EPISODE 283: Sales Agility Expert Amy Franko Shares Three Things You Can Do to Bust Out of Old Patterns That Are No Longer Working


Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales and watch hundreds of replays!

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the CREATIVITY IN SALES Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on September 18, 2020. It featured the author of “The Modern Seller” Amy Franko.]

Register for Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Amy Franko’s Using Your Innate Agility to Advance Your Sales Career here.

Find Amy on LinkedIn here.

EPISODE 283: Sales Agility Expert Amy Franko Shares Three Things You Can Do to Bust Out of Old Patterns That Are No Longer Working

AMY’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “To build sales agility, you have to bust old patterns maybe with the help of a coach or your sales leader, finding the things that are no longer working for you in your sales life. Is there a routine that used to work that no longer works? Is there something that is your stuck point? Second, understand “strategic feed,” which is the ability to simultaneously look forward into the future and also be able to work backwards from that with milestones to help you move forward. If you can do this with your clients, help them see into the future but also help them get momentum in the short term, you are going to help them be more successful. Finally, rethink your revenue streams. Take a really tough, hard look at your pipeline. What opportunities are stuck? You may need to rethink where your revenue streams are coming from. Where in your territory, where in your book of business do you need to be rethinking?”

Fred Diamond: Let’s get to it.

Amy Franko: We are talking excelling through disruption and sales agility, I have some concepts I want to take us through today and like Fred said, if you have questions, comments, please put them into the questions and we will hit those and make this really interactive as we go for today.

Let’s talk agenda first, I have three major themes to cover in our conversation for today. First, I want to give us a working definition of sales agility. There’s a lot of different types of agility out there but we’re going to talk sales agility. Secondly, I want to hit on some current trends to stay aware of that call for sales agility, what’s happening out in the marketplace, what’s happening out in the world. You likely have some things that you can chime in with as well. Lastly, I want to give you some strategies. What are some things that you can do today as a result of this conversation whether you are an individual seller or you are a sales leader leading a team? We’ll walk away with some to-do’s that you can put into your book of business, your sales territory.

With that, let me give you a little bit of background of the skills evolution. My background is I spent the first 10 years of my career in technology so I was a quota carrying sales rep, all client facing and I worked for IBM and I worked for Lenovo. After about 10 years, I took this big pivot into entrepreneurship and started a learning and development company, that’s where I spend a lot of my time still today, helping organizations like yours with sales strategy, sales skill development and everything in that arena to help individuals and teams grow. I am someone who likes to follow learning and development trends, skill trends, what are the things that companies are hiring for? If you’re an individual seller, what are the skills that are really top of mind?

I want to take us down a little walk from the past into the future here. This was a research that was done by the Center for Creative Leadership and they do all kinds of research as it relates to skill development, leadership and the like. In their research, what they found was that 25 years ago, the #1 skill that organizations were looking to hire for was technical mastery, how much of a technical expert were you? How well did you know your craft as a subject matter expert? Now fast-forward to 2012, that’s about 20 or 30 years. Look at how the skills have changed just in that time where technical mastery isn’t even on the list in 2012 as a top 5 skill. It’s a table stake in my opinion, you have to show up to the game with technical mastery no matter what organization you work for, what your discipline is, I think of that as something you have to show up with. Look at #3 and #5 here, learning agility and adaptability and versatility come onto the scene as top 5 skills that individuals need to have in order to be successful. Organizations need to build these capabilities in order to be successful. I mentioned early on there are lots of different types of agility, when I was doing research for the modern seller, in my research I think I came across maybe half a dozen different types of agility: learning agility, emotional agility, results agility, we’re going to talk sales agility. It suffices to say that agility, adaptability and versatility really came onto the scene as these top 5 skills. Now look at 2022 – and we are very close to 2022 – and look at what organizations are needing going into the future. I would argue that they’re going to need this going into the next decade. Adaptability and versatility up to the top of the list and learning agility still holding there at #3. Then of course, #2, being able to communicate effectively, that’s a passion of mine. So much of sales is about communication and thinking about how we’re communicating with our prospects, with our clients, all the different channels that we have available to us in order to communicate, that we were communicating inside our organizations. The key takeaway from this part of the conversation is looking at the skills that we need to be building in ourselves and if you’re a sales leader, the skills that you want to be looking for in your current team and as you’re hiring into the future.

Let me stop there, Fred, for a second and see if there’s anything coming in from our audience of perhaps anything you would add to that.

Fred Diamond: We have a comment here from Brian, “We’re no longer technical brochures.” The sales professionals of the 90s, even the early 2000s were walking brochures, essentially and we talk many times at the IES and the Sales Game Changers podcast and webinars that the customer has more information obviously at their exposal. Amy, after the pandemic kicked in we started doing a daily webinar for sales leaders around the globe, the one that we do on Friday right now as we speak, we specifically called it the Creativity in Sales webcast and the reason is for the reasons that you just talked about. Sales professionals have to be versatile, they have to think on their feet, they have to shift. One of our members told me a story yesterday where they were going back to one prospect and they kept going back to the same technology leader at this customer and the guy kept saying, “No budget 2020.” The sales rep went a different route, he went to a sister organization inside the same company who said, “We’ve been looking for this solution for the last month.” Creativity, not just keep going back to the same, “I’ve got to talk to this channel, this group.” He went a different route to another sister organization, they made a deal in 24 hours and the company is going to benefit from it. The guy who originally said, “We have no budget” is going to be the biggest beneficiary. So, as a sales professional now more than ever you really have to be adaptable, versatile, agile and creative. I’m excited to talk about how the sales professionals watching today can get there.

Amy Franko: Let’s talk about that next and I do want to make a mention of, Brian, your comment of the technical brochure. That is so spot on, it’s very easy for no matter what it is that we sell, whether it’s expertise or it’s a physical product, our comfort zone is speeds and speeds, features and benefits and thinking about ourselves. In order to be agile and adaptable, we have to flip the equation and really be focused outward on the client or the prospective client. Everything that we do, our solutions, our expertise has to plug into what they want to accomplish and not the other way around, so you are spot on about the brochure.

Fred Diamond: I want to make one other comment that you just talked on about table stakes, and this has come up on the Sales Game Changers podcast as well. I remember I was talking to Paul Smith who’s the GM for Red Hat’s public sector and he very clearly said, “To be successful today, you need to know the product. You might not need to know to the bit level where you could bring in your technical resources, but you’ve got to be conversant on what you’re selling and you’ve got to be conversant on how it’s going to be of benefit to the customer.” You can’t get by even back in the 90s on charisma and those kind of things, long gone, man. You’ve got to know your stuff because you’ve got to be of value to your customer. If you don’t know how your stuff can help them, you’re toast, you’re gone.

Amy Franko: It’s that combination of you do have to know your product and you have to know your stuff, and again, that being table stakes. If you’re not conversant in your stuff, it’s going to be really hard to have credibility. It’s also going to be really hard to be agile when questions and problems are thrown at you and being able to make quick decisions, you’re not going to be able to do that if you don’t know your product or your service at the baseline. It’s marrying that with selling skills and communication skills, as a sales professional there’s a lot more that I see you needing to bring to the table today. Like you said, it can’t just be the charisma factor, you have to bring all of it. Your expertise, your selling skills, your communication and leadership and as a leader, for our leaders online, you have to be able to develop those skills and coach those skills in your team. There’s a lot more to it than there was, for sure.

Let’s talk about what sales agility means to you. I would really like to hear from the people on the line today, put that into the question feature. When I use the world ‘sales agility’, what does that mean to you? I’m going to give you a working definition of that in just a moment here but I want to get your perspective. What are you seeing in the marketplace, what are you seeing on your teams?

Fred Diamond: We’re getting some answers here. Jason says, “Creativity, like Fred said.” Thank you, Jason. Martha says the ability to think quickly and shift, that’s very good. We have an answer from Deborah, “Bringing solutions before the customer asks.” That’s interesting, that’s a big theme, Amy, that’s come up many times over the Sales Game Changers webcast and podcasts. Prior to the pandemic we would talk all the time about great questions and those kinds of things. We’ve come up with the answer that we should know what people are going through right now, for the first time in every living person’s history including everybody on today’s webinar, we’re all going through the same thing. We’re all going through COVID and the economic results, can’t go to events and have to learn how to use the screen more effectively, use your hands when you’re looking at the dot, like our good friend July Hansen has trained us all on.

At the same time, we should as sales professionals know what our customers are going through. If you have to ask your customer, “What are your biggest challenges right now?” You should know what the biggest challenges are, it’s getting out of COVID, shifting back from the economic challenges, it’s not a three-year strategy for CRM, it’s getting out of this and moving forward in this whole world that has shifted. You need to know those answers before you even ask those questions, although Lisa actually just said, “Asking the right questions.” I think what she’s trying to say is you have to implement great sales skills and be a well-trained, well-practiced sales professional as well to be able to be agile. You can’t wing it.

Amy Franko: On that point about questions, we have to have really smart questions in our back pocket at all times. When I’m working with clients I talk about creating a question bank and in my programs I talk about different categories of questions, you have to have those things at the ready. There’s this balance of asking great questions but also – and this is the Hallmark of agility – is being able to provide excellent ideas and input. Often times you’re improvising but you have to be able to take what’s coming at you and be able to synthesize it and turn it into ideas and insights. Lots of times our clients and our prospective clients are making a decision to do business with us based on our expertise and the ideas that we bring to the table which feeds into Deborah’s comment about making sure that not only are you solving for a customer’s problem that they know that they have, you’re uncovering problems that they didn’t know they had. There’s a difference there, that’s a whole different level of being a trusted adviser, of having agility when not only can you solve for what they know, you can start to see patterns and uncover problems that you’re looking at a mile down the road and you can see something coming and help them with that. That’s where we want to get to to be agile.

Fred Diamond: Actually, one of our past guests brought up the quote from a Rod Stewart song from the 70s, “Her ad lib lines were well rehearsed.” It’s the same thing right now, one of the key words that we hear every single week on the Sales Game Changers webinars is preparation. We hear words like empathy, courage, listening, of course but preparation – which goes into what you were just talking about – is being well-prepared before you’re in that position to give ideas. We actually spent some time with one of our guests last week mapping out what you need to do to prepare. A lot of people would do it a minute before when you have a call with somebody, but now you can’t do it a minute before, you can’t just know who they are. I like what you just said, you need to go in with solutions even on the first call. There’s making some presumptions and it’s not, “I will make you more productive”, it’s like, “I know what your business problems are specifically because I serve you and I serve your marketplace and I’ve evidently thought this through with my team, my partners, my tech team.” That’s a great point, being agile to go in with the solutions because you understand their challenges and you’ve thought it through.

Amy Franko: Sales agility is not winging it, those two phrases are not synonymous. There is preparation that goes into having sales agility, planning for your next sales conversations, planning for that big customer presentation that you’re probably doing on Zoom or GoToMeeting now. You don’t have your typical ways available to you, being agile takes more preparation right now because the things that we’re used to doing and having at our disposal – in-person meetings, events, conferences, you name it – we don’t have that stuff right now. It takes more preparation to have sales agility in the environment that we’re working in with again. Those are really great points from everybody and what I’d like to do is add to this by giving you a working definition of sales agility.

I see sales agility as the ability to strategically and decisively pivot in order to grow your sales and best-serve your clients. There is this fine line between agility and feeling like you’re running on a hamster wheel or running in circles. There’s a tipping point to it where if you are always changing and always pivoting, you’re not going to make any forward progress but when you’re strategic about it, when you’re decisive about the pivots that you need to take – and being decisive right now is probably more important than ever because we are making decisions in chaos, we’re making decisions with less information and the information is always changing. As a sales professional, as a sales leader, strategically and decisively are the two big words here because when we can be strategic and decisive, you’re going to improve your odds of growing sales even in down markets and in disruption and you’re also going to best-serve your clients. Right now our clients are living in so much overwhelm, they’re as overwhelmed as we are. Our job as a trusted adviser to our clients and to our prospective clients is to be that calm in the storm and agility and being strategic and being decisive can help you be that for a client or a prospective client as well. It’s something to add to the tool kit.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here from Sheldon, and I believe Sheldon is local to us. We’re doing today’s broadcast from suburb of Washington DC, you’re in Columbus, Ohio. The question from Sheldon is, “I’ve only been in sales for two years. What should I be doing to be more strategic?” That’s a great question, Sheldon, thank you so much. Let’s get a little bit deeper into this, Amy. For the people who maybe are in their first 5 years of sales, let’s talk about what it means to be strategic and what it means to truly prepare. A lot of the sale professionals who are at the early stage of their career, their job is to get appointments, SDR or BDR type of stuff. Maybe they need a 3×3, three things about the customer in three minutes that our friends at ExecVision talk about. Let’s get deep into what it means for the younger sales professionals or the junior sales professionals to think strategically. What might be some of your suggestions on some things they should be doing or could be doing?

Amy Franko: Here’s the great news, Sheldon, you’re two years into your career, you don’t have a lot of bad habits to undo. [Laughs] you’re in a great spot, let’s talk about what it means to be strategic and I actually teach a program called Strategic Selling. There’s a lot to unpack with that but just to give you some ideas out of the gate to be thinking about especially as you are younger in your career. For me, the idea of being strategic is really being able to look multiple steps ahead down the road whether that is with your business/sales plan. Do you have a sales plan that you can execute on over the next 3 to 6 months, over the next year? Realistically, a lot of organizations aren’t looking beyond a year right now just because of all the disruption that’s happening out there, so that’s my first thing for you, Sheldon, and for anybody who’s newer in their career.

Do you have a sales plan that you’ve worked out with your sales leader that you’re going to execute on and work toward in the next 6 months to a year? That’s the first piece, and then also thinking strategically and working with your sales leader, what are the things that you’re really good at right now? Is it prospecting? Is it presenting? Is it earning commitments and closing the business? What are the key skills that you excel in right now and where do you maybe have some gaps to fill in? This is something that you can get feedback from your leader on, maybe feedback from peers, organizations like the organization that Fred runs here, those are all great places to be getting that kind of feedback and figuring out what the skills are. When you know where you’re strong at and you know where you have some gaps, that’s where you can go to work amplifying the things you’re great at and filling in the gaps of where you need to work on. We all have those no matter if you’ve been in selling for a year or you’ve been in selling for 20 years, we all have those things we excel at and we all have those places where we need work. Those are two things and then lastly what I would say is as you’re looking at your sales plan, who are your best target prospective clients and current clients where you can really grow and succeed? It’s not just prospecting anybody or selling to anybody but really thinking through the best fits for your territory, the best fits for your organization. That’s part of being strategic, making choices about where you want to head and you may need to choose to not pursue some other things. We could probably go even deeper into that but those are three things that I would give you upfront.

Fred Diamond: The other thing I would suggest too is that one of the challenges right now is that everyone’s still typically working from home. Some people have started to go back but we’ve been hearing from a lot of our members that they’ve been invited to go back home or instead of being there for every other day, they’ve been told to come in one day per week. It’s a little bit challenging if you live in an apartment, quiet time, this comes up all the time as well. Using time for quiet, thoughtful time, put down the computer screen, turn down the laptop screen, go sit down. I keep a huge sketch pad right next to my desk. Sit down at a side desk, go to one of the spare rooms, we’re still at home but we’re not quarantined so you can go places. Take the quiet time to think. I’m just curious, how do you do that? You do presentations all the time, you do training you’ve written tons of stuff. Tell us how you practice your quiet time. The reason I’m asking you is it comes up all the time on the Sales Game Changers webcast that we do.

Amy Franko: I will admit I’m a work in progress on that one, my friend [laughs] but I’ll give you a couple things that I try to do. I’m a big proponent of exercise, movement, working out, whatever that looks like for you. That is one thing that helps me clear my head more than anything else, that’s something I consciously put into my routine. It’s not a daily thing but definitely multiple times a week. In terms of quiet time, I am not great about shutting down the laptop or shutting off the phone but when I do and I can clear my head, I think so much better. Turning off those devices absolutely helps me. Like you, Fred I take a lot of written notes, I have notebooks all over the place and I handwrite a lot of things whether it’s ideas or I might block out a chunk of time a couple times during the week just to get out of my home office, give myself a little bit of free space to think and I’ll just jot down ideas that come to me. To your point, you’ve got to get all the noise out in order to open up the space to just think and have some open space on your calendar.

Fred Diamond: I have one more question before you move on. You work with a lot of sales organizations, you work with a lot of sales leaders. A lot of our members have a lot of younger sales professionals, how do you suggest that younger sales professionals approach their managers for help? It’s a little bit off topic but I’m just curious based on what you’re talking about here because I get this a lot. We have a lot of members with large companies, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales our mission is to help companies retain, motivate and elevate top tier talent and I get a lot of emails or LinkedIn messages from people in their first seven years of sales who say, “I’m struggling with this, what do you suggest?” I’ll give advice but I’ll say, “Go back and talk to your manager, tell them that you’re struggling.” I’m curious on how you would suggest to a younger professional, for example, yesterday we had John Washko from Mohegan Sun on the show and he urged people to get mentors, I guess people like me or you. I want to know specifically how you would suggest that a sales rep talk to his or her manager about maybe a block or something that they’re struggling now, especially now that there are so many things.

Amy Franko: I have a couple thoughts and I go back to when I was earlier in my career. There were a couple of rock star sellers on my team earlier in my career and I still know them to this day, fast-forward 20+ years they’re still in my sphere. One of the things that I did early in my career that I always recommend to people is I take the assertive approach on this, don’t wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder to give you the opportunity. Shadow a rock star in your organization and you’re going to be virtually shadowing them right now but can you be on a call with them? Can you be on a presentation with them? When we do get the opportunity to be together again going on sales calls with them, that stuff early in my career still sticks with me, the lessons that I learned from that.

Taking the assertive approach and not waiting for somebody to give you permission to do it is a big part of that decision-making process, that executive thinking. I remember another younger sales rep, we came up together and she took a move to a new territory, she was also very proactive and she built her six month sales plan before going into the role, presented it to her leader and got feedback on it. Again, she took the assertive path and actually put the ideas out there for feedback. If you’re struggling with something, thinking through what the block is and what research can you do on your own, bring it to your sales leader to talk through it with him or her and you’ll get more productive feedback that way because you came in with some ideas. Those are two things that are food for thought if you’re struggling with something and you want to get some advice.

Fred Diamond: JD says, “Thank you so much” and Lisa also says, “Great ideas.” Before we move on to the next slide, for the young people out there, your sales leaders would appreciate if you were struggling for you to reach out for them. It’s too late when they come to you and you’re unplanned, they’re going to have to say to you, “We need to talk about this revised plan that you’re on” because it’s always a challenge to get back after that. It goes back to sales agility.

Amy Franko: I was just going to say that [laughs]. Yes, because you’re thinking strategically, you’re thinking decisively and you’re bringing something to your leader. This is all leading indicator stuff, your lagging indicator is your quota performance whether you exceeded it, you met it or you didn’t meet it, all lagging stuff down the road. Everything we’re talking about right now, these are all leading indicators where you want to control the process and control your decision-making around this kind of stuff.

I’m going to walk through a couple of these slides quickly, I want to give you some trends to be thinking about but I want to give us enough time to get to three agility strategies. I don’t want to fall short on those so let me walk through these trends briefly. I want to give you two trends just to be thinking about. The first is that your customers and your prospects are radically shifting their business models right now and that is coming from the conference board and some of their COVID-19 research and reporting. This is a # 1 or #2 trend happening according to them. Radical shifts in business models right now which means you’re having to shift as a sales professional or sales leader to help them move in the right direction. The second trend – you’re not going to be surprised by this one – expect your sales activities to be largely virtual if not entirely virtual for the rest of this year and at least into the first half of next year. That’s my prediction, we’ll see if that prediction holds. Here’s the great news, everything skill you’re building virtually right now, you’re building sales agility right now by practicing virtual selling and it is going to be additive to your skill set. You’re not going to stop doing this once we’re back together, it’s going to be additive so take the outlook that everything that you’re practicing right now is just going to make you better when we can be back together in person. Those are two trends to just keep top of mind.

Fred Diamond: If you’re watching today’s webinar, listening to this podcast or reading the transcript, congratulations to you for putting some effort into you and how you’re looking to drive your career especially during such a disruptive time.

Amy Franko: Absolutely. As I was doing research for The Modern Seller which actually released two years ago in October but I will say that the concepts and the strategies in that book are probably truer today than they even were two years ago with all the disruption that we’re all facing. I’ll share with you that no matter what disruption we’re facing, we’re facing COVID right now but there will be something else that comes along that we have to be ready for. There are some key tenets that no matter what, these are some things that we can be doing to really build our sales agility and to build our success. As I walk through these three, I want you to think about where you are strong in these today and where there may be some opportunities to grow. A modern seller is someone who is recognized as a differentiator in your client’s business.

We think we’re difference-makers but it’s different when they recognize us in that way so are you recognized as that person? A modern seller is also someone where the value of your product or service, no matter what you sell, it’s not fully realized without you as part of the equation. Marrying yourself to your product or service and the expertise that you bring as an individual seller amplifies the value of your product or service, it amplifies the value of your organization so never underestimate yourself as a valuable part of that equation. Lastly, your clients view you as someone who is so strategic to their competitive advantage, they can’t imagine not doing business with you. You are ingrained in their organization in a way that they really couldn’t separate themselves from you or your organization because they just view you as so strategic. Run yourself through those three lenses, run some of your clients through those. Do you have modern selling in your repertoire or maybe there are some things to be working on? We all have things to be working on.

Fred Diamond: Someone’s asking if that’s available as an infographic.

Amy Franko: I know I have it somewhere, I’ll find it and make sure that you get it.

Fred Diamond: Shoot it over to me. Jean, thank you for that recommendation.

Amy Franko: There are five tenets to modern selling. I have this as an infographic too, Jean, so we’ll make sure that you get this as well. The modern seller is agile, entrepreneurial, holistic, social and an ambassador. These are capabilities are foundational so they make us better as prospecting and they make us better at building relationships, they make us better at presenting and closing business. All the everyday selling skills that we need to be doing, these are capabilities that can lie underneath that make us better at those things. As an individual sales professional or as a sales leader, we can build these capabilities in ourselves or in our teams. The book The Modern Seller is all about that and it’s a field guide that helps you build these capabilities but the one that I want to spend the rest of our time talking about here today is focusing in on agility for the remainder of our conversation. I really see agility at the core as a growth mindset, there’s probably a phrase that many of you are familiar with, Carol Dweck is the researcher who’s probably most known in that space although there are other researchers as well.

The idea behind growth mindset is that at your core, you see yourself as someone who has the ability to build capabilities and skills. You’re not just set in time as, “Right here, this is it.” You have the ability to expand and grow your skill set and when you see yourself in that way, you are more willing to work on building skills, you are more willing to bring fresh ideas to a customer or prospect even if they aren’t totally vetted. You are more willing to take strategic risks and put yourself out there. As an individual seller assessing yourself on that spectrum, we all have some growth mindset, we all have some fixed mindset or if you’re a sales leader, thinking about your team. Who on your team really has that growth mindset, they trend toward that? Who on your team might trend more toward a fixed mindset? One isn’t good and one isn’t bad, we have all of that inside our minds but it’s figuring out where we are on that spectrum and wanting to move ourselves more toward that growth mindset because that agility is where that’s at. If we’re going to build sales agility, we need to be really conscious of building that growth mindset.

Fred Diamond: Today I mentioned it’s the Creativity in Sales webinar. Every Thursday, Amy we do a webinar on Optimal Sales Mindset. Once a year prior to the pandemic we would bring a speaker in like you in October and they would talk for three hours about mindset. Now we do it every single Thursday and we get 50-100 people showing up and we convert that into a Sales Game Changers podcast as well. Amy, we have time for maybe one or two more points and then I’m going to ask you for your final thought, something people watching today’s webinar can implement today to take their career to the next level. We just got a quick note here from Steven, “This is awesome.” Thank you, Steve, we appreciate it.

Amy Franko: Thanks, Steve. Let me give you three brief strategies to walk away with. To build sales agility, you have to bust old patterns. There’s a fine line between a pattern and a rut, a routine and a rut so busting old patterns means uncovering, maybe with the help of a coach or your sales leader, finding the things that are no longer working for you in your sales life. Is there a routine that used to work that no longer works? Is there something that is your stuck point? There’s likely a pattern that you need to be able to bust, so becoming aware of what that pattern is and having to make some shifts in either your environment or your actions with some accountabilities in order to help you move toward a new, more productive pattern. You could look at anything that you’re doing in sales, your prospecting, your presentations, closing business, things stuck in your pipeline. There’s usually behind that a pattern that needs to be busted, busting old patterns will help you to be more sales agile.

The second one, strategic feed. Strategic feed is the ability to simultaneously look forward into the future and also be able to work backwards from that with milestones to help you move forward. You have to be able to really look forward and also look at what’s right in front of you. When you’re able to do that for yourself, you’re going to be more successful as a seller but if you can do this with your clients, help them see into the future but also help them get momentum in the short term, you are going to help them be more successful which in turn will help you to be more successful.

The last one is to rethink your revenue streams. Take a really tough, hard look at your pipeline. What opportunities are stuck? Which opportunities are actually going to move forward? You may need to rethink your pipeline, you may need to rethink where your revenue streams are coming from. Fred, your earlier example of that rep who had to work some different angles, great example of rethinking a revenue stream. Where in your territory, where in your book of business do you need to be rethinking? A revenue stream has dried up and you now need to find another revenue stream so rethinking that. If you’re a sales leader, taking your team through an exercise to help them rethink that.

Those are my three, I know I covered those pretty quickly but let me stop there and we’ll see any questions or we’ll being to wrap up.

Fred Diamond: We’re getting some notes here again, we got a note here from Jean who asked a question before, “Thank you, Amy, so much.” We also have a note here from Rob, thank you so much, appreciate it. I want to thank Amy Franko, the author of Modern Seller for the great insights today. I want to thank everybody who’s participated on today’s Sales Game Changers webinar or listened as a podcast. Ivan says, “No questions but I’m going to use a lot of this on my team call in 10 minutes.” Thank you so much.

Amy Franko: Excellent.

Fred Diamond: Thank you to our good friend up in Boston, I think she is now, or DC. Amy, we’d like to have you come on one of the Women in Sales webinars as well with Gina to talk about how the women sales professionals out there can utilize some of these skills and raise their visibility and really start moving their careers ahead. Why don’t you give us your final thought? We like to end every podcast with an action step that people can do today, September 18th or whenever you watch this. Give us one that they can leave on.

Amy Franko: I will leave you with sales agility being an inside job, we really have to adopt the outlook and we need to adopt the skills to best-serve our prospects and clients. With that, the thing that I would ask you to do, pick one of those three strategies, look at your pipeline, reimagine your revenue stream, pick one to work on and that’s going to help you build your sales agility and you’ll amplify that in other areas of your professional life and also your personal life.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.