Andy Paul's Blog, page 27

#594 Don’t Surrender to Your Confirmation Bias. With George Brontén.

George Brontén, CEO of Membrain, joins me for the second time on this episode of #Accelerate! Listen to George’s first visit in Episode 347.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

George says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is to stand out and differentiate themselves. They need to understand their buyers and their product’s selling point and communicate it quickly to their buyers.
George recently wrote about confirmation bias in sales, which led to this visit to Accelerate! Confirmation bias is selecting data to reinforce our existing beliefs, even when contradictory data is present. This is a human behavior.
We have a bias that we are not biased. We need to acknowledge that we have biases that impact how we communicate with and receive information from others. It is also important to understand others’ values or biases.
Andy cites the book Blind Spot, and Project Implicit’s online Implicit Association Test, that reveals biases. We all have biases. Our biases impact our communications with others. Listen to the words people use to detect biases.
Don’t take what the customer says at face value. There is a motivation behind it that a sales rep needs to know. The conversation becomes more productive if you ask probing questions.
We need to ask what new information means and if it challenges what we or the customer believe. System One thinking is easy. Perceptions are sticky. It’s hard to change them.
Sales reps need to help customers activate their System Two thinking. Messaging must be simple, or the customer will simplify them with their own assumptions.
Humans are not motivated by logic. We make decisions from our emotions, linked to our values and beliefs, and then justify those decisions with rationalization.
Andy suggests asking customers questions about their business they should know the answers to but don’t. Challenging is not to be argumentative but to awaken in the mind of the buyer a risk of missing something.
Sales reps have a confirmation bias that if the first calls with a prospect go well, the prospect is on the way to a sale even with subsequent contradictory evidence. They may skip discovery steps or miss influencers.
Sales reps tend to have ‘happy ears.’ This bias can be overcome by strict adherence to process. Don’t forget anything important. Make sure the prospect meets exit criteria for each stage of the pipeline. Look at details.
A thorough pipeline review can dispel confirmation bias. Managers also have biases. All reps need pipeline reviews and leads should be distributed to reps appropriately.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth companies based on a recurring revenue model — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

The post #594 Don’t Surrender to Your Confirmation Bias. With George Brontén. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#593 Virtual Agents, AI and Sales. With Diego Ventura.

Diego Ventura, CEO at noHold, Inc., joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Diego says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is getting introductions to the right people (decision-makers). It is hard to do with email.
Diego explains the sales process noHold uses, and future directions they may take.
Before noHold, Diego’s first company was STEFRA, which made software for video cameras. To support customers, they wrote a virtual assistant. They wanted to offer the VA to others. Diego raised $15 million in VC to start noHold.
Diego explains how a virtual agent or assistant differs from a knowledge base. A virtual assistant helps the user get to the most specific solution as quickly as possible within the framework of a dialog rather than a search.
The agent uses inference engine AI to access hierarchical categories of content about product installation and setup, use, compatibility, price, and warranty service. The agent asks questions that lead to the correct content.
Diego compares the inference engine to navigating a chess board from edge to edge. The path is not scripted but is followed by questions and inferences.
NoHold is partnering with companies like Google and Amazon to accomplish voice recognition and speech synthesis with natural language processing (NLP).
Diego points out potential applications for online sales. Besides speech technology, it requires NLP-to-SQL (Structured Query Language) technology. This may be ready on some sites for 2017 Christmas shopping!
Diego mentions two current noHold projects: a customer-facing application (the Sales Advisor), and an agent-facing application. Diego covers the details of the Sales Advisor and gives examples.
Diego discusses levels of AI in virtual assistants. He gives examples of chatbots built from user documents, including executive orders from four U.S. presidents.
Diego address the future of AI in sales and its impact. It is an excellent tool to augment sales capabilities. Diego gives an example for the enterprise, the Marketing Advisor, for augmented selling in groups of 500 SDRs.
AI guides transactional selling. AI can also guide B2B sales by previewing points to be covered in an upcoming call. Diego notes that noHold has a tab in Salesforce to guide reps. NoHold plans to enable smartwatches with AI.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth companies and built on recurring revenue — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth subscription-based companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

The post #593 Virtual Agents, AI and Sales. With Diego Ventura. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#592. How to Start More Sales Conversations. With Bridget Gleason. And special guest, Ryan O’Donnell.

Bridget Gleason is VP of Sales for Logz.io and my regular partner on Front Line Fridays. We’re joined on this episode by Ryan O’Donnell, CEO of SellHack and Replyify.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

SellHack is a prospect list-building tool with email address verification for salespeople who don’t want to manage their address lists. Replyify is a cold email automation system.
Ryan’s motivation for these companies was his desire as an entrepreneur to spend his sales time having sales conversations, not entering data to feed the pipeline.
Ryan is writing a post on the psychology behind sales emails. Some people talk about email, some write emails, and some run experiments to quantify email testing. Ryan tests for high response and high engagement.
The psychology of cold emailing is the right person at the right time with the right message. Are you writing very specific campaigns for very specific segments? Ryan treats segments differently and writes the emails accordingly.
Andy and Bridget see people talking about segmentation and personas, but not much practical execution. Bridget remarks about timing and segmentation challenges.
Ryan offers his thoughts on personalization at scale. How many email campaigns does your team have active? One or two is not enough. Apply the scientific method. Ryan has 80 different but similar campaigns running currently.
Don’t send a test to 5,000 addresses. Divide into subsets and vary the test messages. Bridget talks about the campaign Logz.io marketing runs, and the various campaigns the salespeople run, which are segmented.
Ryan’s email Call To Action is an invitation to talk on the phone next week to see if there’s a fit. Not for a demo call, but for a few questions. Ryan has two categories of cold email and five sequences based on segments.
Ryan explains some segments. Ryan encourages listeners to examine how they are approaching cold outbound emails and to challenge their assumptions. He suggests running different edgy test campaigns.
Ryan discusses ads, showing up, calling, and emailing. If your message is easily consumed and your CTA doesn’t require deliberation, an email shows the most respect for a prospect’s time. It is most efficient. Learn how to do it.
In testing, you might find one that yields a 60% response rate. Double down on that one! Ryan suggests writing drunk and editing sober! He describes his process of writing to a LinkedIn group of people like him.
Andy invites listeners to share their email templates, and the best and worst replies they’ve received to their campaigns. Send them to Andy@AndyPaul.com or leave an audio message on AndyPaul.com about your experiences.

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#591 Why you Need to Sell for the Category King. (Or Quit.) With Christopher Lochhead.

Christopher Lochhead, the host of Legends & Losers Podcast, retired Silicon Valley executive, and co-author of Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Christopher says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is understanding if their company is going to be the category king in their market or not. If not, they should quit and work for the king. 2nd best is not enough.
For their book, the authors tracked VC-backed companies founded from 2000 to 2015. They tracked financing and how their market caps changed. 76% of market cap went to the leader in each category. Winner take all!
Play Bigger is about dominating markets. The category king is the company that designs and owns the market category and teaches the world to think as they think. Pepsi will never catch Coke. Bing will never catch Google.
Christopher points to Henry Ford, Sara Blakely, and

Steve Jobs as pioneers who taught the world to think differently about a problem and a solution. One company takes two-thirds of the economics. Sell for that company.
In a startup in a new category, there is no line item in the buyer’s budget for a product that never was. You have to meet the category where it is and take it forward. Henry Ford presented a horseless carriage, not an automobile.
The value of being on the category winning team is more than the value of being anywhere else. It’s pretty fun to be on the team that is laying the others to waste. When you’re different, you design the rules of the new space.
Christopher uses Spanx and 5-Hour Energy as examples of category creators that own their categories. Existing categories can be redesigned or new categories can be designed. If you’re not there, you’re losing.
Nobody does an RFP or hires a consultant to figure out which office suite to buy. We just buy Microsoft Office. Microsoft has over 90% share in that space, even though there is a great free suite from Google.
It’s only when the problem definition shifts, and the solution definition shifts, that the category gets redefined. Dell kept innovating but lost the category. We need category innovation or category violence.
Reed Hastings, Founder of Netflix, didn’t start out to compete with Blockbuster. He created violence in the category of getting movies to your house. Blockbuster went bankrupt.
Andy talks about the growing number of competitors to Salesforce. Christopher talks about the category design that made the company. In 1999 it wouldn’t sell, but Benioff evangelized until his way of thinking won.
Christopher discusses Spiro.ai vs. Salesforce. In the enterprise software world, we are moving to apps that do things for us. Spiro is a proactive app that helps sales reps very simply. NetSuite dominates the category SAP owned.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies and software service companies — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

The post #591 Why you Need to Sell for the Category King. (Or Quit.) With Christopher Lochhead. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#590 The Future is Now in Sales. With Sam Mallikarjunan.

Sam Mallikarjunan, Executive Strategist at HubSpot, and author of Inbound Commerce — How to Sell Better Than Amazon, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Sam says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is that the information power paradigm has shifted. The role of sales has changed from closing to guiding.
HubSpot did a correlation coefficient analysis of sales reps and quota attainment. Closing ability had a negative correlation. Domain experience led to a high correlation.
The first half of Sam’s book stresses competing for customer retention and competing for customers earlier in the buying process before they are set on what they want. That is still current knowledge.
Conversica studied sales reps. They sent idealized sales leads to companies. They found that less than half of the companies followed up on the leads, and less than a third followed up quickly or repeatedly. (Conversica sells bots.)
Initial prospecting — the SDR role — will either be by bots, or reps will have to add value beyond what they do today. Once there are no human SDRs, we will need to develop another entry-level role for sales.
Sam says to learn patience. AI will know what conversations to have with people, when. FAIR predicts reactions better than family and friends do. Reps will need to be good at having these known conversations.
Sam tells a sales story of his own experience illustrating a conversation that could not have been codified. There is not an algorithm to address every circumstance.
2024 is the earliest estimate of when computers will have the same processing per second per thousand dollars as human beings. Sam sees the EQ of selling as the last thing to go but it will not be disruption-proof forever.
The buyer’s journey will change in several ways through AI. Buyers will select the experience they want. AI will be good at predicting what buyers want. It will also become good at influencing what buyers want.
Another HubSpot survey asks whom you trust. Teachers and doctors are at the top. Marketers are at the bottom rounded down to 0%. Sales reps are rounded up to 1%. They rank lower than bots. They lost to politicians in 2016.
This problem of low public regard for sales and marketing needs to be solved before any other problem can be solved. There are industries built around blocking sales and marketing from doing their jobs.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies and software service companies — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

 

The post #590 The Future is Now in Sales. With Sam Mallikarjunan. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#589. A Listener Asks, “What is the Best Action for a New Entrepreneur to take?” Also, Books. With Bridget Gleason.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Taking an overseas flight with nothing to read is unimaginable to Andy. Ebooks are great! Bridget says people may take the time for extended meditation. Bridget and Andy share thoughts on retreats.
Listener Jason asks, “What is the single best action you would tell a new entrepreneur to take when selling to a seasoned client base?” Jason is a business intelligence analyst selling customized data visualization reports.
Take sales classes. It’s not about knowing more than the prospect but understanding their pains, challenges, and aspirations. Jason needs to learn discovery and to help the prospect. It’s about the prospect, not the product.
As a new entrepreneur, Jason needs his Ideal Client Profile. Andy suggests that the more successful people are the ones who will appreciate the value of the product. Successful people are constantly learning. Research them.
Having an ICP is essential. A seasoned professional will not need to be educated on the benefits of a product. It is hard for new entrepreneurs to identify their ICP.
A common business mistake is to focus on helping companies that are struggling. An entrepreneur can build a better business by helping successful companies to become even more successful.
Jason uses Tableau. Andy suggests partnering with Tableau to teach new clients how to use it. Bridget discusses The Patriots and Kraft Analytics Group data use.
We tend to use data on a superficial level, to confirm our biases. Data should stimulate questions. Jason could help clients understand the questions they should be asking the data.
Andy recommends asking the questions of prospects that they should know the answer to, but that they don’t, establishes your credentials with them.
Bridget just read Extreme Ownership, by Jocco Willink and she strongly recommends it for leadership. Andy just read Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, by Banaji and Greenwald. They created an Implicit Association test.
Clicksand, by Bill Troy, is an upcoming book about the dangers of much online marketing. It’s an analysis of inauthentic behaviors used in online marketing vs. the behaviors needed to create lasting client relationships.
Bridget is reading A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel, by Amor Towles and is enjoying it. In a future episode,  Andy will talk about Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion, by Paul Bloom.

The post #589. A Listener Asks, “What is the Best Action for a New Entrepreneur to take?” Also, Books. With Bridget Gleason. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#588 The Simple Formula for Success at Work and In Life. With Keith Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi, Founder and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, and author of NYT bestsellers, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success One Relationship at a Time and Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep Trusting Relationships that Create Success and Won’t Let You Fail, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Keith says the single biggest challenge facing salespeople today is loneliness. Sales is a team sport and not enough salespeople know how to lead sales teams and to collaborate and elevate individuals critical to a sale.
Sales today is focused more on the activities, metrics, and methodologies and less on the relationships to create. Keith sees an awakening of salespeople to creating value for people by being of service to all the parties to the sale.
Keith describes the first question a salesperson needs to consider at the first prospect meeting, “How do I make their career successful?” It means recruiting them as an evangelist of a solution that lets them look exceptional.
Have you earned the permission to shift the way they buy? Relationships include permissions, and even forgiveness if you misstep and ‘stub your toe.’
Keith creates a pyramid of value for a sales rep to work through: social value, product value, and co-creation value, to make the client personally successful. The pyramid combines personal and professional value.
Too many reps don’t believe they have enough to offer. Don’t rely on charisma. Sit your team down with the client team and ask what value looks like to them. The art of the facilitator is the art of the salesperson.
Keith explains what drove his search for authentic relationships from a young age, and how that has become his business success. Keith gives a thumbnail sketch of the chapters of Never Eat Alone and his success.
Build relationships abundantly with meticulous planning. Build a strategic alignment of your goals and your relationships. Be generous, authentic, humble, and vulnerable. Your relationships do not let you fail.
At some point in a strong enough relationship, you can be vulnerable enough to ask them for help. That solidifies the relationship. Keith talks about asking for help. Keith does deep talk, not small talk, creating mutual empathy.
Keith says networks replace what we used to depend on from company loyalty. Relationships between companies consist of individual humans, not the companies themselves.
Connecting with others is the most challenging part of sales. Keith tells how he will manage a 15-minute introductory call with an important prospect. It’s all about the prospect. Let them ask about you when they’re ready.
Keith talks about his practices in reaching out to people. Build your brand. A sales rep must be a thought leader. A LinkedIn link isn’t permission. Find more joy in your life and more abundance through leading with relationships.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies and software service companies — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

The post #588 The Simple Formula for Success at Work and In Life. With Keith Ferrazzi. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#587 Trust is the Real Sales Accelerator. With Stephen M. R. Covey.

Stephen M. R. Covey, Co-Founder and CEO of Coveylink Worldwide, and author of the worldwide bestseller, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Stephen says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is building a relationship of trust with the customer or prospect. It’s a whole new way of competing and it’s a huge differentiator for selling. You have to move a lot faster.
Character and competence, combined in equal share, make a person or a company credible. Credibility leads to prospects having confidence. Credibility establishes your reputation. Credibility and behavior lead to trust quickly.
The quickest way to build trust with someone is to make them a value-added commitment and keep it. Repeat the process. The first job of sales is to create trust. The second job is to create value. Keep these in order.
Andy gives a case study of a client committing to respond to every lead within 30 minutes, which doubled their sales. Stephen ties this to keeping commitments and the reps’ building self-trust as they did so. Make, keep, repeat.
Companies view the ability to make good decisions quickly as a competitive advantage. Reps then can help them do that will build trust. It becomes an upward virtuous cycle. Don’t think that trust takes a long time.
Sales is being driven by metrics. Trust is a hard asset that is quantifiable. It is an economic accelerator. It affects the speed at which we move and the cost of everything. There is a formula for creating trust.
Sales is trust monetized. It is a natural extension of the relationship established. Then come referrals, where trust is transferred from your customer to your prospect, who buys faster, and at less cost for marketing.
Technology and AI tend to disintermediate the rep from the relationship. The opposite should be true. With more technology, the trusted advisor relationship becomes even more important.
We can’t outsource trust through the content we produce. It starts with the people. Your first contact will determine whether you win the deal. Stephen talks about the eBay exception, which builds trust through the system.
Stephen gives a case study on a company using a Speed of Trust workshop to build trust in their team as well as in a prospect. At the end, the prospect did go with the company that invited them to the trust workshop.
Andy compares medical care to sales. People want to talk to a trusted doctor, not to a website.  The same is true in sales. We research our purchase online, then we talk to a trusted sales rep. That last step is the most vital.
We have the ability to be better at creating trust. Read Stephen’s book. Reinvent yourself. Self-trust precedes relationship trust. Disruption is the mother of reinvention. It helps us stay credible. Trust is learnable.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies and software service companies — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark ARR and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capabilities of your team to crush your goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

The post #587 Trust is the Real Sales Accelerator. With Stephen M. R. Covey. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.

#586. Setting Priorities to Increase Productivity. With Bridget Gleason.

Bridget Gleason is VP of Sales for Logz.io and my regular partner on Front Line Fridays.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

[3:47] Bridget is fantastic and busy! She talked to the executive coach working with her and he reminded her that her time management is within her control.

[5:01] Andy refers to systems by David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, and Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. You can hear interviews with David, on Episode 483, and Kevin, on Episode 82.

[5:48] Andy was using Kevin Kruse’s system until about four months ago when things just went off the rails! Andy is doing a reset and starting to be more clear about priorities. Bridget picks up projects that are left on the table. It’s too much.

[7:54] It’s important not to be a helicopter manager. Lead your team to get their tasks done. Bridget’s compulsive neatness contributes to her tendency to take over.

[12:19] Andy suggests reading about time management, and pick a methodology, to understand the principles. Find one that’s more aligned with who you are. Andy uses bits of several, which is a purposeful choice.

[13:56] Everyone has a favorite sales metric. Bridget describes the KPIs she uses. She gets a snapshot of actionable items, such as MQLs, the dollar value at top-of-funnel, and prospects at the Proof-of-Concept stage.

[18:31] Other KPIs Bridget looks at are stage conversions, revenue per rep, and how quickly reps ramp. Reps look at the same KPIs, so they know what matters to Bridget.

[23:22] Andy says talk time is a metric some consider outmoded because it doesn’t move the needle. We have so much data coming to us; are we using the right data? Can we normalize other metrics? Bridget ignores some dashboards.

[26:27] The problem with so much data is knowing what to look at. Are we missing something? Some assumptions may be wrong, and the data could clarify them if viewed correctly. Bridget talks about metrics used at an earlier job at Yesware.

[29:12] Test your assumptions continually. One of the weak points of big data is that algorithms are based on assumptions. Reexamine assumptions to understand the data.

[30:12] Please tell Andy and Bridget about your important metrics, and which ones provide less value now than they used to. Send them to Andy@ZeroTimeSelling.com.

[31:02] We tend to use data to confirm what we already think to be true. We need to take maximum advantage of the data, to learn what we need to do differently than we now do. Get some outside perspective, such as a coach or consultant.

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#585 Be Obsessed With Serving and Learning. With Grant Cardone.

Grant Cardone, speaker, CEO of Cardone Enterprises, and bestselling author of several books, including, Be Obsessed Or Be Average, joins me on this episode of #Accelerate!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

[3:48] Grant says the single biggest challenge facing sales reps today is that they don’t think big enough. Don’t think about a quota, think about making some money that does more than paying your bills. Grant calls $400K warmup money. Think big!

[5:28] Grant compares a low financial goal to being in prison. He talks about a sales rep working for Cardone Enterprises who will make seven figures. Grant wants sales professionals to think how much money it takes to have freedom.

[8:29] Grant asserts that you need to get to $400-$500K a year to have financial freedom. Figure out how to do it where you are or go someplace else. The average real estate person can’t buy the house they’re showing.

[9:41] Andy sees passivity in sales, where salespeople are not committed to doing more, or being obsessed about earning a certain level of money. Grant says before teaching people how to sell, teach them how much money they’ll need to have.

[12:38] 75% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. We should feel like we are living under threat in that circumstance. People say they’re in good shape until there is a crisis.

[13:42] Obsession is a scary concept because it implies doing more, and of life being out of balance. For Grant, Obsession is a means to achieve balance. Children think big, and Grant wants adults to do it, too. All great people are obsessed.

[15:30] People have become spectators rather than players. Be on the field. The game is played on the field. Grant is obsessed with serving others. Addictions are misguided obsessions.

[17:43] Andy recommends changing the education about money. Grant says a 15-year-old who knows how to make money, and much money they need to earn will figure out that to make that much money they will need to be in sales.

[19:46] Grant recently talked with rapper DJ Carnage. They talked about making money, keeping it, and multiplying it. Grant suggests after taxes and expenses you should have 40% left to multiply. Don’t have someone else control it for you.

[23:00] Managers are obsessed with KPIs because they’re not in control. People are on defense when they’re not on offense. The salespeople should be making more than managers.

[25:00] Grant gives his theories on the future of B2B sales. If you’re average, you should be feeling like T-Rex. You had better become great. Focus on kicking up your activity by 10X. Then get away from everyone that contradicts that message.

[26:42] Grant teaches a much tighter sales process. Don’t spend more time with the customer, but use a transparent, short sales process. Grant explains the sales model he uses.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

For Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies and software service companies — Andy is teaming up with his friend Jacco van der Kooij, founder of Winning by Design and author of Blueprints of a SaaS Sales Organization, to launch the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind, an intensive 12-month learning, coaching, and mastermind program for the Vice Presidents of Sales of high-growth SaaS companies. If the responsibility sits on your shoulders to scale your revenue team, to hit the $100 million mark and beyond, then the Sales Leadership Accelerator Mastermind will help you transform how you sell, scale, and develop the capability of your team to crash their goals. Enrollment is limited to a very small group, so, first come first served. Go to SaaSSLAM.com now, to learn more and enroll today.

 

The post #585 Be Obsessed With Serving and Learning. With Grant Cardone. appeared first on Andy Paul | Strategies to Power Growth.