Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

SalesLoft was growing again I was 16th employee and we got to 50 employees I was thinking to myself was like wow we’re at 50 employees I could have lunch with a different person at my company once a week every day for a year or every week for a year. So I started thinking alright I’m going to start doing this. I sent out a doc hey sign up and I’ll take somebody’s lunch every Wednesday a different person. And doing that was probably one of the best decisions I ever did. In sales you kind of get stuck in your little sales silo in your corner you know with your sales team. He talked to the sales team. I wanted to know more about other people my organization. Taking an engineer out to lunch somebody that would typically not reach out to you and you know to have a conversation and have lunch with. And I’ve made more great relationships by doing that over the last three years than I could ever imagine. And it’s really helped especially when I’m in a deal cycle and I have a very unique question I can go to one of these people that I’ve now known for three years that maybe other people in the sales team don’t know that well I go and ask hey here is a really technical question how would you answer this or what would what would be our answer from an infrastructure perspective. You know since we have that relationship they’re really are always more than willing to help. So it’s been very impactful for me and I love getting to know other people especially outside of the sales world and learning about them and not even talking about work talking about how they got to SalesLoft or you know where they come from. When they grew up or what did they do what they do outside of work. It’s it’s been awesome to be able to be part of that that culture and be involved in you know people’s lives outside of just the sales team. That’s that’s huge. And you know I think at some level sure you can be the the lone wolf and you can try and take this all on your shoulders and you can go do it. But when you get to a certain point and I’m thinking of my interview with Trong Nguyen who was managing a $50 million book of business for Microsoft. He’s like you can’t begin to do that by yourself and it takes a lot of other people and those relationships are really important and it reminds me of literally the best thing I’ve ever read on networking in my career and I’ve I’ve read a fair amount about networking for a variety of reasons. There was a Harvard Business Review article and again we’ll find the link for this and we’ll put it up at top1sales.wpengine.com/kevin. I’m pretty sure the article is called “Better Sales Networks.”

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

We have to be mindful about I make a point of asking when I’m spending time with the marketing executives and the c-level folks in my network. I always ask them particularly in the marketing space which I think is probably the most it feels to me like one of the most saturated places in the world because there are literally thousands of tools out there so if you’re a V.P. of marketing or you’re a CMO like you’re screwed. I don’t know how they operate with the amount of salespeople reaching out to them and I asked them I like. So what do you actually respond to like how do you deal with this and was talking with with one of those individuals just recently and I’ve seen this sort of validated in some other things here recently is like yes you know what. The first message. Like as soon as I can tell that this is generic not personalized I got loaded into some type of a spam cannon. He says I just take a second and I create a rule that’s going to make sure that I never see messages from that individual or that company ever again. You’re spot on. And so that this rep is actually doing a disservice by sending those fully automated e-mails. They’re going backwards. They’re burning bridges because they’re not being authentic in the way that they’re engaging and that’s to your point. Those marketing folks, I’m glad I’m not in market because they just get bombarded all day every day and you’ve really got to do something to make it through that so you’re not getting tagged as hey never ever reply to somebody from this organization because they’re just trying to fully automate the sales process and going back to the evils of some of these tools that these tools aren’t built for reps to just dump in a thousand people put their feet up and you know casually check for replies every couple of hours. You know it’s meant for automating the menial tasks of what I struggle with. Logging those things in your CRM or making sure you’re being persistent in following up but still doing it in a authentic way customizing that message and not just fully automating the entire sales process because that’s just only going to do a disservice.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

I’m a huge huge fan of Vidyard they are doing just a fantastic job by humanizing that element. Hey I’m going to sift through all the rest of that junk in your inbox. I’m going to send you like you said a video with you holding that white board. It’s so impactful because you really stand apart from all of the other mess in their inbox and people are genuinely more interested. I had a prospect tell me the other day they would rather spend a minute watching a video that’s personalized to them than 40 seconds reading an email. So they’d rather spend more time with something that’s more engaging and more beneficial to them. So I’m absolutely a huge fan of Vidyard. SalesLoft actually has a Vidyard integration for their freemium version and they are absolutely fantastic. Love them over there. Great company.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

You’re exactly right. Good and Evil. There’s two different ways to leverage a sales engagement tool. You can try to boil the ocean and say alright I always send an e-mail to a thousand people and it’s going to be an email that’s me generated. This is who I am this is what I do this is and this is why you should be talking to me. That’s a very me focused e-mail. And I think a lot of that is what you’re seeing and getting posted on linked in people you know with bashing you know ad sales emails because there’s no like you mentioned human to it. It’s a robot going through that and by leveraging a solution like SalesLoft or any sales engagement platform the right way. You have to have that human element you have to be authentic in the way that you’re engaging. That email needs to be about them. It needs to be about how you understand their business and how you understand that they might have some challenges that you might be able to help with and that you want to earn their business not just hey you should do business with me because I’m sending you a templated e-mail. You really have to be sincere in the way that that you’re engaging and make that engagement about them and how they can be better off by having a conversation with you.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

Speedy Readie is another app that I use is great for reading blog posts. You highlight the text you hit enter twice and it allows you to read at. I think I have mine set at 350 words per minute. That way I don’t have to read down it just it reads it pretty much for me at 350 words a minute. So a great app as well. Now when you say reads it for you it does the scrolling for you or what do you mean by that? Pretty much it puts a little bar at the top and it’ll put the word in so you don’t actually have to move your eyes it just will flash the word up to you on the screen and it just blows through these words and somehow you can still really get in there and absorb these words because they’re coming in. You don’t have to move your eyes on the page. It’s really clever. It’s free. I absolutely love it.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

My favorite, I guess it’s an app, it’s on my computer for professionally is an app called aText it’s a text expander. In sales I’m sure a lot of people listening can I guess equate to this you end up typing the same sentences over and over and over. And what aText does is allow you to put in an abbreviation and it will populate that sentence for you or even something as simple as the word SalesLoft. I type that word a lot. So if I type in S L S on my keyboard it types up the word SalesLoft for me it’s capitalized already and even something like: “Cheers, Kevin” I just type in ck and it makes me so much more efficient because I don’t have to sit there and type in cheers comma enter Kevin. I just hammered right through it and I’ve got some that are like three four paragraphs long of aText. I’ll go in there and you know edit it but I probably have hundreds of these aTexts saved on my computer and it’s absolutely fantastic I couldn’t live without that app.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

Ralph Barsi earlier he is the one that taught me about putting a ten on everybody’s head. I highly recommend his blog posts. RalphBarsi.com B-A-R-S-I absolutely fantastic content. He’s a thought leader in the space is a mentor to me and really just clear minded on sales, sales process, sales methodology of being most effective building your own brand for yourself and I would say that’s my number one. David Cummings also has some great content as well. DavidCummings.org. I follow his blog he puts out a blog I think he’s been doing consecutively for like three years. He puts out a blog post every single day. And what that means it’s not going to be the longest blog posts which is great because as sales people we can’t sit still. Like you mentioned earlier and you know I just a really short little quip it might be two paragraphs. I love reading David’s content. It’s quick it’s easy to read and it’s relevant. So David and Ralph are two of my favorites that I like to read on a daily basis.

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Clip from Episode 31: SalesLoft’s Top AE – Kevin Walkup – Leverage Your Network:

Smile a lot. Everybody’s heard that you know smile and dial. But it really is impactful it’s part of my routine. Make sure I’m smiling all day long. I’m a very positive person even if something you know shits the bed deal doesn’t go the way I want does not think of it in an optimistic way. How could I have learned from this. So I know it doesn’t happen again so that routine is make sure you’re always in a positive attitude that positivity is contagious and other people in your office will feel it. They’ll receive some of that positive energy and your your customers your buyers will also receive that positive energy when you’re smiling through the phone. And when you’re you know getting excited that’s you know I guess part of my routine is smiling all day long. I love it.

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