Is your dollar size going up? Of your logos, how many are those are you actually retaining? That’s actually just as important as a number to VCs these days because they realize how important that is for a company’s success, is retention.

Marylou: We’re getting close to our out of time indicator, tell us what’s on the horizon, your prediction for 2018 and beyond about how this is going to evolve. Where do you see account-based marketing position as we move forward into 2018 and beyond?

Brandon: I actually just published a post yesterday on other people’s predictions. You know what, I didn’t include my own in there.

Marylou: Go edit that thing.

Brandon: This is a really new space, we’re five, seven years into it but it’s so new, it’s so young yet. There are so many technologies popping up and there’s a lot of hype around it. I actually think people are actually gonna get ABM wrong in the next few years. A lot of people are gonna just jump into the bandwagon and blindly do it because they heard another company doing it successfully. I actually think it’s gonna get worse for some companies before it gets better.

I’m very bullish in the long term about account-based marketing and account-based everything, these account-based strategies because I really do think it is the way to go if you’re doing B2B sales and marketing. I think people have to really be careful in the next few years to figure out is this the right thing for our business, in our business model? Does economics makes sense? Let’s make sure I have the foundation in place before I get going with it.

A lot of people, they love to just jump right in with ABM ads and direct mail, whereas if they don’t have the foundation of account matching, making sure all of the leads and contacts are mapped to the right accounts, making sure their sales and marketing are really aligned, making sure that you’ve selected the right accounts from the first place. You have to do all of that before you do the fun, sexy stuff like what’s the most creative package I can send, let’s send them some Dom Perignon and a handwritten note, that’s the fun stuff that people love doing. If you don’t have that foundation, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Marylou: The message here is planning is very important. If there are some tools that we can include in your page, on my website for planning purposes because I’m a big fan of planning versus execution in terms of planning first because planning is cheap other than time and brain power. If you start executing before you have a solid plan, it’s like my house, I have a deck that was built on my house that when it rains, the water goes into the house instead of out because they put the deck quickly and didn’t think about sloping and things like that. Fast forward, we had to replace the entire deck.

I would like to see if we can include on the pages what kind of planning tools, simplified checklists and things that you recommend for us to start because I think account-based marketing is definitely an important part of being a high revenue company. There are different segments of accounts that you wanna master, there’s the minnows, there’s the sharks, there’s the whales.

I think once we understand the relationship between all of those, this type of option makes sense for a lot of companies. I have one client that started with enterprise and is working down which is unusual. I have a lot of companies who are small, medium business working up. They’re trying to get into the enterprise and trying to get account-based marketing going. I think if we can include some of those checklists or point someone in the right direction, it’s like, “How do I plan for this thing? Where should I start?” That would be very helpful for it.

Brandon: We actually have a guide that our co-founder wrote. For people who don’t know, the co-founder of Engagio is also previously the co-founder of Marketo who anyone in the marketing space is gonna know, the biggest player in the market now, automation space. He left Marketo a few years ago after being there for nine years. He left Marketo to start Engagio because he saw this very thing, account-based marketing is the future for B2B marketing.

He put out the definitive or the clear complete guide to account-based marketing. You can get that if you go to engagio.com/abm-guide, you can download it for free there. I think it’s 130 plus pages. It really is everything that you need to know from start to finish. Jon is really all about educating the market right now, it’s not gonna be we’re going to pitch you every other page, there’s hardly even a pitch in there actually. There’s a lot of great information. It’s all foundational, these are all things that you need to do. It’s really your roadmap to getting started with ABM. Of course we write about that on our blog two times a week, engagio.com/blog.

Marylou: Those are great tools. Truly, when we’re working through a new concept like this, understanding the basics, putting together a plan, thinking about your environment because you’re unique and how you sell and the accounts that you service and figuring out where you wanna start. Like I said like we talked today, top of funnel, business development is my passion, it’s what I wake up every morning loving.

There is also cross sell, upsell at the end of the rainbow when you already have the client. This particular type of process and strategy works there equally as well. There’s a couple places you wanna definitely deploy it. If you’re just learning this, starting at the basics of the guide I think is the best way to go. I’ll make sure that that sits inside of your page for the podcast, Brandon. From there, how can people get a hold of you?

Brandon: I think the best way to get a hold of me is if you just go to LinkedIn, I think I’m the only Brandon Redlinger. There might be imposters out there, I don’t know. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or just shoot me an email at brandon@engagio.com. I’m always happy to chat with people.

Marylou: You do a lot of posts, I would definitely signup if you’re interested in doing this. Sign up and learn from them because there’s a lot of great material out there. The smarter you are and the more prepared you are when you go into your planning sessions, the more successful you’ll be on execution. Brandon, thank you so much for your time today. I wish you a very happy holiday. I look forward to seeing what you guys do in 2018.

Brandon: Thank you so much.

Episode 85: Developing a Successful Sales Mindset – Will Barron

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 85: Developing a Successful Sales Mindset - Will Barron

00:00 / 00:00

Download file Leave Review

Having issues with mindset and skill set can amplify issues that we may have at the top of the sales funnel. Will Barron the host of The Salesman Podcast is here today to talk about mindset. He has so many skills and there are so many topics that we can talk about, but I wanted to hone in on mindset because having the right mindset can amplify our sales success.

Will has interviewed so many people and has had so many conversations that he brings a wealth of knowledge to the show. The Salesman Podcast is the most downloaded award winning B2B sales show on iTunes. The reason Will started his podcast was because he was hitting his sales marks, but he wanted to go beyond that and smash it. Now he shares some of his deep dive sales knowledge with us here today.

Episode Highlights:

How Will has personally beat his chronic procrastination through habits.
His biggest sales mind hack was actually understanding why he wanted to work in sales in the first place.
He worked in sales because he wanted to save up cash to start a business.
Once he made this plan he worked harder, put his head down, and got things done.
Having an end goal can be an underrated sales tool.
How he started asking the questions of what he wanted to achieve through his sales work throughout his life and minimize regrets.
Projecting your future happiness and asking if what you are doing now will lead to your happiness.
Marginally acceptable goals, acceptable goals, and whoopie goals!
Focusing on blocking out time for productive single focused goals.
Will’s passion is getting people excited about science. His motivation for doing the sales podcast is leading to his goal of starting his new Excited About Science podcast.
He wants to break the mundaneness of life by giving people fun facts about science every morning.
Will shares his routine and how he timeblocks and protects himself from distractions. Then it is habit and process.
How getting a 25 minute pomodoro task done helps to build momentum.
It is easier to carry on with the work then to change the task.
Start in small blocks and work your way up. Start with 25 minutes and work up.
Being specific with our goals and making sure you physically have the time to fill in the slots or else you have to be more efficient.
Use trial and error to move your blocks around until you find the best nuggets of time to get stuff done.
It’s about highest impact and lowest effort.
Working the way your prospects work to have those conversations.

Resources:

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler and I’m honored to have today as my guest Will Barron. Those of you who don’t know Will, he is the host of The Salesman Podcast. It’s a very wonderful service that he provides sales people in multiple roles. I am thrilled to have him today on my podcast.

I asked Will what he’d like to speak about today because he’s interviewed so many people and had so many conversation, there’s just a wealth of knowledge in that man. We thought we would concentrate today a little bit on the mindset because sales process – this is what we do at top of funnel, sales process. But there are things about the sales process that amplify and accentuate when we have issues with mindset and skill set. Because Will has had so many conversations with people, I think he can really share his information with us, shed some light on where we can begin to start developing really good habits as sales people.

Welcome to the podcast, Will.

Will: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Marylou: So, where do you wanna start? Mindset.

Will: Mindset. The biggest leverage point for myself, and I’ll preempt this with when I worked in sales, I would always hit my target but I won’t smash it, that was one of the reasons for starting this podcast. I wanted to improve as a salesperson myself. That in mind, and also at the back of the audience’s mind as we go through this that still even to this day, I’m a chronic procrastinator. There’s numerous ways that I personally beat this and then I’ve interviewed olympic athletes, I’ve interviewed astronauts, and habits obviously come into the conversation, process come into the conversation, as well as we can dive into that perhaps.

But I think, it’ll be interesting to hear your thoughts on this as well, the biggest leverage that I had working in sales as a mindset hack, as a motivation hack, as a kick in the bum to put all the brilliant process that have been put together by the engineers in the company and the sales management of the company. The biggest hack that I came across was understanding why I wanted to work in sales in the first place. Because a lot of times, the crazy, stressful environment, it’s ups, it’s downs, it’s rejection, the highs of closing those huge deals, so I was in medical devices, my sales would be anywhere between £50,000 to a couple of million for a full operating room or operating theater. They were the best moments and then there’d be three months of downs and miserable conversations leading up to those occasions.

I think we all need to stress out why work in sales. I think the biggest leverage point for me was understanding I was working in sales because I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I wanted to start a business. I worked my last two, three years in that sales role to save up two years worth of cash so that I could start the podcast, so that I could start other things on the side, and I can experiment with things. As soon as I got that in my head, I worked harder, I doubled down on the process, I stopped experimenting, procrastinating, and I just got my head down every single day because I knew that in a two year period, I was gonna save X amount of cash. I was gonna come out of it and do something with it.

I knew this is a really an underrated tool for sales professionals. It’s something that probably sales managers and sales leaderships should be discussing with the sales teams. As I said, as soon as I knew that I had an end financial goal, put all the work, all the hustle, all the late nights, all the not going out on Fridays to see my friends, and spending it in an operating room with a surgeon looking inside patients, was just essentially my Friday nights and Saturday mornings for that period.

The motivation was there, the mindset was there. Everything else clicked in place as soon as I had that end goal.

Marylou: How did you get to that end goal? Did you do exercises to sort of write down, make a list, how do you zone in on that really strong why that keeps you motivated?

Will: I read Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within. That gave me some really interesting insights as to what my personality is built upon. The elements of my personality that drive me to do things and then drive me to run away from things as well. I highly recommend the book. It’s well worth, it’s a beast to read. It took me two months to read it, reading everyday. It was well-worth it. I took a bunch of insights away from that.

After that, I started asking that question of “If I’m only gonna be working for 50-60 years, I’m gonna spend 5, 10 years in the sales role perhaps, 20 if you really love it and you’re in a vertical that you enjoy, you’re selling a product that you enjoy, you’re in a team that you enjoy working and communicating within. What do I wanna achieve with that? We’re probably going quite deep, pretty quickly, Marylou. But it was almost a mortality kind of conversation I was having with myself of the worst thing, I think, I can do when I’m looking back at 95, 120, wherever I am, is to have regrets. My goal was always to minimize those regrets.

If I’m working in sales, I’m earning great money. What is the point of doing it? I’m trading my health to a certain extent with the stress I was under, with the running around, even with – because this is field sales – the amount of time I was spending in a car that dramatically increases your risk of dying on the road for a car crash which sounds crazy but the numbers are significant for field sales reps. The numbers of them that get in accidents just because of the amount of time spent on the road. When you factor all this in, it comes into a bigger conversation of, “What do you wanna do in two years time after you’ve crushed it and you’ve hit your target?” If you spread it over your lifespan and the youthful years that you’ve got in sales, when you’ve got that drive, that hustle, and I had zero responsibilities, I was somewhat single at the time, no mortgage, no car loans or anything, I had a company car, I could invest essentially all the cash I could into this one lump sum that will allow me to then start a business and do other things on the side.

A long-winded answer to your question here but it was just putting things in perspective. I think we take things too literally in the moment. We look at the small scale of it and we don’t scale it off of the long term. An exercise from that Tony Robbins book that I do regularly is if you just have a minute to yourself, if you think if I’m doing what I’m doing right now, I’d do it for a year. In a year’s time, I’m gonna be happy. Most people, it’s like, “Well, if I plot along and hit my sales goal, I could go on this holiday, it will be fine.” If you do that over five years, in five years would you be happy? The answer is probably no because you want that career growth, you want personal growth, you want business growth. You wanna have invested, maybe you want that Rolex, whatever it is.

But then when you scale off 10, 20 years, things start to get a little bit scary. I find, from speaking – I’m 31 – when I speak to mentors that I have that are 50, 60, 70, whether they had huge success or not, they always look back and think that they should have done more, could have done more, and they didn’t set their goals big enough because they were essentially having success but plodding along. Again, we’ve gone crazy deep, crazy quick here. For me, it was just sorting out what the point of this sales role is. Why am I doing this? Then, leveraging that into something bigger and moving forward.

Marylou: I do a very similar exercise every year. I have what I call marginally acceptable goals, acceptable goals, and then whoopy goals. I put them into three separate columns, and then from there I figure out – I’m all about hourly rate right now because I am in the service business. Then from there I figure out, “Okay, if I want this whoopy goal, this income, and I wanna work X number of hours a year, what is my hourly rate to achieve that goal?” When you start looking at the numbers that way, all of a sudden those tasks of staring out the window or trying to talk to a colleague or going to the water cooler more than you should, they all start adding up as, “Is this a really good use of my time?”

I think, for me personally, that putting it into that perspective of if I wanna reach this monetary goal and it’s a whoopy goal, my hourly rate is X, I’m not gonna be doing the tasks, the things that get in the way of that. I really focus on blocking out time that’s productive and single focused so that I can reach my goal that way.

I have been in sales now, I’m gonna be 60 in May, I’ve been in sales for a long time. Love it, but I have to constantly reevaluate my goals. Are you finding that as well? You mentioned the one year goal, maybe a 5 year, 10 year, do you sit down at the end of the year each year and reevaluate where you are relative to the goal?

Will: I do every quarter. I’ll take a full weekend, and for perspective now, The Salesman Podcast, it’s grown from nothing from about two and a half years in now, we’re about 600,000 downloads a month. It’s a multiple six-figure business. We work with some of the biggest players in the sales industry, HubSpot, LinkedIn, SalesForce, all from nothing. It’s not that I’m a genius, I scratched my own itch with the show. There was a lack of, I thought, content for the B2B sales professional for them. There was loads of content for leadership, and so just luck and timing that the show’s grown at this pace.

In perspective with that, that is one business. I enjoy it. But it’s not my passion and I talk about this on the show. I’m happy to hustle down. I’ve promised the audience 1000 shows. We’ve got just under 500 recorded. We’ve published about 370. I promised the audience 1000 shows. I’m in it now for at least another two or three years just to get those numbers that I promised when I first started off.

My passion is getting people excited about science. With the money from The Salesman Podcast, all that revenue at the moment is being funneled across to grow The Salesman Podcast, grow the audience somewhat organically, somewhat paid advertising. We’re about to launch a new podcast which is launching in January called Excited Science which is me interviewing professors from all around the world about all kinds of crazy science subjects.

My motivation now for doing the sales podcast, as well as helping hundreds and thousands of people every month. The emails that I get on a Friday afternoon as they’ve just got in from hustling, doing a 12-hour shift essentially, on the phone or driving around off to people and they thank me for keeping them company in the car as they’ve been going back and forth. That keeps me going. But it’s also the fact that I’m working towards what my real passion is. The business is essentially funding the next business, if that makes sense. That’s my perspective in all of this.

Every quarter, I ask myself, I want to be 50, 60, I wanna be known as someone who helped break the mundaneness of life for people who give them cool, interesting science facts every morning and got them excited about science, technology, developments on that front. The sales podcast is helping me do it. That’s how I stay motivated. That’s how we put out three, four shows every week. That’s how I’m travelling all over the world, going to different sales conferences, interviewing people at these conferences.

I probably spend two hours every evening and then a little bit of time every morning emailing people from the audience who are asking me questions, and most of the time, I’m just referring them to other people because I’m probably not the specialist on all the subjects and I know the specialists in those areas. The tale is that I’m motivated to grow my sales audience because it’s not necessarily an X amount in the bank that’s motivating me. I don’t really care about being a millionaire, although cash is allowing me to do something bigger and greater in five years’ time with the science podcast and what will become of that.

Marylou: We have our why. We feel very deeply in our hearts that we’re on the right path. How do we take that into our daily actions, our daily habits? What do you recommend there?

Will: I’m a terrible procrastinator. As you described then, process and habits are the only thing that keeps anything I ever do together. I get up every morning, I do the show notes for the podcast that’s going out that day, I think you alluded to before, Marylou, that I time book my diary. My phone’s off, and for an overlay of this, no one has my phone number. The only way that anyone gets in touch with me is Skype. I protect myself on multiple layers so I don’t get distracted on this. I time block, I use a technique called the Pomodoro technique which essentially you set a 25-minute timer, 5-minute break, 25-minute timer, 5-minute break. That’s the only way I can get myself going in the morning. As much as I wanna do all this, as excited as I am to help my audience, as I said, build cash to start the next podcast which is gonna be the 20 year project, I still need a kick in the ass every morning from this time that I set.

And then, it’s just habit and process. You gotta know what you wanna do each morning, so I write my to-do list the day before. That only kicks in at about 1:00 o’clock. Before that, it’s my daily tasks. In medical device sales, my previous role, that was clearing my inbox of incoming requests because we’d have lots of requests from somewhat emergency from doctors wanting to loan equipments from [inaudible 00:14:19] and things like this, so clear my inbox. And then, I would spend a little bit of time on the phone, then I’d sort out where I’d be driving to, sort out the traffic, make my driving around Yorkshire where I am in the UK, I’ll make that as efficient as possible. And then, I would ring up, before I left the house, again, process habit, I’d ring up every surgeon, theater manager, procurement officer, I’d ring them up before I left the door so I wasn’t arriving at places and they’re busy, things have changed, their plans have changed. I’m just making that 10-minute investment of time which is a habit. I did it religiously everyday, that will make the rest of the day more efficient as we went forward.

For me, it’s all about process, it’s all about building habits. We all know the clichés of it takes 66 days to build a habit and I found that to be true with different things I’ve implemented, whether it’s going to gym and all this kind of stuff as well as sales. For me, to beat that procrastination, as long as it’s a good sales process in place that you can follow, it’s just get your head down. I don’t think we should ever complicate this. It’s just sucking it up and getting on with that first few bits of work every morning which then allow you, over time, to develop into a habit, it becomes easier and then you start the next one.

Marylou: That’s what I do. I actually keep a Google worksheet of my block time when I’m in the office. I block out email, I could do email all day long because I get a lot of requests and questions from people, I only allow myself 30 minutes of email early AM and then 30 minutes of email in the PM. Then from there, I actually work myself up to two hour blocks now of work time. I do the same thing you do though with the timer. How funny is that?

I have a timer, I learned this from a copywriter actually, one of the best copywriters in the US used to do this regularly. I do 33 minutes of timer. When that comes down, then I have a five minute break, I can get up and do whatever I want. But during that block time, I do single tasks. I only do working on my intellectual property or I’m working on a client work but I don’t look at my phone, check my email, work on a client. I don’t do it like that at all. I even block out my exercise time and my break times because I feel that rather than be slave to time management, like from 9-10 I’m doing this, from 11-12 I’m doing this. I just do things in blocks and I just make sure that the blocks are completed before I go to bed.

If I wanna get up at five in the morning and do my work, great. If I wanna get up at 9:30AM or 10:00AM, I will still get my work done. A lot of people don’t have that flexibility working for a company. But business developers, especially those who work where they’re servicing clients in different geographies, they’re gonna structure their day that way because they’ll have a better chance of getting ahold of the people if they work in block time.

Will: Got it. Just to reiterate the time elements of this, I set that 25 minute time, obviously, that’s a nice number that rounds off the hours. I set that timer to when I sit down I say, “I’m just gonna do 25 minutes of work.” Single tasks, as you described them, Marylou. If I do 25 minutes, it’s been a great day. It doesn’t matter about the rest of it or what happens then if I get that momentum of once I’ve got 25 minutes done, your brain is focused, there’s probably tons of studies and science on this, once I get focused and zoned in, I don’t want that five minute break then, often I’ll work through it.

For me, it’s the drain and mental energy of switching different tasks that really fatigues me throughout the day. As we know, we only have a finite amount of willpower and I believe that the change of tasks drops my will power more than anything else really. I have my phone on airplane mode, I’ve got a nice, big monitor in the home office I work from, and I just have one huge page on and I just nail through that content. That work, that podcast uploading, those email outreaches, those customer requests, those sponsor requests that come in, all I’m doing for that 25 minutes is that one job. But then I find that I wanna carry on after that because it’s easier to carry on with the work than it is to change and start a new task.

Marylou: Exactly. For those of you listening, block time or time blocking, whatever you wanna call it, is the way to reach those goals that you so desperately want and you know you can achieve but you’re just not sure quite how to get about it. Just start in small blocks and work your way up. For me, I work to two hours now. But I’ve been doing this for a long time. When I first started and the folks I’ve worked with coming out of college that are in sales, I do what Will does. I try to get them 25 minutes of structured single-focused task, and just like Will said, once you’re in the rhythm, in the moment, you just keep going. It’s a beautiful thing.

Will: The other thing to layer on top of this, I think you may do it slightly different, if you allow your blocks to be moved around. When I’ve got something in the diary, that is it. That is happening then. Nothing can be rescheduled. If I’ve got a call to go on Oprah and then talk about whatever it was, maybe I’d bend the rules a little bit for that. But anything other than Oprah, I’m 100% sticking to my diary. What it allows me to do is I say to myself, I’ll use the science podcast, “I wanna record 20 episodes of science podcasts so we can launch it at the beginning of January.” I will look in my diary for 20 hours worth of recording slots and there just wasn’t any. I physically could not fit that in without sacrificing something else. That allows you to be very specific with your goals. It tells you whether you physically got the time to achieve them or not. It’s one thing for a sales manager to say, “You need to make more calls.” But then when you look at your diary, there’s physically not enough time in the day unless you stay in over four hours each evening to physically make more calls, then that changes the game, think about sales specifically for a second. Then you need to become more efficient with your calls rather than just make more of them or more emails or whatever it is.

I think it was Andy Paul on my podcast a little while ago, that changed the game for me of you only have so many hours in the office, on the road, wherever you’re selling. By doing that, the excuse or the simple and not very useful advice from sales leadership of doing more of X can easily be disproven or can be shown to just not be effective when your diary is full. You physically can’t just dial more, then you gotta request new auto dial, you gotta request new email automation software, you gotta do something then that changes the game. But until I get it all down in my diary, I don’t really know how long a task is gonna take. I don’t really know if I’m gonna fit it all in. Because like most sales people, we wanna get as much crammed into the day as possible. I think we overestimate what we can and can’t do.

Marylou: That’s for sure. The reason why I talk about this rotating block time is because a lot of times, we’re trying to figure out best time to call, and we’re working with certain buyers who are in the office at certain times, so I’d like to have the call blocks set. But I allow them to be moved around based on the best time to call. Same thing with the email blocks, I like to move those around based on the best time to email. We’re on trial and error mode for quite some time until we get a good rhythm. Then, you have to overlay that with not all sales people are just prospecting. There are sales people who are in multiple roles of prospecting, closing, servicing. We have to find just nuggets of time in their schedules to do prospecting alone. We really have to set those block times, move them around until we figure out the best time.

Will: Sure. In medical devices, I’d block out every single Friday as just relationship building time. That’s the easy Friday afternoon evening job for me to just got and sit with a procurement officer and go hang out with the NHS here in the UK, I don’t know how to describe it, as amazing as it it, winds down a little bit, probably most industries I guess, winds down a little bit on a Friday. That’s why I’d always block Fridays for that. Tuesdays would always be a contract and deal negotiations. In hindsight, I would do some more of that as well. Narrow down specific days, specific times to specific jobs, but I guess I probably was less flexible.

I’m learning as we go from this conversation as well, Marylou. I was less flexible than perhaps what I should have been because you’re taking the same amount of effort, the same amount of time, but you’re making it more efficient by having it perhaps just nudgable in different directions to do the same amount of calls but get .5%, 5%, whatever is the high response rate within that same time period.

Marylou: Yeah, a classic example of that is a client that I worked with in Florida. We had block time for calling from let’s say 9:30 AM to 11:30 AM, they weren’t getting very many connects obviously, they would get put into voicemail. We moved it around, we came in one morning at 7:30 AM East Coast time and within half an hour, they had their five meaningful conversations. It was consistent. It wasn’t a fluke. We kept moving this stuff around and everytime we went back to this one day at 7:30 in the morning, we had a better shot at getting our conversations. Maximizing return on effort. Highest impact, lowest effort is really the reason why I’m totally fine with moving stuff around, in blocks though. In blocks. It really does make a difference.

For me, personally, Friday afternoons and Sundays are when I hear from sales managers and executives. I know to keep that time open and I have office hours in those time blocks. They could pick up the phone and call me anytime.

Will: I think you just took some stuff in here which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and that is I think salespeople are selfish. I think we’re trying to pigeon-hole our customers down into social selling, for example, tweeting them rather than essentially communicating on the platforms that they wanna communicate on. I guess this dribbles down onto the time as well of, “We don’t wanna come in at 7:00 in the morning to speak to customer.”

We’re selfish. I wanna be rolling out, well, not me personally, but I’m up at 5:00 everyday. There’s people who wanna be rolling out of bed at 8:30, having a shower and rocking and rolled in at 9:00 AM. That’s not a choice that we get to make. That’s a choice that the market makes and we gotta follow the market.

Marylou: We have to do what our buyer does. I can remember sitting in parking lots at 6:30AM with a cup of coffee waiting for the CEO to drive in. That was the way I rolled because I knew I’d have that conversation, and it’s all about getting that first conversation and working within the way they work. You become them. You become your CEO. You become your COO, your IT person when you’re getting ready to have those conversations. You have to look, think, act, and behave like your prospect. Some of you have more than one person sitting around the table that you need to talk to so you’re a little bit of a chameleon as well.

Will, we are running to the top of the hour here, how can people get ahold of you? I know you said The Salesman Podcast, we can look it up, I’ll put the information on the page for everybody, where else can we find you?

Will: Super simple. Just search Google for The Salesman Podcast or head over to salesman.org, there’s a new blog that’s launching in the next few weeks. It’s gonna cover sales and everything else that goes alongside that, widen your audiences, business acronym. But if you search Salesman Podcast, you’d find us everywhere, hopefully.

Marylou: What about the science one, I’m so excited because my sales process is actually highlighted in a table of elements format.

Will: Nice. The science show hasn’t launched yet. It’s gonna be called Excited Science. The premise of the show very simply is to get the audience excited about science so they can share facts and different tidbits with their friends, colleagues, as they go throughout the day after listening in the morning or the evening. That’s over at excitedscience.com and should be off and launched beginning of February, end of January 2018.

Marylou: What a wonderful gift, especially if you have children and you want them to get as excited about science as you are. I know that for me, with math, it’s been a wonderful experience to hear my daughter come home from school talk about the Pythagorean Theorem but do it in a way that talks about the history of it. It’s just so amazing when you get down to that level, how exciting these topics are. Thank you for doing that with the science thing. I love it.

Will: No problem. I think we all get stuck in our own heads. Salespeople do this as well. I don’t think it does us any harm rather than listening seven days a week to your show, Marylou, to my show, if we just choose one, it doesn’t have to be necessarily entertainment, I’m not talking about watching The Bachelor or nonsense like that, but one podcast where we learn something. That allows us to have more interesting conversations with our customers, it allows us to just broaden our knowledge in general. It allows us to just think outside the box in a lot of scenarios. I read a lot of science books, non-sales books.

I’m always coming out with different tidbits and different elements of business that I never thought would be applicable for sales. I’ve interviewed on the podcast a neuroscientist, we interviewed a psychopath, I’ve interviewed olympic athletes, I’ve interviewed recently Jordan Belfort, the dude that The Wolf Of Wall Street film was based on. I think it’s important for us as salespeople to make conversations everyday. We need to be interested. I feel you become interesting by consuming content that stretches your comfort zone, stretches your mind a little bit. I think that is the bigger competitive advantage, you being an interesting person the customers like. When you pick up the phone, they like speaking with you. That’s as big as a competitive advantage as sales process, as mindset, as anything else.

Marylou: Well said. Thank you, Will, so much for joining.

Will: You’re welcome. Super excited to be here, Marylou. Thanks again for having me on the show.

Episode 84: Optimizing the Marketing for a Sales Funnel – Hardy Kalisher

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 84: Optimizing the Marketing for a Sales Funnel - Hardy Kalisher

00:00 / 00:00

Download file Leave Review

The top of the funnel and improving, augmenting, and optimizing the ability to start conversations with whales on a consistent basis for higher revenue and a higher lifetime value is at the top of most listeners minds. Hardy Kalisher is the Executive Director of Parallel Path out of Boulder, CO. He is here today to talk about more of the marketing side of things.

His focus is generating awareness and serving up those great opportunities for us. Parallel Path is a digital marketing agency, and Hardy shares his strategies for getting quality responses to bubble up to the top, so that we can get these potential clients into the pipeline and start those all important conversations.

Episode Highlights:

How sports create a certain amount of discipline and focus.
Getting too many minow leads that are muddying up the pipeline.
How digital marketing is best implemented on the outreach side of things.
How sales and marketing are both working towards the same goal of growth.
Foundationally building a data collection infrastructure for marketing to feed the funnel so that the sales team can engage.
Optimizing the marketing for a sales funnel that creates revenue.
Optimizing for campaigns that actually close deals.
Parallel Path has a proprietary solution structure that closes that loop.
Holding on to clients by making relationships last and closing the loop end-to-end and continuing to optimize.
Finding the lifetime value of customers.
Finding a cost per lead threshold that makes sense.
Creating solutions for sales and marketing people to work together to create the golden leads.
Having a checklist that leaves no stone unturned.
Working on process for efficiency and effectiveness even though each deployment will be custom.
From data collection to implementation in three weeks. Challenges are related to allocated sales and marketing resources.
The unlimited potential of the future state of digital and marketing.

Resources:

Transcript:

Marylou: A lot of times, I make analogies to sports. I don’t know if it’s because sports to me seems more disciplined, and there’s something you’ve got to continually wake up everyday thinking about or doing. If you’re not actually in your area of expertise, you’re not practicing your area, you’re building out other areas like diet, and sleep, and food. It’s just making sure that you’re not losing sight of the fact that this is a continuous loop.

Hardy: Yeah. It’s a continuous process and I think anyone who’s out there and looking to hire leaders and managers, just successful A team players in their business often are attracted to those who have played sports or competed at the high school and collegiate level, and athletics, there’s a certain amount of discipline and focus that you know they’ve brought to that discipline.

I think, it was actually interesting last night, I was listening to a podcast from the sports psychologist for the Stanford University soccer program. Stanford university, obviously, if you are going to play collegiate athletics at divisional level, you have to be very good at sport but also to play it at somewhere like Stanford, [inaudible 00:01:49] the admissions for the athletes, anyone who’s playing athletics typically had a sport like soccer is coming in from being top in their school as well academically. What’s interesting about the Stanford program there is they just won the third national title in a row for soccer, and then they won the women’s national title as well. Both the men and the women won the NCAA Division 1 national title this year just this past week.

The sports psychologist of the program was saying it’s not a coincidence that outstanding students become outstanding athletes, which also might become outstanding leaders, and members of the community, and business leaders and whatnot. There’s direct parallels, and their ability to focus and be achieved and oriented.

I’ve always been drawn, whether we’re hiring interns, and teaching them the way of the digital marketing world, or if somebody is coming in at more of a senior level, coincidentally they happen to be collegiate athletics or high school athletics. We can’t help but be attracted to those types of members of our team.

Marylou: Right, right. We’re still gathered here today talking about top of funnel. Most of my audience is interested in improving, augmenting, optimizing the ability to start conversation with those whales on a consistent basis so that it has high revenue, high lifetime value.

I asked you to come to the show today because I know that you’re coming from, if I say this correctly, more of a marketing side of things to serve up those great opportunities for us and help generate the awareness and all things digital in getting people to bubble up to the top so that we have more quality coming into the pipeline.

Hardy: Yeah.

Marylou: For those of you who don’t know Hardy, Hardy Kalisher is the Executive Vice President of a company called Parallel Path, that’s out of Boulder, Colorado. We met a few years ago when I was working with Aaron Ross on an account. I think they have since been bought out actually, but they were looking to look at other ways besides the outreach program in order to generate buzz around their product service, and also they had this issue, which I still see today, Hardy, and that is we get a lot of leads in, but there’s some minnows in there that are kinda mudding up the pipeline and creating a lake out of it instead of a nice flowing machine.

I’d like for you today to tell us about some of the things you’ve learned over the years and how digital marketing is best implemented, especially if we could focus on the outreach side of things and trying to target those accounts that are going to give us high revenue potential, high likelihood of closing, high lifetime value, whatever that marker is for you guys that allow you to keep a client of all time happy, and generating revenue for the company.

Hardy: I appreciate that. Parallel Path, going on the 13th year, has been very focused on feeding the lead funnel and particularly in the B2B space. Majority of our clients are ultimately trying to drive those qualified leads for the sales team. Most marketing consultants or marketing agencies are brought into the mix from the CMO level and we’ve always been fascinated by the challenges that are brought to the table from the sales team. Ultimately, everybody is answering to the goals and the objectives of the CEO, or whatever the instructions of the organization.

Over the past five years in particular, I think what Parallel Path has been focused on not just driving traffic, because anyone can really get traffic, and not just driving leads, because as you said, not all of these are created equal, but we’re really getting to the root of how do we drive the highest quality of leads that are ultimately gonna convert into revenue. I think what differentiates our perspective on marketing is we’re all working towards the same goal for our business growth and revenue growth.

I was speaking at a digital marketing conference recently with 700 people in the audience and I asked the question, “How many marketers are not held accountable to revenue?” Expecting no one to raise their hand, but actually three people did raise their hand, and we had a good laugh about it, some job openings coming up in the area. Ultimately, we want to be business driven because that’s why we’re in this game. The joy of the hunt, the thrill of the catch that is experienced on the sale side, we also experience on the marketing side.

Foundationally, what we do is it’s important to build what we call the data collection infrastructure of your marketing program to be in place, not only gives you that end to end or 360 degree data view of the quality of your marketing activity. If we’re feeding the funnel, then ultimately, it’s gonna enable our sales team to engage and qualify their sales accepted lead. We wanna be able to make sure that the marketing activity, the marketing strategy, and the tactics that are involved, and the optimization that’s involved in that marketing program can be optimized all the way through, and on the actual revenue and the sales deals are closed. That’s what we’ve identified as the holy grail.

Let’s say we’re running a typical page search campaign, if we know page search ads are driving traffic and ultimately driving leads, we want to know which campaigns are also driving the closed deal, then we can optimize our program and invest more deeply into that channel, and those tactics, and those strategies that actually turn into revenue, and that’s where we want to optimized too.

Over the last five years, what we’ve been able to do is build a proprietary custom solutions that close that loop between sales revenue, sales activity, marketing activity, and be able to push that data through our marketing strategies and tactics, and the day to day optimizations, whether we’re running paid search advertising or organic search, distributing content on social media. All of that ends up driving how we build the content and the messaging, and the value proposition.

Going back to traditional marketing, a [inaudible 00:09:41] so that we’re continually optimizing the strategy in this process to making these real connections and these connections that last in driving this revenue. That’s how we’re able to hold onto clients for four years and watch even for our longest running clients, the clients we’ve been working with for seven years, having record breaking years because we have so much data that we’ve been able to close the loop on the data from end to end and continue optimizing proof. And that’s really the holy grail.

I have great conversation with marketers where they get so excited about just getting leads or something, a lot of the potential distribution channels that are out there whether Facebook, for example, and their lead generation on [inaudible 00:10:28] one click, and Facebook scrapes all the contact information from the individual who merely clicked the ad and that link pushed them to your CRM. That’s great but volume is gonna go up, your cost per lead is gonna go down, and you’re gonna be spending a lot of time filtering what ultimately is the digital equivalent of throwing a business card in a fishbowl. Again, it’s about how do we determine then what is the highest quality marketing activity of revenue.

Now, we get into some of the important things that you write about in your books at around ultimately what is the lifetime value of these customers, the average order value of these customers, and really identifying what is a proper cost per lead threshold that makes sense for driving this quality traffic.

That’s kind of the foundation, our why of what we do and who we do it for. I think some of the uniqueness from our perspective is hold us accountable as marketers like you hold your sales team, like the entire company’s held accountable, which is ultimately to revenue growth. Whether that revenue is coming from new business which the sales team is focused on, going out and getting the whales, dropping the rain makers and driving in that new business. That similar approach can also be applied to back end sells or loyalty sales or your current revenue sales, or ultimately looking to grow revenue there as well.

Marylou: In your world, do you really need to have the handshake between marketing and sales be pretty tight? Because as you said with the 360 tracking capability, or the ability to do that full circle, sounds to me like there’s some sales conversations, snippets, or wrap ups, or milestones that you need to have?

Hardy: Yeah. We’re really not interested in throwing the leads over the wall. We do want to have sales executives, sales operations team in particular, having a seat at the table as we map out the strategy, particularly getting to the data collection side, because there is a handshake that has to happen there often.

Marketing challenges can be around the dependency that we would have on IT support, Sales Operations support. For example, we’re using a popular CRM like Sales Force, there needs to be some Sales Force engineers in collaboration with our developers because we’re gonna be doing some custom scripting, and some custom integrations into CRMs. We’re CRM agnostic in our solution.

But yeah, we have to collaborate, and that’s where the sales executives and the marketing executives need to come together and support the value of being able to have this end to end view so that we can do the 360 degree optimization. They’ll have a better close rate, they’ll be getting better leads if we’re ultimately having to fill the pipe with quality leads from the marketing end that are based on that revenue. Everybody has a stake in the success with this type of program in place. And it takes the kind of vision and leadership on the client’s side to be able to champion that and sit down at the table and make that happen. Not every organization has a very collaborative relationship as we all know between the sales and the marketing team. The mature ones and the successful ones are heading in that direction, or have already headed in that direction.

We would love to see, it doesn’t happen very often but just as much as we were working with the marketing teams, sales teams, sales leaders can definitely champion not only sitting to the table and say we’re closing the leads, but there are solutions out there that can help deliver these golden leads, and ultimately they can bring, we’re a very consultative approach, but consulting [inaudible 00:15:09] that can implement that type of solution. Handing it over, but we all have to work together to make that happen. Often, the ideal situation is maybe that sales and marketing leadership is the same person, but sometimes it’s not.

Marylou: A lot of times, especially up market, we’re gonna have a Sales Director, a Marketing Director, a Sales Operations Director of some sort. And now there’s this thing called “sales enablement” which is yet another thread in there, but I’m curious. I had a call with a colleague of mine who outsources getting the door opened, that’s what she specializes in. I was telling her my timeline when I work with clients is typically from an internal point of view, it takes four to six weeks to get the assembly of the super highway in place. Four weeks is the ideal, six weeks is more realistic. And then we activate after that. She can do exactly what I do in four weeks, she takes two weeks, and I thought, “Wow. Okay. That’s awesome.” But she’s like I got my people, I already know who’s gonna be working on the account, she’s an agency as well. She said, “I already know who’s gonna be working on it. We have the contacts into these larger companies, this is a large complex sale type of agency.”

I’m curious with the work that you do, Hardy, can you give us some sense of a timeline of what’s typical, and essentially the benchmark is we’re doing more complex sales, perhaps longer sales process and multiple stakeholders. What’s a typical great client coming in and assembling and then activating and then optimizing?

Hardy: Great, great question. [inaudible 00:17:10] generally onboarding a new client going into our sales process. I always have to be careful because if I have our data scientists and engineers in the room and developers will always say, [inaudible 00:17:25] done real quick. It’s easy when you know how to build a rocket ship.

Marylou: Yes. I have a gigantic checklist of things. I don’t leave a stone unturned, and that’s probably why I take longer, but it doesn’t mean that the results are just as good with my colleague but she just knows how to cut things to the chase.

Hardy: I would say efficiency and effectiveness are two areas where we spend a lot of time working on our process and trying to make it as frictionless as possible for our clients to onboard and for us to implement these solutions. Ultimately, every deployment is gonna still be custom.

I think to your point earlier, there’s different stakeholders, and depending on the size of the team, we definitely work with enterprise clients and we work with mid-market challenger brands. They all have their different infrastructures that are in place. We would work towards an initial what we call our data collection kick-off to implementation. I know that that can happen in three weeks and it has. We recommend that’s going to take four. And then the challenges of potentially some bottlenecks coming into place. We’re gonna try to resolve those through our project managers, and our consulting team.

The biggest challenge that can arise can be related to resources allocated to sales, and marketing, and operations. If they have a lot on their plate, then we will often have to escalate the initiatives we’re working on and get those to become more prioritized. On the front end, working with our clients and really driving the priority of these initiatives that they’re investing in, and these are investments that they’re gonna expect to see a return on, that’s how we ultimately get them pushed through in a reasonable time frame. We generally shoot for four weeks.

Now you start running the data, the data is coming through and you’re optimizing. The four weeks is really building the piping in place, that ultimately is dependent upon the volume of the client and if it’s a high average order value, longer sales cycle type of B2B or even B2C business. It takes longer to have the data, to ultimately be statistically relevant for us to be optimizing against it.

A lot like your proposition of predictive sales, the future and the kind of work where we’re always working towards and probably another conversation I’d love to dive into is what it means to truly be data driven in our marketing efforts is really moving towards the round-up machine learning, predictive modelling machine learning, and ultimately even artificial intelligence, running our marketing campaigns, which is a really exciting thing that we’re investing our resources in. [inaudible 00:20:45] people in technology to ultimately building our marketing programs based on actual machine learning to help improve the quality of our marketing efforts [inaudible 00:20:57] putting a lead in front of a person to follow up on and close the deal.

Marylou: I think of all the disciplines that I work with, the marketing side is probably gonna be the first to activate that type of machine learning in the sense of having those conversations queued up, the right person at the right time, at the right place, in the right context. And then sales will probably follow with that because they’re still having those one on one conversations and we still are in need of the reps wrapping up their conversations in a meaningful manner, which is what I see is still a challenge for us. But since we don’t use a lot of technology to do that yet, it doesn’t mean we won’t in the future.

Simple things like taping a phone call are legal in some states. There’s some things that we can’t do, we have to rely on the reps to close that conversation and wrap it up in a meaningful way so we know what themes, paintings they talked about, next steps, the things that would allow us to then quickly change this conversation of any type of campaigns that we’re using to more quickly focus on the areas of challenge that the actual person has, the buyer has. Still, it’s an opportunity more so than a challenge by the way. We definitely need to work on that in sales.

Hardy: Yeah. I think in the world of the more complicated sale, there’s always gonna be the human element. But with machine learning and the implementation of these algorithms based on actual behavior, and creating these predictive models for ultimately improving, delivering more relevance for the potential customer or client and ultimately delivering more relevance for the sales professional as well. What that is going to mean a “much shorter sales cycle,” a more efficient cycle. I don’t see any time in our immediate future the elimination of the human element.

Positions are at risk in the whole team of marketing to sales or positions such as the analyst. I think as an analyst right now would be getting an education on machine learning as well, because there’s just too many variables, we have access to so much data. Big data’s intimidating, we can try to make it smaller but also look at how big all those big data engines have the right tools in place to help decipher the behavior that’s happening on the front end [inaudible 00:23:55] lead to ultimately optimize our marketing effort.

For example, if the website is getting enough traffic, we can look at the way people are engaging in the content of the website without necessarily downloading assets that might get them into a lead scoring funnel of some sort. Just like how they’re actually engaging with the website as a predictor of whether or not they would potentially become a qualified lead and then being able to tie that back [inaudible 00:24:31]. Those type of behavior sets ultimately lead to close deals, then we can start looking at how we [inaudible 00:24:40] change the way we look at the way we build our website, the type of content that we put on our website, the type of assets we put on our website, and building that is going to require a lot more than just a human analysis.

I recently heard that before Google serves a paid search ad to an individual search query, they look at 5,000 different variables. When somebody is managing a paid search account, they’re managing it from their home office and they’re just kind of learning the craft, to where you have a sophisticated, experienced team like we have here. If you’re just doing it on a human level, that’s just not where you can take it, you can’t optimize against that many variables and be successful. You can only start to cherry pick.

Marylou: Right, exactly.

Hardy: We would rather take it to the level where we’re really using machine learning to do that type of optimization. It’s exciting for us. One of the questions asked, what are we up to these days, we’re continuing to deliver in and out and we have resources and brighter people than me working on what the future state of digital is also going to look like. It’s fun to that because at the end of the day, we’re a tight boutique shop here in Boulder, but we’re able to attract some very bright people that want to work on these types of projects and then maybe go mountain biking at lunch.

Marylou: Of course. My son who lives there, he loves going snowboarding. He just have a snowboard for travel on the back of his backpack kind of thing, so yeah, it’s great.

Hardy, thank you so much for your time. I’d like to end this by you letting people know how they can get a hold of you, and we’ll put some of the links on your page so that if you’re driving, you don’t need to take down his information but let us know how we can reach you and what’s the best way to have a continued conversation if people listening are interested in whether or not you’re a good fit for them.

Hardy: Yeah, sounds good. We’re always looking for the right fit. A lot of our client partners are kind of even middle to late adopters and they really need a trusted digital solutionist to help support them in the building of their digital marketing program. We really are end to end, we can watch an entire program from scratch, or elevate someone’s marketing program that’s been in place, and we also can come in at a channel level as well. Our website is parallel.com. We’re excited, we actually launched a new website. If anyone has any questions, they can always reach out to me and all my contact information will be there, hkalisher@parallelpath.com. Happy to have a good conversation with sales professionals.

Marylou: Thank you so much. I wanna end this by if you weren’t listening at the beginning of the call, Hardy is also an elite Soccer Coach. He’s just so impressive, and he was nominated this year as a National High School Coaches Association, Soccer Coach of the Year, so congrats on that too.

Hardy: I appreciate it. Lots of parallels between.

Marylou: Yeah, indeed. Thank you so much for your time and I appreciate you sharing with us where things are going.

Hardy: I appreciate it. Thank you, Marylou.

Episode 83: How to Drive Winning Behaviors – George Bronten

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 83: How to Drive Winning Behaviors - George Bronten

00:00 / 00:00

Download file Leave Review

George Bronten the founder and CEO of Membrain is here today to talk about sales effectiveness and how to drive winning behaviors. Membrain is a sales effectiveness platform that helps complex B2B sales. There goals are to make it easy to execute your process, enable your team, coach effectively, and optimize your strategy.

George is a lifelong entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. Because of the Internet and global competition, George knew the sales process needed to evolve. It is his vision to increase sales effectiveness using modern SaaS technology.

Episode Highlights:

After failing to build a successful sales team. George realized that he had some wrong assumptions.
George started Membrain to create a way of working and selling that gives a strategy for sales people to use.
Everything needs to be centered around the buyer.
How can we differentiate when everything looks the same.
How we sell is going to be even more important in the future.
Having a buyer centered strategy that is centered around the buyer.
Making sure everyone has the skillset to execute things properly.
Then empowering everyone with the processes to be successful.
The huge importance of management and being a better coach.
Sales people having multiple roles and problems that arise around that.
Focus first by starting with the clients.
Reducing the number of mistakes made and having technical people and sales people onboard with new technology.
Getting the right people onboard in the right stage of the process. Systemizing this process.
The importance of milestones and points of interest in a checklist. Go down the checklist in relevance of the goal.
Autonomy and resistance to a checklist.
How the sales process is dynamic and needs to be flexible.
The process is living, lean, and constantly getting adjusted. The importance of analytics.
Start planning what area of the pipeline you can address in the first quarter.

Resources:

Transcript:

Marylou: George, take it away. Tell us about your experience and what brought us today to this place, and how you can help people listening in for this next year in doing that highest amount of impact with lowest amount of effort in getting their teams to where they can be high producing, high functioning sales teams.

George: Thank you. Thanks for the warm introduction. Yes, my name is George, and you mentioned that I’m the Founder and CEO of Membrain, maybe to give you some backdrop, I could share how that came to be. It was really me failing to build a successful sales team in the previous company that I started. I really came to the conclusion that I had been doing a number of faulty assumptions. I was assuming that sales people who had sold something before could sell successfully for me, which was wrong. I was also assuming that sales people by nature are very disciplined and structured, which wasn’t always true either. I also thought that systems designed for salespeople, the CRMs out there, were designed to make sales people more effective. All of these things, I came to realize that they just weren’t true.

That was sort of the birth of why I started this new company called Membrain. It’s like how can we get away from these assumptions and instead introduce a way of working in selling that takes away this notion that salespeople are born and instead introduce a way of executing a strategy that we’ve designed, and that we believe in. That was the start of this whole journey that I’m on now.

I think also another conclusion that I made was that everything needs to be centered around the buyer, which sounds pretty obvious, but sometimes it’s just not. We’re trying to sell our solutions, and our products, and offerings, without really understanding how the buyer makes a decision.

I think especially now, when everything is becoming so competitive, and everything is available online for buyers, all the offerings look pretty much the same. How can we differentiate in a world where everything looks the same to the buyer? This is also something that I believe really brings out the importance of how we sell.

How we sell I think is gonna become even more important in the future to make our company stand out in the competition. That starts with understanding the buyer. Who are we trying to help, what are we trying to help them with, who are the other people in this space that we are competing to for their mindshare, and how are we different, how do we communicate in a way that makes us stand out, and makes us interesting. There’s so many things we need to think about and do right, and at the end of the day, it has to be executed with discipline everyday. In between, there are constant things that we could do wrong.

A very long rant, but I think it’s really about having a strategy that is centered around your buyer, making sure that everyone has the skill set to execute that, and then having the processes, and the technology as well, to make that happen in a very disciplined and professional way. That all needs to come together somehow, which is the big challenge.

Marylou: Right. Then the other challenge is we have dual roles for reps. Some reps are prospectors, closers, servicers in a lot of industries still today. We have the Predictable Revenue Model where we separate out some of those roles. We may have someone dealing just with inbound inquiries, we may have someone doing outreach to cold accounts, or to warm out that chill. The Sales Managers face with, you know, I love what you’re saying but, where do I begin? Where is the magic checklist?

George: Yeah. Definitely. I think that’s a good insight that you’ve been working with, and talking also. These are really different processes within the whole sales process. Just having that insight is great, and knowing that there will be different types of people needed in those different roles.

You touched on management, I think that’s a huge leverage in the sales profession today. The time, and the will to become better coaches, I think, that would make a huge impact on revenues. Because we see a lot of times, Sales Managers, and they’re promoted to Sales Managers, but they may not have the skillset to be a great Manager, they’re bogged down in all these reporting, the excel file they need to produce for everyone. They don’t have time, or skills, or the attitude, or the mental willingness to do coaching in a good way. I think that’s a huge leverage, if that can be done right, that could even move the needle.

Marylou: Right. Where do you see in your work now, if we were to, since I’m a process person, I’m gonna force you to split the pipeline. If you go in and things are broken everywhere, where do you focus first? If I was a manager coming in to a company, we’re not getting enough leads, our close rates suck, basically our lifetime value of clients is just hurting, is there a process of hierarchy of where you would begin to start fixing things? If you can’t fix the whole thing, where do you think the biggest bang for the buck is in putting this type of process effectiveness, loop that you’re talking about in.

George: I think that’s gonna be very different of course, depending on the type of company, but I think we should start with the clients, the customers. Who are we trying to sell to? Who have we been successful selling to profitably? And that’s also an interesting question to ask because sometimes we chase the top line so much that we drive revenues that may not even be profitable. Which clients should we be able to attract, and win their business, and deliver, so that they’re happy. And then we should design a strategy to get more of that business.

I guess I would start with understanding who’s the customer, are we targeting the right customers. I see a lot of times, especially now with this whole inbound marketing and content marketing hype that’s been going on, that we attract a lot of leads to the websites, but sometimes, they’re also not the right type of leads. You have sales teams chasing the wrong type of deals, you’re chasing everything that comes through the door, or through the website.

Marylou: Right. I see that still to this day that I call minnows and whales. We get a lot of minnows, some whales on the inbound side, and reps chase the minnows just as hard with as much effort and time as the whales.

George: I think that’s the typical mistake that’s made, and the qualification process is poor. There’s nothing really guiding the reps to say, “Okay, this is one you shouldn’t spend time on, and this one you should spend time.” I think that scenario, that’s pretty easy to fix, that can make a huge difference. But then I talk a lot about just reducing the number of mistakes that we make.

Marylou: That’s an interesting concept. Let’s talk about that. I like that.

George: Yeah. That’s really one of the ideas I had also when I was starting this company. In the previous company, I saw that sales people were making a lot of mistakes. We sold in that company an IT automation product, it’s a software that could really make an IT service provide a much more efficient and effective. But, it was a pretty hefty investment for those companies, and from a business standpoint, it was a pretty easy pick. Do you want to go from 3% profit margins to 30% profit margins? All CEOs would say, “Yeah, sure. Of course, absolutely.” But unless you got the technical people on board, they were very afraid of the solution because they thought it was gonna make their jobs go away.

That was one mistake I saw the sales people doing all the time. They didn’t get the technical people on board, so their deal stalled and their deals died. That’s a typical mistake I think a lot of salespeople do, they don’t involve all the stakeholders in the deal. They run with a few stakeholders and then at the end of a three to six month sales cycle, someone pops up their head and say, “This is a very stupid project, let’s just cancel it, we have better things to do.” That’s a typical mistake, I think, a lot of sales teams do. They’re just failing in identifying all the right stakeholders, and there are probably a tons of other mistakes. I think if we can just identify those mistakes and reduce them, we can do a pretty substantial improvement.

Marylou: You mentioned early on in the discussion about the CRM and your awareness around the tool itself; the way we track, the way we traverse down the pipeline. In eliminating mistakes, where do you go look to see what’s wrong? Is it the CRM, is it interviews, how does one go about systematically defining what these mistakes are looking for those gaps?

George: I think the problem with the traditional CRM systems is that they don’t really provide any granularity in the sales process, they’re pretty rough. You basically ask the salesperson to select the stage the deal is in. The rest, you need to go dig up in notes, somewhere. Hopefully, they’re in there. But I think usually, and the way I found out, was just in the deal we’ve used and in deal coaching, when asking sales peoples, Okay, this is a great deal, you’re very happy about this deal but you mentioned you don’t know who their CTO is. You haven’t figured that out, because if you don’t get that person on board, how do you think this deal will go? Maybe that person will object, maybe they’re afraid. Have you seen this before? There’s a lot in the deal coaching that we could find out these mistakes, and I think a lot of Sales Managers do that, and they do that well. But the question becomes, “How can we systemize that?” Always done, not just by manual probing in manager sessions, but the systems should be making sure we don’t make these mistakes.

I read a really interesting book on this topic actually, it had nothing to do with selling, whatsoever, called the Checklist Manifesto, I’ve read about it, it’s an American Surgeon. They were approached by, I think, the World Health Organization who said that the number of surgeries is going up exponentially, just one problem, people are dying. They asked him, “Okay, you’re a Harvard Surgeon, you’re a team, you’re great, help us understand why this is happening and how we can prevent it.” Pretty quickly, they figured out that people were dying, and there were complications post surgery because of simple mistakes. Not just not washing their hands, anesthesia was off, and the timing and scalpels weren’t disinfected, etc. etc. They lifted that problem and said, “Okay, what should we do? Should we train them? No, they’re very well trained, they should know these things. They’re just forgetting about it, or things that come in between.”

They started looking at other industries, and other professions, and they saw a pilot’s friends list, they all use checklists like okay, that’s interesting. They don’t take off for the plane unless they’ve really checked off all the things, and if those things they have on the checklist were missed, that could jeopardize lives. They went back to the surgeons and say, “Hey, I really think this is a really good idea, let’s introduce checklists. Before we put the scalpel through skin, we have to do these things. What do you think?” They were like, “No, that’s silly. I’ve been a surgeon for 25 years, I don’t need no checklist.”

Marylou: “I know what I’m doing.”

George: “I know what I’m doing. That’s really stupid.” But they did try it anyway, and they reduced the number of deaths with 47%.

Marylou: Wow.

George: I think that’s staggering.

Marylou: That is staggering.

George: The surgeons and their teams are very highly trained people. I always tell that story to Sales Managers and salespeople like, “Don’t you think we should have a checklist as well to prevent killing deals? We do these mistakes that kill deals, and sales people do these mistakes all day long. Let’s just introduce more structure, and a process that’s more granular so that we don’t miss anything that’s really important. I think that’s interesting.

Marylou: It is an interesting concept, but once again, not unlike surgeons, sales people love to think of themselves as each deal is unique, every client is different, so we can’t possibly have an underlying process because it ebbs and flows.

George: Have you heard that as well? Yeah. But in part, of course it’s absolutely true. But there’s some things that are always the same, we’re helping a buyer make a decision and throughout that decision there will be milestones, there will be small decisions that have to be made, there’s information that we need to gather. A lot of things are very similar throughout the sales cycle even though each opportunity is different.

Marylou: What I like about that, and I’m just kidding you about that, because I hear that all the time from people and I snicker and laugh, but one of the things that I tell folks is look, once we get it into a checklist format, the number of milestones, the number of what I call points of interest, I get people to think of this as like being on a freeway here on the States where there’s mile markers that show forward movement, there’s exits that, basically exit out of the pipeline when you know that it’s not a fit now and may never be a fit. And then, there’s this points of interest that allow you to traverse to the next important meaningful stage.

When you think about it that way, there’s not a lot of stuff that we really want you to track, or to be able to converse with us about, in relation to the entire deal. It shouldn’t be that difficult to give us three to five things versus the hundreds of things that could go on. If we have a checklist to guide us, our meetings are shorter, because we just got on the checklist, and we go through the things where we are relative to goal. We know positionally where things are because the checklists aligned to points of interest or levels of probability in the opportunity pipeline.

George: I think one interesting piece or concept with the resistance of checklist I think is our willingness to have autonomy in what we do. I think a lot of sales people especially like their freedom on their autonomy in their work that they can be creative. They feel that process is sort of standing in their way for that creativity.

Marylou: Yeah, you’re right. It did exist. But in prospecting, it can’t exist like that in prospecting. It just will not work if we try to allow too many free spirits out there doing whatever they need to do.

George: No, I agree, of course I agree with you, I’m just saying to understand why that pops up, I think that’s a big part of it.

Marylou: It is.

George: Also, I think the checklist, I always say that a sales process is not a recipe, because a recipe is very like okay you have this [00:18:28] and very rigid and then you come with an end result. And of course selling is not really that rigid, you have a sales process which is marked guiding and then it should be dynamic as well. If we find out that the customer is in a particular industry or we know that, we have different scripts, and this is a different buyer. It can’t be too strict and it can’t be too rigid. It has to be there, I wouldn’t even go grocery shopping without a shopping list because I’ll forget something.

Marylou: I agree. I think the points of interest or the main milestones, whatever you wanna call them. The concepts of project management and understanding how to leverage the brain power that we have in our teams into a process that works for everybody, that’s the baseline of what you’re talking about, sitting down in that planning session together, brainstorming, what’s real, they call it the FOG Effect, what’s Fact, what’s Opinion, and what’s a Guess. Creating those milestones based on as much fact as possible, instead of the opinions and guesses which a lot of sales people like to live in the world of opinions and guesses. Once we can all agree that we can all get into some type of structure that’s not overwhelming that we can follow but still have our creative side addressed is, in my opinion, the best way to attack some of these issues that we’re having.

I’m not a bottom of funnel expert like you are, and I have, luckily, at top of funnel, there is less resistance to the creative side because people know that we’re dealing with higher numbers of records to begin with, can’t possibly get through them all without some type of process underlying it. But then when it gets handed off to an opportunity, that’s when things get fuzzy and gray.

George: Yes. I would agree.

Marylou: Hence, the reason why Marylou doesn’t cross that line.

George: Yeah. That’s the challenge on working on it. I think another issue we’re facing is the analytical part. How can we do win-loss analysis and how can we really look at the pipeline, and what we are doing that’s working and what we’re doing that’s not working as well, and how can we improve the process because the process is never completed, it’s living.

Marylou: It’s living, it’s lean, it’s constantly getting iterated.

George: But if you don’t look at the analytics, then you won’t know what really what to prove. I see a lot of sales leaders not really looking at the analytics in a way that I would like them to look at it. Just some more like in depth.

Marylou: George, we’re running out of time, I could talk to you forever. I would like you to kind of let us know, if we were to pop on to your Membrain website, and say, “Okay, he’s speaking my language. I’m drinking that Kool Aid, I really wanna know more.” Where can everybody go find more information on you, your process, your company, your history, etc.?

George: Thank you, membrain.com is the product website, the company website, you’ll find information there. Connect with me on LinkedIn, it’s probably the easiest. I’m very active on LinkedIn, George Bronten. It’s a weird last name which makes it easy to find, or just email me at george@membrain.com.

Marylou: And just for you guys out there, George has got a lot of articles, a lot of blog posts on this topic, makes a lot of sense to outlining the challenges that we’re facing. As we move into the new year, it’s a good time now to sit down and plan out what area of the pipeline, starting with the buyer as he said, what area of the pipeline can we affect first quarter, and then just chunk away at it because that’s really how this works when you’re leveraging the strategies, the buyers, the skillsets, the process, coaching. We can only take off a little bite and perfect that and move on. And knowing that we’re gonna come back to that bite, because it’s never perfect, but at least we have a system in place that we can strategize against, and make sure that we’re continuing to optimize that process. George, thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it.

George: Thank you for having me.

Episode 82: Top of the Funnel Focus – Jamie Crosbie

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 82: Top of the Funnel Focus - Jamie Crosbie

00:00 / 00:00

Download file Leave Review

Jamie Crosbie is here today to talk about the top of the funnel. Jamie has experience all the way through the funnel and knows a lot about the pipeline. For the show, I asked her to focus on the top of the funnel, but if you like her processes and workflows by all means get in touch with her because she has a lot to share.

Jamie has over 20 years of experience in sales leadership and the talent acquisition industry. She founded ProActivate over 13 years ago. ProActivate partners globally with forward thinking leaders of organizations to achieve their revenue goals. We provide the top-shelf sales talent you need to amplify your message, leverage your position, and expand your base. Our unique model is the next generation of sales talent acquisition. We qualify talent through an in-depth, precise methodology based on behavioral modeling, digging deep into both skill-set, mindset and simulation evaluations. This allows us to offer only the most qualified sales professionals for your continuing strong growth.

Jamie is a certified speaker in The High Performance Mindset ® system, a revolutionary model that is elevating the performance of professionals ranging from athletes to executives to sales leaders. During these trainings she shares both the science and working tools that you can use immediately to enhance performance both for yourself and your team members. It’s proven that human performance is limited not primarily by skills and knowledge, but by the nature of our thinking, our mental preparation for success and the environment within which we choose to operate.

Episode Highlights:

The passion behind ProActivate is to help organizations achieve revenue goals, increase productivity, and maximize talent and performance.
They help replace C players with A players and build talent to help organizations create a peak performance culture.
They mostly focus on the people piece, but skillset, mindset, and toolset enable people to be successful.
How mindset is a peak interest of students.
The importance of mindset for any industry. We have 60,000 thoughts everyday and 80% are negative. The impact on a sales person who deals with rejection is huge.
How engaging in higher level thinking enables us to perform at higher levels.
How habits are something that you do. Moving from discipline and sheer will to habits of work processes.
Hiring the best and upgrading the rest.
How the workshop has a step-by-step framework for developing mindset skills in a tangible way.
How rewarding it is to unleash someone’s mindset to the highest level.
For the next year, write down your goals and know your bigger why behind them.

Resources:

ProActivate
The Power of 2 – Exponential Sales Leadership
@jmcrosbie on Twitter
Jamie Crosbie on LinkedIn
JCrosbie@ProActivate.net
(214)720-9922

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. I have a guest today that you guys are going to love, Jamie Crosbie. She’s the CEO and founder of a company called ProActivate. I’ll let her tell about what the company does and how they serve. But I wanted to introduce Jamie. We’re going to talk today about the top-of-funnel, although she does have experience all the way through. Unlike Marylou who only does top, she knows a lot about a lot of different things with the pipelines. I’ve asked her to focus, for our sakes, on top-of-funnel. But if you like what she’s saying, if you love the process that she uses and her workflows then by all means talk to her about the whole pipeline. Jamie, welcome to the podcast.

Jamie: Thank you so much. Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Marylou: Tell us about ProActivate. What is ProActivate? What’s your passion around that? Who do you serve as clients?

Jamie: Absolutely. We serve VPs of sales and CEOs of sales organizations across all industries specializing specifically in sales and marketing and really supports revenue generation within an organization. The passion behind it is really helping organizations achieve revenue goals, increase productivity, and just maximize the talent among their teams and their performance to achieve peak levels of performance, and with individuals as well to help them reach their full potential within the organization.

We serve our clients by specifically finding A-players to join their team or protecting their revenue by either replacing C-players with A-players or building a funnel of talent to protect in case their top performer were unexpectedly to leave or something of that nature. Then as well, helping organizations really look at creating a peak performance culture within their company.

Marylou: Oh, wow. That’s great. If we were to look at the three-legged stool of people, process, and technology, would you say ProActivate focuses on all of those three areas or do you specialize perhaps on the people side more? How much do you do if I were to put you on that box of those three different layers?

Jamie: It’s interesting you say that because I do think when you look at someone’s success within a company, I may look at the three layers a little bit differently but it is those three layers. I would say to answer your question directly, we focus mostly on the people piece of that. As well sometimes companies need help with their sales process. When we’re looking at that people piece saying, “What does it take for people to be successful?” It’s skill set, mindset, and tool set.

The technology is the tool set of what you’re speaking about, just the tools for the company to give them a bit. Skill set and mindset are super important. 80% of skill success is about mindset. But so much we’re focused on skill set development. I would say we really help to focus in terms of development on mindset that’s getting the right people in the seats and maximizing the potential of the organization by getting great people first and foremost, finding A-players, and upgrading the team from the perspective of making sure that that’s the mindset component as well.

Marylou: I just finished teaching an MBA class here locally in Des Moine. It was very clear that mindset is an area of peaked intros among students. It’s funny because I’m coming from the process side of things. I wouldn’t consider myself a people mindset type of person. But I do know that from the process point of view, we can amplify when there’s skill set issues or mindset issues. But I’m not the person you’re going to come to to fix that or to understand what we need in order to be successful in each of the sales roles.

Tell us about the mindset piece, if you don’t mind sharing. What got you interested in that piece? What types of frameworks or systems have you put together to help companies focus on developing a higher quality mindset for each of their people in the different sales roles that are available in the company?

Jamie: Sure. That’s a great point and a great question. I think that the way you helping identify if it’s a skill set or mindset issue very important and impactful. Because it starts there, with figuring out what the true issue is. Then you can go about adding value to fix it.

How did I get into it? First of all we’ve had great people. But then a lot of times, mindset is an issue across the board for any level of leader, for any industry, whether it’s someone in sales or leadership or marketing or operations, truly no matter who it is. I started learning about mindset and just the fact that this and this alone is just eye opening. Naturally, everyday we have 60,000 thoughts. Without editing those thoughts and without being aware of mindsets and the impact of it, naturally 80% of those thoughts are negative. If you look at just that and then in of itself, the impact of that on a salesperson who’s facing rejection all the time. When you just think about especially getting appointments and all of that and trying to close deals and just how our minds can impact opportunities all of the time.

I started learning about that and how when we can engage in higher level thinking, we can perform at such optimal levels. When I say higher level thinking, I’m really referring to flipping the script on these naturally negative thoughts, learning how to conquer that and learning how to think at a higher level. Detach emotionally sometimes in scenarios you think of it a hard client situation where you may just be getting flustered. But instead of that, thinking at a higher level especially in the data at hand, quickly presenting a new solution, and you end up getting the deal.

I thought there was a huge need because a lot of us have had great skill set training. There’s a lot of great sales training. I have been through it and I’ve presented it. The mindset piece is so impactful whether you’re an athlete, so much of that is the mental preparation or you’re in sales, so much of it is the mental preparation.

We, as a company, at ProActivate for 13 years we’ve helped organizations find A-players, people who can maximize their revenue potential. But now we’re helping as well, over the past couple of years people get certified and peak performance mindset. We help to impact that by offering workshops within organizations to teach them about all the components of growing their mindset.

Marylou: Wow. It sounds like it is a framework that you’ve put together?

Jamie: Absolutely. It sounds like it’s really unclear but it’s a specific framework. There are specific actions that you can take to think about our self-talk and how to manage that self-talk. Just how to engage in no limit thinking, how to engage in higher level thinking, and just to regulate ourselves to achieve and perform at a higher level. Thinking really about our bigger why. What’s the reason we’re even doing what we’re doing? What are our specific goals? How do we structure those in our lives and write them down? There are so many components that really make a difference. There’s a framework. There’s a growth framework to look at our mindset overall.

Marylou: I know. A big part of what I preach in terms of my very limited scope of habit, mindset, discipline, is that we’re trying to really instill in business developers that a big portion of the workflow that we do is habit-based. In my simple mind, I just say things like, “Discipline is great but discipline is still something that you have to do and you muscle through it or grit, clench teeth, get it done.”

What we’re trying to get to is the habit is just something you do. The simple analogy is brushing your teeth, people brush their teeth everyday. It’s a natural occurring habit that we all do. But in the 1960s, it was not. It was definitely a disciplined type of task to get people to brush. The top-of-funnel, a lot of the workflow pieces in order to be successful, really you have to move from that discipline or sheer will or desire all the way up to habitual workflow.

Jamie: Right.

Marylou: In your mindset class, do you talk about moving from just sheer grit of getting things done to an innate process that’s in your brain? Is there a piece of that?

Jamie: Yeah.

Marylou: Okay.

Jamie: Yes, exactly. Because it becomes innate over time. It’s a practice. It’s not anything else but it’s not natural. What’s innate right now is the natural negative thinking. That’s definitely not what we want.

Marylou: Correct.

Jamie: First, the awareness of it. But then it is learning how to just change the way you think. This is interesting. We do definitely talk about specific steps that you take over time that will retrain your brain so that it is more innate to think differently and to think at a higher level and to think as someone who has that high performance mindset.

As an example to create that awareness, one of my favorite parts, and it’s just simple. This can be a full-day workshop, a half day or a few-hour. There’s keynote as well in it. One of the things I do in the workshop is ask for a volunteer to come forward. You could have 500 people in a room, 1000 people in a room or 10 people in a room. It’s always just the same. One or two people will raise their hands and be willing to volunteer.

What’s interesting is 1 or 2 out of 500, out of 100, again it doesn’t matter. Then when someone comes up then I’ll say, “What’s your name? Okay, great. Nice to meet you. Here’s $100. You may be seated. Thank you so much.” Everyone else is like, “Oh my gosh. I totally would’ve volunteered.” I ask them just have a moment, a pause and say, “Okay. Let’s be as honest as we can be with each other. Think back to that moment when I said I need a volunteer. What thought went through your mind at that exact moment? What were you thinking?”

Marylou: Would that be in pairs?

Jamie: Yeah, exactly. There’s always one out of the crowd that’ll say, “Well, I just wanted to give other people the opportunity to go as volunteer,” which is never really true. I’m like, “Whatever.” The people who are vulnerable enough are honest. It could be a room of CEOs I’ve done it with. It could be a room of sales leaders or sales people. It does not matter. It’s the same every time.

If people are real they say, “I didn’t know what you were going to need. I was afraid I would look stupid. I have fear of rejection, fear of failure.” It’s the negative thinking. But it is very poignant in helping us become aware of what naturally happens. How many opportunities we’re missing everyday for $100, so to speak, because we just are afraid?

Marylou: Big enough.

Jamie: Yes. There’s that.

Marylou: I can totally relate to that. I think a lot of it too when we’re thinking about the top-of-funnel, we have the ability to knock on doors, virtually speaking, but we’re talking to CEOs, we’re talking to director-level people, and we may just have one or two years under our belt in sales and the skill set. There’s this natural apprehension of talking to a senior-level person when we’re the lowly business development team. It’s a very real fear on a lot of people.

Jamie: Right, absolutely.

Marylou: Your mindset training teaches us how to get rid of that and how to actually embrace those conversations as a means towards the end goal. Is that what we would come up with?

Jamie: Yes. That’s definitely a big piece of it and a component of it. We talk a lot about that rejection and how to within that negative thought, how to manage through that and to think of it differently and how to persevere and get better results. Definitely, that’s something that salespeople have to fight against.

Marylou: In your work, do you work with salespeople who actually do all roles in sales? They prospect, they close, they service. Or do you also see this movement towards business development people? That’s what they do. They open those doors when they hand off the opportunity to someone who closes deals and then someone then services once they become a client. Do you actually see those folks going through your programs or a mix? What are you seeing out there?

Jamie: I see a mix definitely. Again, it’s not even just people in sales. They’re definitely a mix. Because as we work with organizations, it also relates to finding talents or peak performance. It’s different across all industries. There are different structures. Really all types of sales roles. Again it could be sales leadership, marketing, operations. Just the C level within an organization.

You need that kind of peak performance culture within the entire organization. It does make a huge difference. People who have a positive mindset for sales specifically sell 38% more. It makes a major revenue impact within an organization. But you need that across the entire organization.

Marylou: You said that you also help companies by putting the right people in seats. What do you do with the company that’s got a mismatch of people who are not necessarily high performers but they’re employees of the company? How do you balance them all out so that everyone is performing at high peak?

Jamie: First and foremost, one of the things when we look at partnering with an organization, we’ll talk about the sales organization as a whole. When we talk about talents, we’re talking about their great opportunity in the marketplace, where they have some vulnerabilities in regards to C-players. Where their natural turnover that may just be an industry type of turnover and just an average on sales. Across all industries, there’s a 30% turnover in sales. But some industries are a lot more. We talk about all of those factors and how to proactively build a funnel of talents that matches the profile of a top performer within their organization so they can protect their revenue, for growth, for that, for any areas.

I think what you mentioned earlier is assessing to see if the skill set or mindset issue is important. If they want to be better, whether at skill set or mindset, then absolutely, the peak performance mindset workshop or any skill set training that is provided to them will make a difference. But if they don’t really care, no great leader, no one can make someone care. They’re just one person and they need to be replaced. Our tagline is, “Hire the Best, upgrade the Rest.” That covers everything we do.

Marylou: Great. Of the three: the skill set, the mindset, the tool set, is there a priority order? Or after you start having those conversations with your clients, you go down one channel versus the other? How is that normally?

Jaime: Yeah. I think the tool set piece is there internally. What’s the CRM system? What are they using? How do they help them? The skill set and the mindset, it takes either. First priority is looking at the people overall. Where do they have open seats because they’re missing revenue opportunity? That’s an urgency. Where do they have C-players that they know need to be replaced and can’t be upgraded? Let us get those right people in.

A lot of companies, they may have great training development within the company. We’ll talk about just the gap and opportunities within the organization for development and if they offer any development around peak performance, just mindset specifically or if most of their onboarding or sales process or development is focused on skill set.

It’s different for a big company connected out because they all have different challenges. It’s not a cookie-cutter approach. It really is customized based on the company’s specific goals and challenges.

Marylou: One of the other areas, I don’t know if you addressed this or if it’s even something that you have entertained doing, but a lot of times at top-of-funnel business development, the smaller companies especially seem to want to outsource that function a lot. They would have someone else journaling those appointments or those first meetings and then their internal reps would handle from a meeting down to close one or close loss.

Do you look at that as part of your assessment, whether outsourcing some of these roles would be beneficial? Or are you working with people who want to keep everything in-house and grow their teams internally?

Jamie: We have clients that do both. We definitely have clients that outsource the piece of it or some clients would just ask us who might we outsource those to. But they’re not looking to have the teams internally. Most of our clients, of course if we’re helping them find talent specifically, they’re internal teams. Some organizations have a combination of both.

Marylou: Right. I was just curious if the work that you’re doing transcends the internal organization to the outsourcer because a lot of times from the standpoint of the handoff, it’s important to have the same cultural dialogue going on between the external and the internal. There’s always a big disconnect in my eyes.

Jamie: There can be a disconnect. Yes, absolutely.

Marylou: Yeah.

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. That’s important to not have that.

Marylou: Right.

Jamie: That’s why I said earlier to your point, yes, peak performance, mindset, workshops make a huge impact on the sales organization. But if you’re going to have that culture within the entire organization, then there’s no disconnect. It helps support that and make a major impact.

Marylou: Well I tell you, I’ve been doing this now for 30 years on the process side. Without these components that you’re discussing today, the skill set, mindset, without that in balance with what you’re calling tool set which is the process itself, you’re just setting yourself up for failure in so many ways. Because if you can put the best engine in and have the best rocket fuel going in there from the lead to the prospective. But if you’re not turning those leads into qualified opportunities and if there’s stalling, the pipeline becomes a lake instead of a pipeline. That’s typically going to be skill set and mindset issues. I’ve seen it so often. It’s hard to figure out what the framework looks like for those things.

A process is brick and mortar. It’s just like A to B. It’s just not any shades of gray. It’s black and white, so to speak. But when you get into the skill set, mindset pieces, there are so many nuisances to it. It just seems very fluffy to me. I love the fact that you have a framework, step by step where people can go in, they can learn the framework. Then overtime they’re going to master the framework and see those results and more revenue.

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. I agree with you completely. It does sound fluffy. You have to walk away with something tangible. You have to walk away with a framework. How do I fix this? I have 60,000 thoughts today. If naturally 80% of them are negative, how do I change that? I don’t really want to know that unless I can fix it.

Marylou: Exactly. What’s also beautiful about what you do too is this is not just for sales. This goes into your life. These are life lessons. If you’re trying to become an athlete or healthy or eat better, it’s all in the mind just to how you go about improving upon your behaviors.

Jamie: Right.

Marylou: Yeah. It really touches so many different areas. I’m sure you have just fabulous conversations with your folks at the end of these workshops where they’re heading. From a follow-up perspective, where they were, how they’re growing, and where they’re going to get to. It must be very rewarding for you.

Jamie: It really is. I think when you can unleash someone’s mindset to the highest level and just helping people become who they were fully created to be, that’s what I love about the peak performance piece of our business. It just raises the quality of someone’s life overall. When companies do this within their organizations, people feel like they’ve been personally poured into. It’s different than anything they’ve ever gotten. They walk away knowing their dreams so clearly, their goals so clearly in business, which is highly impactful for the company, but personally as well. Why they’re really there personally, which motivates them so much more.

People walk away feeling like, “Oh my gosh.” That is how I ultimately got into it. I was having a conversation about this and learning more about it. I thought, “This is life changing, whether it’s in business or not.” This will change businesses but this will change lives within the people and businesses. It’s just truly impactful.

Marylou: I think it’s a wonderful gift that organizations can give to their employees, colleagues. Tell us how we can get ahold of you to find out more, inquire about your services? Any recommendations you have as we move into, this is being taped for the end of 2017. We’re starting to move into a new year, new goal. There’s a lot of fun planning ahead of us. First and foremost, let us know how we can get ahold of you. Secondly if there’s any documentation you want to include on your page for planning for 2018, let us know about that too.

Jamie: First of all, I can be contacted at jcrosbie@proactivate.net. Not proactive but proactivate, I have to specify. Then in 214-720-9922. In regards to just getting ahead for next year, I would say first and foremost write down your goals, whether you like to prospect, you want to get in where your top target companies. When I say write down your goals, it’s not just business goals. I know we’re talking business but I learned at the age of 18 from my mom, or probably 16, to write down goals.

I write them down for professional goals, for financial goals, for community service goals, for family wellness goals, relational goals, physical goals, financial goals. Every category in your life that’s important to you. Know your bigger why. The bigger the why, the bigger the try, and the better the half. Write down specific goals and know the why behind them. What do you want to accomplish? Why do you want to accomplish it? How will you go about accomplishing it? What are the specific, measurable steps?

If I could only say one thing that would make for a greater 2018, it would be that. Just to have very clear, measurable goals that you look back at. At the beginning of every month, I will look at the goals that I have set out and plan and schedule time for each of those things into my calendar. If I said I’m going to work out five times a week then I will write down my workout into my calendar, whatever it is.

We want to have a plan of action. We want to live on purpose with a purpose and be intentional. Studies said that people who write down their goals are much more successful and have a higher, greater chance of achieving what they set out to achieve. We don’t want to just get through the year. We want to make things happen in the year. That would be my biggest piece of advice.

Marylou: Perfect. The other thing I’ll add to that, I think people know my goal for 2018, I’m turning 60 in May.

Jamie: Oh my gosh. You do not look like it. I’m sorry I’m interfering you but you do not look like it at all.

Marylou: Thank you. I have a 60-second handstand goal. I want to hold the handstand for 60 seconds on my birthday. Everybody knows that. The story here is write your goals down as Jamie said. But also make them public. Let your colleagues know, share with your friends and your family what your goals are. The ones you want to share. Don’t share everything. But share the ones that you think are good to share with the public. That also motivates you internally, it’s just fulfilling, and your behavior does start changing towards the goal.

Jamie: Right.

Marylou: I’m taking one of my classes in Aerial with my daughter to strengthen my upper body. All because I told everyone I’m doing the 60-second handstand goal in May.

Jamie: Yes. Because when you tell people, you definitely want to make it happen.

Marylou: Exactly. Jamie, thank you so much for your time. I so enjoyed that conversation. I will put all of Jamie’s information and contact for you guys on her page. That way you can start 2018 or anytime you’re ready to start the planning process and changing your mindset. It’s not a yearly thing. It’s something that we really complement. Everything that we worked so hard for in getting the process in place and all of our tools and understanding metrics, those are all great things.

If you don’t have the mindset and really to get started and then work on your skills in addition to all of these, you’re never going to meet those goals that you have set for yourself. Give yourself a present. Really look Jamie up and see what she has to offer. Thanks again, Jamie. I really appreciate your time.

Jamie: Thank you, my pleasure.

Episode 81: The Characteristics of a Good Closer – Mark SA Smith

Predictable Prospecting

Episode 81: The Characteristics of a Good Closer - Mark SA Smith

00:00 / 00:00

Download file Leave Review

Process and metrics are so important, but there is a whole other side to selling. In this episode, I have a conversation with sales expert Mark SA Smith. We talk about selling professionally and being authentic. We talk about polishing the saw not only with systems and frameworks, but when it comes to the conversational side and speaking from the heart.

Mark shares stories of exceptional sales professionals. Ones who have skills like caring about their customers success, having foresight, choosing who you do business with, and being pragmatic. He talks about the importance of trust, and how the number one salesperson is usually the most trusted salesperson. We also talk about the importance of customer motivation and more.

Episode Highlights:

How life can be easier when you are in build mode because you have a path planned out.
Moving from knowing what’s next to being OK with uncertainty.
Having a growth mindset and progressing in a way that is comfortable for you.
How life is a series of challenges and triumphs.
How the person who signs the checks is the person who actually closes the sale.
Being a trusted partner as opposed to a sales person.
Creating customer success through foresight. Making a mutually profitable transaction.
Characteristics of a closer are caring about customer success, having foresight, picking your customers, and being pragmatic.
Working consistently instead of working hard.
The importance of trust and relationships with customers.
The product line is only 10% of the sales equation. Most sales people focus on the product. Focus on helping the customer relationship instead.
FAB charts or features and advantages. Attempting to map product to customer motivation. It should be mapping motivation to product.
Stop pitching and start asking questions and listening.
Offering permission to defer helps with building relationship.
Where the empathy comes into play and being open.

Resources:

Transcript:

Marylou: Since you and I last talked, I’m pushing 60. I got a notice from my broker to save all my retirement stuff, to check my balances. I have hit every woopy goal that I set out. If this is when I was younger, I’d probably have no idea what I was doing. I’m faced with, “Wow. Okay so I’ve hit all my goals. Now what?” I feel like an Olympic athlete who won a gold model. Then you’ve got to kind of like, “What’s next? Should I push harder? Should I change directions? Should I become a welder?”

Mark: I hope we’re recording this because it’s a really dreaming podcast.

Marylou: It’s all being recorded.

Mark: I think almost anybody who would listen is going through the same situation. If you’re an executive, if you’ve been doing something for 40, 50, 60 years, you’re going to hit that place where you go I’ve done it all, I’ve hit all my goals. Do I grow my business bigger? Do I go for lifestyle? I had a really interesting conversation with Bo Burlingham a couple of weeks ago. His podcast went up last week. Do you know who Bo is?

Marylou: No.

Mark: He was an Editor at Large of Inc. Magazine for 25 years. This man is a repository of knowledge for entrepreneurship through so many business cycles and he’s pragmatic, and he’s wonderful, and thoughtful. One of the most amazing interviews that I’ve ever had just because tapping into that extraordinary depth of experience.

He wrote a book. His last book is called Finish Big and it talks about entrepreneurial exits, similar to what John Warrillow did with Built to Sell. With this one, he talked about the psychological impact of people who sold their businesses. More than half of the people he interviewed regretted selling their business because they lost their identity.

Marylou. Wow. I definitely relate to that. A lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in build mode. I used to tell my kids this, we don’t have a lot of choices. You’ve got to put food on the table, take care of your kids, take care of your family. Life seems a little bit “easier” because you have a path.

When I went to school, for example, my daughter’s going to school to become an English major, she’s going to college. I went to the college of engineering and computer science. As soon as I set a toe in the door of the college, my whole four years was planned, every task that I needed to take, everything. There were no options. You just buckle down.

Sometimes, it seems that when you have that defined path, life flows a lot easier. The other phenomena that I’ve been discovering is if I have too much time on my hands, I seem to not get projects done but if I have five projects lined up that I’ve got to do, somehow they all get done.

Mark: The miracle of the deadline.

Marylou: I’m trying to figure out how to harness this energy, this goodness that we go through when we have these multiple things happening, to focus on being a better prospect or being a better salesperson, whatever that definition is that you have. But approach it more with that growth mindset that I’m not there yet but I will get there and these are the steps that I’m going to take in order to get those daily wins, micro wins, whatever you want to call it to get to that point.

Mark: I think what we have to do is move from this place of knowing what’s next to being okay in the uncertainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s a wild and crazy world both politically and economically and spiritually. It’s a crazy place.

We have been rewarded, Marylou, by our knowledge. We’ve been judged by our knowledge. We’ve been paid for our knowledge. You and I are at that place because I’m only a few years behind you. I’m 58. This notion of what happens next and all the things that I’ve been rewarded for are starting to disappear. My knowledge of the world of I.T. is going away because I.T. is going away. What happens next? There’s this fear of, “Am I going to fail?” Yeah I fit all those goals, all those things like you. Every one of them, boxes have been checked. Now what? It’s an interesting philosophical question. Any answers?

Marylou: I turn to what do I love to do and I just try to focus on how can I get some improvement out of that? Everything in life, you can always improve a little bit more. The other thing I’d like my books to really grasp is this notion of turning pure will into habit. This is for top of funnel, I can’t speak for bottom of funnel. So those of you who are rolling their eyes who closed business, I’m sorry but I’m top of funnel. You guys should know that.

But I think if you could really focus on changing the behavior from sheer will to determination to drive to discipline and eventually to habit, that’s going to be what’s successful. You wake up in the morning and you not necessarily have your whole day planned but you have it blocked out so that you can accomplish the things within that block time, single focus that will allow you to advance whatever it is you set out as your goal. But I think there is a goal though.

One of the things that I’m struggling with now that I got this news about meeting my retirement, financial goals is what are my new goals? What do they look like? I’ve been working so hard over the last 30 years to meet the goals that I thought would be so far out there that if I’d be 100, I still wouldn’t have made it. It’s really sitting back down now and say, “Okay, I have a couple of levers that I know I love to do.” One is to have this podcast, to talk to people, to help them with their prospecting. The other is more of a creative side which for me, believe it or not is programming because that’s where I was trained in. I want to continue.

My other hat in life is a market research analyst and that business is actually picking up lately with surveys for employee, Net Promoter Score loyalty. That’s another area that I can focus on. I wasn’t kidding. I am taking welding class because I want to know how to weld. That project is going to be putting little 4×4 gabions. For those who don’t know what they are, look it up. Putting 4×4 gabions in my ravine and stringing LED lights that I can change the color with so my ravines sparkle in the winter.

Mark: Magnificent.

Marylou: Those are all levers. Obviously, I don’t know the first thing about welding but it’s a process. I’m sure even in your life, Mark, with the work that you do with your clients, there is a system, there is a method, there is a process and really, you have to start on that journey and be okay with the fact that you’re not mastering it on day one.

Mark: Absolutely true.

Marylou: That you’re moving along the journey and that you’re not there yet but you will be someday and you have to have that growth mindset of, “I’m going to get there. It won’t be tomorrow but I’m going to do things that I need to do to progress in a way that’s comfortable for me that I’m not killing myself.”

Mark: Absolutely true. One of the quotes that came out of our podcast conversation is discipline is something I have to do, and habit is something I do. That was such a powerful thought for me. Of course I made a meme out of it. It’s all over Twitter because of that. You’re right, it’s about systems, it’s about habits that push us a little bit forward everyday whether it’s reading or listening to a new podcast or trying something you’ve never done before or just the willingness to step out and fail or the willingness to step out and say, “I’m wrong.” We have to be so right. We’ve been programmed from kindergarten to be right.

Marylou: And rewarded like you said. Our parents, whenever we have that great piano recital, they get up and clap but they don’t clap or encourage, not all parents, but some parents don’t clap or encourage the path that got us to the great recital. The daily getting down into the living room, hitting those keys, that notion of I’m going to work on this every day, that’s what we really need to reward. Yes, the end result is great and fabulous and wonderful. We’ve all seen our children, our friends and family or colleagues, achieve a goal but it’s the path to get there that really should get the reward because then, you’re going to take the next goal and do the same type of thing.

Mark: Taking those daily steps sometimes can be really boring. People can laugh at us. If we consumed a regular diet of standard media, we’re going to think that what we’re doing is stupid because they can wrap up any problem in 30 minutes. That’s just not the way life works. Life is a series of challenges and triumphs and disappointments and challenges and triumphs. That happens in prospecting and it happens at the bottom of the funnel too. Let’s talk about the bottom of the funnel just for a moment. You mentioned the fact that we’re the people that close businesses on a regular basis. Listener, I challenge you, I don’t think you’ve ever closed any business. I don’t care how much money you’ve made selling.

Marylou: This is good.

Mark: The reason why is, who controls the sale?

Marylou: The client.

Mark: Always. Whoever signs the check controls the sale. If you think it’s anything else, you have robbed yourself because the thought that I control the sale has driven away extremely profitable clients who refuse to be manipulated by salespeople. They can buy the same thing from a lot of different places and if they feel that you’re a jerk as a salesperson, they’re not going to buy from you. They’ll just quit returning your phone call. They’re going to buy from somebody else. In fact, my bet is you’ve closed more doors than you’ve closed sales with that attitude.

There’s only one guy I have ever met in the 35 years that I’ve been doing sales, his name was Gary, and he had signature authority on all his customers’ checking accounts. He wrote himself a check at the end of every day for the customers he did work for. He closed his own business. But he did so by providing such extraordinary service that his customers were willing to give him that level of partnership. He was a trusted partner, not a salesperson, a trusted partner.

They saw him as a partner. Even though what he sold was a commodity, building supplies, lumber, studs, that’s what he sold. But what he did instead was project management. The contractors he worked with finished their houses in an average of six weeks sooner than anybody else on the market. What did that do to those contractor’s profits? It massively magnified them. Because they could have their crew on another project six weeks early than everybody else and you kind of increment that along over 5 or 10 years and that’s a huge increase in profitability over no difference in costs.

What Gary would do is he’d look at the weather report and say, “Okay, for the next week, I see we got some good weather, we got some bad weather.” He would load up a truck of everything that he thought that they would need for that day for an inside job or an outside job based on the weather. Every week he would send out a truck to sharpen the saws and repair drills and to make sure that no worker would ever have to leave the job site to get a piece of lumber or a tool. That’s what he did. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known that really closed sales.

The rest of the time we close sales is when a customer agrees that what you’re offering is worth more that the money they’re paying. The reality is that as salespeople, what we get to do is facilitate a profitable, a mutually profitable transaction. When we can show it’s mutually profitable, that’s when customers say yes and they make the commitment. That’s my thoughts on closing. Stop fooling yourself, you don’t close anything, you just facilitate.

Marylou: Can you share with our audience what are the characteristics of someone like Gary? You mentioned that there’s a lot of knowledge of his people, knowledge of how they do their work. Rattle off some of the characteristics that some of our closers are not probably thinking about because they’re so focused on just closing the deal that Gary, or a Gary-type of person would have just a part of his DNA?

Mark: I like that. That’s a great question. Thank you, Marylou. The first one is Gary cared way more about his customers’ success than he cared about his own success. Because of that, he was number 1 in 57 stores, ahead of number 2 by 300%. He cared more about his customers’ success than his own personal success. That ties to a thought that I share with salespeople when I say, “How can I position myself against my competition?” I say, “Stop it. Stop being a child. Instead, help your customer position themselves against their competition.” When you do that, people will do business with you because you are so valuable to them.

Marylou: Perfect, indeed.

Mark: The second thing that Gary had was foresight. Most salespeople don’t have foresight beyond the next quota period. But customer’s foresight runs substantially beyond the quota period. What he looked at was his customer’s business cycle, not his business cycle. And he mapped his behavior to their business cycles, not his business cycles. I think that’s so important because once you get into that alignment, the business just flows. The boss keeps saying, “Why can’t you close something?” “Well, nobody’s pulling out a checkbook.” “Well no, you’re outside of your customer’s business cycles.”

For Gary, because of that, he had contractors lining up to do business with him and he would only do business with people who are easy to do business with. He had earned the right to choose his customers. He didn’t work hard, he worked consistently. And he lived a really wonderful life because of that. People really cared about what he did, and cared and found value on what he did. I think that’s the third characteristic, it’s Gary was picky about who he did business with.

The fourth characteristic of Gary is he’s very pragmatic. One of his regular customers said, “You know, Gary? You charge $1.59 a stud, I can go down to 84 Lumber and get them for $0.84. Man, you’re ripping me off!” Gary says, “Jump in the truck.” They drove down to 84 Lumber, he says, “Okay, let’s pick some studs. No, that one’s crooked. Nope, that one’s worked. Nope, that one’s not going to work. Oh, there’s a good one. Throw it in the truck. Okay, let’s do another one. How long did it take for us to pick 100 good studs?” He said, “90 minutes.” And he said, “At $18 an hour, for your people to do that plus drive down and drive back, it’s going to cost you probably somewhere around $1 a stud to get all this stuff done. Is my $0.60 more a stud ripping you off?” He says, “No, I get it, Gary. You always send me out straight stuff. Anything that’s crooked, you fix right away.” He says, “That’s right. I charge more because it makes it easier to do your job.”

He was really good at understanding the true value and being able to illustrate it. Salespeople are so important. He did it through the discovery of his customers versus attempting to argue with them. He went and created an experience that was undeniable. That customer, never again, questioned Gary’s pricing. It was over.

As salespeople, we have to remember this critical concept, adults don’t argue with their own data. When the insight comes from the customer, it’s forever versus you attempting to argue and the customer doing their very best to be right which kind of harks back to our starting concept of us needing to feel like we have to be right. That’s just a human behavior.

Because of that, customers will lie to themselves to justify their crappy behavior towards us. That’s bad. That doesn’t work because we have no idea why the business just goes away. It just does. I think those are some of the characteristics that Gary illustrated that quite frankly, if you do all four of those, you’re going to be number one.

I was in a real estate office just this past weekend, Keller Williams’ office here in Las Vegas. The number one salesperson had twice the revenues of the number two salesperson who had twice the number three salesperson. You have to ask yourself what’s the difference between number one, number two, and number three, doubling in each particular case? By the way, the bottom salesperson was probably 1/10 of 1% of the top salesperson.

You have to ask yourself, what’s the difference? Are they smarter? Do they have a better product? Do they have a better process? What’s the difference between these? I think salespeople, you need to ask that within your own organization. I don’t have specifically the answer for that particular situation although I’ll bet, I will bet that it’s a matter of who trusts whom. The number one salesperson is usually more trusted by their customer than the number two salesperson. The number two salesperson’s more trusted by the customers than the number three salesperson.

My bet is it’s that level of trust because quite frankly, the relationship is what you control. Because in any sales situation, 50% of your success is the customer’s motivation. Do they want what you’re offering? Does it create value for them? Is it something they’re willing to risk their career to purchase? Risk is a big thing that kills deals. “Too risky, too risky, too risky, I feel risky. If this fails, I have to explain myself up the food chain and it doesn’t feel good.”

Marylou: Not at all.

Mark: “My boss, he’ll rip me a new one if I screw up. Oh man, that’s not a good sign. I’m just going to say no.” Motivation of the risk avoidance is a big issue. 40% of our success as sales professionals is the relationship we have with our customers. Do they trust us? Do they believe us? Do they think that we are acting in their best interest or are we just trying to close them? 10% of our success is the product that we’re offering.

That surprises a lot of people because I think that’s really what it’s all about. Well it’s not. There’s not a product out there that’s unique. The reason why is because there’s a lot of ways customers can solve the problem. Even though you believe your product’s unique, there’s a lot of ways to solve the problem, that are completely acceptable and other people have risked their career purchasing and bringing into play. If it wasn’t the case, then your competitors wouldn’t be in business. Your competitors are doing a great job for at least somebody.

Most salespeople put all their focus on the product. See, that’s not what Gary did. He put his focus on the other 90%, on the relationship, “I’m your partner,” and the motivation, “I’m going to help you be the best contractor you can be by managing your projects and making sure your people stay on the job working, getting the job done.” Then that lumber was ancillary in that particular case.

Marylou: A by-product.

Mark: Indeed. It just happened to be the vehicle but it wasn’t the relationship. I believe that from a salesperson standpoint, we have control of our relationship which is four times more important than the product. We can do a really great job understanding and working with our customer’s motivations. May I share this idea with you about features, advantages, and benefits which I think is a big, interesting issue especially for both prospecting and closing deals?

Marylou: Yes, indeed.

Mark: I was taught FAB selling, feature, advantage, benefit, back in the 1980s when I was working for Hewlett Packard. We’d have these really cool products. They were disruptive and they would do things nobody else could do. We’d have these FAB charts which are the features, the advantages, and the benefits that our customers would enjoy while they purchase our absolutely amazing equipment.

The FAB charts that I would create and share with my customers, I won. Then I’d take a look at competitors’ FAB charts who happened to be done by Tektronix in those days, and they’d win. How the hell could this happen? It’s because our FAB charts are attempting to map our product to the customer’s motivation.

Marylou: Say that again. That really hit home.

Mark: The features, advantages, and benefits is attempting to map our product to our customers’ motivation.

Marylou: Our product to our customer’s motivation, when in fact it should be?

Mark: The other way around, mapping the motivation to our product.

Marylou: There you go. That’s really hard to do, Mark.

Mark: Yes, it is hard to do because it means that we have to, as a salesperson, stop pitching and start asking questions and listening. We’ve been taught all our life that the best salespeople have the gift of gab, that’s bull. The best salespeople have the gift of empathy and understanding, and trying to connect with a customer and figure out how to do something bigger and better than even they can imagine.

Marylou: Mark, at what point when you’re going down the empathetic questioning rabbit hole does one feel we’re intruding in our customers’ lives?

Mark: This is where you get to use your professional judgment. We started this conversation extremely intimately for somebody who’s only had one other conversation.

Marylou: Yes, true.

Mark: From that standpoint, you can look at the signs. There are times when you step into a customer office and you know something else is going on. You say, “Man, you feel a little off today. What’s going on if you can share it with me?” “No, no, it’s just a personal issue.” “Okay, well if you trust me enough to share it with me, I promise to keep it confidential and perhaps telling me could help. Sometimes telling it somebody who cares but is a disinterested third party can help.” “I just got divorce papers.” “Wow.” Just be with them for a moment. “You’ve got a lot to process. You’ve got a lot of things to think about. You want to have this conversation on another day? How do you want this to play out today?” “No, no, no. I’ve got to get this stuff done. I’m up against the deadline. Thank you for your sympathy. I’ll deal with it.” “Okay. If there’s anything I can do to refer you to lawyers, guns, money, whatever you need, I know people who know people.”

Marylou: I know people.

Mark: That’s where that professional judgment comes into play of where do you go? You can’t force it. If there’s any resistance, you back off. Blessings on you, I hope it works out for you. I hope that you see some light in the darkness along the way. I hope you find a pony in the pile. Until then, do we proceed? Do we reschedule? What do we need to do in this moment to take you to where you need to go next?

What I found is just offering that permission to defer often flips them around to say, “No, no, no. Let’s get back. Okay listen, should we just go get a cup of coffee maybe just kind of shift our energy and then we can talk a little bit about what you have in mind and where you need to go and how you can move forward.” That’s it. That’s relationship.

Marylou: We’re humans talking to humans, we sometimes forget that.

Mark: What are you doing? B to B, B to C? It doesn’t make any difference. It’s still person to person and that’s why relationship is 4x more important product.

Marylou: I have a schematic in my office. It’s two half circles, like a moon, facing each other and two little tiny circles inside the bigger circles. It’s supposed to be representing belly to belly. That’s really what our conversations are, belly to belly. Even though we’re virtual, even though we may be on the phone, you and I are on internet, I don’t see your face, you don’t see mine, you’ve got to make that connection, a human connection.

I think that the sales rep executives who take the time to just take a deep breath and get an assessment of how your person is doing at the top of the call whenever you want to do it is just really the way to set the tone for the conversation.

Mark: Indeed. The tone like any good piece of music, can vary. It can increase, decrease, get loud, get softer, you can go up, you can go down. What we get to do is track, in some cases, lead. Follow sometimes, sometimes you lead. I think a really good example that even sales, music is a great metaphor for sales. Sometimes you step back and let somebody else solo, sometimes you’ve got the spotlight and you’re going to play 16 bars.

The only reason why we’re playing is because we have an end in mind. The reason why customers entertain your conversations is because they see ultimate value in accomplishing their objectives, their goals, their outcomes. They’re not going to waste time working with you if that’s not the case so you have to let them lead sometimes and you have to follow and sometimes, you get the solo. That’s a really good metaphor, I believe, for what you’re talking about.

I want to step back to your concept of belly to belly because you’re saying it in this context really gave me a new light on it. Thank you, bravo. That is we feel so much in our gut, in our belly. So many of our feelings come from that area of our body; fear, satisfaction, comfort, warmth, coldness, prickles, warm fuzzies. When we are doing belly to belly kinds of conversations, that’s where the empathy really comes into play. That’s a cool logic.

It’s that, “Do I trust you as a human being? Do I feel good in your energy? Do I feel good in your intention? Because if I don’t, I’m going to buy from somebody else.” A lot of salespeople think that’s selling yourself. It’s not, it’s just being open. It’s just being open to how other people are feeling and then helping them navigate to where they want to be and how they want to feel.

Marylou: Let’s face it, sales executive, salespeople, sales professionals, we chose this occupation because theoretically, “we love dealing with people,” we love talking to people, otherwise we would be engineers in the back room with the pizza underneath the door writing code, which is my former life.

Mark: Likewise. I’m an electrical engineer. Yes.

Marylou: We do this human aspect of sales, we can still stick on task to what we’re trying to do but we’ve got to open up our hearts, we’ve got listen to our gut as you said. Somewhere in there too, I’m hearing proof of concept. You’ve got to have the business case ready to go should you come to that type of conversation. Getting back to Gary again where he was able to take that $0.84 and justify the gap, the delta, whatever you want to call it, because he had that story, that case study, story, business case in his head ready to go. We need that too as part of our conversational pieces.

Mark: Absolutely. The 10% profit is still important. Mapping the motivation of the product is still important. The thing that I think we’re talking about here is the relationship, is the basis of being able to get permission to understand their motivation.

Marylou: And to further those conversations.

Mark: That’s exactly right. Relationship, when you’re selling complex things as a combination of corporate brand, do people trust IBM, do people trust HP, do people trust Oracle? As well as your personal brand, are you somebody who shows up on time or even a little before? Are you somebody who keeps their promises? Are you somebody who is mapping to the brand of the customer?

One of the things I learned decades ago is that an executive will never bring somebody into their inner circle that will embarrass them, never. As a salesperson, I have to have behaviors and language patterns and dress codes and speech patterns that are acceptable to the executives I’m selling to. It doesn’t necessarily seem fair, they’re writing the checks, they get to choose that culture. If we don’t fit their culture, if we don’t augment their culture, there’s no way that’s going to happen.

Marylou: So true. I’ve seen so many blogs and posts on LinkedIn about the dress, about the appearance. It’s amazing now the conversations around that because we grew up in the 80s and 90s of selling where you did have to dress the part. You did have to look at your clients and prospects and dress the way they dress. If you’re there on casual Friday, you’re not going to show up in a suit. You’re definitely going to be a part of the team.

Mark: Right. That said, you always wanted to dress just a little better than the person that you’re going to be talking to. You and I grew up in an era where John T. Molloy’s Dress for Success was a required reading of any sales professional.

Marylou: And there was one Dress for Success For Women.

Mark: Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt, across the board.

Marylou: Yes. No gigantic necklaces. Then I see a lot of women today wearing those and it’s funny. I think back to that book, pearls or nothing.

Mark: Simple, no big diamonds. You wear the diamond ring but nothing else. No big hoopy rings. No, no, no.

Marylou: Exactly. This is bringing back memories.

Mark: But the thing to keep in mind is remember the folks that are writing multi-million dollar checks. Read that book and embrace those principles.

Marylou: Exactly.

Mark: There’s a bit of that and it just depends on where you wish to play in the marketplace. There was a time where I put on a tie because I knew that’s how I made money. Maybe it’s time for me to do that again.

Marylou: We’re getting to the point where we’re going to wrap up, Mark. I could talk to you forever but I know our audience is like, “Okay, Marylou…” We’re there now.

Mark: Half a dozen great points. Thanks very much. Kind of went to a little different way than I expected.

Marylou: We can always have another conversation later.

Mark: Anytime. I’ve got plenty.

Marylou: Very good.

Mark: We’ll find some new things just like we did in this conversation. This conversation brought new ideas for me. Thank you very much.

Marylou: You’re welcome. How do people get a hold of you Mark?

Mark: Best way is Mark’s on linkedin.com. Let’s hook up on LinkedIn. I find that as a safe place for us to meet. From a business standpoint, I write an article every week about customers and sales. By the way, Gary’s story is up there, some place in my LinkedIn articles. Let’s do that. If you think this is interesting, shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I’d be delighted to connect with you.

In fact, I have a call later on, today, from a guy who reached out just yesterday. He said, “You know, you seem like an interesting guy. Let’s have a conversation.” I’m delighted to give anybody 15, 30 minutes of my time because I always learn.

Marylou: Yes. I think this conversation today, while we usually stick to process and metrics and things like that, there’s a whole other side to selling and selling professionally and selling through being authentic that I think this conversation was just really wonderful for that. Because we do, we are humans, we are selling, people to people, belly to belly. It’s important that we polish and sharpen the saws not only on the methods and systems, and frameworks side but also on that conversational side, the heart.

My kids used to go to Waldorf School. They taught head, hand, and heart. That’s the curriculum for that school.

Mark: Three H.

Marylou: Yes. For the selling, it’s the same thing. The head would be all of the business cases, use cases, stories that compel people to move further into the pipeline. The hand is really understanding that you’re human on the other end and what their struggles, challenges, priorities, goals are.

Mark: For motivation, yes.

Marylou: Then the heart is knowing that in your heart, you’re going to be able to help them but you’ve got to let them drive the train but you help steer it and you guide them.

Mark: Fuel it.

Marylou: Exactly.

Mark: That’s exactly right. That’s how it works. It’s all important. But I’ve got to tell you, if you don’t have the heart, you got nothing. It’s unsustainable.

Marylou: Definitely.

Mark: It’s all important. All of it is important. All of it has got to be there.

Marylou: Let me get you on the spot because I wrote down 10% is product, 40% is success, what is the other 50%?

Mark: 40% is relationship, 50% is motivation. 50% motivation, 40% relationship, 10% product.

Marylou: For those of you out there saying, “Wait a minute. I didn’t get that other 50%.” We just got it.

Mark: Yep, motivation. I don’t care how good you are, if they’re not motivated, they’re not going to buy it. If they don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy it. Give me 15 seconds more. Here’s the reason why even though you have customers, they may have another relationship with another vendor. If you can better understand your customer’s motivation to their current vendor, you can take them out. I’ve got processes to do that. I can take out an existing vendor with six questions. If it’s possible, those six questions will take them out. We’ll leave that for another call podcast.

Marylou: That is a cliffhanger. Yay! Okay audience, you need to call Mark now to find out. I love cliffhangers. Mark, thank you so much for your time. I enjoyed speaking with you. Just keep in touch.

Mark: You know it.

Sign Up!

Join to our newsletter to get the latest