“So I focused on fewer accounts, but I focused on getting in with the right executives, finding the right executives, really getting high up, and being a partner.” – Ian Koniak in today’s Tip 1369
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Less vs More Pain vs Pleasure – Ian Koniak & Jeff Bajorek
Ian Koniak on Sales Success Stories Interview
Ian Koniak Sales Coaching
Ian Koniak on YouTube
Ian Koniak on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip is just a clip from the slightly longer hallway conversation between Jeff Bajorek and Ian Koniak that we just released on the Sales Success Stories podcast as a bonus episode today. Here’s Ian:
Ian Koniak: One of my mentors, Ed Mylett. He says, “Make your mess your message.” And my mess was I was a transactional sales guy in an enterprise role at the largest SaaS company in the world Salesforce.com, failing miserably, trying to be the guy who is pleasing others, be the guy who’s outworking everyone, be the hustler. And it didn’t work. And I missed three years in a row of quota and I looked at myself in the mirror. This was between 2014 – 2016, so a while ago. And I said; Everything I thought I knew about sales is wrong. And there is a big difference between transactional sales and enterprise sales. And when you’re selling to a large enterprise, they don’t want someone who’s going to grind and hustle, they want a partner, someone who understands their business, someone who really takes the time to listen and understand where their challenges are and co-create a solution, not someone who’s trying to pitch or sell them. And that was what I was missing. I always thought you just show up and you throw up and you go in and you try and close deals. And that is actually ineffective when you’re working with very large organizations where sometimes it’s been 10 or 15 years of building in something that you’re taking out or changing. And I think once I realized that the approach that I was taking was not working, that’s when I took a step back and I said, I need to invest in myself. I need to really take a step back. And I ended up signing up for a coach in a Mastermind program. I invested $20,000 in my own money. And what they taught me was to slow down. A lot of the focus was around creating your vision for what you want in your life, doing a lot of meditation, doing a lot of visualization work, doing work that had nothing to do with hustling in the transactional pressure-oriented sales rule, and actually slowing down. So I think it started really six years ago and one of the things that that translates to so that year I finished number one at Salesforce globally in the enterprise and made seven figures. And it wasn’t by doing more, it was actually by doing less. Hence my theme of addition by subtraction. So I focused on fewer accounts, but I focused on getting in with the right executives, finding the right executives, really getting high up, and being a partner. And I can tell you stories for days about what that looked like, but the short answer is less is more.
Scott Ingram: For links to both the full hallway conversation between Jeff and Ian, as well as my full original deep dive episode with Ian Koniak on Sales Success Stories, click over to DailySales.Tips/1369. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!