Sales Talk for CEOs

Years of trust can evaporate in a matter of moments if you forget this simple rule. Dmitri Leichik learned the hard way that customers are not buying your product, they are buying your commitment to their success. The moment they perceive a transactional motive, you’ve lost.Utilizing a founder led sales model, Twistellar has grown globally and still relies on Dmitri’s long term relationship strategy that in many cases takes years to mature from conversation to trust to a project.If you sell B2B, you have to assume that a potential customer already has a trusted supplier. They may say no to you on a Monday and yes on a Friday because something changed in that relationship. Timing and luck are everything and that’s why you have to be tireless in maintaining relationships over long periods of time.Highlights3:24 You need to clearly understand how people interact, how people communicate, how your sales people actually work every day to make their customers happy. Only then can you automate the process.5:14 A professional consultant must focus on the customer’s business processes, not the solution features.  Sometimes our role is to convince the customer not to spend money on a solution because the business is not ready.8:27 In sales, the first step needs to be defining “What difference can you bring to the table?”9:49 To be successful, three factors need to come together at the same time: You need luck to be in the right place at the right time, you need to be very active to be in as many places as possible, you have to be working hard to make every customer successful.11:49 I still do most of the selling myself since I am the best person to match business needs to technical solutions. I am a technical advisor and am never trying to sell a specific solution.13:47 In B2B, a potential customer already has a supplier to solve their problems. You have to get to them at the exact moment where they have some reason to consider a new partner.14:45 We work 12-14 hours a day so that we can always be available to give friendly advice. That’s how we ‘sell’.18:48 To win business, you have to demonstrate that you bear the responsibility for the project’s success.20:49 It can take years to build a relationship before the first project. On the other hand, one wrong action can spoil that relationship in one day.23:01 You must consider all of the people in an organization who benefit from your work. They are part of your word of mouth referral network especially when they move to a new company.26:50 The sales process ends when the work is done and the customer is happy.28:10 Mistakes can be made and it's critically important to take responsibility for them. We recently underestimated a project by 400 hours and we accepted the loss.About Our GuestDmitri Leichik is CEO and co-founder of Twistellar,  #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark. Dmitri brings more than a 20-year background of being a co-owner and CEO of a group of trading and production companies, providing hands-on management experience.For now, Dmitri is a business expert who's responsible for corporate strategy, finances, business development, customer relations, and general operational efficiency in Twistellar. He managed to gather a team of 100+ motivated professionals in just 5 years.Dmitri is a master of business & service processes automation and optimization. He ensures that the customer is always the key figure at Twistellar.Connect with DmitriLinkedinTwitter About Guest CompanyTwistellar is a #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark, working with customers in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The company pro

Anthony Iannarino has some bad news for sales leaders who are depending on 20 year old sales models. They just don’t work anymore. “Tell me about your problems and let me tell you about my solution” won’t even get you a second meeting.”Alvin Toffler, who wrote The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. The hard part is unlearning.Sales teams must be retrained to create value not sell benefits. Anthony calls this becoming a One Up. The core value creation is ‘'I know more about this decision than anything else.” Let me start a conversation with you about that.Unlearning old sales habits is only the beginning. Anthony takes us through his three, non-negotiable, steps to hold salespeople accountable. Number one, a set amount of time per week prospecting. Number two, reporting on the actual conversations that are ongoing. As a sales leader, your job is to establish the criteria for what represents a quality conversation. And finally what is the next conversation that we should be having and our strategy to get there.Listen to the entire episode to learn how to build your modern B2B sales strategy and team.Highlights:2:21 I'm not disrupting the industry. All I'm doing is documenting the strategies and tactics that work because the buyer has a different problem than they've ever had before. They're more confused, they're more uncertain. They have a difficult time getting consensus.3:07 The most common problems that sales teams have: I don't have enough opportunities. Opportunities aren't moving fast enough through our pipeline for us to reach our goals. I don’t understand why salesperson A is doing well while salesperson B isn’t.4:47 If you're training your team in a legacy approach where it's looks like solution selling and we start with let me tell you how great our company is and look at all these logos…8:21 …one client said to me, we did $10 million. Our goal next year is $12 million. And I said, that is probably the worst goal I've ever heard…9:26 The part of the vision that I care about is what do you want your team to be?10:03 The best salespeople create more value in a conversation than others.10:52 There's a chapter in the book about alignment. It’s when the CEO has a vision that is tangible, proven, and clearly understood by customer success, marketing, and sales.12:39 I would describe churn as the devil.14:16 We can get the first meeting, but we can't convert it to a second meeting. What that means is you didn't create enough value.14:54 Let me give you another lens, my lens is not filled with false assumptions. I'm showing you what reality looks like and what you need to do.15:30 We transform your team to a modern approach that means they're going to be what I call One Up. And One Up means I know more than you and I have greater experience than you do about this decision, not about everything.Helping them understand what's going on, what it means for them, and what they need to do. So that means you're going to have a different sales force on the other end that can create greater value.17:13 So it's not about what you sell. It's about how you sell. And if you get the ‘how’ we sell right, then you have a better shot of reaching your full potential.18:29 Alvin Toffler, in The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. So that's where we are right now. So the hard part is the unlearning.19:09 the most important thing for you to work on is increasing the effectiveness of your salesperson in the conversation with their client.20:39 That's where growth comes from. It's the conversations that we're having.23:34 I have two chapters on accountability…It's a very, very different kind of accountability. And

Jake Dunlap takes us from founding Skaled Consulting to his first successful sales hire. And yes, it did take 10 years to get it right.It’s great to be a founder led sales company but founder led services delivery is a problem. This was the first major hurdle that Jake encountered in his fledgling sales consulting business and a barrier to scaling. It took years to structure a scalable services delivery model. The first big lesson, young, affordable, full-time staff didn’t have the requisite skills to replace Jake and properly service the accounts. It turns out, contract, part time senior team members could deliver.As he grew globally, it was time to expand the sales team. His next big challenge was finding salespeople who could sell even 80% as well as he could. His hires kept failing until he realized it was because the sales process was in his head and needed to be on paper. His second big a ha moment was realizing that selling a product is different from selling a service. Jake only recently cracked this problem and hired an experienced services salesperson.The biggest takeaway that every B2B company needs to understand, customers want everything on their terms and this includes learning about your product. Sales teams can no longer be gatekeepers of the buyer's journey.Highlights:1:57 We are a revenue strategy, operations and enablement company and really what that means, we've got 40 plus people globally and what we do is we help organizations optimize the sales process. 3:13 If you've got a marketing organization that's compensated on one thing and a sales organization that's compensated and there's no overlap, you're not going to have marketing and sales alignment.6:27 When I started my business, I started cold outreach from Crunchbase. I found people that just raised a seed series A, series B and started reaching out cold to CEOs. Hey, you know, chances are you're probably thinking about these challenges. I've faced them multiple times. Let me know if you need help. And sure enough, within the first 45 days, I had a few customers. I’ve just been figuring it out since then.9:59 I thought everybody had to be full time because if they were contractors, they wouldn't care. And boy, was I wrong.11:57 Over the years we hired a few different sales people and it never worked out. Obviously as a CEO, everything's my fault. I didn't really know the DNA of the person that I needed. Selling a service is much different than selling a product.15:05 I can count on two hands how many founders I've seen that didn't have to figure out the Go-To-Market themselves before hiring the first salespeople.17:18 It's your job to fix these problems no matter what department. You can't outsource fixing your problems.20:36 And so another mistake that I made when I was scaling early is I kept hiring junior people and putting them in roles that they were not set up to be successful in. 22:03 Get it right and then get it off your plate.23:27 Some of our first big deals were through partnerships where the other partner didn’t provide the services that we did.26:21 Handing a job off to someone without the training or process is abdicating not delegating.30:40 I didn't ever really define what made a good partner for us. I took probably hundreds of calls with people who were never going to be a fit.35:46 ​​Revenue Operations is really a good synopsis of what we do. It's looking at the end-to-end customer journey and experience.40:03 We live in a world of now on my terms. I want to consume information when I want to. The problem is B2B sales is in the Stone Age right now. We've created a process where the salesperson is a gatekeeper for information instead of giving it to consumers on their terms.About Our Guest:Jake Dunlap consistently designs repeatable, sustainabl

Matt Fok came up with his idea for eZ-Xpo, before the pandemic. He thought, what if you could continue the dialogue started at conferences virtually? Since his company was already selling an eLearning platform, he simply went to his existing customers to validate the idea. And then the pandemic hit. His founder-led sales approach paid off as he uncovered more and better ways to address the market need. By providing content and ongoing interactions between companies and their prospects, the platform could be used to build communities. eZ-Xpo provides the middle of the funnel nurture interactions virtually. Rather than hire a sales force, Matt has employed two sales strategies. He has hired and trained a team of 20 Digital Collaborator Champions to guide customers through the setup and management process. Each champion specializes in a niche such as fintech or blockchain.And instead of trying to clone himself, he runs boot camps to teach customers what he has learned about creating successful implementations.An unexpected consequence of his approach is improved SEO as a byproduct of the enhanced content and interaction on his customer’s websites.“The lack of in person events taught us that we needed a way to maintain interactions started at in person events!”Join us to learn more about how quickly Matt scaled eZ-Xpo with his sales model. Highlights:2:13 We help companies get more organic traffic and leads by leveraging hybrid events, both in-person and virtual and on demand not just for lead generation, but actually for ongoing engagement.3:26 One of the big challenges or huge untapped opportunities for companies is to leverage the same platform to do in-person events or hybrid events.5:31 We started thinking that there is a better way to get virtual traffic. We actually started the virtual trade show before the pandemic.6:33 Sales is about educating your clients about new ways to do business.6:59 You bring the leads at a trade show but then you have to nurture. Instead of spamming them with promotional material, have a virtual summit with subject matter experts to show the benefits of your approach to solving their problem.8:27 Bring people back for more content boosts your SEO ranking for free.9:10 After our initial sales focus of promoting SEO benefits to existing customers we reached out to channel partners. The platform itself is really good at creating a partner ecosystem network.12:19 Our first target audiences were communities like associations that have captive audiences like the Chamber of Commerce. They don't have a solution to connect all the local chapters.14:22 We do some outbound marketing through social media and, SEO, but of our lead generation comes through channel partners. 15:26 Instead of growing a sales force, we rely on 20 Digital Collaborative Champions. They specialize in verticals such as fintech or blockchain and work directly with channel partners to design the community programs.19:00 Instead of looking for new customers, focus on expanding your offer to existing customers.21:30 Instead of cloning myself to get out of the founder-led sales role, we created digital bootcamps to pass all of my knowledge to potential customers.22:38 Any B2B company with a channel partner ecosystem can take advantage of this platform to enhance the front end experience versus focusing just on backend API integrations.27:48 Companies and communities are looking for thought leadership in order to think outside the box.29:47 A company that brings a community along with their solution will have a major competitive advantage over their competitors.32:21 Hybrid events or in-person events is like e-commerce. Remember 20 years ago asking should we just have a brick and mortar company or just e-commerce? The short answer is both. We need both h

My next guest on Sales Talk For CEOs is Brent Adamson and he’s got some revolutionary ideas about B2B enterprise selling. Brent explains decision maker confidence is the main barrier for B2B teams to close deals. The three factors eroding confidence are complexity, information overload and value opacity or consensus on the value of the desired outcome.So stop selling product benefits. You need to propose a framework that starts with consensus on the value that the solution will deliver and builds a picture of the steps, and barriers to delivering that value. By the same measure, help the customer make the best decision and if that’s not your product, get to that answer as quickly as possible.Stick around to learn what your sales teams need to do to overcome this crisis of confidence. Highlights:5:48 The number one thing we need to solve in B2B commerce is customers' lack of confidence in their ability to make complex decisions on behalf of their company.6:12 There are three forces eroding buyer decision making confidence: complexity, information overload and value opacity (outcome clarity)8:16 The value discussion has to start significantly farther upstream than your capability or benefits.10:24 (the old way of selling) was based on this idea of frame breaking. You map a customer's mental model of how their business works, and you find places to displace or disrupt that model to break that frame and show them a better, different way to think about their business.11:12 I think there's an opportunity for us today to move from frame breaking to frame making.11:59 Travel agents went out of business because I could do it all online. And all of a sudden, I tried to do it online and was overwhelmed. And I realized, you know what I need? I need a travel agent.13:15 Now they're stuck and really frustrated. What if you were the company that helped them anticipate that obstacle, helped them avoid it to begin with? What if you took them by the hand and guided them through a decision making process, gave them a heads up? By the way, the phrase I use all the time, “in working with other customers like you, one of the things we've found is…”15:17 Let's see if we can, in our case through software, put a framework around, okay, what are you trying to do? Why is that valuable? By the way, do your three colleagues agree with you that that's what they're trying to do?20:49 …notice everything we're talking about here isn't about selling and buying, it's about humanity.32:35 A faster close comes from confident customers. There's our bumper sticker.34:04 Because if we're going to lose, we want to lose early so we can move on to better opportunities. About Our Guest:Brent Adamson is a world-renown researcher, author, presenter, trainer, and advisor to B2B commercial executives around the world. Known as having the “biggest crystal ball in B2B sales,” Brent is the co-author of the best-selling, industry changing The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.  He is also a frequent contributor to well-known business publications, including the Harvard Business Review, featuring his recent articles, “Sensemaking for Sales” and “Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete.” Across the last 19 years, Brent has been privileged to work with some of the greatest thought leaders in B2B and B2C sales and marketing, building and leading exclusive communities of highly progressive commercial executives.  Known as a world-class facilitator and speaker, Brent has presented to tens of thousands of commercial leaders both in-person and virtually all over the world, ranging from executive leadership teams to l

My guest today on this episode of Sales Talk For CEOs is Karen Frame whose company Makeena, is on a mission to help people live healthier lives on a cleaner planet.  She talks about the advantages of having a founder-led sales organization. The obvious advantage is being close to your customers and making sure that your product is solving a real problem for them. The not so obvious advantage is using scarce capital to hire a brand and consumer success team for her two-sided marketplace instead of hiring a sales team.One of her earliest lessons about selling came from a successful Silicon Valley startup CEO who taught her it's never too early to sell. Whether that be customers, investors or future employees. She continues to follow this sage advice.Highlights:1:45 We connect you with brands that are better for your health and better for the planet no matter where you shop5:24 I'm going to take the mall kiosk concept into the 21st century. Everybody's got a handheld kiosk in the palm of their hand. And now I can really help people buy better anywhere they want to shop.8:06 I was giving up a lot in my career to really focus on building something where I felt like I was helping people lead healthier lives on a cleaner planet. 10:25 I learned from a Silicon Valley CEO named Praveen that you don't really have to have everything all together before you start selling. And as a founder, you're always selling. You're selling to investors, team members, in my case, consumers, brands, and partners in the industry.14:32 But the mission is around helping brands really understand how to move their product off the shelf. Where are they doing well? What is their competition doing?15:53 So when I started Makeena, I knew that I wanted to be a Certified B Corp because when I launched Natural Interactions, this interactive touchscreen kiosk system in the 1990s, I had sat on a steering committee for business for social responsibility. And I knew that business could be a force for good.19:13 And when brands saw this (a Certified B Corp), they're like, “Oh." And immediately they trusted us more. 34:11 Keeping customers delighted as we continue to grow the company is really just about listening. And this is one of the reasons why I think it's really important for a founder to continue to sell no matter what. You have to listen to the feedback you're getting from your customer. 37:06  Being the founder with a small scrappy team, my first real hires are brand delight people that are continually talking to the customer because I can't do that all the time.About Our Guest:Karen, Makeena’s CEO & Founder, is passionate about being an entrepreneur and making the world a better place.  She firmly believes that building a technology company in the natural products space will encourage people to shop healthier and lead to a cleaner planet because Makeena will make it easy for them to make smarter choices.  Karen became an entrepreneur in the early 1990s when she moved to Boulder, Colorado, and built and operated two interactive touchscreen kiosk companies, one for the real estate industry (InterActive Properties) and one for the natural products industry (Natural Interactions).  After that, Karen was general counsel for a number of emerging growth and publicly-held software and data analytics companies.  Karen earned her degree in accounting and business from Indiana University and a CPA and law degree from the University of Illinois.  She also attended Oxford University, focusing on international business transactions, and taught Principles of Business for Entrepreneurs in the Cross Campus Entrepreneurship Certificate Program at the University of Colorado.About Makeena:Makeena is a rewards app that connects shoppers with “brands for good.” Available on iOS and Android,

Arman Eshraghi can teach us something about building sales teams from scratch. He is, after all, on his fourth startup Qrvey. So, what has he learned from one startup to the next? What has he changed and what stayed the same? One constant that remains true for Arman, if you, as CEO and Founder can’t sell your product, bringing in a sales team won’t solve the problem.  Once you do bring in a sales team, Arman believes  sales teams only succeed if they can see that the product is helping customers. This is the only way to build their confidence. Do you agree?Another major shift, in perspective for Arman over the 4 startups is the way to measure success.  Sales numbers are not it. Successful customers is the ultimate measure.  Making Qrvey indispensable to every customer is the finish line. Highlights:1:29 Qrvey is an embedded analytic technology that SaaS companies can infuse within their own product rather than spending years and millions of dollars building it themselves.3:50 The world is about data and what you can do with that data. If you have a coffee shop, and you want to make more sales you could improve your coffee, or you can improve your data and do better marketing. Better marketing will improve revenue more than improved coffee.4:24 Amazon is Amazon because they have data and the more data they have, the faster they grow.6:28 The software world is getting to the point that you just put pieces together unlike 30 years ago when you built everything from scratch.8:32 If you, as a founder, cannot sell, bringing in a sales person won’t solve the problem.10:16 I would like to admit that good sales people do a much better job than me. When it comes to sales, I cannot really keep up with them. (Because as CEO, he set them up for success)12:46 In my previous company, I came to market when the web was brand new. We came to market in a completely different way.About Our Guest:Arman Eshraghi is a serial entrepreneur presently serving as Founder and CEO at Qrvey. Arman's professional career includes founding four B2B software companies while also serving as an advisor to startups and entrepreneurs. He is a member of Mindshare and the Forbes Technology Council and also a board member of INCspire.When he's not working on his own startup or advising other startups, he can be found sharing his thoughts on leadership, entrepreneurship and technology on Linkedin, Medium and Forbes.com.Arman currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his family of three. For fun, Arman maintains an unusually large board game collection and sometimes designs his own strategy games, drawing inspiration from everything, especially from the nature around us.About Qrvey:"Qrvey delivers embedded analytics specifically designed for SaaS companies, empowering them to offer rich self-service reporting and dashboarding capabilities to their business users easily and quickly."Show Links:Arman Eshraghi:Twitter: https://twitter.com/arman123LinkedIn:

The world of selling has irrevocably changed. Buyers no longer want to be sold to and especially not as a result of a cold call. They want to get to know a company by getting to know and trust the people who work there. Starting digital conversations is the first step to build this trust. As CEO, it’s imperative that you lead by example.In this episode Alice talks with Tim Hughes who explains how to change your sales approach from “interrupting to pitch” to “gaining trust”. Simply put, you and your team use social media to start conversations that both expand your network and build trust for a future opportunity to sell. He explains the three how-to steps: Creating the right social profile, expanding your network, producing content that engages. Many salespeople don’t know how to use social media to connect and build a trusted network so they simply have a meager profile and don’t do anything else. In fact they may even be afraid because their previous company may have fired employees who posted on social. If you expect your sales or better yet, your Go To Market team to build networks and share content on social then as CEO model the behavior and create the proper framework for success including training, guidelines and content strategies.Tim goes on to explain the opportunities for B2B CEOs to dominate their vertical as thought leaders by producing content designed to educate target customers. Unless you are one of a handful of CEOs like Bernard Looney of BP, who already have it down, it’s time to watch, learn and do social selling.Highlights:3:02 In the past our sales and marketing used interruptive methods, cold calling, email, billboards. We interrupt you to pitch. And now, the buyer just won't put up with that.3:24 …buyers are digital. What can we actually do to be where the buyers are? 4:23 Gartner research is telling us that more and more people are saying 'I'd like a seller free buying experience. I'd like to be able to learn  on my own.'5:11 What we're doing on social is trying to create a conversation. There's three things that you need on social media. One is you need to have a great profile. A great profile as in what we call "Buyer centric." So when a buyer looks at you, they go, "That person looks interesting, that person could help me."9:14 So the second thing you need is a wide and varied network. And that's about you building out contacts in the people you want to influence, so the accounts you want to sell to, yes, but better yet, people who could introduce you.11:08 And the third thing that we need is content. And the reason why we need content is buyers are online looking for information and advice. 16:31 If you are not connected in your digital network to enough people, it's going to be really hard to get introductions, or if you connected and then spammed me, I'll never give you an introduction , because I know you're going to do that to the next person. 20:03 CEOs, senior leaders, lead by example. If you want your teams to be digital, you have got to be digital.21:01 Look at people like Julie Sweet, who's the CEO of Accenture, or Bernard Looney, who's the CEO of BP. Bernard has done an amazing job at repositioning BP in the world via social media. 24:41 I ask CEOs who is the leading technical and commercial influencer in your market or vertical?" And the answer to that usually will be, "I don't know. There isn't one." Well, why not? Why isn't it you?29:40 It's about digital dominance. Owning the narrative out there on social media.37:18 I don't think we realize how much it's changed, but COVID has changed the world, it's changed society. And so it changed the way of business. It sped up our need to be digital.About Our Guest:Tim Hughes is universally recognized as the world leading pioneer and exponents of Social Selling and he is curr

My next guest is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc. who is a case study in drinking your own champagne. He is here to talk about using his own platform to build his business and the breakthroughs that he discovered to make the platform more effective for him and of course the customers that use it.Chris Beall takes us through his journey building the ConnectAndSell business model starting with his “Wartime” stance to pioneering better pipelines and finally inventing the next generation of technology that cannibalizes his first generation. His biggest breakthrough was going from demo to test drive where customers get to experience the thrill of having actual sales success in a day-long, on premise, session. Every CEO can learn how to increase sales team performance by listening to this interview with Chris. Highlights:2:10 So everyone out there who's saying cold calling is dead, cold calling is not dead2:27 You don't want to pay your reps to be phone jockeys14:13 "Look, there's two kind of CEOs. There's peacetime CEOs and wartime CEOs, and you better know which one you are."14:49 We got going pretty fast and started making lots of sales. Then we focused on making a sales machine and finally made the breakthrough “The Test Drive”18:44 I don't believe that it's possible to figure out what to do until you're doing something and feeling the pain of it not working.20:41 To me, something that's not done in anger is not done at all. So that's our test drive. We do 500 of them a year.23:57 So what the question on the table really is, what's it going to be like to work together to solve thisproblem? 25:02 Your competition right now, today, tomorrow, the next day, and forever is to do nothing!27:01 Well, we need to experience what our customers are experiencing. So let's organize like they're organizing even though we don't like it.28:05 There is no such thing as a person who talks, listens, reads, writes, and does data who isn't a CEO or a future CEO.31:14 Rescheduling (missed sales calls) is your number one source of new business.33:36 The idea of the lone wolf salesperson who's not part of the machine is just not part of our company.34:41 We establish status alignment with somebody that we're their peer, and then we need to let them feel comfortable that we're an expert, and then we need to give them a piece of advice about what the next thing is to do.38:27 So once a test drive has happened, the conversion rate is about 37%. 40:31… the enterprise is not that person you're talking to, it's this big dynamic beast that's going to reorg once a year. 41:19 Everything's renewals, everything's upsell, everything's the future.So how do you start in a way that establishes, for sure, that value is being deliveredAbout Our GuestFor thepast 30 years, Chris Beall has participated in softwarestart-ups as a founder or at a very early stage of development. His belief is that the most powerful part of any software system is the human being that we inappropriately call a “user,” and that thevalue key in software is to let the computer do what it does well —go fast without getting bored —in order to free up human potential. Toward that end, Chris has been involved with Requisite Technology, GXS, Epiance, Qlip Media, Aptara, Cadis, Sun Microsystems, and Unisyn. He is currently CEO of ConnectAndSell, Inc., based in Silicon Valley, and hosts a podcast at MarketDominanceGuys.com.Show LinksGerhard Gschwandtner and the Sales 3.0 Conference Connect with Chris Beall in the links below:Website: https://connectandsell.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/Twitter: http

So many founders make it their goal to get out of the sales role as they scale. “I can hardly wait until we can afford a VP sales to take over” is a common founder refrain. While his role has evolved, getting out of sales entirely is the last thing that Usman Sheikh plans to do. In this episode we will learn what defines a founder-led sales organization and how you might change your mind about getting out of sales.It all starts with redefining the sales mindset. B2B sales are not transactional. They come with building a relationship and the core currency of a relationship is the right information. That’s how he got xiQ - Personality-Driven Sales & Marketing™️, started in the first place. He reached out to his SAP network to share his vision of providing more helpful data to sales organizations than they could possibly collect on their own. This turned into more and deeper conversations with people in his network who eventually became his first 5 customers. Rather than change this approach, he expanded it by reaching out to more and more people in his network which created opportunities for his sales team. Highlights:4:54 Fortunately for me, when I was at SAP, I was able to form a great network ofhighly valuable and engaged and influential people7:15 I started explaining my vision, which was to be able to tap into this enormous amount of data that's out there that's relevant to sales but humanly it's not possible to analyze and bring in, it started ringing bells.9:04 So it was very clear to me that listening to what the customers had to say, addressing their key pain points, and being able to bring novelty innovation to how traditional problems were solved was super, super important.12:47 … being able to hire the right mindset. Sales is not about selling anymore, it's about educating. It's about having a conversation.15:42 We have to make it easier to buy from us, and knowing our buyers better helps us do that. 18:18 We take salespeople and we make them into tool jockeys, and that just takes time away from selling.20:03 Salespeople are only spending about 20% of their time with actual customers. 80% of their job is doing so many other things.21:45 We, by the way, drink our own champagne. Everybody uses xiQ. And one of the core purposes of xiQ is to help you spend less time on doing research, more time on selling.25:30 We're still doing a lot of networking and finding individuals that can help us meet a heart lead leader.31:16 We are increasingly leaning towards partnerships and channels. Quote: “You’ve got to know the problem you are going in to solve. The client doesn’t have time to explain it to you.” Connect with Usman Sheikh in the links below:Website: https://xiqinc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/usmanmsheikh/Twitter: https://twitter.com/usmanmsheikh You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/