Takeaways

1. Understand How Your Prospect Makes Money: You already know how your company makes money and you already know how you make money once your company makes money. During the sales process, if you really dig in and figure out how your prospects make money, then you can sync your offering with their real incentives. It truly doesn’t matter what you sell if you can figure out how your offering impacts their revenue engine. That’s the key.
2. Put Yourself Out There: Your network is not just going to build itself. You have to commit time in a given week or month outside your organization. Think about it just like you would building your pipeline. Who are the top 3-5 people you’d like to know? Reach out to them and ask for coffee or for lunch. Be genuine in your reasoning and figure out how you can provide reciprocal value. This effort you put in now will pay off in spades for a long time to come.
3. Own Your Day: It’s been mentioned a few times on this show but understanding your own process and the things that make an impact or crucial to real success. Get organized and plan your day intentionally. Block on time on your calendar to do the things you know need to get done and don’t let the 5-10 minutes between meetings get wasted with goofing off because you can’t get any “real work” done in that short of time. Also, at the end of each day, recap the day and plan for what is going to happen the following.

Full Notes

• https://www.salestuners.com/amy-appleyard/

Book Recommendations

• It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy by Michael Abrashoff
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Sponsor

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

In the last 5-7 years, there has seemingly been an explosion in the number of companies, both tech startups as well as more traditional businesses, that require salespeople. Unfortunately, in that same period of time there hasn’t been any magical creation of new sales talent.

That misalignment has led companies to over-recruit, under-train, and honestly… just hope reps “figure it out." I’ve had some sales leaders tell me they’ll hire 10 reps knowing full well only 4 will work out. What in the world is going on?

Most sales reps actually know what to do — that has been drilled into them over and over. They need help understanding the why (and even the how) behind the what. Today, I’m talking with Vendition’s Ashleigh Early about this exact challenge and what both reps and leaders can do to fill the void with context and personalization.  

Links

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein https://amzn.to/2QEOIkL
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek https://amzn.to/2QCbslr