“There’s no magic formula. Just work harder and outhustle the competition.” – Jerry Brooner in today’s Tip 937
How about you? Do you work harder than everybody else?
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Jerry Brooner 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 comes from Jerry Brooner. Jerry is the President of Global Field Operations at Enable, a cloud-based SaaS solution for B2B rebate management. He has over two decades of experience as a high-growth global enterprise SaaS technology executive. Previously, he was the former Chief Revenue Officer at Scout RFP and has built high-growth teams at Dropbox, SAP, Callidus, and Siebel Systems. Here he is:
Jerry Brooner: Outhustle the competition. Simplistic title and covers a very simple topic. But the one that surprisingly everyone seems to ignore. What do I mean by outhustle the competition? Simple. Work harder than everybody else.
Three areas I see lacking the most in efforts by sales professionals. Preparation, knowledge, follow-up. Let me give you some examples.
Preparation. I am amazed how unprepared some sales teams will be when they show up at a customer meeting. No agenda, no talk tracks, no objective set internally or externally. I once had a meeting with the CFO. I looked at my calendar I saw it the next day. So I asked the team the night before what their goals were? They said they want to finalize the deal. I was like, Great, let’s talk a deal. What do you want me to say? What does the agenda say? What the CFO think about the agenda and what pricing discussions do you want me to have with the CFO if we are finalizing a deal? The silence was deafening, I even found out the CEO had never seen any pricing numbers before, so how could I possibly have a pricing discussion? Absolutely no preparation.
Knowledge. It amazes me how much information is so easily available now on Google and how most people never do a simple search. If you want to know everything about your customer and the person you’re working with, why would you not type in their name? I was on a deal review with the entire company and I asked a few questions about a key opportunity for them. Key executives, company goals, focus areas, teams that they didn’t know. So literally on the spot I typed in the company name and the person’s name into Google and I found out the CFO had been the company for 12 years, was the brother the CEO had a professional goal of opening 12 new stores next year and personally supported the local Humane Society. It took 8 seconds. You think that knowledge would help you sell to that account? Yet most people don’t do a simple Google search.
Finally, the easiest one. Follow up and often the least utilized simple follow-up. I get lots of outreach by other sales team offering services to my company. I track them because I like metrics that track things, and I’m amazed how little follow-up is completed. I get an email, maybe a phone call, but 99% of the time that’s all I hear two outreaches at most. It’s crazy to me, people that do not do more consistent outreach. Anyone who does three outreaches to me, little tip for everyone out there, I will automatically take the meeting because it’s literally less than 1% of the people with automated email outreach, CRM system. It’s really easy to stand out if you work harder.
So, again, outhustling the competition is not easy. I shared with you, preparation, knowledge, follow-up. It takes a lot of hard work to do these things. Perseverance, organization, and a great attitude. But I guarantee you, you will stand out and be hugely successful. There’s no magic formula. Just work harder and outhustle the competition.
Scott Ingram: Connect with Jerry on LinkedIn. We’ve got a link for you at DailySales.Tips/937
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!