Sales Tuners

Now displaying: February, 2018

Feb 27, 2018

Takeaways

Learn From Others: Everyone learns from failure, but you don’t have to learn from your own failure. Whether it’s your peers, other professionals in your network, books, blogs, or even podcasts like this. You owe it to yourself to seek out knowledge both positive and negative from others. But be careful, you want to learn from the best, not just your buddy or some random stranger.
Pride Will Kill You: The stubbornness of pride locks you into your own thoughts. We have a cognitive bias around consistency that once we’ve formulated an idea that we can’t be inconsistent with that or flip flop our position. However, this is ridiculously dumb and short sighted. Be willing to listen to others and study the data that may challenge your worldview.
Good Things Come to Those Who Practice: One thing that continues to amaze me is salespeople not practicing their craft. How much time do you prepare for each call? Showing up to work and running sales calls is not practicing. The biggest personal example I have of this is spending 10 hours on a Saturday preparing for a 30 minute call the following Tuesday. Yes, 10 hours for 30 minutes. That’s doing the work.

Successful Customers Trumps Revenue: The goal of sales should not be revenue at all costs. It’s our job to find people we can make successful through the value prop we’re pitching. Rather than focusing solely on the signed contract and commission check, make sure the customers you close are going to find value in what they bought 90 days later.
Buyers Don’t Have to Talk to Salespeople: 20 to 30 years ago, every buyer had to talk to a salesperson. Today, buyers can watch demos, compare and research alternative products, and even get ballpark pricing online, all before reaching out to talk to a salesperson. In the shifting world of buyer empowerment, you have to provide value in each interaction with a prospective customer.
Live Your Buyer’s Job: What does your prospect’s daily job look like? What’s their role in their company? What are their goals? How do they quantify it? What happens if they don’t achieve it? It’s not enough to just ask those questions. When looking at things through their lens, you can really dig into what they’re thinking before they even look to buy.

Outsource List Building: While you need to own the process of creating and validating your ideal customer profile, you can and should outsource the data gathering. Using the idea of virtual assistants from countries like the Philippines, building targeted lists of prospects can be done quick and cheap.
Build Outbound to Create Inbound: Instead of blasting inboxes with requests for 15 minute conversations, leverage your outbound messaging to deliver information that entices prospects to click through to your site. Then, using a chatbot tool like Drift, those visitors qualify themselves, generating conversations actually worth having.
Optimize for the Long Term: When comparing opportunities, consider the long term value of opportunities over short-term money. OTE is often a mirage. Make sure you ask the question to understand how many reps actually hit quota and achieve the expected OTE. Oftentimes, it makes more sense to take less money today in order to work for a better sales leader or CEO.

Open and Close Shop: Airline pilots go through a checklist before taking off. Restaurant managers have a standard operating procedure for each shift. I have check downs for the conversations on this podcast. The point I’m trying to make is that you should have a routine each and every day that helps you begin and end your work session. Being intentional about the time you have creates your opportunity for success.
Be Confident in Execution: To be good in sales, you need to have confidence in your solution and believe it can solve a customer's challenges. But, to be great in sales, you have to truly believe in yourself. Your biggest competitor or obstacle is the man in the mirror and the matter that exists between your two ears. To execute at the highest level, you have to get your mind and attitude aligned with your priorities.
Go Talk to Customers: Some of you have listened to all 75 episodes of this show and have been waiting for the secret. Well, here it is, go talk to customers. I don’t mean at them, I mean talk with them. Get to know why they bought your solutions. What did they believe they were actually getting. Where has it fallen short? What do they wish they could do better? Listen intently to the words they use. These stories can help create better conversations with future prospects and translate their enthusiasm into larger commissions.

Costello-What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.