The Business of Authority Jill Konrath - Getting Paid To Give (Almost) Everything Away
How to give away expertise for free and make good money doing it
Talking Points
- Selling more in less time without pushing
- How having a mission can help you strategically
- The roles that writing a book can play in a business
- How to give away expertise for free and make good money
- The importance of a good mailing list
- One way to constantly be in creation mode
Quotable Quotes
- "I didn't sit down one day and decide I wanted to be well-known."—JK
- "How can I help these people and not go broke?"—JK
- "People in the consulting business fundamentally think about sales in the wrong way."—JK
- "Sales is a skill. If you don't learn it, you can't create a sustainable career."—JK
- "Sales is not pushy. It's consultative."—JK
- "Your clients don't want what you have to offer. They want outcomes."—JK
- "I'm well aware that my books are the lifeblood of my business, but that's not why I write them."—JK
- "About 15 years ago, I asked myself 'How can I give my expertise away for free and make good money doing it?'"—JK
- "I have passed up a significant number of revenue generating opportunities."—JK
- "It's all about creating a conversation with someone you want to reach."—JK
Guest Bio
After an award-winning sales career in the technology and services sector, Jill is now an internationally recognized speaker and sales strategist. She’s a bestselling author of four books—Selling to Big Companies, SNAP Selling, Agile Selling, and More Sales Less Time.
Recently, LinkedIn named Jill as their #1 Business-to-Business Sales Expert citing her 1/3 million followers. Salesforce selected her as one of Top 7 Sales Influencers of the 21st century. Plus, she’s featured in the just-released “Story of Sales” documentary.
As a consultant, Jill has worked with companies like IBM, GE, and Staples as well as many mid-market firms. Her expertise has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Inc, Entrepreneur, Bloomberg, ABC and Fox News.
To sum up her career, Jill is constantly searching for fresh strategies to enable sales success n an ever-changing business environment.
Related Links
Transcript
Jonathan S:
00:00 Hello, and welcome to the Business of Authority. I'm Jonathan Stark.
Rochelle M:
00:04 And I'm Rochelle Moulton.
Jonathan S:
00:05 Today, we're joined by Jill Konrath. After an award-winning sales career in the technology and services sector, Jill is now an internationally-recognized speaker and sales strategist. She's the best-selling author of four business books, most recently More Sales, Less Time. LinkedIn has named her their number one B2B expert, and Salesforce selected her as one of the top seven sales influencers of the 21st century. As a consultant, Jill's worked with companies like IBM, GE, and Staples, as well as many mid-market firms. Her expertise has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Inc, Entrepreneur. The list goes on. We're super happy to have Jill with us today. Jill, welcome to the show.
Jill K:
00:46 Hey, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Rochelle M:
00:49 Jill, I just have to comment on your big idea on your website, which kind of sums up everything Jonathan just said about you. Sales Accelerated. Yeah! Love it!
Jill K:
01:00 I do, too. In the niche that I'm in, it's about how do we make more sales and do it in less time. How can we make it faster? To me, it's not just faster, it's really about how do we have a better conversation that's more focused on the customer. That's what makes it faster, not just push.
Rochelle M:
01:21 Love it! Before we get into all this, maybe for some of the members of our audience who might be experiencing you for the first time, will you tell us a little bit more about who you are, how you work, what you do?
Jill K:
01:35 Who I am. I am a sales consultant. I have been in the sales field pretty much my entire career. I never wanted to be in sales. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but they told me when I brought my business plan into SCORE, Service Corps of Retired Executives, that it was a really good idea, and then they said, "How are you going to sell this?" I looked at them. I thought, "I thought you said it was a good idea." They said, "It is, Jill, but somebody has to sell it," so I said, "All right. I'll go into sales for one year. I'll learn everything there is to know and then I will get out of it." Anyway, I never left.
Jill K:
02:14 I found it to be fascinating and totally different than I thought it was. I assumed most salespeople were slimy, manipulative con artists like you see on TV or the movies. I found out that, in the business-to-business field, salespeople are intelligent, creative, concerned about their customers, focused on their customers, trying to help them make good business decisions that enhance the quality of their work, and it was fun. I sold directly for a few years, like eight years, and then I actually started my own company, working as a consultant and did that for a long time, specializing in a very specific area of new products.
Jill K:
03:01 Then, my business crashed. I got totally wiped out because my two biggest clients came under pressure from Wall Street at the same time, and it took me a few years to get going again. I had to reinvent myself, and in the new iteration, I became me that people see on my website, which is not what I was doing before.
Rochelle M:
03:20 One of the things that's so fascinating to me, Jill, is that it feels like from the outside looking in that you've made some interesting pivots in your career. What made you start your own business? Leaving Xerox had to be a big deal.
Jill K:
03:36 I actually went into technology sales after Xerox. What caused me to start my own business was really, I have an extraordinarily low boredom threshold, and I'm a really rapid learner. I would throw myself into every new sales position, quickly learn it and, as soon as I learned it, I was no longer interested in it, which is not a good career choice then if you're constantly leaving as soon as you get good at something.
Jill K:
04:08 What I discovered was that I had the ability from a consulting perspective to go into massively complex situations, challenging business environments, and assimilate a whole lot of information about the buyer, the product, the sales process, the marketplace. I was so good at rapid learning, I could assimilate that all quickly and put it into a structure that would help my clients be more effective faster. I became a consultant, really to satisfy my need for continual interesting and challenging projects to work on.
Rochelle M:
04:48 I get you. I was thinking as you started to say that, "Well, gee! That's the definition of consultant." We keep creating our new assignments.
Jill K:
04:58 Yes, it's all about creating your new assignment. To me, to find a niche and to go off to the niche and to build it out and to get good at it and then to continually have new projects feeding me all the time, it was like, oh, I was in heaven as a consultant!
Rochelle M:
05:14 That sounds familiar. There's a description you have on your website, and I'm not sure why I hadn't seen it before, where you descri...