“When your confidence is unshakable, you build trust, you build their belief, and you will more than likely have the next meeting, the next step, or the sale.” – Meshell Baker in today’s Tip 1860

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number one. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Meshell Baker, our favorite sales confidence igniter and authentic selling crusader. Here she is:

Meshell Baker: Hello. Let’s talk about excellence. And the way we’ll do that is we’ll go with 5 P’s. So first, Proper, Preparation, Prevents, Poor Performance. That’s how you establish yourself to deliver excellence. You must prepare for what you want to create and the desired outcome. Now, there’s 5 additional P’s that I’ll go through to show you how to set up a powerful meeting and create valuable and profitable outcomes.

First, Purpose. Why are you having the meeting? What is the purpose? Are you clear on what you want the outcome to be, what the opportunity is, who will be there, what they’re looking for? What is the purpose of the meeting? Did they ask for the meeting? Are you cold calling? Were you referred by someone? Where did you meet them? What is the purpose of the meeting? This must be clear because the clarity of this purpose is what establishes a strong, unshakable foundation for your confidence as the rest of the meeting progresses.

The next P is Product. What is it that you are attempting to get across? What is it you’re selling? What are you offering the person? What is it that you will be discussing and looking at as the opportunity as a solution to solve the buyer’s conundrum, their challenge, their issue, their problem? What is the product that will be offered and placed in front of them as the opportunity.

The next P, People. Who are the key people that will be involved? Have you taken a chance to look at them? Have you connected with them on LinkedIn? Have you flanked? If it’s one person, Do they have a supervisor? Is there another decision maker involved? Is there someone else in the department? How have you taken the time to do your due diligence and research on the person or people that you will be meeting with that are involved in the decision making to say yes to the product?

Next one is the Process. What is the process aside from you just meeting with them? Is there something that they can review before? Have you sent it to them? Are there additional steps? Or is there something that you need to have ready for when they come? Are you doing a presentation? What is the process? Is there an agenda when they show up, are you able to take them through the steps? This is what we’re going to do today, and this is where we can come out the next time. Are you prepared to secure a meeting for a next step if necessary? What are the process of what takes you from that initial purpose to a profitable outcome? Do you have that outline and are you ready to maneuver and adapt accordingly depending on the outcomes of the meeting.

And the last P, this is Preparation. And this is all the checklist. What is your action plan? Everything that you need throughout this step so that you know that as you go through this, your confidence is unshakable. When you prepare, it does not mean that everything is going to happen accordingly. Remember, in sales, all bets are off that things are going to go the way you plan. Preparation just has you ready to adapt and maneuver and be flexible in the face of circumstances. When things don’t go your way, your confidence, your belief in favorable outcomes is unshakable because people buy based off of who you show up to be in the midst of this meeting. And when your confidence is unshakable, you build trust, you build their belief, and you will more than likely have the next meeting, the next step, or the sale. Have a great day selling.

For more from Meshell, including the transcript of this tip, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1718. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“If you want to drive urgency and change now, you need to trigger some sort of emotional reaction to that change and why it needs to happen now.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 1859

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number two. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from David Weiss. David is the Chief Revenue Officer of the Sales Collective and founder of DealDoc. Here he is:

David Weiss: What’s up, everybody? David Weiss here with another tip of the day. This one is around creating urgency. Believe it or not, you can absolutely create urgency within organizations to do things now. Just like you as a human have things that come up that weren’t a priority, that are now a priority. You can absolutely create that. Companies are just groups of people. If you can trigger urgency in a person, you can trigger urgency in a group of people. The way you do that typically first, is by triggering some degree of fear. This is all about external forces making current state things and goals unstable. If people feel like whatever their world they’re living in today will be a different world in the future, they will normally have, in some degree of change needs to happen in order to create, again, stability. They’re going to change to get that level of stability. So, as an example, if they have certain business level goals that they’re currently not able to achieve or starting to struggle achieving, and you can paint a picture that if they don’t, it’s going to get worse and worse and worse over time. That is something that people then can mobilize around to make change.

Now, you then need to implicate those problems. You now need to figure out this unsustainable, fear based future and then implicate it down to a metric level that says, look, these are exactly the areas that are going to fail if you don’t do this, and here’s how much they’re going to fail by. And here’s where you are today, and here’s where we can get you in the future. And the value of that change is right there. You then take that and you need to make it unignorable. So what people mistake in making the problem unignorable is they don’t rally enough cross-functional teams and they don’t rally enough end users. You need to talk to enough people in the field and across different departments and understand how that problem is going to impact them. Because if it’s just a, you know, one or two people that are complaining about this or asking for funding around this, it’s very easy to ignore that. But if you’ve got 10, 20, 30, 40 supporters across a business, across different departments, in regions and levels, and silos that are all agreeing with you, change is way more easy to be made. And it’s something that a business leader often can’t ignore. You then need to financially justify it. So that’s creating a business case around it and once you’ve done all of those steps you can get an executive to pay attention and in theory sponsor it.

So again, if you want to drive urgency and change now, you need to trigger some sort of emotional reaction to that change and why it needs to happen now. You need to implicate it down to a metric level. You need to make the problem unignorable. You need to financially justify it when you do those things. You can often get executive sponsorship for that change right now. Hopefully, that was helpful. If I can double click on that for any listeners please let me know.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with David and learn more about him, The Sales Collective and DealDoc, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1751. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“If you feel uncomfortable in the role that you’re in, if you feel like you’re not behaving the way that Mike and I just described, reach out, do an assessment, and also just take a look in the mirror and say, “What am I doing to make the profession more noble?” Because it should be.” – Mike Simmons & Jacquelyn Nicholson in today’s Tip 1858

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number three. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip features both Jacquelyn Nicholson and Mike Simmons in another of their joint tips. Here they are:

Mike Simmons: Why do people hate sales?

Jacquelyn Nicholson: Oh, funny story. So I encountered this in a personal way as a person who’s been selling for over 20 years in my own life, where I was at a wedding sitting at a table next to a gentleman I didn’t know. He was older than I was by many years, and I asked him what he did for a living, and he told me he was in sales. And at the time, I was also in sales. And my gut reaction when he said this to me was, Dear God, if I am still in sales when I am this man’s age, somebody please put me out of my misery. And that was this visceral reaction I had at the time. I don’t know why, but I will say this. It’s probably for the same reason that people “hate sales.” It’s because the profession has been given such a bad name from the bad actors that are in the profession who are slick or sleazy or the always be closing mentality, the go, go, go, hustle, hustle, hustle, culture has made people hate people in sales because they perceive sales as that. When in reality, folks like you and me and our compatriots at Sales Success Stories, as well as people People like Dale Dupree at the Sales Rebellion have said, no, that is not what sales is. Sales is serving people. It is helping people. It is solving problems. It is treating your customers the way they want to be treated and treating them in a way that you’re honoring what they’re trying to do. What business problems are they trying to solve? Personally, what’s in it for them? When sales is done that way, nobody should hate sales. But that’s why people hate sales. It’s that same reaction I had because in In my mind, I was only doing it at the time, 20 years ago, because I needed to do it. And then what has happened to me, what’s evolved in me over the last 20 years is just really love it. And I see it as my chance to serve people. And so for me, It’s how I used to think, which is funny, considering I’m in this job.

Mike Simmons: Yes. Sales is, you hit it, sales is an act of service. It’s about connecting the dots between problems that are known or unknown and solutions that are known or unknown, and helping to make those connections happen better and faster. It is truly an act of service. It is an act of leadership. Awesome story. Thank you.

Jacquelyn Nicholson: Funny story.

Mike Simmons: What’s the call to action?

Jacquelyn Nicholson: I think the call to action here for sales professionals is realize that if you feel uncomfortable in the role that you’re in, if you feel like you’re not behaving the way that Mike and I just described, reach out, do an assessment, and also just take a look in the mirror and say, What am I doing to make the profession more noble? Because it should be.

Mike Simmons: If you’re not getting that leadership inside your organization, look at the Sales Success Society as a place to find a group of leaders who are going through this path together and are focused on elevating the profession and serving clients and sharing experience and sharing questions and sharing parts of their journey. Ask those reflective questions, and if you need help, look at the Sales Success Society.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with both Jacquelyn and Mike, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1708. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Play a role that only you can play, and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been playing it. Your expertise matters. Slow down, take up space, help your prospect think through their situation, and that’s when really good outcomes happen.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 1857

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number four. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jeff Bajorek is here with a great story and a great lesson to help us close out the week. Here he is:

Jeff Bajorek: I spent the formative years of my sales career in orthopedic medical devices. I stood in a lot of operating rooms providing real-time technical support to my customers, the surgeons who were using my implants. One of the implants that I sold was for total knee replacement, and it utilized a state-of-the-art, quarter-of-a-million dollar computer-guided navigation system to make sure that measurements were exact. It also gave us an opportunity to approach the surgical technique differently, which was very important. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But because of the way we were approaching the surgery, and it was different than the way a lot of surgeons had been taught, those surgeons required a lot of our expertise and a lot of our context, and really to interpret the data the machine was giving you. It wasn’t giving them new information, it was just giving them information in a different way. That’s one of the reasons I stood in a lot of operating rooms during these cases.

Well, this was my first case by myself. My manager/partner/mentor was on his way to Tucson for our national sales meeting. I actually had to reschedule my flight to grow my business and stand in this case. But that’s what you do when you’re in sales, right? I was assured that I would be okay. I was assured that I had done enough of these with my partners and with technical expertise that I could do this by myself.

Jeff, you’re ready. It’s going to go great. Doc knows our stuff. You know our stuff. You know, Doc, we’re going to be in good shape. Well, the case wasn’t so straightforward. I’m standing there 26 years old, and a surgeon getting The information that he’s not entirely sure how to interpret turns around, looks me in the eye, and says, Jeff, what do I do now?

Now, my pucker factor, that’s an industry term, was about an 11 out of 10 at this point. There’s a patient on the table relying on me and the surgeon and everybody else in that room to do a great job so that their knee could function well again. This is someone who’s been in pain for a long time, long enough to undergo major your surgery to correct it. That’s the weight that we all carried on ourselves as we entered that room. He turns around and looks at me and says, Jeff, what do I do now?

Now, after I gulped, took a couple of deep breaths, I gathered myself and said, Hold on, what is it telling you? What is it telling you that you don’t like? How can we verify what it’s telling us? Is the computer wrong or are we just getting information that we didn’t expect? How do we validate through the redundancies in the system that we’re actually getting accurate information? If this is accurate information and we don’t like it, how can we proceed safely a step at a time? How do we make sure that we’re doing right by the patient? Only after we slowed down, only after we took it a step at a time, only after he went through those redundancies did he start to appreciate the information that he was given.

Finally, he said, No, you know what? That was strange information, but based on what I’m seeing, I think we can proceed. So he did. The case went beautifully. Despite that little tense moment or two in the middle, the outcome was ideal. We did a great job. The surgeon did a great job making sure that the implant was put incorrectly and the patient had great range of motion, pain-free, the whole thing. I obviously spent time making sure that the outcomes came out the way that we did, and that patient did great.

What was really interesting is, afterward, we were just doing a little bit of a postmortem on how we could get better. We did that often. We learned that there were some things that we didn’t pick up on in the preoperative planning that would have primed us to get that weird information and wouldn’t have been so tense in the middle.

But the moral of this story here is that even though I was only I’m 26 years old, even though this surgeon had been operating since before I was born, I still played a role in that case. I played a role not just in interpreting the data, not just in reminding that surgeon of what he already knew so he could do his thing. I brought down the blood pressure in the room by reminding that surgeon of what he knew he was capable of. I brought that surgeon back down to Earth by helping him do what he does best. As a sales rep, as that trusted advisor, that is often what you do best.

When you play your role and enable your customers to play theirs, when you do what only you can do that enables them to do what only they can do, that’s how you become an indispensable part of their team. That’s how you earn customers for life. That’s how they rave about you and tell their friends about you.

Don’t abdicate that role. Yes, you’re selling a product. Yes, you’re selling it’s an implant or a widget or whatever it is. And yes, at the end of the day, you’re going to get a commission check, hopefully, for selling those things. But your role is often something bigger, at least when you’re trying to build a long-term reputation and a long-term business out of that.

So don’t abdicate that role. Don’t forget how valuable you are, even if sometimes that value is just to bring the collective level or the collective blood pressure down in that operating room or boardroom, whatever it is. You play a role that only you can play, and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been playing it. Your expertise matters. Slow down, take up space, help your prospect think through their situation, and that’s when really good outcomes happen.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Jeff and to get his newsletter where he shares ideas like these every Sunday, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1717, and once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“In the process of fact finding and conversing, you’ll often develop new insights, valuable nuggets and start to build relationships that can all serve you in different ways well into the future.” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 1856

1275: Generating Insights in Enterprise Accounts – Trong Nguyen

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number five. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I want to talk about dealing with complexity either in complex deals or complex organizations. In these situations, there are often a ton of moving parts, a lot of different people who all have different perspectives and sometimes figuring out what’s really going on can be a challenge.

It’s times like these where it makes sense to find as many good sources of information as you can. Of course some of these will be public things, but more often than not it’s going to come down to conversations. You want to try to have conversations above, below, and around the issues you’re trying to understand as you do the real hard work to triangulate the truth. And don’t just think inside the organization. You can also talk to other complimentary vendors, consultants, and the like to get further perspective.

This may sound like a lot of work, and I’m not going to suggest that it isn’t, but you also make yourself way more valuable. In the process of fact finding and conversing, you’ll often develop new insights, valuable nuggets and start to build relationships that can all serve you in different ways well into the future. This scales too, from just making sure you’re not single-threaded and ensuring that you’re in contact with at least a few people in simpler deals to potentially talking with dozens or even hundreds of people in the most complex situations.

Speaking of which, if you go back to tip number 1275 you’ll hear a slightly different variation of this idea from one of the best enterprise sellers I’ve ever known and I know a lot of greats. So for the transcript of this tip you can click over to DailySales.Tips/1706 and to learn more from Trong you can go to DailySales.Tips/1275. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“We need to learn how to bring in executives early in the sales cycle. That’s one of the huge secret weapons of much doing larger deals.” – Jamal Reimer in today’s Tip 1855

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Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip is just a short excerpt from the full presentation audio that we just shared on the Sales Success Stories podcast today featuring Jamal Reimer’s top-rated presentation at last year’s Sales Success Summit on How to 10X your Deal Size Even During the Economic Downturn. Listen to this:

Jamal Reimer: I want you to think about this. You’re only one mega-deal away. You’re one mega-deal away, I mean, the relationships we want, the lifestyles we want, the roles we want, they’re all fueled and supported by the craft that we perfect. Are you ready for the secret? Of all the things that I could share, these are the biggest pieces of doing mega deals that I could share. Here they are.

Number one, executive whispering. I’ll tell you what that is in a minute. Number two, how to craft a mega deal premise. And number three, how to dominate how you run sales cycles because it’s completely different than how you do a sales cycle on a small deal.

All right, number one. Number one revolves around executive engagement. The executives are absolutely, positively necessary not only to be active in the deal, they need to drive the deal. Why? Because there’s too much fear, lack of responsibility, or accountability at the lower tiers to do anything transformative. Everybody’s too scared about doing something wrong, screwing up, not getting promoted, or maybe even getting fired. There are a lot of reps, and I was like this for a long time. There are a lot of reps that are intimidated with thinking about working with executives. Does it give you a little butterfly to talk with senior executives? That was me for a long time, and sometimes, it still is. It depends on the executive. Maybe you’re uncomfortable speaking with executives period. That was me in the early stages of my career. Maybe you could feel confident meeting with an executive once, but if you’re going to deal with them over and over, you’re going to feel like you’re over your head. Or maybe the flavor is that you might feel that, okay, people tell you you look cool, calm, and collected in front of an executive audience. But really inside, you’re feeling all that imposter syndrome, and you fear that everything is just going to fall apart any moment. And that’s just Jack. He’s the only one. He’s the only one who feels imposter syndrome.

Okay, so I have some good news and I have some bad news. Let’s get to the bad news. There is no way around learning this. If you want to become excellent, not only do you need to learn it, this has to become your job description. You need to become executive seller. The good news is, as you start on this journey, you don’t need to go it alone. You don’t need to be the only one in the room or the only one in the ring. You don’t need to go toe to toe with executives on your own from day one.

Now, let’s get into this concept, executive whispering. I define executive whispering as the art and science of working with executives on both sides of the table. There’s many aspects to it, but there are four big ones. We have to learn how to connect cold or warm. We got to connect with senior executives. We have to learn how to engage them in a business conversation. Then we’ve got to maintain getting access to them after they kick us down to work with their project team. Then we’ve got to build them into champions, because with all the energy and conviction that we might have in our product, it’s got to be somebody senior on the customer side to pull that thing over the line because there’s so much inertia within their own organizations.

Anyway, what is the typical way that most reps go about trying to initially connect with senior executives? Peer-to-peer. Customer sign executive. Do you think that’s the common way? Okay, it’s either bottom-up or cold email. And how often does that work? Or how long does it take to work? A long time. A long time. How much time do we have? What’s the maximum number of days that we have to achieve something? 365. That’s just to make our number. But if we want to overachieve 200, 300%, there is no way that we can hang on to these old ways doing business. We have to leverage. We have to leverage things that are oriented to existence, leverage relationships, leverage energy, positive or negative, leverage tools. We have to speed up.

Now, leveraging your own executives in many ways is the secret that’s right up there in front of us. A lot of reps don’t even think of using their own executives because they’re thinking too low. The other lot of reps are the ones who are like, I’ll use my executive at, and these are both not right. We need to learn how to bring in executives early in the sales cycle. That’s one of the huge secret weapons of much doing larger deals.

All right, this is the dynamics. Let’s go through it. Most sellers think of themselves as mountain climbers, thinking that we have to climb on ourselves to get to that senior executive. We got to take every step of the journey. But that’s not right. That’s run-rate thinking. Instead, we should think of ourselves as a heliskeeter who leverages a helicopter to get to the top of the mountain in 10 minutes and spends the rest of the day skiing down the other side. Our executives can be our helicopters. That’s like our first port call to look for a helicopter. This is the way to do it.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Jamal, to grab a copy of his Mega Deal Secrets book, and of course to the full presentation audio over on the Sales Success Stories Podcast, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1715 and you’ll find it all there. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“Pre-planning is more than just information gathering. An effective pre-plan should also give us a roadmap for the conversation.” – Derek Roberts in today’s Tip 1854

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Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number seven. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Derek Roberts. Derek is co-author of the new book, Listen to Sell: How Your Mindset, Skillset, and Human Connections Unlock Sales Performance. He has built, trained, and coached sales teams for three decades. Derek is an executive partner with the sales training firm Integrity Solutions and owns Roberts Business Group. Here he is:

Derek Roberts: Let’s face it, making headway with new prospects and sales isn’t all that easy. So when you do finally get someone to sit down with you and share their needs, or answer questions about what their issues are, how do you make the most of that? Well, one of the first and most powerful things we need to do is pre-plan.

What do we know about them already? What do we need to find out?

In this age of information and technology, there’s no excuse for us not to at least find out the most basic of information about a prospect or a customer before we engage them. But pre-planning is more than just information gathering. An effective pre-plan should also give us a roadmap for the conversation.

For example, much of what we learn in our pre-call research and planning can give us direction on what the customer’s issues are, the prospect’s needs, the areas that we need to engage, perhaps even the behavior styles of the individual that we’re engaging so that when we approach them, we have the strongest and most concise way to engage them in an effective conversation from the beginning.

Likewise, a strong pre plan can often direct an interview stage in a very specific and powerful way. We may ask questions that penetrate into deeper needs than the customer may have even considered for themselves, and those questions can then drive the kinds of solutions that may ultimately demonstrate our value to the customer. But a pre-call plan allows you to structure those questions ahead of time, rather than trying to scramble for them in the middle of the conversation.

Also, behavior styles can factor powerfully into your pre-call plan. A little bit of advanced research, just talking to someone in the organization, perhaps even a receptionist, about how someone likes to communicate, the way in which they engage other people can tell you a lot about the best way to approach that individual, the way that you may even structure your questions, whether it’s an outcome based question or a more relationship based question, even the interview kinds of discussions that you have and the ways in which you offer solutions to them. Do they need lots of data, facts, and figures, or are they more interested in examples or experiences?

But pre-call planning is also not just for prospects. We find effective pre-call plans really influence an existing customer engagement as well. And so, taking a few minutes in advance to figure out, do we find ourselves more as a simple supplier or a value added partner, someone who really goes beyond just the transaction and understanding that can really influence how we structure our approach to the conversation with them.

And at this point, most salespeople are going to nod their head and say yes, of course, we believe that pre planning is important, and some may even say that they make it a priority. But the truth is that for most salespeople, it’s not.

So that makes the question, why is it not? If we know that it absolutely influences the conversation and prepares our mind and gives us a track to run on and can influence the kind and quality of engagements that we have. Why don’t we do it? Why don’t we take the simple amount of time on the front end to do the research and structure our conversation for the highest level of effectiveness?

First, when you look at commitment activities. Do we understand and believe that this activity drives an effective outcome? If not, then we have a low commitment to activities and as a result, a low follow through on our pre-call planning.

Second, it may be our view of abilities. Do we really understand how to appropriately and effectively pre-plan, and do we believe that if we do that, that we’re still able to leverage that in an effective way in the conversation? And if we don’t believe that, then the chances are we won’t do that, or we’ve not had experience doing that, and therefore, we don’t believe that it will actually work for us when we do.

But beyond this, I find one more area that probably influences precall planning, and I want to challenge you to consider this. And that’s the area of overconfidence. Unfortunately, many salespeople actually do pre-call planning, especially early in their career. And I think that’s what happens to many salespeople is they believe that they’ve sort of got it, that they don’t take the time to engage because they think they can do it in their head.

And that’s where the danger creeps in, because skipping the discipline of actually writing it down and working through the scenario, even just for a few moments, of what are the right kinds of questions that I need to ask? What do I know or not know about this particular prospect and how do I prepare even those first few moments to get off on the right foot and engage them in the most effective way. And when I take the time to just do those basic things in a pre-call plan and utilize the form, utilize the structure, utilize those things that I know and discipline myself to do that, those are the things that then yield a much stronger and more powerful outcome for me and for the prospect that I’m trying to engage.

Scott Ingram:  For links to connect with Derek and to buy his new book, Listen to Sell: How Your Mindset, Skillset, and Human Connections Unlock Sales Performance, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1721. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“For me, it means really showing people. Transfer belief is selling.” – Alex Smith in today’s Tip 1736

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Transcript

Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number eight. 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 my most recent interview with Alex Smith on the Sales Success Stories podcast. Check this out:

You talked about You Sell by Being Human, which also happens to be the name of your podcast. So talk about what is that exactly? And maybe that’s also a good opportunity to just talk through the story of the pod as well.

Alex Smith: Yeah, amazing. It’s funny. This is a question that’s flipped on me, Scott. So I ask everyone, and honestly, I challenge everyone. I’d love to hear everyone’s answer to this question. So even you, Scott, anyone, think to yourself, when I say the phrase, sell something, but sell it by being human, what does that mean to you? And I ask every guest that. And I think I’ve heard amazing things like being authentic, being aligned, being curious, helping people, serving people, all sorts of great things. I’ve heard even people saying, Don’t sell it, which is funny to me. But there’s a great book, To Sell Is Human by Dan Pink, and we’ll get into tons of different things about it. But in that book, that’s really my guide in sales. And it’s not written by a sales guru or leader. If anyone’s familiar with Dan Pink, he’s an author, he’s a social scientist. I guess you could say. And he just realized, and this is someone who I’ve had the pleasure of actually talking to, which is freaking crazy, and we can talk this story about doing it.

But the premise of the book is everyone in the world is essentially in sales. And he did a study, and he asked people throughout all walks of life, educators, business owners, nurses, doctors, people that you would not consider in sales, how much of your job is influencing, changing, persuading, that thing. And it’s the majority. People aren’t doing the ABCs, Glengarry Glen Ross, which is an awesome movie. They’re not doing the Always Be Closing. He said they’re doing things like the new ABCs, which he said were attunement, really taking perspective, getting in someone’s mind and their heart, and understanding what they’re feeling and thinking. He called that attunement. That was the first A. B, boy, and C, he called. Staying just level-headed with a sea of nos, a sea of rejection. We all have to face it. How do you do that? And then C was clarity. He was talking about how the best sellers really help people make sense of all the information out there. So much information. We’re not as much sellers as we are curators of information. And that’s a powerful distinction of we’re not giving people information, we’re helping curate it for people and making it easy to buy.

So first off, that book is my guide. But when I hear the term sell something itself by being human, I just think to, we’re all human beings that have emotions, and we’re more alike than not. For me, it’s understanding that I want to lean on index on the person in salesperson, meaning I want the person to feel like I’m dealing with a real person in Alex. He’s not putting on a mask. He’s not a typical seller. He’s just him. He’s the same person I’m talking to on a Zoom in a sales meeting if I met Alex on the street. So for me, it means really showing people. Transfer belief is selling, that’s one definition. Sales is the transfer of belief. I think another is doing it through the lens of human connection and really helping people feel like he’s a real person. That’s what, to me, selling by being human is. And a lot of what that book talks about, and we can talk about that. But yeah, that’s what I’m thinking about as I hear that question.

Scott Ingram: For a link to the full episode on Sales Success Stories as well as links to connect with Alex, his podcast, and to Dan Pink’s book: To Sell is Human, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1736. Usually, I’d tell you come to come back here for another great sales tip, but I totally won’t be upset if you want to dig into my full hour and forty-minute-long conversation with Alex. Either way, thanks for listening!

“Understand what your executive contacts want most, what success looks like for them and then figure out a way that you can help them get it through use of your product or service.” – Ian Koniak in today’s Tip 1852

Ian Koniak on LinkedIn
Mindset of Sales Champions – Ian Koniak
How I Became #1 Enterprise AE at Salesforce: From Inward to Outward Selling
2024 Sales Success Summit

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number nine. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got a clip from Ian Koniak’s presentation at last year’s Sales Success Summit on the Mindset of Sales Champions. Give a listen to this:

Ian Koniak: And the last principle, the last principle is you have to shift from inward to outward focus, inward to outward selling. Again, I encourage you guys to Google from Inward to Outward selling with my name. I have a whole video training on how to do this, but I’ll give you the short answer. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s about being somebody that cares about your clients and is willing to go to bat, run through hoops for them. When I learn this, and this is the philosophy. Again, for my business, it’s a philosophy that I teach and coach on, is if you want to get the results that you want, if you want to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, focus on helping others get the results they want. And your success is simply an outcome of that. Your success is directly proportional to how many people you help and the degree of help that you can get for other people. So if you want to get what you want, help others get what they want.

Understand what your executive contacts want most, what success looks like for them and then figure out a way that you can help them get it through use of your product or service. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just connecting them with other people or other companies. That’s okay, too. It doesn’t always mean a sale. You have to shift from inward to outward. What does this look like? I just wanted to find this because this was the last change that I made. Again, they’re all important, but this is how you show up. It’s your energy.

My quota is my priority. Everything I do is so I can hit quota and close deals. Outward is your success or What are your KPIs is my priority. What are the priorities you have? What are your top metrics and goals for the year? What are you trying to do? What problems are you trying to solve? That’s my priority. They’ll pay to solve their biggest problem. They’ll pay millions. That’s the first thing.

The second is show up and throw up. The inward focus rep is trying to talk and pitch. The outward focus is trying to listen and understand. They’re focusing on listening and understanding.

The third, sell software. Try to sell software. I got to sell my products. There, the program, the outward focus sales rep is focused on solving problems, not trying to sell the software, but use the software to solve problems or use your product and service to help solve the customer’s problems.

Way more important. Two more. I make a commission. This is a naked impact. The last is I’m viewed as a vendor who they want to take off the account so they can bring in a trusted advisor. Trusted advisor. This changes everything, but they all feed together.

Scott Ingram: If you enjoyed the clip. You can listen to the entire presentation over on the Sales Success Stories podcast. We just released that today. You’ll also find links to connect with Ian, to the full Inward to Outward Selling video that he references, and to join us in-person at this year’s Sales Success Summit, all at DailySales.Tips/1711. Once you’ve clicked over there to do all that, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“You take the time to invest into a process to hold yourself accountable while keeping your manager engaged in your business.” – Leon Baumann in today’s Tip 1851

Client Champion
Leon Baumann on LinkedIn
Sales Success Society on LinkedIn
Mastering Sales: A Toolkit for Success
1:1 Template

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: We’re counting down the top 10 tips of 2024. Here’s number 10. You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Leon Baumann. Leon’s focus at Dell Technologies and his career are centered around being a Champion for his Clients. While he has been engaged in B2B Sales for over 2 decades in Tech, he has found much more joy and success by focusing on Human to Human Helping (H2HH) as his approach. Here he is:

Leon Baumann: Hello, Daily Sales Tip listeners. I’m excited to share some experience to help you all become better sellers and better serve your customers. And today, I’m going to focus on something that I started doing religiously. A few years ago when I got a new sales manager and has now become a part of my weekly process ever since. It’s simple. It’s a weekly cadence or weekly one-on-one with my manager that I set up and run. And really, it’s as much for myself as as well as it is to keep my manager informed of what I’m doing and what I might need from them.

It’s an opportunity for me to observe and reflect on my week. I start with a what am I did well? And what do I need to do differently? So your did well, or what are the things that you’re proud of in that past week that made progress in what you’re trying to do to help your customer? And you do differently, is there maybe some of the things that you learn from, that you need to adjust, that you need to do, as it says, do differently as you approach that customer next week and maybe your next meeting. Then I go on to what are my goals. So what are my priorities, both personal and work-related? And how did I do in the last week to measure up against those goals?

And then the next element is I document my priorities, and I categorize them into the Eisenhower matrix. I figured if it worked for one of our greatest presidents, it’s probably going to be a good tool for me to use as well. So I categorize my activities that I need to feel to get done in the next week into what’s important and urgent, what’s important and not urgent, what can I delegate, and what can I eliminate.

So once I go through that exercise and update it on a weekly basis, I can develop my plan as to what’s important and urgent, and that I time block to make sure that I get those to get things done quickly. And then maybe the important and not urgent, what I can time block to get done later or early in the next week, or if I can have some extra time that I can get that done. So I have it ready and waiting for me to tackle if I get some free time. And then, of course, what do I need to delegate and how to get my team assigned to get those things done for me in the time that it takes to be able to make sure that I can be successful in helping my customer.

And of course, I always want to have a spotlight deal that I’m focused on or a mega deal that I’m working on. And I use this weekly exercise as an opportunity to say, Am I making the progress on it that I want to be? And can I measure my progress on that mega-deal? What are some of the things that I need to be doing? And what are some of the things that I need help with that I can be talking to my manager in that weekly one-on-one about what I need from them to help me move my deal forward.

Another thing I capture every week is, what have I done in the past week in the areas of knowledge, skill, and discipline? So what have I learned? What have I read? What have I listened to? And what did it mean to me? How did I exercise some of the skills that are important to me to most effectively help my customers get what they want out of life and out of their business objectives? And then what is the discipline that I exercised in that past week that’s important to me, that I need to make sure that I continue to exercise that discipline? So to me, knowledge, skills, and discipline are how I run my business. And this weekly exercise is an opportunity for me to reflect on that.

There’s also some elements in there in terms of aside from my priorities, is there anything else that I need or that I need from my manager? So I document that and go into it with me. I make sure that I ask my customer or my manager, if he observed any did wells and do different ways when he was in joint sales calls with me or maybe internal meetings. It’s always good to get someone else’s perspective.

And then ultimately, are there some tactical things like expense report approvals, training questions, upcoming meetings, things like that that are always good to capture in there as well. So I recommend that you take the time to invest into a process to hold yourself accountable while keeping your manager engaged in your business. You, your quota, and your career will be glad that you leveled up to this type of experience.

I’ll have the template that I’ve been referring to available in the show notes. If you want to learn more from me, simply reach out to LinkedIn or join the Sales Success Society and join me there for regular interaction to engage with other top sellers, focused on helping our customers and getting better at our craft.

Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Leon and to get his 1:1 Template, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1704. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!