“The biggest thing that you can do is ask for advice” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 272
Do you ask for advice?
Join the conversation below and check Jason’s LinkedIn post!
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Jason Bay LinkedIn post
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back after spending some time with us at the Sales Success Summit earlier this week. Here he is addressing a challenge that I get asked about quite a bit:
Jason Bay: At some point in your career, I’m sure you’ve had to deal with. Having upper management, you know, a director of sales, VP or someone else maybe that you don’t even really meet with on a regular basis or that hasn’t done a sales call in a very long time, maybe years. Telling the reps what you have to say in a cold call or providing the templates for you to use in a cold email. And that works really great if what you’re using is working. But oftentimes what I’ve heard and experienced firsthand is that those things aren’t working that well. So I don’t want to talk about is you know how to handle that because I think this is a pretty sensitive situation where you don’t want to be a Lone Wolf and be doing your own thing and you want to be a part of team, culture and atmosphere and that sort of thing. But at the same time, you also have a quoted ahead and you’re paid based on performance and if you know something will work better, you know you want to do that. Right? So I want to talk about how to navigate that and I put up a post on LinkedIn that’s going to be linked up here in the show notes and I definitely check it out the Crowdsourcing feedback on this as well. So there are essentially two things to look at here. I think from a rep’s perspective you need to think about, well I need to hit my activity targets, right? Because if I’m typically I’m being measured on activity or quota, I need to hit whatever my quota. And how that’s measured is while testing this. So it might require you to put in some extra time in order to do that. So if you’re a rep, but what I recommend doing is creating an internal case study. So if this is a conversation you’ve tried approaching maybe with your manager and it has been unsuccessful, what you might do is create a case study and frame this in the way that a business would frame a case study or the key cities you might be using for your company when you’re prospecting or selling.
So in the case study, it’s going to be used for internal purposes. So you want to have a challenge or a hypothesis that, Hey, if I use this thing or say this thing in my calls or my emails, my hypothesis is that it will increase my response rates by this and it will yield X amount more of opportunities, which will yield X amount of revenue. Everything’s going to come down to revenue. The second part to that is to talk about how you approached it. So try testing one or two things and you’re essentially AB testing within your company here on how you’re, how you approach solving it. And then the third part is the results. So make sure that everything does tie back to revenue or opportunities or however else that you’re measured based on your quota. So that’s one way of approaching it from a reps standpoint.
The other thing too is if you have not approached that conversation and let’s say that you are given templates and talk tracks and things and aren’t really working that well and you haven’t approached the conversation with your sales manager or your boss or whoever, you might just try talking to them. So there’s a couple of different ways that you can approach that conversation. But I would really look at it in terms of what your sales manager or your boss really cares about. And really everything comes down to dollars and cents in sales.
So the way that conversation might be approached is, you know, “Hey I know we have these talk tracks and cold email templates and you know, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to put those together and in that, you know, it really saves a ton of time. What I’m curious about is, you know, my understanding is that I’m measured based on my quota here and specifically I know I have an activity target, a measurement that I need to hit on a daily basis here in my quota is X amount of dollars.” Like what’s the most important thing to you guys? You know, if I had a suggestion on something that I’d like to try, cause I think it might have a higher response rate so that I could surpass my quota. Like what is your suggestion on how I might go about doing that? And just ask them for advice. That’s the biggest thing that you can do is ask for advice and let them know that you’re coming from a place of, I’m not trying to be a lone wolf here and do this my own way. Like, I really want to do this in a way that might help me surpass my quota. It might be something that I could share with other people on the team that could help them do the same. And what’s a way that we could approach this together. So definitely check out the LinkedIn posts. There’s going to be a bunch of feedback in there where you can sort of see how other people have handled a situation like this. So check that out and good luck and let us know in the comments how this goes.
Scott Ingram: You can find the link to Jason’s LinkedIn post at DailySales.Tips/272 leave your own thoughts and comments there and you can read what I had to say there as well. Again that’s DailySales.Tips/272
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