Sales Success Stories

Hear the Secrets of World Class Sales Professionals

Peer Accountability & Growth Groups

By

Richard Balius is the Head of Sales & Peer Group Coordinator at Sales Success Media. Richard has been leading peer advisory boards for CEOs of small to mid-market companies in Austin for over sixteen years. He’s also a results-driven sales leadership consultant focused on helping leaders deliver sales results in their organizations. Richard has spent his career helping private owners to build sales teams capable of growing revenue and defending margins.

In this episode, Richard shares his extensive knowledge of peer and group learning. With over 350 peer advisory meetings led with more than 50 CEOs, Richard understands the inherent value of peer learning. Scott and Richard break down the three components of group learning, which include peer, accountability, and growth. They analyze the origins of peer learning and speak to the ways in which both sales leaders and individual contributors can accelerate their careers.

Scott and Richard discuss the importance of having a facilitator in peer learning sessions. They delve deep into common topics of conversation that are touched upon in these group learnings, including career aspirations and how to know if your current role is the right one for you. Finally, Richard and Scott discuss the commitment necessary for those looking to join a peer learning group. It requires discipline, time, and, above all, having the right mindset.

What We Covered:

00:24 – Scott welcomes today’s guest, Richard Balius
06:30 – Richard expounds on the concept of peer learning
08:56 – Richard recalls a significant moment at the Sales Success Summit that reinforced the concept of peer learning
11:21 – How peer learning fosters development above other learning strategies
15:44 – Why it is critical for sales leaders to develop their team members and why many struggle with that aspect
21:58 – Richard speaks to the importance of having a facilitator in peer-group learning
27:12 – How Richard determines the ‘growth goal’
28:49 – The third component of group learning: Accountability
32:24 – Common topics of open conversation in group learning sessions
36:34 – The importance of committing your mindset and time to peer learning
44:49 – Richard invites interested listeners to reach out about the different types of groups offered
50:10 – Scott thanks Richard for joining the show

Tweetables:

“What I know about peer learning is it’s winning all across adult learning.” (06:55)

“The answer is not always your answer.” (15:11)

“When you internally seek out guidance from someone who is either your direct manager or in a sales leadership role and you’re looking for what’s next for me, the challenge is almost anything they say next is no longer an idea but more of a direction.” (16:18)

“Peer is a very powerful thing. And if I can get the learning environment right, people will learn and grow and I know it.” (24:33)

“I think an outside facilitator is a game-changer. I certainly think an outside facilitator changes the game if he/she is doing their job.” (26:38)

“A piece of that commitment, for me, is their mindset. You’ve got to come with the right mindset.” (39:08)

“I’m very compelled by this project and excited by the opportunity to help give individual contributors and sales leaders a place to really accelerate their careers.” (50:31)

Links Mentioned:

[email protected]
Sales Success Stories Podcast
2020 Sales Success Summit
Richard Balius on LinkedIn

2020 Sales Success Summit Preview

By

This episode is brought to you by the 2020 Sales Success Summit and you can join us on the Live Stream Experience October 12th and 13th for free thanks to the support of our sponsors: Outreach, Sales Hacker, Vidyard, Terryberry, Alyce, and Gong. To learn more about them and to register for the Summit just click over to Top1Summit.com

I’m taking the week off this week from my regular sales day job to focus on delivering a world-class virtual event next week, and that of course, would be the 2020 Sales Success Summit.

Today I thought I’d give you a bit of a preview and let you know what to expect. Hopefully, you’re already registered, but if not, real quick, right now, click over to Top1Summit.com and fill out the registration form. It’ll only take a minute and thanks to our amazing sponsors the entire event is free to attend.

What won’t be free those is the videos of the sessions afterwards. The reason I’m doing that is because I really want you to be there live. While we’re not able to get together physically in-person I want you to think of this as a regular event. Invest your time, invest your attention, and really be there with us. I hope you’ll block your calendar, set your out of office message, and really engage with us over the course of these two days.

Now I’m technically hosting two experiences simultaneously. There’s what I’m calling the virtual experience that is exclusively for the paid ticket holders who were planning to be here in Austin. That includes all of the presenters and at least count I believe 28 of those individuals are the top 1% performers that you’ve heard here on the podcast. That experience will be super intimate, and we’ll all be getting together in-person next year at the 2021 Summit, because I decided to roll all of their tickets over in addition to providing this more exclusive virtual experience.

Everyone else will have an opportunity to be a part of the Live Stream Experience. This is the free sponsor-supported setup and I’ve asked the amazing Nikki Ivey to help host this side of things since I’ll be busy with the core of the Sales Success Community in the virtual experience.

Let me first walk you through the timing. The core event and content will take place from 10am to 3:30 or 4pm Central Time each day, however, the hour before and at least the 90 minutes after as well as during two breaks between the sessions we’ve got some epic networking opportunities for you. We’ve invested in a platform that’s going to allow you to meet new people, have live conversations and we’ve organized things around a variety of core topics so hopefully, you can go jump into conversations that are most relevant for you whether that’s prospecting in our Prospecting Parlor, enterprise selling in the Big Deal Brainstorm. Maybe you want to dive into our LinkedIn Lagoon or talk about the role you’re trying to hire for in a space we’re calling: We’re Hiring Y’all! There’s a Leadership Lounge, the Mentorship Meetup, and more, all to help you connect with other real sales humans!

For me, this is the main thing that’s been missing from so many other virtual events. That feeling of actually being at an event. It’s more than just incredible content, and you won’t be ushered into a giant Zoom room with 50 other people where it’s nearly impossible to have a productive conversation that meets your own personal needs.

Let’s talk about the content though, because it’s going to be really special.

If you’ve been listening to this show for any length of time then you already know that I only interview active, quota-carrying individual contributors who are either the #1 top performers at their companies or at least in the top 1% inside a very large sales org, and it’s those same people you’ll find presenting at the Summit.

We’ll start with a heavy dose of prospecting. Sarah Brazier is going to open things up and talk about Using LinkedIn to Book Meetings. Then Dale Dupree is going to talk through The Living Pipeline. Then during our first networking break, you’ll have the option of attending a sponsored session from Vidyard where you’ll find Vidyard’s VP of Marketing talking about From Prospecting to Proposals: How to Use Video to Sell Faster in 2021.

Now it’s worth noting that I will be making the sponsored presentations available afterwards so you don’t have to choose between networking and watching a compelling session from one of our sponsors. You can have the best of both worlds in that regard.

Then we’ll come back for one more prospecting dose from Vincent Matano as he talks through his Prospecting Checklist and Advanced Multi-Channel Prospecting.

That will bring us to Jacquelyn Nicholson’s presentation on Building Rapport and Relationships: From Prospect to Customer to Friend

That’ll take us to our second networking break, and if you want to follow along with this you’ll actually find the detailed schedule at the bottom of the page on Top1Summit.com

During that second networking break, you’ll get a chance to hear from Alyce’s Nina Butler who will talk about the ABP’s of Gifting in Sales: How to Win with 5 Gifting Plays.

If you engage fully and contribute to the conversations you’ll have an opportunity to win a gift from Alyce and see their service in action. It’s really cool. I’ll say a bit more about that in my introduction during the Summit.

To round out the first day Evan Kelsay is going to present: Demystifying the 10K for Sales Professionals and Camille Clemons is going to bring us home with Sales is a Team sport before we get to our final After Hours Networking session to conclude day1 on Monday.

Tuesday after our Pre-Game networking session and my short Day 2 welcome you’ll get to hear Matt Du Pont talk about Maximizing Your Commission Per Hour Worked.

When Matt’s done we’re going to dive into a panel discussion with DeJuan Brown, Nikki Ivey, Lisa Palmer, and Scott Leese titled Black at Work: Anti-Racism and Anti-Discrimination in Sales.

That’ll take us to our first official networking break of Day 2, but if you want to keep going with the Anti-Discrimination theme, Outreach is going to talk about some of their own Inclusive Hiring best practices.

After that, we get to hear from Lisa Palmer again as she talks about Team Selling, Visual Dartboarding, and Winning at Enterprise Scale.

Then Dave Schwartz is going to pick things up and help me make good on a commitment I made at least year’s Summit to delve deeper into the topic of mental health in sales. Something we all probably need to be more aware of, and that was before this current Pandemic situation. So Dave is going to present: The Hardest Conversation Worth Having: Your Mental Health.

Amy Quick will pick things up where Dave leaves off and talk about The Power of Being You.

She’ll take us into our second networking break where you’ll get a chance to converse or checkout Terryberry and Gong. Terryberry will be talking about recognition in a session called: We Want Cash (or do we?)

Then our closer is going to be Leila Mozaffarian who blew us all away with her presentation at last year’s Summit. This year she’ll be talking about Writing Your Next Chapter.

Which finally we bring things back to me where I’ll be talking through the future of the Sales Success Community and some additional ways that you can get involved in learning from and with the best of the best in addition to the announcement of the 2021 Sales Success Summit.

I hope you’re half excited as I am. Tons of great content, plus so many opportunities to connect. We’ll see you there. Top1Summit.com again is where you’ll go to register and to see the full agenda. Tell a friend, tell your team and we’ll see you online. Once you signup you’ll get all the details you need via email prior to the event.

Oh, and stay tuned next week. Like we did last year Jeff Bajorek is going to take over the podcast feed and share interviews that he’s doing with some of the presenters and other attendees. Those were a lot of fun last year, and I’m sure he’ll do a great job again this year.

I’ll see you at the Summit. Take care!

Bringing in the Biggest Deals: Evan Kelsay and Jamal Reimer

By

This bonus episode of the Sales Success Stories podcast is brought to you thanks to all of our amazing sponsors who are making it possible for us to bring you the Sales Success Summit Live Stream Experience for free. To learn about our sponsors and to register for the Summit. Just click over to Top1Summit.com

Today I’ve got the audio from a conversation between Evan Kelsay and Jamal Reimer at last year’s Sales Success Summit where they were essentially interviewing each other about Bringing in the Biggest Deals.

Evan was the star of episode 56 here on the podcast where we talked about how he achieved 800% of his annual number at Seismic with a massive deal, and Jamal was featured in episode 61 where we talked about Mega Deals and some of the behind the scenes of how he was able to land 3 different deals, each worth over $50M at Oracle. If you want a shortcut to both of those episodes you can just click over to top1.fm/56 and top1.fm/61 or top1.fm/evan-kelsay and top1.fm/jamal-reimer will take you there as well.

Here they are:

Evan Kelsay on Sales Success Stories Interview
Jamal Reimer on Sales Success Stories Interview
Sales Success Summit

For more content like this make sure you register for the upcoming Sales Success Summit. Again the Live Stream Experience is free thanks to our sponsors, and you’ll find all of those details at TopSummit.com

If you like this content in particular there are a couple of talks I think you’re really going to appreciate. The first is actually a presentation from Evan Kelsay. Evan will be talking about Demystifying the 10K for Sales Professionals. We’ve also just added Lisa Palmer to the lineup. If you didn’t hear Lisa in episode 100 you’ve got to go listen to that episode. Lisa will be talking about Team Selling, Visual Dartboarding and Winning at Enterprise Scale.

Top1Summit.com. That’s the spot.

Once you’ve gotten yourself registered, be sure to come back next week for another regular interview episode. Thanks for listening!

Episode 101: Top 1% Cisco Channel Sales Performer – Ivana Zivkovic Meesters

By

Ivana Zivkovic Meesters is a Partner Account Manager at Cisco Systems, an organization that enables people to make powerful connections–whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity. Ivana works in channel sales, focusing primarily on building relationships with her sellers, leveraging those relationships, and constantly adapting new sales strategies and best practices. A nine-year veteran at Cisco, Ivana has Continue Reading …