Forge High-Impact Sellers with David @ CerebralSelling.com - Escape Velocity Show #25
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Summary
In this episode, I sit down with a good friend of mine, Dan DeBeau, to talk about how he got into sales at Salesforce and how he went from there to becoming VP of sales at Ripple and then VP of Salesforce.
Transcript
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People value all different things for different reasons and so sell the way you buy is just all about understanding like what is that person value and how are they making that buying decision so that you can align your sales motion to them in a very human way.
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David what's up man good to see I'm gonna reach across the table we go get my exercise really
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appreciate you making it pleasure yeah it's great um so cerebral selling is your thing I mean so
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this is interesting this is the first time we've got to meet but I've known of you I think Dan
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Well, I actually thought you guys were related.
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when DeBeau had his Batman doll, if he's watching this,
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And then we did Ripple together and then Salesforce.
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No, so I ran sales for Ripple for a couple years,
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and then what happens is when Salesforce acquires a company,
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they kind of let them run solo for a little bit,
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We don't need you to run your own sales team anymore,
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Like, we made our number every year for the first two years
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which was running small business sales for the eastern U.S.
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for Salesforce for the core team which was awesome because kind of coming from
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one of the acquired companies into now repping like all the products that
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Salesforce sells into companies that were like me which was cool what's their
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definition of small business so it was basically that's like now I think it's
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like companies that are less than 40 employees so you know okay so small
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business yeah they don't do it by revenue yeah like small business
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customers you know and I had been a small business customer before so it was
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kind of cool to kind of now be on the other side and then between those two
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jobs. I had a six-month stint where I basically made up a really cool job that
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I want to do and I was evangelism lead like basically a sales growth and
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evangelism lead basically saying hey you know what like Salesforce you have this
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great company and this great platform and you've learned so much and when I
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was one of your customers I would have loved to have some of that pixie dust
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like spread on me so that I can help you by creating some of these customer
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programs and and in some internal you know work with the leadership team
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around you know the things that we learned at Ripple around culture and all
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to kind of get some, like how Salesforce does Salesforce?
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Here's what I had learned building these startups
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so that I can then tell you as the startup kind of lessons
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I sat down, had dinner with him after, probably it was a year,
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and he was like EVP of support or whatever it is,
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And I was like, tell me, what's it like working at it?
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I mean, Salesforce created the ability for a company
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We owe a lot to Mark Benioff in Salesforce, I believe.
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What did you learn as somebody with your background in sales?
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Well, the cool thing is that you can see at Salesforce
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So it's one thing to have 10 reps, 20, 30 reps.
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who are all operating along the same comp plan,
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the same month end, year end, you can see some of these tactics.
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Yeah, that you can't see when you're just small.
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Let's say when you did the small businesses in,
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So you kind of have, everyone has their own little geographic
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area, which could be if you're in New York City.
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So they're really subdivided quite a bit versus, you know,
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the kinds of customers you get when you're in New York
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or Boston versus Miami or Raleigh, North Carolina.
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You actually need the complexion of the customers
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are different, and so the complexion of the sales rep
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And then the salesperson had to map to that buying process?
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Buying process, like level of knowledge about the cloud,
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So you might have more manufacturing, more high tech,
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like the kind of sales cycle they typically like to lead.
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So you had Toronto, I had Atlanta, I had New York.
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And in the South, they're great and a lot more relaxed.
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and high school football and all that kind of stuff.
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that you took away from that experience in regards
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to how you teach people today how to sell the way customers
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Well, one of the things I think with most marketing and sales
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organizations is that we're very keen to push our products
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So we have content and e-books and all these kind of things.
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can sometimes turn into like a very thinly veiled product pitch it's like oh
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yeah here's what we learned and boom product here's the punchline at the end
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and and i believe customers today are very like receptive like the way i kind
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of describe it sometimes like you have kids right yeah i have kids when my kids
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come to me and they're about to proposition me for something like a ride
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to go somewhere or i want to download this app or i want to eat something
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before bedtime like how long does it take you to tell that they're about to hit
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you up with a question you know like like in two seconds but just by how they
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approach you right and you get very immediately defensive you're like the answer is no whatever
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it is right yeah okay what's your question starts off by saying i know you're gonna say no and i'm
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like of course if you say that that's right you ask it so customers get very defensive right and
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it's and as people we get very defensive and so when i attend an event or there's some kind of
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like marketing something something and i can i can feel that there's a product pitch like coming here
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but the amazing thing is when you don't pitch a product there the customers have this like moment
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of delight where they're like oh my gosh like they didn't even pick they were just genuinely
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helpful and was it well i'll tell you so one of the things that i learned is when i started doing
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these executive dinners as part of our our territory and we would just go into various
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cities and we would get a whole bunch of executives from our customers together and i would facilitate
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just a conversation i would i would buy people copies of one of my favorite books that had
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nothing to do with sales and we would drive a conversation that was great for me and it gave
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us access to those people and it and it um uh you know kind of engendered them to the brand because
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we were actually helpful but when we measured the roi of all of our sales and marketing activities
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those had the highest roi of any event that we did really because pure gives pure give like we
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we just we built the relationship we added value and then what happens is at the end of that you
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didn't do uh hey we just launched this new module nope pure give pure give yeah because imagine like
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these people who are very standoffish they don't want to talk to us and so what was the payoff down
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the road we learned more about their business and how we could help they saw
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us and this is really really important especially for young sellers who you know
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I so I wrote this article in Harvard Business in the springtime about this
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concept they call experience asymmetry which is most of sales is a younger less
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experienced salesperson calling on a more senior level decision maker whose
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job they've never done and this is actually there's a big divide and it's
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getting worse yeah not we because the average age of a sales rep is just
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calling on your older customer, they're not taking your calls.
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Because like, who's this kid and what are they going to teach me?
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And all of a sudden, they get to know us a little bit better.
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where they see us as people and not the enemy, which
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And so we start changing from the enemy to a human.
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having these events where it's just a pure give
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it's not just, oh, let's just have a dinner and chit chat.
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But that was definitely one of the biggest learnings.
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I haven't, I'm still waiting on my copy of your book,
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but is this what you're covering in your book in regards to,
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because the title is, I mean, do you want to unpack it?
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So yeah, so the book's called Sell the Way You Buy.
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And the idea behind sell the way people, if I tell you that title, you have like an intuitive
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sense of like what it would be, but there's really two parts to it. So the book is all about how to
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connect with modern customers and sell and win more business through science, empathy, emotional
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intelligence. But when I think about sell the way you buy, I think about two things. Number one is
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empathy. Like don't use tactics that wouldn't work on you as a buyer. And I had this kind of
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epiphany when I was at Salesforce where, you know, you're kind of in this amazing sales machine and
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it's the end of the month, end of the quarter and people are like, hustle, hustle, make the calls,
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make the calls there's never been a better time to buy and all these things
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are good and true and it really like it pumps the team up
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and they start operating with this kind of sense of urgency and nothing you're
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asking the team to do is unethical it's not category
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categorically ineffective but then what would happen is i would go back to my
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it was sales people trying to sell me something because i'm a vp at salesforce
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10 of the quarter or a recruiter trying to you know trying to yeah you know and
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right and so what happens is i had this like little epiphany where i'm like i'm not i'm not
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selling the way i'm buying here like i'm telling my reps i mean i'm almost kind of like by by
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complicitly i'm just endorsing these tactics yeah which are not bad but that's not how i would buy
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so there's an empathetic component as well yeah but the second piece which actually interestingly
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more powerful is the fact that the way we buy things is often subconscious to us the way we
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make decisions or some things we don't often think about and our brain actually tricks us
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into thinking that we buy things in a certain way
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So sell the way you buy actually helps us unpack
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Because a lot of people think they know the way,
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is I talk about this concept I call the solution fit paradox.
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So here's the question, and for everyone who's watching this
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involved with you in a sales cycle there's three outcomes at the end of that sales cycle they buy
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your solution win loss they buy someone else's solution or build it themselves they solve it
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some other way or they do nothing okay so imagine you looked at all of your sales cycles and you
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kind of rank them in those three categories what did the customer do and now let's say you're an
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auditing firm you're deloitte your kpmg and you were called in to audit that customer's decision
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And the question you need to ask is, OK, how often do the customer make the best decision for them?
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Best as defined as the right business outcome, ROI, if you were the board of directors, it made the most sense for them.
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And so I would ask you, when you see people buy things, what percentage of the time would you say it's actually the right thing for them?
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The kind of the layperson example I give is like, let's say-
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It was in the magic quadrant, but whatever, it wouldn't be.
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And the same thing actually applies in our personal lives.
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to write down everything that you ate for lunch,
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what percentage of the time would your doctor say,
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You ate the best thing for you, calorically, food groups,
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It's actually, you know, when I ask that to people,
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sometimes I say, is there a negative number I can do?
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And so value and ROI are two very different things.
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The impact if we get that right in regards to value
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So the way I think about selling the way you buy
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Was it to just be super healthy and lean and in shape?
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And so like, hey, look, I don't care what the food tastes like.
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So if someone, let's say, for example, you go on vacation.
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And if I were to ask you, what was the ROI of your last vacation?
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You'd be like, well, I went to this really fancy, expensive
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But I'm like, what if you just had a staycation?
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People value all different things for different reasons.
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It's just all about understanding, what is that person value?
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so that you can align your sales motion to them
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And is that where I know you wrote a blog post about connecting
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the emotional, there's an emotional component to a buyer.
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It's about the recognition that maybe they don't want to.
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Is that the full spectrum that a lot of sellers don't
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understand is that it's not just about the ROI of the product,
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what's the most common objection salespeople get
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Yeah, take out a piece of paper and write down all the permutations of, like, it's too expensive.
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Like, it's too expensive compared to this other thing.
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It's too expensive because my buddy Dan works at your competitor.
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And some of those things might be spoken, and some of those things might be unspoken, right?
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So really diving down to figuring out, like, what do people value?
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And more importantly, how are you going to get them to tell you?
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The more information you give me, the more you're going to use against me.
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Like, even if I say, like, so what's your budget?
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Like, is he going to change his number based on what I say, right?
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So sell the way you buy is kind of thinking about, like,
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both scientifically and just kind of, you know, operationally,
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so it just feels a lot more natural and authentic.
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would fundamentally feel or see around either the questions
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or the timelines or the way things are presented?
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can do tomorrow on their next call, their next demo?
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So there's some things that are just super simple
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And you're like, OK, why is this person asking?
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There's tons of questions that we get asked all the time
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Like, Dan, how much money do you make doing this?
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So if you ever, and it's funny, a lot of these things
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that if you were asked that question in return,
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Do you still ask it that way, or you go to that question
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And if you want me to help you create one, I can.
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talking about all the science behind why that works.
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It's like, if you inject a few of these just very
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like little tiny things into your sales motion,
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Or a big issue is no-shows on demos or next step calls.
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going to talk in a month now, does that sound good to you?
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And so a very simple tweak is asking the person.
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So again, there's a ton of science behind this.
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But the science of asking questions, like, Dan,
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if for whatever reason you can't make the meeting in a month,
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Micro-commitment is way different than like, yeah.
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I actually believe that we learn so much not just
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If you've ever been on the phone with your telco
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and they're pissing you off because they won't give you
0.87
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the discount, you're like, I want to speak to the manager.
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Like, even if the manager tells you the same thing,
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you still might actually feel better at the end of the day
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Like, we all buy feelings at the end of the day.
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If anyone's ever put together an ROI case study
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and then found at the end of the day, like, oh, yeah,
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Let's go back and massage the data to make it more realistic.
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All you're trying to do is get people to buy in
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And in regards to the objections, I think there was five
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What's the right way to overcome these using either language
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or process tweaks based on the fundamentals of the book?
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Well, I think one of the biggest mistakes people
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Customer says this, an objection, like, boom, we say this.
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And the reality is, like, there's no one hit crush.
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what the root cause of the objection is in the first place.
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Maybe I just want to get off the phone with you,
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really expensive maybe i am asking you to help me architect a financial commercial deal that makes
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this viable for me right so the biggest mistake people make is that they they compartmentalize
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their playbook too much and some someone says this boom you say this this competitor comes up
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oh okay now we have to say this to get around that competitor when in reality the way i kind
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of describe it it's like sparring right so customer punches you and then you block and
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then you hit them back and i'm not saying you should hit it yeah you know it's kind of a back
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and forth so the example i often give is like let's say you met someone at a party and you
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exchange phone numbers and you call it up and you're like hey yeah it's david we met at the
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party yesterday you know would you like to go next saturday night and they say no i'm busy
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and now you're left wondering okay well do they are they really busy or do they just not want to
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go out with me at all so what do you do how do you find out what do you do dan it's been a while
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So what you're doing is you're testing the objection.
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You want to see, is this a pure logistical issue of like,
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And then they're like, oh, OK, I'll call you, right?
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And so that's when you think about the spectrum of intent
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need to go back and forth a few rounds, spar a few rounds,
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until you figure out where this objection is coming from,
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So you're trying to figure it, and that's testing it.
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have a bit of a man crush on Benioff and Salesforce.
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was like their sales process when you saw it did you feel like wow that's really well thought out
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or was it like oh that's really old or like is there things that startups can borrow from the
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way they structure the training you know how they got their reps productive how they hired reps how
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they comp like was there is there anything that you feel like worth founders you know pattern
00:22:35.820
matching against yeah well i think the first thing is like a common language so the great thing is
00:22:39.640
that everyone at Salesforce, you know, and this is part of the training. It's like you, you learn
00:22:43.720
to speak the common language. Like, so when I say this is in stage five or stage six, I know what
00:22:48.440
that means. And if, for example, I'm a sales leader and I get a, a, a, a quote request from
00:22:53.840
a client saying, Hey, I'm sending out this paperwork. And I look in the CRM and it says
00:22:57.660
it's in stage five. I'm like, Oh, we don't send out paperwork until it's in stage six. So like,
00:23:01.580
where is this? Right. And so having that common language across the organization is very powerful
00:23:08.540
And it also makes your job as a leader a little bit easier,
00:23:11.240
because you're not like some rogue agent where you're just
00:23:14.040
So the common language, I'd say, is very powerful.
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The other thing that Salesforce does very well,
00:23:18.680
and it's interesting now, sometimes I'll talk to a company
00:23:20.920
and I'll say, oh, our year end ends in February,
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and then we're going to have our sales kick off in June.
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And they're like, well, because we don't have the comp plans.
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And one thing that Salesforce does really, really well, pardon me, is they turn that ship around really fast after year end.
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So the planning for the next fiscal year starts months before.
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In fact, people often say that for leaders at Salesforce, the last few months of the end of the year when the planning really kicks into high gear is like our year end.
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Because missing hiring targets is like a cardinal sin.
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you are in the sales kickoff, ready to go again.
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reoriented really quickly so they don't lose any momentum.
00:24:21.260
Yeah, so that's one thing I have not seen as much in the startup
00:24:25.180
world is that they just keep everyone really focused.
00:24:31.180
The SMB side, was it all inbound and they were just making calls,
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or were they responsible for generating their own demand?
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Yeah, so in small business, it's more inbound than, obviously, like the bigger companies.
00:24:44.700
So you might have, and this is part of, there's a very elaborate algorithm they go through
00:24:48.720
to kind of score territories so that if you have a, like if I'm a manager
00:24:53.200
and I have 10 territories in my region and 10 reps, all the territories are different.
00:24:57.680
Some might have some greater percentage of new business customers.
00:25:06.280
But they're all balanced so that as a rep, ideally,
00:25:13.640
And so you might have a teeny tiny postage stamp
00:25:20.140
and savvier customers versus a whole big territory that's
00:25:26.800
Yeah, as a startup guy, when I joined Salesforce,
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And when I left five years later, they were 24,000 employees.
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What does the work that you do with clients look like?
00:25:48.700
So I've developed a curriculum, so the science, empathy,
00:25:51.400
execution, emotional intelligence-based training
00:25:56.460
So it covers a lot of the foundational elements
00:25:59.240
like messaging, so how you describe what you do, discovery, like how do you get people to tell you
00:26:03.820
things they don't want to tell you, and quite honestly, prime them to discuss the pains that
00:26:07.900
might be latent in the back of their mind, objection handling, like how do you actually
00:26:12.180
overcome objections with this kind of sparring mentality and understanding the root cause,
00:26:16.280
and then things like negotiation. And I think about negotiation as like, everything is a
00:26:20.220
negotiation. They ask you for a demo, it's a negotiation, right? So I teach kind of foundational
00:26:25.360
curriculum and i also teach sales leadership uh through my practice i also teach at the
00:26:30.100
smith school of business here at queen's university that's cool which is awesome actually
00:26:33.960
it's a big big focus of mine which is foundational sales education because we don't we don't teach
00:26:38.700
it in universities or high ed uh you know places of learning so this is so crazy it is crazy it's
00:26:45.060
like either you've got it and it's just something that you do inherently or you know you're trained
00:26:50.140
but you're a professional salesperson but like everything's a pipeline everything has stages
00:26:54.580
and there's a process to get it from stage one to two.
00:27:02.820
what's the cadence, and I don't know if you cover this,
00:27:07.300
but on a daily basis, weekly, as a maybe player coach
00:27:21.100
there are there's a lot of a lot of the people watching or listening are founder-led sales then
00:27:27.700
sales teams but like now they're like okay i've got three reps and i probably should be doing
00:27:32.660
maybe weekly one-on-ones or maybe daily whatever like what's the cadence that you think at that
00:27:39.500
stage they should be looking at well so i'll say two things the first thing is just think like
00:27:43.600
exercise i often go through with people i train as i say think back to the best manager you ever
00:27:48.780
had okay what was it about that manager that makes them so great if you have a pencil and paper take
00:27:54.300
that out write it down okay so i do this with with groups time and time again and the the traits that
00:28:00.300
always not just come to the top like they're almost exclusively the only ones that are there
00:28:05.660
are the ones that relate to my manager cared about me that's it they couldn't do their it wasn't like
00:28:11.020
oh they were really good at being an individual contributor yeah they pushed me they they believed
00:28:16.060
in me they gave me the freedom to fail they gave me feedback like they cared
00:28:20.440
about me so that's like the number one thing for me in terms of being a good
00:28:24.760
leader operationally like how often should we be meeting and so on I like
00:28:29.500
like a weekly cadence of meeting and in fact there was a study that I often quote
00:28:32.680
it was in Harvard business that talked about sales rep productivity and they
00:28:36.640
measured all of these various metrics across sales or productivity and they
00:28:40.340
found that the top sales reps excelled in in kind of three main areas number one
00:28:46.280
Who would have thought we spent time with customers?
00:28:48.800
Number two was just the network they had in their own company.
00:28:53.440
We talked about, like, WorkBrain back in the day.
00:28:55.340
So I joined when there was 20 people, and then it grew to 700.
00:29:04.700
And so kind of the fun thing was I knew a lot of people from the beginning,
00:29:08.000
and I also got to associate and play hockey with people, engineers, customers,
00:29:12.620
that I would never have spoken to at the company
00:29:22.760
So that was the second thing they found in the study.
00:29:25.160
And the third thing was time spent getting coaching
00:29:46.840
And then what happens is, if you show up to the gym,
00:29:49.160
and you don't know the exercises to do, you pick this up,
00:29:57.480
So yeah, meeting every week, having an agenda that is,
00:30:03.620
Meaning, just because we talked about this last week
00:30:07.400
doesn't mean we have to talk about it this week.
00:30:11.080
We're going to talk about quotas for next year.
00:30:12.900
So it's consistent in that it happens all the time,
00:30:15.320
and that we know generally what we're going to speak about.
00:30:17.320
But it doesn't have to be the same thing every single time.
00:30:22.320
I used to, when I had a big team, I would do 45 minutes.
00:30:34.320
that you have on your dashboards and all these kinds of things.
00:30:39.500
which I stole from Mark Roberge, I'm sure you know.
00:30:44.600
And one of the things that he did, which I loved,
00:30:47.820
which was every month, and he's a big fan of the one thing.
00:30:57.060
Because I've seen sales managers almost critique
00:31:01.420
Or I have a sales rep, and he's always like, yeah,
00:31:06.960
The one thing that we talked about, stick to that two weeks,
00:31:10.440
Because, man, it's like trying to shoot a moving target.
00:31:15.180
And it's like, what did you actually make better?
00:31:21.000
So the thing that he did, which was just focus on the one
00:31:23.300
thing, but the way he broke it down, which I really love,
00:31:25.500
which was like, OK, so we're working with Dan this month.
00:31:27.820
What's the one thing that we're working on Dan with?
00:31:31.840
What are we going to do to work on that together?
00:31:33.740
And how are we going to know if he got better at that thing?
00:31:44.040
a different tab with everyone on my team, what we're working on.
00:31:46.400
And the cool thing was it helped me get a sense for what
00:31:50.460
So I'm like, oh, I'm working on the same thing with six people.
00:31:55.760
And then, OK, this person isn't moving off of this thing
00:32:00.720
So it does have to be a little bit individualized.
00:32:04.820
And if there's certainly a mandate that you're pushing
00:32:09.580
It's like if you're coaching someone on a sports team,
00:32:12.800
the coach does coach the team in a macro sense,
00:32:23.300
It's kind of a newish thing, and really revenue
00:32:35.720
It's a question I haven't really thought too much about.
00:32:38.060
When I think about sales motion, it's almost like the collective, you know, it's like think about like what's your what's your swing?
00:32:45.140
You know, it's like I'm shifting my weight here.
00:32:48.500
Like your sales motion is the combination of like how you describe what you do and how you do discovery and how you make your customers feel and like how you're tracking all this in your CRM.
00:32:56.340
So it just kind of sales cycle doesn't seem to, you know, apply because sales motion seems to implicate like there's a human to human element of it as well, not just like the analytical piece.
00:33:10.880
is a sales motion versus the SMB customer segments
00:33:23.720
Where do you say that is a relevant conversation
00:33:27.760
Or is it all pretty much the customer's experience
00:33:34.100
I think it's different than the customer's buying process,
00:33:36.220
because there's things that happen behind the scenes
00:33:37.940
in your sales motion that the customer doesn't see
00:34:04.240
Because there's different ways to almost go to market now,
00:34:07.400
it's almost like, let's talk about our sales motion.
00:34:10.000
It's not as simple as just like lead gen, pipeline,
00:34:15.040
It's just, what do we do and what do we not do?
00:34:19.540
Let's try to build a repeatable scalable model.
00:34:21.640
I find it, I just love, especially in SAS, when I started off,
00:34:38.680
RevOps is a newish thing in the last three or four years.
00:34:43.760
about the concept of sales motion versus sales cycle.
00:34:57.580
of these like AI machine learning where people are just
00:34:59.740
using it and like, I don't think that word means what you
00:35:11.980
Do you have any other kind of, I like the reason I ask,
00:35:15.700
do you have any other examples of just good questions
00:35:24.460
to dealing with objections or asking for the order
00:35:34.940
because there's actually quite a lot of science around,
00:35:41.500
and this is like, this is kind of very advanced
00:35:44.260
because most people are taught to ask layered questions.
00:35:52.060
But there's also kind of like a school of thought
00:35:55.380
like the way you order your discovery questions.
00:35:59.900
like are you happy these days you're like oh that's like a hard question to answer because
00:36:04.760
there's a lot of things that feed into my happiness right but if I say like how many
00:36:08.180
dates have you been on in the last month actually so I'm stealing this yeah I'm stealing this
00:36:12.220
example from one of my favorite books thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman but you know
00:36:17.200
they talk about like these very specific questions versus like the very broad questions now if I ask
00:36:22.000
you like so for example I say are you happy with your overall level of fitness and you might be
00:36:25.440
like like I guess like you know like well let me ask you this how many times have you been to the
00:36:38.980
Well, one is easier to answer, because it's more tangible.
00:36:41.440
In fact, online, I saw Kenan, he asked this question.
00:36:49.260
when was the last time you just bought your wife flowers
1.00
00:36:56.320
And so we're tempted to ask the first question,
00:36:58.200
then the second, versus asking the more specific question
00:37:08.820
What happens is called a substitution heuristic.
00:37:11.340
The emotion from the first question, which is very clear,
00:37:22.920
But it takes a little bit like a kind of mindful approach.
00:37:26.720
There's tons, like, in terms of how you describe what you do,
00:37:30.260
I want to, I mean, this is the stuff that fascinates me.
00:37:38.820
I mean, the reason I ask is this, but, like, is there,
00:37:51.660
like, is there some weird things where you can do it backwards?
00:38:02.080
you wouldn't just go to Google, search for lasagna recipes,
00:38:04.860
find the first one, and then just do that, right?
00:38:12.900
And then it would suck, and then you would make another one.
00:38:15.760
So I advocate don't fall in love with anything.
00:38:21.520
And unfortunately, when we don't have the arsenal of tactics
00:38:28.980
If you were a doctor, you would not take a CPR course,
00:38:38.160
as the average age of a modern seller gets younger,
00:38:54.660
the world you know like he has a vision for the future of the planet that he's trying to enact
00:38:58.900
through his products or services he he doesn't advertise like i've never seen an ad for a tesla
00:39:04.180
or anything anywhere and yet he's got like everyone's like imagination right and so like
00:39:08.980
there's lots of different ways to do it and he is not stuck in what i would refer to as like a sea of
00:39:14.020
sameness like there's there's not a lot of people doing what he's doing and yet for most people who
00:39:18.900
have like a b2b technology business there's a million people that do what you do and even if
00:39:23.060
if you think that you're this delicate, unique snowflake,
00:39:28.300
To your customers, the way Chris Orlob at Gong described
00:39:30.680
this, which I loved, was if you're walking in the park
00:39:32.900
and you see someone pushing a carriage with twins in it,
00:39:44.360
So whatever it is you think you do that's so amazing and unique,
00:39:47.480
as a customer, first of all, I spend a fraction of a percent
0.99
00:39:50.360
giving a shit about what it is that you do.
0.98
00:39:53.000
got my own problems to deal with and so when i do kind of open my mind to what you have to say
0.99
00:39:57.320
it has to hit me like an armor piercing bullet otherwise i'm just going to like move on right
00:40:02.540
so very simple things like when i ask people what do you do what do you what do you say like it's
00:40:08.580
a question we get asked all the time and we're always wondering like who who's the person asking
00:40:13.220
like if one of my wife's friends asked me what i do i say oh i train sales people and they say
00:40:17.420
that's nice and they go on with the rest of their day yeah right but how you answer that question
00:40:21.740
And when you are stuck in kind of this undifferentiated sea
00:40:24.780
of similar sounding solutions, makes a difference, right?
00:40:28.060
So there are definitely some messaging tactics, which I would
00:40:37.860
is continue to educate yourself around different ways.
00:40:44.840
if you're listening to this and you want to up your game,
00:40:52.400
And is it to find their own cadence and either the economy
00:41:01.100
And is it just to find it the way that feels good for you
00:41:05.960
What are your thoughts on scripts versus talk tracks
00:41:32.280
Like, yes, we do need to arm people with the talk tracks
00:41:38.420
so we're all saying the same thing, which is a huge,
00:41:41.080
Huge problem, where we don't all say the same thing.
00:41:43.680
And I love what you said earlier when you talked about it.
00:41:51.740
And maybe we actually do do that, but customer success didn't.
00:41:56.460
So there needs to be some consistency in the playbook.
00:41:59.420
But then also from an execution standpoint, one of the biggest challenges is that people,
00:42:03.560
especially young sellers, feel emotionally encumbered.
00:42:06.220
So you come into a big company or a company in general, and you're like, here's the product,
00:42:11.980
We want you to call these people on this list and bother them and take them away from what
00:42:15.980
they're doing and tell them how awesome we are.
00:42:18.180
and you're like oh crap like that's not cool like i don't like to be bothered in my personal life and
0.97
00:42:24.420
shoot i don't even talk on the phone that much and you know anymore i mean the phone is for old
0.93
00:42:28.500
people right so you're asking me to do these things that are kind of inconsistent with what i
00:42:33.140
do and believe and behave and so when i go and do them it feels kind of unnatural and oftentimes i
00:42:39.460
saw this all the time at salesforce especially with the new york crew who are awesome so imagine
00:42:44.340
this you look in your sale you look in your crm and you see tons of activity lots of calls emails
00:42:48.900
no pipeline right and so you're like what's going on like maybe it's something operational
00:42:53.300
maybe you're calling at the wrong time of day or calling the wrong person but i would listen
00:42:57.060
to these phone calls like and there's a million call recording you know technology out there so
00:43:01.700
i'm listening to these phone calls and i'm like it sounds like to me if i were to just close my eyes
00:43:07.380
and not pay attention to the words you're saying it feels like you're bothering them like it feels
00:43:13.300
You feel like you know you're bothering them, right?
00:43:20.360
and tell them they won $10 million in the lottery.
00:43:25.820
So that's, you know, it's all very well and good to say,
00:43:27.700
like, get excited and pumped about what you're doing.
00:43:29.660
The reality is most of us are not feeding starving children
00:43:38.260
that helps people automate their blah, blah, blah.
00:43:58.400
You know, I remember we were at a sales kickoff
00:44:07.180
And now I did not know who Aziz Ansari was at the time.
00:44:19.860
He talks a lot about dating and the modern era and dating with apps and the whole thing.
00:44:24.360
And so all of his content, he's talking to middle-aged software people who are married.
00:44:31.740
So about 40 minutes in, he just kind of switches gears.
00:44:38.040
He's like, Salesforce, you guys hired me to come in here, do your kickoff.
00:44:40.980
he's like what the hell do you guys even do and so he points to parker harris right co-founder
00:44:46.920
salesforce in the front row and he's like you you look important he's like salesforce.com
00:44:54.120
he's like what do you guys do and everyone's like waiting to see what he says so what does
00:45:04.080
parker say he says what the marketing you know at that time was which is actually not far from
00:45:10.040
is now she says you know we help our customers connect with their customers in all new ways
00:45:15.000
and everyone's like quiet just to see what's going to happen and aziz ansari like erupts into laughter
00:45:19.240
he's like what the hell does that mean he's like do your customers know this is like a pyramid scheme
00:45:23.080
or something like that yeah and everyone's like laughing as well because like those messages well
00:45:28.200
might be good and correct are contrived in a marketing lab and people don't talk like that
00:45:32.840
they don't talk like that right and so that's like the big disconnect is like okay great it's
00:45:40.240
But a sales rep can't go out and say those words to a customer
00:45:44.860
And as soon as it sounds that way, customers turn it off.
00:45:53.720
how do you have a human-to-human conversation that is still,
00:46:00.240
And I think you were kind of alluding to this before.
00:46:06.800
When you say someone has natural-born sales abilities,
00:46:08.800
usually you're just saying, like, they're extroverted,
00:46:13.580
And we meet a lot of these, what I call, unconscious sellers.
00:46:16.380
And shout out to my sister, who I always joke with her.
0.91
00:46:20.920
She's a personal trainer, and she's great at what she does,
1.00
00:46:34.000
Repeat them, train other people on how to do them.
00:46:36.460
And if you're an unconsciously bad seller, meaning you go out and you do all this bullshit stuff.
0.99
00:46:44.520
Not only does it not work, and it's bad for you, but what's even worse is, and this is almost unique for the sales profession.
00:46:52.240
There's very few professions that are like this.
00:46:57.620
So now when I'm a salesperson, I speak to a customer like, you don't want to talk to me because I'm the enemy.
00:47:03.220
I actually do believe that all bad salespeople are not bad people.
00:47:14.460
But they're just executing these plays that have been taught to them because we don't teach sales in business school.
00:47:20.480
And sales and buying has changed so much in the last 5, 10 years that sales has not kept up.
00:47:26.640
A lot of selling systems and knowledge are good, but they're old, right?
00:47:30.500
And buyers have changed their buying habits a lot faster
00:47:42.660
I think what's happening now, when a lot of the work
00:47:44.900
is being done by the product and the marketing,
00:47:52.540
I mean, there's a lot of stuff to deep dive in.
00:47:54.500
Plus, it sounds like you've got the science and research
00:48:05.680
Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.
00:48:08.900
Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.