Sales Strategy & Enablement by Revenue.io

Kimberlee Slavik, author of five books, including Visnostic Sales and Marketing: The Power of VISualization DiagNOSTIC Statements™, A Neuroscientific Approach to Communicating, Training, Selling, Marketing, and Leading, joins me on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast.SUMMARYKimberlee Slavik has published five successful sales books in 2019 and is working on three more. Readers’ reactions to her first book led to the others in a series. She also wrote a leadership book from her sales experience. Kimberlee recommends upgrading sales management standards and suggests requiring licensing for sales management; there should be consequences for bad behavior in the sales industry.Kimberlee was motivated to write Visnostics to provide plans for the execution of the sales theories she had learned along the way in sales. She tells how to flip the story to appeal to customers. Generation Zs have a three-second attention span so you have to get their attention with your first words. You never know what your audience is going to be. Different people have different perspectives; present your services from their perspective. Kimberlee relates the meeting that sparked that moment of understanding to create the basis of Visnostics.Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Ian Altman, co-author of Same Side Selling: How Integrity and Collaboration Drive Extraordinary Results For Sellers and Buyers, 2nd Edition, joins me again on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast.SUMMARYIan introduces the second edition of Same Side Selling. Ian advises subject matter experts and trusted advisors who serve their clients’ needs with integrity. Ian emphasizes to aim for the results your clients have in mind and build trust with them. Andy and Ian explore how offering discounts diminishes your integrity. Ian shares a story about home renovations. Ian reveals his decision quadrant for asking questions about the client’s problem to solve, the importance of solving it, the desired result, and who else is impacted by it. Ask the right questions about what a successful result looks like to your client.Andy and Ian agree that companies should hire salespersons that serve their clients with value. Clients will buy proposed solutions that help them to be successful. Ian tells a car dealership story. Your company must have a culture of integrity and hire salespersons with integrity. The objective is not to make the sale at all costs but to sell the client the needed product or service at the right time.Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content.(Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul)

Chad Sanderson, Managing Partner at ValueSelling Associates, Inc., joins me on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS Chad defines the sales singularity as the combination of tech tools and human connections to use the best features of both in the sales process. Technology needs to amplify the human element, not replace it. Automated templated emails tend to devalue human relationships. You can turn that email into a message relevant to a human being by adding two sentences crafted by a person for a person. Chad uses Amazon Prime as an example of a customized, low-friction B2C user experience. Now, on the complex B2B side, buyers are looking for a frictionless experience. You can ask a question to uncover a solution. You can take 15 minutes to research a role in an industry to come up with a relevant targeting question or statement. SDRs qualify a contact for the next call. Chad notes that this requires showing respect for the contact’s role and understanding how your business might help them. Chad recommends that SDRs call board chairmen and CEOs. Chad looks for multiple points of contact, including decision-makers. He speaks of an SDR who called a CFO and built trust through demonstrating industry knowledge. The AE builds on the trust initiated by an SDR. If an AE doesn’t build on facts the SDR discovered from the contact, they break trust by making the contact repeat themselves. Build on what the contact has already shared with the SDR. Work with your SDRs. Why is the SDR role a stepping stone to a higher role? Should it be a career, in itself? Chad shares some thoughts on the SDR role, and how they influence potential sales. Chad suggests a conversational framework for SDRs. Most have not been trained in holding conversations. They need focus, mindset, critical thinking skills for effective research, and business acumen. All interactions need to start with self-respect and respect for other people. Success comes from managing time and behaving professionally. SDRs need to be valued and feel that they are valued. Andy calls out the onboarding process of SDRs. Are their managers coaching them? How are the SDRs recognized? Try having CEOs give them referrals on LinkedIn! Andy recommends investing in the development of SDRs to reduce attrition. Chad tells how ValueSelling does this for companies around the world. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Mercy Bell, Analyst at Dogpatch Advisors, joins me on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS As a young woman of color, Mercy was unusual in B2B tech sales. She sees an echo chamber in sales and on LinkedIn of white men of a certain age and experience. After college, Mercy was the second hire at a startup. At age 23, she had a $3.7 million year in enterprise sales. In her family, she was the first to graduate high school, first to graduate college, and first to get a desk job. Mercy worked at the fundraising call center for Stanford in the Great Recession. Her territory was Stanford graduates on Wall Street, many of whom had lost their jobs. After four years, she was prepared for sales. Mercy talks about the “in-the-moment” creative decision tree Dogpatch Advisors reps follow to position their software for their customers. Mercy’s first memory as a child with her mother was people asking her, “Where are your parents?” She felt she was constantly giving people an “explanation of self.” That “why me” type of exercise helped her in sales. Mercy describes how she crafted email messages in sales to make the technology the first experience for the customer with herself as the rep to be the second customer experience. Her appearance was an advantage. Mercy tells Dogpatch Advisor reps that the first sentence you write in a cold email is the first experience and impression the prospect has with you. Make it memorable and focus on accuracy and creativity. Creativity is necessary. Andy advises taking risks. Mercy notices an incredible fear of experimentation. Mercy implements a “manual-to-scale” loop for companies. Creativity is unique to individuals. Mercy explains how to scale creativity using an example of how she would use the data concerning a company in an email. Mercy has ideas about what sales managers can do to encourage improvisation in their reps. Managers need to workshop habitually with their rep teams. Outbound Operations takes the burden of prospecting burdens from reps to give them time to explore the human connections creatively. Outbound Operations is not Sales Operations. Reps should not do data entry and follow arbitrary rules. They should be doing human communication. Happy reps will be supported and retained. Mercy and Andy discuss what attributes in a rep are relevant to customers. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content.(Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul)

Stu Heinecke, author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and Get the Meeting!, joins me again on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS Russ Klein, CEO of the American Marketing Association, calls Stu Heinecke the Father of Contact Marketing. Stu admits to naming it. Stu is also a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. Cartoons offer a point of agreement. Stu used cartoons in direct mail campaigns for Rolling Stone and Bon Appétit and set records for responses. He wanted to penetrate the rest of the publishing industry. He put together what he called a ‘contact campaign.’ He sent a cartoon to two dozen VPs of big publishers. He needed a 100-percent response rate. All the contacts responded and became clients. Stu started a multi-million dollar business from an investment of about $100.00. Contact marketing means reaching out to a relatively small group of top influencers. Stu sometimes uses ‘big boards’ that cost him $250.00 each to reach a contact worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. Get the Meeting! is a field guide for How to Get a Meeting With Anyone, full of examples and case studies of what people have done to break through the noise and get in touch with people. Personal meetings have an impact. Stu talks about using personalization for gifts. Wide personalization uses the correct name and address. Deep personalization uses profile scrapes from social or AI tools to learn about your contacts before gifting them. Andy appreciates the human angle. Relationships are about humans. The customer is always thinking, “Why you?” Contact marketing makes you memorable. Daniel Kahneman taught about the power of peak events. Do your contacts love the way you think? Don’t fall into the landscape of identical competitors. How can you be one percent better than everyone else? Pocket campaigns involve engagement devices, such as multi-tools, imprinted with your contact information and a second step to get something more or to watch a video (that places a tracking pixel on the contact’s browser). Stu shares an example of a pocket campaign of a Z-CARD® that folds out into a cartoon poster. The marketer got a sale from the fourth card he shared. Poul Nielsen, a physical trainer, has a rubber card that was printed while stretched on a jig. You stretch it out to read it. People show it around. Poul gets three or four new clients for every card he gives out. Do something fun that resonates with the receiver. Make yourself memorable. One meeting can change everything. Without meetings, nothing happens. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Sean Sheppard, Sales Influencer and the Founder and CEO of GrowthX, joins me again on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS GrowthX is a Silicon Valley venture capital partnership with an accelerator focused on sales and an academy that trains people in sales, marketing, design thinking, and data science and aims at developing markets. Sean describes the ‘lasting-mover advantage’ for companies that own the customer use case. Sean reminds his clients to go slow so they can go fast later. Look first for the customer profile of ‘Mr. Right Now.’ The first into a market is not the last in the market. Apple was not the first GUI; Google was not the first search engine. Sean gives examples. The first company to the market can rarely sustain its position. Sean teaches three keys to build a lasting-mover advantage. The first is to own the use case by earning it through value. The use case is changing at a faster rate than ever. Andy Grove wrote that only the paranoid survive and that we constantly have to be staying out in front of everyone and everything. Sean’s partner, Andrew Goldner, asks people where their focus is. The second key to build a lasting-mover advantage is to figure out, once you own the use case for the customer, how do you own their thoughts and actions around it? Think about what you’ll do next based on what you’ve learned from what you did for your customers yesterday. They will guide you to where you need to go. Sales organizations are wholly focused on acquisition — closing the deal. They invest in marketing, sales support, Sales Executives and technology but forget about customer onboarding, adoption, retention, and growth. The third key to lasting-mover advantage is to design an organization around the knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed for learning, defining, solving for, and owning the use case as it evolves, with the proper roles in place. Who drives the functional data-driven learning loop? Sean suggests it is not an individual contributor but a person with market development responsibility and with certain skills and knowledge — the commercialization leader. ‘Stage relevance’ refers both to the product within the market, and to the qualities of the person that proactively develops and maintains the evolving use case. Andy says you have to keep learning and developing to be prepared. Sean reads biographies, histories, self-help and personal development books — no fiction. Always have a mindset to learn, grow, and do better. Your life will start to change positively. Turn off the TV and read. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Bill Bice, CEO of Boomtime, joins me on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast.KEY TAKEAWAYS Boomtime brings scale and efficiency to marketing. They combine technology and expertise to provide marketing as a service. Aggregating data opens up insights into your buyers, whatever size your company may be. Bill has founded several companies whose success correlates directly to the effectiveness of their go-to-market strategies. Bill started Boomtime to improve his companies’ marketing results. Bill first asks a CEO from where their last couple of clients came. If they were referrals, that company is a prospect for Boomtime’s word-of-mouth marketing service. Bill follows a structured interview process with new clients to understand their business. Boomtime provides a content-driven approach to marketing and positions the CEO and their business as thought leaders. Boomtime helps you to do three things better: 1) capture the leads and referrals that are already coming in, 2) follow up on those leads, and 3) stay top-of-mind with the audience you are growing. Use CRM to track your clients. Create great content for your audience about their problems and your solutions for them. Bill uses the insight-driven Challenger Sale. Use your insights to leave your clients better off because of meeting with you. Gartner’s new research suggests that while buyers have access to all the information, they need sales reps to help them make sense of it. Sales reps must be consultants. Prospects you don’t sell can still give you referrals. You can’t sell without relationships. You can’t sell only by relationships. The main advantage small companies have is putting a face on their business. Real people are behind the solution. “About us” is an essential page on your site. Tell the story exactly how you want to tell it. Put passion into the bios, not just facts. Direct the viewer to the next page to visit. Drive the customer experience on your site. SEO has changed dramatically. SEO suppliers charge $2K to $3K a month for effective results. But you don’t need it. Google now evaluates your website as a human does. Focus on a steady flow of great content to attract traffic. Bill has used LinkedIn to build his business. He uses it as the ideal networking event — without the food. Grow your network. Don’t pitch in connection requests; post great embedded content and let clients come to you. You can use a dedicated resource like Boomtime or someone in-house whose job is to run your CEO’s LinkedIn profile and send out connection requests for them. Activity creates conversations. Stay on top of them. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Steve Farber, author of Love is Just Damn Good Business: Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do, joins me on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS People who are great at what they do love their company, team, and customers. Steve explains the impact of translating love into action in your work. Do soft skills make you nervous? Can love be quantified? Steve talks about the net promoter score and employee engagement as examples of love metrics. If you can’t measure something, is it still worthwhile to do? What is the measure of a relationship? If you’re not hitting your numbers, that is a measure of failed relationships. The highest-performing salespeople have great relationships. Selling is all about relationships. Steve shares a case study of a top salesperson who asked herself if her customers loved her. She went on a campaign to gain their love by serving them in a way that showed her love for them. Listen in for her results! How do you develop love? Steve discusses relationships in transactional and complex sales roles. We always want the customer to love our brand, product, and service. Steve tells how to sustain those customer conditions. Can you simultaneously want to serve the customer and close the deal? Steve gives a hypothetical example of a salesperson motivated only by money. Will they be loyal? A sales manager who loves their team will hold their team’s feet to the fire when they are living below potential. Love has high expectations. Love has a low tolerance for negativity. Love is good business! What about employee development? Andy and Steve explore the impetus for improvement. Steve breaks down what he means by doing ‘what you love in the service of people who love what you do.’ It starts with you. How do you find what you love? Steve devotes a section of his book to that question. Don’t wait around for it to dawn on you. Search for it. First, ask, “What do I love about the work that I’m doing now?” Steve talks about his development as a musician and then going into business. He started as a broker and then founded a brokerage. He explains why he was miserable in it, and what he looked for, next. Discover your purpose and apply it to your work. Andy talks about sampling careers before settling on your chosen career path. Steve shares a story for the first time of his son’s motivation for education and where it took him. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Oren Klaff, Managing Director of Intersection Capital and bestselling author of Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal and Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idea is Their Idea, joins me on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS Buyers have become increasingly empowered in the years since Oren wrote Pitch Anything. Now, buyers receive your proposal and then can search everywhere online to find the lowest price. Buying options reduce conversion rates and take the margin out of selling. That’s why Oren wrote Flip the Script. When the buyer chases you, you close sales deals. Andy and Oren discuss maximizers and satisfiers. Anyone who asks you for a proposal plans to ask you for a discount when they compare proposals. Oren finds from his consulting that when buyers are motivated and decide to work with you, that decision is resilient throughout negotiations and distance. But when buyers have many objections, you don’t close deals. Objections come from two reasons: 1. Your status as a salesperson isn’t high enough; 2. You’re not perceived as an expert. Status measures your trustworthiness and credibility. Expertise provides certainty for the buyer. When the buyer assigns you trust and certainty, they want you to do business with them. Oren says the basis of feeling like or being an insider wins deals. It involves being able to talk to someone in their language about their business. People are skeptical of outsiders and their promises. Inception (with credit to the movie) refers to the writing a storyline to ensure that the audience deduces the solution before the characters do. That aha moment makes you feel good. Oren applies that to selling. Oren discounts decision-making theories. Oren does not recommend storytelling in spite of the storytelling culture in which he was raised. Storytelling is too hard for most people to use effectively. Oren explains the Flash Roll. Give the buyer details about your business, their problem, and the probable solution, in their technical language, told quickly, in under 30 seconds, as if you have delivered the solution 1,000 times. Andy recommends listeners to get Oren’s book, FLIP THE SCRIPT. Most of Oren’s customers are respected, technical people of high status who are not interested in cheesy tactics and don’t want to sell. The book shows you how to get your buyer to want and need to buy from you. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul

Chris Spurvey, Business Growth Facilitator and CEO at Chris Spurvey Sales Consulting Inc., joins me on this episode.KEY TAKEAWAYS Chris shares his negative first exposure to sales. He doesn’t respect “pushy” salespeople. At university, Chris and partners started a business. When they sold it, he moved on to become a marketer, not a salesperson. After 10 years, he read a Robert Kiyosaki book and identified himself as an entrepreneur. That led him into sales. Chris’s first sales position was Manager of Business Development for an IT professional services company. Chris remembered the salesman that had sold his family a $3,000 vacuum cleaner; he thought that was how he was supposed to sell. He studied Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy; internalizing their methods didn’t work for Chris. After months of miserable, determined, and unsuccessful efforts, Chris realized he needed a way of selling that was in line with his personality. The more he experimented, the more he found things that worked for him. Chris helps individuals who are not primarily salespeople build relationships and sell in a way that feels good to them, leveraging their strengths to become effective in getting results in sales. Chris’s clients take CliftonStrengths (StrengthsFinder) to learn their strengths. Chris shows people how they can leverage their strengths to sit confidently with a buyer and have a positive selling conversation. Andy quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson on life being an experiment; the more experimentation, the better. Chris quotes Price Pritchett on experimenting on one thing each day to test your limits. Experiments are deliberate. Take a weekly objective look at your accomplishments and decide what to change. John Maxwell advises you to focus on growth and you will meet your goals as you grow. Andy emphasizes reading every day. Companies need to help employees who desire to learn, grow, and flourish. A “sales kickoff” is not training or development. Bob Proctor said if you're not growing, you’re dying. There’s no standing still. Andy advises salespeople to follow the sales process as far as it works for you and to ask your manager for leeway in doing things that work better for you, as long as you hit your numbers. Chris shares a conversation he had with Wes Schaeffer about “sales initiatives.” Andy calls them trust breakers. Buyers can see through your end-of-month motivation, and that’s not the transparency you want with buyers. Find a sales environment that supports your developing in sales, even if it requires investing your money into it. Be about growth, not goals. Chris shares an observation about self-motivation. You need a compelling vision. Powered by ringDNA: the revenue acceleration platform that helps businesses scale growth through AI.Visit ringdna.com/andy for exclusive Sales Enablement content._Formerly the Accelerate! Your Sales podcast with Andy Paul