“There might be an opportunity out there for you. It’s just in front of someone else’s face. Don’t be afraid to help them look for it.” – Chris McNeill in today’s Tip 1641
Do you look somewhere else for a change?
Join the conversation below and learn more about Chris!
Ockam
Chris McNeill on LinkedIn
Chris McNeill on Sales Success Stories Interview
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 Chris McNeill. Chris is a long-time contributor to the Sales Success Community, and recently Joined Ockam, where he helps enterprises secure their data-in-motion. He will be joining us next week in Austin at the 2023 Sales Success Summit. Be sure to say hello if you’re there. Here he is:
Chris McNeill: Hey, everyone. Chris McNeil with another daily sales tip. As usual, I was talking with Scott recently about something interesting that had happened to me, and he suggested that I turn that into a tip for you all. I didn’t even realize that it would be a good tip. He had to call that out for me.
Today’s tip is to remember that not everyone thinks like we do, and that’s probably costing us some opportunities. What I mean is that we as salespeople, are wired to solve a particular type of problem, one of customer acquisition. While other teams in the organization are focused on solving other problems, sometimes those folks might be looking straight at something that can help sellers without even realizing it.
Let me share a couple of recent examples.
I joined a brand new company a few weeks ago, and I regularly share content that is at least tangentially related to what we do on an internal Slack channel dedicated to learning. I appreciate it when folks do this because it helps me develop a more broad understanding of the market we operate in, so I try to contribute to that myself. One of my recent shares led to someone on our engineering team chiming in and saying that, Oh, he’s seen that problem firsthand at a couple of prior companies, problems that we solve. I’m sure you can all see where this is going. I dropped back in that Slack chat and mentioned that, hey, sales would totally be cool with it if some introductions were made. So far, I’ve landed one of those two meetings.
A second great example, and to me, this one is just sheer genius, originated with our CEO. When we’re interviewing new candidates for technical roles, we ask them how they see themselves using a tool like ours, either in a former employer of theirs or even their current one. That information, if it’s useful, gets fed back, of course, to the product organization, the marketing team, and the sales team. We have to treat that with extreme care, of course, because it could negatively impact someone’s job. We act more like it’s just a data point that we can use to align a value prop and a use case against. We still act like we have a strong hypothesis. We still go find our own way into an account, and we definitely don’t mention anywhere that we may have found that information.
I’m sure there are dozens of other examples of this thinking out there, and I’d actually love to hear about them. Do me a favor, open the voice recorder on your phone and record yourself talking about one of those examples. Then visit top1.fm, click Daily Sales Tips, then click Submit a Sales Tip. Pretty sure you can figure it out from there. That’s today’s tip. There might be an opportunity out there for you. It’s just in front of someone else’s face. Don’t be afraid to help them look for it.
Scott Ingram: For a link to connect with Chris, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1641. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!