Scott Ingram welcomes Jeremy Leveille to the podcast. Jeremy just became Team Lead of Sales Development at LeadIQ, a company specializing in prospecting tools. LeadIQ looks to make prospecting fun and easy by providing software technology that assists sales development representative (SDRs) in generating more leads and closing more deals. Prior to becoming Team Lead, Jeremy worked as LeadIQ’s top Senior Sales Development Representative. He has beenContinue Reading …
Episode 54: Microsoft’s Carson Heady – Master the Day
“A day achieved is a success in itself.”
Carson Heady is a top sales performer and cloud transformation specialist for Microsoft. In his role, Carson orchestrates segments of account teams for all of the opportunities that fall in his sales territory for any facet of Microsoft Cloud. Having held several roles within the organization prior to this one, Carson has encountered a multitude of challenges, setbacks, triumphs and changes. His philosophy of Continue Reading …
Episode 53: Sales Hacker’s #1 and Only – Scott Barker
“Treat every deal like you’ll work for that organization one day, because you just might.” – Scott Barker, Sales Hacker
Host Scott Ingram welcomes to the podcast Scott Barker, a top performer in sales, lead generation and business development. Scott is the Head of Partnerships at Sales Hacker, which was recently acquired by Outreach.io in August of 2018. Scott is truly an innovator and influencer in the field of B2B sales and technology. In addition to his role with Sales Hacker, Scott heads up the Vancouver chapter of Enterprise Sales Forum and sits on the board of the non-profit organization, Interfit.
In this episode Scott Ingram and Scott Barker talk all about Sales Hacker, the number one business-to-business community on the planet. At the company’s core, Sales Hacker creates content for B2B sales professionals, and Scott has been an integral part of that for over a year now. Scott talks about his successes as Head of Partnerships at Sales Hacker, including bringing in and closing one million dollars of revenue in nine months. Scott lists three attributes that have been vital to his success. These include being an expert in your field by giving as much value as you can, building a repeatable scalable process that works for you, and having empathy in the workplace.
Scott Ingram also talks to Scott about his former sales roles where Barker was a top performer. Scott maintains one of the most important aspects of his role is the power of storytelling. He reveals the secret to his immediate sales success at Payfirma, a company specializing in payment processing and financial technology. His big picture, strategic thinking along with his initiative and ingenuity have been cornerstones of his overall success. Scott recounts his favorite sales stories and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
We also hear about Scott’s proudest career accomplishment, attracting top-notch mentors who have challenged him to grow in his career. He stresses the importance of always leading with curiosity and questioning leaders in order to continue to grow. He talks about his greatest challenge, time management, and how he’s tried to combat this by utilizing different daily strategies. Scott also speaks to the hardest decision he ever had to make, and how it became a seminal moment in his career path. Scott provides insights and advice to those looking to become successful in the field of sales. These include thinking in the long-term, taking time for yourself personally, and creating your own sales playbook. Scott shares his consultative sales philosophy, which centers on an entrepreneurial approach where Scott takes full ownership of all sales projects he works on. Finally, Scott reveals his main motivation: happiness. That happiness comes from achievements in career, personal relationships, and much more.
What We Covered:
00:40 – Scott Ingram welcomes to the podcast, Scott Barker
01:07 – Scott states that there are three things he attributes to his success
02:55 – Number 1: The importance of adding value and being an expert in your field
04:15 – Number2: Finding a work process that works for you specifically
06:22 – Number 3: Having empathy in the workplace
07:33 – Scott talks about Sales Hacker and his role as Head of Partnerships
09:56 – The importance of going above and beyond what is expected in order to achieve success
12:01 – How Scott defines and quantifies social selling
14:28 – Scott’s background in sales
16:24 – What Scott would do differently if he could go back and start over
17:55 – Scott Ingram promotes the 2019 Sales Success Summit
19:45 – Scott discusses his results with Sales Hacker within the last year
22:29 – Former sales roles where Scott was a top contributor and the results he was able to achieve
24:54 – Scott shares the secret to his immediate success at Payfirma, a financial technology company
28:42 – Scott shares his favorite sales stories and the lessons he’s learned
30:59 – Scott’s proudest accomplishments of his career
32:28 – How curiosity attracted great mentors to Scott
34:02 – How Scott has tried to formalize his mentor relationships
36:29 – The biggest challenges Scott faces in his professional career
44:55 – Scott’s strategies for blocking off time for core activities
48:31 – Scott Barker’s morning “SAVERS” routine
52:30 – How Scott spends his time after work hours
53:49 – Other good habits Scott tries to incorporate into his daily life
55:41 – Scott’s personal sales playbook
58:05 – Scott shares a version of his playbook with the audience
59:25 – The process of iteration that Scott utilizes
1:00:39 – Consultative Selling as a sales philosophy
1:01:44 – Scott’s style when it comes to consultative sales
1:03:43 – What motivates and drives Scott
1:06:22 – An average salesperson’s belief that Scott believes is crazy
1:08:27 – Content-based Networking
1:11:00 – One of Scott’s beliefs that the average salesperson thinks is crazy
1:12:22 – What sales tools are working best for Scott today
1:14:22 – Advice Scott would give to upstart salespeople
1:16:10 – Advice Scott would give to struggling, middle-of-the-pack salespeople
1:17:34 – What Scott would want to know about other top sellers
1:20:10 – Scott’s challenges to the Sales Success Stories Podcast audience
Tweetables:
• “Build a repeatable, scalable process and then continue to iterate. Your job is not done once something is working.” (04:15)
• “I think it’s really funny that empathy is king in sales now. Could you imagine, ya know, telling the boiler room sales guys in the eighties that empathy would rule the day? They probably wouldn’t believe you.” (06:27)
• “Social is about, for me I looked at it as a way to open doors that previously may not have been open to me. Meaning, I could get in front of more influential people if they saw I was visible in the same realm that they’re in.” (12:23)
• “Treat every deal like you’ll work for that organization one day, because you just might.” (30:29)
• “One of my tips and advice for anyone new to sales is always, ‘Lead with curiosity. It’s going to take you so unbelievably far.’” (32:40)
• “People that are the top one percenters, you typically don’t see too many blips in their career. Ya know, maybe they’ve had a blip or two, but past that there’s not too many.” (43:38)
• “I think my gut check of when I’m like, ‘Ok, not feeling that motivated today, but let’s strip it down and look at my life and my accomplishments through, ya know, the eyes of my eight year old self.’” (1:04:32)
Links Mentioned:
Sales Hacker
Sales Success Summit
The Miracle Morning
The Miracle Morning for Sales Professionals
Sales Hacker Podcast
Want to see a sample of Scott’s Sales Playbook? Just email: scott [at] top1.fm and ask. He’ll send it to you as quickly as he can.
Clip: Settling the Social Selling vs Cold Calling Debate
Clip from Episode 22: Top SDR – Florin Tatulea – Actionable Prospecting Tip to Get More Meetings:
One thing that I think is crazy withinin this industry is the amount of time that people focus on the debate between social selling and cold calling. So that’s something that you can find out yourself. You have analytics in whatever platform you use like SalesLoft. Find out what works for you. I’ve personally found out that calling works great. So to me that conversation doesn’t even matter and I don’t know why so many people spend that much time debating this topic when they should be focusing on actually selling.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger on Improving Sales Results
I don’t know what their target is everyday or how many people they’re targeting, but cast a wider net. I know it’s cliche, but I tell this to everyone I’m talking to. Because I’ll ask them: ‘Are you really trying to target 100 new people a day?’ Well, you know, 40 or 50. Well, double your efforts, or try to and you’ll see the results. I tell all of these other people from the teams that I’ve worked with. Keep me updated. Let me know if this is working or if this isn’t working and it’s cool to hear success stories from people that I’ve spoken to. That they’ve actually utilized social to help them land a large deal.
Clip: Cold Calling is Crazy
We talked about something you do that others think is crazy. Is there something that the average seller does that you think is crazy? This is going to get me a lot of heat, but cold calling. I’ve spoken to. I actually went to Baylor University. They have one of the best sports management programs in the country. The asked me to come speak. They actually have a program for kids that are interested in becoming, what I do, ticket sales. You can graduate with a degree in sports management with a concentration in ticket sales. Which, Baylor is one of the few universities that has it, and they’re very well known for it. So they asked me to come speak, and I’m on this panel. The professor says… there’s five people on the panel: When’s the last time you guys made a cold call? Everybody else was like: yesterday, or last week. I said, I was last to go, I haven’t made a cold call in 5 years. It was like a pin dropped in the room. You could hear it. There was dead silence. I didn’t think it was weird, but I think everybody else thought it was weird because they were trained. They had done I think a project with the Houston Astros where they had to call Astros single game buyers to try to upsell them into ticket packages, but they were doing that through the phones. It’s been so long since I’ve made a cold call that you may have to train me on how to do that again because honestly. What’s funny is sometimes our other reps will make fun of me. They’ll be like: Do you even know how to use your phone? I know it’s there. It’s collecting dust and stuff, but do you even know how to use it? Yeah, it’s probably cold calling honestly.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger on Sales Motivation: Being #1 and Getting Better Every Year
What’s motivating you in all of this? I want to stay on top, and obviously in sales as you know, the more you sell the more money you’ll make. I just want to keep getting better every year. I don’t want a year where even if I’m still #1. My revenue was a little bit less than the year before and so I could rest on my laurels and say ‘hey, I was number on this year.’ But instead of $500,000 I sold $450,000. To me that’s just unacceptable. So, just push. My wife is the same way, and so maybe that’s why we’re perfect for each other. We’re wired that way where we both get in early and we both want to be the best at what we do. Just to continue, and I want to see my name #1 on the leaderboard. The league releases the leaderboard rankings once a month. If they’re a day late I send them an email and am like, why haven’t you guys released the leaderboard rankings? They probably hate me for that, but I just need a little reminder every once in a while.
Clip: Push Yourself – Control what you can control: How hard you work
Push yourself. I know it’s kinda cheezy, but. There’s certain factors that you can control and there’s certain that you can’t. But you can control how hard you work. And you can control: I can outwork the person that sits next to me. And so putting yourself in the best chance to succeed is probably by doing that. That’s how I’ve been successful and that’s how I’ve seen others in the industry that I’ve just tried to learn from. My boss in San Antonio is probably the hardest working person I know. He’s been with the Spurs for 17 years. So about almost double as long as I have, and he actually wakes up at 4:30 every morning. So he’s got me beat by an hour because he goes to the gym for an hour every morning. It amazes me because I can literally text him at 6:30 about a question about a deal I’m working on and within 5 minutes he’s responding at 6:30 in the morning.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger’s Social Selling Process: LinkedIn-Email-Coffee
I prefer email and mainly because LinkedIn Sales Navigator only allows you to have 30 inMails a month. So I’m doing everything I can by using some email finding tools to reach out to these people. I’m introducing myself. I’m introducing the team. I specify in every email that this could be for business or personal use, because that doesn’t give them an out either way, and I’m asking for 15 minutes for a coffee. So I’m buying these people a cup of coffee once I get the meeting. The meetings never last 15 minutes. They’re usually like 30 minutes to an hour. It’s just very non-threatening to get your foot in the door with some of these companies.
Clip: Allen’s half million dollar sales result and goal for next year
So I hit a personal best from the 16-17 season which just ended in April. I did a half million in ticket sales, and just to put that in perspective. The second highest person in our league did about three hundred thousand. So it was great for me obviously to continue to push myself and so now for next season or the season we’re currently selling for that starts in November. I’m going for six hundred thousand, would be the next logical step. So it’s going to take a lot of hard work and effort, but I’m hoping I’ll get there.