“Sales is all about discovery.” – Diane Helbig in today’s Tip 809

Are you trying to convince someone to buy from you?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Diane!

Diane Helbig on LinkedIn
Succeed Without Selling
Helbig Enterprises
Accelerate Your Business Growth‬

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’s tip comes from Diane Helbig. Diane focuses her time on advising small business owners and training business leaders. She is the host of the Accelerate Your Business Growth podcast and the author of Succeed Without Selling. Her book recently received the 2020 Top Sales Book Bronze Award. Here she is:

Diane Helbig: Sales is all about discovery. You’re better off learning as much as you can about your prospects, your customers, your competition, and those you network with then you are trying to convince someone to buy from you. No one likes to be sold. People will buy from you when they trust you and they need what you offer. Moreover, you don’t know whether you can or want to help someone until you know them. Some prospects turn out to be a bad fit and that’s okay. You can’t convince anyone that they need what you offer. So stop trying, choose to be curious, to learn wherever you go. And with everyone you encounter, people will trust you and you will identify where the right opportunities exist. Those prospects will realize this as well. You’ll both see the connection and closing the sale will happen naturally.

Scott Ingram: For more about Diane and for a link to get a copy of her book: “Succeed Without Selling,” just click over to DailySales.Tips/809. We’ll have a link to her podcast for you there as well.

Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“The key to gaining a mentor network is quite simple. Just ask a very specific question. ” – Alex Whyte in today’s Tip 808

How do you find mentors?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Alex!

Alex Whyte on LinkedIn
Zscaler

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’s tip comes from Alex Whyte. Alex started his career by helping to build a media startup but pivoted by moving into software sales 4 years ago. Alex was the Number 1 AE at GoCardless globally in 2020 and is now supercharging his software sales career and just joined the Enterprise team at Zscaler. Here he is:

Alex Whyte: Weather Bill Gates or a top salesperson at Salesforce, all high-performers boast mentors in some sort of capacity. The question is always being asked is, where do you find mentors? How do I ask them? Why would they say yes? But in actual fact, you end up over-complicating the process by asking yourself so many questions. The key to gaining a mentor network is quite simple. Just ask a very specific question. Mentors come in various capacities from our long quarterly sessions to regular five-minute exchanges, but what’s constant in all successful and prosperous mentor-mentee relationships are very specific asks. Clear actions or next steps and honest reporting. Asking someone to help you be a better salesperson and close more deals. It’s a very broad topic and therefore difficult for your mentor to quantify and provide you with clear advice that is relevant to you. Whereas asking your mentor how to know whether you have a good champion, a quantifiable pain, and therefore a strong deal is clear enough to enable them to provide you with clear advice to which you can action immediately and report your findings back to them. In summary, make your ask specific which in turn makes go actions clear, and report your results back to your mentor. It is simple as that.

Scott Ingram: If you want more from Alex, I’ve got over 100 more minutes ready for you, because Alex is the star of the latest Sales Success Stories podcast episode that just released this morning. We talk a lot more about building mentor networks in that conversation, and cover a ton of other ground besides. As always you’ll find a link at DailySales.Tips/808

Once you’ve downloaded that episode. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“You have to think carefully and design an experience that helps the customer move their decision-making from the early to the middle and the end game.” – Anthony Coundouris in today’s Tip 807

What is your ‘Wow’ moment?

Join the conversation below and share your experience!

4Qs Framework
run_frictionless Website
run_frictionless Youtube Channel
run_frictionless: How to free a founder from a sales
Anthony Coundouris on LinkedIn

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’s tip comes from Anthony Coundouris, and is the final installment in his four part series on Sales Time Management series. Anthony has a decade of experience consulting to technology and software-as-a-service startups. He specializes in designing automated sales and marketing systems, and is the author of the book run_frictionless. Here he is:

Anthony Coundouris: Thanks Scott for having me on the show. In today’s daily sales tip I’d like to teach you sales time management. I’m going to show you how you can save hours of time by planning just three ‘Wow’ moments with your customer. If you guessed, I’m an Australian, you guessed right. Fun fact about Australians. In 2019, 30% of us were born overseas. It seems your chances of getting a visa to Australia have pretty good. Now he’s the definition of wow moments.

Wow moments or key interactions are turning points in the customer journey. Wow moments occur when significant value is delivered to a customer, they are the interactions that have the greatest impact on achieving the customer’s goal. Here’s why you want to focus on wow moments.

Our research shows, if you serve small business owners, you can be supporting between 10 to 15 interactions to create a customer. If you serve enterprise decision-makers, you’re likely to be serving 25 upwards of 50 interactions before a customer is created. The good news is you can save yourself a lot of time by boiling down these 25 or 50 interactions into 3 you need to master. Throughout coaching classes, we’ve found that a business can be reduced to 3 wow moments. If delivered flawlessly. These three interactions deliver 90% of the value required to create a customer.

In a form of business, I ran called future books. We served startup founders, accounting and compliance services in Southeast Asia. Our first wow moment was delivered as an email that read something like this, while we are busy drafting you a proposal, check out these important dates. This report took the founders by surprise. It often arrived in their inbox within a few hours of them having made contact with us. It told founders things they knew and didn’t know about the business. A single sheet told them where compliance was broken in their business, and if they were facing any late penalty fees to the customer, this wow moment delivered a lot of value very quickly. It costs us around 35 years to produce this wow moment. However, it got our brand noticed, helped lock out competitors, and gave us valuable intel on their business, saving us time later.

Remember wowing your customer doesn’t mean pulling a rabbit out of a hat. You have to think carefully and design an experience that helps the customer move their decision-making from the early to the middle and the end game.

Let’s sum up.

If you did what we did and decided to design three wow moments, you made a good call. Here’s why. Firstly, you saved a sort of time by boiling down 25 interactions into just 3, which deliver the majority of the value to your customer, saving you training costs. Secondly, you possess intel about your customer, not known to your competitors. This made it easy for you to take control of the sale and pitch products, your competitors never imagined. Lastly, producing this wow moment didn’t require you to talk to the product people in your business. You built it yourselves. So it was quick and easy to operationalize. Back to you, Scott.

Scott Ingram: Wow! Thanks Anthony. If you enjoyed this tip from Anthony and want to learn more about thin-slicing and the 4Qs Framework it belongs to, head over to DailySales.Tips/807 where we’ll have a link to Anthony’s run_frictionless site where you can find that. We’ll also have links to the rest of the tips in this series. DailySales.Tips/807.

Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another wow sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Research who you are interviewing with.” – Prateek Mathur in today’s Tip 806

How do you differentiate your best sales hires?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Prateek

Manager Enablement
Prateek Mathur on LinkedIn
Submit a Sales Tip

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’s tip comes from Prateek Mathur. After leading global sales teams for the last 17 years, Prateek now focuses on helping new sales managers lead smarter, sell more, and grow their careers. Here he is:

Prateek Mathur: Here are four common traits I have seen that I’ve differentiated my best sales hires.

1. Research. Just as you would do for your prospect. Research who you are interviewing with. My best sales hire research my organization, they’ve reviewed glassdoor. Read the last few companies and my personal posts on LinkedIn and research their prospect, which in this case is me as the interviewer.
2. They can tell a story. Sales is all about storytelling and these hires could clearly articulate a deal that they were the proudest of. Now, not just how large the deal was, the company they sold to, but how they ran their sales cycle from identifying the prospect, to running a cadence, having a discovery call, running a demo, overcoming internal and external obstacles to actually solving a problem for their prospects.
3. Their value-added. Based on the story, they could articulate how they would add value, not just by exceeding quota, but by actually adding value to the team, but the skills they bring to the organization and to me as the hiring manager.
4. They always have questions. They conduct an interview, just like a discovery call, and try to understand more about the team, the role, the organization, and me to make a decision that is beneficial for the longterm.

Scott Ingram: To connect with Prateek on LinkedIn and to learn more about his Manager Enablement program, just click over to DailySales.Tips/806

Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Your biggest competitor is the status quo” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 805

Do you configure your own sales process?

Join the conversation below and feel free to share your thoughts!

[email protected]
Books by Jeff Bajorek
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
The Why And The Buy Podcast

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. Here’s this week’s tip from Jeff Bajorek:

Jeff Bajorek: I work with a lot of sales reps who don’t work deals as long as they should. They give up on their prospects way too soon. And I think the common reason for this lack of persistence is a misunderstanding of who your biggest competitor is. Now, look, your buyer’s sense of urgency to make a purchase is almost never as high or as intense as your urgency to make the sale. So you need to temper your expectations right off the bat, but recognize that the competitor that you’re going up against in almost any situation is not the outfit across town. It’s not the big logo that you compete with on the internet. It’s your own prospects status quo. That’s right. Their willingness to do nothing at all to stay nice and warm and safe and cozy in their own predicament. Sometimes, yes, I know this doesn’t make any sense because people want to improve, right. Companies need to grow, right. It’s still easier to do nothing than it is to invite the risk involved with a learning curve and a new process adoption. And all of those things that you’re selling, even though the end result and outcome is going to be amazing, right?

So I want you to do one thing as a result of this tip. I want you to reconfigure your own sales process, your own prospecting cadences, your own intentions behind everything you do in the process. And I want you to gear them toward the status quo rather than worrying about the other companies out there that might be buying for the same process, or I’m sorry, for the same prospects and the same customers. You need to get their buy-in to do anything at all before you worry about getting them to do what you want them to do. And when you recognize this, you can go back in your career. You can go back, particularly in your recent memory, and recognize all the times where you thought you had a deal knocked out of the park. You were ready to go. And then all of a sudden nothing happened. It’s almost always due to the fact that you missed the concept, that your biggest competitor is the status quo.

Scott Ingram: For more from Jeff, the video version of this tip, and even your opportunity to join the listener list. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/805 and we’ll have everything for you there.

Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Adding inside sales skills is crucial to your business and to your customer relationships.” – Dawn Grooters in today’s Tip 804

How do you sell?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Dawn!

Broken Vessel Sales Solutions
Dawn Grooters on Instagram
Dawn Grooters on Facebook
Dawn Grooters on LinkedIn

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’s tip comes from Dawn Grooters. Dawn is the founder of Broken Vessel Sales Solutions. She uses her 18+ years of buying and sales experience to consult with companies and train her clients to increase sales. Dawn has represented several vendors for a variety of retailers through outside sales, inside sales, and key account management. Here she is:

Dawn Grooters: Inside sales is different than outside sales. Let me explain what inside sales is and the difference. The role of inside sales is to sell products or services through phone calls, emails, and other online channels. So think social media or virtual meetings. For inside sales, you are primarily using phone calls, emails, and other online services to generate an order. And you’re not selling products and services face to face. Inside sales does not rely on a customer to physically be in front of you to buy products or services. So you can be talking to customers on the phone, taking orders via email, and having virtual meetings. And this would all be considered inside sales. And inside sales model can be used in conjunction with any other sales model or by itself.

Now the opposite of inside sales is outside sales, which is actually meeting your customers face to face. In a traditional outside sales position, you are physically in front of your customer and you can use your verbal non-verbal written, and visual communication skills. Along with all of your senses to sell a product. Your customer can see and touch a product, and you can see their reaction to see how interested the customer actually is. You can take cues on how to help your customers from their demeanor, their body language. And of course the words they say.

With inside sales, you don’t get access to all of your senses or your communication skills. You primarily rely on verbal communication, what you hear and say and what your customer says. It is important to listen to the words your customer is saying and not saying, their tone of voice background noise, and to ask questions. You use your tone of voice and words to describe a product or service and answer questions. You can also use email and online services as written and visual communication. And inside sales rep does not get to use nonverbal communication skills. So they don’t get to read a customer’s body language and the customer doesn’t get to touch and feel the products, but you can be successful using inside sales skills in your business. And to do that, you need excellent verbal communication skills to sell a product or service. Focus on your customers, communicate all the information they need to know, and continue to follow up with them. Especially now, when you can’t be in front of your customers like you want to, adding inside sales skills is crucial to your business and to your customer relationships.

Scott Ingram: Do yourself a favor and connect with Dawn on LinkedIn right now. We’ll have a link for you to do that and to learn more about Broken Vessel Sales Solutions at DailySales.Tips/804

Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Use your skepticism to validate and ask more why and how questions.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 803

Are you sure about your process? 

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Submit a Sales Tip
Scott Ingram on LinkedIn

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.

If you listen to these tips on the day they’re released. Thank you, and this tip is especially for you, but I’ll keep it relevant for you even if you’re coming to it after April 1st.

In sales I think it’s important, especially on April 1st, to have a healthy dose of skepticism and paranoia. Being just a little bit skeptical about everything your buyers tell you should prompt you to always think about digging a little deeper. I’m not suggesting that they’re outright lying to you, but sometimes people just don’t know. You might be talking with someone about their buying process, and they walk you through the whole thing. But are you really sure that that’s the process? Is it possible things have changed recently. Have they made enough purchases like this in the past to be intimately familiar with the process? That’s just one example. Use your skepticism to validate and ask more why and how questions.

You should also be just a little bit paranoid and regularly ask yourself. What could go wrong? What could mess up the timing of this deal? Then use that paranoia and the answers to those questions to be a bit more proactive. Find ways to get ahead of those risk factors and address them before they blow up your deal.

I know, not as much fun as an actual April Fools prank, but perhaps this is a little more valuable. We ended up putting most of our creative energy into the “Whatever it Takes” email that we sent earlier this week. If you’re not already on the listener list and getting those emails, let’s fix that! Just click over to DailySales.Tips/803 and drop in your name and email address so you can be fully in the loop. There are a couple of significant things we’re getting ready to share with you. One coming a little later this month, and another even bigger announcement likely in the May timeframe. What’s ironic is my April Fools tip from a couple of years ago kinda, sorta hints at what might lie ahead.

Anyway, don’t believe everything you see and hear today, and be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“The most important thing is to know who I’m selling to and why.” – Nancy Nardin in today’s Tip 801

How about you? Do you have an amazing sales tech landscape?

Join the conversation below and go check out the links!

Nancy Nardin on LinkedIn
Nancy’s Sales Tech Landscape
Smart Selling Tools
Sales Tech Podcast
Smart Selling Tools Founder, Nancy Nardin, on the SalesTech Landscape

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’s tip comes in the form of a clip from a brand new podcast that we just launched yesterday. Part of what I guess now is the Sales Success Media Podcast Network, but I’m not hosting this one, my friend Thom Singer is doing that, because frankly, I’ve got enough to do. This clip comes from his conversation with Nancy Nardin. Nancy is the Founder of Smart Selling Tools where one of the things she’s done is create an incredible image showing the sales tech landscape. Here she is with Thom talking about that image:

Thom Singer: So you have this great graphic that is your 2001 B2B Enterprise SalesTech Landscape. And I can see it. Obviously, most people are just listening to this, but I can see you on video and you have the landscape is your background. It’s an awesome graphic, but I get the sense that you’re not the type of person who just creates something. So it’s an awesome graphic. What led you to create the landscape?

Nancy Nardin: Yeah, Well, in fact, you’re so right, because I resisted putting together all these logos of all the different vendors that were out there and categorizing them for the longest time, because I felt like, well, what’s good is it gonna do? It’s certainly interesting. And it’s one of our most popular and viral, if you will, kind of things, when we put it out. People are sharing it everywhere. They kind of is mind-blowing that there’s so many solutions. But when I finally went to do it, I said, look, it’s gotta be done. I’m the one to do it. So how can I do it in a way that is going to actually tell people, what do you do with all of this? And so I built the landscape on a framework and the framework I actually borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy.  So I thought, well, you know…

Thom Singer: I like this, it’s a pyramid taken me to the top.

Nancy Nardin: That’s right. That’s right. And you know, what’s at the very bottom, the most fundamental thing on Maslow’s hierarchy is, well, first thing is you got to stay alive, right? So I was thinking about what’s the most important thing for a salesperson to need to do? Not a sales organization, but a salesperson. And that is, and it’s not to hit quota because that comes later. But if I want to hit quota and I want to do all those things that I have to be done, the most important thing is to know who I’m selling to and why. If I’m spending time selling to people or companies that aren’t as likely to buy as someone that I’m not calling up right then I’m not going to use my precious time wisely. I only have so many hours in the day. So I need to know as a salesperson, how am I going to prioritize my limited time? Who am I going to call? Why are they good prospects? What am I going to say to them so that I can get them to engage? So that sorts the who to sell to and why, or prioritizing.

So the very upper left box on my landscape is all about how do you prioritize? What are the tools that can help you do that? Now, once you have all those tools in place and you feel real good about that, of course, you need to get those people to engage with you. And that’s not easy because we’ve got, 10 times the number of salespeople. Making 10 times the number of phone calls and sending 10 times the number of emails because of all this technology has made that possible. So how do you get through? Well, so there’s lots of different technology now that can help you actually engage with those people. So that’s the next level up.

So that’s how to read the landscape from left to right. That’s the very top layer is all about salespeople. How can I get all the way from prioritizing to not only closing, but the ultimate, which is how do I get my prospects or my customers to buy again? How can I upsell and cross-sell and continue that cycle? And now we have the light layers down, which are things like, how can I train my reps? How can I manage my organization? How can I make sure I have the right data in our CRM solutions? And then finally, of course, the actual CRM of layer, which has around 500 solutions in it, just the CRM solution.

Scott Ingram: There’s lots of links in this one. If you’ll click over to DailySales.Tips/801 you can find a link to Nancy’s Sales Tech Landscape. We’ll also have links so you can connect with Nancy and Smart Selling Solutions. We’ll also have a link to this full episode. There are actually 3 episodes of the Sales Tech Podcast available right now. You can hear my intro episode with Thom where we talked about why we decided to launch the show, the interview with Nancy as well as an interview with Scott Brinker the Platform Ecosystem VP at Hubspot who’s known to many as the Chief Martech.

Again, links to all of those things at DailySales.Tips/801, but I would love it if you would do a quick search in your podcast player right now for the Sales Tech Podcast, hit subscribe and let me know what you think.

Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“You capitalized on the investment you made in the initial task by creating a follow-up task.” – Anthony Coundouris in today’s Tip 800

Do you schedule follow-up tasks?

Join the conversation below and check out the links!

4Qs Framework
run_frictionless Website
run_frictionless Youtube Channel
run_frictionless: How to free a founder from a sales
Anthony Coundouris on LinkedIn

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’s tip comes from Anthony Coundouris, and is a continuation of his Sales Time Management series. Anthony has a decade of experience consulting to technology and software-as-a-service startups. He specializes in designing automated sales and marketing systems, and is the author of the book run_frictionless. Here he is:

Anthony Coundouris: Thanks Scott, for having me on the show. In today’s Daily Sales Tip, I’d like to teach you sales time management. I’m going to show you how you can save hours of time by scheduling follow-up tasks. If you guessed I’m an Australian, you guessed right. A fun fact about Australians. One of our former prime ministers set a world record drinking a third of a gallon of beer in 11 seconds. While on the subject to be that favorite breakfast we call Vegemite was created from leftover yeast, used to make beer. Indeed, Australians love beer, and here’s the definition of a follow-up task.

In the previous Daily Sales Tip, we discussed how scheduling an email to arrive at a particular time increases the chance it’s red. However, there is a chance a customer will not open my email. So as a safety measure, I schedule a follow-up action to contact the customer should I not hear from them. Here’s why you want to begin scheduling follow-up tasks.

If we fail to follow up, we lose the investment or time made contacting the customer in the first place. Follow up tasks, have a second benefit. They organize us. The biggest question salespeople face each morning is what do I do next? Well, if you practice what I’m suggesting, you’ll fill the next few days, weeks with follow-up tasks that close sales. Instead of guessing, or at worst procrastinating, you simply open your calendar, CRM app, or strategic plan, and you know what to do next.

In our previous Daily Sales Tip, I gave an example where I wrote to a customer asking them to post a review on a service we delivered. The customer did not respond but did reply to the follow-up email sent three days later, they explained they are on holiday until the beginning of November. I booked a second follow-up task to remind the customer in mid-November to post a review. And by the end of November, the customer posted a five-star.

To make this Daily Sales Tip work. You have to teach yourself to book follow-up tasks now, not later when you get back to the office and forget. Right now, there are probably half a dozen tasks that you’ve completed that need a follow-up task schedule. Get onto them as soon as you get to the end of this podcast.

Let’s sum up. If you did what we did and decided to create follow-up tasks, you made a good call. Here’s why firstly, you capitalized on the investment you made in the initial task by creating a follow-up task. Only 10% of our customers provide a review on first contact. However, 80% provide a review on the second follow-up contact. Secondly, when the sales manager asks you, what have you got on your plate this week? You had an answer. By reading your follow-up tasks. You have an idea how close you are to making your quota this month. And lastly, you blew away a customer by doing what you said you’d do. You remember to contact them when they returned from holiday. You left a positive impression. Thanks, Scott. Back to you.

Scott Ingram: Thanks Anthony. I love the little bits of Australian trivia at the beginning of these, and I’ve got a follow-up task that you can act on right now. Click over to DailySales.Tips/800 There you’ll find links to connect with Anthony and to get access to his 4Qs online sales training where you can try one course for free.

Once you’ve completed your follow-up task. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!