You may recognize today’s guest from previous episodes of this podcast. Max Altschuler is the CEO and Founder of SalesHacker Inc. and the VP of Marketing at Outreach.io. Max is also one of the co-authors of a new book, Sales Engagement: How The World’s Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale 1st Edition

In today’s conversation, Max talks about his new book, what inspired him to get involved with it, and what teachings in the book are most useful for sales professionals. Listen in to hear Max’s ideas on how sales and marketing to work together, how to use sales engagement strategies in closing, and what Max sees changing in the near future.

Episode Highlights:

• What made Max decide to get involved with this new book
• What teachings in the book are most impactful for sales professionals trying to start and close conversations with people they don’t know
• Max’s definition of sales engagement
• Which channels sales can use to better coordinate with marketing
• How do sales methods of advancing prospects in the pipeline align with marketing
• How sales engagement principles can be applicable to closing
• Changes in how CRMs are being used
• What Max sees changing in 2020

Resources:

Max Altschuler

SalesHacker Inc.

Outreach

Sales Engagement: How The World’s Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi, everybody! It’s Marylou Tyler. I have a repeat guest back. I just can’t get enough of Max. Max Altschuler is the CEO and founder of Sales Hacker Inc. He’s also the vice president of marketing at outreach.io which is a fabulous tool for those of you who are considering leveraging technology and automation in your conversations either at the top and now they go all the way to close with their tool.

Today, I’d like to talk with Max about a new book that he has just come out with, co-authored with Manny and Mark—he’ll talk to you more about that—it’s called, Sales Engagement: How The World’s Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale. That’s a lot.

Max: Yeah.

Marylou: Tell us, Max, what got you guys involved with this book. What made you decide now is the time to talk about it? Let’s talk about some of the learnings inside that you feel are most impactful for our audience, which are the audience they’re trying to start conversations with people we don’t know, follow up a conversation with people who reach out to us, and then also now taking it all the way down to close.

Max: Thanks for having me on the show. It’s great to be back and be back chatting with you, of course. The book was fun to write. This is the stuff we live, breathe, and sweat here at Outreach. I got a lot of our employees involved that are deeply ingrained to the product out of a lot of our really happy customers, and savvy power users involved, in kind of talking about how they use modern sales engagement strategies. There are some amazing strategies throughout and helps you create that sales engagement strategy, but it’s super tactical, and actionable, and practical, and allows you to do things immediately based off in the books.

For example, understanding how do you use multiple different channels and being where your buyer is when your buyer is there. Understanding how to run experiments and AB tests, so that you know the best way to reach out every time instead of just going off intuition. I see all these silver bullet nuggets out there on LinkedIn and everywhere else. It’s like, “Hey, if you use ‘Best’ to sign off your email instead of ‘Sincerely’, you have a 12.5% higher response rate.” That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard, and also, it doesn’t teach people how to run their own experiments. It’s giving you an inedible fish instead of teaching you how to fish for things you can actually eat.

We wrote the book to do just that. We want to teach people how to fish and how to run an effective sales engagement strategy. As the leader in sales engagement and as the category kind of rolls down the hill, and builds on itself. We’ve got quite close to 50,000 users who are jumping on the platform every week. There are a lot of people who need this information and it’s only going to grow from there. We’re going to make sure we were able to be the ones to provide it.

Marylou: Help us understand your definition of sales engagement. It’s used in a variety of ways and a variety of flavors of it. How are you describing sales engagement?

Max: Sales engagement is really anything you do to engage with your customer or prospect. It doesn’t matter if you’re prospecting, and you are cold emailing, cold calling, sending out one-on-one personalized videos, whatever channel you’re using. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold and at the top of the funnel, or if it’s nurturing a deal along, and getting the right stakeholders involved, and having a process and a strategy to track, measure, and analyze that, or it’s CSMs who are going after the renewal and wanting to be on top of their game, and making sure that they’re following up appropriately with the customers who are renewing at a certain point. It really can be used in any stage at sales process—inbound or outbound.

I think now more than ever before, sales and marketing are integrated, and sales and success are integrated. You need a strategy and a process that’s really going to tie all that together. I think sales engagement is that process. At Outreach, we are trying to build the single painted glass; any action, all the insights, all in one platform. You can do all of your channels, all of your activities, and get the insights from the results in those activities or channels all in your one platform, so you can then use that to inform your next best action. I think that’s when it gets really interesting.

Marylou: Based on your background, you cover both sides of the fence. A lot of times, we don’t have insights into marketing from sales, and sometimes when we’re sitting on the marketing side, we’re not really sure what sales needs. You have a unique talent in that you could blend and crossover pretty easily. When you say that sales engagement does help those two align, how do we start the conversation with marketing? If we’re in sales and we really want to set up what you’re calling an Omni channel or multi channel approach. We’re talking about email, phones, social, even direct mail in some cases, video, and a lot of these different channels. How do we get started on picking which channels we want to go to, to get this gravity in conversation. Because we can leverage a tool now, do we start with multiple buckets of things of channels, or do you recommend that sometimes we look at, “What are the three top ones?” How would you advise us on that?

Max: A lot of different talking points in that one. We can start with choosing your channels or understanding your channels, and really start to understand your buying persona. We did a sales engagement survey with The Bridge Group and the Modern Sales Pros. We polled about 884 sales and marketing professionals, sales and marketing leaders, about how they like to buy. Inside of sales and marketing, there are a lot of different sub roles. Let’s say there’s ops, there’s executives, etc. What we were able to find is that logically, if you’re selling to a salesperson or like a CEO, or a C-level—let’s say CRO or CMO—all of these people are out at their phones, they’re out of pocket more than they’re in computers.

Using channels to be where they are is going to give you a higher chance of success. For  example, if you’re selling to a salesperson, you probably want to call them, or leave them a voicemail, or text them, over sending them an email because they’re living out of their phone. With an ops person, maybe they’re sitting in front of two screens all day. Calling them or leaving them a voicemail isn’t as interesting because they’re not at their phones. You might want to LinkedIn message them, or send them a one-to-one personalized video because they’re going to be living in their screens. It’s really just about understanding your persona and where they spend their time. Then finding ways to set up sequences so that you are capitalizing on where they live, but also surrounding the account, and that’s where marketing comes into play.

As you go up market and you surround these accounts, and you do your account-based revenue, account-based sales and marketing close, you use your sales engagement platform to either prospect, nurture, or manage a newer process, however you’re using it, and then marketing can support how they typically support. You live out on all those different channels and marketing is able to set up retargeting campaigns, and intent data campaigns that allow them to target the same contacts in the same accounts at the same time. It all needs to be led by sales. Sales needs to do the account selection and lead from the front of the pack, and then integrate with marketing around your sales engagement strategy to understand where they can support with marketing this ABM campaign, and sales is sales engagement campaign.

Marylou: Okay. In the sales engagement arena, sales is going to take the lead on how these campaigns are set up and because the persona development is probably done on both sides, since on the sales side, we’re really focused on, “What conversation snippets can I utilize in my dialogue with prospects to advance them further into the pipeline?” Whereas marketing is really thinking, “Okay, how can I get people to raise a hand to actually want to start a conversation?” We’re taking that conversation trying to further it into the pipeline as well. It  makes sense that we would need that type of alignment.

How about the content assets itself? How is sales engagement utilizing content assets, or do we not? I know with Outreach, their email engine for example is a fairly simple engine which it should be, not a lot of HTML for example. It’s not really a graphical really pretty type of email message, because we don’t want that. How does that align with the way marketing likes to do things which is usually, they’re very visual in nature, and having the piece look really nice, but we’re just trying to get the conversation going. How does that work?

Max: There are a couple different types of content that you talk about when you talk about sales engagement. At Outreach, for example, we have a full time sequence writer. A full time content person who solely focuses on running experiments with all the content. That’s like the sales engagement side of it, that’s what they focus on. They work with marketing and sales enablement to figure out what are the key things that we need to have prepared, or what are the campaigns that we’re running for this persona, etc.

This person kind of sits between sales and marketing then goes off marketing these campaigns, what they know about the personas, and sets the content up from the SDRs and sales reps. While marketing takes a similar campaign, and approaches that through targeting them with advertisements, or direct mail, or whatever else they can do, events, etc., on the marketing side of things.

In terms of injecting content assets into the message, that’s something that every company has to experiment with. That’s one of the things that we talk about when we talk about experiments. “Should I embed this content? Should I link to a piece of gated content? Should I link to a piece of free content? How can I utilize content in my Outreach? What’s the best way to do it?” There’s no silver bullet. I can’t sit here and say, “You should always link in your second sentence to a piece of gated content where you can then get their email address and understand their level of intent.” It doesn’t work like that for everybody. That’s where you can use a sales engagement platform to start crafting that. It’s like, “Alright, I’m going to include the link at the end of my email explicitly.” It’s not going to be hidden at all, and it’s going to go to an un-gated page, and it’s a value driver. It’s a credibility builder.

The asset that you link to can be something that can A, provide value for the person on the other end. B, provide credibility maybe it’s an analyst report or something like that. C, it can be something else. There’s a million different things really you could probably link to from a concept perspective. I think [inaudible 00:13:11] first to the most common, but it’s really up to you in your sales process and your persona, and you experimenting with what works.

Marylou: Right. The beauty of a tool, like an Outreach tool is that you don’t need to worry folks about, “Okay, what did I send? When, and how, and to whom?” It keeps track of all of that for you. All your activity, everything that you’ve done, and it automatically computes metrics for you, so you’re going to get a statistically-relevant sampling when you do a test that X number of people open, X number of people are going to click through or not, and then X number of people reply, and in the case of an email which gives you just a plethora of ways to go from there with that particular piece of conversation.

That is, by far, to me, the beauty of these types of tools is that we could sit here in a manual environment, just think of an excel worksheet, and move people from column to column as we do testing. But just think if you have hundreds and thousands of records, or if you do in a sequence which a sequence is a grouping of conversation snippets one through and usually 10-12, somewhere like that.

Just think of these members that are starting with email number one, then go to a voicemail; number two, then do a LinkedIn. You can’t possibly, as a human, keep track of that. It’s just impossible for you to do that. These tools are fabulous and that peace of mind that once you finish a sequence, you can look at it overall, you can watch things as they go—it’s a beautiful thing. I love to be able to see, as we go, how things are performing and, “Should we change a conversation at this position in that sequence because it’s resonating? Let’s move that guy up.” We would never know that otherwise, but with a tool like yours, you can tell right away.

I peeked at the software. I am seeing things now where we’re starting to march down to getting to close. If somebody is sitting in the audience thinking, “Okay, this is great. In my prospecting time, I could certainly use something like this sales engagement.” Does that also crossover from opportunity to close? Are these principles also applicable to an account executive who’s taking the opportunity and getting in to close one?

Max: Yes, definitely. If you’re not a full cycle, you’re only a closer, you can definitely take advantage of the sales engagement strategies. Because deal cycles, unless it’s super transactional stuff, and even then, you still want to have the ability to track, and analyze, and as a manager, make sure everybody’s running the best practice or the best plays. But in the longer deal cycles, if your deal is not done, that you get the hand off, you’re on the demo, you still need to triangulate, usually a lot of people within a deal. You need a platform that’s going to be able to track all of that activity and allow you to one, streamline a lot of it so that it’s less of this tedious menial tasks, and two, track the best practices and insert the best practice of your team across the way.

Your sales engagement platform should integrate with a lot of your other technology. It should make your life a lot easier. It should be the one single painted glass that you live in day-in and day-out, that surfaces all the information from your research sites, from your CRM, from wherever you’re taking your notes, whatever else, can all live within that one place, to be able to surface all of your sales enablement content. Whatever your file cabinet is that you use, Highspot, Showpad, Seismic, you name it, it should be able to pull in from there. It should allow you to streamline your entire engagement and connecting process.

If you are an AE, you shouldn’t be able to get a lot of value from it. If you’re a manager, or a director, or a leader of the team of closers, I think that’s where it gets really interesting because you can make sure that your team is doing and saying all the right things throughout the entire process. If they lose a deal, you want to know why they lost that deal. It’s really hard to get that information if the rep is just telling you. But if you can go back and look at all the interactions and the activities, you can say, “Well, typically, we see a lot more activity. What happened? You aren’t in touch not only as often as you should be, but maybe with the right people. You didn’t have executive alignment. You didn’t have a texting relationship with the champion. The champion is not a champion unless you’re in a texting relationship with them.”

All of these different things that you can look at and say, “The data of the activities are showing me this.” It doesn’t really matter what this person says, “Here’s how I manage my team based off of what activities are they doing. What are the things that they’re mentioning. Are they mentioning them at the right time?” And they go in by the battle cards. Are they saying the right things at the right times?

Marylou: The other thing that I think is interesting is that with the way this is going, I am always trying to figure out where is the single source of truth here? Is it in the engagement system, or is it in the CRM, or is the CRM is kind of becoming obsolete for us because of the fact that we are trying to track the conversations as opposed to tracking mundane activities and manually tracking them. Whereas the sales engagement software can track activities on our behalf because once we hang up the phone, or close out an email, or get a reply, all of that is automatically tracked for us, and triggered for us, and essentially, scored for us in a sales enablement system. That just doesn’t exist in CRM.

Max: CRM is definitely more of data warehouse, and a valuable one at that. A lot of successful organizations use Outreach in tandem with their CRM. I think your activities and engagement need to be tracked in that system of engagement and not in the CRM where your data is kept. Your data should be kept in a CRM and should be kept clean, but everything else should be tracked in a sales engagement platform.

Marylou: It really is transitioning more. I know with a lot of my most recent clients, we’re getting the AEs to hop on eventually to the engagement platform because of the fact that we have these great insights—the top of the funnel—with the business development folks, and the inbound people now can actually use the system, and even our researchers because we harvest our lists for a lot of my clients. We can’t rely necessarily on purchased lists. We have the research team that utilizes the engagement platform. Why? Because then we can single source the records coming in to understand researchers, where they’re getting their records, where they source them, the close rates on those. It allows us to now take multiple avenues of list building, multiple avenues of attraction base, from the inbound side. Then of course, the original design of these systems for us was to target those accounts that we wanted to go after from the predictable revenue days. We have that all blended now inside of this one little tool.

Before, it used to then hand-off and go to the CRM abyss where we can’t really tell what was happening to it. It makes sense that we’re starting to move activity for conversation into the systems and then use the CRM perhaps as a reporting engine—even that, I think is going to change. Right now, it is like you said, a glorified data warehouse for us. That’s all we use it for really in most of these cases because of the fact that these systems can track our activity on our behalf and we’re not bogged down on data entry at all.

Max: Yes. We still do a lot of reporting, and forecasting, and tracking stages, and stuff like that in Salesforce. That definitely comes in handy for us with our [inaudible 00:22:05] Salesforce customers. Salesforce is a strong integration for us, but now that the dynamic is coming out in the next 2-3 months, we will eventually be, I think, CRM agnostic at some point. You need to be tracking things in a sales engagement platform. You need to have your team live in there so you can optimize your sales process. I think that’s the way your team is going to get better in 2019 and beyond, not sitting in your CRM.

Marylou: You’re the VP of marketing for the brand Outreach and you’re running Sales Hacker at the same time, a busy guy. What should we see in the future like in 2020? What should we be looking for? Is GDPR going to hit us here in your opinion? Are we going to have issues with sending out emails? If you can give us the Max crystal ball of sales engagement, what would that look like?

Max: I mean the Arbor and GDPR is already coming, CCPA, there’s definitely going to be more of a crackdown on email. I think that’s good for us. Our mantra is not about, “Just go send cold emails.” It’s, “We send them the right way.” I think that’s what GDPR is all about. It’s not enforcing the fact that you can’t send a cold email to anybody; it’s making sure you do it in an appropriate manner. I think it’s just going to make everybody better at what they do versus the other way around. I don’t think it’s going to really stick or stuck anything. We’re excited to see what comes from it and we’ll be ready for it. I think, for us outside the GDPR, it’s really just about helping reps understand their next best action.

For us, we just launched Outreach Galaxy which is our application marketplace, our ecosystem. We understand that a lot of these companies use a lot of different technologies, and they’re all kind of fragmented, and all over the place. Sometimes they connect inside your CRM. “Insights are over here, activities are over there…”

Marylou: Yeah, it’s a nightmare.

Max:…there’s a bunch of different actions. We want to tie everything together. What we really want to be able to do is, like I said in the beginning of the podcast, if you can keep all the activities in one platform, then you can get all the insights in one platform. If you can get all the insights in one platform, those insights can actually be used to inform your next best action. If you send a one-to-one personalized video to somebody, and they open the video, and are watching the video, and you can get a notification in the same application that you sent the video in that the video is being watched right now, trigger the phone call, then you call them—think about how amazing that is if they’re watching the video and you call them, and it all got triggered from your application. As a leader, you don’t have to have your reps logging in and out of different apps and potentially getting the notification 15 minutes later.

If they get the notification 15 minutes later, that person’s onto the next thing in their day, so when they do call them, they’re not going to pick up or have the time versus like while they’re watching the video, it’s still right fresh in their head, and it’s the perfect time to call. They have the time. The activity is creating insights. The insights are feeding the next best activity. If you can do that every time, then you could essentially clone your best reps. I think that’s what we’re getting to is the point where your team is experimenting and knows how to experiment. They can track and analyze all the activity and the insights all in one platform. And then because of that, leaders and team managers can basically say, “Okay. Well, here’s the best practice because we know it’s the best practice. Now, you go and do it.” That’s when it gets really interesting.

Marylou: It does. I mean, letting the data drive. The data driving the next action is just for someone like me who is a data nut, that takes the ego like you said, the guesswork, the gut. I mean, yes, some of these [inaudible 00:26:51] reps have all that and are fabulous because of that. But what we’re trying to do is get those other 80%, who are not the best reps, to perform the way that the best ones are. Max, thank you so much for your time. I will put all your contact information for anybody who wants to know how to reach him. He’s very well-known out there in our world. Again, outreach.io, he’s VP of marketing there. I’m sure [inaudible 00:27:18] a lot speaking. You can touch base with him there or over at Sales Hacker. Thanks again, Max.

Max: Thank you.

Today’s guest comes from the marketing side of the business. And while that may be an unusual choice for this podcast, what Chris Dayley has to say about digital marketing can be useful for prospectors as well.

Chris is a digital marketing entrepreneur, speaker, and neuromarketer. He is also the VP of testing and site optimization at Disruptive Advertising in Utah. He’s skilled at helping people understand the impact of website landing pages, testing, analytics, and psychology. Listen to the episode to hear what Chris has to say about how his work related to outbound sales and different ways to use data, metrics, and testing.

Episode Highlights:

• How Chris’s work fits into an outbound, targeted approach
• What Chris is doing with analytics
• Using data to refine the pitch
• Metrics that can help prepare for contacting prospects
• How Chris uses testing
• Technology used for testing in sales
• How best practices can vary from company to company, even within the same industry

Resources:

Chris Dayley

Chris on Twitter

Disruptive Advertising Blog

Transcript:

Marylou: Everyone hi, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week I have a really interesting guest. He’s not someone that we normally talk with in our area, but I think what Chris has to say in terms of digital marketing and how the different channels interact. You and I have talked about the different types of behaviors and where people are at, relative in their mind as to their purchase intent.

Well, Chris Dayley is a digital marketing entrepreneur, speaker, and also a neuromarketer—we want to pick his brain about that—who is really great at getting people to understand the impact of website, landing pages, testing, analytics using psychology. He is a principal or founder of Disruptive Advertising at Utah. I’ll put all of his information on his page so you can contact him. He’s currently serving as VP of Site Testing and Optimization. Welcome, Chris, to the podcast.

Chris: Thank you for having me on, Marylou.

Marylou: Very good. Where do we begin? I mean, there’s just so much to cover here. Let me just give you some background about where we are in the scheme of things. We’re typically targeting people that we want to talk to. By definition, we should have some level of understanding, maybe not under purchase intent, but definitely the sweet spot, because we’ve done our homework on the ideal account profiles. We kind of know the people because we’re picking these people to start a conversation with. We don’t have a lot more than that in some cases, so I would like you to help us understand the work that you do, how it could potentially fit into an outbound targeted approach, because you’re all about attraction, inbound, and getting people to come to you. You’re doing some really cool things that we could probably leverage off of.

Then secondly, I’d like to understand what you’re doing with analytics because that is what Marylou Tyler personally loves to do. I think some of my audience, too, gets a little excited about metrics and how to do what I call utilized quantitative information, and even qualitative to that extent. Let me start by asking you, where do you see the connection between the type of work that you do and this outbound targeted approach that our audience is mostly involved in?

Chris: That’s a great question. I’ll give a couple of thoughts there. Any time you are trying to sell somebody on anything, there’s some level of marketing that’s involved. I always pair sales and marketing together because in my mind, they’re one or the same. You’ll say, “Well, of course you think that way, Chris, you’re a marketer,” but anytime you are exposing someone to a new message and then trying to sell them, there’s some level of marketing and salesmanship that’s required.

Any time we start working with clients on a marketing campaign, we always start with some of the foundational basics. Some of those questions that we will often ask are number one, who is your target demographic, or who are your customer profiles, or personas? That’s something that most companies I think have a general idea of. Great sales people are usually able to kind of back into a great customer persona just because they’re talking to so many people on a regular basis.

A good sales person should be able to say, “Well, the average person that I sell or that I close has this and this trait,” or whatever or, “is from this and this type of company.” You can usually back into some sort of persona and then based on those types of personas, we usually have a good idea. I’ll just give you one disruptive advertising’s target personas. We were just having a sales marketing meeting right before this call. This is fresh in my mind. We were realizing, when we are working with clients that need advertising on Google or Facebook, the best people for us to be talking to are people that are already working with another agency that have seen a dip in sales or a dip in performance over the last three months.

On the one hand, that’s very specific, and on another hand, it’s pretty broad. Just about any type of company could fit into that from any location around the world. This is where some of the analytics will come in. This is where it’s really helpful to go back, take a look in as much data that you can possibly get into, it’s helpful to look at what are our conversion rates. For this type of customer, if I can look at all of my customers, wherever we have them, in some kind of a CRM or whatever, if I can look all the customers that I have sold, what are the other metrics that I should layer on top of this?

All of the people that we’ve worked with that were working with an agency before us, that’s probably a list of 500 clients. I’m just going to estimate. We have a list of 500 clients we’ve worked with that have previously worked with an agency, that were attracted to us in some way, shape, or form. What are some of the additional characteristics that we can layer on top of that? Is there some commonality in terms of location? Is there some commonality in terms of job title? Is there some commonality in terms of budgets or anything else? All of the things that you would ask for if you were qualifying a sale, I want to try to figure out as much of that information before I actually engage with these people as possible.

The messaging that I’m going to give to a CEO is very different than the messaging that a sales director, or marketing director, or HR director, or whatever is going to respond to. The types of value points and the type of value propositions or selling propositions, or the types of pain points those people are going to have, it’s all going to be different. This is part of what good sales in marketing is. It’s learning how to personalize your pitch or personalize your messaging based on the person that you’re talking to. That’s a lot of what I do on the website and I view a website as just a microcosm of the entire sales process.

A lot of what we do on a website is we try to figure out how much information do these people want, what order do they need to know this information in, and can I pull out some data. If I am hitching verbally 10 people, can I do something on five of those pitches and something on five of the other pitches? Can I do one thing different and find some kind of cause and effect in there? If I tell my pricing at the beginning of the pitch versus the end of the pitch, what ordering do people prefer at certain levels? That’s a little bit of what we do. It’s trying to boil down and figure out, what do people need to do in order to make a decision, what information can we give them, what do we need to say, how do we need to say it, and how can we use data to prove some of these things so that we can be continually refining our pitch.

Marylou: We do some of that very similar analysis. First of all, why do we matter? Why change? Why now? Why us? The value proposition you talked about that we call value themes, getting an understanding by persona, by role whether they’re decision makers, direct influencers or indirect influencers, depending on who we pick to talk to—remember, we’re picking the people we want to talk to here—we’ve developed this matrix of, “Okay, am I having a strategic conversation with decision makers? Or is it meeting visionary? Or is it going to be something like business outcomes of how we can be more efficient, more effective?” Getting rid of this problematic thing has stymied us for so long that we can’t get past it. What is that activity, that job, that challenge in that level that we could talk about from a business use case perspective?

We also can talk about service, how we differentiate with our people, and then finally products. We put product at the end, the least sexy thing to talk about because we have made the assumption now with the internet, it’s just if they are savvy about the kind of work that we do, that they know a little bit about the why and how maybe is not too clear, but that’s what we’re going to be talking to them about, and also really reinforce why us over anybody else. We do a little bit of what you just talked about. The nice thing about what we do is that we can immediately test our hypotheses, we can get a list, get a small little data set, try these conversations out, and look at the metrics.

The metrics for us are gold, are so important. Like I heard you say, you’re looking at all these different things and sort of layering on top, and feathering in. How does one know what to feather in and what to layer on top in terms of the metrics? Is there a formula or a thing that you look at? In my book, we talk about firmographic, we talk about socio information, heuristic information. Do you do similar things in your world to preparing it ready? If so, are there go-to metric that you always look at that seem to outperform the old 80/20 rule?

Chris: You bring up some really great points. One of the things that I love about what I do is we kind of take a combination of all data sources and then ultimately put them to the test. I’m sure that you talk a lot about AB testing in terms of the pitch, putting to the test what we are able to identify and learn from analytics. I’ll share in terms of data that we typically collect, I’ll share a couple of things that is usually helpful, and then some interesting things that I have seen.

I’ll start with a story. We got together a group of clients, one of our customer’s clients. We did a survey. We said, “Out of all these different types of things, which one do you like the best? Which one would you most likely to respond best to? What type of messaging would you respond best to?” et cetera. We were able to extrapolate some information from that. We put it up to a test and ran an AB test—granted this is on a website—we presented both of these experiences, and then we compared the data of the test against the data of the survey. One thing that was fascinating to me is we got the complete opposite result. What people told us they wanted was the complete opposite of what they actually responded best to.

Marylou: Their behavior versus what they’re telling you.

Chris: Exactly. It’s very interesting, all of the data that we gather, all of the information that we gather can be informative and it can help open our eyes, but I think one of the most dangerous traps for any type of business person, sales or marketing, to fall into is to make assumptions based on data that’s been gathered. If somebody tells me that they want something, I need to just automatically start giving that to people going forward.

There was an interesting study that was done I believe Harvard. They studied what percentage of a purchase decision is conscious, like it takes place in the conscious mind. They found that that 90% of a purchase decision is subconscious. In other words, only 10% of our purchase decision we are conscious of the reasons why we’re purchasing. Of course, there’s probably some difference in the percentage, depending on the price, or the scope, or the number of people that are involved in the decision, but by and large a lot of the decisions that people make are gut instincts. If you ask people what they want, or if you are trying to base your pitch, your marketing efforts, your sales efforts off of what people are saying they want or people are telling you, you’re just getting the tip of the iceberg, the top 10%.

The only way to get beneath the surface, the only way to figure out what do people really want to hear, what should I actually include in my pitch, because I can include every pain point that my potential audience might have. I can include every value proposition that my business has, but if there’s only one pain point that they really care about, and only one value proposition that they actually want to hear about, if I spend too much time talking their ear off, I’m going to lose the sale, even though I told them the thing that they said they wanted to hear. I told them too much.

A lot of what we do is picking apart some of these data points, some of these customer demographics and psychographics that companies piece together, and basically throwing this up against the wall and saying, “Let’s put this to the test. Let’s see if all these assumptions that we’ve made about these audiences are actually true.”

Marylou: Or actually valid, and you put your ego in your pocket and you test. That’s really the beauty of all of this. You brought up such a great point. My entire life and I still am a market research analyst. We do a lot of focus groups and you hear things in a focus group that just contradict what you see in a survey, which directly contradict what you end up seeing if you do some type of CRM or loyalty type of exit interview type of thing. It is very difficult to kind of know what is true, and where truth lies. The only reason that I bring that up is that testing is really where you start uncovering. Then maybe 180 from what you thought, and be prepared for that, and be okay with that.

Chris: I think that the most important skill or the most important behavior, whether you are sales, marketing, whether you’re an entrepreneur or an employee, whatever. The most important behavior for people to have is the willingness to challenge your own assumptions. The ability to be open-minded. One of my favorite quotes is, I believe it’s from Jim Rohn where he said, “Your level of success in life will rarely exceed your level of personal development.” To me, personal development is being willing to constantly learn, change, and adapt.

All of this kind of comes together for me, especially in any kind of sales capacity as you were talking about evolving your pitch over time. Being willing to challenge your own assumptions, being willing to challenge what you’ve heard before, what you’ve done before, in order to continue learning, and in order to continue adapting.

Marylou: This is really interesting because you’re definitely a kindred spirit for me, even though you are more marketing than probably sales. You probably favor that side of the house which by definition, I think marketers—they’re going to kill me for saying this—seem to be more analytic in really taking as many data points as possible to have it paint a picture. It may not be the right road map, but it’s a road map to get started on, the data split testing and all these other principles that we learned way back from direct mail and prior to the internet which is where I grew up. We tested everything. We tested subject lines. We tested headers. We tested the envelope, what was written on the envelope. Everything was tested because we never really knew that ideal conversation, that ideal way of presenting something to prospects.

Like you said, there’s a variety of prospects that either are the decision maker themselves, are heavy influencers in the decision process, or are the type of people who let us in the door, the warm referrals, the indirect folks, all of which we have to tune our sales conversation and hone it so that we get them engaged, we get them interested, they’re compelled to give us what we want which is that meaning, that next step in the sales process.

Chris: Absolutely.

Marylou: I wish sales would borrow more from the operation side of marketing, people who are like you that are just diving into the weeds and pulling out those data points. There’s just so much wasted effort on our side by people not willing to do that homework ahead of time, and also to learn for what’s actually in execution to make those changes and to pivot if necessary. We tend to want to waste data and waste in fatigue our list, to the point where we just drop our hands and say, “This just doesn’t work for us,” but that’s not the case.

Chris: Right. There’s another interesting study. There’s some very cool technology nowadays that a lot of retail stores are using to try to determine the optimal store layout. Retail stores have been doing this for decades. Walmart will test different store layouts to figure out, “What should we have by the entrance versus by the cash register? What order should people walk through the store in?”

There’s been some interesting research that’s been added to their efforts in the last 10 years or so in the form of EyeTracking. They will literally have customers walk into a store and they will put these glasses on them where they can track where their eyes are pointing and in what order. It’s a very simple thing, some very simple things can really influence people’s purchasing decisions. For example, Walmart has tested, does the color of our sale banners that we put over different sections in the store, does the color of that impact sales at all? What they found is that it did. The color that that sale banner, or the color that the price is in, is going to draw attention in either a positive, or a negative way.

You can have a blue sales banner with the price. You can have green, you can have red, you can have orange, all these different colors. Different colors are going to draw different amounts of attention to them. It’s interesting to look at some of these things and try to apply it to a sales mindset. What does that mean for sales? Obviously, a retail store is a very different ballgame than pitching somebody in person. Many of the principles, the same principles apply. What happens when I show them this particular presentation in this order? What happens when I talk to them and I address these specific questions or these specific points in this specific order versus this other order?

I’m affecting the way that their brain is thinking, the order that they’re thinking about things, and the level of buying that I’m getting at different stages of the conversation. Some people are very naturally gifted at this and some people are horrible at this. A lot of people will take one approach and try to refine it to death without even trying something different and throwing everything up against the wall. Anyways, I think it’s very interesting to understand what we need to say, in what order, and how in order to really resonate with somebody else, like “What is it going to take to really get this person to make a decision?”

Marylou: Right. I keep coming back to our world. We have this concept called sequences and cadences which give us multi-touch ways to reach our prospects. Order is very important. Order of the sales conversation, order of the touch itself, what kind of touch. Is it a phone call? Is it an email? Is it a social touch? Is it direct mail, sending out a postcard? What is this order for the ultimate high conversion rate? So many people out there don’t think that way when it comes to putting these sales conversation engines, these new ones that are out there, the follow up systems that allow us to have multiple conversations at scale. But we’re not thinking about the order of the conversation and how they should resonate, in what order do they resonate. Is it a strategic conversation maybe, or a business conversation? Or when do I introduce the product? That kind of planning very seldom exists.

Chris: Yes. The other piece of that is, it’s going to be different for just about every business. I think one of the most dangerous things that I see with a lot of professionals is people who move from one company to another or one industry to another, and bring all the best practices from the last company into the current company instead of testing everything all over again. I see things that work for sales people in one industry that completely fail in the same industry for a different company.

You can’t just take best practices. There are some best practices that, as a principle apply but in the actual application… For example, you talked about sequencing of messaging. When you’re reaching out, what’s the best way to reach out, and what’s the frequency of that touch? Those types of things are going to be different on a case-by-case basis. It’s so critical to keep an open mind, to continue testing, and challenging those ideas, especially when you have a new message, or a new audience, or a new business that you are presenting.

Marylou: Like you said earlier, I don’t know if we were recording at the time, but you said earlier on, the channel. We may not have multi channels like we think about for attraction-based marketing and inbound, but we do have conversations where we’re not cold, we’re warm, or maybe they came through and had a relationship with us but it fell out for some reason. It wasn’t the right time so we put them into a nurture cycle.

The starting point is also something we have to think about, is where they are relative to being in their head, this thing you were talking about the neuromarketing. What level of awareness are they at or do we think they’re at? Do we need different sequences based on the levels of awareness? Whether they’re interested now but they weren’t six months ago, what was that pending event that caused them to jump back over into a conversation with us?

We can track all that now. We have the intel, so that when we do get them to bubble up, we route them to the right sequence. A lot of that is not even really thought of or planned ahead of time as to whether these different road maps and routing of records that I need to consider. Because with you guys, what you do, you have to think about that because you’re getting people from all these different channels in various states of awareness by definition.

Chris: Yes. In fact, I’ll tell a funny story. I spoke at a conference last year and we tried a new approach for sales. I would call it a mid-funnel offer. We had an eBook that I had created. In my session of the conference I said, “Hey, if you’re interested in getting started with data testing, go to this URL. You can download this eBook.” I told the sales team about it, “People are going to come here, they’re going to download this eBook, and there’s a little box that people can check if they’re interested in talking with our company.” But the problem was, because it was somewhat of a new process for us to try, our sales team was not taking into consideration the point of origin for these links.

People were coming to my conference, downloading the eBook guide, and checking that they’re interested in talking with us. Then our sales call is going to call them up and say go into their bottom of the funnel, bottom of the sales funnel-type questions to start pitching. It totally didn’t resonate at all. In fact, it rubbed people totally the wrong way and we had a lot of complaints. We had to modify that process pretty quickly. It really highlighted to me again what you’re talking about right now which is if somebody is upper- to mid-sales funnel, or in other words they’re not entirely sure that they want what I have yet, or maybe they’re sure that they want what I have, they’re just not sure that I’m the company for them to go with, if I just start talking to them, if I start hitting them with all the stuff at the bottom of the funnel, they’re not there yet, they’re not ready for all that yet. Again, it’s so important to the other leads that we were generating, that’s where they were at in the sales funnel. We could either nurture them to that point or we had market it to them in that point. Anyways, I think it’s just so incredibly powerful to be able to adapt your sales process and your pitch to the level of where these prospects are at.

Marylou: Right and we have the luxury with multi-touch to sequence these conversations in different orders to test them, but also like you said before, we’re not bombarding them with 10 pain points in one message. We’ll pick one. Pick one, make it short and sweet, give them the punch line, it’s like an episodic television. We’re going to give them the punch line, we’re going to solve their problem, then they will introduce another problem and say, “Wait until you hear what we’re going to tell you about that one.” It’s really all about that engagement, that dating, keeping people interested to want to get that next email, or see what else that we can help them with, transform their day, and these little tidbits.

I think we’re so focused sometimes on just vomiting on them with everything that we can do that we forget, “Oh wait, they’re at A, we’re at Z.” We need to kind of jack it up and get to A with them, and then take their hand and walk them through. It may take a little bit longer, but because we can mechanize these conversations now, we can put a lot more in and feed a lot more in at the top. The people who are ready in scoring themselves, self-directed scoring, will want to talk to us if we organize our sales conversations in the proper manner.

Chris: Right.

Marylou: Chris, how do people learn more about you and your company? And what’s the next step if someone’s listening to this saying, “Okay, I get it. He’s speaking the language that I need to learn more about,” what we do?

Chris: Yeah, great question. The first thing, again my area of expertise being marketing, we do all kinds of different types of marketing. My area of expertise being website conversion rate optimization type of focus. We have a variety of different resources that we have put together. I mentioned just a minute ago a starter eBook that we put together for the conference last year. We also have just a variety of blog posts on our website that are focused again on marketing, but marketing principles, conversion principles, and analytics principles.

People can find those just at disruptiveadvertising.com/blog. We’ve got a phenomenal content team that works together with me and some of the other experts here at Disruptive to create some of the best content pieces. I would love for people to go check out the blog, check out some of the blog posts. I’m on LinkedIn, on Twitter if people want to reach out to me directly, I’d be happy to answer any questions and that’s @ChrisDayley.

Marylou: Okay. I’ll make sure all your contact information is on your page that we put together for the podcast. One thing I want to note for everybody who’s listening to this, you can think of your sequences which are those multi-touches over a period of time as many funnels. They really are acting like funnels. A funnel is usually a marketing term of how to get people into the top, and then get them through the middle, and towards the bottom of the funnel.

Each of our sequences should be treated that way as many funnels that we do. The thought that goes into how those funnels operate, the velocity at which they operate, and the conversion rate at which they operate is how we should be running our outbound, our outreach, people that we want to contact. That’s how I teach my folks, by utilizing the concept of marketing in the funnel, and also the preparation that goes into exactly what the conversation should look like, what order as Chris was saying they should be in, and then testing along the way to see the conversion rates of each of the conversation pieces. The subject line, the click throughs, the actual body of the message, that’s all being tested as we move them through this sequence or mini funnels in order to get them for us to that first meeting, that’s where we’re trying to go.

What Chris does and the work that he does can be directly applied to the work that we do. The smarter sales executive and professional will take this information and apply it right away. You’ll start to see that your list fatigue will go down, that your conversion rates will go up, and you’ll be maximizing your return on effort which is what we’re trying to do here.

Chris: Absolutely.

Marylou: Chris, thank you so much for your time today. I very much enjoyed you coming on the podcast and I hope and wish you more success as you work through this. Hopefully, some of our guys will come over there, pick your brain, and start interacting with you on the work that you do.

Chris: Thank you, and thank you for having me on the show I appreciate it.

Even with all of the social media and automated sales tools available, a one-on-one conversation over the telephone can still be a powerful selling tool, especially among consumers that value authenticity. The resurgence of the telephone call is one of the things that today’s guest talks about in this episode.

Mark Hunter is an author, speaker, coach, and consultant, as well as the Co-Founder of the Outbound Conference. Listen to the episode to hear what Mark has to say about what’s new in prospecting, the difference between informed calling and col calling, and how to get into the prospecting mindset.

Episode Highlights:

• What’s new in prospecting
• Why the telephone is making a resurgence and what Millennials have to do with it
• Informed calling vs. cold calling
• The place of automated follow-up systems in prospecting
• Positive feedback that Mark has gotten about his book
• Using social media for prep work
• How to get into the prospecting mindset
• The Outbound Conference

Resources:

Mark Hunter

The Sales Hunter

High-Profit Prospecting

Outbound Conference

Transcript: 

Marylou: We’re listening to Mark Hunter. Mark Hunter is one of my colleagues in the space. He is an amazing person. You all should go right over to the Sales Hunter which is his website. He’s an author, he’s a speaker, he’s a coach, he’s a consultant. He’s the author of High Profit Prospecting, one of the books that’s out there. Go to Amazon, it’s got a gazillion reviews, it’s a fabulous book. He’s also the cofounder of a conference called OutBound with three of his compatriots who you may also know. It’s in its third year now, right Mark?

Mark: Third year coming out of the tail end of April.

Marylou: Tail end of April, it’s grown leaps and bounds, they’re expecting over 1,000 people this year, and that’s with Jeb Blount, with Anthony Iannarino. I don’t know Mike. What’s his last name?

Mark: Mike Weinberg, he’s a great guy. He is out at Saint Louis, don’t use that against him. He doesn’t like the Rams anymore because he did move from Saint Louis.

Marylou: They moved back to my hometown.

Mark: Yeah they did.

Marylou: Yeah, well great. He is with us today to talk about prospecting. As I said, he is an expert in this area, he’s very passionate about it. You and I spoke probably a couple years ago, 2016. You’re one of my first podcast guests. What’s changed or not? Now you’re running all over the world. What’s new in prospecting so my folks who are listening to this can get some tidbits and some knowledge from you. What’s changed?

Mark: It’s amazing how everything goes in a circle. I think in 2016, everybody was getting hammered with a shiny object called social media and social selling. I think what’s interesting is we’ve come full circle with the telephones. We were having a really strong resurgence because people know. This is something I’m going to give a real shout out for millennials. Millennials have done a really good job of waking us all up that really when it comes down to is authenticity and transparency.

A millennial will not go to work for a company unless the management demonstrates authenticity and transparency. You’re not going to get that by way of social media. You’re going to get that by way of a conversation. I think what we’re doing is we’re coming right back to this human-to-human interaction which is what people crave, because there’s so much stuff out there confusing people and it’s the ability to create a relationship. Has it changed? No. It’s just kind of elevated itself to a higher level. I think the sales process has gone through just a circular motion over the last 100 years. The only thing that changes is the mediums with which people use. That’s it. It’s really the same thing, it’s just the mediums we use.

Marylou: You do have a lot of nice ways to learn more about a prospect in a setting where we can be more authentic. It’s really helping us understand where they’re coming from, what their day in life is like, what kinds of jobs are frustrating to them in their work day, or challenges that they’re experiencing. I think that that has been a blessing for the internet is having this information, not always accurate, but at least we have an understanding where to start the conversation and when to come into the conversation that we didn’t have in the olden days, when we were going to the library looking in research books to try to figure out what are prospects and our companies were doing.

Mark: Yeah, you hit on something very key there because people say cold calling is dead. Well, cold calling isn’t dead because there are some industries that very much works very cost effectively. If you think about it, we’ve moved to an era of really informed calling. I can google you and find out all kinds of information about you.

I actually think it’s easier today to prospect than it’s ever been. There is so much information out there and there’s so much noise. People are craving for, “Give me the truth. Give me a real authentic relationship.” There’s so much information out there that I can’t help but stumble across things so that I might be able to help you with. I admit, I’m a sales junkie and yes, Hunter is my real last name. I’ve never been more bullish on sales as I am today. I know there’s a lot of people that that just sends chills down their spine. But I truly do believe because people are craving for authenticity and transparency, like you said before, and the ability to connect with people to create trust and confidence. When you do that all on a foundation of integrity, you’re going to be successful and the customer is going to be successful.

Marylou: That’s a great point. I’m wondering what do you think about all of these automated follow up systems and their place in the prospecting area in the pipeline? Do you feel that they’re helping or hindering us?

Mark: I think unfortunately, they do quite a bit of damage. Now, they’re very beneficial, I’m not going to […], but you got to know how to use them. I can give somebody a power saw and in 10 seconds they can cut their fingers off or I can give them a power saw and then cuts a magnificent piece of wood. It’s knowing how to use the tool right and I think that that’s the problem. So many people buy the tool and try to force it into a solution that doesn’t work. You got to know what’s that challenge in finding the right tool.

Here’s a the other piece though, I’ve got nothing wrong with tools. It helps make me more efficient. My phone rang about an hour ago and we’ve all been trained to let it through the voicemail. But I thought it might be you, so I picked it up and there was this 5-second pause. Well, you know what it was. It was because it was being routed to a live person. It was a global sales call. That turns me off. We wonder why the society have this disdain towards the sales community.

Unfortunately, we have probably earned most strikes. I’m on a mission to try to correct that. I think sales is absolutely a very noble profession because my definition of a salesperson is the definition of a leader, to help you see and achieve what you didn’t think was possible. Think about that. That’s cool, that’s my trigger, that exciters me.

Marylou: We change lives.

Mark: We change lives. I’m sorry, I’m going to go on a rant here. So many people go, “I’d be successful in sales if I had something decent to sell,” or, “I’d be decent in sales if we just lowered our price every deal.” Shut up. Here’s what I can tell. It’s not what we sell, it’s why we sell. I want to be focused on the outcomes. I want to be focused on the outcome I’m going to help you achieve. That’s what I’m focused on. As long as I am zeroed-in on helping you achieve something you didn’t think was possible. That trips my trigger. That excites me. I want to get up in the morning. I want to go. I want to do it.

Marylou: Yeah. Everyone knows this, I have a note on my computer that every morning I look at it and it’s says, “How can I add more value?”

Mark: I love it.

Marylou: That’s my daily mantra.

Mark: Right.

Marylou: When you approach sales that way, you’re there to add value. You’re not buying people. You’re not being a pest. You’re adding value, which means your correspondence, your conversation is all value-driven conversation. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

Mark: You know what’s interesting about that? The high performing salesperson is like that, not just with salespeople, but with the barista they meet, with the wait staff at the restaurant, with everybody. The high performing salesperson is bringing value to every conversation, every interaction they have all the time. To me, sales is not a job, it’s not even a profession, it’s a lifestyle. You bringing value. What are you doing? You are bringing value and you’re helping people. That’s cool. That’s neat.

Marylou: Let’s focus a bit on the high profit prospecting. That’s one of the books that we all, at least I, have sitting on my desk. There’s reasons for that. I’m curious. It’s been out for a little bit now. What are the top two or three things in that book that people come up to you and want to give you the biggest hug, that you solved that problem for them? What do you hear most often about that book?

Mark: There are several. One of the big things is they say, “Thank you for telling me, ‘Don’t start what you can’t finish.’” It’s one of the big piece I talked about in the book, don’t start what you can’t finish. So many people just put, “Just fill up this pipeline,” and all you wind up with it is a sewer pipe. I say, “No, your objective is to make it very simple. Keep it simple.” I think the other thing that people come up to me and say thank you is the fact that you demystify sales.

You work with a lot of engineers and so forth, incredibly smart, brilliant people. I made the upper half of my class possible, but we’ll just leave it at that. I very much have to take the approach to sales that, I want to keep it as simple as possible. The whole thing is by keeping it as simple as possible. I’m able to just have a conversation because that’s ultimately what sales is. It’s a conversation just like what we are having today. That’s probably the second piece. The third piece—it has run to a few of my friends the wrong way—is social media has earned its way. It’s not about just, “Oh, let’s go spend 3-4 hours a day on social media and people will be the door to my path.” That’s not going to happen. I say social media has to earn its way. It may be as little as 10-15 minutes a day, that’s it. For as big of followers as I have—I’ve got over 300,000 followers on LinkedIn alone—I spend less than 30 minutes a day on social media. Period. Maybe five minutes of it is during the day, the rest of it is very early, 4:40.

When I see salespeople spending all day on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, oh please. You can’t take clicks and likes the the bank. I’m sorry, I’m going to go down another rant. I love meeting with salespeople, especially solopreneurs. I’m meeting a lot of solopreneurs. I’ll be coaching them and I say, “Let me see your goals.” They all have these social media goals. How many connection they want to have, how many followers they want to have. I go, “Oh please, you’re killing me.” They place more focus on that than they do with the number of phone calls. The number one metric we all need to have is CFT, customer-facing time. What is your customer-facing time every day? If that’s not on an upward trend year-in-year-out, something is wrong.

Marylou: Indeed. I think that the use of meaningful conversations are the ones that allow us to advance prospects into the pipeline towards a sales call to find opportunity, in my case which is where I suck. I like social media from the standpoint of prep work, of research, and I think it has its place there. But like anything, it’s a tool in your toolkit. As a sales executive, we have a number of different tools that are at our disposal in order to be able to have the most meaningful conversation we can possibly have with someone who is in need of what we sell.

Mark: Wow, that’s well said.

Marylou: To that end, I use whatever I can. We use whatever we can to get to that point.

Mark: Right. Here’s the question I love to ask salespeople. Does making sales calls jazz you or do they drain you? I love asking salespeople that question.

Marylou: What is the normal response to that? I’m curious.

Mark: I get about 20% of the time people say it jazzes them. About 80% of the time, they look at me and they go, “What?” and they go, “Drained.” But you know what’s funny though? That’s how you can tell who’s passionate about sales. I’m not saying every call goes well because we all have calls that go sideways. We all have calls where we think we’re calling a prospect and no, they are a suspect. One of the things I talk about in my book, and I talk a lot about whenever I’m keynoting in front of a group is, a lead. I got all these leads, that means they’re all heartbeats, and I always loved it.

For example, I’ve got a dog and my dog has got a heartbeat. But my dog is never going to buy anything from me. You got to qualify the lead. They’re a suspect until they become a prospect. They have to earn the right to become a prospect. So many salespeople keep garbage in their pipelines just to keep their boss happy. “Well, my boss is going to yell at me if I don’t have enough in my pipeline.” Got to line the bosses up right now and start slapping them.

Marylou: I was going to say I’m kind of sad that I’m retiring, but I’m happy I’m retiring. If I had more time, I would be spending most of my time educating sales managers and educating people who manage sales executives, because they’re so misinformed.

Mark: So bad because they measure things that are easy to measure. Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean it’s worth measuring.

Marylou: It doesn’t make it meaningful.

Mark: Yeah, it’s painful.

Marylou: It is painful. It’s very painful and they’re getting the constant pushback. I was talking to someone just the other day about this topic and he’s like, “Marylou, give it up. It’s a monumental task to try to convince, reeducate, and turn this big ship around.” I’m like, “No, we cannot give up. We got to continue on,” but yeah, it’s pretty daunting. A lot of that, like we talked before we started about Howard in the University of Texas at Dallas, he has a sales program and that’s what we need more of. It’s that education of what metrics matter, what’s meaningful, and how this all fits together. We will use the term spray-and-pray, especially in prospecting. We know that’s not right, but there’s still a lot of that going on. Do you agree?

Mark: Right but go back 25 years ago. It was true again that if I could make 100 dial, I could have X number of conversations. I’m not going to discount that today.

Marylou: Right, there’s still a waterfall. I agree.

Mark: There’s still a huge […] but back then, that was the only measurement. We think we can do so much better because what are sales managers doing? All they’re trying to do is keep themselves out of trouble by serving up the ladder. This goes back to the birth of CRM systems. Why were CRM systems created? They were created because the CFO wanted to find a way to measure what’s going on in sales.

CRM systems were not created because salespeople woke up and say, “Let me have every moment of my day be measured for other people.” Wrong again and still to this day, when I see CRM systems, I go in and I work with sales teams and organizations on CRM analysis and implementing. It’s amazing. The finance department, the CFO or some representative from the CFO’s office has a seat at the table because they want to have their fingers in what they’re going to measure.

Marylou: Right, there to command and to control.

Mark: Yeah. Sales is an emotional game. You can have two people, give them the exact same script—I hate scripts but anyway—one could be incredibly successful because they have the right mindset, the other will be a dismal failure because of the mindset. It’s your mental state. I mean sales is a mental game. That’s why we’ve all seen people that go, “I can’t believe how successful they are.” You and I both know incredibly brilliant people that are dismal failures in sales because they over-analyze. They want to dissect everything. Okay, I’m sorry. I’m going way out of tangent.

Marylou: We definitely don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. But you’re right, I believe in a three-pronged approach to sales. Skill set is obviously one that we developed over time, then there’s the process itself, the mechanics of the work flows, and then the one you just brought up which is really important, which is very difficult to quantify, is mind set. How do you teach mindset to someone?

Mark: Well, our mindset is shaped by our historical behavior, and the environment which we come from. I kind of equate it to an example. When I speak of that, we all occupy a chair. Many of us just can’t get out of our chair because, “No, I can’t stand up.” For some reason we told ourselves we can’t stand up, “No, I can’t stand up.” I’m amazed at the number of salespeople who I work with, who struggle in sales because they just won’t make the requisite number of follow-up phone calls.

Marylou: Pretty amazing.

Mark: Yeah it is. Sales is not hard when you can follow everything Marylou Tyler says.

Marylou: Well, process-wise. I don’t profess to know the whole workings of the brain, although I do have a process for mindset that I use, which was borrowed from somebody along the way of 30 years doing this. We start with desire and then from there, we need to move to repetition. Then we do what Anthony talks about, which is the discipline of sales. From there, we get into this rhythm and routine. Then and only then can we move to habit, which is what prospect is. The mindset of a prospector is we’re very habit-based. More so than most of the sales roles, I would say, because of the fact that we’re typically working with a lot more records, trying to get to that first conversation where I work.

That is the latter, and I actually score my people when we’re going through the ramp of putting in an outbound system and we score on that. That’s all I know about mindset. I try to make it into a process so that I can see relative position of mindset where people are, and that helps me then say, “Great, you’re still trying to get repetition down. This is what we need to do from a workflow perspective with you so that you can get to the point where you’re having these skillful conversations right. We’re just trying to get you the do the daily work flow.”

Mark: Yeah.

Marylou: You are right in the thick of all that. I’m sure you have that magic wand of what to do with mindset more so than I would, because I’m trying to get everything into a quantified process. Something that we can actually put on a piece of paper.

Mark: I think the three things when it comes to the mind set, first of all, have to be disciplined with yourself. You have to be able to have the hard conversation with yourself, your discipline to yourself. Two, the discipline has to lead to an art of follow-up, follow through. And three, you cannot allow past activity to haunt future expectations. There’s that old line, well not out of the old line, it’s […] financial services, commercial you see. Past performance or past results are no indication of future performance. You can’t allow that phone call it just went south to upset you for your next five calls you’re going to make. You can’t allow that prospect, you can’t. You have to just shut it down, move on.

But that comes back to this first thing of discipline. Anybody who’s ran a marathon has gone through at least—unless you’re really weird—one level of training where they go, “I can’t go on. I can’t walk,” without the discipline of being focused saying, “I could do it.” That’s the only reason they continue and they play through that, “This is painful. This is difficult. How I’m going to rehab from this? How am I going to work through this?” to be able to run a marathon. Sales is not a sprint. Sales is a marathon.

Marlylou: Most definitely.

Mark: Yeah. Anybody can be successful for a day or two. I always say this. I see plenty of salespeople be successful for a quarter, that’s it. After that, sorry they’re done.

Marylou: Yeah, well my boss would start to say, “What have you done for me lately, Marylou? Great, you just closed this deal. What have you done for me lately?” It was constant for me. Let’s wrap this up by talking about the OutBound Conference. We’re into the third year now and 100,000 people you’re saying, or more are coming. What should people know about that event in case they want to catch it?

Mark: Yeah. outboundconference.com is the website. It’s a very unique conference. It’s totally pitch-free. There’s no selling from the platform. It’s 100% content driven, that’s a huge piece. It’s all around prospecting, pipeline productivity, that’s it. It’s Anthony, Mike Weinberg, Jeb Blount, myself. This year we’ve got Victor Antonio coming, we’ve got coming Waldo Waldman coming, Bob Burg coming, Jeffrey Gitomer coming, Colleen Francis coming, Andrea Waltz, that’s just on the main stage. Then we have another day of just breakout sessions. If you buy, you can buy the two-day ticket for the main stage, you can buy the three-day ticket which includes the breakout day which is 23 breakout sessions.

Marylou: Wow.

Mark: You can get the recordings to those. You can get the video and the audio. Or you can buy the VIP pack which includes half-day VIP leadership workshop, which is actually being held at the Porsche Experience Center.

Marylou: Fun.

Mark: Is that cool? That is like way over the top, but the only event takes place at the Georgia World Congress Center right across the street from Mercedes Benz Stadium. It’s the Atlanta Convention Center.

Marylou: Oh yeah, I’ve been there. It’s a really huge place.

Mark: Yeah.

Marylou: Great. For those of you thinking immersion, this sounds like a really nice way to get everything in in a couple of days and work towards that third and fourth quarter goals.

Mark: Yeah, it is Circus Soleil takes over a rock show to disrupt the sales meeting. We have no emcee, there’s no emcee. Once this thing kicks off, it just runs. It just flat out runs. It is why we have so many people come back every year. It’s crazy, let’s just put it that way. It is a mind-blowing experience without the drugs.

Marylou: There you have it. For those of you who are driving down the road listening to this, I’ll put all these links on Mark’s page when we get this podcast launched.

Mark: Don’t tell this to anybody, but I’ll give you my secret code, just between you and I. the secret code to save $100 on tickets is MARK100, but don’t share that to anybody, okay?

Marylou: I won’t.

Mark: It’s MARK100 outboundconference.com.

Marylou: Your secret is safe with me. Alright guys, you heard it here. Mark, thank you so much for your time. It’s really great to speak with you, and I will put all of your links so that people know how to get a hold of you. The Sales Hunter. Mark Hunter, author of High Profit Prospecting, cofounder of OutBound, the annual conference for sales executives, taking those sales conversations to the next level. Thank you so much for your time today Mark, I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Mark: Thank you so much, great time.

In any field, one thing that you can be sure of is that things will eventually change. This is as true in sales as it is in any other industry, and it’s important to be able to keep up with the changes as the come. That leads to the question: can the ability to change be taught? Today’s guest thinks that the answer is yes.

Brian Keller is the Director of Sales Training at McKesson. He joins the podcast today to talk about his sales training workshops and the importance of learning about change in the sales field. Listen to the episode to hear what Brian has to say about why change matters for sales executives, how to connect data with the real life experience of salespeople on the ground, and how Brian’s students apply what he teaches.

Episode Highlights:

• Why change is important for sales executives
• Whether change can be taught
• How to connect the data to real life experiences in the sales field
• Whether tenure has an impact on whether or not to engage in change
• Tools Brian uses to get students to apply what he teaches
• What goes into planning a training workshop
• How the salespeople that Brian trains share their success stories
• The motivation for formalized training at McKesson

Resources:

Brian Keller

Transcript:

Marylou: Everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest I met in Australia. He was speaking on a topic of sales training which sometimes I a little bit gloss over on that because I’m not really focused in my world on the training aspect of sales, but Brian Keller who’s with us today just mesmerized me. He did two talks. One, was on the technology involved in sales training. The second one was driving change in the sales department, in sales executives’ mindsets. That particular topic really resonated with me. I asked Brian on the show today.

He’s the director of sales training at McKesson. Last count, he is responsible for 1800 sales professionals in terms of keeping them smart and trained. I asked him to come on today to talk about this topic. Brian, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here.

Brian: Marylou, thanks for having me. It’s great to be onboard. Good to talk to you again.

Marylou: Yeah, we both survived the Australian trip.

Brian: It’s quite a flight.

Marylou: It was quite a flight. First question always is, why do we need this? Who cares? Why do we need to change the sales executives? We’re pretty set in our rhythms, in our flow, in our mindset. Why do you think change is so important for the sales executive?

Brian: I think it’s critical these days. The reason I say that is that your customers—I think this is true in every arena where face-to-face selling is taking place—are changing how they buy. The last 20 years of the internet, the amount of information that’s available to the average purchaser out there, and the way buying organizations have changed their stripes means that you have to have change within the sales team. If you’re going to have change within the sales team, then you’ve got to have it at the executive level as well or the change will not take place.

One of the things that I am quick to point out with our executives here is that many of them grew up with the hand-shaking, taking people out for lunch, and that’s how you get a deal done with an organization. That’s no longer the case. Nowadays, the average buying team is actually a team of people who are making a purchasing decision, has between six and seven members of it. If you’re not prepared to change the way you sell in order to get across to those people, you’re not going to close the deal.

Marylou: Very true. We do have a lot of technology now to help us sell better. We also have on the opposite side, buyers who have more at their fingertips, and are able to make some decision before they actually talk to a salesperson now. Whereas before, we were the encyclopedia of what you needed to get done, how it worked, and all the bits and bytes of a product or service. That has changed for sure. You’re right. Some of the industries, McKesson, is for those of you who don’t know, they’re a very large healthcare. How would you describe them, more of a distribution company?

Brian: We are a distributor of healthcare products. Our total revenues last year were north of $200 billion for the year. It’s a big chunk of change. About three quarters of that, more than three quarters of that is big pharma, the hospital systems, big pharmaceutical stuff. My team works with medical-surgical supplies to everybody except the urgent care market. We’re selling to primary care physicians, or surgery centers, or long term care facilities. You probably have seen a box of gloves with McKesson on them as well as other supplies. We distribute all those in very small quantities as need be.

Marylou: In this industry like you said before, you mentioned it was a kind of a good old boy type of network. You would do a lot more face-to-face, take them out to lunch, go golfing, whatever it was. Now, that has morphed into more usage of the internet, and sort of anonymously, and doing a lot of things ahead of time. Can change be taught I guess is the question. I’m sitting here thinking, it sounds really woo-woo to be in if there’s no profit behind this. What are your thoughts there Brian?

Brian: Well, I think it can be taught. I think the first thing you have to do is get the group that you’re working with to understand how critical the change is and making some kind of changes. I typically start with as much data as you can glum together. Sales teams, salespeople in particular are all about, “Show me the money and show me why is this for real.” By glumming data together, coming up with real information that they can sink their teeth into, and then connect it with some things they may have experienced themselves out in the field, you begin to shine the light that they can see, “Hey, there is something over here that I needed to go look at,” so you can move them out of their current paradigm.

My belief is that everybody is in favor of change as long as someone else goes first. You kind of have to set the table for them off to the side and let them believe that there’s a reason to go over there and visit it. My starting point is to always go about dragging up some data that you can find to show people, here is why the change is happening with the people you call on, and here’s why we have to change to move to that as well. There’s a great deal of data right now that says the average buying person, average customer is doing almost 60% of their investigations before they ever talk to a salesperson, thanks to the web. If you don’t get there by the time the customer is ready to start talking to you, you’re going to be way behind the curve compared to other people.

Marylou: You mentioned something a little while ago where you say you start with the data, which is speaking my language, I love that, but somehow you said, “And then I connect it with real life experiences, or experiences that they are witnessing out in the field.” How the heck do you do that?

Brian: The comment I made about buying teams is kind of the starting point. If you say to them things like, “Our customers are doing X amount of their investigation into what their next purchase is going to be online,” before you ever get a chance to talk them, in many cases they’ll say, “Well sure, but they’re looking at our website.” Yeah and everybody else is. The next piece of that is, I know for a fact that the average buying team has between six and seven people in a large organization which is what a lot of our senior sales executives are selling into.

I’ll just ask them a question, I’ll say, “At your last deal that you closed with health system A, tell me about how many people there were in the room for the presentation,” and just get them to serve up that in the past, “Oh, you’re right. We had six people we had to present to, and there was also a hang-around group of another dozen who were taking notes at the back.” “Okay, when did that change for you?” “Well, it’s a pretty recent thing.” “Exactly, and that’s because of…” and I can start into how the customers have changed to buying groups, and by connecting it to something they have already experienced, they have to go, “Yeah, you’re right. It is happening like that.” It adds credibility to what I’m presenting to them. It also helps them understand, “Holy cow, I have to make that change.”

Marylou: Okay. One of the issues that I’m seeing out there in the world is, perhaps if you are sitting on quota and you are in a company that, whether it’s market share or product share, we want growth, that there is a complacency for the longer tenured you are, that I’ve always said it this way, it works this way, why should I change? Are you discovering that tenure has an impact on whether or not they’re going to engage in this change, or is it across the board? As long as you can show the connection between what they’re doing now and what the outcome will be if they don’t change, does it matter the demographics of the sales or the tenure of the sales executive?

Brian: I don’t have any data to support this. I’m going to go with my gut. My gut tells me that it’s less about tenure and more about success. If you have been a successful salesperson for a period of time, you have a certain amount of income, you’re enjoying, and lifestyle, and everything, it is difficult to talk yourself into doing something differently when you’ve had that success.

If you have been the kind of person who’s become successful by embracing the changes that have taken place in the market, you’re going to jump on that. Making the change is easy for you, but if you’ve done it as most salespeople have through doing the same things for a long period of time, that’s what will stick you to keep inertia in play, so then you can’t make the change and get out of your current state of things. I have seen that in as short a time span as maybe even four or five years.

Our average salesperson here in the group that my team trains is close to 20 years. When you’ve got that kind of tenure, they’re less interested in making a change unless you can make it easier for them to do so, or you give them a reason to do so. A change in compensation for example.

Marylou: That’s a good question and coming up follow onto that is changing in compensation as a driver for change. Are there other tools in your toolbox that you use as a trainer to get your students to activate what you’re teaching and actually apply what you’re teaching?

Brian: It almost always goes back to whatever the motivating factor is for the person or the group that we’ve got in front of us. We have a number of different compensation programs here. A large percentage of it is at risk, i.e., full commission. It is very easy to get changes from them by changing the commission program, or showing them an easier way to take advantage of the current commission program. With folks who have less of their income at risk, I find that they are more likely to be willing to change simply because they have less skin in the game as it were.

Now, do we have things other than compensation to do that? Yeah. We have sales leader leverage, sales managers can apply pressure, motivation, whatever you want to call it, but I find as a trainer and my training team finds it as using our known sales techniques to help us with it. I’ve said any number of times that I have sold for the better part of 40 years. I sell harder nowadays than I ever did when I was carrying a bag simply because I’m selling ideas and changes to behavior. That takes a lot more selling to sell a product or service.

Marylou: It definitely is daunting and overwhelming for someone like me.

Brian: Right. Good salespeople, I think you’ll agree, will fall for a good salesperson. I’m a little bit of a sucker when I’ve got a good salesperson in front of me. It’s fortunate that it’s a small percentage of the selling population that are that great, but when I’ve got a good one in front of me, they will take me down. No question about that.

Marylou: It’s interesting because I rely so much on process in my world and love process because process is black and white in so many ways. Sure, there’s a few shades of gray, but in what you’re talking about mindset and skill set, is just so gray. How do you decide when you’re working with a team, what you’re going to pull out of your rabbit’s hat in order to get them to lean into you and say, “Oh my gosh. This guy really has an important point here that I am going to take a note.” It just seems like this is so art form-ish rather science based. Tell us what a typical scenario is for you to take in a group of people. I can see that I’m almost with hands on hips coming in there saying, “All right, show me.” What do you do in that situation?

Brian: That’s actually my favorite training scenario. I call it training without a net. First of all, you have to do your homework. It may look as if I’m walking in and doing this off the top of my head. The fact of the matter is, the preparation that I put into play before I’ve ever done this is pretty serious. We spent a great deal of time when we’re designing a workshop, particularly one that’s focused on the selling skills, and the selling behaviors, and having to change those.

We spend a great deal of time understanding who our constituents are, what their motivation is for remaining where they are, what their motivation could be for moving to where we think we need to get them to. Understanding which of the behaviors that currently exist we need to either amplify, or mute, or adapt from what they’re currently doing, and then we work through a series of skills and exercises that will move them from point A to point B.

The only way to get it to stick is to ensure that they get an opportunity. Once they’ve bought into, “Hey, I’m going to make this change. I’m going to buckle down and try this,” we make sure that we give them plenty of opportunities to practice it before they’re face-to-face with the customer. One of the things I’ve said over the years is that, nowadays, the average person learns to drive a car that does not have a stick shift. It’s an automatic transmission. I learned how to drive a stick shift, a straight stick when I was about 16 or 17. I almost broke my poor father’s neck from learning how to drive it because it often bump over the parking lot, but I eventually learned how to drive it.

If you took the average salesperson today who drives from appointment to appointment, most of us drive a car in what I refer to as an unconsciously competent manner. We’re not really thinking about it. You just get in and drive. Eventually, you’ll get to your place. How many times have you gotten somewhere and said, “I don’t remember going through that intersection,” and yet you did because your brain having driven thousands of hours, and thousands of miles, your brain doesn’t require you to be really paying attention all that hard. Suddenly, having never driven a stick shift, somebody throws you the keys to a straight stick and says, “Here, drive this.” And now you have an extra pedal, and you have a gear shift sticking up out of the floor, and you’re supposed to coordinate extra limbs, and body parts to make the car move forward.

You go from being unconsciously competent, to consciously incompetent. That is very uncomfortable, because you used to be really good at this. Given a couple of hours of practice, you can get to where you can actually drive the straight stick, but you have to think about it the whole time. That same thing is true when I’m teaching a group of salespeople a new selling behavior or a new selling skill. They’ve got to have an opportunity to practice a little bit or they will immediately default back to the first time they’ve got a customer in front of them that’s doing not what they expect. They’re going to default back to the automatic transmission and stop thinking about it.

Marylou: When you’re teaching a new concept like this where it’s obviously a change in behavior, you do a little bit of repetition in the classroom setting, what types of follow-up processes do you and your team institute so that it moves from that repetitive do-the-role-playing class, to becoming actual disciplined, routine, and then finally have it?

Brian: We’ve got a bunch of refreshers that we throw out there, or fresheners. We utilize salesforce.com, that’s our CRM of record, and we have the ability to connect with a lot of our reps and students through that. We’ll use chatter as a function, we’ll use email as a function, we’ll pop a 45-second audio clip, offline chatter, or drop it into people’s inbox in their email as a reminder to do X, Y, and Z.

It’s going to be up to the participants to go, “Oh yeah, I promised I was going to do that. I’ve made a commitment to myself that I’m going to make these changes,” and I don’t have sales managers walking around with the account managers all the time, so it’s not like they can watch them in action. But by giving those refreshers out there, that can have a lot of value for the reps. We also are quick to grab success stories from the folks out in the field, and when we get a success story, we’ll pass that along as a reminder, “Hey, Charlie’s doing this and it’s really working for him,” as a way to help cement that desire to keep making the changes and make them permanent.

Marylou: I like the idea of the success stories. I’m actually experiencing with a client of mine, a little resistance from the outside folks to share those success stories. It’s not like they want to keep them to themselves, but they say, “I’m too busy. I don’t have time to do this.” What is the mechanism by which they share a success story? There are forms that people fill out? Do they just leave a voicemail saying, “Hey, I had this great thing,” and then you guys put it into a nice format that everybody can use? What’s the typical scenario for that reporting back in?

Brian: It’s a couple of things. First of all, we have access to sales data which we can see spikes that people have suddenly hit upon when something different has happened, so we can do a quick follow-up with a phone call. In many cases, the reps have windshield time that enables them to pick up the phone and give us a call, and we build some pretty decent relationships. My trainers and I do with our sales folks. They’re encouraged to call us, to talk about things, to run stuff by us, to call and complain that something didn’t work, we’ll be glad to act as kind of like a bullpen coach to help you out when you’re stuck with something.

We use those times to dredge those things up. We also utilize our sales management squad for that. Our sales managers stay pretty connected to their sales teams despite a very broad, what I consider to be almost an overly broad span of control, but the sales managers being keyed into it and having an opportunity to brag on their team, or someone on their team who’s performing well or doing something different that’s working, also gives us a fairly rich vein to pull from.

Marylou: I’m curious because I do some work in the startup community, tech community. It’s kind of sink or swim for us out there without very coordinated training effort. Why did they decide to do this? You have eight trainers that of course, you have a zillion salespeople. What was it that McKesson, or you decided, “You know what? We’re investing this amount of time in our sales professionals and continue to do so, not one-off training, not hiring a consultant to come in, do a 30-minute blurb, and then leave.” What was the cultural motivation to have a formalized training for sales professionals at McKesson?

Brian: That’s a great question. I think there’s a couple of things driving this. The first is that, a good bit of our growth has not been organic, it’s been through mergers and acquisitions. Just in my eight-and-a-half years, we have more than doubled the size of the sales team and the markets that we enter through those mergers and acquisitions. In order for us to be as lean and as low cost to providers as we can, we have to have everybody on the same platforms. My team is responsible for all that integration training with the various platforms and technologies that we use.

I think the second piece of it is that, we have a reputation among our customers, and among frankly our peers in the industry of immense credibility with our customer. We have customers that have been customers of ours for a couple of decades and that impressive stat is driven by a couple of things. One is the quality of the services that we deliver, and two is the credibility and skills of the sales teams.

There’s a lot of data that indicates that what causes customers to buy more from a current provider, a current supplier, is that the salesperson focuses on what’s good for their customers’ business as opposed to their own business. That kind of credibility doesn’t come lightly. I believe in order to maintain that level of credibility across a broad organization as well as to the integration training, I’ve been given a much larger team than you would typically see in a sales training organization. I think McKesson’s belief is that, when it comes right down to it, we are a sales organization and if we didn’t put that kind of an investment into our sales teams, what would we be saying?

Marylou: Before we part ways, I’m going to ask you and you can say, “You know what? Maybe not, Marylou,” but I’m curious. I’m sitting here listening to this, I am a person at a smaller company, we don’t have a formalized training process, it’s […] like I said, we role player once in a while. What would be the top most recommendation for a person considering to take that leap and push for a more formalized training program for their sales executives at their firm?

Brian: That’s a tough one.

Marylou: That’s why I said you could say, “Another topic for another day, Marylou.”

Brian: That’s almost a solo topic. I’ll try and do it in 100 words or less. I think that if you have more than a dozen salespeople, you could probably build your own sales training program, maybe get somebody to help you with it. But I think there’s great value on being well-read in the various sales models that are out there, Sandler, SPIN Selling, The Challenger Sales Model, et cetera. Being well-read in all those, understanding your customer intimately, having carried a bag, and been out there in the trenches with your sales team, I think you can probably pull from those various models and build one of your own.

Part of doing that the first time, and the reason I’m saying this is because this is the way I did it here, is that you’ve got to have cred with the folks who are already doing the job. If you come in and tell them, “We’re going to do some completely different unlike anything you’ve ever done before. We’re going to call it this, this, and this,” you’re going to start waist-deep in a hole with a very hard way to get out of it.

You almost have to build it and have them feeling like they had a hand in its construction. I’m a firm believer that people support what they’ve also helped to create so you ought to let them. I think that’s the key to making one of these things work particularly in a smaller organization. I wouldn’t say you take your best salesperson to do it because they often are superstars and naturals, and don’t have a clue how they do that.

Marylou: Right. They’re more outliers or just innate ability that you can’t clone.

Brian: Exactly, nor should we try. Nobody else can do what they do generally.

Marylou: We all know who they are.

Brian: We do and they know who they are. But if you take somebody who’s thoughtful, had some cerebral thought behind how you have to do this to be successful, I think just about anybody could put together some kind of a sales training program that would have a positive impact. Sales is not generally a spectator sport and turning it into a spectator sport, shining a light on the skills that you need to make it happen, will make anybody better at it. I would say just go ahead and start swinging.

Marylou: Exactly. For those of you who have separated roles like Brian was telling me before we got on the call, that they just folded in their small, he called it, inside sales team of 200 people. There’s perhaps a […] in of the actual sales roles as you start to build these programs. The other thing we’ve heard from Brian is repetition is important, it’s not a set it and forget it, it’s a constantly evolving thing, and you’re also constantly bringing them back into fold for refresher, health check, or whatever it is called, so that they continue along that continuum of training. The success to mastery is repetition, routine, and eventually it becomes habit. That’s essentially what you’ve been able to pull together at McKesson. I’m very just enamored with what you’ve done over there. It’s just amazing that with that many people, you can keep the rank and file all move in the right direction to close one, so to speak, in the pipeline. That’s great.

Brian: Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m blessed with a lot of really, really good people in my team and folks at the leadership level who were willing to listen. They’re not always willing to agree, but they’re always willing to listen.

Marylou: Yeah, you have that support, the leadership support which is great. Brian, people are going to want to connect with you, figure out, “Okay, who is this person. How do I find him.” LinkedIn, is that the best way for us to connect with you?

Brian: Absolutely. I’m on LinkedIn, and by all means, connect with me. I’d be glad to chat with you.

Marylou: Great. Thanks again for you time. I very much appreciate it. I’ll put all your contact information on the podcast page for those of you who are like, “How many Brian Kellers are there?” Don’t worry, I will make sure that we link an address on the page. Again, thanks so much for being a guest on the show today.

Brian: Thanks for inviting me Marylou, I enjoyed it.

Your prospects encounter many salespeople in all areas of their lives. It’s easy for salespeople and their products and services to begin to blend together. In order to make your sale, you’ll need to convince them that there are reasons why they should choose what you’re selling over what other people are selling. How can you do that? By making sure that you can stand out from the others. You have to differentiate yourself and your product.

Today’s guest has written a book that can help you understand sales differentiation and how to use differentiation to make your sales. Lee Salz is a sales management strategist and the CEO of Sales Architects. He’s also a keynote speaker, author, and consultant. Lee joins the podcast today to talk about his most recent bestselling book, Sales Differentiation. Listen in to hear what Lee has to say about why describing your product as “the best” is ineffective, how to help buyers make informed buying decisions, and how to identify the things that differentiate your product from others.

Episode Highlights:

• What happens when you describe your service, product, or company as “the best”
• Why saying that your product is the best doesn’t help to differentiate you from other salespeople
• Whether buyers are really as educated as you may think
• Helping buyers make informed decisions
• Two parts to sales differentiation
• Five steps to profiling your sales differentiation
• Exercises that can help you identify your sales differentiation
• Your biggest competitor
• Customer service and account management
• Pre-call research
• Why the way you sell is also a differentiator

Resources:

Lee Salz

Sales Architects

Sales DifferentationVisit this page to register for the Sales Differentiation Minute video series

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest is Lee Salz. Lee is a leading sales management strategist and CEO of Sales Architects. I’ve asked him on the show today to talk about his super-great book called Sales Differentiation, which won a silver medal for Top Sales Book of 2018. He’s also the author of five additional books. When you go on Amazon to look him up, make sure you get the library of books because I think you’re going to be totally glad you did. Lee, welcome to the show today.

Lee: Thank you, Marylou. I appreciate it.

Marylou: Besides being a feature columnist, and media source, and guru, what else are you featured on that people can look for before we start this conversation that would get them started on understanding how you work and what your message is for our audience?

Lee: Absolutely. Marylou, could I ask you a question before we come back to that one?

Marylou: Sure. Yeah, ask away.

Lee: Over the years, you’ve had a wonderful show. How many expert guests would you venture that you’ve had on?

Marylou: Let me think about this. I’m on Episode 128 right now. We’re recording this in January 2019. I would say 110 or 115, somewhere in there.

Lee: Your listeners are probably wondering why you’re having Lee Salz on your show so, if you don’t mind, I’ll tell them.

Marylou: Please go right ahead. The floor is yours.

Lee: I’m the best sales consultant in the world. That’s rude. You’re laughing at me. To those of you listening, what do you think of me now, the fact that I’ve described myself to you as the best sales consultant in the world? Are you thinking to yourself, “What a wonderful human being,” or are you saying, “What an arrogant jerk. Marylou, what were you thinking having this guy on the show?”

Marylou: There’s a little bit of both, I’m sure, going on in people’s heads right now.

Lee: If you’re thinking negative thoughts about me, here’s my question for you: Why do you think your prospects feel any differently about you than you feel about me at this moment when you come marching and saying, “My company, my products, and my services are the best.” Guess what? They don’t. They feel the same way about you that you feel about me when I introduced myself as the best sales consultant in the world.

Marylou: Touché. The first thing I thought was, “Wow, he’s very confident.”

Lee: You’re polite. Usually, the word is cocky, arrogant, and full of himself.

Marylou: It’s funny because I keep thinking about one of our colleagues who wrote the book The Only Sales Book That You’ll Ever Need. It sounds like coming off of that, I’m not surprised now where I hear things like that and I think, okay, there’s got to be a story to this.

Lee: If you think about, Marylou, why do salespeople use that word “best”? There’s actually two reasons. The first one is we think we’re building relationships; we’re endearing ourselves to others. I just proved to you that we fail for that purpose. The second one is to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Now, I’ll give you a little insight on me, Marylou. I was a history major in college. I went to Binghamton University in Upstate New York.

While I was studying history, I discovered an interesting fact I’ll bet you’ve never come across this. In the history of business, there has never been a salesperson who’s come into a prospect and says, “You know? Our product’s so-so, our service is pretty good, and our technology is ‘eh’. How many would you like to buy?” It’s never happened. We say that we’re using that word “best” to differentiate ourselves. In reality, we sound like every other salesperson because everyone’s coming in preaching that what they have to offer is the best.

Marylou: A hundred percent. What’s even more difficult is we don’t really know we’re saying that. We think we’ve figured it out. We think we found the gap of the reason why people should choose us over somebody else, and it’s really hard to sit down and brainstorm how are we really different, and is there a magic recipe that we could use to build our differentiation or is it completely art?

Lee: Yeah, that’s a great point. You transitioned exactly the right way of going from that word “best”. That’s not a word that salespeople should have in their vocabulary. What we want to be thinking of is “different”. In my mind, that’s our responsibility, is to position “different” in such a way that our prospects say, “Hey, you’re the best,” without us every saying the word. I did discover there’s actually one person on the planet who can say “best” and have it be meaningful. Do you know who that is?

Marylou: No, who?

Lee: Your client. When your client says, “You’re the best,” that’s meaningful. When we say it about ourselves, the same word is meaningless. You’re right. There is an art to this, which is, first, having the mindset of saying, “We’re going to get out of the business of arguing or trying to say that we’re the best and position different.” Imagine starting a sales call in a way like this: “I’m not going to tell you that what I have to offer is the best. What I will do today is share some differences that our clients find meaningful, and you could decide for yourself if those are meaningful to you as well.” Isn’t that refreshing?

Marylou: It is, and it’s built in a little bit of social proof as well that you’re not speaking from what you think is the best but what from your clients and colleagues of theirs, peers that they may admire, think is the best.

Lee: Absolutely right.

Marylou: I love that, but I’m still stuck on how does one go about finding our differentiators. We’re feature and benefit-rich. We have sheets, upon sheets, upon sheets of why we’re better feature and benefit-wise, but that gets cloudy after a while.

Lee: It does. One of the worst pieces of advice that salespeople have been giving in recent years is that we have educated buyers. There’s this fad called the internet, and the people we’re selling to are so well-informed. There’s a question I’ve asked audiences for I can’t tell you how many years and how many places I’ve been asking it, and the question is this: Who knows more about the world of potential solutions in your industry: you or the people you sell to?

Marylou, I’ve never had one single salesperson raise their hand and go, “The people I sell to know much more than I do about this stuff,” never one. Even though we say that all of this information is there, we still really don’t have an educated buyer.

Marylou: Or at least a buyer that may have too much information. We may be overloading them with so many choices that they get completely lost in the weeds.

Lee: That’s right. A follow-up question that I’ll ask the audience is, “What’s the difference between an organic apple and a regular apple?” and I never have more than one or two people that raise their hand that could tell me the difference. Everyone else cites one thing: It’s exponentially more expensive. Here’s a product we buy every week, and we don’t know how to make an informed decision on an apple. They certainly don’t know how to buy your stuff.

In my mind, that gives us both an obligation and an opportunity. I believe that we have an obligation in sales to help our buyers make an informed buying decision which then gives us an opportunity to help shape buyer decision criteria because they don’t know how to buy what we’re selling. If your approach is, “Let’s go into the executive’s office with this presumption that they don’t know how to buy what we’re selling, and we’re going to lecture them on what they don’t know,” you make for a very short meeting.

Where there is an art to this is asking thoughtful questions to help people think differently about the solutions they have or could have. One of the mistakes that’s commonly made in discovering meetings is we ask only pain or challenge questions. “What are three things you’d like to have that you don’t have today?” and that’s one side of the equation. The aspects that they perceive could be better or different than what they have to day.

If you agree with me that we know more about the world of potential solutions in our industry than the people that we’re selling to, then we can’t just rely on the questions that expose the aspects that they perceive; we have to help them think differently through questions. I call those types of questions “positioning questions”, and they map back to your differentiators. No one likes to be lectured even if you have young kids. Young kids or adults, no one likes to be lectured, so we need to get that out of our toolkit and rather ask questions to help them think differently about the solutions they have or could have. Would you like an example?

Marylou: I’d love it. Yes.

Lee: I’m in Minnesota, and Minnesota has one of the oddest aspect to it, which is that every homeowner and every business has to contract for their own trash removal. On Wednesday mornings, there is a parade of garbage trucks coming down my street representing all the different haulers, and each one pulls up to a home seemingly doing the same thing. The truck pulls up, an arm extends out, grabs a can, lifts it up, dumps the contents into the garbage truck, puts the can back down, drives away, and you get an invoice at the end of the month.

A CEO of one of these companies reached out to me and he said, “You know what, Lee? I believe we have something different to offer. I believe that we have meaningful value so that we don’t have to fight over price.” I was intrigued because, gosh, I just witnessed this countless times on Wednesday mornings. How could that be? He was right. One of the aspects that salespeople and executives struggle with is where they’ll be so passionate about their differentiators. They’ll say, “Boy, this is unbelievable. Nobody else can do this the way we can do it,” and they’re ineffective at building that same passion in someone across the desk.

When we talk about sales differentiation, there’s two parts to it. There’s sales differentiation on what you sell and how you sell. When we talk about sales differentiation strategy around what you sell, it’s understanding what your differentiators are, the right timing to position them, and a strategy to position them in a compelling fashion so that that person who goes outside of their desk sees what you see and they’re so excited about it.

That was a struggle that this particular company had. They had a differentiator called the “Can Be Clean Truck”. Twice a year, this truck follows a garbage truck and cleans your garbage cans. Isn’t that cool? They’re the only ones in the state of Minnesota that offer that, and it’s free for their clients. Again, they struggled with, “How do we have that conversation?” For their residential salespeople, the ones who knock on doors or making calls to homeowners, we developed a positioning question. The question was this: Right after they introduced themselves, the question was, “When was the last time you had your garbage cans cleaned?”

Marylou: Never.

Lee: Correct, unless they did it themselves. Folks, if you’ve ever cleaned your garbage cans, you know what a miserable experience that is. Right in that moment, we’ve helped someone think differently about something as simple as trash not because of something we’ve said but rather a question that we’ve asked.

Marylou: We start this whole conversation by looking at where in the spectrum of offer do we differentiate ourselves or where are the gaps. You have a process person so I’m trying to sit here and figure this out from the standpoint of process. What are the steps to figuring out what the differentiators are that you should be using? Second to that is do you have to be really experienced to know how to do this, or can my guys where some of them are just starting in sales become differentiation machines, or do you have to be really in sales for a while?

Lee: No, they have to help them. It’s a team effort. It’s not something that you would want to do on your own.

Marylou: Point number one is more heads are better.

Lee: More heads are better, yeah. Then, when you identify your differentiators, there’s a five-step process you put each one through. I thought you’re a process person. As am I, so don’t be surprised that there’s a process.

Marylou: I feel so much better already.

Lee: Here’s the first question you ask for each differentiator: Why does this matter to a buyer? So often, I find buy that we’ll say that we offer this–for example, we have this patented technology. Now, tell me why does that matter to a buyer? They’ll look at me like I’ve got 14 heads. If you can’t figure out why that differentiator would matter to a buyer, let’s not talk about it because those moments that we have with a buyer, whether it be on the phone or in person, are so precious. Let’s not waste it on something that they’re going to find of interest.

I had a prospect call me yesterday, and they were selling laboratory services to veterinarians. I asked that question, “Share me with some of your differentiators,” and they said, “Well, we don’t have a contract.” “Okay,” I said, “Well, aren’t you calling on businesses that already have an established relationship?” Veterinarians already have a place where they’re sending those specimens for laboratory testing. They said, “Absolutely.”

The fact that you don’t require a contract and all the competitors do really is only going to be a conversation point if you’re talking to someone who is miserable with their current laboratory provider. Other than that, the general public, if you will, of veterinarians doesn’t care that you don’t require a contract to do business with them because they already have a solution, so that’s not going to get the door open for a conversation. That’s Question #1 that we need to answer in the process of, “Why does this matter to a buyer?”

The second question we need to ask is, “To whom does this matter?” When you look at the spectrum of people that are involved in making the decision for what you sell, we need to figure out which differentiators matter to which people. I’ll give you an example. Marylou, let’s say our business has just changed and you and I sell copiers for a living. Today’s a very exciting day for us. Do you know why, Marylou?

Marylou: Why?

Lee: Our R&D team has a major announcement. For the last three years, they’ve worked so hard, and they now have the first copier that has the ability to print 50 shades of gray, first ones ever that can do that. Tomorrow, we have a meeting with a CFO to talk about this new copier. I hope none of our listeners would be talking about the Fifty Shades of Grey with that CFO for so many reasons. Most importantly, CFOs don’t care about color, shades and hues. They do care about the financial impact that that copier is going to have.

That afternoon, you’re meeting with a marketing manager to talk about that same copier, doesn’t necessarily care about financial impact, but does care about print quality, the color, shades and hues. The next day, you have a meeting with the IT manager, doesn’t care about financial impact, doesn’t care about color, shades and hues, but does care about security, integration, reliability, all of those kinds of things, so three completely different conversations even though what we’re selling is the same.

For our sales differentiation strategy to be effective, we need to pick the right differentiators for the right person. I get pretty bold. I like to ask salespeople if they have an elevator pitch and they’ll say, “Absolutely, we do. That’s our best practice,” and I’ll tell them the worst thing they can do is have an elevator pitch. They think I’m nuts. My issue isn’t the concept of an elevator pitch; it’s the word “an” in front of it, thinking of it in a singular sense, having one spiel that it doesn’t matter who you are. You’re going to hear it. Just like with that example of the copiers, we need to figure out the right audience for the information we’re going to share.

The third step is to identify when does this matter, what have we learned before or during the meeting, something that they’ve said or something we’ve observed that screams to you a conversation about, “This differentiator is really going to resonate.” The fourth step is to develop the positioning question which is an open-ended question, which means a non-yes or no, designed to expose interest in a conversation about that differentiator. “When’s the last time you had your garbage cans cleaned?”

The fifth step is to document what information are you going to share once the door has been opened with that positioning question. Why does it matter? To whom does it matter? When does it matter? What is the open-ended question that helps a buyer see that this matters? What information will you share once they want to learn more?

Marylou: Is it very customary, then, to take what we have as solid feature benefit and starting with that, flip that on its side, so to speak, so that we get into this, “Why does it matter first?” or is there another process that you feel has better results, working with a group of people to brainstorm about these differentiators?

Lee: There’s a couple of workshops that I talked about in this the book and the ones that I do for my workshop clients. One is to make a list of your main competitors and ask yourself two questions. I would do this, again, in a group setting. “Why do we win and why do they win?” because, after all, nothing else matters other than the outcome. The second exercise is to make a list of the decision-influencers who’s anyone and everyone who affects the decision to buy what you sell, and, again, ask two questions: What is it that’s keeping them awake at night, the things that are at the forefront of their mind? and the second question is, Based on what is keeping them awake at night, what do you offer that can help them? The answers to why you win and how you can help will give you a laundry list of differentiators to then put through that five-step profiling exercise.

Marylou: Okay. Now, you also mentioned previously that this pain and challenge, these things that we know about and keep us up, are things that we know. What you also asked us to do just a little while ago was think beyond that into the unknown. How can we use the materials that we have to think into the unknown, or do we need to do another exercise of walking through a day in their life? I don’t want people to sit here thinking fat and happy, “Great, we just have to figure out what’s keeping them awake at night,” but there could be things that are unknown to them that should be keeping them awake at night that are not. How do we get at those nuggets?

Lee: The positioning questions that I referenced earlier are the questions designed to expose the areas that they didn’t perceive could be better or different. If we just relied on the pain or challenge questions and we said something like, “What are three things you’d like to have from your garbage provider that you don’t have today?” no one would say, “Boy, I’d love it if someone cleaned my garbage cans,” because they don’t know it exists.

Marylou: We have to come up with those.

Lee: We do. One of the other challenges that salespeople have is they don’t know who their biggest competitor is.

Marylou: I remember reading or seeing you talk about this. Who is our biggest competitor? I think of it as another colleague, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?

Lee: Yeah. I’ll ask this question to salespeople. “Who’s your biggest competitor?” and three will just roll right out of their mouths. I’m sure that’s a pretty good competitor, but there’s one even tougher. Someone will say to me, “You mean the old sales trainer one, the status quo, the choice to do nothing?” which is also a very tough competitor, but there’s one even bigger. They look at me like, “I have no idea where you’re going,” which is fine.

Marylou: Like me right now.

Lee: We get egocentric in sales. We think the world is all about is. It’s not. It’s about people we’re selling to. Our biggest competitor is every salesperson that is calling the same person we are, trying to get a meeting. That’s really the completion. You’re calling these executives who have this broad purview of responsibility. They’re getting calls from anyone and everyone within that purview and beyond. They’re getting emails, phone calls, voicemail messages, everyone trying to get face time, and I don’t mean the Apple technology.

I mean the ability to have a meeting. I’ve shared with you before as a history major another interesting fact: In the history of business, there has never been an executive whose responsibility has been meet with a salesperson every hour on the hour. This never happened. We have to differentiate ourselves right in that first moment or there’s never going to be a meeting. If there’s no meeting, there’s never a proposal. If there’s no proposal, there’s no win and we don’t make any money or hit our quota.

That’s where the side of the equation comes in of sales differentiation around how you sell. Every interaction between seller and buyer provides us with opportunities to be different, to provide meaningful value that our competitors have not. We need to go through the steps or process, if you will, to be different when we’re first making that prospecting call all the way through when we have the meeting down to when they ask for references. We can be different than our competitors and provide meaningful value and even into account management.

I find that a lot of companies will go that end of the spectrum. They use the expression, “Customer service and account management are synonyms,” and I define them. Customer service is not the people but the function of customer service that takes place when every one of your clients asks you for something. The measurement is, “Did you respond timely and accurately?” and that’s the expectation, is that you will do those two things for customer service.

Account management is the proactive set of activities and behaviors that you’re going to provide to your clients not what they’re asking for but additional value, things beyond the features, and functions, and benefits of what you’re selling, but the overall experience in them buying from your company. I don’t think I’ve come across a single company that has defined their account management experience. What I find is they’ll say, “We have our A, B, and C lists,” so they’ve ranked them only by revenue, which is short-sighted as well because you might be doing a nickel of business with someone that has a potential to be doing millions with you, and you treat them like a C because they’re doing so little with you.

There needs to be broader thought in how you rank your clients. There could also be a wonderful name and strategic account that is a smaller name, but, strategically, it’s great having them in your portfolio. Maybe you don’t want to treat them like a C. Maybe you want to treat them like an A. I don’t find that there’s a prescription around that. I know you’re a process person so you say, “We’ve got these A, B, and C lists. Now what? What is the account management experience going to be?” When that’s not defined, what happens is you have C-list clients treated like an A, A-list clients treated like a C, and no two salespeople providing account management the same way.

Marylou: The fact that you mentioned my favorite word “proactive” is definitely something that I agree with you, that there is a blending or a feathering of those two roles that doesn’t make sense. One’s more reaction-based and one is very proactive. It’s the difference between business development that, when we separate the roles out, that prospecting piece is usually not responding to inquiries but actually outbound.

There are two portions to it but, definitely, the proactive side is what I love the most, and that allows us to really target and create plans and profiles for people and accounts that we want to go after. In your book, though, I remember reading something about an intriguing way that you’ve viewed prospecting. Would you care to share that with the audience?

Lee: Sure. Imagine it’s two in the morning and there’s a pounding on your front door. It’s the police. They want to talk with you about a crime that’s recently been committed. Now, they don’t randomly pick your home and you for a conversation; they follow a trail of evidence and put together a crime theory, and that crime theory has led them to you for a conversation right now. Do you see where we’re going, Marylou?

A sales crime theory is founded in the answer to this question: “Why should they want to have a conversation with you right now?” not, “Why should we talk with them?” Why should they want to talk with us right now? We need to first identify what types of evidence would lead them to want to have a conversation with us right now. For example, let’s say you sell technology for conference rooms. The types of evidence that might make sense to look for would be ones like a business is opening a new location or a building is being renovated, et cetera. Then, you look for companies that are having those types of events because you know that conference room technology is going to be part of that conversation. Therefore, they should want to have a conversation with you right now.

You want to do what I call pre-call research. I’ve got to do some research. This is a way to make that work and put some framework around it, process, so that we’re not just saying, let’s go do some homework and try to find something. We’re seeking the answer to this question: Why should they want to have a conversation with us right now? Here are the events that would say that is the case, and let’s find those buyers who are in those cases.

Marylou: It’s the same thing you said before. This is going to be different for the different levels of decision-maker, direct influencer or indirect influencer, so not unlike that elevator pitch. You’d probably need multiple crime theories.

Lee: A hundred percent true.

Marylou: Yeah, I love that because when we’re calling a top of funnel and we’re trying to get that first appointment, we can be talking to a myriad of people. One of the biggest mistakes we make with our automation is to generalize everything. I’m loving the fact that you’re saying it’s segmenting and continually segmenting so that that conversation resonates and it has a sense of urgency tied to it that they just can’t say no. Their body is not allowing them to not want to know more, and that’s what I love about the way you’ve described this. I think this chapter in the book for prospecting is one that I think would finally get that light to go on for some of these folks that are just stumbling, bungling that first conversation to get in the door.

Lee: I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well. It’s so easy to tell salespeople, “You’ve got to be creative. You’ve got to find a way to get it in the door. Do some pre-call research.” It’s easy to say that. I believe we have an obligation when we’re in the sales management role to provide a framework, and guidance, and help our salespeople to be successful.

Marylou: Yes. When Jed did the forward to your book, he described differentiation as an art. I just had such a hard time with that because, yes, there is art in a lot of this, but there’s also science. There’s also foundational elements. There’s building blocks that you can pull in because, immediately, when I hear the word “art”, I think it’s a one-off. It can’t be repeatable. I know your book is all about consistency, promoting the return on effort; that we’re trying to do a good baseline. Yes, we’re going to artistically sometimes segue or pivot, but there is a foundation there that we’re building by putting these frameworks together.

Lee: Absolutely. I’m a big believer in developing sales playbooks. Back to what I said a moment ago, I believe that employers have an obligation to provide that success framework to their salespeople. The name of my firm, Sales Architects, I didn’t even come up with the name. One of my salespeople many years ago came up with that name. She said, “What I love about what you do is you give me the framework to be successful like an architect”–she should have said “engineer” but that’s fine–”but you don’t tell me what color the drapes should be.” In other words, don’t just say, “Memorize all these scripts and you’ll be successful.” Put the framework in place and provide your salespeople with the tools so that they can use their style and personality in that framework to be successful.

Marylou: This has been a fabulous entrée into this world of differentiation. You’ve developed 19 sales differentiation concepts for this book. Of those, knowing the audience today, which one of those concepts could you teach right now to the audience that they could put into effect?

Lee: How you sell not just what you sell differentiates you. We alluded to this a little earlier. When salespeople think of differentiators, they think of features and functions of what they sell. Back to what we were saying a few moments ago, if we look at every interaction and say, “What can I do different than what my competitors are doing that a buyer would find meaningful?” and employ that strategy, and when you look at why people win deals, lose deals, it’s not just features and functions. I asked my wife this question the other day and I said, “Would you rather go to a restaurant that has pretty good food and outstanding service or one that has great food and horrible service?” What do you think she said?

Marylou: The first one.

Lee: The first one. If you think about what you’re selling, in theory, you’re feature and function in this example, but the way they package it, the way that they delivered service delight people in such a way that people want to return there. It’s beyond just what we’re selling.

Marylou: It’s totally beyond that. It’s all about you. It’s about how you represent yourself and your products and service and how much you love your prospects and clients.

Lee: Absolutely.

Marylou: Folks, the book, Sales Differentiation, 19 Powerful Strategies to Win More Deals at the Prices You Want, Lee Salz. He’s the CEO of Sales Architects. For those of you driving around, make sure you check in and find all the spots to reach out to Lee. Are there any other places or things that you want to share with the audience now before we part ways?

Lee: Yeah, there is one other piece. The book is available in hardcover, Kindle, in audiobook, and it’s available at freaking motor stores and your favorite online site like Amazon. Regardless of where you’d get it, when you do, go to salesdifferentiation.com and register for my Sales Differentiation Minute video series. I initially had planned to do 20 videos but, gosh, it’s going to be more like 50. We’re just having so much fun producing these. Those are normally only available to my workshop clients, but, for those purchasing the book, you register for that, you’ll get a video a week for at least 20 weeks, though it’s probably going to be like 50, with information that’s going to help you put what you’ve read into practice.

Marylou: The other thing is this is a team-building exercise, so what better way than to take Lee’s episodes? It’ll have a teaching point in it. Get your folks together, brainstorm, work through that episode, do the homework, and then continue to do this. By the time you get to Episode 50, you guys will be rocking and rolling, ready to go, and have a consistent and predictable sales pipeline. Lee, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lee: Thanks for having me, Marylou. It was great fun.

Do you know what the four levels of value are, or how you can win clients over from your competitors by creating more value for your clients? Today’s guest didn’t just write the book on that subject, he actually wrote three books on the subject.

Anthony Iannarino is the author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, The Lost Art of Closing, and his latest book, Eat Their Lunch. These books are a trilogy of useful information for salespeople. Listen to the episode to hear how Anthony suggests using these books, why he believes it’s important to separate service and product, and how to apply his four levels of value to different stakeholders.

Episode Highlights:

• Anthony’s books
• Separating service and product
• Winning clients by creating greater value than competitors
• The four levels of value
• How the four levels of value apply to the different stakeholders
• Winning with the intangibles

Resources:

Anthony Iannarino

The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need

The Lost Art of Closing

Eat Their Lunch

Transcript: 

Marylou: What I’d like to do today is talk about the book and also shed some light to the listeners. You mentioned upfront that the book is the trilogy, the three books. I would like you to touch on that, if I’m just listening to you for the first time and I have this book, do I want to read them in order, does it matter? I’d like you to talk about that. And then talk about the value creation pyramid or whatever you’re calling that because that’s really interesting to me.

I would’ve never thought to put service as its own level. That was an aha for me because it’s usually product and service we’d lump together. I really saw when I read that piece of it how we can differentiate ourselves on service, even. For example, one of my clients has a 97% renewal rate on their software.

Anthony: That’s amazing.

Marylou: Yeah. They do an amazing piece of software so it makes sense. They’re literally saving lives with their software. It’s amazing to see it in action but also there’s a loyalty there that I know is an outlier for them. It’s something that we can talk about. I circled that, like wait a minute, we should…

Anthony: I think that what happens to sales organizations is they don’t realize that the fact that their support, their service and the experience is such a differentiator that it creates a level of value that, for the client, ends up being something that’s important to retention. A lot of people, when they see this framework, are like, “Okay, so everything is Level four.” Level four transcends and includes all the other levels, so you’re like, “Well, I’m super-strategic but my product sucks, our service is terrible, and it doesn’t really get you the job done in the first place.”

It’s really good that you’re strategic, but I need all of the levels. I think people misunderstand. The way that we start a conversation, the way that we create the maximum value is to get to strategic first so we just change the order in which you come at this problem, but you still need Level one, and Level two, and Level three. You need all of the levels. It’s that combination together when you recognize what part of it’s making up the ability for you to generate that strategic outcome that that’s where you end up really over-indexing on results because you now have something worth a serious conversation when it comes to leaving somebody you’ve been working with for a decade or more, which is a hard problem.

Marylou: It is. I think, more and more, this really spoke to me on so many different levels, the opener of how we are forgetting how to sell. We’re not even at the point where we are comfortable having these types of conversations. We hide behind email. We hide behind social to get these conversations started and to create an opening that way. I love that realization in the book where you talked about that and it’s like, yeah, this is what we’re dealing with as coaches, consultants, working with companies, is that we’ve forgotten how to have a meaningful sales conversation.

Anthony: I think that’s right. This is in one book back, The Lost Art of Closing. I didn’t write this but the publisher did. They wrote Always be closing, Glengarry Glen Ross, 1988 or whatever, and then it was Never Be Closing, a sales book, whatever year that was, 2015 or something like that. I think what happens to humans, generally, is that you start off with this idea of, wait, always be closing is bad, so what’s the opposite of that? Never be closing. If “always be closing” is bad, then “never be closing” has to be the right answer.

No, that’s not the right answer, and sort of this idea of if closing is bad, then asking for commitments is bad. Let the buyer tell you what to do. We get confused by this. If interrupting people is bad, then what must be the right thing to do is to just wait for people to reach out to you, so you go from being a hunter, which people don’t like that word because of the aggressiveness and the connotation, but it’s the word that we’ve traditionally used as hunters and farmers.

Instead, they’re like, “Well, no, I’m a fisherman now,” or, “I’m a trapper. I just lay lines out and then I go check to see if anybody touched anything.” When you go from, “This is outbound. It is proactive,” to, “This is responsive, and reactive, and waiting,” I think a lot of what I’ve written over the course of three books is trying to find this point to explain to people it’s not always be closing if closing means that you’ve skipped the process and don’t help somebody make a good decision because you’re in too big of a hurry, and it’s definitely not never be closing because there’s all these commitments that people have to make, and we’ve lost that part.

We don’t even talk about competition anymore. It’s not something that we talk about, but it’s part of the game that we play. I wrote a post on Forbes about a Red Ocean strategy, and I started the book talking about the Blue Ocean strategy that the Harvard professors wrote about. Be so different and so unique that you have no competition. How do you go to the 99.6% of the population that doesn’t have that advantage? What are they supposed to do? They have to call on their competitor’s customers, and their competitors are calling on theirs, and we need to address it.

Because you read the book, you know there’s nothing about attacking your competitor and focusing on your competitor. That’s not how you win. I keep teasing people with this idea: Go to your competitor and say, “We both compete in the same industry. We’re both professional. I’d like to ask you to stop using your irrational pricing scheme and stop saying bad things about me behind my back.” Go try that and see if they’re going to say, “You know what? I never really thought of it that way. Now that you said that, I’m going to price exactly the same as you so we can have a fair contest.”

That’s not real. We live in a Red Ocean, and you have to have some amount of competitiveness. I said this in the book: You’re not a mafia don or a warlord. You’re not out to destroy people but you are competing in this great upward spiral of advance in our economy, and then the value that people create for their customer comes from that competition that causes. I beat Marylou, and then she looks at what I do, and she goes, “Wait a second, I need to up the game here to do even better than he’s doing,” and so the customer, and the economy, and everybody benefits from that even if you don’t benefit from it in the short term.

Marylou: As I was looking at the book–and I love the fact that we can get online books now because I can see what other people highlight versus what interests me–one of the things that was highlighted early on in the book is when you talked about this whole concept of very little of what leads to successfully taking your competitor’s clients has anything to do with the competitors themselves as we’ve just talked about. Instead, you said you will win those clients by creating greater value than they do.

Anthony: That’s a mindset shift for a lot of salespeople. They think, “It’s my product,” or,  “It’s my company,” or, “It’s something external to me,” but the real test is who wins is the salesperson that comes in and creates compelling differentiated value where somebody goes, “Wait, that’s the smartest person. This is the best idea we’ve heard. This is the right answer for us. This person gets me,” and there’s a lot of different ways to create value for people.

Understanding how to help a buyer make a good decision was in The Lost Art of Closing, which is why these books came out in that order. The first book was The Only Sales Guide and an unfortunate title when you have two more books following very fast on the tail of that one, but that book was first Be Somebody Worth Buying From. It’s a competency model where those mindset and skillset. that comes first because if you’re somebody that’s worth doing business with in the first place, that solves a big part of your challenge and sales, so get that part right.

Then, learn how to control the process and learn how to serve the buyer by making sure they do the things they need to do to really get what they want. That’s the second book. The reason that I did them in this order is because when you get to this third book, it’s a little bit of a step up even though I think each book was a step up from the one in front of it, but it’s a step up in your responsibility to say, “I’m not competing against my competitor who’s $8 billion to my $100 million-company. I’m competing against the salesperson that’s sitting there, competing for this business or who owns the business now.” When you get that understanding, you understand that you’re the value proposition so you have to go in and do the work to create a preference to work with you instead of everyone else, and that can be a real mindset shift for people.

Marylou: That is an incredible mind shift. I know people are listening, thinking, “You know, I’ve heard this term ‘create greater better value’, ‘create more value’, ‘create better value’,” a lot of times, we don’t even know where to begin. Is there a recipe for that? What you’re saying is, yes, there’s a tactical way to do it but you have to change your mindset in that it’s not the company creating the value; it’s you as the person creating the value. It’s your personal value proposition, what you’re bringing to the table. That’s a whole different way to look at this and try to get your arms around, “Where do I begin?”

Anthony: The way that I think about the beginning, we’ve talked about the four levels of value. Level one is the value of your product or service. Level two is the value of experience, which is your services, your support, how easy you are to do business with, what that interaction feels like for the people that buy what it is you sell. Level three is the tangible result you produce. If you say, “Well, we’re a printing company so we print some things and we ship them from here to here,” good. Do they make it from here to there? “Yeah, they do.” Good, so that’s the outcome that people need. You can print it. You can get it to them.

If the reason that you’ve sent something by mail in the first place was because you were helping them acquire new clients, then the strategic outcome is, is what you send going to cause somebody to sign up with you? That’s the real thing, so you look at that and you say, what’s the strategic outcome? They want greater market share, or they’re trying to penetrate a new territory, or they’re trying to retain their existing customers to get them to buy more. That’s the strategic outcome that they’re really working on.

What we’ve done historically is we’ve come in from the left. When I say that, what I mean is, if you’re looking at a PowerPoint deck, Level one would be all the way over on your left, and we’re like, “Let me tell you about my company. Let me tell you about the services we offer. Let me tell you a little bit about me. Let me tell you about the kind of clients we’re working with. Then, I’ll ask you some questions so I can learn a little bit more about you.”

When people hear that now, they’re like, “Listen, I’m busy washing my hair that day. I’m sorry, I don’t have time.” They’re going to find any excuse they can to get out of that because when you listen to what the value prop is, you’re going to talk about your company. That should be interesting for all of four seconds because we already know who you are and what you do. Then, you’re going to talk about your solutions, and I’m already buying that solution from someone else and you’re not going to be that incredibly different.

Then, you’re going to talk about you, which should be just the most delightful conversation I’d ever imagine happening. Then, you’re going to ask me what’s keeping me up at night. I know how this story goes, and it ends badly for both of us so I say no to that. When you start at Level four and you say, “Marylou, I’d like to share with you the four biggest trends impacting your business over the next 18 to 24 months some of the questions we’re helping our clients to answer right now and some of the decisions that we’re helping them make, even though there’s different choices for different companies, and even if there’s not a next step, we’ll leave a deck with you with some questions that you can challenge your management team with, and I promise you will make some different decisions after this meeting. What do you like Thursday for a 20-minute executive briefing?” I just tried to pile all the value I could into that because I want somebody to pay attention to why change.

The more strategic you can make that, the more that you create a case for change. When you start with your product and your company, what you’re trying to do is say, “I’m not really a value creator. I’m just here as a representative of this company that can create a whole bunch of value so let me tell you about them.” The pushback that I’ve gotten on this book and this idea from many salespeople is, “Yeah, but first I have to prove that I have the ability and the right to have this conversation with them.”

How do you prove you have the right to that conversation? You prove it by having that conversation, so you just start by being strategic from the beginning. You don’t have to lean on your company to say, “Well, my company’s been in business for 85 years, and we have 72 locations, and you’ve seen these big logos that we have.” Great. Hurray for you and your company.

It’s not why change; it’s a proof provider. If you lean on that for credibility, what you’re basically giving up is, “I don’t really have anything to say myself about any of this so I’m going to talk about things external to me.” If you have an opinion and you start with Level four to say these are the biggest challenges, these are some of the questions we’re helping our clients answer, now you’re starting at a point where there’s a conversation to be had. That’s the shift.

Marylou: It’s a big shift. I think that’s in the first part of the book where you talk about a lot of that, and you provide worksheets. For those people thinking, “Wow, this is kind of woo-woo. I don’t even know how I’m going to do this,” he has worksheets throughout the entire book that you can download, and work on, and apply. It’s not sit back and read Anthony’s book. It’s read and do. Read and do.

Anthony: In all three of the books, every chapter ends with a “do this now”. Why read a book if you’re not going to do anything with it? That’s the same as not reading the book.

Marylou: One hundred percent.

Anthony: Let me just make a disclaimer, though: If you want to buy the book and you don’t read it, we still are happy with that.

Marylou: Indeed. To again summarize the levels, there are four levels. As I was telling Anthony at the beginning of the call, I always lumped product and service together. I didn’t think of it as experience and support as its own level. That was a real big aha moment for me because we can find so much value. I was sharing that one of my clients has a 90%-plus renewal rate on their software. That’s something to celebrate and talk about, the why behind that.

That was really a great thing for me to see that, that it’s not just product service; it’s product, service, and it’s experience and support, and then you go to the business cases and outcomes, which I think most of us get stuck there, too. Correct me if I’m wrong. We sort of end there. Again, this is new strategic thinking for us. Don’t end there. Start even higher with the strategic side of things.

Anthony: When you think about what you just said, Marylou, you talked about a client who has a 90%-something retention rate so, automatically, I know something else is true. You have clients that have a number far lower than that. One is doing something about that experience that is easier for them to retain people than the other or the many others. That is part of their recipe for creating Level four, and they figured something out to say, “Look, when we paid better attention to these conversations, we tend to keep them longer,” so maybe the strategic conversation gets you in, but you need all four of the levels. If they’re really good at over-indexing where other people fail, then even that Level two can be compelling differentiated value that helps cause somebody to leave their existing supplier and buy from you.

Marylou: The point is you’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to do the planning. You’ve got to figure out where your things, what makes you, you, fall in these different levels. This is not a wing-it exercise. One of my biggest pet peeves that I see is that we’re so reliant now on just throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks that we’ve lost the ability to really plan and strategize before we actually execute. It’s something we don’t assess. We go straight to execution because we have tools now that, unfortunately, allow us to do that.

Anthony: One of the things that is a mistake for sales people just generally, the expert on experts is K. Anders Ericsson. If you’re listening to this, then you know his work has the 10,000-hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made popular in a book called Outliers, but that’s not what he said. He didn’t say that 10,000 hours of doing anything actually makes you an expert. What he said was 10,000 hours of deliberate practice makes you an expert, and that’s not just doing something for 10,000 hours.

When he describes this, if you read his work, the violinist that he studied, after they did an hour of deliberate practice working on a very difficult passage that they had to do in some piece of music, would take a nap. It was that draining for them to give themselves over to something so intensely that, afterwards, they had to have a period of rest. That’s not the way most of us plan a sales call. Most of us plan a sales call with something that sounds like this: Marylou, I’ve made a thousand sales calls so I’m going to go in, and I’m going to find some pain points for them, and then I’m going to get them to agree to have another conversation.

Creative thinking there. You did nothing, so there’s no deliberate practice. The way K. Anders Ericsson expressed this one in Fast Company Magazine I always kept a copy of, he said, “I’ve been walking for 48 years but I don’t feel like I’m getting any better at it.” I think it’s very possible for people to have 10 years of experience in sales but to really only have one year 10 times, and that’s possible for all of us.

The more intentional and the more deliberately you think about, “What am I trying to do? How am I best going to achieve that? How do I serve this client where they are now?” the better the results are, and that’s a different exercise than many of us do when it pertains to sales. If you’re listening to this, I’m not throwing the first stone. I’ve made thousands of sales calls, I’m also really good at improv, and I’m happy when I haven’t prepared because I get to act and respond to things with an improvisation, but that is not a reason to believe that that’s the primary way you should do something.

I’ll share just one quick story about that. I was in Toastmasters and I gave a really good speech, made everyone laugh. Everyone was happy. When you’re in Toastmasters, you have somebody who reviews your speech, and mine happened to be PhD Brenda Jones who, after I got done speaking, said, “Anthony, that was a really, really good speech, and I can’t wait to hear it the second time after you’ve rehearsed it.” Her point was well-taken. The fact that you can do that doesn’t mean that you delivered the best thing that you could do, but you do have to spend the time to figure out what you do to differentiate and how you compel change, especially if you’re in a competitive displacement business where you have to go and work on taking clients from your competitors.

Marylou: Now, let’s shift to Part 2 of the book where you talk about building consensus, wiring the building. I love the title of that section. If we look at our four levels now, our product service, our experience support, business results and outcomes, and strategic partnerships, how does that apply now to the different stakeholders? Do we still need all four with all of our stakeholders or can we somehow take a portion of things? What is your recommendation there?

Anthony: You have to serve the person that you’re sitting across from. If you go to an end-user and you say, “Listen, I’d like to really talk about the future of your company over the next 18 to 24 months and I’d like to talk to you about some of the challenges that we’re helping other companies with as it pertains to their strategy in this area,” you’re talking to somebody who’s like, “That’s great, except I don’t have anything to do with that, and I couldn’t help you with that even if I wanted to.” What do they care about? They care about, primarily, Level one and Level two.

Marylou: A day in the life.

Anthony: “Yeah, I need it to work for me. Talk to my boss about our long-term strategy. I’m not even sure he knows. That’ll be a good conversation for you to have with him, but I need to figure out how to get this thing done now.” When you go to executive leadership and I’ll talk to your audience specifically and you go, “Listen, Marylou, what I want to do is I want to set up an hour and 20 minutes to go through a demo so I can show you the software,” if it’s me as a person you’re calling, I’m like, if I have to know how the software works, we’re already done talking because I’m never going to open the software. I’m never going to open it myself so you need to talk to somebody who cares about that.

Here’s what I need to have happen: I need these people to produce better results than they’re producing right now. If you can help me help them produce better results, we’ll have a great conversation, but if I have to know how the software works, I’m the wrong person to talk to. We have to match the conversation we’re having to the group of people that we’re talking with because what creates a preference for them when you talk to Level one people who need Level one and two value and you’re talking to them about strategy, you’ve lost them.

When you talk to a Level four about Level one, you’ve lost them. They might have a technical person who cares or something like that but, for the most part, you’ve got to figure out how to create the right outcome for each group who cares about what. In the book, there’s that little framework. If they’re end-users, they care about 1 and 2, and so they’re what we call ancillary stakeholders. They’re accounting, or finance, or people who care but they don’t use what you sell but still need your experience to be good. They tend to care about 2. Managers tend to care about Level three. “Can I get the outcomes? Can you make it work?” and then leadership tends to care mostly about Level four, and they’ll leave it to other people to make the decisions about if it’s right for Levels one, two, and three.

Marylou: For those of you who understand that bullseye concept that we talk about in other episodes where we have the decision-makers in the center and then, as we go out, the influence becomes less and less direct, this is a nice alignment for what Anthony’s talking about, is how to prepare and plan the way you’re going to be building these relationships with these types of users based on his levels.

Anthony: Why didn’t you just send me your list last time we talked so I didn’t have to go through all this trouble to do this work? I could have just taken yours and dropped it in. That would have been really nice.

Marylou: Because, of course, you know, Anthony, you’re getting to close. You’re the entire pipeline. I am opening the door. That’s all I do, so it’s a little bit different for us because we tend to love them and leave them as we pass them off to the people that are going to close the business, not always, but you’re getting a lot more into the nuts and bolts, the long-term relationships. We’re adding value, but it could be a very quick dating environment, and then we go onto the next one.

Anthony: That doesn’t sound very good in the world we live in now when you say it that way.

Marylou: Indeed. That’s the second section of the book, is really understanding the map, how to plan based on the stakeholders, what is important to them, which means we’re not going to be doing demos for everyone just because we want to do a demo. It doesn’t work that way. We’re looking at the person and what they care about. As we go into Part three, Part three is an interesting part, too. There are just so many nuggets in this book. I’ve got everything underlined in different colors because we could do that now with the online books and stuff. Let’s talk about that: winning with the intangibles.

Anthony: As we’re recording this, my son’s at Denison University, and it’s in Granville, Ohio, a sleepy little town 45 minutes out of Columbus. Their president and I met at one of my kid’s theater shows and we were talking and asked me to have coffee with them. He asked me, “How do we, in a liberal arts organization like this, do a better job preparing kids?” They’re so focused on skills, but that’s not what a liberal arts degree does.

I explained to him the purpose of the first book, and I found a way to have weaved this through all three books. It’s the intangibles that actually allow you to win. When you start thinking about what does a trusted advisor do, they have trust and they offer advice. I say that and people laugh because it’s so simple, but you can’t be a trusted advisor if you don’t have the Level four insight so that you can offer people the best advice, and that’s really what you’re trying to do.

When we say things like, “I want to be consultative,” what most of us mean when we say that is, “I don’t want to be high pressure, I don’t want to be a hard sell, and I want to ask really good questions.” That’s not what the word “consultative” means. Consultative means you tell them how to run their business. That’s what you do. When you are consulting with someone, you’re telling them, “These are the best decisions for you to make to get a better result in your business.”

Consultative comes with that advice. The challenge for most of us is we don’t work on the intangibles. In one of the chapters at the end of the book, it’s very helpful to have a sense of humor and levity. It’s very, very helpful to be thoughtful, and follow up, and care about people. Those kinds of things over-index on preference even though we don’t talk about them. We’re so transactional right now. I think one thing that technology has done that’s probably hurt sales organizations more than anything else is that you have an example of amazon.com where Bezos has 300 salespeople for AWS and that’s all they have. They don’t have any salespeople. He thinks they shouldn’t have any salespeople at all. That’s his vision.

You have a whole bunch of people trying to optimize everything to the point that they can eliminate all of the friction that comes with human interactions, and someone should just be able to order what they want and buy, but that’s not the world that we live in; that’s one of the view of the world that we live in that we’ve gone super transactional. For things that you don’t care about, you’re going to be more and more transactional over time.

I’m sitting in a loft to stock this place up with the stuff I need to be able to do work. I reach out to Amazon. I had them bring water, and coffee, and all kinds of other stuff. That’s easy. When you’re making a decision where the future of your company depends on that decision, you want somebody that you have a deep relationship, that knows your business, that has situational knowledge. In one chapter, we talked about the 52% SME.

You maybe don’t have to be the SME but you’ve got to be half or better of a SME because you have to be able to talk about these things in a way that allows you to have somebody make the decision. I prefer to work with you instead of someone else, and that’s really where the bar is set right now, whether we like it or not. I will tell you the second choice. Super transactional is certainly a choice but, for most of us, the right choice is super relational. How do I become high-trust, high-caring, high-value where people prefer to work with me? That’s the part where you have to do some work on you.

Marylou: Exactly. For those of you who are wondering what the heck is SME, it’s “subject matter expert.” When I first saw that term, too, a long time ago, I went, “What the heck are they talking about?”

Anthony: “What’s a SME?”

Marylou: “What’s a SME? What does that mean?” We’re pretty much out of time, Anthony, but I want to make sure that the listeners know the books. The first one is The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, except for the next two, which are The Lost Art of Closing, a great book, and that came out just last year, 2017, and then this book, Eat Their Lunch. They are great books. It’s a trilogy. If you are inclined and you’re really wanting to make a difference in the way that you work and the results you’re going to get, I recommend all three. I think it’s best you do them in order, but Anthony can tell you what he suggests regarding that.

Anthony: Doing them in order is great, but what I sent to somebody who asked me that yesterday on LinkedIn is I said, read the first two chapters of Eat Their Lunch, and then read The Lost Art of Closing, and then read the first book. I wanted to just give them a jumpstart on Level four because once you get that into your mind, it affects the way that you think about everything. You realize, “Wait, I need to start way, way higher than I am,” and that tends to help them a lot.

Marylou: That, and you also need to be nimble. It’s not a Level four conversations. That’s a big part of this, especially since we are talking, and more people are getting involved in decisions, and we need to switch gears when we sense that we’re talking to a Level two or Level three. We don’t have the same story that we tell to everyone in the prospect’s company. It just doesn’t work.

Anthony: That is right. Serve the person in front of you.

Marylou: Yes, yes. Anthony, always a pleasure. I really thank you so much for starting my new year off, this is my first interview of the year.

Anthony: Me too, thank you.

Marylou: How is the best way for people who want to follow you, learn more from you, apply with your teaching? What’s the best way we can reach out to you?

Anthony: thesalesblog.com, I publish there everyday. There’s the newsletter that’s probably the very best way that people can connect.

Marylou: Okay, I’ll make sure I put that in the show notes. Anthony, thank you so much for your time today.

Anthony: Thank you, Marylou.