Andy Paul's Blog, page 15

701: What Can You Learn from the Best Salespeople? With Paul Cherry.

Paul Cherry, author of the new book, The Ultimate Sales Pro: What the Best Salespeople Do Differently, joins me again on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The book is for salespeople to develop and accelerate their growth. It looks at over 1,000 interviews and observations of sales professionals in major industries.
Be in charge of your development. Reps need grounding in the basics of becoming a professional salesperson. Leverage your strengths — don’t just meet the metrics.
One chapter is called “Sales First, Relationships Second.” Relationships often devolve into casual service roles. Attempt to pull the client up. Probe with questions to bring new opportunities to the surface.
A sales relationship is not a friendship. It is a working, learning relationship. Work together to achieve growth. Small talk is necessary but use it to leverage client news.
Andy says responsiveness requires answers to problems. It is value, delivered at speed. Paul suggests responding by email with a request for a call to discuss the issue fully. Tap into a prospect’s passion; don’t just give data.
Salespeople are often reluctant to ask ‘power probing’ questions for discovery. Never start a conversation assuming that you ‘know things.’ Mark Twain said his tailor took measurements every time.
Paul always asks clients, “Tell me what’s changed since the last time I spoke with you.” Andy asks, “Tell me what you’re thinking about now.” Find what is top-of-mind for them; what has changed. You’ll discover opportunities.
Paul suggests including the organization — “Tell me what you and your team are thinking about now.” That shows the decision-making process. Don’t take orders from the purchasing agent but talk to the organization’s leaders.
One chapter is called “Don’t Go Native.” Be genuine. Be yourself. Get to the issues that are important to the client. Paul talks to customers about the ROI they want.
Think about what you can provide the customer to help them gather information to make a good decision with the least investment of their time and effort as possible.
Salespeople are motivated by how they are recognized, rewarded, and incentivized. Paul talks about KPIs. The company has to be profitable, at the end of the day.
Salespeople need a sense of ownership in their business. Andy had the opportunity to take risks in his early days in sales. Salespeople need room to grow and breathe. A company should fit the KPIs to the strengths of the rep.

700: Increase Your Growth IQ, with Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova, Growth & Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce and author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In Tiffani’s role as a sales leader, so many people asked for growth advice that she started looking for patterns in high-performing companies; then she wrote Growth IQ.
Tiffani’s real-world experience gave her a leg up at Gartner over analysts with only academic knowledge. She became a research fellow on the future of sales. Then she joined Salesforce where she meets clients worldwide.
Tiffani quotes Ginni Rometty that “Growth and comfort never co-exist.” That set the frame for the book. Tiffani says the one thing about growth is that it’s never one thing.
If your organization is comfortable now and it doesn’t have a problem, now is the time to invest in where you think you need to be in two years. Pilot and test things while you’re strong and growing.
Successful companies constantly check the canary in the coal mine. If your growth slows for two or three quarters, look at what is slowing you down. 95% of your issues will be internal problems.
80% of companies will go through a growth stall and few of them will recover to robust growth. In a stall, you go into defense mode and cut back on marketing. That’s the wrong time to cut back.
Tiffani says there’s only one thing sales reps can control — their behavior in front of a client, whether on the phone, in an email message, or face-to-face. Sales reps need to be serious students of their profession.
Sales managers are squeezed between the client-facing reps and the VPs. They manage down and up. They need to empower reps to do what’s right for the customer. Andy wants reps to close a greater percent of leads.
Tiffani coined the term Seller’s Dilemma about changing processes while generating revenue. Think about NASCAR pitstops. How long do you pause to change the things you need to change? Watch the data and make the changes.
Innovation must be rewarded even if it fails. If a campaign doesn’t work, try a different one. Have a culture where people are willing to bring ideas to try new things to generate new revenue.
Tiffani challenges sales managers to enable their reps and also carve time out of their own day to study circumstances and make appropriate changes. Tiffani cites Mike Bosworth on improving quota attainment.
Tiffani summarizes the book: Understand the context of your market, the combination of changes you need to make, and in what order you need to make them. Andy recommends the book to you.

699: Accelerate Revenue by Aligning Marketing and Sales, with Darryl Praill

Darryl Praill, Chief Marketing Officer of VanillaSoft, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Getting Sales and Marketing to work together to generate revenue more effectively will be a trend in 2019. Is there sales and marketing alignment, or is it a turf war? Darryl suggests that marketers should make some cold calls.
Darryl has been a sales rep, a VP of Sales, and a CMO. He says the heads of sales and marketing must agree on the rules of engagement and understand their own roles.
Rule 1. Determine what percentages of the leads should come from marketing and from sales.
Rule 2. Define the characteristics of a lead as agreed upon by sales and marketing. Darryl explains.
Rule 3. Define how leads will be contacted within stated periods of time. Sales and marketing should meet regularly and review progress to eliminate misalignment.
At VanillaSoft, 80% of closed deals have historically come from inbound leads because of the conservative growth pattern they followed. They are hiring more hunters now and ultimately looking for a 50-50 split.
Some companies have moved the role of SDRs into marketing. Darryl explains in detail how this works, including the handoff from SDRs to AEs. Marketing’s job is to generate and qualify leads for sales.
The AE does additional discovery qualification and prepares prospects for closing. Andy reflects back on the marketing aspects of his cold call prospecting.
Darryl examines sales engagement automation. It gives sales reps the time and tools to build their own credible brand. It is marketing. Being a marketer is not for the faint of heart.
There is still a cultural split between sales and marketing, even when SDRs work in marketing. If you are early in your career, think of the SDR role as an apprenticeship. Improve your sales skills every day in your job.
Data tools give feedback on your effectiveness. What if Andy and Darryl could have had AI tools on their very first sales calls? It’s a good time to be in sales and marketing and the difference is blurring. New terms are needed.
The Chief Growth Officer may direct sales and marketing on the same company team. Andy talks about one huge, growing company that has no sales VP. Sales needs to change. Darryl sees exciting changes coming.

CONTACT DARRYL PRAILL

Twitter: @Ohpinion8ted

LinkedIn: Darryl Praill

Website: VanillaSoft.com

698: Big changes needed in B2B Sales, with Skip Miller

Skip Miller, founder and President of M3 Learning and author of ProActive Selling and Selling Above and Below the Line, joins me again on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

In the 1890s, NCR revolutionized industrial selling in the U.S. Industries have revolutionized manufacturing but manufacturing selling is stuck in the same old way. Skip talks about Silicon Valley.
Skip says that sales teams’ 90-day sales forecasts have an accuracy of 45% to 50%, their sales cycle length is too long for the price, and the average order size is too low.
A close rate of 20% is too low! What if you increased your close rate to 40%? Raising the number of activities is not enough. Make the activities that you do more effective.
Ask yourself, what’s the size of the client’s problem you are helping to solve? Have the conversation on the business case well before any proposal or demo. Qualify the prospects before selling to them.
Selling is not about giving discounts. Do an ROI on discounts and spiffs. Change your paradigms. If the management demands 90% forecast accuracy, they get it.
Measure salespeople on the accuracy of their forecasting. Don’t give your reps the incentive to put garbage into the pipeline. Andy remembers learning to qualify early on. Skip mentions the necessity of disqualifying deals.
If the buyer can’t quantify in dollars the outcome they want to achieve, then they haven’t made the decision to change, yet. What are the problems they are trying to fix, and what will bridge the gap? Can you help them get to it?
Think about the amount of time your reps spend on deals that just would never close. Great sales managers define the standard qualifications required at each funnel stage. Managers have not been trained how to set expectations.
Salespeople must prospect and ask for referrals unless all their time is filled with good leads they can qualify. Skip talks about getting referrals in client meetings. 20% to 30% of a salesperson’s pipeline should generate itself.
Managers need to put a culture together of expectations. This will swing us away from methods we have used for over a century. Get salespeople out visiting their clients.
A sense of urgency comes from the culture the managers create. Managers can set the standard of prospecting for 20% to 30% of the day.
You can’t create customer urgency. When they are ready to buy, they will feel the urgency in the C-suite. A client who is meeting their goals has no urgency to change. Learn their business goals and if you can solve them.

697: Providing Interactive Buying Experiences, with Matt Suggs

Matt Suggs, EVP of Sales at Mediafly, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

B2B buyer behavior is changing as a result of access to information online and at trade shows. Matt suggests sales reps must assess what misinformation a buyer may have prior to digging into product features.
In the technology space, the pace of innovation is greater than the pace of the distribution of product knowledge. Matt says analysts cannot keep up with product releases.
Matt notes the alliance of communities of systems integrator partners, customer user groups, and analysts joining to provide information on products and providers.
What is the actual point of entry into the buying process? Matt describes what “ready to buy” means from the customer’s point of view.
Mediafly management reports start tracking when a customer commits resources to a formal evaluation with the intent to make a purchase.
Matt shares some Mediafly customer use cases.
MillerCoors uses Mediafly to keep track of tap handles in bars and show bar owners data on the profitability of premium light beers vs. craft beers. Mediafly data is also useful in selling beer to grocery stores.
The Mediafly app allows a rep to select a specific store and compare their MillerCoors product sales to the competitor product sales, updated to the moment for that store, derived from Nielsen and Mediafly data.
A customer needs data insights for the go/no-go decision. If you are the vendor that provides those data insights, you take a major step toward getting the sale. Don’t depend only on your stock Powerpoint deck!
Mediafly started by assisting large enterprises with sales-ready content and measuring the effective use of the content. They evolved a selling model that provides a conversational interactive customer experience.
Mediafly allows a sales rep to weave data insights into a seamless presentation assembled by the rep from a collection of content. Mediafly works with their customers so reps can sort and format their data insights for sales.
Matt explains how to get from data insights to a value proposition. A client can use a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator from Mediafly to show their customers the dollars and cents impact of making the change.

696: How to Win Customers from Your Competition, with Anthony Iannarino.

Anthony Iannarino, bestselling author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, and The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the Ten Commitments that Drive sales, and now, Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition, joins me again on this episode of #Accelerate!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Anthony has a stack of books to read. Learn every day. Col. John Boyd, the developer of the OODA loop, taught combining disparate things to create something greater. Learn from many diverse areas.
Besides situational knowledge from your work experience, continually figure out what else is interesting and useful that your clients might care about or need.
In Eat Their Lunch, Anthony says to learn what trends are going to impact your client’s business. What should clients be thinking about? Are they ready for change?
People don’t know their skill level. 90% think they are above-average drivers. K. Anders Ericsson, the expertise expert, said, “I’ve been walking for 48 years but I don’t feel that I’m getting any better at it.” To improve takes efforts.
Anthony notes books on his reading list. Read things you disagree with and look for applications. Eat Their Lunch teaches how Anthony sells.
The relationship matters more than anything else. You should be competent, smart, and able to challenge someone’s view and still be known, liked, and trusted. Having a relationship is better than not.
The process doesn’t win deals. People do. At the minimum, your prospects need to be positively neutral about you. In millions of years, social grooming has not changed much.
Anthony contrasts buying a book to buying a house. Some decisions are still super relational. You can learn about trusted advisors in the Old Testament. People still need them for better views and insight. People are alike.
Buyers need to mitigate risks and they look to a trusted human to help them. Travel to see your clients. Build relationships that will matter to your success.
The sales professional has the knowledge of their product application and of the industry. How is the client to know what they need, without a trusted advisor? Supply the advice for their need.
Clients think changing is difficult but don’t consider that not changing is more difficult. Use messages to trade value for meetings.
SaaS products were created to disrupt businesses but their sales process is based on compliance. Scaling an inefficient process does not make it more effective. Anthony notes ineffective pitches on LinkedIn.


CONTACT

Book: Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition, by Anthony Iannarino

(To buy the book in bulk, you can get it at 800-CEO-READ.)

Website: EatTheirLunchBook.com

695: The Best Time to Sell, with Dan Pink

Dan Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and five other Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling books, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Timing is a science. Make timing decisions based on evidence, data, and facts — not on intuition. Dan lays out the aspects of timing and what research in social psychology and biology reveals about your best times.
Your cognitive abilities vary over the course of a day. The Synchrony Effect is to align the right type of task with the right time of day for your ‘ChronoType.’
Dan touches on age and memory tasks. Regardless of age, more performance errors are made in the late afternoon than at the beginning of the day. Find your right times to do the right tasks.
ChronoType comes from the study of biological rhythms. Based on your daily performance, you are either a Lark, an Owl, or in-between — a ‘Third Bird.’ Note your peak, trough, and recovery times of the day.
Dan gives a ‘back-of-the-envelope’ way to figure your ChronoType according to how you sleep on a free day. Larks and Third Birds have a Peak, Trough, and Recovery during the workday. Owls are more complicated.
Your Peak is when you are most vigilant and can ‘bat away’ distractions, lock down your focus, and analyze data. Your Trough is a very bad time of day for performance. Use that time for administrative work.
In your Recovery, your mood is high but you are less vigilant than at your peak. This is a good time for ‘insight’ work. Brainstorming is a good activity during Recovery. Experiment, day by day, what works for you.
Research shows that people have a default, which is usually ‘no,’ for making binary decisions (transactions)  You are more likely to overcome the default early in the day or immediately after breaks. 2 to 4 p.m. is a bad time.
Consider the stage of the sale, your prospect’s likely mood, and your peak or recovery time for making visits. Experiment and pay attention to possible differences. Then keep doing what seems to work best for you.
Andy elaborates on 1% performance gains, added up, citing Team Sky in the Tour de France. Dan agrees — when you are always testing, you are making cumulative gains. He notes Marketing A/B testing.
Sales ‘folklore’ can offer some guidance but don’t rely on it. Rely on continual testing. Test when your emails are opened; test email content. People like good stuff. Give them the best.
Andy brings up curiosity. How do we convince salespeople to try something new and not sell like we’ve been doing for the last 100 years?

 

CONTACT DAN PINK

Website: Visit DanPink.com for free great resources!

Podcast: PinkCast

694: Sales and Marketing Trends, with Jake Dunlap

Jake Dunlap, CEO and Technology Leader at Skaled, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

How do you reconcile the balance between technology and human relationships in sales? Jake says it depends on buyer behavior. Buyers increasingly want to go ‘down the funnel,’ themselves.
Transactional selling will become a form of intelligent shepherding; enterprise selling will remain dependent on buyer needs. Jake predicts ‘the era of the buyer’ in B2B.
The role of the salesperson will be increasingly more of an expert consultant about the entire product industry rather than an educator about their own product.
Bots already set appointments. Jake expects there to be less friction between the buyer and the purchase as bots develop. The rep’s value will come later in the process.
BDRs and SDRs will need smarter behaviors. They’ll need to understand real personalization and also how to build a defensible base of thought leaders that trust them. Your Rolodex® matters to get you in the door.
Longevity within an industry helps you build a serious network. You need to understand the buyer’s industry space. Be very curious. Keep learning. Be active.
Active users go to LinkedIn every day to get their professional news. Post news about your industry regularly and you will build a network of people who interact with your content.
Look ahead 10 years. What do you need to master? What can you do to serve your customers better? The buyer will require you to be curious. You will not have a sales job if the buyer does not need your help.
The sales industry has not caught up to the changing behavior of the buyer. If you can’t add value to the equation, that’s where the bots will replace you. The playbook will change. ‘Modern American Sales’ is over.
Amara’s Law addresses the impact of technology in the short term and in the long term. Mastering the ability to add value in a human way in the era of bots will allow you to thrive.
Reps need time in their day for activities to develop skills that will help them ‘crush it’ in a year, not just to hit this month’s sales. Set aside time every day to learn.
Sales leaders must let go of activity volume and stress the effectiveness of activities. Create better processes, not more activity. What worked before does not work now. How do you help the buyer make a buying decision?

 

CONTACT JAKE DUNLAP

LinkedIn: Jake Dunlap

Instagram: Jake_Dunlap

Website: Skaled.com

693: The Science of Success, with Eric Barker

692: Don’t Just Read; Study to Get Smarter with Harvey MacKay