Natasha Hemmingway is a sales coach with an interesting background and a lot of experience with the middle and bottom of the funnel. In today’s episode, she will share some of her background and expertise in creating successful sales where everybody wins. Listen in to hear Natasha discuss how she developed her sales processes, the importance of negotiating, and common mistakes in the pipeline.
Episode Highlights:
- What got Natasha interested in sales
- How Natasha developed her sales process and whether her biology background factored in
- How Natasha envisions sales process and strategy
- How sales reps get it wrong
- Training salespeople to correct the wrong moves
- Whether Natasha starts by focusing on the clients or the physical setup of their pipelines and processes
- The importance of negotiating by looking for a win-win
- Whether the size of the account matters
- How COVID has affected the pipeline
- Common mistakes in the middle of the pipeline
- Chat bots vs. live customer service
- Top of funnel gaps and issues
- The need for slow sales
- Selling with heart
Resources:
Transcript
Marylou: Hey, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Natasha Hemmingway. She’s going to talk to us today about her career in sales and give us some pointers, not necessarily a top of the funnel but the middle and the bottom of the funnel. I know you guys are going to love this because I have bombarded you for years with top of funnel stuff, and it is great having some experts attend and be part of the show who have the rest of that pipeline for you.
Welcome, Natasha, to the podcast.
Natasha: Thank you so much, Marylou. I’m so excited to be here and honored to serve and pour into your listenership, so I’m excited. Honored to be here.
Marylou: Great. I’m so glad you’re here, too. We don’t get a lot of women on my podcast, so yay. Let’s celebrate that.
Natasha: I’m super excited because you’re exactly right, we don’t see a lot of us in the sales industry.
Marylou: I know. It’s crazy. I’d like to start off by asking you, as I ask a lot of folks, what got you interested or what pulled you into sales as a career for you?
Natasha: I graduated from college with a biology degree and I thought I didn’t want to go to med school. My mom’s a nurse practitioner. I have an aunt that’s an OBGYN. I have an uncle that’s an orthodontist. It’s just in my family. I grew up around that and I thought, I want to be an OBGYN.
As I got to college, I was like, no, I actually do not want to go to school for that much longer to have all of those loans. I was like, no, I don’t think that’s what I want. When I graduated with a degree in biology, I knew two things existed about me and that’s just me to my core, a) I love people, and b) I wanted to be able to help people. How can I help people? How can I be around people in conversation?
I’m just a people person and so I knew that I could not go work in anybody’s lab, okay? I could not be a biologist in a chemistry lab or a biology lab with no windows, lab coat—that’s not for me. I started discovering and finding out.
In college, what I also started doing is I went into physical therapy. I started getting my hours to apply for physical therapy school. At that point, they come out with a doctorate of physical therapy and I’m like, ah, this might merge the two things—helping people in a science biology-based kind of related way. Then three, being able to still have a doctorate of some sort.
At the time, that was the career to go into and I knew I did not want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I applied to two physical therapy schools, then I also started looking into how to break into the medical world industry of sales, both pharmaceutical sales at that point was the hot thing. It was the thing to go to, it’s super popular, a great opportunity, but it was really hard to go into because, to be honest, Marylou, at that point, they were only mostly hiring male pharmacists with the company that I was looking into. Because I wanted to be with a reputable company that has been around for years, that has a proven track record that I can really learn from.
As I went into that, I was like, I am an African American female. This will be interesting. Let’s definitely not put all our eggs in one basket because it was a white male-dominated pharmacy industry. I was like, okay, again, I need to have a backup plan, so I applied for both. At the time, I just prayed about it. I was like, you know what, whatever comes first, I’m going to trust it, that’s the path that I should take. I ended up, surprisingly, getting into pharmaceutical sales, I moved to a new city right after college, and I started and never looked back.
I have literally spent 16 years in corporate sales on the rep side, the management side, and eight years in both companies so very much a loyalist. I spent eight years in pharmaceutical sales and then I went to a higher level of medical device sales, a lot faster paced, a lot more money, and a lot more cutthroat.
That’s kind of how I ended up being there because it married the two things. One, being able to be around people and using my science background, my biology degree, and two, being able to support and help people in regards to what I was selling because I’m a firm believer in you need to believe in what you sell in order to be successful, in my opinion.
Marylou: Given the fact that you’re coming from a bio background, do you feel that that prepared you from a sales process point of view and then you needed to learn the what to say part? Or do you abandon the process side and just focus 100% of your time on learning the sales conversation? What would you say your path was? When you made that decision to go into sales, what was the very next thing that you’re like, oh, goodness?
Natasha: I think you have to actually know both. When they start you in sales school, you’re learning just the message, the niche, the product, and all those things. I think in order to be an excellent sales rep, you have to know the process and you have to know the strategy. It’s one thing to follow the company’s process and strategy, but then how do you actually make it unique to you? Because you’re out there with 400, sometimes 500 other reps. You’re ranked, you have quotas, and all these things.
I think as you grow, you really start to understand, wow, if I’m going to really master this, get promoted, and be a lifelong salesperson, I need to know process and strategy just as well as obviously the messaging, the what to say, the how to say. I think as you advance and you grow, you start to understand deeper really what’s going to make you an excellent sales rep that allows you to be promoted to lead teams and things like that.
I would say starting out, messaging niche, knowing what to say, then really starting to understand that no, to be excellent, it’s the process and strategy and how do I make it unique to me.
Marylou: Interesting, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the process and strategy. My first love is understanding two things. I’m a programmer so my whole being wants to program something. If I do something more than once, chances are it should be programmed. That’s my mentality.
As I started looking at the sales process and the way my rhythms were, I started noticing things that I did repetitively by hand and look towards ways that I can leverage whether it’s technology, or pre-prepare things ahead of time, wherever it was, to help me so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. How did you envision process and strategy? Where was your first move there?
Natasha: I think that is exactly it. When you are a sales rep and you’re in a corporation, the company gives you the handbook, the bible, the training, but it’s for you to actually understand your clients, your territory, opportunities, gaps, churn, you need to know all of these things. You’re exactly right. That’s what happens.
I’m a very type-A perfectionist type of personality. My thing was how do I maximize opportunity and reduce time? My brain is kind of like yours, Marylou. If I see something that I’m doing over and over and over or I’ve noticed something that’s working for three of my key accounts, what and how do I actually make that a process to actually implement it or duplicate it in these other accounts to help them grow to be a key account?
I think you understand very quickly that you’re doing a lot of the same behaviors and as you start to find rhythms, trends, and strategies that are working, it’s like, why wouldn’t you start to go, see, and test that to say okay, I did this here. What does this account that’s over here in this other city have the same potential? Does it make sense to be there and put this type of process, strategy, attention, and time all of that there? If so, do it, test it, and figure out what works or doesn’t work.
Marylou: You said a key phrase that I think in my travels, I have been beating my head against the wall about this, but you naturally just said, I am looking for things to help my clients grow, to help my clients. You’re putting the client in the center of this whole equation.
Natasha: One thousand percent. I think we often get it so wrong as sales reps.
Marylou: So wrong, Natasha.
Natasha: We’re so focused on our goal, what we need, growing, quotas, making money, and hitting bonuses, and that’s literally why my business sits under the umbrella to the point that it’s trademark selling with heart, not hustle. When we do that, that’s the hustle part. You’re worried about yourself, but really as sales reps, we’re a service-based industry.
You may be selling a product but you’re there to serve the client and advance their growth. The minute that you start flipping that and you make what you do and what you’re selling about the heart of the client, what they need, why they need you, and then you explain or can articulate to them why you have the best solution or why you’re the best person to bring a solution to their problem, the money comes, the growth comes.
It’s like we get it so backward where it’s like hustle, hustle, hustle and it’s no slowdown and really tap into your account because every single thing that you do if you want to know a process or a strategy, know your customer. Do you want to know how to grow them? Know your customer. You want to know what they need? Know your customer.
It always goes back to them and actually helps you develop the process in this strategy where you no longer become a sales rep, you’re actually a partner, and there’s a sense of trust that’s built from that. There’s no resistance around like, I don’t know if I can trust doing that, or I don’t know if we should go that route. It’s like, oh, no, we are in partnership with Natasha. She is thinking about our best interest, our bottom line, and what growth we need, and so when she says something, we trust it.
Marylou: Is this idea that you have, naturally I would say and you say we get it wrong, is it coachable? Is it trainable to flip that with any sales rep that you’ve ever taught or mentored?
Natasha: Absolutely. What’s so cool, Marylou, is that I don’t care if they’re male clients of mine, female, introvert, extrovert love it, this style of selling around selling with heart, not hustle is literally flexible to any personality. It’s just that is the person willing to trust it? Because when I start breaking down simple things and I reverse engineer them why this way works, it’s like ah, I never thought of it that way.
Sometimes it’s just revealing it to them because there is this certain amount of energy that you have to constantly put in check and in place when it comes to selling. The hustle, the money, the goals, the quota, the expectation, the outcome, it’s so much that we just get spun up into it, but it absolutely can be coached. I don’t care if it’s a company and if it’s a small business if it is a person. We’ve seen it happen with other corporations who do it this way, and even in their marketing, they’re shifting towards that where it’s really forward-facing.
The bottom line is we are in a world where we’re dealing with conscious buyers. They’re very, very conscious, they’re very aware, and they want to know, do you care or you don’t. To some level or degree, they want to know. Yes, it is. It’s duplicatable, it is flexible, it can be taught to anybody.
Marylou: When you go in and work with companies and sales organizations or teams—with a process and a strategy in mind—do you look physically at the pipeline and start attacking certain areas? Or do you, first and foremost, take a look at their existing account base if they have that? When you step over that threshold to a client, where are you focusing first? Are you focusing on the clients, or are you looking at the physical setup of their pipelines and processes?
Natasha: I would say first, it’s about the customer and the client. What is currently going on and what do they perceive are their gaps. Then I think looking at the client base like digging in deeper, but I think no matter what, both have to exist if you want to take a holistic approach.
Sometimes I think as consultants, we can come in with this is how you fix it, but it’s like, although that can yield a short term win or you can completely miss the mark, again, if you’re starting with finding out as much information that you can from the client, it’s going to actually help you better develop a customized process or strategy for that set client that meets their needs because that’s the goal.
Like you said, we’re there to help them grow, not hit our agenda, but what is growth to them? What do they want, or what do they perceive as gaps? Because a lot of times, they can’t see what they can’t see. The more information when we come in with an open mind and we’re willing to kind of start mining and pulling back the layers, we’re going to have a better understanding of what we see that’s going on, then what they perceive, and then what needs to then be done that you can come to an agreement of what actually meets that solution that they’re looking for.
Marylou: Okay. Now, you said the light shines on the middle and bottom of the funnel, negotiation. I love the fact that you love negotiation because that’s kind of an anomaly. I think people are just so fearful. A lot of reps are in this sort of hope mode and just going in. With negotiation, you’re going in. Let me answer my own question and you can correct me or not. Because you’re so focused on the client and you want them to win, then you go into the negotiation looking for that win-win. It comes naturally.
Natasha: That right there, you hit the nail on the head. That’s why it has to start with the customer at the beginning because you automatically gain trust. I tell people when they come on a strategy call with me. One of the first things I do after welcoming the calls, I let them know, newsflash, I am not here to sell you me.
I’m not here to sell you me, my business, my team, my corporation, or my solution. No, I’m here to find out two big things, what you need and why you need it. Then out of integrity, if I know that I have the solution to help you, I will invite you into that opportunity, but if I don’t, out of integrity, I will let you know that.
Disarming that and closing the negotiation, why I love it so much because I’m such a people person, it’s a lot of EQ. It’s a lot of really shifting your mindset, having confidence around how do you just simply communicate because that’s what sales is. It’s serving and communication. I say the three pillars of sales success are communication, energy, and then the strategy. The sales process and the strategy sit under that. If we don’t understand that, we get caught up in our emotions. I’m like, relax. You’re there to provide them a solution. That’s why they’re there because they believe that you have what they need and they want to advance the conversation with you.
A lot of times, we trip ourselves up by getting in our own way. When you shift that energy and the focus to the client, not what you’re going to say, not what you’re going to negotiate, not what your pricing is, not if they’re going to say yes or no, not how badly you need them to love you, buy you, are you scared? It’s not about that. The minute you start flipping to their focus and what they need, that’s a switch.
Marylou: Definitely. I’m assuming that these could be small, medium, or large deals that you’re negotiating. It doesn’t really matter because the “playbook” or the way that you approach it would be the same or similar, but you have more people to deal with more personalities.
Natasha: Right. You’re exactly right. It really does not matter. It doesn’t matter the size of the account. Obviously, the size of the account may require other people that handle certain arms or other team members that are needed. We were talking about contracting in where it’s like, I’m bringing in Marylou. She is going to focus on the top of the funnel. She is the expert. She’s the strategist. I’m going to take middle to bottom.
Sometimes I think in bigger contracts, it’s smart. Bring in more experts so that you get to the goal and you get there quicker, and that’s understanding capacity. Then I think the smaller businesses, usually those can be taken on a little bit easier, one. But still, there might be an opportunity to bring it in. I think at the end of the day, it doesn’t change. It’s just my approach and if they’re open to doing that.
Marylou: Let’s talk about some of the gaps that you’ve found. In generic terms, the middle of the funnel, what are the common either mistakes or trends that you’re seeing that seem to be ubiquitous? We’re in the middle of COVID here still, has that impacted some of your strategies as far as the middle of the pipeline is concerned?
Natasha: No. I think if anything is highlighted the focus of how much you need to be focused on middle of pipeline. So that pipeline advancement, middle of pipelines. The biggest trend that I see and the biggest issue is companies not really having, I would say, authentic genuine follow-up processes. You know this, we say it in sales all the time, the fortune is in the follow-up. It’s one of the biggest gaps where people drop the ball.
One, they don’t have a system, process, and strategy in place to make sure the follow up happens, the ball doesn’t get dropped; or two, they’re so busy trying to move so fast and generically automate the process that we don’t also have some kind of organic touch process in there and we miss that because again, we’re dealing with conscious buyers.
Let’s say it’s a SaaS company, or I don’t care what the company is but they have inbound outbound. Hello, there is a lot that can be done in that middle advancement where we can ensure by having a process and a strategy that we don’t drop the ball when it comes to follow-up.
I would also say again, the follow-up is where I see the ball drop, but also not having an actual process and strategy for your said company team to follow, or if it’s there, something is not working. I think sometimes we get so fast or we want to churn, turn the sale, and we […] about this high touch low tech model. I think there’s a need for both. It’s great. We have high tech, low touch. Great, that works, but there’s a subset of customers too that you may be missing out on that need high touch low tech.
Is it a thing or does it exist? What does the process look like? How are you unique? Because we have so much technology at our hand and we forget we’re communicating with humans.
Marylou: Yes, and as my CCO loves to say, rubbish in, rubbish out. Even if we have this follow-up engine and technology in place, the conversations that we’re putting in there have got to resonate and have got to feel as if we care and that we are addressing the needs and what resonates instead of these bots. It’s almost like you get these messages. Yeah, they’re timely and there’s a lot of them.
Natasha: That part, I was just going to say the whole bot chat thing and not having a live person that I can talk to. I know the platforms and the services that I use on the backend for operations for my business, I would much rather pay more money for a platform that if I need to escalate something that I get a live person, or that they will send me a […] and they will walk me through something because you are wasting my time when I’m trying to get to a solution.
I have to go through 15 million chats or it’s a live bot chat, and then somebody emails me two, three, four days later and I can’t even still get it. You cannot do everything through tech. That is a huge, huge, huge issue I see in that whole midline.
Then closing, it depends on is it web base, inbound, outbound? Or is it face-to-face or is it phone? Whatever it is, that varies. That goes back to that mindset, this kind of like, I just want to close the deal. It’s like, no, we actually focused on that person and what’s best for them and actually meeting their needs because when people feel that and see that, they’ll buy from you all day. The price point doesn’t matter at that point, literally. It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. It’s about how you made them feel and did they feel like they have a solution and that you actually care? That closes them.
I am curious, Marylou. On your end, what do you see at the top of funnel gaps and issues?
Marylou: The main thing is we feed, I call it the rocket ship with banana fuel. We haven’t done the work with clients. It’s all the same, Natasha, with the client in the center. We haven’t done the work to say, is this an ideal account for me? Is this account one that I would chase manually? I do want to have as a client because I feel that we can best serve them and really understand at a deep and meaningful level the people within those accounts that are going to benefit from a conversation.
That planning upfront is absent in so many. Why? Because we can buy lists, we can throw them into an automated system, and we can just churn the heck out of it, blast all these touches to people, and upset them because they’re not relevant. The biggest mistake I see is that we don’t take the time to plan. We don’t put that client at the center of our universe and understand what is important to them. What can we do to express and get them to fully understand and be able to articulate back to us why we’re different, why they should change this whole emotional component we’re missing.
Top of funnel, it’s more about emotion, less about the logical, but we have to segue then to you in the middle of the funnel to a bit of the logical so they start putting the pieces together to say, oh, I really need this and they do it differently. I can actually tell you how it’s different. I don’t know how it all works yet, as I learn more from them because I trust them, then I’ll work through the actual logistics and the logical reasons why this is a better fit for us.
I think that’s the biggest thing I see. It’s frustrating as heck for me because these systems are, like I say, rocket ships. They basically will send out as many messages before you get blacklisted. If you put the wrong ingredients, it’s like making a soufflé in your kitchen. If you put the wrong things in there, if you use baking soda instead of sugar, you’re going to get a very ill-tasting chocolate soufflé.
Natasha: Absolutely. That’s so interesting that it’s pretty much the same. You know what it makes me think about, Marylou? I don’t know how this came to mind, but go with it. You know how In the fashion industry right now there’s a lot of small business designers who are really into slow fashion, they call it? Slow fashion where it’s organic, it’s equitably sourced, it is not just mass-produced, it’s more unique to their customer and client, and they are blowing up. They are blowing up.
I have a client that is like that. He’s a designer. It is unbelievable. It’s almost like we need to have a little bit, and I’m not saying that technology is not helpful, but I feel like we also need to have these slow sales. There needs to be this segment of yes, we have these things, but then how do we segment out of that and really start having high touch, low tech.
Marylou: I had a friend and colleague who used to describe technology as allowing us to spin multiple plates. You got them on your feet, you got them on your hand, you got them on your head, they’re all spinning around and it’s all these different types of accounts, these different ways to serve. Technology allows us to manage them all very easily and remind us when it’s time to do the high touch or when it’s time to get on a blog post or whatever it is.
We have a bunch of little series now that can remind us to do things in the right order so that we have the best experience laid out for our clients. That’s what technology is designed to do, but we have to know, to your point, what the process and the strategy is by putting that client in the center of our universe and understanding them at a very deep level—how they function, how they do their workflow? If I’m sitting at the desk, what does my day in the life look like as a client? What are things that are keeping me from getting to finish a project, to do a project that is done well, or to start a project?
What are those things—through the lens of our product—that highlight the fact that we’re not there yet? We need to be able to just get a little bit further into our knowledge and highlight something that we know can take us a step further to solve our problems.
Natasha: Yeah, that is so good and I think it’s so interesting that the problem that you’re seeing is the same that I’m seeing bottom. I think there’s so much there, which is why we exist, right? We get to help lead these companies and these small businesses and really making sure they don’t get lost in the technology because I think the convenience is easy to be like, oh, this is so much more convenient than doing it this way so let’s go that way.
I think a lot of times, companies have good intentions, they just don’t have the awareness. They don’t have that, but that’s why we’re needed to be able to come in and help them realize actually wait, we need to pull back the layers and really understand on a deeper level. Because when we do that, we start aligning ourselves with the right customers who actually not just pay, but they will also stay.
Marylou: Right, exactly. That we can leverage technology to emotionally stimulate, intellectually inspire, and positively improve their condition. It’s just that we have got to be able to feed this engine with those messages in order we think we’ll allow them to absorb it, believe it, and trust us to then advance them. They advance themselves through the funnel. It’s like they sell themselves at that point.
Natasha: That’s so, so true when we do that right. I love that.
Marylou: I’m speaking with Natasha Hemmingway. Natasha, thank you so much for your time today. This has been absolutely a great discussion and so heartwarming. I think one of the things that I know for me personally is that I tend to think of people that don’t get this as “lazy at times” so I’m tainted. Where you’re like, no, we’re selling with heart and we’re teaching people. I think that’s such a great attitude. I’ve learned from you today that I should stop. When I get to that point where I’m like ugh, I should just realize these are multiple humans.
Natasha: That’s it, and they also don’t know what they don’t know. What’s beautiful is it gives you the opportunity to come in and be able to provide a solution to them. I think when we think that way in our business, we’re selling with heart, not hustle. We’re focused on what are they struggling with? How can we bring a solution to them? How can we partner with them? How can we bring value? But then also, helping them duplicate that in the way that they show up to their clients and customers as well, it becomes this ripple and everybody starts winning.
Marylou: Absolutely. Empathy, empathy, empathy. How do we get a hold of you to learn more from you? What do we do?
Natasha: You can find me on my website at natashahemmingway.com. On Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, everywhere is Natasha Hemmingway. The website honestly gives you if it’s a speaker interest form, workshop, training, consulting, or coaching, it’s all on the website.
Marylou: Very good, and I’ll be sure for the listeners that we have a page for Natasha. All her links will be on there, so you can go to any of the sites and they’ll direct you to maryloutyler.com and there’ll be a nice page with all of her info on it.
Thank you again, Natasha. I really enjoyed our conversation today.
Natasha: Thank you so much for having me, excited to serve and pour into your community, and look forward to continued conversation.
Marylou: Wonderful.