“If you work on projects of any depth, you got to be pretty good at presenting multiple options, understanding their cash flow requirements, understanding what they prefer, and being open and honest with that.” – Luke Floyd in today’s Tip 1500
What do you do in sales?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Luke!
Luke Floyd on LinkedIn
Unlimiting Beliefs and Owning Your Success
Luke Floyd on Sales Success Stories Interview
Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’m going to give this place of honor to Luke Floyd in this 1500th tip. This is an excerpt from my personal favorite presentation at last year’s Sales Success Summit, but there’s so much great content that comes out of that event that the audience ratings determined that it was tied for third. Here’s a portion of Luke’s talk on Unlimiting Beliefs and Owning Your Success:
Luke Floyd: The second one to talk through, my job is to hit quota. So a good way you can tell, if this is you, if you’re an SDR, your job is to book demos. If you’re a new business, your job is to produce revenue out of thin air. If a client won’t buy from me, they’re a waste of time. What this is is a number has been put on you, effectively dehumanizing what you do, removing the human capacity and capability from what you do. And now you look at You equals revenue, client equals revenue or no revenue. What a terrible way to live. So we’re going to test this.
If you’re a SDR, your job is not to book 10 demos a month. Your job is to start impactful conversations. How well you do that translates into how many demos you book them up. If you’re a net new revenue, your job is not to close or hit quota. Your job is to do all of these core competencies and quota is the byproduct. It is the outcome of what you do. So when I think about what I do at Deel, I broker fair value between Deel and clients with potential projects. That’s what I do. In that, all those core competencies I have to be good at.
Quota is a lagging measurement that might or might not be relevant based on how I do my job. So this is what I do. My $1.2 million quota is not what I do. So if you have never taken a chance to do this test, it’s actually really interesting. But if you think about, all right, you’re going to be a seller for the next 5, 10 years, maybe you move in management, whatever it is. What are the core competencies if you want to get better that you want to get 1 % better at every day? Because I promise you getting better at demos really doesn’t matter.
Communication skills, how well you can tell a story across an account, how curious you are to be able to find out and get those interesting details like we were talking yesterday about the procurement, right, with a bonus and all that. How does Lynn even broach the conversation about procurement? She doesn’t treat them like a number. Number one. So you get people to open up. That’s not something that’s going to be taught in a hack or a tip or a trick. That’s not focusing on what email template gets you the most opens. None of that stuff matters. What matters is that you continually develop the core competencies in your field because those things change, but the core competencies won’t. So your ability to start conversations and stand out is a core competency, prospecting.
Communications, how well you send follow-up emails, how well are you recapping their priorities and consistently circulating those priorities across the company. Consensus building, telling the story. I meet with, for example, accounting managers who hate their payroll workflow. It takes them a week at the end of the month. I talk with their CFO. Their CFO does not care about how much time it takes them. Their CFO cares about what could they be doing with that time saved on my strategic initiative. That person doesn’t know that’s what the CFO cares about because that’s like five bosses above. They never talked to the CFO, but I get to. So I get to build consensus across those.
Meeting administration. How to run a good meeting is an art itself. Setting strong agendas, follow-ups, recaps, pre-looks, all that good stuff, and then financial modeling. If you work on projects of any depth, you got to be pretty good at presenting multiple options, understanding their cash flow requirements, understanding what they prefer, and being open and honest with that. So if you can’t tell, what are my core competencies that I work at, you probably think your job is to produce quota. You’re not a number. Your job isn’t to produce a number. Your job is to do this stuff. The number is what happens. And I can tell how well you… Supposedly, we can tell how well you’re doing this stuff by quota and how much you’re closing. So there’s a disconnect there.
Scott Ingram: We just released the full audio from this talk on the Sales Success Stories podcast yesterday, so as always you’ll find links to that, the video version and to connect with Luke at DailySales.Tips/1500, wow, that’s a lot of tips. Keep coming back, because we’ll have another one tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Thanks for listening!