Speaker 1hey good day morning everyone here with Donald my new friend today we're gonna dive in on some sales tactics welcome Donald hey
Speaker 2it's an honor to be here to sit next to you and to be able to do this and I'm really pumped for it to share some of these things that work I'm out of West Palm Beach South Florida you heard about me a little bit there I love selling and I talk a little bit fast so if I go too fast don't worry we'll be here afterwards and we could go a little bit deeper into it but we want to have some fun so if you're excited for that say yes whoo if you're pumped for that say oh yes I think they're ready mark
Speaker 1love it dude talk fast I just am finishing the Lex Friedman episode with Elon Musk who talks about bips per second of the human language so we got it we can advance here all right what's the first case set it up yeah so the
Speaker 2first case is an all-state company affiliate company and they don't know all stay like selling shirts oh yeah they sell everything and this team in particular I know their sales leaders we've did engagements before in the past but earlier this year all state had an increase in rates and a lot of people across the board with interest rates and so forth that are increase their rates the challenge that this team was facing right now they're getting a lot of inbound but unfortunately their policies that are writing each week was dropping and dipping so there could be a several things that you could diagnose and fortunately they had an internal sales enablement team and they did a lot of the fundamental things and so forth so once they did their internal thing and it wasn't working they said alright let's see what we can talk about bring an outside view to look at it and it brought me into the conversation say how can we help our team is it the price increase that's really causing this problem and we did some discussion we worked and we listened some of the calls and so forth the other interesting factor was that a portion of their team were new reps as well new reps being about a year old so they were used to selling under certain pricing and all of a sudden I saw this increase so now and where there should be writing anywhere above this they're writing about 300 policies a week as a team and that's well below their level there should be at least 350
Speaker 1all right so let me just take one point that a lot of folks miss here in proper diagnosis usually what I see is when a seller is not hitting goal a non data-driven sales manager will say they need to make more calls and that's like rarely the diagnosis so one little thing that I've very few people know is I like to look at the performance of my tenured salespeople as an initial point of my diagnosis and that's what Donald that a team did here is if you're if you're starting to miss as a team but your tenured people are constant and hitting we have something internal to the team so we have something like on boarding or a particular territory a particular patch but if your tenured people have all dropped simultaneously we have something going on sort of like outside of the team that triggered it it might be the economy it might be a new competitor it might be you know something something different and that's what we had here it was it was sort of self-induced through a price change and they realized that this was like a big deal because even the tenured reps were going down now we don't have the full diagnosis why and how do we fix it how did you
Speaker 2figure that out yeah so what we started to do with their team after you listen to some of the calls we found out right after they were talking about the price there everyone was confident going into it you you know your value so to speak at least the initial stuff but usually when they got that price objection on the call they started to climb up because they felt like it wasn't fair and I and that was what we also when we started talking more of the reps they felt that the belief that they had was that this is not fair so to speak it's our company raised the price so much and it's impacting us in our pocketbook and also impacting our clients in a tough economy at this point and
Speaker 1literally pitching on the phone or is it a zoom and how are you diagnosing this like discomfort yeah
Speaker 2that was on the phone okay you're hearing the audio recording here yeah
Speaker 1okay so suddenly this is like this is a psychological mindset thing in a way okay dive into that how'd you get
Speaker 2through so here's one of the fun part that we went into I gotta I gotta get my phone on my pocket now I get get excited you know got to loosen up so here's what we realize most people when you talk about mindset they just make it like this ambiguous thing like it's just you know just just think different think positive and life's going to change but what I'm uh maybe I'm like Tony Robbins we didn't have a walk on any fire but here's a but here's what happened though there's a science behind it when you can put the science it makes total sense there's something called the reticular activating system and what I want to just really want to explain that in a simplest terms so like for instance we talked about it how my wife got a new vehicle right and we've all done this whether you buy a new whatever car she got a new Atlas so because of this new Atlas all of a sudden we saw Atlas everywhere on the road which you never
Speaker 1saw before never saw them before
Speaker 2like they're never paid attention to them but is it a fact that Volkswagen just retargeted our family in particular and the cars around West Palm Beach absolutely not but our reticular activating system was focused on that because something that we've been thinking about researching and deemed as important so then therefore let's look back I don't know when it comes to sales if for instance if I tell myself that cold call doesn't work then automatically all of the gurus on social who say cold call doesn't work are the only ones that I would see in podcasts listen to mine we it does work um but then um but you start to focus on a thing so we started looking at helping them to understand the science you're focusing on the negative outcome of a price increase and because of that you're validating it over and over especially in conversation I told you because the client just told me they're you know we're way expensive so we started helping them to understand and be recognizing that that was happening then they were mindful of it the second component to fix it now was going back to the value side of things how do I help Express the reason why we're more expensive and do I believe that we can offer the value on it and there was a huge value that Allstate had over their competitors fortunately my wife is okay but she did have a wreck that led to the fact that she had to get this Atlas but the um in a previous car wreck we worked with the company the previous insurance company of the person and it was a nightmare it was horrible but Allstate their focus was that you don't have to go through hoops and jumps if you do business with us once you have a policy claim we're going to take care of it hands down
Speaker 1okay so we have a relatively data-driven diagnosis of what's happening here unfortunately this is like a psychology exercise which is shocking how much overlap there is between the science of psychology and sales like I I often say to my students the best sales people in the world are therapists I ironically had like a therapy session driving in this morning I do it over the phone with my guy and the crazy thing about therapy right you go in you're you're bothered by something all the therapist does is ask you nine questions and you feel amazing that's like the beauty of sales and we're dealing with a mindset situation Allstate did all the right things they did the perfect calculation with McKinsey or whoever on what the price should be they did the value statements they trained the reps they did all the enablement they had the scripts Etc but they never addressed the psychology of the route a little bit like what happened with
Speaker 2this team so the first week we did this and I'm telling this is so now the data comes in the first week we did this they wrote 300 policy and it should be above 350. nice they wrote 300 the next week after that um that's when he called me the next week after that they wrote three I'm sorry it went up to 350 so they got back up to par then it went to 385 yeah then it went to 400 and it eventually topped off around 425. and it wasn't anything like revolutionary we didn't change the price we didn't bring in some new tactic that we got from Mars it was just understanding the way that they were thinking about their value offering right and then also being willing to ask the question the confidence to do it so and that's what happened with them it made decent money from
Speaker 1it I connect with this story it reminded me like eight months into HubSpot first off like how we came up our pricing in year one was a complete joke like literally I remember sitting out with Brian and Dharmesh and they're like okay we're gonna build this and it does this and it does this and I was like how much does it cost and they were like we hadn't thought about that 100 bucks a month I'm like all right sweet and then so we were selling this thing they were like I was like I think I can charge more I think I can charge 250. and then one time they were like we should increase it to 750. and our reps sort of freak out same thing yeah and I went around and I was like hey John you're from Monster what how much did the product you sold sell for 10 000 a year is HubSpot better than that yeah so what's the hesitation I went around to each person where did you work before how much was it turned out their price was way more they believed in HubSpot more and we got through it yeah from mindset standpoint all right what's the next
Speaker 2one so the next one is uh you probably heard of the company um their 3D printing company called form Labs um one of our podcast listeners he was individual at form Labs he was uh one of the early sales reps there and they started breaking into the medical division a little bit more and he reached out to me and he said I'm having challenges he got put on a pip performance improvement plan and um the program if you're below 70 you're in grounds of danger so he was right around that grounds of danger listened to the pod decided to reach out didn't know what he was trying to do breaking into this new medical market and he said he needed help um and that's where
Speaker 1we started off okay first off I think this is set up Ron no offense to form Labs we do teach the case at HBS great company I think they're Boston founded yep um and you know Pioneer and 3D printing but like when you are exploited in a new market, like medical device, you got to think like a seed funded business. You don't have product market fit yet. In this case, they had product market fit in wherever they were. Maybe it was in manufacturing. I know they did a lot with like Ford Motors and GE and stuff like that. But like they're a completely different market. And most entrepreneurs and founders are overly optimistic about how they can apply what they learned in this product market combination to a new market. So this rep shouldn't have even been on a pip. This should have been like a couple of product managers and some engineers or whatever, trying to figure it out the message in here. But anyway, you saved them anyway. So what was the diagnosis here?
Speaker 2Yeah. So he had a good, he would get into a conversation, the name and the idea of like 3D printing would grab attention. So, but the problem was you're not getting everybody engaged. Anyone who's done anything with the medical world, you recognize that you need multiple stakeholders and it's almost in any industry, right? You, you have to, you have to have multiple stakeholders, but specifically with theirs, when you try to sell to like, try to get to the doctor, God bless you. You're not going to get through. So he had to understand to get to the office managers or those individuals and gatekeepers in some of these SMB size dental offices. But then also how do I expand and get others engaged? So one of the other people was definitely, what can I say to get the doctors engaged? And then the other part was, what can I do to make sure I get like pretty much the account managers, people working directly with patients to get them engaged? And then the other part was, what can I do to make sure I get them engaged early on in that process? And that was one of his biggest mistake. And then his discos or his discovery calls weren't structured. It was kind of like, I have something interesting. Let me give you a quote and then let's hope and pray that something comes through. Show up and throw up.
Speaker 1Hey, alligator selling big mouth, little ears. Yep. We have two ears for a reason. Let's throw all the frigging eyes out there. Okay. A couple of things to break down here. The first off is, uh, the getting to power. And it's just not easy all the time. In this case, getting the doctor. I know we teach this case on like Boston consulting group and a great partner that was trying to get into a fortune 100 company. She did all this research and found an ex client who was a private equity person that was personal friends with the CEO. And he, she asked him for an introduction to the CEO. He said, hold your horses. I don't do that for anyone. Fly out to my house next week. I'm going to do that for you. Let's sit down over dinner and talk through how we're going to like what you're going to do for them just to get an intro, but that's a hundred million dollar account. So like, let's not minimize the act of getting to power. Yes. The other thing that's happening here is we have a decision-making unit. We have a doctor, we have an office manager, we have potentially a CFO. They all think about different things. The doctor cares about like, I'm going to get patient care up. I need to do my job easily. The CFO cares about the price. The CTO cares about the price. The CFO cares about the I don't want to buy anything. Anything I buy is more work for me, but like, is it secure? All that kind of stuff. We have to appreciate all these different folks. How did you get him through
Speaker 2that understanding? Yeah. So the, one of the, when it's, when we looked at each of the deals that he was working with and we got a chance to analyze, it was really that it just said that one individual, the idea was my wife speaks Spanish and she grew up here in the U S but so she's fluent Spanish and English, but there are certain situations when I, we went to Dominican Republic, I did six years of Spanish and we were going through the, through their equivalent of TSA, whatever the V you check in, whatever the airport. And I pulled out my Spanglish and she was behind me and I look more Dominican than she does. So I started doing my Spanglish and then they're like, they started going over my head, asking questions that I didn't understand that then, then come Christina and she started to speak Spanish. And then all of a sudden they're like, Oh my goodness, we can have a conversation with her. Here's what happened. What I realized he was not having the conversations. He was having surface level conversations with the, with the office manager, but then he was given the
Speaker 1same presentation each.
Speaker 2Exactly. So we started saying, can you speak Spanish? So to speak to the span, the other Spanish speaker, can you speak above her level or his level and explaining the business challenges that were happening because, and how form labs can help them in a business situation. And then also from the medical component, how can this revolutionize the way that things are working right now in the dental practices? So we started speaking these different languages. And then obviously at this point, office managers were like, huh? This sounds like something that I needed to bring this other person in. So we started changing the conversation. And then the other parts of that too, is you bring it up beforehand. Certain times people go into a con and a disco, and they assume that the other person knows how to buy from their buying a product with a new product and a revolutionized product. No one's not going to know how to buy it. You have to teach them how to buy that particular product, right? So in this particular case, we started establishing in the disco, these are the people that usually engage. And this is the reason why when they're using or implementing a 3d printing in their organization. Instead of doing like the basic spin, we started teaching them more relevant opportune ways. And one of the ones that he didn't know much about, we started talking to him about bands. Like you don't know anything about these guys' budgets and so forth. And it's a basic setup. You're going to teach somebody who's new in sales.
Speaker 1Yeah. Double click on that one. Cause that's always the hardest thing of like most salespeople just want to give the pitch. Yep. Like how easy is that? Like product management gave me a sales deck. Let me just go out and show the sales deck to as many people as possible. Meeting went great. They listened to every slide and then I left. It's like, it's really hard to like ask open-ended questions and listen, but that's like, thanks to gone and all these people, like the top performing reps speak less than half the time on the first call. Yes. And by the way, I don't understand why I don't see board decks that just show me what percent of sales calls where the reps spoke less than half the time. What an easy summarization of the effectiveness of our sales org. So think about it as just an analysis that thanks to AI today, we can do that. But how do you get this rep? That's just like, I like to just give the presentation and teach, like, how did you get them to do this?
Speaker 2Same idea of role play. We had to practice, you had to get muscle memory. So during our sessions, we help understand the, you have to teach the education side of it. Like this is how you do it. And then let's practice it. And we started practicing a lot more. And then he started sending me some of the stuff we analyze, listen to what we're doing. And he was like, you know what, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. And he was like, no, I'm not. And, uh, but it was just practice. And that was the biggest difference
Speaker 1with him, that muscle memory, that's all sending out what to do. I don't remember who posted this recently, but like, well, first off, like quick little cheat, if you're getting comfortable with this is like a very, very simple opener is why'd you take this meeting? Yep. It usually works. And it's like, not, it doesn't fall on your face. And it's just an easy thing to like, most people are just going to go and start talking. I know like someone posted this recently that I joke with my like, this is a great venue to do it after today's session. Okay. Walk up to a stranger, introduce yourself and start asking them questions and see how long you can ask them questions before they get pissed off. Like that is awesome. And great salespeople, they're grabbing beers with them after they love it. Like I know when I go to like a wedding and I walk up to someone and I ask them questions, I don't say anything, but my name, I ask them questions for 30 minutes. Sometimes they're like, that's a great question. No one's ever asked me that before. I know I've reframed their perspective. Wow. That's an advanced level. And then they go over to their spouse and like, oh, I just get this guy, Mark. He's amazing. Amazing guy. I didn't say anything about myself, but that's really like, you know, kind of prototype of what we're talking
Speaker 2about here. So what happened in that situation? 70% pip. So in three months he came to me and I thought it was like, holy moly, this is going to be tough with the goodness in three months. So Chaz went up to 100, then he went over to 120% of quota. And it was again, nothing revolutionary, no secret system was just better having conversation and being able to fundamentals.
Speaker 1I think when we were debriefing too, I think the other thing that was really cool that you said is he didn't realize the sale was happening in a room that he wasn't in. Yes. When you have a decision-making unit, it's like he could do his pitches, whatever. At the end of the day, the CFO, the chief medical officer, he's like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm the doctor and the office manager are going to sit in a room and say, which vendor are we going with? And you know, who's going to win? Whoever's the strongest champion. Yep. Whoever has the strongest champion. If you're a competition as the CFO and the CFO is best friends with the CEO and has been there for 12 years, they're winning. If you have the champion, the chief medical officer, and they've been there for 10 years and they have the most political power, they're winning. When you talk about great enterprise sellers, it's not about the best product. It's about the ability to develop the strongest champion.
Speaker 2One of the secrets that we do too with everyone on, you know, now you can get people's mobile device number. But one of the things that I taught him back then, and I also continue to teach, is that you get on text messaging basis with the prospect as quick as possible. So what I would do in a situation like with yours, if that office manager is going to be the champ or whatnot, and they buy into it, I'll say, hey, in preparation for the next meeting, in case something comes up, here's my cell phone. What's yours that I can get at?
Speaker 1Dude, I love that. Because like, I think sales forecasts suck and they're not accurate because people build sales forecasts by seller activity. Oh, once you give them a demo, it's at stage three. It's a 20% close. Once you send them the contract, it's at stage four. It's a 70% close. It's about buyer action. Yes. I want, I bet you if we did analysis of like whether giving them a demo predicts a far more accurate, and that's a perfect example. -
Speaker 2Because then you have the conversation post the call. So, like, even after a demo, I would text my, you know, champ and I would say, even right now, I'll say, like, hey, Melissa, what do you think? How did that go? And then, you know, we start the conversation.
Speaker 1We got to build that into the CRM. Yamini, we're, like, breaking things there. Come on. We got to just get this in there. Dude, we got three and a half minutes. We got to do the last one real quick.
Speaker 2Gentleman out of Poland, right? So, Jay, out of Poland, working for a software house. They develop a development house. They develop for most of the, you know, companies here in the States who are developing software. Jay started at a company in 2000 and, well, 2001. And he came to us at that point. He was referred in to us. And he had challenges with just doing his outbound, your full cycle selling at that point. Most of the individuals, you've all received those emails or the in-mails on LinkedIn where it's just spamming, hey, we do software. We'd love to set up a call, book a demo. Here's our link. And that doesn't work, as we all know. But LinkedIn was the first place that he was going. And we love LinkedIn. So, we started working with Jay. So, he was hitting. It wasn't bad. He was doing 99% of his quota attainment. And it was good. But he recognized that he could be better because he needed to. He wanted to. Once the way their company is set up, at a certain point, you can start getting some more of the bigger deals, enterprise-level deals. But you have to prove yourself. So, he was really, really stressed on how can I prove myself that I can source my own leads, I can bring business in, hit my numbers, so I can start getting some more of the larger deals and get a bigger commission. So, that was a challenge that Jay had at this point. And he didn't quite know how to break through.
Speaker 1So, people always say, like, dude, first off, can I say the word? Can I say the word? Can I say the word? Can I say the word? Can I say the word? Yes. All right. So, like, reaching out to people doesn't work. No. The way you're doing it doesn't work. Okay. So, like, even when we started inbound selling, it didn't necessarily mean that someone's, like, DMing you on Twitter and that's an inbound sale. It's the way you go about it. So, tell them how you use LinkedIn and tell them how to do this in a very personalized way.
Speaker 2So, the critical component, and I'm big in the camp. There's different philosophies. I'm in the camp. If I send a connection request to someone these days because of my reputation, I don't have to have a personalized message and I'll get connection because my validation's out there. But most individual rep that I feel, and I've done this with, looked at the data, most individual reps, if you're reaching out to somebody in an industry and they have no clue who you are, it's a LinkedIn charge more for you to send a personalized message towards that individual. That's why they. They have that little, you know, you only get five of them now on a basic plan. So, look at the data that they have. So, that's the first component. So, but we're not talking about dumb personalization. Like, I saw that you went to Stanford. Great mascot. Good luck football season. Can we connect? Like, that's garbage.
Speaker 1They get five of those a day.
Speaker 2So, the way that we do it is we use Sales Navigator. Not a pitch for them. They do sponsor me, but I'm a fan of Navigator. But what we started to do was we look at the filters, and Navigator has several of those filters. One, you can see who is active on LinkedIn or new people in their role. Cool. LinkedIn said it yesterday. So, we know the medium is going to work.
Speaker 1Yep. Who's active on LinkedIn?
Speaker 2Go. Somebody who's new in the position, who's posting on LinkedIn within the past 30 days. Perfect. So, we go with that. And whatever posts they're doing on LinkedIn within their demographics of the ICP, we use that in our messaging. But we're not doing a pitch. We're not doing a one, two, and hit you with it. I might say something to the nature, hey, Mark, saw that you mentioned Inbound was, you know, biggest Inbound this year overall. Do you feel that Inbound is beneficial for any type of reps or any type of company? P.S. Permission to connect here on LinkedIn. I always use that. I know it's not accurate, Mom. The idea, though, if you're, my mom will get me for my grammar. But I say permission to connect. But if you use that, it just triggers something that it starts engagement. You want engagement. Engagement leads to, sorry, grab attention. Attention because this is something that you posted and you're passionate about. And it's not something dumb about it. I'm asking a real question relative to your post. So, grab your attention to engagement. Once I can get you to engage and accept my connection request back, I send a video. And that's why I taught Jay to send a video or a voice message, especially in a world like his. Whereas a lot of people who are sketchy, we send a personalized video or audio message. Hey, Mark, I just want to put a face with a name or a voice with a name. I appreciate your reply back to that. I'm going to put this to my senior leader to see if Inbound is something we can do next year. Thanks for connecting. And then the third step now is conversation. We'll dialogue back and forth. I don't teach you pitch on LinkedIn, but I use that as a vehicle three days later to then send that email that has a high propensity of getting open if I go back into this. I'll say, see you at Inbound next year. See you at Inbound as my subject line. Hey, Mark. Hey, Mark. It's Donald again. Just wanted to tell you, appreciate your insights. I thought about this after looking at whatever value prop that's happening. I saw you guys were increasing in your headcount. Have you guys ever thought about outsourcing some of that monotonous labor development in a fraction of the price?
Speaker 1What a wonderful way to get down to that filter of who's actually active. The other one you mentioned was new to the job. So now you're. Because when people are new to the job, they're going to make changes. They're going to spend stuff. So he's filtered this down to people who are active on LinkedIn. They're six months into their role. They live in the U.S. They have between 50 and 500 employees, and they're in this particular role. It's like you are starting with a goldmine list, and you're not going to send 1,000 messages that get no responses. You're highly engaged and personalized, and that's the stuff that works. Dude, you've earned the right to do a little commercial. What do you want to say for 30 seconds here?
Speaker 2So I'll tell you where Jay ended up. So I'm from 99%, and Jay ended up at 120% of quota. And so for me, I run an organization called the Sales Evangelist. We do a popular sales podcast. You each share your story. You should download it right now. And I also run a sales training firm, the Sales Evangelist. We teach a lot of top of funnel strategies and also help teams to be able to increase the velocity of their deals to get close. So that could help you. I'd love to be your friend.
Speaker 1Dude, it's been great to meet you. Great to jam with you. You're doing the real work with real results. Let's hear it out for Donald. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 3So that's it, folks. Today's episode is written and produced by my favorite producer, Matthew Brown. Editing comes from Patrick Edwards. And hey, if you like the show, be sure to follow us. Wherever you listen to podcasts and check out my VC firm, Stage 2 Capital. We are the VC firm that's running back by the CROs, CCOs, CMOs, and other go-to-market leaders across all the tech. So that's it for today. I'll see you on the next episode.
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