The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast!
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
On today’s show, Fred interviewed 2025 Sales Guru (from Global Gurus) Carajane Moore from Hunt Big Sales.
Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.
Find Carajane on LinkedIn.
CARAJANE’S TIP: “Tighten your target and expand your network. Identify the 10 accounts you truly want, then work with people who know those decision-makers to get warm referrals — because in today’s noisy marketplace, the most effective path to senior buyers is through trusted introductions.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re doing a special series of shows for sales leaders who were named by Global Gurus as a Sales Guru for early 2025. Congratulations to you for being recognized by that. For these particular shows, I just ask three questions. Tell us about yourself, what are some of the biggest challenges facing sales professionals right now, and what are some things people can do to solve those problems?
We’re doing today’s interview in March of 2025 for people who are listening in the future. Carajane, it’s great to see you again. Congratulations on being a Global Gurus Sales Guru. Why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction to the people who didn’t listen to your Sales Game Changers Podcast yet, and tell us what we need to know about you.
Carajane Moore: Thanks, Fred. It’s good to see you again. I’m President and Partner of Hunt Big Sales and we are a boutique agency working with that small to midsize organization that really wants to grow rapidly and recognizes that large accounts is where they need to play to blow through their numbers and really grow at the speed that they want. Really in today’s world, as we’ve talked about before, and especially as AI is stepping in and all the rest of that, large accounts is really where sales professionals are going to be moving. All of those professionals are going to be in large accounts versus standard accounts. We’ll talk about that, I’m sure, as a part of the things that are impacting sales today.
We help organizations first shift their mindset, but second of all, understand that the large accounts sales process is a different game than standard sales. You have to have different conversations with different people about different things. We help set up all of the processes, systems, tools, and coach you through landing those large deals. We’ve got over 22 billion in new sales doing that with our clients.
Fred Diamond: I’m going to pay particular interest because at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we made some shifts during the pandemic and coming out of it where we’re shifting more so on larger accounts. At the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we typically service B2B or B2G sales enterprises with at least 25 salespeople, and in some cases hundreds if not thousands. I’m going to pay particularly close attention to what we talk about today.
Carajane, what are the biggest challenges facing sales professionals today?
Carajane Moore: There are what I call three key increases that are impacting sales today. First, the increase in informed and more likely misinformed buyers through the digital commerce and AI space. Meaning that companies are trying to self-diagnose their problems when they really don’t have the skillset and information necessary to do so. That’s one key impact that’s happening. Also, the increased difficulty in reaching the senior level buyer because the traditional methods are causing a shrinking sales funnel. It’s just hard to get through.
Then the last thing is then the increase in purchases of outcomes, not services, products, or solutions. When I say solutions, I want to be real clear, because people get confused. Solutions are the plans of what you’re going to do to get the outcome, but it’s not the impact or the outcome that the buyer is buying. They’re buying the outcome, not the solution. There’s an increase in purchases of outcomes, and that’s a distinction that I think is worthy of noting as we look at what is today in the future of sales.
Fred Diamond: Give us the definition of outcomes. Get a little more specific in what those might be.
Carajane Moore: Outcomes would be that I’m looking to increase the efficiency in my operational processing line for business by 15%. Now, a solution might be we’re increasing training. A solution might be, we might shift the processes in the way that they’re designed. We might redesign an entire manufacturing line to increase that efficiency. But the outcome is they want to increase their efficiency by X percentage so that they can get generally a greater throughput or velocity or they’re trying to reduce their cost per individual item by increasing the efficiency. What they’re looking for is something that is more of the outcome of the action or the service or the product that you’re providing.
Fred Diamond: What can sales professionals be doing to solve those problems?
Carajane Moore: First and foremost, for those larger complex sales today that we talked about, the informed or misinformed buyers, on those larger accounts, they need the expertise and experience of a professional to assess the true nature of the problem and establish the solution needed. Part of it is coming in as the expert to assess and provide the expertise that they need, that they are not going to get what they need from AI.
If we think about Dr. Google, how many of us have Googled symptoms to see what’s wrong with me? Well, Google can only give you the information based on what the input is you provide, and so it doesn’t have all of the information. Going to Dr. Google, you might be directed to take aspirin when you have cancer. That’s the same thing when we go to Google AI digital commerce to solve a problem that we might not have all of the information to provide it, to come up with the right answer. That’s the first one.
The second one, when we start talking about the difficulty in reaching senior level buyers, senior level buyers are more effectively reached in today’s marketplace through referrals. Those channels are noisy, and the traditional methods for lead gen are just providing decreasing yield of results. As sales professionals, we need to expand our market, our networks. We need to work with people who network with the people that we’re trying to get to, to get that warm introduction, that referral. I also encourage us to tighten that definition of an ideal client or an ideal target so that we’re not shooting for 400 as a broad out into the marketplace, but we’re looking for in this area, in this particular place, these are the 10 accounts I want to go after. Tighten your target, increase the number of networks you go after or you engage with.
The last one, if we’re talking about purchases of outcomes, not products, not solutions, the idea is if you’re selling benefits or products or solutions, you’re touting the features of what you’re doing and you’re going to go the way of the blockbuster. We need to really define what those purchases are, what is the outcome they’re looking for? So many times we do understand a general understanding of the problem, but we don’t work through what is the measurement of the outcome. What is that outcome that they want? We need to define what the outcome is and then work through an assessment to really dive to the outcome, and your solution is just how you get there, whether it’s a product, a service, or a combination.
Fred Diamond: When you’re going after the bigger accounts, you’re talking to people with bigger risks and bigger challenges. We talk about this a lot. I’m curious on your thoughts on this. We tell people that they need to be a step or two ahead of where their customers might be. Now, that’s hard, but if you’re the sales professional, again, emphasis on the word professional, you’re in the industry. I like the way you said get tighter with who you’re going after, which means you have the opportunity to know more. You have the opportunity to understand where you are, and with AI, of course, access. You’re not just typing in and the information that you can find about where an industry is can be critically succinct. What are some of the skills that you would suggest for sales professionals targeting these type accounts need to be?
Carajane Moore: First and foremost, and I know probably everybody has heard this, but this is absolutely true, you have to understand AI in today’s world. You have to understand the way to build the prompt structure to get the information you want. One of the things that I heard recently that hadn’t dawned on me, but it makes a lot of sense, if AI doesn’t know the answer, it makes it up. I don’t know if you knew that. A lot of people, they’ve heard it, but they don’t really tie into what that really means to them today. As part of your prompts, you have to say, “If you do not know the answer, do not provide an answer.” You have to add that element of clarity, otherwise you’re going to get misinformation. Skills, you have to be able to be a prompt engineer to really get to the data that you’re referring to. We have to understand what our customers are.
Two, we have to understand and get to the skill level of the language of the executive. You have to understand how to speak executive, you have to understand how to speak money. Those skills are critical, especially in large accounts, because what are we really doing? An outcome is about an increase in time, money, or risk. You have to be able to speak the language of the time, money, and risks. Those are just a couple of skills that I believe to be ahead of our contemporaries as professionals. We have to be able to do those and to be effective in the new world of sales.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Carajane Moore for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. Congratulations again for being a Global Gurus number 10. You gave some great information here.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo