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Please register for OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET: Entrepreneurial Habits for High-Achieving Sales Leaders with Melinda Emerson on Thursday, June 25, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in February 2020. Since the show was released during the pandemic, we asked Todd what his advice is for sales professionals now. He offered the following:

• Show empathy in all your communications— As a sales leader, you need to give your teams ample oxygen to sustain life in the new normal. This includes being human. Some tactics to consider might include doing weekly, high-touch videos (that show you with your family) so your team sees all of you, and is reassured that we’re all in this together.  Additionally, be transparent. We’ve found that our employees like to hear from our leadership frequently, and that they appreciate the candor and open lines of communication.
• Remain tech-savvy—As sales professionals, we’re all 100% inside sales reps now and there are incredible technologies we can quickly adopt so that we still can maintain intimacy with our customers, who by the way, are all feeling and experiencing the exact same things we are as sellers and company officers.
• Redefine success—We all want signed orders and uninterrupted revenue flows.  However, we also need to adjust to this unprecedented time by adapt our definitions of success.  Of course, sales is about bookings, but it’s also about the ‘building blocks’ of bookings, including forging new customer contacts, implementing smart outreach campaigns, providing demonstrations of new features, and reminding people of the essence of your product’s value.  It’s basic stuff, but it is authentic, and plants the seeds for eventual growth.
• Be pithy— Right now, people are starved for time, so cut to the chase.  Nobody—not a single professional—can recall a time where you’re simultaneously a) making the kids breakfast, b) responding to a forecast request from the board, all while c) trying to jam in a last-minute home-delivered grocery order (before your window closes).  Be kind, be relevant, be brief.

EPISODE 245: Datasite Global Sales Leader Todd Albright Says These Four Things are Critical for Sales Professionals to Do Right Now to Be Successful

TODD’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “My grandfather once told me, “Don’t get too smart” and that was sage wisdom to say nothing will ever supplant or replace hustle and humility when it comes to being a successful seller. That hustle is staying vigilant day in and day out. You haver to put in the cycle time. If you put in the process and you’re disciplined about it, good things will happen.”

Todd Albright is the Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer at Datasite formerly known as Merrill Corporation.

Prior to coming to Datasite he worked at FIS and a couple other growth stage startups.

Find Todd on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Todd, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast. I’m excited to hear your story, why don’t you tell us a little more about you that we need to know?

Todd Albright: Dedicated in sales for the better part of 20 years, had a wonderful ride with great mentors, started like all great sales leaders carrying a bag for 10 years, laddered through that in my career and eventually stepped into some leadership roles, team leads and to regional managers and eventually you take on more responsibility. I’ve been the Chief Revenue Officer of Merrill Corporation/Datasite for about 5 years and prior to that I’ve had a nice ride with some great technology growth stage companies. It’s wonderful to be here today.

Fred Diamond: I’m excited. Have you spent most of your career based out of New York City?

Todd Albright: I was born and raised in northeast Ohio, spent a lot of time in the southeast, I’ve lived in Europe for four years, been in New York for 10 years but a wide geographic experience for sure.

Fred Diamond: Where did you live in Europe?

Todd Albright: I lived in Germany, I lived in Munich, I lived in Berlin, spent some time in London as well.

Fred Diamond: Again, we’re excited to talk to you today. Datasite, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Todd Albright: We’re a growth stage SaaS technology company, we specialize in providing solutions to the M&A community, Mergers and Acquisitions. Most of our customers are large investment banks, private equity firms, corporations, law firms, we do a ton of work with them and our principle job without boring you with M&A jargon is just to provide them with technology that accelerates the completion of a merger or an acquisition. They take about 6 to 9 months and with our technology it happens faster, it’s more secure and you’re assured better outcomes.

Fred Diamond: A lot of people listening to the show like to know who our guests physically sell to, so what type of positions do you sell to? Is it a Chief Technology Officer or someone in the program side or leadership?

Todd Albright: We sell primarily to the business itself so the people that are in the middle of these transactions or advising them, so our clients at corporations are CEOs, Chief Financial Officers, general councils and they have a group of advisers that are typically helping them through a sale process. It could be an investment banker like a managing director or a VP, even an analyst or an associate, law firms, accounting, tax experts, these are the people that we sell to primarily on the business.

Fred Diamond: What excites you about that? Tell us what gets you juiced in the day to come sell more to these organizations.

Todd Albright: There are about 30 thousand M&A transactions that happen each year globally and we’re in 170 countries, our sales team is about 200 people. I bet what excites us the most is that we really assure positive deal outcomes when you use our software, you can be at higher degree of certainty knowing and confident that that deal is going to get done quickly, auditable, safely and certainly securely. In the old days people got on planes, they flew to physical file rooms to actually do this work, it slowed the process, it certainly wasn’t secure. We’ve been making a ton of technology investment to make sure our system is world class for our clients and I have the privilege of leading the sales organization that gets to talk about that day in and day out.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about your career. Tell us how you first got into sales as a career.

Todd Albright: I wanted to make money.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely.

Todd Albright: [Laughs] I started my career in consulting at Ernst & Young and it was a wonderful ride. A lot of that work was learning how to solve customer issues and I really enjoyed that work. At the same time – and this was, I’ll date myself, in the mid-90s – there was this new technology called the internet that was being invented and I lived in Atlanta, Georgia and there was a small growth stage company called Security First Technology which was selling internet banking software. This was software that would allow people to look at their account information on the internet, it was [Inaudible 04:39] technology in 1994 and they were looking for salespeople and they were looking for salespeople and I thought, “I have no sales experience, I know nothing about banking or financial services technology, I’d probably be a good fit.” I’m joking, of course but that was my first sales job, I carried a bag there for nine years and learned a ton.

Fred Diamond: There are guests we’ve had on the show who were management consultants where someone said, “You have good skills in front of the customer, you should move into this side” and then we have a lot of engineers who supported the sales process who wanted to make the shift. Looking back, did you really have the sales skills when you were younger or were you barren to going into sales? When you made that transition, what were you thinking about how you were prior to getting there?

Todd Albright: There are many great paths to successful sales careers so everything that you identified, Fred, is an absolutely bedrock path to being successful, there’s no one-size-fits-all but I must tell you that when I was in elementary school, I got called to the principal’s office because I was selling candy from the deli next door at markup from my fishing tackle box. On the way to school there was this stop and go and I would pop in and buy all kinds of candy, I’d put it in the tackle box and I would get there early and the kids would want to buy the candy. I think I was a born salesperson from the start but eventually you start to understand what you’re good at. You’re curious and wanting to solve people’s problems and maybe you’re okay in front of an audience and maybe you can articulate an argument. That led me down the path of sales but the management consulting background was definitely the first step because what selling is about is solving people’s problems and creating better outcomes for them and that was really the starting point. Then wanting to be on stage promoting that good work to the customers out there.

Fred Diamond: When you made that shift, what were some of the key lessons that you learned that have stuck with you?

Todd Albright: Urgency. When you’re carrying a bag you’ve got a number to hit. There’s a lot of pressure there and learning how to work with that. Second is you may be a salesperson out there but the reality is depending on what you’re selling, you’re recruiting help and resource from all parts of the organization. How do I build internal credibility to get people to ride along with me and to get sponsorship from the top of the organization and all parts of the product and customer service group to be able to create those outcomes? Those are a few of the things that I learned early on.

Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to you for a little bit. Tell us what you’re an expert in, I’m curious. What do you think your area of brilliance is?

Todd Albright: I think all sales leaders have clarity of vision, good communication, good leadership skills, written and oral but I’d say that two things probably stand out. The ability to identify the objective and to harness the organization focused in that singular direction, I think it’s very easy in sales no matter where you are in the organization to get distracted by extraneous stuff that’s really not going to move the needle or deliver the result you’ve committed, so a clarity of focus. I think the second thing, and this is more to the orchestration work you make or you do as an individual contributor and certainly in the role I’m in now, the word I use is synthesis. It’s more than just having a great sales plan, you’ve got to bring together other parts of the organization from the product expertise, the engineering organization, customer service, marketing, etcetera to make it all happen. Certainly when you’re doing a deal you’re recruiting help from finance and legal. Getting those people on side is part of the learning curve but I would say those are the two things that I might distinguish myself, clarity of vision as well as the ability to synthesize and orchestrate those resources across different functional areas.

Fred Diamond: I just mentioned you’re the Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer. Talk about global sales for a second. What are some of the things that you’re dealing with today as a sales leader globally?

Todd Albright: It’s balance. We have a large sales organization for our space, the largest in the space, about 200 quota carrying reps and then we have a sales enablement organization and certainly a leadership core. There are standard things that we want to do as a company, where do we hunt? It’s pretty consistent from market to market whether you’re in Asia, you’re in Europe, you’re in Latin America, you’re in North America, it’s pretty consistent about where we want to hunt. So, our job at a systemic level is to help guide our sellers in the direction of the customers with the highest propensity to buy, that’s a lot of science, that’s a lot of analytical work. How we incent and how we pay our reps and motivate our reps, that is consistent worldwide but I would say that most successful global sales leaders are highly empowering of their field resources.

The reality is that the VP of mine waking up in Sao Paulo this morning knows a lot more and has an intimate understanding of what’s going to make that person successful in their home market and it  might be very different in Paris, France or Athens, Greece or in Singapore or in Sydney, Australia where I was recently. I think it’s that balance between empowering the field sales force to tailor our approach on the go to market front while also building skill in the organization by having consistent culture, operating principles where we hunt and how we pay our people.

Fred Diamond: Again, you mentioned some mentors before, tell us about an impactful sales career mentor or two and how they impacted your career.

Todd Albright: I have to say that I’ve been really fortunate in working for great leaders and mentors throughout my career and that started at EY and through the various technology companies, I can list them by name but we’ll protect the innocent right now, Fred. I think it was important as well that these mentors didn’t just happen to me, I sought them out and not just above me in the sales organization but you start to look at who’s the head of customer service, who’s the head of product and engineering, let me learn from you. The reality is great leadership having a plan, executing that plan, it’s not like sales has a corner on any of that, it exists everywhere in the organization. I would say that the biggest thing that I learned or the consistency I found among them is you start to realize that whatever you’re selling, you’re selling to the individual needs of the people in the room.

Most of us show up to a sales pitch, maybe there’s three or four people from the customer. We’re not selling to an institution, we’re selling to the individual needs and wants at a personal level of the people in the room. The person from IT operations has a very different set of needs from the person who’s running the business and that person has a very different set of needs from the people in legal and finance and information security that you’re going to talk to through the process. Being really astute and sharp in not reading the room for any purpose other than fulfilling the need of that individual at the point of sale and it could be in some cases of an enterprise sale, 30 people. In a [Inaudible 11:58] might be a couple of people but that was probably the consistency that I found.

Fred Diamond: Just curiously, how would you coach some of the salespeople on your team to understand that? That’s actually a great point, you talked about that you’re selling to the individual needs of the people in the room and in the process what might be some of the coaching you would tell your sales team to get better at that?

Todd Albright: It’s not complicated, it’s human. If you’re raising children, for those of you out there you know that your children are a little bit different from one another so your approach is different. We do a lot of work at Datasite around interpersonal style and classically there are four different styles, you have drivers, you have amiables, etc. and we do a lot of work in identifying, “What is my personal style, strengths and weaknesses? What are the typical interpersonal styles that I’m going to deal with either in the seller universe i.e. the buyers that I’m selling to or within the organization that sell for partners of ours?” We spend a lot of time and I think what happens is we start to overcomplicate it, it’s all human but there are some skills that you can develop in terms of understanding that, “I happen to be a driver, my driver style can be endearing in certain capacities for certain people, it can be off-putting if I don’t edit that style.”

Fred Diamond: What are the two biggest challenges you face today as a sales leader?

Todd Albright: Scale, we can’t hire enough people. We are growing like crazy, I believe three times the industry average. I’m not sure we broadcast that but I just did, we feel good about our growth. My obligation to our board and investors is to sustain that growth so a lot of our work right now doesn’t keep me up at night because we’ve received accolades for the growth of our sales organization and we feel good about that. Attracting talent, then the second thing is how can we make the talent that’s in the building as productive as possible? By productive, it sounds like a grownup word but what I really mean is how do we put those people in a position to be as successful as possible? Those are the two things that we focus on, those are wonderful challenges to have, for sure but it’s what we focus on day in and day out.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, you’ve had a great career here. Again, we’re talking to Todd Albright, Worldwide Chief Revenue Officer at Datasite formerly known as Merrill Corporation. Todd, take us back to the #1 specific sale success or win of your career that you’re most proud of.

Todd Albright: I’ve been fortunate to either ride along or lead a few different ones but I’d have to say, when I was a young seller I got the mandate to sell a $10 million dollar order to this large bank who said they wanted to purchase “right now”. Five years later after multiple management changes we finally got that sale done and I think the reason that’s a signature win is it shows that in sales you’ve got to be patient. During that sales process executives changed on the client’s side or technology changed, etcetera. You have to stay vigilant and staying on top of that but eventually we got the deal done. What was most satisfying is that the number of people who were involved in closing that deal – and that was the point earlier I made about orchestration, that’s really the fun of sales, you’re the quarterback in effect bringing all that talent together from your organization to create a result for the customer.

Fred Diamond: Todd, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, again you started your career as a management consultant with E&Y and then you made the shift over to sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Did you ever think to yourself, “It’s too hard, it’s really just not for me”?

Todd Albright: No.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] let’s just leave it at that. Let’s take a short break, we’re going to listen to one of our sponsors. When we come back, even though Todd has given us a lot of great tips, urgency and some other things, we’re going to ask Todd for his tips on how you can take your sales career to the next level. My name is Fred Diamond, this is the Sales Game Changers podcast.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Todd, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the sales professionals listening around the globe to help them take their career to the next level?

Todd Albright: Build your network. I’ve talked a little bit about early in our career and we’ve talked about mentors, seek out mentors. It is very probable that the organization that you are joining, are a part of has a ton of knowledge already in the building, why not tap that knowledge?

The second reason you build your network, and I’ve talked about this, is you’re not out there alone as a lone ranger trying to get deals done. These are complex enterprise sales, it’s going to take an army to get that deal done not only because there are many buyers on the client’s side but the reality is you don’t have a corner on the knowledge required to get that deal done whether it’s process, a particular legal term, certainly deep engineering and product expertise. Build your network for the purposes of learning and accelerating your growth and also build your network because you’re going to need those people to be successful in the field.

Fred Diamond: I have a question, you gave us a great answer before when I asked you about your mentors. I’m sure you get a lot of people who reach out to you about you being a mentor to them. What advice would you give people who are asking you to be a mentor? How can they be a better mentee to you as a mentor?

Todd Albright: That’s a great question. One, I never turn anybody down. If you’re sincere about being successful no matter what your professional goals are, it doesn’t have to be in sales, I love giving back, I’m an adviser at a formal level for a couple of growth stage companies, it just stays fun all with the full support of my existing organization, of course. I enjoy doing it. I guess when you’re recruiting me I would say have a plan, have a vision of where you want to be in five years and map back from that and we can work on that plan together.

I think what doesn’t work – and this is independent if you’re approaching me or you’re approaching anyone that you’d solicit advice from – if it’s open-ended and not fit for purpose, it’s just hard to contribute to your growth unless you feel like there’s a shared plan you can work on together, so that’s a little bit of feedback. By the way, the other reason I never say no is I’m learning too, I’m learning a lot from people at different generations of their career, certainly people from other parts of the organization. I had a young person the other day who approached me and said, “Hey, I’m in the engineering organization, I saw a rec go up for a pre-sales resource. Can you tell me what is it like making that transition?” He’s a C++ expert coder, I don’t know anything about C++ so we’re learning together and I would say don’t be bashful but have a plan, have an idea of what kind of feedback you want.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your continued success?

Todd Albright: Endurance, you’ve got to keep at it. There’s the old adage in sales, what have you done for me lately? For those of you who run a calendar fiscal year, we flip the page on 2019, we’re into 2020 and you’ve got that mountain to climb. I think what allows you to maintain that endurance is you break down the sales process into its amino acids, it is building blocks, pots and pans, etcetera. You’re never going to eat an elephant in one bite, if you’ve got a two million dollar quota you’re not going to sell that quota in one deal. It’s an amalgamation of little steps so I also find that when you have that high cadence, it keeps you fresh, it keeps you vocal. That would be a little bit of feedback in terms of my selling habits.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us about a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Todd Albright: We are at an incredible pivot point at Datasite right now so I mentioned our growth and success and our core market of supporting data rooms and we’re growing like crazy, we’re taking a ton of market share, revenues are up into the right expanding margins, great free cash flow. Everyone’s really happy but we’re not satisfied because we know within our world there are still lots of problems that we can solve and value we can add to our community of buyers. One of them is a space called asset marketing. What we support today is what’s called due diligence, think about when you buy a house you agree on a price but you do an inspection, a termite inspection, you got to get a loan approved, etc., that’s what due diligence is even if you’re doing a multibillion dollar global transaction.

What there isn’t a lot of technology supporting is the marketing of that asset, how do I assemble a list of potential people who might be interested in this house? How do I market to them? How do I run them through the process? We have this great new product coming out called Datasite marketing but it’s going to be a different sale. We’re going to be selling to a slightly different audience, how we’re selling that is going to be a little bit different, it’ll be an enterprise SaaS sale different from the high velocity transactional sales that we do today but that’s a big project for us as we pivot and learn new muscles for the organization.

Fred Diamond: Todd, before we ask you for your final thought I want to thank you, you’ve given us a lot of great insights today. I love your energy, I love a lot of the thought that you put into your career. We get that a lot with the people who started out their careers in consulting because a lot of what you’re doing is process, helping customers through process. I’m just curious though, you made the move from management consulting, you have global responsibilities, sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls or your emails. What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Todd Albright: I love the action, you love the energy. You’re in many cases at a very young age charged with being the face of your organization and representing that ethically, morally and valuably for the people that you’re selling to. I don’t know a lot of careers and what’s particularly exciting about what we do at Datasite is we’re selling to CEOs and CFOs and white-shoe investment banks and law firms and private equity so we get the opportunity to interact with really smart people on the client side every day. Those are a few of the things that keep us going at Datasite for sure.

Fred Diamond: Todd, again I want to thank you for the great insights today, it was a great interview, I appreciate all your insights. Why don’t you give us one final thought? We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, a lot of them in tech, a lot of them in some of the spaces that we talked about today. Give us one final thought to inspire our listeners today. 

Todd Albright: My grandfather once told me, “Don’t get too smart” and that was sage wisdom to say nothing will ever supplant or replace hustle and humility when it comes to being a successful seller. That hustle is staying vigilant day in and day out, you just got to put in the cycle time. If you put in the process and you’re disciplined about it, good things will happen. The second thing, that humility, you’re never going to sell alone, you’ve got to recruit other talent from all parts of the organization and likely on the customer’s side to make you successful. Bringing those two things together, hustle and humility, will take you a long way.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 245: Datasite Global Sales Leader Todd Albright Says These Four Things are Critical for Sales Professionals to Do Right Now to Be Successful first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for Emotional Intelligence For Sales Leadership: Maximizing Hard and Soft Skills of Sales and Influence Right Now! on Friday, June 12, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in February 2020 before the pandemic. Since the show was released during the pandemic, it’s so valid as we need to draft interesting stories to help our customers recover from the resultant economic challenges.

EPISODE 241: Introvert Edge Author Matthew Pollard Details How Crisp Storytelling Can Lead to Sales Recovery as Re-Opening Accelerates

MATT’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “People remember 22 times more information when it’s embedded into a story which makes it so much easier to sell. Block out time to write a story, perfect it, learn it and then actually put the skill into action and you’ll see a transformation in your sales results.”

Matthew Pollard is the author of The Introvert’s Edge which has been recognized by Hubspot, Sales Hacker and BookAuthority as one of the top sales books of all time.

He’s also a global expert on storytelling for sales.

Find Matthew on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Matthew, it’s great to have you on the Sales Game Changers podcast today. I want to talk about storytelling, a lot of the people who listen to the show want to know how they can tell better stories in their sales process.

Matthew Pollard: Firstly, it’s an absolute honor to be on. I’ve heard your show before and you have some amazing guests so it’s great to be on this side of the equation. When people look at storytelling in their businesses or their careers, the biggest issue that I find that they have is that they think they tell great stories. Generally I find pretty soon that they either don’t tell stories at all, they just think that a story comes up when they submit a document that has a case study on it or if they do tell a story, it tends to be more, “A customer wanted this so we gave it to them.”

That’s about it, I tend to find that they lack depth and to me, stories should be more like the conversation about how you met your wife or how you met your husband, over time they get better and better so it’s always the same stories that you should be telling. I remember the first time I told the story of how I met my wife and originally when I first told the story I started to notice people were bored with certain elements so I stopped telling those parts. Then there were certain elements that people really enjoyed so I started to embellish on those parts. I think everybody does that, eventually it becomes a bit of a theatrical masterpiece, I say this, my wife says that, we say this together, then we look at each other, we hold hands and we say, “So that’s how we met.” We’ve rehearsed it almost a thousand times, every time we tell somebody we’re rehearsing it. I think what the biggest hurdle I see in the business format is in our personal lives we tell such emotionally rich stories, yet in our business careers there’s generally no emotion because we’re talking to a specific person.

Fred Diamond: Let me ask you a couple quick questions about storytelling. We have a lot of young people who listen to the Sales Game Changers podcast that might be in the first, maybe in the second stage of their career, first or second job, if you will. They don’t think they have any stories, is that true? How do you deal with that?

Matthew Pollard: It’s interesting, I think that I’ve seen organizations especially in the technology space at the moment, they’re hiring hundreds if not thousands of new people and they just can’t resource that unless they’re looking at the universities and hiring people with just no experience. You’re not just dealing with people that don’t have stories for the organization that they work for, they don’t have any stories period because this is their first job so they’re dealing with impostor syndrome because they’re talking to a customer and they can think in their head, their head’s almost screaming, “This person that I’m talking to is probably thinking, ‘How long have you had this job?'”

Secondly, they have just learned all the technology so their head is full of jargon that they feel like they have to educate the customer on. The truth is that you don’t need the stories to be yours, the organizations that you’re working for have so many rich stories to tell. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that you go and find a hundred stories and please, for the people that are listening, a rich story is not a case study. A case study is full of metrics and it’s more like an eye witness account, it’s the detail you would give if you were testifying at court. A well-prepared story is full of emotion, it reads more like watching your favorite character on TV or you’re reading about somebody in your favorite novel. It’s scented on a person that’s making a decision that has stress and later is less stressed and they’re happier because of it, and by the way the organization makes a lot more money. What I would suggest to those people that are just going out and selling for their first organization is go find somebody that’s selling your product, the same product that you’re selling or the same service that you’re selling and find somebody that’s the leader in their field and say, “What are your best success stories?” Ask them questions because you can use that story, you just change the word, “I worked with a customer” to, “We worked with a customer.” That’s all there is to it.

Fred Diamond: You’re the expert on storytelling in sales – again, we’re talking to Matthew Pollard today – what are three or four bases of stories that people would want to think about as they begin to grow as a storyteller?

Matthew Pollard: It’s interesting, I think when people look at stories and I talk about salespeople saying, “Customer wanted this so we gave it to them”, if they embellish a little bit more on the story, the embellishing is really done on the story of the implementation so it’s all the tech jargon that overwhelms the customer. For those people that are new or 30 years’ worth of experience, the customer doesn’t want to hear that. Sure, you may think that it makes you come across as the expert and therefore allows them to say, “I’ll work with that person”, that’s actually not what’s happening. Inside their head they’re overwhelmed and you’re trying to download 30 years or experience of 5 days’ worth of training into a 20 minute meeting.

At the end, the customer is going to look at the proposals – none of which they understand – and pick the one that may be the cheapest price or the one that they may have struck up a slightly better conversation with if all the prices are around the same. Stories, the way they should be designed should focus maybe 20% of the time on the implementation, if that. Most people if they’re telling stories, it’s probably going to be 80% right now.

What I suggest is they spend about 40% of their time really focusing on the customer’s state before the implementation. I always say there’s three elements to that which is the real cost, what is the problem currently costing or not having the implementation currently costing them? Second is the opportunity cost, what are they missing out on because they haven’t done that or because they have that problem? Then third which is actually the reason why people buy sooner, for item A and item B they will make the decision to go with you likely if your story covers that, the sale cycle is just going to be really long. But if you cover the emotional element of maybe as a result of this problem, the CEO or the Vice President’s waking up at night going, ‘Oh, gosh’ and worried about their office, maybe they’re getting stuck in the office because of this situation, maybe they missed a kid’s dance recital or they’re just not sleeping well at night because they’re anxious about a specific situation.

That’s the part that’s going to say, “Forget the proposal process, let’s just do this today because I need the problem solved.” The beginning state in three categories: real cost, opportunity cost and emotional cost. Then you move to implementation which again is a shorter pace, then you spend another large chunk of the time talking about the after state, i.e. was the money saved? Was the opportunity cost realized? And does the CEO sleep better at night, does he worry less, did he make his kid’s dance recital, did he get promoted? Maybe he was worried about losing his job in the start and now he actually didn’t lose his job, he’s now in a place where his organization is recognizing his department for amazing performance that before it just wouldn’t have been seen as possible. How does he feel about that or how does she feel about that? Then the moral of the story which is the fourth element. Now, most people think the moral of the story should be obvious and therefore you don’t have to tell them.

The problem is that people, when they hear a story, evaluate a story based on a couple of factors. Their past experiences, their beliefs, their values and potentially what they had for breakfast this morning and the conversations that they had this morning, the framing that they currently have. If you want them to walk out with the exact moral that you want them to take away, you need to explicitly say that so the moral is also a really important element that you’ve got to get across. The focal point for me is that when I say, “It’s got to cover these elements” people say, “That takes a long time” and, “How am I going to express all this? I’m used to a customer spending 8 seconds on the phone with me.” There’s some great science behind stories. When you tell a story, it short-circuits the logical part of the brain so when you’re a cold caller it’s terrific, the logical part of the brain is the part of the brain that’s sitting there going, “That might work for me, that won’t, I don’t have time for this, hang up” and C level executives, you get so little time because they’re very logical brained.
When you tell a story, it literally short-circuits the logical brain and you’re speaking directly to the emotional brain. The emotional brain just goes, “Story time!” and it listens. It assumes all the detail in the story is factual and then interprets the moral, and if the moral is, “We worked with someone just like you who had your objection and they’re so happy they worked with us because we saved them from a really big mistake” or, “They wanted what you wanted and got such an amazing result” you’re going to go from one of the people in the [Inaudible 09:35] to the only choice that they’re going to be happy to make.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to ask you a question. A lot of people listening on the Sales Game Changers podcast today are in inside sales or they’re in the early part of their career so they’re doing BDR type work or SDR type work. They’re thrilled to death to get someone on the phone, let alone to have the opportunity to tell them a story. Again, we have a lot of people here who are making 50-60 phone calls a day, they’re in tech, they’re in hospitality, wherever they might be, media, financial services. How can you get the opportunity when it’s your first time talking to someone to tell them a story?

Matthew Pollard: The important thing to first understand is that you’re going to get objections and you have to learn how to handle that. The thing that I always suggest is have a very short but concise introductory script that you’ve prepared, that you say the same thing every time. It’s a lot more helpful if your organization will allow you to focus on one sales play or speak to one specific niche because then you can prepare just one story. When you have a story, I don’t mean read it off a piece of paper so you sound robotic, we’ve all heard telemarketers at 8:00 o’clock at night, we hear that and we’re like, “That’s terrible.” However, think about the last movie you just watched. I just finished watching Gangs of New York and Leonardo DiCaprio is amazing in that movie, he just embodies the character, he’s reading from a script and it’s not even him. For me, you’ve got to have that script where you’ve learned it, you’ve read it, you can tell that story in your sleep but how do you get from script where you get an objection to somebody letting you tell them a story?

The answer is you need to have what’s called an objection handling cushion. I create it to be just long enough for the extroverts that are probably the ones that are listening today and this morning they got hyped up on coffee and now they’re probably standing up fist on the table yelling at the phone, and it gives them time to emotionally regulate so that they calm down and realize that all they’ve got to do is tell a story. For the introverts that are going through that brain spasm that comes with, “I’ve got to think of something on the fly”, it gives them time to think. It’s a lot easier to think again if you only have one story because it’s pretty obvious what you’re going to talk about, but as you succeed and get better in the sales process the same story is not going to be relevant so it’s great to learn this skill straight away. The objection handling cushion that I love to use is, “I perfectly understand, the last thing I want to do is waste any of your time. However…” Words are critical. I perfectly understand, I actually listened to what you said. The last thing I want to do is waste any of your time, I get that your busy. However – salespeople love to use the word ‘but’. It’s funny, I hear the word ‘but’ and I hear like it’s a petulant child, “But, but, but…”

The word is actually more critical than that, the word but means everything I said beforehand I didn’t mean, now I’m going to tell you what I really think. It’s called a subtraction term. For those that don’t believe me that are married, the husband’s out and they’re even more so. Go home and tell your wife, “Dear, you look beautiful in that dress but…” and see what happens, it’s not going to be a great situation. The word ‘however’ is an additional term, it means everything I said beforehand I mean, however, have you considered this additional thought? It’s like the word ‘and’ in a different way, if you’d like. What I would suggest is you have an introductory script that you practice, “I perfectly understand, the last thing I want to do is waste any of your time, however…” It’s like a knee flex reaction while you think of your story and emotionally stabilize so you can tell it in a great way. Then you say, “However, you actually remind me of a client of mine, Fred, who had this situation or the similar objection to you…” And then you go through the story of how lucky he was that he actually took the time to listen. That means the moral is that. We’ve tried this for industries like commercial real estate where the C level executives are hanging up the phone in 8 seconds.

When you do it this way, we’ve been able to keep people on the phone for 2, 2.5 minutes on average before they logically switch back on and go, “Why am I listening to this?” and that’s for two reasons. One is that obviously it short-circuits the logical brain but the second thing which is super powerful especially for those introverts out there is that studies at Princeton highlight that it actually activates the reticular activating system of our brain and the teller of the story and the listener of the story, actually their brains synchronize. It’s why when I get up and do all the sales kick offs that I do, the first thing when I walk on stage is I say, “What an honor it is to be here.” This part’s scripted because I’m an introvert myself and I’m scared of getting on stage. However, I’ve got myself to the point now where Top Sales World Magazine just listed me as one of the top 50 speakers in the world. If I can’t get from that uncomfortability into my comfortability, I’m going to have a lot of trouble getting there and succeeding. I say, “What an honor it is to be here. How will I live up to such a wonderful welcome? I know, let me tell you about Alex” or, “Let me tell you about Wendy” and I go straight into a story and straight away I can see everybody becomes at ease, I feel at ease. I do the same thing whenever I talk to someone in a sale or pick up the phone to do a cold call. As soon as you get to a story the brains synchronize and comfortability sets in and the sale just becomes easier.

Fred Diamond: Matthew, before we take a short break and listen to one of our sponsors, can anybody become a good storyteller? Is it the kind of thing where you need to spend two years like learning how to play the guitar or is it something that you could train anybody to do if they’re comfortable speaking?

Matthew Pollard: It’s really interesting, I think storytelling has become overcomplicated especially if you run a corporate organization and you’re trying to operationalize this across thousands of sales leaders. The story narratives, people just go, “Ugh, it’s too hard” and while the trainers think it’s a great idea, when you actually try to implement it, it just becomes too tough. I think that’s because yes, you can tell amazing stories, you can make a story like a Disney movie, the problem is that in reality when you try and operationalize that the salesperson says, “This is a huge story, it’s uncomfortable, there are too many elements, it’s overwhelming.”

To me, learning the elements of the story and then implementing it, you can do that same day. Today I spoke on your big stage and we got a whole bunch of people in a six minute exercise to tell their stories and then I invited someone up on stage, one person shared their story and it was a great story. However, I marked it against a few criteria and everyone’s like, “Yeah, it was a great story, it was concise.” Did they talk about the emotions of the customer? And everyone was like, “Yes, he did” and I was like, “Really? Because I didn’t even hear the customer’s name, we talked about a company.” It’s really hard to fill the emotions of a corporate organization, what about the one person that was in charge of the decision? We found out all these things about the fact that they were under-performing, he felt uncomfortable talking to the CEO, all these elements came out and then we found out that he later ended up in this situation where he went from – that’s why I was talking about this example – he went from worried about talking to the CEO to the CEO using him as an example for all the other departments. All of a sudden I just asked all of these questions and then I re-articulated the story back to him in I think maybe 45 seconds and I did it instantaneously.

He told me the story, I asked a few questions and then I retold the story and I think that’s powerful because everybody saw how quickly that happened. It’s fine for me to do that, I’m the story master so what we then did is we then said, “Okay, let’s do the exercise again but this time, four minutes for the story and then your partner gets to critique you for two minutes and then we’ll swap over.” The amount of difference just hearing what the criteria of the story was, seeing the template for the first time and then delivering the story, the transformation of the story, many people came up to me afterwards and said it was a transformative event. It wasn’t the fact that I’m an extra special speaker, it’s that simplifying the story process so you can look at a card and go, “These are the four elements” and then having somebody coach you on the things that you perhaps missed – by the way, teaching is the best form of learning so they were learning at the same time and then they swapped over – the stories were so much better.

When I learned to sell I was an introvert, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I fell into commission only sales. There was no way I should have been a salesperson but I spent six weeks spending eight hours in the field, eight hours at home practicing sixteen hours on the weekend, it was a terrible six weeks but I taught myself how to sell watching YouTube videos and believing sales was a system. By doing that I got better and better and people are like, “Yes but you must have been amazing just to focus on system and practice”, it’s harder. When we do this exercise it’s 12 minutes and their story is transformed so they got the benefit of it the same day. Tomorrow the trick is making sure their leadership know that they have to use that story with the customer, that’s the behavioral shift. All it takes, really is perfecting one story you can do in one day, use it tomorrow and then by the end of the week you’ll feel you’re a story master for that one story. However, the time it takes to perfect the next story is by far less because you now understand what the quadrants are. By the time you get to your fourth or fifth story or in my case your thousandth story, you’re transforming it from stage.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: What should sales professionals out there do to get on their journey to becoming a more effective storyteller?

Matthew Pollard: I think the most important thing is to actually start the process. For me, I think these days we get caught up in targets and hitting the targets by this quarter, we get so busy in the doing we forget that if we take a step back, standing still for a day you can accelerate forward like crazy. The problem is unless our manager brings us to a sales kick off, we tend not to do that so here’s the suggestion that I would have. Go back and listen to the start of this episode where I explained what the four quadrants are, write them down and then tell a story out loud to a recording, then go over the template again and say, “Did I hit all of those elements?” The first thing you do is find out the answer is, “Absolutely not” so fill in those elements. If you don’t know the answers, go and ask questions to your customer.
If you’ve got it off a sales leader, ask if you can interview their customer or get them to ask the questions but fill in those gaps. Then – and I think this is key – block out time in your schedule to practice the story until you can say it with your eyes closed. Then set time aside and say, “Here are the customers where I think the story is going to be relevant” and judge yourself on just one criteria: did I tell the story or not and did I say it in its fullness? Because salespeople go, “I’m trying to be mindful of their time” so they truncate it with a customer. In truth, everything else you say is where the customer is like, “I’m busy, I’ve got stuff to do.” When you tell a story they just sit back and go, “Storytime!” and listen. You’ll see the effect that it has, once you see that then you’ll be willing to double down.
My suggestions to you are write your story down, judge it against the criteria, perfect it, practice it until you can do it with your eyes closed and then deliver it in a sale. Look, I can tell you, back in the days when I used to sell telecommunications I used to see people with ten brochures on their desk from other salespeople and I knew because of the science people remember 22 times more information when embedded into a story. They’d remember more of what I’d told them and because of the reticular activating system synchronizing our brain, even though I was an introvert and kind of awkward in the initial parts of the conversation, they actually felt like they’d have a deeper and stronger relationship with me. It was so much easier to sell so just change the behavior, block out time to write a story, perfect it, learn it and then use it, that’s the key one, actually put the skill into action and you’ll see a transformation in your sales results.

Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final thought to inspire our listeners today, you have a lot of things going on, again you’re a best-selling author here, The Introvert’s Edge, you’re speaking all over the world to large corporations and at conferences on storytelling and how to be more effective in the sales process. Why don’t you tell us, before you give us your final thought, what major initiative you’re working on today?

Matthew Pollard: At the moment I’m in the process of finishing my second book. My first book was really successful, I did 25 thousand copies in the first 12 months which was super exciting, it won all these awards so my next book is actually coming out in the first quarter of 2021. However, anyone that knows the publishing industry knows that when the book comes out next year it’s going to be finished this year so it’ll be due actually just in a few weeks. We’re putting together the finishing touches on The Introvert’s Edge to Networking which will be a lot of fun.

Fred Diamond: Matthew, I want to thank you again, you did a great job today at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. I read the book The Introvert’s Edge, it’s a great book, congratulations to you on your first book, on being so successful and being so impactful. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe, give us a final thought to inspire them today.

Matthew Pollard: I think for a lot of people listening that are introverts, the book is on introversion, they’re the ones that tend to accept sub-par performance and I think as introverts we believe that it’s okay to be the below average because we don’t have this gift of gab. Gift of gab is a fallacy, I think as extroverts they may struggle with listening, perhaps but they’ll go out and get coaching and training.

For introverts, I want you to know that not only can you sell, that you can actually be amazing at sales. You can even beat the extroverts hands-down but you need a system that allows you not to become more extroverted because you’ll feel inauthentic and it’s exhausting. What you need is a system that you can follow that allows you to channel your natural skills and abilities while getting people to the outcome which is that they work with you. Remember one thing, the definition of sales was derived from the Scandinavian term, “To serve.” In truth, sales is a service. If we are selling a product that benefits our clients or a service that benefits our clients and we walk out and they don’t buy from us, they’re more likely to buy from someone that offers them a less quality product, a product that may not deliver them the value or they buy no product at all which means nothing happens.

So, you are doing yourself and your customer a service by getting them past their own mental blocks and business blocks to making a decision, but you need a sales process to do that more effectively and for the extroverts without the roller coaster ride.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 241: Introvert Edge Author Matthew Pollard Details How Crisp Storytelling Can Lead to Sales Recovery as Re-Opening Accelerates first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: We conducted this interview in February 2020. Since the show was released during the pandemic, we asked Trevor what his advice is for sales professionals now. He offered the following:

• In today’s environment, sellers must be very aware of buyers circumstances and respond with appropriate levels of empathy and patience. This could be both personal (ie. someone who’s loved one is sick) or related to their particular industry (ie. travel & hospitality). While some buyers are willing and able to act as though it’s “business as usual”, sellers should never assume that this is the case for all. The pandemic has effected everyone and every business in different ways. Sellers should be mindful of this and act accordingly.
• Rethinking your key value proposition to ensure it highlights the new world realities. This is critical to grabbing and maintaining buyers attention today. While it is sometimes difficult to change what has worked so well in the past – sellers who do not adjust their messaging to incorporate the new future will look prehistoric. Think hard about what current problems you and your company can help solve for your buyers. Then have meaningful conversations that inform the both of you about what is possible.
• Communicate more than ever with your marketing and product teams. Give them constant intel on what is working … and what needs to change. Over communicate!  The smart companies are willing to alter their strategies and product offerings quickly to respond to changes in the market. Make sure sales has a place at the table to help set the agenda. While everyone can agree that we are in a crisis – opportunity is always available for those who work for it.

EPISODE 239: Diligent Corporation’s Global Sales Chief Trevor Vale Lists Three Fresh Strategies to Lead Sales Teams Beyond the Pandemic

TREVOR’S FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you’re going to get into sales, you’ve got to be prepared to handle pressure. If you’re not confident it’s definitely not the career for you. You always must be confident. You must be confident when you’re winning and most importantly you have to be confident when you’re failing. If you’re not believing in yourself you’re just not going to inspire anyone to purchase from you.”

Trevor Vale is the SVP and Global Head of Sales at Diligent.

He worked at Intercontinental Exchange and Thomson Reuters

Find Trevor on LinkedIn here.

Fred Diamond: Tell us what you sell today and tell us what excites you about that.

Trevor Vale: In short, I sell modern governance. What is modern governance? We provide a software suite of services that empowers leaders to simplify, secure and streamline their governance practices leveraging our tech. Our governance solutions offer a range of capabilities including entity management, insights and analytics, secure collaboration and our flagship product, the one we’re known most for is Diligent Boards which is the most widely used board portal in the world used by 50% of the Fortune 1000. Simply put, we provide the right information to the right leaders at the right time.

Fred Diamond: You mentioned in the beginning that it’s a PE backed firm, what does that mean from a selling perspective? Do you have to sell differently if it’s a public company versus privately owned versus private equity based?

Trevor Vale: Big stark difference between selling within a publicly traded company like a Thomson Reuters, for instance and a PE backed company like Diligent. We’re fortunate to have some great PE backers so Insight and ClearLight are two private equity firms. I have a keen understanding of the SaaS space so they get it, they understand the importance of marketing demand generation in that vertical and provide us a ton of support and resources to scale and acquire new companies and assets to expand what we are doing.

It’s a real privilege to align with solid private equity companies like the ones I’m currently working with and it’s a different dynamic, frankly. It’s one of hyper growth so very performance based, expectations are high, that’s why we’re all there but also the support and the vision are super clear. There’s a great sense of purpose and if push comes to shove, I’ll pick that any day of a week because as a seller, someone who’s asked to lead sales teams it’s easy to tap into that energy, it’s easy to leverage that energy to inspire the team. When you’re constantly moving and change is often the order of the day, it’s a fantastic stimulating environment to work in.

Fred Diamond: How did you first get into sales?

Trevor Vale: Like a lot of people, I got my start in an unexpected way in sales. There is no sales university, you don’t go do four years to get your sales degree so my path into sales is unique like I’m sure most folks listening today. After graduating college with a political science degree I took a year off to try and figure out what I wanted to do. Politics was a dirty possibility but I thought I’d pursue law, that’s where a bunch of my friends had moved onto pursuing a law degree somewhere. I decided to take that year and move to Japan where I spent a year teaching English and took the opportunity to learn a little bit about another culture and also make a little bit of money.

After a year when I returned to Toronto, I found myself back at mom and dad’s place – which was great, I love mom and dad, just want to make that clear – but as I quickly ran out of the money I’d saved in Japan I started to think about what I needed to do. One thing I really needed to do was find an apartment, I needed to get back out there and live on my own, I’d done it in college and of course, a year abroad. That was a big catalyst to me, deciding that I’d probably better go make some money and I debated, “Do I keep the band going or do I maybe see if I can get into law school and again make that money and find an apartment?”

In the end, that again was the catalyst and I ended up one day picking up the phone and calling a good friend of mine who I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. As I called him, he picked the phone up and I could sense that he was very busy and there was a lot going on in the background, phones ringing, people screaming and he quickly cut through the pleasantries and said to me, “So what, are you looking for a job? Get a resume over to me tomorrow” and abruptly hung up the phone. [Laughs] I quickly went into mom and dad’s study and tweaked my resume as best I could, and at the time I was a kid fresh out of college, a couple of odd jobs in the summer at a gas station and a little stint as a dishwasher at Denny’s and of course, a year teaching in Japan but tried my darnedest to parlay that into something that could be exciting to a company.

I ended up getting an interview at this company my friend was working for and the company was called SuperCom, I think it’s since defunct but it was essentially a VAR reseller of computer components. After a quick interview I got the job and found myself working at SuperCom which was essentially a boiler room for computer components. Doing that for a year taught me a lot about cold calling, taught me a lot about value selling and really taught me a lot about performance based sales, frankly. What’s the old joke? We’ve got a sales contest this week and the winner gets to participate in the sales contest next week. That’s what this place was about, you were only as good as your quarter and if you didn’t produce, you were out. 70% of what you did was based on commission, we used to have spiff campaigns. Maxtor Hard Drives, for instance would come in and say, “Whoever sells the most hard drives gets $500 bucks.”

Fred Diamond: How many phone calls did you make a day on average?

Trevor Vale: We must have done three dozen calls a day, just to outreach, maybe more. I had a small book of business, was asked to grow that but most of it was just pure straight up cold calling.

Fred Diamond: What are some of the key lessons you took away from those first few sales jobs?

Trevor Vale: I think the lessons were being comfortable in terms of being able to message something and you had to message lots of different products and you had a short time to do it. You had distracted buyers you were reaching out to, intense competition, this was going back to 1997 so everybody out there was selling computer components so how do you distinguish yourself? How do you differentiate? All those things were quickly instilled into me in the short time I was there.

Fred Diamond: How did you differentiate yourself when you’re selling such commoditized products?

Trevor Vale: That’s a great question because a Maxtor Hard Drive or an Asus Motherboard is a Maxtor Hard Drive or an Asus Motherboard regardless of where it’s coming from. As I sold to these VARs, one of the things we had going for us and that we leveraged in our pitches was that we did some work for IBM. IBM actually outsourced some of their Toronto based PC business to our firm so gravitating towards that and trying to communicate that we were a trusted partner of IBM definitely differentiated us and transcended us from the suburban office mall that we existed in – it was essentially a warehouse. To the buyer on the phone was able to communicate a degree of trust, a degree of legitimacy that frankly our competitors couldn’t do.

Fred Diamond: Who did you sell to? Was it to the home or to corporations or certain verticals?

Trevor Vale: It was a ton of local electronic stores in the Toronto GTA area that happened to sell PCs as well. We sold to VARs who we would sell components to and they would build customized PCs and we also sold to resellers as well. It was a mixed bag of storefronts and this was in the early days of dot com so there wasn’t a ton of online options. Firms like SuperCom were pretty much a go-to for most of these brick and mortar type environments.

Fred Diamond: On today’s Sales Game Changers podcast we’re talking to Trevor Vale, he’s a senior VP of global sales for Diligent. Trevor, get us caught up on you right now. Tell us what you’re an expert in, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

Trevor Vale: I’m sure my wife would have a different answer than the one I’m going to give you and I’m sure some of my team members would also, but I think I’ve become an expert in, it sounds a little strange, but just adapting to change. I think spending 25 years in sales you learn a ton and your experience provides perspective on lots of different scenarios so sales acumen gets refined. You have a good tool box of things that you can utilize in various sales environments but the rapid pace of change that’s going on right now is unprecedented.

My father was a very successful sales and marketing executive, he let a number of large sales teams and marketing teams within the consumer electronic business over his career. When I speak to him about the X’s and O’s of sales, it’s a pretty stark contrast the world that he lived in versus the one I’m living and he can see that when we’re trying to compare accomplishments in a healthy competitive way, by the way. I think the rapid change that we’re going through right now provides a whole ton of opportunity, tons of new ways to unpack analytics, to understand what your close ratios are in different circumstances, how you fair against your competitors. There’s just a deep mind of data that can be accessed in a very quick way and there’s tons of new tools and technologies that are constantly being introduced into not just sales but frankly, every profession whether it’s legal, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s sales, what have you.

Fred Diamond: What’s a good tool that you deploy in your sales organization?

Trevor Vale: We’re a big fan of Salesforce, we’re a big fan of Domo which adds another layer to access that data out of Salesforce and we’ve started to deploy Gong which is an effective tool to see how messaging is going in the marketplace, how reps are positioning new products, etc. and for on-boarding new sales staff. Those are an example of three, we’ve got many more that are used across our customer success groups and within our sales organization. Where I was going with what I’ve become an expert at, I think it’s really managing that new capability on the technology side to empower the sales organization and improve your close rates and generate more bookings ultimately. Also being able to maintain a focus on the sales side so inspiring the team, making sure they’re not distracted with too many new things, making sure we adhere to the old principles of those sales X’s and O’s I referred to earlier. Becoming an expert at just balancing the new world with the old, if that makes any sense, is how I view myself as a nice cross between the two.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, I very rarely ask this question but before I ask you about an impactful sales career mentor, how would you describe yourself as a leader? If someone would say, “Trevor is a ‘blank’ type of leader” how would you fill in the blank? How do you view yourself as a leader?

Trevor Vale: My leadership style is absolutely performance driven, so I spend a lot of time studying coaches. We talked about hockey so hockey is a place I go to a lot and try and read as much as I can about leadership roles in that form as well as other sports. One of my favorite books is Urban Meyers’ Above the Line, I think he’s got a very succinct way of inspiring a team to win. Those things definitely resonate with me on the sports side of the spectrum. I think the constant search to find new ways to inspire has to be part of any successful sales leader. It takes a lot to continue to wake up every day and rally the team and you’ve got to be legitimate about that. I’ve worked for sales leaders who you didn’t buy into what they were doing and similar to sports, if a coach doesn’t really feel that that team can win or that they’re going to do it then that team probably won’t.

Being a constant variable in terms of inspiration and energy I think is something that I aspire to on a daily basis. Also, an important and often overlooked component of sales leadership is trust so being able to gain the trust of your team and having walked into Diligent and inheriting a sales team that I didn’t choose, they didn’t choose me, I didn’t choose them but being able to establish that trust takes time. It has to happen on the individual level so I have a team of just under 50 around the globe and I make an effort every two months to interface with each of them on a 30 minute call or in person when I can but because they’re all over the world, sometimes a call has to happen. Just being able to communicate for 30 minutes with that individual and start to understand what makes them tick and conversely communicating what I’m looking for is extremely valuable. That trust needs to be invested in through time and as sales leaders it’s sometimes difficult to carve that time out but I’d encourage everyone to try and do that and know all of their sellers.

Fred Diamond: That’s an interesting answer. A lot of times trust comes up on the Sales Game Changers podcast from the concept of being a trusted adviser for your customer but this was the first time I believe one of the sales leaders that we’ve interviewed talked about having to build trust. The reason you had to do that was you mentioned you took the job and your sales team was given to you as compared to growing with them type of a thing.

Trevor Vale: Yes, that’s one thing and also we acquire new companies at a fairly rapid rate at Diligent. Our growth is tied into organic and acquisition so we do inherit salespeople from time to time. The trust, I think just needs to be established in a way that the sales reps feel that they can trust their sales leader, that they can speak and communicate to that sales leader, that they can bounce new ideas off that sales leader and feel like they won’t be penalized for it. I’ll take the truth any day of the week so if I understand why a seller is not performing, for instance, if they trust me and I trust them there should be a good back and forth on, “How can we improve this? What you’re telling me in terms of maybe your persona situation in life or otherwise is certainly having an impact. How do we course correct, how do we bring in new resources? Whatever the fix is.”

If you don’t have the trust, I feel like sometimes you just won’t get candid answers around what’s not working and on a more superficial level it’s just like, “This product is not working because of this.” As an example, if I’m a sales rep overseeing a region that’s far away from HQ in the Middle East, for instance and that rep is having problems with a certain product I’d like to know about that sooner rather than later.

Fred Diamond: You’ve been in sales for 25 years. Why don’t you tell us about an impactful sales mentor and how they impacted your career?

Trevor Vale: I mentioned I was at a bit of a boiler room in terms of SuperCom and during my stint there it quickly became evident to me that I wanted to do more, I knew there was a bigger world out there and felt like I’d established or gotten a foothold in the sales game and was enjoying it, enjoying making money and enjoying communicating with a variety of characters on a daily basis. Sometimes it would be a dramatic phone hanging up with an explicit or sometimes I’d actually establish a bond with a potential client and got connected to sales through that back and forth but I knew SuperCom was not going to be big enough for my aspirations.

In my sixth, seventh month at the firm dialing for dollars I started to establish a shortlist of companies that I felt had the scale to elevate my game and offer maybe a more professional and civilized environment to work in with better options than the strip mall that was just down the street from where SuperCom was located in terms of lunches and things. Ultimately I identified Reuters as a potential company to work in so I took those cold calling skills I’d learned and started to dial for dollars around these firms that I’d earmarked and tried to connect with the sales leaders within those firms and got a couple of bites, one which turned out to be Reuters. I connected with their head of sales who was a bit confused as to why I was calling, I had no background in financial services, I barely had any background in sales but I was able to communicate a bit more about me in terms of what I had accomplished, the experience in Japan, for instance and other things, enough to captivate him to take a meeting.

One evening after working a full day I drove into the city of Toronto and met with that sales leader and I spent about two hours with him. I remember it was a late night meeting, it was probably from 6:30 to 8:30 and had a good back and forth and tried my darnedest to show him that I understood financial services, I knew what investment banks did, I knew the difference between a buy side and a sell side which I didn’t know at the time. I’d done enough research to put together a bit of a story and he was walking me out of the door leading me towards the elevator shaking my hand thanking me for the time and all that. I turned to him just before getting on the elevator and I said, “I really appreciate the meeting and I just wanted to see when would be a good time for you to have a follow up discussion and talk about next steps.”

It was a very stark moment in my life, he grabbed me and pulled me back into the office and sat me down on the couch in reception and said, “I was just about to say goodbye to you and thought you were a great guy and really enjoyed meeting you.” We had a lot in common, he was – surprise, surprise – a hockey guy and happened to grow up in my neighborhood but he said, “I was going to let you go until you asked for the close. Because you did that, I’m going to give you another shot and I’m going to have you actually come back and talk to some other people.”

From that, he actually put me on a trade show floor manning a booth for Reuters product. I had to take a day off work because I was still at SuperCom and he said, “Come on in, I want you to work this booth and I want to see how you do.” He had me stand there for six hours at the booth, I knew nothing about the product, he was taking a big risk although I guess he knew the trade show better than I did, but I still did it for six hours learning about the product as I engaged potential clients. He was barely to be found, he was in the room but he actually had people coming up to me interacting with me and asking me about the product and things and getting feedback on the side. At the end of that day he took me out for a glass of scotch – I don’t think I drank scotch at that time, I think I was a jack and coke guy – but he took me out for a nice glass of scotch in a nice place in Toronto and offered me the job to start at Reuters as an account manager.

Fred Diamond: One of the key things that you just said there which comes up not infrequently is the lack of follow up. We’ve interviewed some people who have managed call centers and they said after analyzing hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands of millions of calls, one of the key things that they see wrong is that people don’t do the follow up so good for you for asking that question about what’s the next step and what do we do. I’m just curious, what do you see as the two biggest challenges that you face as a sales leader?

Trevor Vale: I think the challenges today that I have, I think some of your listeners might be a bit envious. If I take a look at my business, I am lucky enough to have a first class marketing organization that I align with on the commercial side. It’s been an extremely pleasurable working experience to work with my colleagues in marketing at Diligent and they’ve developed a first-class demand gen capability for Diligent. The result of that is a big chunk of my bookings are the result of a lot of inbound leads and that’s a good thing. Again, I think a lot of folks would be envious of that.

My challenge is to make sure my sales reps don’t get too lazy, too complacent with that drip which is more than a drip, and y #1 challenge is to motivate, inspire and teach them how to be better sales prospectors. Expect some great inbound leads for sure because my marketing team are great at delivering those, but also to own your book, own your territory. I’ve spent the last couple of years instilling that culture trying to make those changes and I’m happy to report in 2019 we increased our sales prospective contributions to our book, we almost doubled that contribution and it now represents about 20% of our annual bookings. That’s one thing I focus on, the other one is equally enviable in some ways but it’s really about product. I talked about the rate at which we acquire companies, it’s at an accelerated rate, it’s making the modern governance story better and better but for sellers I have to make sure – back to my point on distraction – that I’m very cognoscente of the fact that they need to be able to understand the new products we put into market. They need to be able to message our proposition as it relates to those new products and most importantly, that those products work and are ready for prime time. The go to market strategy as a sales leader, I try and be very active in working with my product team, with my legal team, with my marketing team to ensure that when we release a product it is fully baked, it is ready to go, we can contract for that product, we can create a sales force for that product, that the product works and is ideally integrated into our other offerings. That’s something I spend a lot of time focusing on.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you take us back to the biggest success or win from your career that you’re most proud of?

Trevor Vale: I’m happy to say there’s a lot of them but if I look back to a sale that I feel leveraged a whole bunch of my skills and brought them all together to realize a successful win, it has to be during my time at a startup company. It was back in 2012, I was working with a San Mateo based company called Xignite, fortunate to work with their CEO, Stephane Dubois. They had brought me in to leverage my relationships within the financial services sector and break out of a model that was API delivered to a lot of startups and try and take a market data cloud concept – remember, this was 2012 so the cloud was not as popular or accepted as it is today – and push that into the financial services space.

At the time most of the major investment banks had server firms, very few of them were open to cloud distribution points and I was asked to try and change that. Stephane and I traveled the world talking to pretty much every bank you can name and I would reach out to my network and do my best to facilitate those meetings. One Canadian bank in particular started to be receptive to what we were talking about and was open to exploring the cloud. After a lot of scrutiny around our security, after a lot of internal product changes to our stack working with my CTO and also CEO, we actually started to gain some traction at this Canadian bank and identified some champions there who we could make look good.

Of course, if it didn’t work they would look bad but we all knew that, they were willing to take that risk and we got access to some of the most senior folks within that Canadian bank. In the end, we ended up papering a multi-million dollar deal, it was a milestone deal for the company, it was a game changer for the industry and it’s certainly one I’m super proud of.

Fred Diamond: You’re a hockey guy, who’s your favorite hockey player of all time?

Trevor Vale: Favorite hockey player of all time? The obvious one is Gretzky and I know he gets a lot of press so I don’t need to give him any more but yes, Wayne Gretzky, definitely my favorite but my favorite Toronto Maple Leafs has got to be Darryl Sittler, #27. He’s a guy I grew up with, inspired me so big Leaf fan, I’ll say those two guys.

Fred Diamond: Those are good, you know who mine is?

Trevor Vale: Who?

Fred Diamond: Bobby Clarke.

Trevor Vale: There you go.

Fred Diamond: I grew up in Philadelphia.

Trevor Vale: He’s a scrapper, he had some great teeth, great chompers.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] he did, from Flin Flon, Manitoba. Have you ever been there, Flin Flon, Manitoba?

Trevor Vale: Never been to Manitoba, no.

[Sponsor break]

Fred Diamond: Trevor, we have Sales Game Changers listening around the globe. What’s the most important thing you want to get across to them to help them take their careers to the next level?

Trevor Vale: If you’re going to get into sales, you’ve got to be prepared for pressure. The good thing about sales I’ve always said is that it is so quantifiable that you could potentially avoid any corporate politics – I used to say that [laughs] I’m getting older and wiser now. It really is one of the few jobs in the world that performance can be assessed relatively quickly. You know if you’re winning, you know if you’re losing, you know if you’re adding value, you know if you’re not. It’s not abstract in any sense. There are of course other nuances and caveats that you have to be mindful of working together with your colleagues and making sure you interact with your customers in a professional manner, etc.

At the end of the day it’s a results-driven profession so being cognoscente of that, being confident in yourself. I think confidence has to align with that performance based culture, if you’re not confident it’s definitely not the place for you. You always have to be confident, you have to be confident when you’re winning and most importantly you have to be confident when you’re failing. I think confidence is tough to fake, you could fake it for a day or two but when you’re talking about a lifetime profession, sales is all about confidence. If you’re not believing in yourself you’re just not going to inspire anyone to purchase from you.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about one of your selling habits that has led to your sales success.

Trevor Vale: One of my big selling habits is off what you just said there, just being organized and prepared. Those two things I can’t stress enough. Being prepared for a sales meeting is half the battle, being able to demonstrate that you’ve done the research, that you know who you’re meeting with puts you in the driver’s seat and can only fuel your confidence. If you’re under prepared and just winging it, you’re just not going to extract any value from those meetings. You have to set the agenda, you have to be very specific on what you want that outcome to be, the information you’re looking for and be respectful of the people you’re meeting with whether it’s your colleagues or the buyers themselves.

I think that point was driven home to me, I remember my early days at Reuters and I remember accompanying a colleague to a meeting with a large Canadian commodity firm. We were supposed to meet with one person so the senior sales colleague was bringing me, the rookie along. He said, “We have this meeting with one person, he’s very senior but it should be quick, I just have to get some pricing over to him and a proposal and we’re just going to drop it off and leave.”

When we arrived at this lavish office, the receptionist took our coats and then walked us down a long hall and opened two double doors and inside the board room were over a dozen executives all waiting for us. I remember this moment vividly because my senior colleague stood there with her mouth literally open and I could feel the fear, I could feel the shock, this was not what she was prepared for. One of the executives, they were talking amongst themselves, looked up and say, “Okay, you guys can plug in over there for your presentation.” We didn’t have a presentation, we weren’t expecting to give a presentation and I was young and probably stupid, too stupid to understand what was going on but I basically just started talking about Reuters, what we were doing, just pushing out as much information as I knew about that commodities client as I could.

That gave my senior colleague enough time to get it together and we put something together. It was not a successful meeting by any stretch, don’t get me wrong, but it did really emphasize to me the importance of preparation.

Fred Diamond: Tell us about a major initiative you might be working on today to ensure your continued success.

Trevor Vale: We’re calendar year so we just wrapped up our Q4. Analyzing 2019 or analyzing the prior year is something that I always do just extracting data points around what was working, what wasn’t working, trying to understand what our year over year ratios look like in 2019 versus 2018, what regions need to be focused on and potentially invested in to improve performance. I think right now there’s a global initiative on my end going on to really see where we’re deploying resources and where we might need more of them. This all boils down to new territory planning and taking a look at adjusting certain sales structures in certain regions. Organizationally it’s the main focus right now.

Fred Diamond: What is it about sales as a career that has kept you going?

Trevor Vale: Finding the right company, that is a big part of it. I talked about passion, I talked about bringing an energy to what you do every day and you’ve got to believe in the company, vis-à-vis the product. That is definitely table stakes in terms of being successful. Like I said earlier, if you don’t believe it it’s going to be difficult to convince your team, it’s going to be difficult to convince your buyer that that product is going to be a game changer. With Diligent being in the corporate governance space, it’s a unique space to be in for sure but I do find a ton of inspiration in the fact that our products are materially impacting businesses in the way that they govern and those things, if you look at the roster of clients that we have – I mentioned earlier 50% of the Fortune 1000 – these are companies that change the world.

These are companies that when they decide to do something, they’re affecting tons of lives. Amazon wants to set up a new corporate office somewhere, that’s going to impact the local economy, that’s going to impact a whole bunch of things. If you look at all the challenges that governance professionals are facing today with ESG, environment sustainability, all those good things, activist investors, diversity in the board room, there’s just a ton going on. I understand intimately that our product and services offers governance professionals a ton of tools to make decisions quicker and address these changes.

I think that’s where I am right now so this is easy for me to inspire my sales team, this is easy for me to get into a conversation with someone in an airplane about what we do or one of the many hockey dads who’ve heard me pitch to them I’m sure one time too many. It’s definitely something I would urge all sales professionals to do. You’ve got to interview the companies as well as they’re interviewing you, some salespeople or sometimes people view sales as, “Anybody can do sales, that’s an easy thing to do, you don’t have to go to Harvard to be a salesperson” but the reality is as we’ve been talking about, Fred, there’s so many variables that are unique to salespeople, there’s so many traits that salespeople have that a lot of other people don’t. I think if you find the right place, if you find the right company and the right product and you can believe in that, that is half the battle.

Fred Diamond: Give us a final thought to inspire them today.

Trevor Vale: Being able to make a difference as you say, Fred, is absolutely key to every salesperson in today’s world. If you look at where brick and mortar has gone, if you look at where Amazon has entered the equation, you can purchase most products or even services online these days. If you look at where buyers go after work, after they’re finished dealing with us on a B to B basis, they’re clicking to get their groceries, they’re clicking to get their TVs, they’re clicking to get whatever it is, dog food, you name it. The buying experience on the consumer side has moved in a very significant way over the past few years. You do not need to go to a car dealership to purchase an automobile, you can do that online and if you don’t like it, you can return it.

There’s very little friction in the sales process so your point on the value that we bring is even more pronounced today than it ever has been and we have to leverage technologies as I mentioned earlier to enable sellers to provide more information to buyers sooner. The buying process is typically 30% completed by the time they make a call to us, so goes some data, sometimes it’s even higher than that. There’s been an internal decision that they need something and by the time they reach out to vendors, a lot of decision have been made. The ability to impact, say 60% or 70% of that process has to be controlled, has to be understood and as salespeople, we need to add that value by keeping things clear, by asking the right questions, by being prepared and by understanding our buyers.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 239: Diligent Corporation’s Global Sales Chief Trevor Vale Lists Three Fresh Strategies to Lead Sales Teams Beyond the Pandemic first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Creativity in Sales Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on May 8, 2020. It featured “Sales Differentiator” author Lee Salz.]

EPISODE 233: What Salespeople Can (And Should) Do Right Now for Success Moving Forward with Lee Salz

Watch the webinar here.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The solution is us, sales professionals. We are the remedy and our employers need us to sell their way out of this. That means we don’t have the luxury of burying our heads in the sand and waiting for this all to be over, we need to do something now. We really don’t have a choice. We need to take key actions now. Some salespeople are afraid to reach out to prospects and clients now but sales is not to be feared but rather revered. If your heart is in the right place, you’ll never be wrong which means you should have no fear of making calls to prospects and clients right now.”

Fred Diamond: Again, the goal today is to help our sales leaders understand some ideas to thrive, to transform as we continue to navigate. Lee Salz is the author of Sales Differentiation. I have the book, I’ve read it a couple of times, I’ve actually sent it to IES members, it’s a great book that came out last year at the top of the charts at Amazon and other places. I encourage you to pick up a copy of Sales Differentiation. You could also go to Lee’s website which is salesarchitects.com. Lee, thanks for taking the time and let’s hear from you, we’re excited.

Lee Salz: Fred, thank you so much and thank you all for joining us here today. There are no slides with today’s talk, it’s just going to be me sharing with you my perspective on what salespeople can and should do right now to be successful both short term and long term. I asked Fred for this opportunity to share this talk with you given the circumstances we’re all facing. This is my way of helping each one of your during these, we’ll call it, interesting times and this program is my way of giving back to the sales community, a community that’s given so much to me. This is a challenging time for everyone, it’s emotional, it’s scary, there’s so much unknown for all of us and the media, they’re not helping us. They keep pounding us with negative news and perpetuating our fears, they show us the up to the minute stats of the sick like watching the ball game and showing us the score board and we get this conflicting information thrown at us. “Wear a mask”, “Don’t wear a mask”, we don’t even know what to believe anymore. Fred, I’m sure you’re hearing some of this as well.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely, we’re hearing everything. We have customers, members of the IES and sales teams that sell to large companies, we have a lot of people who have kids at home now and have become home school teachers. Lee, before I turn it back over to you, I just want to acknowledge the sponsors of the IES, our platinum sponsors Cvent, Asher Strategies, DLT, ImmixGroup, Red Hat and SAPSN2, I see a bunch of people from there. It’s not just you as a sales professional, you’re also a parent, you’re a spouse, you’re a child, imagine if you have a parent right now that’s home by themselves somewhere so there’s a lot of things being thrown at salespeople, let alone the sales challenges.

Lee Salz: If you think of the times today, so many of us have been left to stare at the sky in search of answers – or at least toilet paper. No one’s been immune to this issue, we’ve all been impacted and we aren’t sure what to do now. If what I’ve described is how you’re feeling, rest assured, you’re not alone. So many people are feeling this way today but this also means we’re at a crossroads. We have a choice, we can decide to curl up in our beds and wait for this all to be over, that’s certainly an option for us or we can decide to dig in our heels and take the actions necessary to solidify today and tomorrow for ourselves, our families, our fellow employees and our companies. Look, my world is challenging just like yours, I’ve had some clients need to pause consulting engagements due to cash flow concerns. Like Fred referenced, two of my kids who were away at college are now home doing online study, same thing with my son who’s a junior in high school and my family is looking to me right now the same way yours is looking to you, to stay strong, to fight the fight every day. Fred, what are you hearing from IES members around that?

Fred Diamond: We’re hearing the same thing. We have some members that are busier than ever because they’re helping their customers make the transition to work at home. We have a lot of members who service public sector at the federal government, state and local government so some of these people are working around the clock. We have a couple members that are in certain areas of financial services that say that their business has never been more booming as people look into some financing options and to be honest with you, we have some members who sell to markets that are just dormant right now.

One of our members sells to the entertainment space. We have a question here, someone says, “What does he mean by sales differentiation?” I don’t want to take you off track here but I’m telling people to take a look at the book. Would you mind telling us before you continue, what does that mean? Tell us about your book a little bit and tell us what that means.

Lee Salz: Later in the talk I’ll get more into sales differentiation but sales differentiation is a strategy. You’re probably used to thinking of differentiation from a marketing perspective, I brought it back to the sales side because there’s two types of differentiation. There’s marketing differentiation and there’s sales differentiation. Marketing differentiation is one-directional communication for the masses that screams, “Hey, look at us, we’re here.” That’s what your website does, trade show booths, your collateral material. There’s no engagement with prospects. Sales differentiation is two-directional communication with an individual. Everyone buys for a different reason and sales differentiation takes all the potential of what could be – that’s what marketing differentiation did for us – and narrows it down to what should be for this individual in this circumstance. In the book I lay out 19 strategies to differentiate both what you sell and how you sell it.

Fred Diamond: Thank you.

Lee Salz: Absolutely. Salespeople are the frontline of our companies and all employees are counting on us to rise to their occasion. We’re their hope and you’re hearing about the federal government giving us money, all these funds. That’s merely a Band-Aid, that’s not the remedy. The solution is us, salespeople, we are the remedy and our employers need us to sell their way out of this. That means we don’t have the luxury of burying our heads in the sand and waiting for this all to be over, we need to do something now. When I said a moment ago that we have a choice, we really don’t, we need to take some key actions now. Some salespeople are afraid to reach out to prospects and clients now but sales is not to be feared but rather revered. If your heart is in the right place, you’ll never be wrong which means you should have no fear of making calls to prospects and clients right now. Fred, what are your thoughts on reaching out to prospects and clients given current circumstances?

Fred Diamond: Once again, if anyone has a question for Lee, submit it via the panel. We’re doing four webcasts a week right now and we’re speaking to sales leaders every single day. Empathy, talking to your existing customers, we did a great webcast yesterday with your good friend Colleen Francis, the author of Nonstop Sales Boom. She’s a big proponent on conversations, just reaching out and saying, “How are you?” but also, “How can I help you?” I’m curious on your thoughts on that. When you reach out to your prospects or let’s just say your customers today, your existing customers, half the people on today’s webcast said that their #1 priority is helping existing customers be successful today. What type of conversations do you recommend that they have? Do you think they should go in being specific or just, “Hey, I’m here, what can I do for you?”

Lee Salz: That’s a great question and that’s where so many are struggling. What is the right approach? I come back to what I said a moment ago. If your heart is in the right place, you’ll never be wrong. If you approach it from an empathetic perspective don’t belabor the point. I think everyone on this program today is doing the same way, we’re kind of sick and tired of that word ‘Coronavirus’, it’s nowhere in my talk, that is the only time I’m going to say it. We want to get back to the other side of getting back to business. Each of us in sales provides that opportunity to clients when we are reaching out to let them turn off the world for the moment and get back to business.

That’s what I would be doing and reaching out to clients. I’ve had some wonderful success stories, I’ll share a couple with you. I have this accountant coaching client, he’s in New York City, he’s not a salesperson, he’s a CPA practitioner but he also has business development expectations. You’ve all heard the issues about what’s happened in New York City. He has continued his business development activities and he’s won 7 new deals during the stay at home period. I’ve got to keep updating that number when I share this talk because he keeps texting me that he won another deal. The other day he sent me this cute text that said, “Coronavirus couldn’t stop the ink I got today.” It can be done and it’s working for him because he believes it can be done.

I have an accounting software client right in you backyard in Maryland, they had a record sales month in both March and April and they’re tracking to do it again in May and their salespeople believe it can be done and I hope you do as well. Mindset is so important in sales not just today, always. If you believe you can’t sell today, you’re right. If you believe you can sell today, you’re right and you get to choose what you’re going to believe. Fred, what’s your perspective on mindset sales?

Fred Diamond: There’s three big words that have come up over the history of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. One of them is Creativity hence why we’re calling this series the Creativity in Sales series. The second is courage, every great sales professional that we’ve met understands their fear, how to overcome their fear and be courageous in calling customers, asking for business, asking how I can help right now during this time. The third of course is mindset, which is why we actually even added a webcast every Thursday at 2:00 o’clock on mindset. Like I said, we had Colleen Francis yesterday, we’re having the great Alan Stein Jr. next Thursday as well. Mindset is so critical.

Could you define what mindset means? We hear it, we throw it around a lot, like I said we have a whole webcast devoted to it. We know of Carol Dweck and growth mindset versus fixed mindset but talk about what should the ideal mindset look like if you’re in sales. Once again, for people watching Lee Salz today, if you have any questions for Lee, he’s written Sales Differentiation, he’s a global sales leader, works with sales organizations around the globe, he’s got his finger on the pulse of what they’re doing today to be successful. What exactly is an ideal sales mindset that you should be applying today?

Lee Salz: This is something that I talk to salespeople a lot about. One of the aspects I love about sales is that sales has its roots in optimism. We’re fundamentally optimistic people. Sometimes sales managers wish we weren’t so optimistic like when we forecast deals and we over-set expectations but we truly are optimistic, that’s our core. That’s part of the recipe that makes you so successful so don’t let anyone or any circumstance take that away from you. When we talk about mindset, to me that’s optimism. That’s saying, “I believe it can be done.” It’s something interesting, I learned this many years ago and Fred, maybe you’ve heard this as well. When they train race car drivers, one of the things instructors don’t let them do is look at the wall. Anytime a race car driver looks at the wall, the trainer pushes their head away so that they don’t look at it. Do you know why that is?

Fred Diamond: So they don’t think about the wall.

Lee Salz: Not so they don’t think about it because what their head says, “Don’t hit the wall, don’t hit the wall.” The human mind does not understand the word ‘not’ so if you say, “Don’t hit the wall” your mind said, “Hit the wall” and it’s the same thing in sales. If we think in terms of what we’re not going to do, “I’m not going to drop my price”, “I’m not going to be timid when I reach out”, you might as well give up because you’ve already done it. If you’re a baseball fan and you say, “I’m not going to strike out” you might as well go back and sit down, you’ve already struck out. When you talk about mindset, it’s this optimistic perspective and also thinking in terms of the affirmative, what I am going to do, not what I’m going to avoid.

Fred Diamond: Lee, that’s a great point. You said inspirational, we like to be aspirational. There’s so much going around right now, a lot of the people who are watching our webcast are thanking us for the four hour chunks that we’re doing with our webcast to focus on aspiration. We’ve actually changed some of our messaging as well, we no longer say COVID-19, we no longer say Coronavirus, we no longer say pandemic, we’re focusing on reopening and we’re not naive, we know what else is going on in the world. Everyone’s watching the news, we all know what’s going on but we have a job to do and you’re right, sales is at the core of company success. What are some techniques that you’ve learned over the years that you’ve trained your customers on to really have that optimal mindset?

Lee Salz: A lot of it is just taking a step back in any situation recognizing whatever situation you’re in right now, it could be worse. If you accept that premise and you say, “Let’s look at all the wonderful things that are still out there.” One of the things that I’ve found with some companies if you think about it, is that uncertainty breeds opportunity. Let me share that again, uncertainty breeds opportunity. There’s opportunity for all of us right now and you can see it happening. Fred and I are huge baseball fans and as you know, baseball is on pause right now. Major league baseball’s uniform manufacturer doesn’t have any reason to make uniforms because there’s no games being played yet so what are they doing?

They’re manufacturing masks. GM and Ford, they’re making ventilators, they’re helping us but let’s be really clear, they’re making money, lots of it, they’re not volunteers. Look at Zoom, how few people heard of Zoom a couple of months ago and now it’s part of the English language, it’s pervasive, it’s everywhere and those are just a few examples of companies that have said, “There’s opportunity here where I can help and also create revenue opportunities for my company.” We just need to look for it. Fred, have you had any IES members that have shared stories about ways that they’ve changed their business and participated in these times?

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of members who focus on the state and local government marketplace and right away their business changed because obviously, without getting into politics, the state governments are responsible for a lot of things. Obviously they’re responsible for a lot of the response. The other thing, too is a lot of our members are in the technology world so they’ve been spending a lot of time getting their customers prepared to work from home. You and I know how to work from home, we have all the books behind us and we have our desk although I’ve been sitting on my dining room chair, I need to invest in a nice new chair. But everyone who’s in the IT space, every company now is working from home so they’ve already had to shift into the headphone system and the voice over IP system and other things related to that.

Lee, we have so many people here who are on the webcast. You talked about business opportunity, we had never done webinars before at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. I had done them as a consultant. March 9th, all of a sudden we’re in the webcast business and we’re doing now four a week. Do you mind if we take a question from the audience, Lee?

Lee Salz: Go for it.

Fred Diamond: I know we want to wait till the end but, “What are three things salespeople should be doing each day that might be different than what they were doing before the current situation?” That’s actually a great question. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about, “Here’s what your day looks like, schedule meetings, be on the phone.” What do you suggest from your expertise, what would you tell people, “This is what you should be doing today in this world where we are?”

Lee Salz: I’m going to say that in terms of today but as I share them I would challenge you to say, “Shouldn’t we be doing this all the time?” One big one is strategy development. I find so often we say, “We’ve got to prospect, prospecting is so important” but so few salespeople have a documented prospecting strategy, that they have clarity on who they should reach out to, what their meaningful differentiators are, that they have messaging prepared if they reach voicemail. When you make a phone call, more often than not you’re going to get voicemail rather than reach the person live and you’d be amazed how few salespeople have a documented strategy and say, “When I get voicemail, this is the message that I’m going to leave.”

Same thing with email. There was an interesting study done, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Fred. It was by the RAIN Group and they asked executives if they had ever taken a meeting with a salesperson who reached out to them through some type of prospecting outreach. We could have done this as a poll, this is a fun one. What would you guess the percentage of executives who said they took a meeting with a salesperson who had reached out to them through some sort of prospecting?

Fred Diamond: I could go either way, I could say 70%, I could say 10% so I’m going to go on the lower scale, if you will.

Lee Salz: Okay, 82%.

Fred Diamond: My first inclination.

Lee Salz: 82% of executives said they took a meeting with a salesperson who had reached out to them through some sort of prospecting means but there was one key ingredient that they cited in this study that said, “These were the salespeople that got those meetings.” That secret ingredient was personalization. If you have this generic message that you always use, voicemail, email, when you reach someone live, you are not in the group that was going to get that meeting.

When you look at the personal outreach that you can have as part of your prospecting and if you’ve been in the programs that I’ve done at IES or you’ve read Sales Differentiation, I talk about this concept of a sales crime theory. It’s based on this, imagine it’s 2:00 in the morning and there’s a pounding on your front door. It’s the police, they want to have a conversation with you about a crime that’s recently been committed. They don’t randomly pick you and your home for this conversation, they’ve followed a trail of evidence, put together a crime theory and that’s given them reason to contact you for a conversation right now. If you apply that same approach to sales and what I call sales crime theory, we don’t pick up the phone, we don’t send a prospecting email unless we can answer this question: why should they want to have a conversation with us right now?

Not why should we call them, why should they want to have a conversation with us right now? That means we need to do some research so that we can personalize the outreach and reach that 82% who’ve said that they’ve taken a meeting with a salesperson who had contacted them through some type of prospecting means. That’s just one example of the overall strategy development that salespeople should have. I’ll give you another one. I get calls all the time from executives, sales managers, CEOs, business owners saying, “We’ve got a closing problem” and what they don’t recognize is that closing is rarely the problem, it’s a symptom of the real problem which is poor discovery. If you don’t have effective discovery conversation then you don’t have the tools as you move through the process to keep the energy in your deal.

When we come back and we look at discovery, you’ve all heard the importance of, “We’ve got to have a great discovery” but who’s taught you how to do it? Have you put together, “Here’s the outcomes that we look for when we have an initial meeting, a discovery meeting with this individual in this market segment about this particular product”? Once we know what the outcomes are that we look for, then we can put together, “Here are the questions we’re going to ask, here’s the information we’re going to share, by the way, here are the obstacles we may encounter in that and let’s put together a plan to address them.” We need to have strategy development, now we have the time to do it because we’re not as busy as we were but we should always have strategy in place before we’re picking up the phone or we’re going to meet with folks.

Fred Diamond: Lee, I want to follow up on that. A couple things, we’re getting some great questions coming in through the question panel. Again, if you have a question for Lee please submit it, we’re going to go to about 45 minutes after the hour. I’m also the host of the Sales Game Changers podcast, I interview sales VPs, I always ask them, “What is your tip for emerging sales leaders?” Preparation, planning, practicing comes up all the time. I want to ask you a follow up but first, we have a bunch of people here who are interested in buying your book, Sales Differentiation. A question that comes in is, “Where should I buy the book?” Do you have any recommendations? Do you want them to go to Amazon or your site or where do you recommend they go?

Lee Salz: I appreciate that, thank you. Amazon is a great source for that and you’ll find the book is available in hard cover, kindle and audio book. I don’t want this to become an infomercial but I will mention one piece, if you are interested in the book and you do purchase it, after you do go to salesdifferentiation.com. I’ve put together a 54 week video series so you’ll get an email once a week for 54 weeks – by the way, once I can get a haircut I’ll keep recording [laughs] – but once a week you’ll get a video helping you implement sales differentiation strategy.

Fred Diamond: Another question comes through the panel. Again, you’re in Minnesota, one of your good friends, Sam Richter has spoken at the Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Lee Salz: Great guy.

Fred Diamond: Great guy, he’s the guru on using the internet for research. Let’s talk about research and preparation for a few minutes. The question came in, “What should reps be doing?” you said now’s the time, if you aren’t preparing now then you’re a fraud. What are some of your recommendations on preparation? What are some of your go-to tips on how do you research, what do you research and how do you prepare to approach a prospect or customer, even today?

Lee Salz: That’s a great point. Again, my answer as I share with it, Fred, you’re asking me in the context of today. I’m going to share an answer, I don’t care what’s going on in the world, this is a best practice and a way to go about doing it. The first thing is we need to think of this from a systemic perspective. It’s nice when someone says, “You’ve got to prepare” but what does that mean? We need to figure out who the right people are to reach out to. I’ll tell you a little story, Fred doesn’t know this. The inspiration for my book, Sales Differentiation actually came when I was a teenager.

I had a lot of different jobs as a high school kid and one of them was we had this family friend and he had this idea of a pickup and delivery dry cleaning business. This is in the 1980s so this is an interesting concept it’s not something that existed then. He didn’t own a dry cleaner, he was just going to be the transportation so he hired me as his driver and I was really intrigued and I asked myself, “Would people be willing to pay more for this service?” The answer was some people. I grew up in Marlboro, New Jersey and people that lived in Marlboro commuted into Manhattan, not everyone. The ones that did had about a two hour commute each way and they really appreciated someone who would give them the gift of time so they didn’t have to worry about getting to the dry cleaner and not having a clean suit, that was meaningful to them.

People that had a stay at home homemaker wife who could do that or work locally, they didn’t see any value in that. When we talk about preparation, we’ve got to figure out where our offering is really going to resonate so for us when we were selling that service, going after people who work locally, who had someone who could conveniently bring the clothes to the dry cleaner, it didn’t resonate with them. You want to make sure that you’re going after those people who will see value in what you offer and would be willing to buy from you at the prices that you want. That’s the first key and I refer to that in the book as a target client profile. You may be saying, “We call it an ideal client profile” and I’m big on the subtlety of selling. To me, ideal client means if once in a blue moon you were to come across this client, we’d love to have them.

That’s not what we’re looking for, target clients is this is the business we want to go after, this is what it looks like, feels like, tastes like and in the book I lay out all of the components of that. That foundation of knowing where your message is truly going to resonate is the first foundation piece when we talk about preparation, got to have that. Then the next part of preparation is putting together lists. You may call them prospect lists but putting together lists of people or organizations that you’re going to go after and after you have the organizations, then you figure out who the right people are and call them decision influencers. Your message that we’ve put together when we documented a target client profile, who in the organization is that message truly going to resonate most with? Then you take that and you say, “Here’s what my outreach program is going to be, my prospecting” so that there’s quality to the outreach.

One of the aspects of prospect that I found is I talked about the qualitative side but there’s also a quantitative side and I’m sure you’ve seen the studies that show the number of attempts that it takes to reach a prospect and ultimately get the sale. You’ll notice my hand down here, the typical outreach that salespeople have and that big delta here, we don’t have enough outreach but there’s also strategy for that. I’ve put together what I call a four week prospecting rhythm and I’d be happy to send you a copy of that. If you send me an email, my email address is lsalz@salesarchitects.com and in the subject just put ‘prospecting rhythm’, I’ll send you a copy. This strategy takes the qualitative side which says, “What’s my messaging going to be?” but then we need to have creative outreach and you’ll see as you read through this, there’s a phone component, there’s an email component, there’s a LinkedIn component. I’ll give you one little interesting piece.

In Outlook there’s a function that from a sales perspective we haven’t taken advantage of. When you send someone an invitation in Outlook, whether they accept it or not, it’s in their calendar. One of the things you read about in this strategy, a particular phase of it, you leave a voicemail message and say, “I’m going to call you tomorrow at 2:00 pm” and you send them an invitation, and you have some meat in that invitation about the context for the call. Whether they accept it or not, it shows up in their calendar. Nothing I’m going to share with you works 100% of the time but if you take all of these techniques and [Inaudible 32:59] I guarantee you, your prospecting connection meeting getting people live will go up significantly. That’s a long winded answer, Fred, to what you asked me but this is all part of that preparation exercise so we’re effective when we reach the person live and then ultimately have that discovery meeting.

Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. One of the things, too that’s happening is for the most part we know where everybody is. For the first time in sales history we know the people aren’t traveling to trade shows, they’re not traveling for business calls, 97% of people are probably at home. I’ve spoken to one of our members who actually is going to the office every day and this was a couple weeks ago, he was actually rethinking that. Again, we’re preparing for reopening but for the most part, we know where everybody is. We know that everybody’s home, depending on their level of responsibility they may or may not be hugely busy but if I’m trying to prospect to someone who’s a Chief Financial Officer, I know that they’re home. How are you suggesting that people use that to their advantage or not?

Lee Salz: That’s where that prospecting rhythm comes in. When you take into account, you have the qualitative message and the quantitative and creative times when you’re calling, for example, an executive at 10:00 in the morning or 2:00 in the afternoon, you’re not getting them, they’re not going to answer the phone. You want to prospect outside the business days, 7:30 am to 9:00 am in the times and where they are, 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm in the times where they are to increase your hit rate of connecting with them. If you think about what’s going on right now and Fred, you eluded to this just a moment ago.

Most companies are operating at a pace that is much slower than what they normally are. They’re much slower so there’s a really interesting selling opportunity. If what you sell helps a client to increase revenue, reduce costs or increase efficiency, those are three areas of focus that every company is going to have coming out of this. One of the fears that executives have is not having enough time for a proper implementation, that you’re going to disrupt some business flow. They’ve never gone in a slower pace than they are right now so it’s a wonderful conversation to have now because just like Fred, you talked about planning, they have the luxury of time to have planning for a change whether it be a change in process, change in supplier, change in system, whatever that might be. Don’t expect them to see that or recognize it, we have to guide them to recognize that they have this opportunity right now for proper consideration of what an alternative solution could look like and proper planning around implementation.

Fred Diamond: Lee, I know you want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn as well.

Lee Salz: If you’re not connected with Fred and me, shame on you. Get connected with us. [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] they have another 15 minutes to do so. No, actually they have forever. We’ve had a couple sessions on using LinkedIn. Good, someone actually just LinkedIn to me, thank you so much for that person who just LinkedIn to me. Talk about how a sales professional should be using LinkedIn. We’ve had our good friend, Brynne Tillman on a couple of times.

Lee Salz: She’s wonderful.

Fred Diamond: We’re actually going to have her again on May 19th for our Women in Sales webcast which is hosted by Gina Stracuzzi who runs the IES Women in Sales program, she’s going to be talking about optimizing your profile. Talk a little bit about LinkedIn, what should we be doing today? What are your best tips for LinkedIn?

Lee Salz: It’s a wonderful way to perform business development and the way you look to d it, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate your and your company’s expertise and that can lead prospects coming to you. Wouldn’t that be great? I’ve talked so much about prospecting. We can use LinkedIn as a way to showcase our expertise so that we get people coming to us. Let me walk you through a few steps on that. The first one is look at your LinkedIn profile and brush it up, make sure it’s polished, it’s accurate and represents you well. If you’re a fisherman and you have this picture of this glorious fish that you caught, that is your Facebook profile, not LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, you want to have a conservative professional photo for yourself. The second thing you want to do is build your network. We talked about having this luxury of time and what can we be doing, connect with your clients, industry partners, company colleagues, prospects with whom you have a relationship. Build that network for yourself. I had a conversation just yesterday with someone who’s a sales management executive and he’s realized that he’s not done enough to build his brand in the outside world. He’s got a strong brand inside his company but hasn’t done enough outside the company. Once you’ve done that, as you know, in your LinkedIn profile you have the ability to share information and you want to share information that allows you to showcase your expertise.

Let me give you an example. If you wanted to be seen as an expert in babysitting, all you’d need to do is share lots of information on the subject of babysitting and in 30 days, the world would see you as a babysitting expert. That’s the core premise of social media. Notice I didn’t say how to create video, you don’t have to create vlogs, all you need to do is share information on a very specific topic and the world will see you as having expertise in it. If you’re connected with me, you’ll notice I share lots of information on sales and sales management and that creates a perception around me for those topics. You have that exact same opportunity for your world and again, that can get people coming to you. Next thing you want to do is join groups, you can join sales ones. I’ve built the largest sales management group on LinkedIn, it’s called Sales Management Executives and you’re all invited to join, we have about 325 thousand members. Then also join industry specific ones, and once you’re in those groups share information that highlights your expertise. Create thought-provoking discussion, participate in discussions to showcase your expertise around the solutions that you offer.

There’s one huge mistake people make on LinkedIn and I know you’ve had this experience, hopefully you haven’t done it but you might have experienced it. Let’s pretend you’re at an in-person networking event. You wouldn’t walk up to someone and in the first two seconds say, “Hey, you want to buy from me?” You’d never do that but that’s what happens on LinkedIn. Someone sent you a connection request and you can measure with an egg timer how quickly you’re going to get a solicitation email and it’s a turnoff so don’t do that unless you want to turn people off. Just like with in-person networking, you have to earn the right to sell. Those are some great actions to take on LinkedIn.

Fred Diamond: Lee, I want to thank you so much for all the great insights. Why don’t you give us one final thought, one or two final things? As you know, at the IES programs we tell people, “Here’s three things you need to do today”, usually we say, “Before you get on the beltway.” Of course, I don’t think anybody’s going to be getting on the beltway today but why don’t you give us two things that people should do today, May 8th to be more successful and to be more valuable to their customers and to their companies?

Lee Salz: We’ve talked a lot about mindset in this program but there’s another part that’s really important which is having a healthy body. A couple of things that I encourage you to do, get fresh air every day. I’ve been working out of a home office since 2007, I’ve got to remind myself to do that as well but get fresh air every single day. The second thing is get exercise every day. My poor dog Rocky, he’s used to during the business day no one being home except me so now you have me, my wife and my three kids and we get fresh air by taking a walk. Of course, Rocky comes along and he is just exhausted, “Why am I going on so many walks?” He’s looking at us like this, “No, not another walk.”

Get exercise every single day and eat right so you don’t create other health issues for yourself. I go to the supermarket and those Mint Milanos want to jump right in my shopping cart. Keep the right food in your home so you aren’t tempted to eat poorly. I hope I’ve shared enough with you today and given you some inspiration and aspiration to keep going in sales. There’s so much opportunity for all of us if we put that energy towards it. I encourage you to leverage your optimism. Like I said, we’re fundamentally optimistic people. Watch videos, read things and do things that improve your mindset, things that make you feel better, not bring you down. I give this talk two to three times a day right now and why am I doing it? I don’t get paid for this talk. Well, while I hope I’ve inspired your optimism, this talk inspires me. It makes me feel like I’m making a contribution to helping people in a time of need and I hope you take action on the steps that I’ve shared here today because uncertainty breeds opportunity.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 233: What Salespeople Can (And Should) Do Right Now for Success Moving Forward with Lee Salz first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE PANEL: Sales Transformation and Solutions During COVID-19 With Brian Ludwig and Jeffrey Wolinsky on April 29, 2020 2:00 PM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 21, 2020. It featured sales leaders Mike Durso (Veeam and Connor Marsden (Salesforce).]

EPISODE 227: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Mike Durso and Connor Marsden

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Connor Marsden’s Podcast . Listen to Mike Durso’s Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “How do we stabilize our customers today? How do we help them shift to some of the new realities we have to deal with? We’re trying to help our customers normalize. How do we get them to the point where they can continue to operate their business, that they can plug their gaps that they have digitally and create a new steady state as we go through this virus.”

Fred Diamond: Connor, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about what you do and let’s get started.

Connor Marsden: Thanks, Fred. I work at Salesforce, been here for five years now and I lead our enterprise sales organization for roughly half the United States. That’s the largest relationships that Salesforce has, and I live here in beautiful Leesburg, Virginia.

Fred Diamond: It’s good to have you here. Mike, why don’t you tell us about yourself and introduce yourself?

Mike Durso: Thanks, Fred, thanks for having me on. I lead Veeam’s enterprise business across North America. I’ve been here for about four years now, and I kind of built the team from scratch starting in racks the summer of 2016 and I live right outside of Philadelphia so I’m a die-hard Eagles, Flyers, Phillies, Sixers fan. All right.

Fred Diamond: Well, we had that in common which is great. Let’s get right to it. What are your top priorities? Let’s get right to it. Mike, why don’t you go first? What are the big things that you’re dealing with right now?

Mike Durso: I think first and foremost, the top priority is the health and safety of our people. I know that’s a little bit cliché right now, but it really is true. As a leader in this business, you really do have to be concerned with what’s going on in the world and making sure that your teams are safe and healthy and have an environment that they can thrive in so we’re staying really close to them from a virtual perspective with a positive, but I would say, realistic message.

I think a couple other priorities would be to be a partner to your customers right now. Of course, we have revenue goals and they’re certainly not going anywhere during this pandemic, but our customers or clients are looking for true partners, people that are willing to feel their pain and work with them versus saying, “Hey, I need a PO, we said we were going to do something.” The final thing we’re stressing in terms of priorities, control the controllables.

There’s a lot of things going on right now that are just out of control for all of us, we can’t fix and adapt to when we’re going to go back to normal, when the offices are going to open or when we’re going to be able to resume our daily lives. So as much as that’s frustrating, don’t focus on it. Adjust to this as the new norm for the time being and control what’s in front of you and what you can control every day.

Fred Diamond: Mike, this has been an interesting year for your company, for Veeam Software, you had a major transaction at the beginning of the year. Just curiously, you can tell us if you want, how has that transaction set you guys up for right now?

Mike Durso: If you look at the timing of it, it’s pretty interesting.  We announced the plan to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners, I think it was January timeframe. Eight weeks later, right at March first or second, the deal was completed so it was right before this Coronavirus really took off. In terms of how has it changed us, I think when you look at private equity or venture coming in, and the reasons they typically do it, it’s a little different for us.

We’re on a swing of moving from a perpetual license model to a subscription license model so Insight was very purposeful in acquiring us at the right time on that downward swing where your bookings drop a little bit as you switch to a perpetual as a service model. They’re investing heavily in us, they’re helping us mature some of the processes that happen when you grow as fast as we did. They’re  putting a lot of cash in, obviously, to acquire the company and then continuing to invest to help us grow and get out of that curve up the swing into the a subscription, which I can tell you is happening at a faster rate than what we expected.

Fred Diamond: Okay. Connor, you work for one of the most visible companies not just in technology, but in the world. You’re with Salesforce, you’ve been there for about five years now, I guess.

Connor Marsden: Five years, that’s right.

Fred Diamond: So what are your top priorities right now? Again, you’re a busy guy, you’re managing a nationwide team, what’s going on with you? What are your top priorities?

Connor Marsden: Thanks for asking, Fred. First and foremost, similar to Mike, really making sure that the wellbeing of our employees, their families, our customers, their extended families is certainly top-of-mind.

Second, I feel very fortunate to be working with Salesforce. We’ve been really out front with COVID and really trying to put together solutions and offerings to help our customers. We have Salesforce Cares, which is free software and solutions that our customers can adopt to help with this crisis. If I had to bucket the priorities right now, it’s how do we stabilize our customers today? How do we help them shift, to some of the new realities we have to deal with? For example, I have customers that have had to move from a call center environment to a work-from-home environment so our teams have been mobilized to help them with that shift, especially in really consumer-oriented businesses where, quite frankly, the volume has increased substantially.

Helping to stabilize their businesses along that front. I think number two is after this initial phase, we’re trying to help our customers normalize. So how do we get them to the point where they can continue to operate their business, that they can plug their gaps that they have digitally and create a new steady state as we go through this virus? And then I think a lot of our smarter customers and executives are really starting to think about the future and the post-COVID world and how they accelerate back to growth. We’re certainly engaged on those conversations as well.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to move ahead to one of the questions before. Mike, why don’t you talk about your customers for a little bit as well? How are they interacting with you? Again, you’re probably seeing your customers in similar situations to Connor where most people are working from home right now, offices are closing. One of our sales VPs that we spoke to last week sells to the entertainment space – sports arenas and movie theaters, and obviously those are closed right now. So how’s your interaction been with your customers over the last couple of weeks?

Mike Durso: I sympathize with the, the gentleman you referenced that sells the entertainment. For whatever reason, we had a lot of activity in the auto space over the last six-eight months, and we were making some great progress, with a couple of the largest US auto manufacturers. When you talk to your teams and they tell you, “Hey, we were working on something, but unfortunately Ford is now manufacturing ventilators versus cars”, there’s not a lot of inspection and a lot of things you can work with your team on. It’s a little bit what I said earlier, it’s being a partner to them.

It’s really helping them understand that we’re not just here for the short-term to collect a check or a deal, it’s really helping them adjust to the new norm. Our customers are asking us to be patient, “Stick with us”. We’re going to make it out of this and we need to invest now, maybe not with acquiring software but with ideas, with architecture so that as this lifts, they’re ready to hit the gas right away and jump back to the pre-COVID state. They’re asking us to be creative. We have a large healthcare customer right now that has said, “Hey, we can’t slow down the purchase and deployment for compliance reasons, but we also can’t write you a check right now for a couple of million dollars so how can you creatively work with us, and obviously our channel partners, to finance things?”

I would say the customers where we have great relationships, the communication is really strong and we’re working together almost as a team to solve problems. The majority of our clients, they understand the world we live in and that just like them, we don’t eat if we don’t go out and do our jobs so there’s a partnership there and I think it’s actually something very positive that’s come out of this.

Fred Diamond: Connor, how about you? You started to talk about this a few moments ago. I know you work with some of the largest companies in the country so obviously, some of them are going through some serious challenges. How are you playing that role with them? What are they looking for from you as a sales leader? Again, you’re an enterprise sales leader at Salesforce. What are they looking from you that you’re able to serve right now?

Mike Durso: The way that I talk to my teams is I bucket our customers very simply in two different ways. We have customers who are in industries that are just really highly impacted – the airlines, the travel/hospitality groups and whatnot and you have to be really empathetic, you have to be there to help them where you can. We’re investing a lot of cycles to assist with this really difficult transition to where in a lot of cases, businesses went and had revenue drop 80 90, 95%, just unprecedented. Then you have customers that have maybe had some business impact or have some divisions that are actually doing quite well, the organizations that make PP, for example, orders are through the roof, supply chain issues, how they collaborate with their, employees.

The first is diagnosing where your customer is on that spectrum and then the second is, look, everyone is trying to move their business forward at this point in time. The conversation I’m having with my teams is what are the great ideas that you can help them right now? What are the things that you can bring to the table to help them drive growth or help them address cost issues or help with their employees? And bringing those ideas to them now because executives are looking for great ideas to manage through this none of us have experienced. So how you can tap into your extended teams to collaborate those ideas and then bring them to your customers. I’ve found, at least from my perspective, our customers have been really receptive and appreciative when we take that approach.

Fred Diamond: I would ask you a follow up question to that. We have a lot of people around the world who are on today’s webcast watching, learning from Mike Durso and Connor Marsden. So Salesforce, obviously you guys are deeply entrenched with a lot of your clients and Veeam is an enterprise player as well. What would you recommend to somebody along those lines who may not have the relationship yet? Maybe they’re not as deep a trusted partner, maybe there’s somebody who is on their pipeline that they want to get some communications to. How would you go about getting those types of recommendations then? One thing we always talk about in sales is that you need to continuously bring value. What might be some of your recommendations for someone who doesn’t have that relationship yet but wants to use this opportunity to bring something to them? Connor, why don’t we get back with you first?

Connor Marsden: I think it’s really hard. Of course, it depends on the, the solution you’re bringing to market or the product, it really varies greatly but if you don’t have a great relationship, you need to search inside your network to find someone who can make that warm introduction. People trust people first and foremost, so if you can do that, that would be the best idea even if it’s really just an acquaintance you don’t know really well. If they’re willing to make that introduction, that’s first and foremost.

The second is when you get that introduction and you get that time, make sure your idea is incredible. People aren’t looking for nice-to-haves right now, they’re looking for must-haves, or need-to-haves for their business so your idea, your concept has to fall in that. You can do as much damage if you try and pitch something now that they’re just going to see as noise, you’re going to lose your opportunity that maybe six months from now they’re going to be more open towards doing it.

The other concept outside of just the direct sales is work with your marketing team, create a virtual round table. We’ve had great success and I know a friend of the Institute for Sales Excellence, we actually have a virtual round table with Matt Dixon tonight who is the author of Challenger Sale. We’re bringing our executives on board to have a conversation about, dealing with COVID and driving a response. I think you need to think differently around how you can add value to them in virtual ways to catch their air if you don’t have a current relationship.

Fred Diamond: One of the fun things about everybody working from home is that for some reason, everyone seems to mow their lawns right when you start a webcast. So if you hear some buzzing going on in the background, that that’s what it is. Mike, there have to be positive things that have come from this as well so what’s the biggest positive surprise that has come out of this situation or maybe something that you’re proud of that has come out of your company and your sales team?

Mike Durso: Part of the enterprise organization and actually commercial and SMB at Veeam is built around in inside sales organization. We have over 750 inside sellers in various roles whether it be direct, supporting enterprise, supporting a commercial business or even the channel. I’m fairly comfortable working from home, I’ve worked from home for 20 years, I have a home office and always have. It’s different not traveling and being home every day, it’s certainly a challenge but if you’re an inside sales rep and you drive, in some cases, 25, 30, 40% of the segments number, and you go to the office every day and you’re in your cube and you’ve got your manager outside and that is your routine, it’s incredibly disruptive to be sent home for four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, and now you’ve got a completely different setup.

People aren’t equipped necessarily from an office standpoint so I think one of the things that’s the biggest surprise internally for us is the productivity that we’ve seen despite our inside sales folks going back into their home offices and having to deal with homeschooling their kids. Everyone’s playing teacher right now having to deal with not having a great setup. The productivity has not dropped off anywhere near at the level that we anticipated it would. In fact, it stayed fairly consistent which was a huge sign. We’ll probably talk about this a little later, but I think it’s an indicator of things to come in this new virtual world, how comfortable people are going to become and recognizing that we can use some of this flexibility to our benefit.

Fred Diamond: Connor, how about you? What’s something positive or something that’s changed for you in a positive note over the last couple of weeks?

Connor Marsden: From my standpoint, Fred, I think the way I’d shift it is what am I really proud of? I’m really proud of seeing a couple of things. I’m really proud to see how our salespeople are really empathetic on the customers and are really thinking through, “Let’s not think about the commission check. How do I just help my customer get through this?” And just the selflessness that’s created. I’m really proud in working with some of our largest companies out there, how much they deeply care around their employees and what’s happening with their employees especially with furloughs, people out of work and really going to the last mile to try to make sure they’re well taken care of, that they have a path forward.

Along those lines, just the amount of partnership and collaboration that’s happening cross-companies right now is really impressive to see. I think this whole concept of competition will always be there, but people realize we need to come together. GE Healthcare and Ford are coming together, and 3M and Ford are coming together to create these manufacturing arrangements to try and drive things. I think it’s something for us all to be proud of, I think it’s somewhat surprising but it definitely just shows the compassion out there to help us all get through this together.

Fred Diamond: Right before this started, we were all chugging along and you were managing your teams and your organizations the way they were and growing your customers. How have you changed? It’s April 22nd, we’re six weeks, into the pandemic, into this world. Be a little reflective here. How have you changed as a leader over the last five, six weeks? Mike, why don’t you go first?

Mike Durso: I don’t think this is a win for anybody, but I’m doing a lot more video and I think that’s an unfortunate thing for my team. That’s definitely one thing that has changed. I think at a broader scale, and I challenge my team to do this, if you add up the amount of time that you spend in a traditional week whether it be in the car, in an airport, on a plane, on a train, some of us travel a fair amount, that becomes a significant amount of time that you now have back. I think what we’ve been able to do is really take a step back and look at some of the things in the organization that may have been nagging or things that needed a little bit of tender loving care that we’ve pushed off as not being a priority because we’re running around and running at such a fast pace.

Because the world’s slowed down a little bit, it’s allowed us to really get into some of those things. I think what we’re seeing when we explore them is there’s a definite impact to looking at three or four of those things that we’ve been ignoring. Some of them are process related so the trickle-down effect to the rep is that their life gets a little bit easier. There are definitely things like that that we’ve been able to plan for because we have more time and we’re not traveling and doing what we do. It’s using that time wisely and putting a plan around.

That’s what I asked my team to do. You’ve got three, four, five, seven hours a week extra. What are you doing with that time to get better, to enable yourself to dig in and do a little bit more research? Maybe avoiding the financials of your customer because nobody wants to read that stuff and it’s not always that. Get into that a little bit maybe putting a better account plan together and pulling in the extended team so that everybody’s on the same page. It’s really creativity and planning your time a little better, I think.

Fred Diamond: Connor, how about you? How have you changed as a sales leader? You’ve been leading technology teams for a long time.

Connor Marsden: I’m experimenting with new hairstyles, longer hairstyles, Fred, that’s first and foremost one way that I’ve changed. I’m communicating a lot more and I’m communicating and providing a lot more context to our teams. One of the things I truly stumbled upon is that I started writing more often. I started sending out longer notes instead of really short two-sentence emails and really communicating context to people on how they need to be thinking through this with their customers.

I think as leaders we need to be really transparent and help our salespeople be comfortable. We’ve programmed them a certain way, we program to maximize the sale, to push for acceleration and now to some degree we’re deprogramming them. Only try and provide your customer what they need, give them some space to make a decision, realize things are taking longer and you have to communicate this out to the reps and you have to help them along the journey. I’ve been doing more blog posts internally at Salesforce, I’ve been holding more all-hands calls, I’ve been really deliberate on  pulling different teams together to collaborate on ideas and then sharing that recognition out so that people are seeing best practices across the board. It’s definitely helped me strengthen as a leader from that perspective and I’ve seen it across my peers throughout Salesforce as well.

Fred Diamond: Basically, are you doing cold calls during times like this? Is it a good time to prospect to new places? What are some of your thoughts and how are you directing your team? Mike, why don’t you go first?

Mike Durso: This is a great question and if anybody has the exact answer to this, I’d love to hear it. I’m actually looking forward to hearing Connor’s answer here. It’s about creativity. I think the virtual marketing events are a big thing we’re trying to do right now in terms of prospecting so we’ve got a handful of them going on right now and they’re getting good response. We find that the traditional BDR role of picking up the phone and making 50 or 60 dials, the conversion percentage is dropping significantly right now because people either aren’t in their office and you don’t have their cell phone or they’re inundated.

We’re doing a bit more email campaigns but doing them in a very sensitive way because I think there is this idea right now that everybody’s coming out of the woodwork trying to leech onto what’s going on in this whole COVID thing. I’ve encouraged my team again on the enterprise side of things to take that time and do the planning. Make sure that when you come out of this, you’ve got a plan in place and a strategy and you understand all of your accounts. To Connor’s point earlier, the networking, those things all need to be picked up right now because you have the time to do it so you better be talking to your alliance partners and your channel partners, and you have to really be leveraging the virtual things that we can offer right now, but I don’t know that anybody’s cracked the code on this yet. Maybe Connor can give me some advice here.

Connor Marsden: I don’t know if I have a whole lot of great ideas, but I can share with you some of the things that I’ve seen our teams do. I’ve seen our teams, especially accountings, they’re used to walking the halls of their customers, they’re sending virtual videos and offering with door dash coupons so you can have lunch on Salesforce and just video. Just say, “Hey, we miss you, we miss being around you. We hope you and your family are doing well.” We spoke around the virtual round tables with luminaries, that’s absolutely something that we’re doing. We’re creating other really quick videos of things and ways that we can help our customers and saying the real consumable ones that can go broad.

I know we’re all at home but we’re all really busy, so everything has to be in short bites that you’re just trying to get a message across really quickly that we’re here to help, etcetera. And now just the last thing, especially if you’re more into deep account relationships, is that I think our customers are now ready to circle back and start scheduling one-on-ones now that things are starting to normalize a little bit more, we’ve been through this crisis a little bit. I’m reaching out to our execs and scheduling one-on-one conversations understanding what their priorities are, how they’re thinking about re-budgeting, etcetera. Don’t forget that you may not have a frequent relationship with someone, but reach out to them and see if you can grab time on their calendar, pick their brain and be there to help. Sometimes just reaching out can make a difference.

Fred Diamond: I have a question about sales, the sales process and up until March 9th we would spend a lot of time talking about the strategic sales process and did it really matter which one you were using. I wonder how much has it changed for your teams right now. We know that everybody’s home with the exception of essential employees maybe in government or other places, if you will, but we know everybody’s home. We know that everybody’s probably in front of their Zoom or WebEx, whatever they might be using, we’re using GoToWebinar today. The walk now from the house to the desk is a minute as compared to a two hour drive in some cities and Mike, you mentioned that before. Just curiously, how are you interacting with your customers now knowing everybody’s in the same boat?

We know where everybody is, we know what everybody’s going through, nobody really has any inside information. It’s all available on Fox or CNN, wherever you get your information from so we all know where, at some level, that pandemic is, we know where a lot of the companies are. I’m just curious, knowing those things, how has that changed for you and your team and how are you directing your people? It would take weeks to get a meeting with a prospect, now we know everybody’s at home. Maybe they’re busy like everybody is trying to deal with their things but we know that they’re home. I’m just curious. Connor, why don’t you go first?

Connor Marsden: That’s a great question. From a sales process standpoint what we’re trying to do is, I’ll give you an example. We just did a really large presentation for one of our customers on a digital transformation that they’re actually looking to accelerate now that we’re in this crisis because they realize digital engagement is going to be more important leading this. Let’s not waste any time, let’s get it ready so that when the economy really fully opens back up, they’re ready to catch that wave. We were doing a demonstration and think about it, normally we’re all in a room together, now we’re all virtual, and it was on Zoom and it was an industrial customer.

Based on the persona in the demo, they used the Zoom background to have construction site or I’m in the office. They changed the persona based on the backdrop so it would have more context for the customer who’s watching the presentation remotely. It was a really creative way to drive that. What’s really interesting is if you think about the PO process that our customers, normally they’re all in the office together and now that’s manual so everything’s taken a few extra days to move through the process because not everything is necessarily digitized from that standpoint. To some degree, it’s brought us more closely together from a sales standpoint because the things that they need to get done, they realize they weren’t necessarily optimized for everyone working at home so it’s actually, I think, brought our relationships closer. When you’re very respectful and empathetic and you’re not pushing too hard, it can really bring your relationship closer.

Fred Diamond: Mike, we have a good question that came in here from the audience, and again, if you’re watching today’s webinar with Connor Marsden and Mike Durso from Salesforce and Veeam, submit your questions via the panel. Once again, if you’re watching today’s webcast, please take a screenshot and email it to fdiamond@i4esbd.org, it’s been a lot of fun to get your screenshots. Mike, let’s talk about your sales reps right now, your sales teams. A lot of things have changed. A couple of questions came in here,

I’m going to throw them out, Connor, we’re going to ask you this as well. The whole concept of, anxiety, how are you helping your sales team with anxiety and stress caused by their customers not being available or possibly even have their businesses at risk? And a related question, what are you doing to keep your commission salespeople motivated knowing that some companies, Connor had alluded to one before, a company that’s furloughed 80% of its staff and your customers are telling you, “We want to work with you but we’re trying to regroup right now.” Everyone’s going through what we’re going through across the globe, so how are you helping your sales reps with anxiety and then how are you keeping the ones motivated that are commissioned mainly?

Mike Durso: I think the anxiety question, it goes back to the core principles of being a leader. It’s over-communicating, it’s doing those little bit longer emails like Connor said, it’s having the all-hands calls. I’ve taken an approach on those calls to stress the positive of the company right now. There are a lot of people out there that are struggling and a lot of companies that are having a tough time with this. Veeam’s very financially healthy and we’re still hiring quota carriers, what I would say core hires, we’re still doing that. I’ve taken a time to step back and really explain some of that and provide some transparency into the decision making not just around the finances of the company, but around why we’re continuing to hire salespeople.

From a rep standpoint, we’re lucky in a sense that we’ve only been officially calling on the enterprise with a dedicated segment for just about four years now. We’re not at a point where we have one or two or three accounts. If you happen to work for a tech company and you call the on the autos or you call on healthcare, something right now that’s been hit really hard by this, the anxiety is probably through the roof. Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with that in that my enterprise reps have somewhere between 20, 30, 40 accounts and they’re not verticalized.

It goes back and Connor, I couldn’t agree with him more. It’s about bucketizing your customers right now. There’s a handful of them that just simply are not going to engage because they have much bigger problems than the solution we’re offering, but there’s a handful of them that are not as affected and are looking to take time to invest right now. It’s about making sure you understand the dynamic of your patch, but I have all the sympathy in the world for some folks out there that may be gams or enterprise reps that have three or four accounts in an industry that’s just decimated now. I don’t know how you handle that other than creatively build a comp plan or creatively do something to keep them motivated and sticking around.

Fred Diamond: Connor, how about you? How are you doing? Salesforce’s is known for being a company that is very employee-focused. I know you have meditation rooms in a lot of your offices and it’s a very Zen-like company in a lot of ways and very employee-driven and it really takes a lot of that into account but this is a unique time right now. How are you helping your sales reps that might be anxiety-driven?

Connor Marsden: We’re a little more penetrated than Mike from an enterprise perspective so my reps are listening to this, they’re going to be jealous to hear that 20 to 30-to-one ratio of accounts to rep. Salesforce is an incredible company and our leadership team has really stepped up and so a couple of things we’ve done. First and foremost on the commission front, we’ve guaranteed commissions for our sales reps in Q1 so everyone’s getting paid. I’m really proud of our sales teams for stepping up and it doesn’t happen at management, it’s at the RVP, and the AE and AVP level.

That was a really important thing that our team stepped up to do. Second, we’re doing a lot of all-hands calls internally and we have what’s called a ‘be well’ session. We’ve brought in Trevor Noah to do a session with Salesforce. We just brought in Jose Andres and Dave Matthews to talk about World Central Kitchen where Jose is trying to feed individuals. We brought in Arianna Huffington to help educate, Dr. David Agus who’s one of the leading medical researchers to talk about the issue.

Our leadership team has really done an awesome job of bringing in these thought leaders to talk about what’s happening, how you can take care of yourself and on the financial side, we try to bring a little bit of relief from a commission standpoint. With the focus being, we need to worry about our mental health as much as your physical health through this period of time. It’s not perfect and look, there’s a lot of anxiety out there but I think we’ve tried to approach it in several different ways that I think has been really effective.

Fred Diamond: We’ve got time for a couple more questions. Connor, you mentioned before that you’re starting to have one-on-ones with your customers to start talking about how they think their business is going to be “post-pandemic.” For both you guys, for Mike Durso and for Connor Marsden, how do you see the pandemic long term, changing the way we sell? Obviously everyone’s on Zoom, we talked about that, but what are some of the things that you see that may stick that we’re working on that are happening right now in the long term? Connor, why don’t you go first? How’s sales going to change because of the pandemic?

Connor Marsden: I think naturally a couple of things. I think people are going to be much more open to virtual meetings just in general. Like, “Hey, let’s just knock this out, we can have a call or a video meeting” versus you having to come into the office. I think that’s something that’s going to stick. I think for those of us who are in the technology business, I think people are going to realize the importance of having a really diversified digital strategy that if you have processes that require physical interaction, you’re going to look to figure out a way to digitize. A great example of my customer base – and this is public information – is CarMax.  One of the one things you probably wouldn’t do historically over the web is buy a car. Actually, you can buy a full car, have it delivered to your house, take a test drive and sell it and they’d been ahead of the game in that thinking. I think other industries are going to have to adopt those types of processes.

And I think the technology space, that’s going to provide an opportunity for us to try to help to digitize from that perspective.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you?

Mike Durso: I agree. I think that the core principles of what we do shouldn’t change, how they’re delivered or how they’re consumed are clearly going to change whether that  be video or some of the on-demand things, I’m convinced that’s going to change. I had this conversation this morning about, cities that have been hit hard. I’m in Philly and we have a fair amount of business in New York and it’s a train ride away from me. I’m struggling with the idea that our New York customers, I can’t imagine they’re going to be signing in visitors for onsite meeting anytime in the near future.

So, things like what we’re doing now and Zoom and incorporating whiteboards and being able to go through architectural discussions online is going to be really important. I go back to it shouldn’t change the core principles of what we do. We still have to drive value, we still have to drive outcomes, we still have to create a solution that’s going to solve a problem. All of those things stay the same, how they’re consumed and delivered, 100% going to change.

Fred Diamond: Again, I want to thank Mike and Connor so much. Got time for one more question. Again, if you have an urgent question, you still have a second or two to slip it in. What are your expectations right now? Both you guys manage a whole bunch of salespeople, you have nationwide responsibility. What are your expectations for your salespeople? It’s an unbelievably unique time. We’ve been doing this particular webinar for six weeks now, and in the first two weeks people were saying, “I’ve been through 9/11, I was around during the 2008 banking and housing crisis and I know what it’s like to go through a crisis.” Well, this obviously is unprecedented and it’s changing every day and things are emerging every single day. What are you telling your sales professionals, your team? What do you expect of them and what are you telling them? Mike, why don’t you go first and give us your thoughts and then we’ll go to Connor.

Mike Durso: I wish I knew what to tell them and it’s funny when you say a month ago, people were saying things as if it were concrete and they’ve been through this before. I think the reality is we haven’t been through something like this before, nothing at this type of scale. One of the things I stress, Fred, we’ve talked about it on the podcast, but one of the things I always stress is just the ability to be comfortable in an uncomfortable situation, just to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Hopefully, some of the principles and some of the extreme ownership, leadership that we preach here at Veeam and that I preach to my team, some of those principles absolutely apply to a situation like this.

I think it’s falling back on some of those principles and not overreacting and not letting this pandemic send you into a tailspin. I think it has the potential to do that because it is so uncertain and there’s so much adversity out there that we have to face not just at work, at home. [Laughs] I know what’s going on in my house trying to homeschool an 11 year old with some pretty severe special needs. I can only imagine what’s going on in the rest of the houses out there so there’s a lot of things. To me, it’s come back to your core, come back to your principles, come back to your beliefs whether it be on a personal level or what you believe in and how you should go to market as a company. Come back to that and really focus on those things right now and they will help you manage through this chaos and this adversity but don’t take the roller coaster ride of highs and lows.

Fred Diamond: There’s so much that’s out of your control. The only thing you can really control is it’s how you respond to it and how you keep yourself healthy. We just posted a, a great sales game changers podcast yesterday with Diane Cashin and she talks about things you could be doing right now to keep yourself as healthy as possible. Connor, thank you so much for your insights. Why don’t you bring us home? Again, what are you telling your sales people? What are you expecting of them right now?

Connor Marsden: First and foremost, what Mike just shared is 100% right. Realize, number one, that life is going on at home while they’re working and things are going to happen. In fact, a quick funny story, I was on with a COO of a Fortune 500 company and my daughter made a purse out of an old tie dye T-shirt and she was dying to have me see it. She brought it, came in, I had to stop the call, had to turn to her dresser, told the COO that was my daughter and moved on. It was a cute little moment and I think those little moments are happening all over the place so Mike was spot-on.

I think what I’m telling my team, first and foremost, I’m resetting expectations of what success looks like and  I’m being realistic about those expectations. With those expectations – and this is  important, I think – not everything is in our control, but some things are so if you reset the expectations in the right level, we have to hit those expectations. With forecasting and calling deals I’m assuring my team, “Look, we may or may not be calling to what we thought our quota was going to be at the beginning of this crisis, but we’re going to call a forecast and we’re going to hit that forecast and we’re going to deliver and make sure that people know they can rely on us to hit a certain number.”

And I think it’s important for all of us as we’re going through this, as we’re being empathetic, that we still need to deliver on what we’re here to go and do which is to help our customers to drive value and to be responsible on the revenue side for our organizations and clearly, engage in the appropriate way. That’s an expectation I’m setting with my teams. I think it’s really well received and it’s also a rallying cry that we can still do business through this crisis, Fred.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 227: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Mike Durso and Connor Marsden first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Growing Your Sales in a Virtual World: Multiply Your Best Clients/Customers through Referrals and Introductions on Friday, April 24, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 17, 2020.]

EPISODE 226: IES Creativity in Sales Webcast: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19

Watch the webinar here. Purchase Mark’s new book, “A Mind for Sales.”

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “There’s still three levels of sales. Repeat, Get and Create. Repeat are your existing customers that come back and buy from you time and time again or maybe a referral. This is business that’s coming to you because you’ve done something with somebody before.  Focus now on the Repeat. You’ve got to double down your efforts here.”

Fred Diamond: Mark, you and I have spoken so many times about mindset and you came out with the book ironically before the COVID hit, we actually did a Sales Game Changers podcast interview two weeks before everything came down. Today’s going to be even more pertinent as we talk about some of your ideas not just on mindset but on how you can succeed today and how you can thrive and what you should be doing so we’re thrilled to have you here, I’m excited to have you, let’s get started.

Mark Hunter: Thank you for having me on today, I very much appreciate it. When I wrote the book A Mind for Sales, I didn’t realize when I wrote it a year ago what would be going on today but tell you what, isn’t it so important to have that mind for sales? I’m going to dig down deep, we’re going to run through a few slides here like what Fred has always done in the past, when I get done with a slide we’re going to say, “Hey, what are some questions?” Keep your questions coming, Fred will be the host for it.

Let’s go and jump, I want to talk about the three levels of sales here for a second because we could be in the middle of the pandemic, we could be in the middle of anything but there’s still three levels of sales and I want you to stop and ask yourself this question. There’s this level of Repeat, there’s this level of Get and there’s this level of Create. What do we mean by that? Let me break that down for you. The Repeat: These are your existing customers that come back and buy from you time and time again or maybe a referral, this is business that’s coming to you because you’ve done something with somebody before. Then there’s a level of business called Get, this is the manna from heaven, this just pops down in front of you and it’s great, you love it, and then there’s the Create.

Now, how does all this happen in a COVID world? This is what I’m telling clients. Focus first on the Repeat, you’ve got to double down your efforts here. Here’s the whole thing, a few weeks ago everybody was talking about toilet paper and now the conversation is hair colors and hair clippers. Isn’t it interesting? If you stop to think about this, why do I share toilet paper, hair color and hair clippers? Because needs change and you may have had a customer who buys from you, who does business with you regularly and then, “We don’t need you right now, come back after COVID” but then things change. Just as the survey that Fred put out, the 53%, we’re now getting into a routine. People are figuring out how to do business so don’t think for a moment that that customer who you weren’t touching base with who said, “No, we’re not going to buy”, you need to be in touch with them.

One of the pieces – and I got to move quickly because I’ve got so much content I want to share with you – is that you need to be prepared for everybody’s backstory. What do I mean by the backstory? How did they wind up where they’re at right now in this COVID world? Everybody has a personal backstory and a professional and you better be prepared to listen to both but I’ll tell you what, what it’s doing is it’s allowing us to create deeper relationships. I’ll get to more of that in a second, let’s talk about Get. Are there businesses just falling in your lap? Yes there is, there is business, don’t think for a moment that you can take an inbound lead and blow it off, it’s incredible. Again, I’m going to talk more about that later, the Create is what I want to talk about right now. Don’t think for a moment that you can’t create business in this environment. There’s a lot of industries that are doing very well and there’s a lot of industries that should be down for the count. I was on the phone two hours ago with a gentleman who’s with a company whose 100% of their business is in the travel industry and I got on the phone with him expecting to hear a downer phone call. The guy was up, the guy was as positive as can be because he says, “You know what we’re doing? We’re now taking this time to create new opportunities, to create new solutions, to create new things. I said, “Are you out there?” and he says, “You bet we’re out there selling and we’re having people who are very much interested.” Now, you may not be able to create to close the sale now but you can create to close the sale post-Coronavirus. You see, PC does not stand for Politically Correct, PC stands for Post-Coronavirus. Let me stop right there, have any questions popped up?

Fred Diamond: Someone asks here, “What should I be talking about to my customers when I know that they’re in a non-buying mode?” What should we be talking about?

Mark Hunter: A couple weeks ago it was all talking about COVID but I think we’re getting a little COVID fatigue. What I want to do is I want to bring my customers solutions and ideas for down the road. Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s what some other industries are doing. I am sharing insights, I am sharing things that are seen or things that you see are relevant. For instance, I work with a client and I haven’t worked with him for about 4-5 months, I’d like to do some more work with him. In one of my calls with him, it happened to be via BlueJeans. BlueJeans is a little bit like Citrix, it’s a little bit like Zoom. It was fine, no big deal and suddenly I saw yesterday that Verizon bought BlueJeans.

I immediately texted the gentleman, I said, “I see Verizon just bought BlueJeans, are you still using that?” and two seconds later he texted me back, “Yeah, we are. Hey, we haven’t talked in a while, let’s connect” and 15 minutes later we were on the phone. What were we on the phone about? He calls me and says, “What are you seeing happening out there?” It wasn’t that much about his business but he wanted to know what’s going on out there in the industry. You can create conversations, you want to create conversations but I’m saying I’m a little bit COVID fatigued. I’m going to listen if somebody wants to talk about their backstory but I’m more gearing people to what’s happening down the road. Did that answer the question?

Fred Diamond: It does. We have another question that came in here and we have a number of people on today’s webcast who are relatively early in their sales career. If we were talking to you and the pandemic had never happened, one of the topics we’d be talking about is if you’re relatively new, first 5 years in your sales career you’re still learning about your customers’ challenges. How do you get better at learning about your customer challenges? Let’s say I’m in the first 5 years of my sales career, what might be some conversations that I could be having right now with, let’s say, somebody who’s double my age? I’m trying to get to the C-suite or director level, how can I present myself as somebody of value to them besides, “I just want to chat”?

Mark Hunter: I love new salespeople right now because let me tell you something, you are getting your MBA on selling skills during this period because we are all sharpening our selling skills and here’s what it is, it’s about having the conversation. There’s two things you have to do with any conversation and that is you have to have a conversation that creates trust and a conversation that creates empathy. What does that mean? That means listening. I want you to listen to the other person’s opinion and value it more than ever. Again, these are concepts that I wrote about in both my books, there’s nothing new about this but nobody ever did it because we were too busy selling, now it’s about listening. What you want to do is you want to create that relationship because when you create that relationship here’s what happens, when I can be seen as being authentic – I create authenticity by being empathetic and trustworthy because then people are going to see me as being authentic, because they don’t want to deal with a fake, a fake doesn’t create trust.

When I’m seen as authentic then they’re going to open up, they’re going to share with me more. This is a great time, the conversations you can have are no different than anything else, no different than any other time. I’m just taking more time to value you, the individual person. Great, we’re going to jump onto the next slide because Fred, did you ever notice that I get a little excited when I talk about sales? Yeah, I get into it.

Fred Diamond: Mark, what does unlock your day mean?

Mark Hunter: Unlock your day. I want you to unlock your day, what do I mean by this? We’re all in this WFH – Work from Home – and that means we are also SFH – Selling from Home – and on the other end they are BFH – Buying from Home. Here’s the whole thing, it’s so easy for us to ease into the day, it feels like Groundhog Day #38, doesn’t it? And tomorrow’s going to be Groundhog Day #39 and we just ease in. What I want you to do is I want you to set up your time, I do this and I’m going to share with you how I do this. I get up every morning at about 4:30 in the morning and by 5:15, 5:30 I’m working and here’s what I do, my first 15 minutes of the day I am geared up and I set it by by 5:30 I am working at my desk. That’s just the time I choose to start.

You may say, “I’m not doing 5:30”, I don’t care, whatever time you do. Again, my first 15 minutes of the day what I’m doing is I’m sending out, I’m crafting, I’m writing the most important email I’m going to send of the day. There may be one client I’ve got to respond to, there may be something but I’ve got to make sure I get that out first thing and I’m doing that first thing. The second 15 minute window I’m just scanning emails, I’m not trying to dig down deep because email can be a big giant time suck but I’m running through email. Is there anything really important that I got to deal with? I use Slack for my team and for my several clients so I check Slack real quick, is there anything pertinent? Again, I’m only allowing 15 minutes so in other words, within the first 30 minutes I’ve taken care of high crises and I’ve taken care of my most important thing. Then I take the next 30 minutes or an hour, depending on the activity, and that’s when I do my deep thinking as to the project I’ve got happening.

Here’s what’s nice, what I may do is I may say, “I’m going to work on this project for 30 minutes and I’m going to work on this project for 30 minutes” but it’s all time driven. In other words, in the first 90 minutes I’ve already had a very productive day. See, I’ve unlocked my day and when I unlock my day it’s amazing how then the rest of the day just stays just as productive because at the end of the day when I close up the office I’m preparing for tomorrow. In other words, I’m figuring out what’s going to be that first email, what are going to be my objectives and I’m also evaluating the day. How did I do? We’re all busy but busy is not productive, productive is, “What did I do to help a customer?” I’ll stop right there. Any more questions popped in?

Fred Diamond: Some questions are flying in. Quick question here, I want to go back to something you mentioned on the previous slide, sorry to shift you back but you said something very powerful and on the Sales Game Changers podcast we’ve done over 240 episodes. When I ask the sales leaders what they’re really good at, one of the big answers is listening so it’s very powerful that you just went back to spend your time listening. If you could give us a little bit of advice on how do the people watching today’s webinar, how can you become a better listener? What are some active skills that you train people to do? You obviously train for conversations, but how do you get to become a better listener?

Mark Hunter: There’s three things. First of all, when you’re working from home that means you’re on the phone or you’re on Zoom or you’re on Webex, whatever it is and you may have your email, open. Guess what? You’re distracted. We do not multitask well, get over it, be in the moment listening to the customer and be an active note taker. I’ll share with you I happen to use a microphone here on my desk and it’s funny but the other day – I just wish Amazon would hurry up and deliver it – I spent $29 dollars to buy a boom thing here because here’s my problem, I can’t take notes as well on my computer when I’m talking to you on Zoom or something.

Here’s the whole thing, you want to be an active note taker, I have a yellow pad over here and I have my computer. Again, active note taking has you listing better. Two, when they get done talking just wait. I was on the phone this morning with a gentleman and he answered a question and I’d just wait and he talked more, it was amazing. I talked very little he must have talked 80%, I got incredible insight and here’s the payoff I’m listing. You’re taking something that they share with you and you play it back in the next phone call. When I shared with you the example about BlueJeans, that was because this client had shared that with me several months earlier and I made a note of that, make notes of everything and it gives you the perfect reason. If I hadn’t known that they used BlueJeans I would not have known to follow up with them. What did it do? Created a conversation.

Fred Diamond: Mark, do you find that senior level decision makers are open to Zoom calls for an initial conversation?

Mark Hunter: Yes. The barriers on Zoom have dropped completely, everybody is on Zoom 24/7. Remember, you only have to dress from the waist up but just don’t stand up, we’ll just lead with that. Now, I think there’s also a little bit of Zoom fatigue. Zoom was this initial piece and now we got this one down so yes, they’re comfortable with Zoom but don’t hesitate to do a phone call and then say, “Let’s go and pop over to Zoom, have you got time?” or you set up Zoom for the second call.

Fred Diamond: A quick comment you just made there before is I’ve always said that a great sales call is one where you do 5% of the talking and you just hit on that, and definitely take notes. John Asher who’s spoken at the Institute before, he always recommends one of the first things you say is, “Can I take notes?” and then the answer is going to be yes as compared to, “Do you mind if I take notes?” where the answer is, “No, I do not mind if you take notes.” Always ask, “Can I take notes?” Mark, let’s move to your next slide. Once again, if you have any questions for Mark Hunter, The Sales Hunter, submit them via the panel like some of you are doing and also, once again, take a screenshot, email it to me at fdiamond@i4esbd.org.

Mark Hunter: I don’t want to spend too much time here but I want to share with you a very simple concept and that is we are moving at the speed of light during this pandemic, I really feel that we have taken 40 to 50 years of societal change and jammed it into literally a 3 or 4 month period. What does this mean? Inbound has depreciating value, what are we talking about here? Here’s the whole thing, if you get an inbound lead it depreciates quickly because that person, that company may have liked this idea right now but two days from now they may not. I’ll give an example. I’m working right now with a client and they’re doing a rotating furlough – this is weird, but okay, that’s how the company has chosen to do it, that’s fine – 25% of their employees are furloughed each week.

So it’s a Friday and there’s a person who I’ve got to reach out to because if I don’t connect with her today she’s on furlough next week and a whole week is going to go by. I’ve got to jump, speed is more important than ever. Let’s flip this around and look at outbound, what do we mean by outbound? Outbound has appreciating value, much of your outbound work that you do right now may not pay out until we get PC – Post-Coronavirus – but that’s okay. What I want you to do is I want you to treat your prospects as if they were customers. Here’s a risk, just because somebody says, “We’ll do business with you as soon as we’re out of this situation”, that is not code word for, “I don’t need to follow up with you again until that.”

No, you better stay in touch with them because you don’t know what can happen if this thing drags on, they may come to that point and they go, “You know what? I really forget, why were we going to work with them? What were the real reasons? Let’s just start all over again” so I’ve got to be constantly working.

Fred Diamond: A couple questions come in. Again, your new book is A Mind for Sales and it’s available wherever people buy books, it’s a great book, I encourage people to read it but again, you’re also one of the world-renowned experts on prospecting. I have a couple questions about prospecting that have come through here and again, if you have a question submit it via the questions panel. I’m going to rephrase this question here but 98% of people are working from home unless you work in a hospital or an essential factory or something on those lines or construction, but most people are home. Is it okay to call people after hours and on weekends? We know where they are, so what are some of your thoughts on that today? I know one of your strategies is your early weekend email, that 6:00 o’clock email. How are you shifting this during COVID-19?

Mark Hunter: I’m not going to hesitate to email somebody on the weekend, I’m probably not going to call them on the weekend. It could depend on what you sell, if you’re in a B to C then I probably will go and call but if I’m in a B to B environment or B to G, Business to Government, I am not going to call them on the weekend, I’m going to go ahead and respect their boundaries. I do open up the window a little bit more in terms of I don’t hesitate to call a little bit earlier in the day or call a little bit later in the evening. Many times what I’m finding is people who are working from home, what they’re doing is they’re starting their work day at 6 because then their kids get up at 7, 7:30 and they’ve got to spend some time getting them set up for school and then they get back to work and so forth. Some of those days are a little broken but I’m still a very strong advocate of the Saturday morning email to senior people, I love doing that and I don’t hesitate to send out Sunday afternoon emails to mid-level people.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got another question.

Mark Hunter: That’s okay, jump in.

Fred Diamond: Before we get to the next slide here, again we have a couple questions coming in. If you have a question for Mark, submit it via the panel. Next Friday at 11:00 o’clock Eastern Time we’re bringing one of your friends, Bill Cates, to talk. We’re very excited to bring Bill and he’s known as The Referral Coach. Is now a good time to ask for referrals? How does that fit in with your prospecting expertise?

Mark Hunter: Yes, ask for referrals. Let’s jump over to the next slide there because that really sets this up well. If you have the ability to help somebody, its’ your responsibility to get in touch with them so don’t think for a moment that this isn’t a good time to prospect. In fact, it’s funny, I was just on the phone a couple hours ago with another gentleman who asked the same question because they get a lot of referrals and I said, “By all means.” Here’s two things that happen. One, you get to have the ability to have a conversation with them. I’m sure Bill Cates is going to go down deep into this subject next week so I won’t do a deep dive, but that’s a great reason for you to reach back out to them. Then they’re either going to recommend or they’re not and that’s quite alright, they may say, “Yeah, but don’t reach out to them right now, they’re having some tough times” but they may say, “Go right ahead” and that’s a perfect time.

I know one guy right now who is doing referrals by way of Zoom calls. In other words, what he’s saying is, “Why don’t we set up a Zoom call for the three of us?” He’s having very good luck with that because now suddenly two friends get on Zoom, he’s in that Zoom call and he’s now one of their friends and it’s a great strategy, use referrals. This comes back to this whole thing, not all leads are created equal so you’ve got to still be very careful as to how you allocate your time. Don’t ever forget you have to abide by what I call ICP, your Ideal Customer Profile. How many of you – no, you don’t need to raise your hand because all of you have – have received countless emails on hand sanitizer and masks and everything else that everybody wants to sell you?

They’re just spraying and praying putting those messages out there. See? Not all leads are created equal. I only want to be spending time still with my best prospects, with my best customers. As a matter of fact, I just did a blog on this and I just did a video on this, – jump out to my website – on your three most important assets, your time, your mind and your network, and your time is so critical especially right now. Don’t think for a moment this is a perfect time to kick back and relax, this is a perfect time to bolt ahead because you want your competition to kick back and relax. I want all my competitors to sit there and say, “Yeah, there’s no business out there” because then I’m going to take it all from them.

Fred Diamond: I’ve got a question here, it came via text. Once again, if you have a question, submit it via the panel. If you know my cellphone number feel free to send me a text. “How does Mark stay so energized?” It’s a little bit after 10:00, you said you get up at 5:30. What are some techniques that you do –

Mark Hunter: No, I get up at 4:30.

Fred Diamond: 4:30, I’m sorry. 5:30 my time.

Mark Hunter: There you go.

Fred Diamond: Seriously, what do you do to stay so energized?

Mark Hunter: I love people, sales is about people and stop and think about this for a moment. It’s about helping people and I’m sorry, but that excites me, sales excites me and you’re right, I drink a lot of coffee and hey, aren’t those cute pictures of some of my grandkids? Yes, I’m a lot older than I look but I’m just absolutely excited because it’s not what I sell, it’s not what you sell, it’s the outcome you create. If you can help somebody, especially right now, then you need to get in touch with them. I enjoy life, I love life.

Fred Diamond: This slide or the next one?

Mark Hunter: Next one. I love this next slide, you can’t turn a Walmart shopper into a Nordstrom customer. We’ve all been to Walmart, we’ve all been to Nordstrom probably, Walmart’s open right now, Nordstrom is not but think about this. This is why your ICP is so important, your Ideal Customer Profile because it’s so easy for us to get distracted. We get distracted with this person over here because they’re responding to our emails, they’re willing to take our phone calls but they don’t line up to our ideal customer profile and that would be like Nordstrom trying to take a Walmart shopper and turn them, you can’t do it. You’ve got to stay in your lane and if you don’t stay in your line what’s going to happen is you’re going to be busy but you’re not going to be productive.

The more you stay in your lane with your ideal customer profile, the more confident you become because the more knowledgeable you become. You become incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly insightful and what does that allow you to do? That allows you to really be seen as even more important to the prospect because your prospect, your customer, they don’t want to spend time with people who don’t have solutions. It’s the reason I don’t respond to people who send me emails on hand sanitizer and masks and so forth, I’m not interested. I want to spend time with people who I know can help me.

Fred Diamond: We have a question, Mark, that came in here, this has come up a couple of times on the various webcasts that we’ve done right now. You just mentioned that Walmart is open but Nordstrom is closed. One of the members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, I’ve had two chats earlier this week, one guy sells to state and local governments and he said his team is working around the clock because they’re now bringing them things that they hadn’t brought before. Someone says he sells to the entertainment industry and obviously movie theaters aren’t buying things and sports venues are closed. This is a hard question to ask but what would you do if my customer base is the Nordstroms of the world or hotels right now? You alluded to this, that you want to build those relations but what would your advice be to somebody who sells to a space that is inactive right now?

Mark Hunter: If I’m selling to a space that is inactive, they’re not in a position to buy. If you buy cleaning supplies to the theater industry – in fact, it’s funny because I do work with the trade association that deals with them – I’m not going to be selling to them but I am going to be communicating to them, I am going to be helping them work through different ideas and solutions. I’m still going to be in contact with them. Do not lose contact but do not go up and go, “This sucks, how much business have you lost?” They know how much money they lost but what they want to know is what are others out there in the industry, what are some techniques, what are some ideas? You mean there’s a way that I can reduce my energy usage? “But I don’t sell energy, I sell cleaning supplies” but because I talked to this other theater owner over here, they mentioned how they reduced their energy bill by even more, I’m going to call up another theater owner and say, “Here’s what I found out, here’s an idea.”

I’m still selling, I’m selling myself so I’m going to be in touch with them. I’m going to share a very quick example. I was on the phone with a client, this goes back about 6 weeks ago and I was talking to them and they were asking me for ideas and I just shared some ideas as to what I was hearing from other industries. The guy goes, “Thanks for calling, that was really good.” I got done with that phone call and I wrote it up and I emailed it out to a couple other clients and prospects responded, they said, “That was really good.”

Now every week I’m putting out a briefing paper of new things that I’m seeing. Is it making me money? No. Is it creating relationships? You bet it is. I’m doing this to allow myself to have a reason to get back in touch with people whose industries – yes, I do work in the hotel industry and believe me, they’re concerned about how they’re going to make the debt payment. I’m sending this out to them and it’s giving them some ideas and so forth. What I’m doing is I’m selling myself now, I’m creating. In fact, go ahead and jump to the next slide because this is the perfect setup for this, I’m creating trust. I am creating trust that now these people will do business with me post-Coronavirus. Let me flip this around because there are a lot of industries that are buying, this was fascinating to me. I was doing a webinar for a company Tuesday of this week and it’s an industry that’s in business but they’re having some tough times. What was fascinating was there were about 9 salespeople on the call and one of them said, “This was amazing, I got an unbelievable order from a customer that reached back out to me on a proposal I’d sent to them 6 months ago. I had written them off but the guy responded” and she made the comment, “Because he’s now working from home, he finally had time to dig through a lot of his old emails.”

Even though this business was flat, she scored a nice piece of business so don’t ever count yourself out. I’ve got to run right here with this, trust is currency because this is more important than ever. Here’s a simple concept if you think about this: the lower the level of trust, the longer it’s going to take for the sale to go through. The lower the level of trust, the more negotiation that’s going to take place. The lower the level of trust, the more difficulty there’s going to be in creating customer satisfaction. The higher the degree of trust, the faster the process is going to go, all things being equal. For instance, Fred, you called me up and you said, “Mark, I’d love to have you do this” and there was no selling you had to do, I trust Fred, let’s do it now. There was no hesitation about negotiating because I trust Fred, I absolutely trust him. We have to, right now, be doing everything possible to create as much trust as possible. How do we do this? This means I’m not going to hesitate. Remember this briefing thing I sent out? That doesn’t really pertain to anything I do but I’m sending it out and people are saying, “If Mark is willing to share with me this type of information, that’s really cool.” I’m creating trust and I know that as we come out of this, people that I’ve been talking to are going to say, “Mark, I want you in front of my sales, I want you right there right now.”

If you think about this for a moment, this is a reason why I love this pandemic – wow, what did he just say? Yes, this reason I love this pandemic because it’s shaking out the fraud in sales, the fake salespeople can’t stand it now because you’ve got to be personal and if you can’t be personal, you can’t make it. That’s why I go back to that question you said about some of the newer salespeople, this is a great time. Mark Cuban was on CNBC about a week ago, maybe two weeks ago and I buy into it 100%, he said, “We are creating so many unbelievable new businesses right now.” I had a person share with me the list of businesses that were created back in the last recession – I hate to use that term, recession – it’s amazing. I love this, when we sell with integrity we will get customers who have integrity.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to go for about 45 minutes after the hour. If you have a question, submit it via the panel. One of the cores of sales is that you need to bring value, at the very baseline you need to bring value to your customers. What would be some of your recommendations right now – besides buying your book, reading your book and rewatching this webinar once it goes live up on the IES and the Sales Game Changers site? You mentioned before that there are some of your competitors who are sitting on the sidelines waiting for the pandemic to end to start again. We’ve got a nice list of people here who are spending their Friday mornings with myself and with you. What would be three ultimate things that you would tell them they need to be doing right now? Of course, we’re talking about prospecting, talking conversations but three things that they should absolutely have on a note next to their desk that they need to be doing every day to be more impactful right now?

Mark Hunter: Focus on the outcomes that the customer is going to receive from working with you. It’s not what you sell, it’s the outcome and what I want to do is I want to quantify what is the value of that outcome because right now, especially in the speed of what’s happening this is going to be so critical. This is what I’m telling salespeople and this is what I’m telling business owners and everybody I have a chance to talk to. If you as a salesperson, as a business, wait until you see things change before you respond, you will be too late. I live in Nebraska, coming to you from Omaha, Nebraska with about 7 inches of snow on the ground. A farmer does not go into the field in September to harvest for the first time, they go into the field in March and April to prepare the field and you prepare the field to reap the harvest you’re going to get in August, September, October. This is what we’re doing right now, this is what we have to be doing.

We are creating, we are planting the seeds. Some if it we’re going to harvest, there’s the California strawberries that come in early, there’s the early crops that come in, but the big stuff doesn’t come in until the second half of the summer. What does this tell you? Here’s the whole thing, if the farmer goes out and plants the wrong seed, they’re going to reap the wrong harvest. How do they know what seed? They know what seed because they’re listening to the industry, they’re watching what’s happening and they’re listening to the experts. I’ve got to be paying attention to what’s happening out there and this is going to really upset some of you. This is not the time to say, “I’m just going to spend all day on social media.” Let me tell you something, you can’t take clicks and likes to the bank. I have been in social media moratorium since Sunday because I just needed to get other stuff done. I’ll get back on social media this evening for the weekend but I just took about a five day break.

Here’s one thing, what I want to focus on is how do I create value? My whole focus this week has been creating value for my clients and my prospects and I’m going to do that by doing deep reading. I’ve really spent a lot of time this week doing some deep reading in some journals and publications and books and so forth. I think it allows me to sell with more integrity because I can create more value. When I get done with this call, I’m going to be an invited guest to a Board of Directors meeting of a pretty significant company, would they have invited me to be a participant in this board meeting if I was seen as some schlocky? No, but clearly they see my insights as being worth something.

Again, when you sell with integrity you will get customers who have integrity. This is the most beautiful business for us to be in, I’m excited, I’m stoked, I love it. I’m sorry, Fred, I could talk for hours.

Fred Diamond: I could listen to you for hours, too and what’s quite exciting is that very few of the people who originally joined us on today’s webcast have left.

Mark Hunter: I’ve been watching them [Laughs].

Fred Diamond: We got a question here. Could you just summarize the three things? What were the three things to focus on right now? One was focus on customer outcomes and quantifying the outcome. Just remind us of #2 and #3 again.

Mark Hunter: #2 and #3 is protecting your time, set your calendar for the first two hours of the day, hour and a half of the day, that’s going to make your day and the third thing is, we didn’t really talk about it, but grow your mind. Again, you’ve got to be very careful because it’s pretty easy to fill you mind with all that negative stuff out there so what I say is I want to grow my mind. Every day I want to learn something new about my industry, about my customers and then I’m going to ask myself, “How can I share it with them tomorrow?”

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us a lot of ideas. Again, the book came out, A Mind for Sales and once again for everybody listening to today’s webcast, we actually interviewed Mark on A Mind for Sales before the pandemic and we’re going to replay that at some point. Again, we’re going to replay this as a Sales Game Changers podcast and as a replay of the webinar as well. Would you mind giving us, again just focus on A Mind for Sales, just give us the one minute overview on a little more about the book and what you talked about. We do have one or two more questions that came in and then we’ll wrap up.

Mark Hunter: A little bit about A Mind for Sales, what is it about? It’s about having the right mindset because I see too many people who have the right skill set, the right everything else but they don’t have the right mindset. The mindset is being passionate as you’ve seen me here today. I’m passionate about helping people. When you are passionate about helping people your goal is to help them see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible so what I do is I share in the book all kinds of different things as to how you go about that, how you set up Sunday night, how you set up Monday, how you set up every day of the week, how you create a mastermind, how you create a network. I go through that, how you set up your goals, it really is about realizing that the most powerful app you have, the most powerful tool you have is not some CRM system, it’s this right here, it’s your mind, use it.

Fred Diamond: You said mastermind, for people who don’t know what that means, what is a mastermind and how do I start one or how do I join one?

Mark Hunter: Get three or four peers, three or four people who are positive thinkers like yourself and you say, “I’m going to be on a mastermind call this afternoon”, I have a 90 minute mastermind call with my masterminds. What we do is we get together, we get together now twice a week to share ideas, to help stimulate each other, to help build each other, to help each other. It’s a rising tide lifts all boats. You become the sum of the five people who you spend the most time with. I didn’t come up with that, Jim Rohn did. You become the sum of the five people you hang out with the most, I want to hang out with really cool people.

Fred Diamond: Once again, Mark Hunter, The Sale Hunter, best-selling author, big fan of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, thank you so much for the great insights you provided today. Once again for everybody listening, we’re going to transcribe this into a Sales Game Changers podcast, we’re going to post the replay up on YouTube and the I4ESBD.com site. Mark, thank you so much. Stay safe, have a great weekend and thanks for all the value you just provided.

Mark Hunter: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 226: IES Creativity in Sales Webcast: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE LEARNING EVENT: Sales Transformation and Solutions During the COVID-19 on Friday, Mar 27, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on March 27, 2020.]

EPISODE 217: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Six Things Sales Pros Need to Do for Success During the Coronavirus with Sales Expert Tom Snyder

Watch the webinar here. Find Tom Snyder on Linkedin.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “We’re not here to just survive. If we can adapt to these changes, we can actually thrive during this time and we can help our customers do that.“

Fred Diamond: For today’s webinar I’m very excited to have Tom Snyder. Tom is an internationally recognized speaker and sales expert, he is the managing partner of Funnel Clarity, he’s a world-renowned speaker on sales training and sales consulting practices. His company, Funnel Clarity, has customers around the globe that they do sales training and sales consulting for. He’s spoken a number of times at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, he’s also been a key note speaker at our award event and he’s also the author of two best-selling McGraw-Hill business books. Tom, it’s great to have you on today’s webinar, I’m really interested to hear what you’re talking about, you’re going to give us 6 things sales professionals should do to be successful and productive. Let’s take it over.

Tom Snyder: Thanks, Fred, and welcome everybody. I’m sure that this is an interesting time, the old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Before we start, I wanted to just pull up this picture of the cherry blossoms. For those of you who don’t live in Washington, you may have heard about this but it’s a beautiful part of Washington this time of year and it, I’m hoping, reminds you that life is going to go on and we’re going to get over this and everything is going to get back to normal at some point in the future. I wanted to marry it with a quote from Marilynne Robinson out of Gilead and she said, “When things are taking their ordinary course, it’s hard to remember what matters.” The inverse of that is true also, when things don’t take their normal course it reminds us of the things that matter perhaps too strongly.

What I wanted to do today is provide you these 6 things, I want to emphasize something that’s very important to me and everyone at Funnel Clarity. Far too many people are self-proclaimed experts and if you’re looking on LinkedIn these days or in Facebook, you can see tons of “advice” people are giving folks like yourself, salespeople. Most of it, if you understand the research, is either not particularly of use or some of it’s actually wrong. Every single thing I’m going to talk about today has been the subject of real honest to goodness research meaning real field research collecting data, doing the statistics.

These are not 6 things Tom made up, these are not 6 things that somebody told me were a good idea, these are literally things that came out of the studies and as I go through them, I’m going to describe the pedigree of them and where they came from. I want us to be clear that what we’re trying to do today is give you some ideas around how to recreate yourself so that you can succeed and thrive during this trying time. Yes, I mean succeed and thrive, I don’t like the idea of survive. We’re not here to just survive. If we can adapt to these changes, we can actually thrive during this time and we can help our customers do that. Let’s focus on that objective as we go through a couple of things.

First of all, these 6 things can be summed up with these headlines. #1, you now have a new job. #2, mindset matters. #3, there are stages of adjusting to change. If you can recognize them in yourself and then recognize them in the folks that you’re talking to as prospects and customers, you’ll find it’s much easier to get those conversation that remain of substance and of interest to both parties. Change equals opportunity and at no time is this change more recognizable than now. The larger the degree of change and the more sudden that change is introduced, the larger the opportunity. I will explain more of that. Environment, where we work and our calendar and how it can be most useful to us. What I’m going to try to do is wrap all these things together so that when we end with contract and strategy, we’ve got some ideas you can employ. If any of this is interesting to you I’m sure we can help you explore it further but I want to assure you that all of this came out of an exhaustive body of studies.

Let’s talk about a new job. The world changed, we all know that, whatever date you want to pick, it could be the beginning of mid-January where we heard all the news from Wuhan, it could be the middle of March when the United States began to shut down in many cases, it could have been yesterday. Whatever it is, though, the degree of this change and the degree to which a very unusual experience none of us have ever gone through before was introduced meant it changed everything and whatever job you have in sales has just changed to a new job. I want you to be thinking about that mentality. I don’t mean your employer may be any different, I don’t mean that the individuals that you call on may be any different but the job you have has taken on a tremendous amount of change.

When we think about a new job, what do we do? What would you do if you had, literally, a new job? This pandemic hadn’t occurred, somehow it just arrived that either you sought them out, they sought you out and now you have a new job. What would you do? Think about it in exactly that way. The first thing you do is you meet new people, you’d meet the people in the new company, you’d meet people you hadn’t met before in the marketplace, it would have a much higher volume of new introductions, not something to be ignored when we’re in the midst of this isolation. We can now reach out in LinkedIn, we can reach out in social media, we can reach out through Facebook, Instagram and all the social distanced ways of reaching out but most people are not going to do it. They’re going to accept the isolation as preventing them from doing it. You wouldn’t do it if you had a new job, who would take a new job and then suddenly hide in their cubicle and not go meet anybody?

Another thing you’d do is you’d take the effort to understand both the market you’re selling into and the customers and prospects you have to deal with. Their world has changed, they too have a new job so the level of understanding you had four months ago or five months ago needs to be updated. How do we do that? We talk to people, not about what we want to sell them, not about what they may want to buy at the moment, we talk to our customers, people in the marketplace, our prospects first about how their job has changed, how has the strategy of your company changed, how have the ideas and business goals been altered. We first want to get an understanding just like we would if we had a new job. What problems do we solve? Maybe they’re no different than they were five months ago but I suspect there are certain characteristics of our solutions, certain characteristics of the problems we solve that we can adapt to a new world.

At the end of the day, we’re looking for those new protocols. What are the new ways that we are either characterizing or adapting the solutions we sell? What are the ways that we routinely communicate with our customers and prospects? All these things, I think one part of it can be on the step towards the positive. Adjusting as though you had a new job, maybe the faces haven’t changed but the job will have changed somewhat. Fred, do you have any questions at this point?
Fred Diamond: Just curiously, are you finding that the sales managers that you’re working with – and you work with tons of sales managers around the globe – are they dictating this message to people or do salespeople need to take it upon themselves to realize this?

Tom Snyder: That’s a great question and we actually had teams looking into that. The easiest summary is because of the isolated nature of the way most people are working, and many of them are working that way for the first time, a lot of this has to be taken on as an individual. However, the really successful managers have begun organizing virtual meetings around subjects like this. They may not title it, “You have a new job” but these items I’ve listed here again, they come from the research of how do people best adapt to a new job, how do people best adapt to a dramatic change in their marketplace and these are literally the things that come out of that research’s best practice. The very best managers are doing that in a remote way.

Fred Diamond: Very good.

Tom Snyder: I want you to be thinking about – I look at this as and maybe I just want to call it an adaptation to a new world – how am I from my own personal success going to describe and measure the next run on that ladder? How will I know that I have embraced these ideas or that I’m remaining positive, I’m really adapting faster than my competitors, I’m going to be part of the solution, not part of the problem? In other words, what am I going to evaluate? What am I shooting for? Is it a particular metric around the number of people I add to my professional network? Is it a particular metric around the number of opportunities I qualify at the top of my funnel? Is it really about getting a new level of understanding of the current strategies and goals of my existing clients? What is it that I’m going to find as my next run that I’m going to work for? Do these things and the research says you will adapt at the fastest possible rate to a new job. It’s no different now because many of the aspects of your job from five months ago will have changed.
Mindset, let’s talk a little bit about what we mean by mindset. You can choose to be either a positive force or you can choose to work or live in fear. The point of all this is that you need to recognize a lot of research has been done around what I’m going to refer to as the curve of adaptation. The work really began, if you remember from psychology class by the work of Kubler Ross, it has been greatly expanded upon since that time but there are some very significant identifiable phases that individuals go through when a change is thrust on them. The more dramatic the change, the more sudden the change, the more poignant or pointed these stages are. As I go through them, I want you to think about yourself. The first stage, of course, is denial. “No, no, the change really isn’t happening.” Where did we see all over the world the idea that, “No, this is a hoax, this is made up, this is exaggerated, this isn’t really it”? It’s not because those people were trying to lie, it’s because the natural reaction to a change of dramatic proportions is denial but as experience begins to accumulate very quickly, that translates then into frustration and concern.

Frustration, “Why did this happen? Who’s to blame? Why can’t we get this over with? What’s the problem?” And we begin to see that this change is not going to go away quickly, it’s not going to disappear and return us to where we were before and we can often find ourselves sinking into a big of a depression, but for most people that doesn’t last very long because out of that depression they recognize we’re not going backwards. We’re not going back to where we were 7 or 8 months ago. We then enter a phase of experimentation and creativity. “Let me try this, let me think about that, let me adjust this way” and we begin adapting, we begin looking as only the human species can do in a very short time, adapt to a dramatic change. Ultimately, we reach a point of not only acceptance but of success, we reach a point where we have now achieved perhaps even a better world or a better situation than before. I want you to think about this for just a moment and think about where are you in this. Are you still telling yourself this can’t be real? Are you focused on the frustrations it’s causing you? Maybe your school year has been cancelled and your young children are at home and at the same time you’re trying to work and you’re just so focused on the frustrations and energy of taking that out, or has it gotten to the point where you’re a little blue about this?

Maybe you’ve already begun trying different approaches and different things of managing through and adapting to this, or you add acceptance where now you are primed for success. All of us, 100% of us will go through these identifiable stages. Some faster than others, some stages may take longer than others but think about it first about yourself and then I want to challenge you to be thinking your own, “When I reach out to prospects and customers, how am I going to figure out where they are?” Because where they are has a profound effect on whether we can help them, whether we can conduct business with them, whether we can add them successfully to our network. Fred, any questions there?

Fred Diamond: I do, and again if anybody has any questions on the webinar, use your question panel to pass them on. Tom, you and I have had many conversations about mindset and we’ve spoken, you’re actually one of the leading thinkers on the sales mindset and growth mindset. A question for you is give us one bit of advice or tip that you do or that you’ve communicated to top performing sales professionals to shift your mindset. Let’s say you’re in that moment where you have young kids in the house as well and it’s not a very nice day, people aren’t interacting the way you want to and you’re getting a little bit frustrated. Maybe give us a tool that you’ve used to mindset shift especially in a time like this where there’s such challenges.

Tom Snyder: It’s a great question, Fred, we could talk hours about it. I’ll give you one or two tips. I want to remind you that these stages happen any time we have a change thrust on us. It could be something like, god forbid, you broke your leg playing softball or you had a car accident, it could be any kind of thing so how do we get out of that? We get out of that by focusing on that fourth bullet: experimentation and creativity. The tactic of doing that is this simple. When you are feeling that level of frustration or perhaps being a bit blue and maybe your young children are very restless or it’s just your stir-crazy going inside or there’s five things you need to get done at once, or you’re having a hard time focusing on work, you keep getting distracted. You simply, even if there is cacophony around you, I want you to take out a piece of paper and let your mind go of judgement. I want you to write down every word that comes to mind, phrase, whatever, free form without judgement, I want it written on paper or typed down on your laptop, everything that will be representative of an immediate success.

What would that look like? No word is too silly, no phrase is too ridiculous, no idea is too grandiose. I want you to do that for at least three minutes, that’s a long time, set a timer. Once you’ve done that, I want you to then go back and strike all the ones that are silly or grandiose and boil it down to a list of the possible. The brain does not operate well in a situation where you’re trying to be creative and judgmental, it stifles everything so you need to let the creative part of your thinking mechanism work without judgement first. Stop doing that and then go back to thinking about making the judgement. I’m going to talk about that in another context in just a moment. Is that helpful, Fred?

Fred Diamond: Perfect, sounds great.

Tom Snyder: Third, I want you to always think about this from now on forever and not one day in sales do I ever want you to forget this, pandemic or no pandemic. Change is the engine of opportunity. If the existing solutions, materials, whatever that people were using continue to be optimal and never wore out and there were no new innovations and nothing ever changed, there would be nothing to buy. If you think of the opposite of that, any decision maker who is expressing frustration or expressing an aspiration unfulfilled is doing so because the world has changed and those changes have made what used to be optimal no longer optimal. As those frustrations or those unfulfilled aspirations continue to build, they will reach critical mass at a point when that person then begins to advocate considering a purchase.

If you think about it, when we take something so dramatic and so sudden as how fast this pandemic came on us, it has created a tremendous amount of change. Therefore, it has created for us opportunities for both failure and success. We have an opportunity to address our marketplace in ways we haven’t had to or thought of before. We also have the opportunity to simply suck our thumb and go in the corner. Everybody deserves a little time to go through denial, frustration, maybe even a little depression but this sudden and dramatic change gives us an opportunity to not only survive but to thrive and come out of this thing in a dominant successful position. That’s not because I told you that, that’s not because I’m trying to give some motivational speech, that’s what the research says. If we’re going to do that, then what I just described as brainstorming is going to be very important.

Most people think a brainstorm means let’s all get in a room and shout out ideas. I guess you could call that brainstorming, the problem is that the loudest voice usually wins. Brainstorming done by individuals and brainstorming done by groups of individuals has the exact same pattern. The first thing you do is you work individually, you quietly do what I told you to do, you focus on whatever it is you’re trying to consider, achieve, solve and you simply let the mind go, no judgement and you write down terms or words that will remind you of every kind of thing that came to mind in this creative phase. This doesn’t have to be three minutes, it can be 30 minutes, it could be 30 seconds but it needs to be sustained without judgement and then you go back and you look at the ones that you consider perhaps ridiculous, perhaps counter-intuitive but you’ll boil out the list that’s really good. Judgement follows the ideation piece. Therefore, if you begin thinking about how this change, this sudden introduction of we now have to shelter in place, we now have to change everything about the way we’re working, it’s harder to get ahold of some people, they’re distracted, you begin to think about those things. Think about the ideas that you can control, that you can deal with and if you can do so brainstorming remotely with several colleagues, so much the better.

If you can do it with current customers with whom you have a great relationship, so much the better. If you can do it with folks that are maybe strangers to you but have the same orientation in the marketplace, so much the better. Change is the engine of opportunity, we can engage with that opportunity, provide our different services, be a better provider of value to our customers if we can follow this process. We also ought to be expanding our network. The typical LinkedIn outreach, for example, “Hi Bob, my name is Tom Snyder, I was looking at your profile, seems like we have common interests, let’s add each other to our professional network” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think that’s reasonable but I’m really talking about doing this in a much more consorted way. I think it’s a time in which you can block out time in the calendar every day, call it 30 minutes, do key word searches or Boolean searches into your network on LinkedIn, into your network on Facebook and be thinking about how do I suss out the kind of professionals who I would like to add to my network. These could be complimentary services or products sold by other companies, this could be decision makers inside the marketplace you care about most that aren’t in your network now.

I think you should look at this as the perfect time to do that outreach and that outreach can be acknowledging the fact that we’re in a tough time, since we’re all isolated and now working in isolation I’m making an effort to really reach out and expand my network with the kind of people with whom I can develop a valuable relationship. I want you to think about that. You also might want to do some brainstorming reframing your solutions. Our solutions aren’t going to change, if we’re selling a software SaaS solution it’s not going to change, if we’re selling some sort of capital good it’s not going to change. It’s not like our employers are just suddenly going to wake us up on Monday morning and have a whole new product this week but the framing of the solution meaning, “How does this provide value, the solution to a problem? What can we now fix, accomplish or avoid through our products and services that the new customer and the new world I’m selling into can utilize?”

I say this and I just pray to god it does not sound self-serving, I’m in the sales training business. This is a superb time to work on those skills, it is a superb time to take one or more online training courses even if you have to pay for them. It is the perfect time to be sharpening the saw because so many of your competitors are going to be viewing this as snow days and so many of your customers and prospects need you to be better, need you to be a better coach of their decisions. Think about doing that. Again, reach out to buyers, reach out to customers, reach out to people with no message about, “I’m trying to see if you’re a prospect, I’m trying to add you to my portfolio.” I just need a conversation with a series of people in your role, I need to know what your peers are thinking, I need to know what your competitors are doing, what the marketplace is telling you.”

Remember, that’s exactly what you’d do if you had a new job in sales for a different company. Fred, do you want to ask any questions about this before I move to environment?

Fred Diamond: Yes, and once again if anybody on the webinar has any questions, enter them through the panel. Tom, we did get a question here and you’ve began to touch on it with your last bullet point, understand your buyer. Once again, this is Tom Snyder, he’s the managing partner for Funnel Clarity. Tom, you’re one of the experts around the world on sales conversations in general. Everyone is going through what we’re going through right now, everyone’s having challenges with their customers and their family and uncertainty, if you will. Could you talk for a second or two about maybe having more personal conversations or maybe being a little more vulnerable? I’m just curious what your thoughts are as compared to purely business type conversations right now with your prospects.

Tom Snyder: That is a subject which literally we have several different training courses on but let me give you a couple of things you can do right now that will adapt to that world. First of all, the research has revealed that the two most powerful ways of establishing trust, rapport and transparency with somebody who doesn’t know you or doesn’t know you well are the techniques that are labelled testing understanding and summarizing. Testing understanding is labelled because that’s exactly what it is. “Mary, we’ve had a great talk here, let me make sure I’m getting the important points” and we restate the central themes of what Mary’s been trying to say.

The key to doing it is we have a tendency to only do that when we are struggling to understand. If we can do that occasionally in these conversations when we clearly understand, the power it has on the other person and the way that conversation will unfold is hard to describe in just a few minutes, but it’s extraordinary. It is the primary way of showing empathy. Everybody these days tells you, “Be empathetic” and you might as well say, “Grow taller” because a lot of people aren’t telling you how. I’m telling you, if you can use that technique, it’d be great. The other one is that people are stressed, they’re focused just like anyone else, they’re somewhere along that curve. I said earlier, if you can plan in your mind, “What am I going to be listening for and what am I going to ask that will tell me is this a person in denial, is this a person who is in frustration phase, is this a person who’s depressed, is this a person who’s experimenting and thinking about creative things, is this somebody who’s at acceptance and looking for different success? Then how does my conversation help them move to the next step, help them move forward?

If you can do that, you can set up a lot of benefits for both yourself and for the person you’re talking to. It’s a big topic, if anyone is interested please don’t hesitate to go to the website and call us if you’re interested in that.

Let’s talk a little bit about environment, I promised you all this was one way or another from research. One of the things about an environment, if you’re familiar with the term ‘contract furniture’, the marketplace is dominated by four very large manufacturers but there’s actually hundreds of manufacturers. Contract furniture comes in four categories: government – what am I going to sell to government agencies – businesses, education and hospitals. The big four in that industry are Herman Miller, Steelcase, KI and Haworth all do ongoing research and it’s extraordinary how much they’ve done about the effective environment on both productivity and morale. I’m telling you, they’ve done hundreds of these studies.

When you look at those data and you look at that research you realize that when you take someone who has been traditionally spending part of all of their time in an office with colleagues who now is told to be isolated alone in their home and communicate by some means of electronic media, you are introducing something that’s both insidious and destructive to productivity unless we know how to deal with it. #1, that research reveals that there is a natural blending between home life and work life and both will suffer. If we are spending part of all of our work days in a different environment, whatever that environment may be like and then we’re coming home at ‘the end of the day’, the sanctuary where we eat, we sleep, we nurture ourselves, we have fellowship with our family is physically separate from where we conduct our business. That means the boundary doesn’t have to be consciously enforced. Yes, there are people who bring too much work home or bring home the problems of work but the boundary physically makes a very big difference. We have to try as best we can to create a dedicated work space and that dedicated work space needs to be as closely mimicking the workspace we use if we’re traditionally working in an office even part of the time. It is destructive to morale, it is destructive to productivity and these studies prove it, if you’re going to sit on your bed in your pajamas with your laptop open and conduct business as you would have conducted it in an office. A dedicated space ideally is an isolated space but it may not be, you may live in a small apartment with roommates, you may live in a place with a lot of children but if you’re going to use the kitchen table while you’re using it as a workspace, that’s all it is.

It doesn’t have anything else on it except things appropriate for your work. Once it’s a kitchen table, you take all that and put it somewhere and now it returns to be a home space. If you’re going to make spaces play duplicate duties, they have to be very distinctively different when they’re a workspace than when they’re a home space. The data proved this up one side and down another. The other thing we want to be sure we do is interact with colleagues and it doesn’t have to always be about the ABC account or about some other issue, it’s important because that’s what we do at work. It’s the primary way many people get fellowship beyond their family. If we’re used to talking about the frustrations of no NCAA tournament, let’s get two other colleagues on the phone and spend 15 minutes talking about it. If we’re interested in some sort of pursuit, what would be those conversations we’d have with those colleagues? Maybe it’s as simple as, “Hey, let’s all get lunch, dial each other up and eat together even though we’re miles apart?” We can have one of those apps I talked about where we can at least see each other and interact. I think this one’s a big one.

We need to celebrate and share our successes. If we’re used to ringing the gong at the office, maybe we can get a little one or maybe we can create some alternative but let’s actually ring the gong at the office and let’s do that also in a way where when we are having our group meetings in remote locations isolated from each other but we’re doing it over our laptop, whatever, just be sure we’re talking about success. There’s way too much talk, way too much marination in the bad news of the pandemic, we’ve got to isolate ourselves from that in some way. Breaks are more important than they were when you’re in the office, they have a natural flow in the office, they have an unnatural flow in your workspace from home. If you don’t set the times when you’re going to do it, what’s going to happen is every interruption will be a break and the interruptions won’t isolate you enough to get your work done well. Control what you can, ignore what you can’t.

Don’t beat yourself up if, for example, you have young children or elderly parents who are demanding of your time, you do what you can do but I want you to get from this part of it that your environment matters. Your environment matters physically, put yourself in the best possible space you can by doing what you can to create a specific workspace, recognize that when you’re in that workspace you’re at work even though you’re doing it in the sanctuary of your home. The sanctuary of your home is everywhere else in that environment, not your workspace. Your workspace and your home life are now colliding but you have to put a boundary in as best you can. Fred.

Fred Diamond: Those are great points and actually one of the members of the Institute for Excellence in Sales posted something on Facebook today and she just wrote, “Give us a compliment that someone has given you over the last couple of days.” One of the challenges with working at home or if you haven’t before, it’s not really the refrigerator, it’s the solitude. No matter how much we’re looking at the screen and Zooming and go to webinar and webcasting and conference calling, you’re away from human beings. This goes back to your mindset point but definitely make sure that you’re getting out, you’re getting up, it’s a beautiful day outside in the DC region. Half the people who are listening to today’s webinar are from outside of the DC region, I see some people from other countries as well, which is great but do that. We just got a note coming in also, I just want to say a little bit about the webinar before we get to Tom’s fifth and sixth points. We will be converting this into a Sales Game Changers podcast with a complete transcription as well. Tom, I’m sure you’re okay if we make these slides available also.

Tom Snyder: That’s not a problem. The last point I wanted to make on this point is what you wear. Again, I can talk to you about research done by everybody from the US military to school systems to many institutions. What we wear is a projection of the role we are playing. If you think about your life before this pandemic, whatever you wore was a broadcast of something about you and when we go inside our sanctuary we no longer feel compelled to broadcast anything about the role we’re playing or what we are.

The problem is if we’re not dressing for work, we’re not really going to work so as much as it may sound ridiculous, if you work in an environment where business formal is what you’re supposed to wear, then wear it during the business day. If it’s a business casual with a collared shirt or whatever, make sure you’re doing that. You sit around in your pajamas even in a dedicated work space, it’s not like you’re working and you’re allowing the home environment and the work environment to clash and intersect and when you do that, the work always suffers. Important stuff, lots of research supporting those things.

Let me talk about the last two things here. #1, the calendar. Most people think of their calendar as a place to track obligations and in fact, if you look at the vast majority of salespeople, they don’t even do that very well. Interestingly, if you look at the studies of the top 5% of sales performers regardless of company, country or industry, there are several things that come out of that research. One of them is people in that level of performance tend to use their calendar as a strategic and performance tool, not just a place to track their obligations. What do I mean by a strategic tool? They dedicate blocks of time in a proactive way to certain activities. For example, I have suggested that it’s a good idea to brainstorm. It isn’t going to happen by intention alone, it’s only going to happen if it’s actually blocked in your calendar and you tell yourself, “I’m not going to allow anything but an emergency to interrupt that commitment.”

That means being rigorous about figuring out what are the key activities that you can do proactively to thrive and succeed during these times, being evaluative of your calendar, how much time and what cadence can I actually fulfill and then what are the rules that I’m going to determine a priori about what’s an interruption and what don’t I allow as an interruption? One thing’s pretty simple. If I’m checking my text messages and my email every time the bell rings, every time the buzzer goes off, every five minutes I’m ruining the mental discipline it takes to do a good job and thrive. I want you to set up these rules of interruption before you get interrupted and then live to them. What are the emergencies that will take priority of whatever I’m doing? What other rule is there? The answer should be, “Other than those things, there aren’t any.”  Routines really matter more than ever and those routines need to be captured in the calendar, they need to be captured in the calendar and you give yourself a checkmark, a star wherever you’re able to fulfill the obligation you gave yourself for that block of time. Do not just schedule appointments, use the calendar as the tool to help you grow and thrive. What does that mean? Brainstorming, new contacts, reaching out to existing customers, time to understand the marketplace, time to understand the buyers and how they’ve changed, time for breaks.

I want you to be rigorous about setting up the routines in your calendar and quite frankly, this goes well beyond just the troubles we’re having with this pandemic. If you can make this a habit, you’ll be astonished how quickly you migrate to the top 5%. Be realistic about the length of your work day. You now do have the direct intersection of your home sanctuary family life with your work space so let’s be realistic. If we’re tending to elderly parents, if we’re tending to young children, if we’ve got a lot of roommates that are now quarantined with us, whatever environment we’re in we’re going to have to be realistic and if we’re going to tell ourselves that now that I don’t have to commute or I don’t have to take a shower and get down to the office on the train we’re really kidding ourselves, we’re not adding any time. Let’s be realistic, know how much time we can actually dedicate to the work and then make that work routine engaging and fun by having the calendar allow us to do a variety of activities with a variety of timings blocked out so I’m not getting the monotony of one activity done for far too long. I really want you to be sure you’re setting times to summarize for yourself the things you’ve learned, the things you’ve heard, the things that you have discovered and then also set aside some time for brainstorming. Fred, anything before we go to the last one?

Fred Diamond: Tom, you’re giving us some great ideas here. We’ve just got some great questions, let me gave you a question here that just came in from the attendees. Tom, I just want to say thank you so much for all this great insight that you’re giving us. One of the things that has always distinguished Funnel Clarity from a lot of the other sales training organizations out there is that your work is based on science, it’s based on research, over the years you and your organization don’t just throw out ideas that a lot of “sales pundits and experts” do, your work is based on deep, rigorous analysis and I can see how it applies here today. Let me just ask you a question here from the audience and then we’ll move to your last point. How much leeway do you allow in your calendar for emergencies and fire-fighting? For example, do you block out 60% of your day and leave the rest for unforeseen demands on your time? Why don’t you give us a second or two on your approach to calendarizing in any situation?

Tom Snyder: That’s a fantastic question, compliments to whoever posted it. First of all, rather than tell you what I do let me tell you what the research says and let’s be clear about something, a couple of rules in answer to that. #1, you cannot fill up your day with back-to-back time blocks even if you’re interspersing a few breaks because life doesn’t isolate you that way. I would strongly suggest that you take a look at what a reasonable work day length you have and the best practice would be to say, “I’m going to allocate 60% of my time” – you hit it right on the nose – “to my intentional activities and leave 40% for the unexpected.” I want to point out that most unexpected things don’t have to be done in an emergency way. I want there to be a distinction between emergencies which are the rules of interruption, meaning the calendar goes out the window if something really dramatic happens, versus the unexpected interruptions where I can say, “Okay, from 3 to 5 this afternoon I’m going to return those emails, I’m going to return those calls or the things that came in that I didn’t have the ability to calendar.”

Fred Diamond: Tom, let me ask you one last question because this has come up from a couple people and then we’ll get to your last point if you actually want to even move to the next slide. Again, your company is called Funnel Clarity, you’re a well-renowned expert on prospecting. Someone asked here, “Is anyone changing behaviors? Is this the right time to prospect into new accounts? Is this the right time to call on people that we’ve never spoken to before?”

Tom Snyder: Whoever’s asking these questions, you’re doing great, thank you so much, folks. The direct answer from the research is as follows. When people are in denial, frustration or depression, they will react either not at all or very negatively to a prospecting outreach. When they’re in experiment or acceptance they will be more enthusiastic than they’ve ever been before, #1. #2, in general, as time goes on there’ll be fewer and dramatic drops in the number of people in denial, frustration and depression. At the moment in the United States – and I don’t know about other countries because I haven’t been able to get ahold of the folks that we were relying on for data in those countries – it appears to us from the trends that outreach of any kind meaning email, social media, telephone, whatever should not really start until next Wednesday. What you should be doing between now and then is building the list of individuals and building that network up. That Wednesday date is picked relatively as an extrapolation, I don’t want to make it a hard and fast rule, it may actually be a week from today to be on the safe side but the numbers are showing a great trend away from this point, denial and frustration. There has been an uptick in those that report being what we are labeling depressed, we don’t really mean that clinically but there’s also a surge in the folks who are doing the experimentation. I hope that’s helpful.

Fred Diamond: Let’s get to your last of the 6 points.

Tom Snyder: I’m going to go through these quickly. Please block out time to expand your network. When you have these conversations, I think if you can do so with genuineness in your word choice, this idea of your trying to find information and get a feel for how the world is changing, “Is there any way you can help provide similar information to those that you’re contacting?” is really a good context for that. Expand your network outreach whether that’s done with in-mail, on LinkedIn, email, voicemail, phone call, whatever. Keep your conversations focused on being upbeat. I don’t mean to be supercilious about it, I don’t mean a big “Ra-ra-ra, don’t worry, it’s all going to be okay!” It’s sort of a lunatic if somebody doesn’t know you [Laughs] but a few things about checking understanding, testing understanding, a bit of conversation of honest exchange I think is really interesting to the extent you can. I think you should brainstorm with others, others could be colleagues, they could be even competitors, in some cases they could be customers, they could be prospects, whatever. I want you to remember something, you’re the answer, you can thrive and succeed here and beyond, you can help your organization thrive and succeed here and beyond, you can actually be a fundamental part of helping your country and your fellow citizens get out of this. Did you have any last question there, Fred?

Fred Diamond: We’re good, why don’t you get to the wrap and then we’ll say a couple last words?

Tom Snyder: I just wanted to say one thing that I want you to remember. At the end of the day, differentiators, decision criteria and value are not always just about how much you charge people or what you’re selling them. Every bit of research will say that you, the salesperson, can be the most important differentiator and one of the most fundamental decision criteria by which people choose to do business. If you will adapt these techniques that I’ve talked about not because I say so but because the research says so, you’ll be surprised how much you can exercise the reality on this screen. I hope these 6 things were of value, I hope we have given you some things to think about. Fred, I’ll hand it over to you to wrap it up.

Fred Diamond: Tom, I want to thank you. One of our listeners just typed in, “This has been definitely helpful as there is no playbook for what we’re going through right now.” I want to thank Tom Snyder, Link into him if you aren’t Linked into him already, he’s one of the true sales thinkers out there. We’ve had him speak at the Institute at least a half a dozen times and we’re grateful, Tom, for your insights. Again, we’re going to be transcribing today’s webinar, it’ll be available also as a Sales Game Changers podcast. Next Friday, same time, 11 o’clock Eastern Time. Key note speaker will be Brynne Tillman, Brynne as known as the LinkedIn whisperer, she’s spoken at the Institute twice and she is fabulous. She’s going to be talking about building empathy through LinkedIn during the pandemic and it’s going to be great. Once again, I want to thank you all for being here, it’s a challenging time for sales professionals around the globe. Feel free to reach out to me, Fred Diamond, feel free to reach out to Tom Snyder. Take care and have a great day. Thanks Tom, and thanks everybody for being on the webcast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 217: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Six Things Sales Pros Need to Do for Success During the Coronavirus with Sales Expert Tom Snyder first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Become a member of the elite Institute for Excellence in Sales.

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Six Things Sales Pros Need to Do for Success During the Coronavirus on Friday, Mar 27, 2020 11:00 AM EDT at: here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on March 25, 2020.]

EPISODE 216: SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE LEARNING EVENT: Sales Transformation and Solutions During the COVID-19 Panel Discussion

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy is the key right now.“

Darrell Gehrt is the Vice President of Sales, Mobile Solutions at Cvent. Listen to his podcast episode here.
Randy Wood is the Vice President of Web America Sales at Akamai Technologies. Find his podcast episode here.
Denise Hayman is the Chief Revenue Officer at Expel. Her show will broadcast in April.

Fred Diamond:  Alright, welcome. This is Fred Diamond of the Sales Game Changers podcast and of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. This is our first Sales Game Changers live learning event, it’s 2:00 o’clock Eastern Time. We’re going to be doing these every week, every Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock featuring Sales Game Changers podcast guests. Because of all the people working from home and because of all the stress being put on the various online networks, there may be a challenge or two with the broadcast. It seems that everything is good from an outage perspective so we’re just going to get going. We’re going to be recording this as well. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this, you’ll get some value out of the next 15 minutes or so. We’re broadcasting from typically Northern Virginia, Washington DC area. Luckily on the Sales Game Changers podcast we’ve had great world-class sales leaders featured twice a week on our podcast which has had over 300,000 downloads. Over the next couple of weeks we’re going to feature three of them discussing what they’re doing to motivate and elevate top tier sales teams.

Today we have three great guests, we have Darrell Gehrt with Cvent, we have Denise Hayman from Expel and Randy Wood from Akamai. Darrell and Randy have both been guests on the Sales Game Changers podcast, Denise’s show is scheduled to come out some time in April so we’re excited about that. Here’s how we’re going to do this, we’re going to get right to the questions so that you can follow along. I’m going to be posting each question in the chat box and I’m going to send that to everybody. We have a couple questions here prepared, we’ve gotten some great questions from our guests on LinkedIn and from IES members around the globe. If you have a question, you can type it in the question box and we’ll try to get to as many as we can. We have a lot of great questions already here that we’re going to get to, we’ll do a poll or two as well.

This webinar will be recorded and transcribed, there’s a good chance we’re also going to offer it as a Sales Game Changers podcast as well. Here’s what we’re going to do first, why don’t we just do this so we can see who’s on the call? We’re going to launch a very simple poll. The question is: how many years have you been in sales? More than 20 years, between 5-20 years, 1-5 years, less than one year and you’re not in sales, just so that we can see who’s on the call here. It looks like tonight’s an even mix between one third of the audience ‘more than 20 years’, one third of the audience ‘between 5-20 years’ and 26% of the audience ‘between 1-5 years’. That being said, let’s get right to it. Once again, I am going to be posting the questions in the chat box, I’m going to be sending them to everybody. First question, let’s get right to it. What are your top priorities right now? This is for the panel. Darrell, why don’t you take us first?

Darrell Gehrt: My name is Darrell Gehrt and I’m the Vice President of Sales at Cvent for our global division. First of all, I hope everybody’s safe and healthy out there and the goal today is just to share some tips. That really is our top priority right now, we really are focused on stabilizing employee base making sure our employees have what they need making sure that they’re comfortable, making sure that they’re stable. We’re prioritizing that even over our customers now. Of course, we have to develop but the focus has to be on our employees and what we’ve told them is, “You have to be able to control what you can control. There’s a lot of things that are out of your control and there are things that you can influence.” That’s been the broad message to our employee base.

Fred Diamond: Randy, you’re with Akamai, you guys are involved with some of the highest performing websites on the planet. Obviously, your customers are impacted but tell us what are your top priorities right now.

Randy Wood: Fred, I would give you that answer in two perspectives. First of all, let’s talk about customers. With respect to the Akamai customers, you said it, we’re the world’s largest content delivery network provider so we’re focused on business continuity, maintaining business continuity for our customers first and foremost. That really boils down to maintaining the integrity and the reliability of our customer’s websites and even things like their mobile application delivery and that’s across all industries.

Then second in the context of customers, to Derrell’s point it’s about keeping our employees safe and productive. Safety first and foremost and then with respect to being productive, obviously we’re in a work from home environment and with that, we’re focused on creating and maintaining successful business outcomes. The business can’t stop but at the same time we’ve got to create a safe environment for our employees. Just a final thought here with respect to a top priority for our customers, back to that first priority, this is really a time to be a friend to our customers and not a vendor. This idea of reasonable person theory really needs to apply, there’s plenty of opportunities to be a vendor and to manage our customers but we really need to focus on being a friend right now and realizing we’re all in this together and these times will pass.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Denise, how about you? What are your top priorities right now?

Denise Hayman: Hey Fred and everyone. I’m Denise Hayman, I’m the CRO at Expel. At Expel we’ve always had a mantra around servant leadership and what that means for us from an overall company values perspective is the idea of leadership takes care of its employees first, always and forever will be. It’s the Richard Branson scenario that says, “If you take care of your employees then your employees take care of your customers and then everything else happens as it should.” Nothing about what’s going on today changes that for us. I think it makes it first and foremost in every single conversation and I’m ensuring that our employees, #1 are safe and psychologically safe, not only physically safe. In lots of different ways we’re doing that and I know we’re going to talk more about that. Certainly that’s #1.

Number 2 is ensuring that we’re doing everything we can for our customers because right now this is not only a stressful time for us in the sales industry but also for a customer to maintain everything that they were doing but in a remote environment. It becomes wildly stressful so what kinds of things can we be doing for them? Then looking forward, what does this mean? Starting to put some theories together about things that we might need to change. Does that mean our go-to-market changes? Does that mean we’re looking at things in a different lens with different types of customers? Lots of forward looking discussions that we’re having right now.

Fred Diamond: One of the words that comes up frequently over the last week or two since everything has shifted is empathy, it comes up a lot as it relates to sales right now. Actually, on the Sales Game Changers podcast ’empathy’ used to come up all the time: be an empathetic seller. Now it’s even more pertinent. How do you be empathetic and move the business forward? DG, why don’t you start with that?

Darrell Gehrt: I’ll start with empathy right now as table stakes, you have to have that. If you’re a sales professional and you can’t wrap your head around that then that’s probably a bigger issue. I had an interesting conversation with one of my reps the other day who said, “All the conversations I’m having right now, they’re empathetic people saying yes, great, thank you and let’s talk again in a couple of months.” In essence, what happens is they’ve gotten stuck in the mud and I think one of the things that we’re seeing right now is decisions and pivots are happening on the hour, not on the day or the month. I think the best way to avoid getting stuck in that mud, first of all you’ve got to have the honest conversation.

I love what Randy said about being a partner and a friend first and a vendor second. For us, Cvent, we’re in the events industry which is arguably, I would say the second hardest hit and the first hardest hit being the hospitality side. Avoiding getting stuck in the mud is really about serving before selling, so you can’t lean into these conversations like, “Hey, can I show you some technology?” or, “Can I talk about how we can help you?” The way that we’re approaching it is, “Hey, we see that in the event industry a lot of people are asking a lot of questions and if you’d like me to share with you what we’re hearing, I’d be happy to do that.”

It’s an empathetic way to continue the conversation because that’s what people want right now, they want to hear from thought leaders, they want to know what their peers are doing. That’s what we’re trying to serve up and if it’s valuable to them, we hope that they’ll invite us in for a further conversation but it’s helping us move conversations along. Maybe they’re not as quick as we’re used to, but we’re able to execute on that friend concept first.

Fred Diamond: Denise, how about you? When we did your podcast we talked about empathy a couple of times, and again your show is going to come out in April. What does it mean to you and how can you be empathetic today while moving your business forward?

Denise Hayman: It’s a big topic and I love, Darrell, what you had to say about how to take it forward with customers. I think I would add to it being authentic, this is a moment in time where you have the opportunity to create more loyalty by not trying to push forward something that is maybe not of the time from a sales perspective, but being relevant about what they are looking for and the kinds of things that are important to them. Just asking a few simple questions up front. “Has anything changed for you? Has anything accelerated? Is there anything going on with your business right now that we might be able to assist you with that maybe even wouldn’t have been thought of before?”

Just being really open and authentic and as Darrell said, recognizing thought leadership right now. “Here’s what other customers are starting to do, here’s the kinds of things that we’re talking to other people around.” In our business we are very much around enabling customer’s security organizations or security operation centers. Right now they went through a huge transformation, everyone working at home not used to having the same tools and elements that they had before so it can be as simple as, “Would you like to hear how we did? We moved our SOC to a totally virtual environment in 36 hours. I can get you on the phone with the person who was in charge of that, that managed that. Would that be interesting?” Thought leadership, educational scenarios without jumping on the opportunity as of right now.

Fred Diamond: Randy, what do you think are the main concerns right now for your people? Actually, all three of you have managed hundreds of people but Randy, why don’t you take this one? What do you think are the main concerns for your people? And let’s break it down, how are your younger people handling this new world and how about some of your more seasoned and senior people?

Randy Wood: Fred, what I’ve seen now in three weeks with respect to people’s concerns boil down to one thing: it’s uncertainty. We can deal with bad news, we can compartmentalize bad news. It’s very difficult to deal with uncertainty. Just last week I had an opportunity to address my sales force, I’m responsible for the business in North America, it was about 350 people, it was an unrelated topic that we were discussing but I took the opportunity for the first 5 minutes to talk about the situation and to try and put things in perspective, and to try and help people deal with the uncertainty. It was remarkable the response from the team back to me in real time on my cellphone, the messages just kept coming in about how comforting that was, how much people needed to hear that.

What I began to understand is what we as leaders need to do right now more than ever before is to create belief in the idea that we’re going to get through this, we’ve got some hard medicine to take along the way and to help deal with the uncertainty. That really provides steady reassurance and it can’t be a one-time thing, it’s got to be something that we do along the way, that we do in a predictable, repeatable, simple and compelling way. With respect to the demographics of age in the workforce, I think older people are more comfortable with things, they’ve seen this before. People in my generation have lived through 9-11 which I think is an obvious and easy comparison here. I think for the younger people in the workforce it is finding ways to help minimize or to deal with the uncertainty that they have and the fear that comes with that. With fear comes some level of paralysis and as leaders we’ve got to work through that to keep people safe like I said, but also productive and working on behalf of our customers to keep moving the business forward.

For me it’s just about dealing with uncertainty.

Fred Diamond: Randy, we’re not going to talk about it on this call but for those listening to the webinar today, a little bit of a trivia there as you’ll hear on the Sales Game Changers podcast with Randy, you actually started your sales career on September 12th, 2001. I don’t want to go into that story right now, you tell it beautifully on the podcast. Everyone on the line, take a listen to Randy’s podcast and talk about being thrown into the fire, you literally started the next day after that tragic event.

Denise, Randy just gave a little bit of a good explanation of what the people are going through. How often are you communicating to your team? Before you might have had remote people and obviously you manage a remote team, people around the country, but you also have people in the office and you would go see them. Now everyone’s at home, I presume, all across the country and the world. How often are you communicating to them and how? Are you using online materials like Zoom or you’re calling? Tell us how you’re going about that today versus how you were a couple weeks ago.

Denise Hayman: We were early to the kicking people out of the office and having everyone move virtual, so we’ve been virtual for a little over three weeks now. The learning that took place with first of all, the isolation, we’re salespeople, we’re used to being out and talking to people, we’re extroverts in the whole, “How do we harness that in this scenario?” recognizing that people needed more communication, not less, in this moment.

As a company we’ve done a couple of things and then I’ve done a couple of things on the sales side as well. We’ve been having an every Monday morning management across the company meeting with our CEO and other executives talking about what the topics are of the day, whether it’s around how to achieve work-life balance, what we’re doing in terms of prioritization, what’s going on with cash flow. Any of those things get discussed in that moment and then a weekly Wednesday Zoom that we’ve been doing, so you can tell we’re using Zoom, where again it’s the CEO talking to the rest of the company.

Again, we’re very transparent, very open culture so it’s a half hour, “Here’s what’s going on this week” kind of scenario. It’s been really fantastic. Then I’ve been doing two other things outside of the regular meetings, I’ve been having sales Hangouts and it’s not meant to be a, “Let’s go over this deal” or, “Let’s talk about this new program.” The first time we did it I had everybody bring a joke and we just sat together and told jokes. The second time we talked about different things and different opportunities that we were seeing in the market where we might be able to reach out to customers in different ways.

Earlier this week we did a session where it was just everybody bring either one personal win or one professional win from the previous week and share it across the team. It’s a half an hour of connection as opposed to a work thing or a specific thing that we’re trying to move forward. We did a Zoom contest where we had fun backgrounds this past week, just trying to add a little bit of fun because everywhere you look, it’s negative so adding a little bit of fun and competition and excitement to the path is what we’re trying to do at the same time.

Fred Diamond: Here’s what’s going on now, we’re getting a whole bunch of questions from our attendees and it’s about to get serious right now. There’s basically two audiences for you as a sales leader, there’s your people – how do you manage and how do you motivate them and keep them elevated today? But we’re getting a slew of questions coming in here asking about how are you dealing with your customers. We’re going to do a very short poll right now and then we’re going to take some questions, we’re going to modify a little bit and ask some questions.

Let’s go off script a little bit here and let’s talk about the real world. Again, there’s managing the people and there’s the real world of customers. Randy, you’re nodding your head. What are you doing? Again, the question was are you making any exceptions or payment plans for customers that have invoices that are past or due?

Randy Wood: This is very timely. This one phenomena is happening at a breathtaking pace. At Akamai we serve some of the biggest brands in the world in commerce, retail, travel, entertainment, the cruise lines, for example and hotels and airlines who are all dramatically impacted by this. At the same time we serve other brands, media streaming brands, online gaming brands which are frankly doing quite well right now for obvious reasons.

With respect to the brands that are impacted, we are being as creative and as good a business partner as we can be by doing things like extending payment terms, in some cases 90, 120 and 180 days by providing other concessions such as contract production on a monthly or quarterly basis. The idea is this, we need to invest with our customers in the good times and celebrate the good times and the joint wins and at the same time we need to make equal commensurate investments in the bad times as they work through these troubles.

There’s no alternatives, this is what it means to be a good partner, to be an essential partner and to make our customer successful. I think this pays dividends along the way and I want to go back to a point Denise made because I think it’s important. The opportunity here is to be nothing but real and authentic, we are all human beings and we’re all in it together. Listen, ethical leadership is important and I think this touches on ethical leadership. At Akamai, ethical leadership means having profits and purpose and not compromising one without the other and we’re in the business to make money, let’s be clear, returning shareholder is important but purposes is important.

Right now I think purpose outweighs profits and just about anything else so stay true to your purpose, let’s be very close to our customers. For us, pricing concessions are top of mind. I’m approving five a day right now for some pretty large brand and pretty large monthly spend.

Fred Diamond: DG, I’m going to ask that question to you as well. Another question came in via LinkedIn which is along the lines of this and I’m going to speak to the question, it’s really about how do you help your customers. A quick note, my apologies, we accidentally hit the poll close button too soon but I’m going to guess the stress level with customers is pretty high. This is for DG, it’s a follow onto the question we just asked and then Denise, I’ll ask you as well. Are there any programs as a company that you’re doing to help your customers that are suffering from anxiety, uncertainty during this time?

This is getting in the way of my productivity at times, for example, when big news is released such as Marriott furloughing or laying off people. Again, DG, we talked about this in the beginning. Your customer serves event planners and actually, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we’re a customer of yours and we do 50 events per year, we don’t do some at the level of some of your big customers but how are you guys helping your customers who are dealing with anxiety, stress, layoffs, furloughs, etcetera?

Darrell Gehrt: I think, Fred, when all of this started to take shape, one of the things that we did was we formed a SWAT team to deal with customers who have requests like Randy was talking about. We serve the hotel industry, we serve event planners and they’re being heavily impacted and they’re coming to us and they’re saying, “How can you help us?” Rather than trying to train up a sales team of 850 people to have those conversations, we created a SWAT team that can help handle those questions. It allows us to be consistent, anytime you do something a lot you get better at it so we’ve done all kinds of things, every situation is different, everybody has different apps. From a business perspective, one of the things that is actually coming out of this is that people are saying, “Can we extend our contract with you? You’re proving to be a great partner, thank you for these concessions.” Purpose before profits, I love that, Randy. I think what happens is when you put purpose before profits you get long-term profits so yes, we have to have these conversations. We are doing things for our customers, they’re all unique. I hope that answers the question, Fred, I’m not sure if there was another component for that or not.

Fred Diamond: Denise, I’ll ask you the next one. The person who asked that question, thank you. It was a two-part question, how are you helping customers and are you doing anything special for employees, your sales team? We’ve talked before and we’ll talk a little more about ways you’re coaching them but how about if your salesperson is selling to Marriott or some of the companies are Disney or some of the companies like that, that are just pure and simple shutting down? They’re not going to reopen for let’s say best case scenario weeks but probably months. You’re selling to the entertainment industry which is almost totally shut down. Denise, is your company or are other companies serving their employees with EAP programs or extra counseling or something?

Denise Hayman: Absolutely, there are a myriad of programs that are being offered to everyone, everything from free class pass stuff for exercising, meditation live, there’s obviously telemedicine options via our healthcare providers for the people who don’t feel like they have to go somewhere. If you need somebody to talk to, you need some stress relief, there’s been really interesting things that have come up across the company as well, people are doing Zoom sessions around happy hour kinds of things or stress relief scenarios. There’s a yoga class that’s happening a couple times a week, meditation classes starting to happen, there’s a lot of people who are pitching in to try to help others where they have time as well as recognizing – I think we’re going to talk about this.

The big thing that we’re seeing right now is the impact to people whose kids are not in school anymore, the scenario of not only being working from home and maybe two parents working from home but maybe two or three little kids who are having to be supervised around a school program means that work has to suffer. We’ve been very implicit about saying family comes first absolutely in this situation, if this means that you’re not going to be able to get all your stuff done, we just want you to have a conversation with your manager and figure out if there are other people that can step in.

Our employee experience team just did a survey around understanding where people are against their full productivity and if they have extra space to be able to offer up to others as well. People offer grocery shopping, people offer, “I could teach this, I could take this thing off your plate” just really coming together as a community and remembering that everyone is in it together is the most important part right now.

Fred Diamond: We have a follow up that came in from LinkedIn as well and I’ll ask this to DG and Randy. DG, by the way, is Darrell Gehrt with Cvent, he’s known as DG. On the Sales Game Changers podcast right before we take a break I say, “Sales is hard, people don’t return your phone calls or your emails, why have you continued?” and most of the Sales Game Changers talk about service. “We’re providing a service, we’re helping our customers achieve their mission, we like the challenge, we like the money” or whatever it might be. Now at this moment in time we’re adding the stress level of this, of having to deal not just with sales being hard but the whole Covid-19 which we don’t know where it’s going to end. DG and Randy, what added things are you having to do or hasn’t kicked in yet to guide your people along? DG, you have a lot of people who are first or second job out of school. Randy, your organization is a little more widespread but are you having to be more of a coach, more of a therapist, if you will, at this time versus just a sales leader? DG.

Darrell Gehrt: I’ll pivot from Denise’s message. We talked about empathy at the top part of this call, yes, we’re doing a lot of programs for employees too but the thing that overrides all of that is the human connection, the empathy, we have to have empathy for our salespeople and understanding that they’re hurting out there, too. Deals are pushed and of course business is still moving forward but you’ve got to have empathy for them and that empathy can come in a lot of forms. Two of my senior managers both just had kids so they’re dealing with that and yes, we have to be flexible, we have to be empathetic to what they’re going through and I think if you’re open and you’re communicating with your people then those problems can all be solved. That really has been a big focus of ours, that’s a message from the top down and something that I’m telling my leaders, too. Get on the phone, get on the Zoom. Get on there, show your face, let them know you’re real. As a senior leader, we need to make sure that we’re talking to our folks one-on-one and hearing them individually.

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you?

Randy Wood: Fred, as a leader I believe that the role of the leader is to see the organization not as it is but as it can become and to get focused on the future. For me, that’s either creating or in this case reinforcing a vision that you can create by and for, that helps people put this situation into context to deal with the situation again to provide some reassurance in a time of uncertainty. With respect to seeing the organization as it can become, to me that’s certainty. Let’s talk about certainty, there’s a lot of talk about uncertainty here in these times of uncertainty and I sent an email out to this effect earlier this week to my team.

There’s a lot of uncertainty but let’s talk about what’s certain, I’m certain we’re going to come out of this, I’m certain we’re going to be better as people, as a society, I’m certain our customers are going to be better off and in a better position in maybe not too much from now, but I’m certain about that and I’m certain there’s an opportunity here for us to be better advocates for our customer. Let’s focus on what the organization does look like when we come out of this, that’s the role of the leader. Also, just in terms of clear, compelling and simple communications, this is something new that I’ve started doing. For me it’s about creating a rally cry or a mantra for the organization, something that the people can say to themselves as they try and deal with this and take care of themselves and at the same time take care of their customers and get back to work.

What I settled on in Akamai in my role is the idea that tough times don’t last, tough people do and by tough I don’t mean physically tough, let’s get spiritually tough, let’s be mentally tough, let’s be physically tough and let’s be tough for our families, for our customers, for ourselves. That seems to be a rally cry, a mantra that my organization has bought into, it’s the hashtag #ToughTimesDontLast, it’s about creating that vision. I’ll say it again back to Denise’s point, it’s about being authentic. People need authenticity.

Fred Diamond: If you have a question that you’d like to ask the panelists, Denise Hayman from Expel, Darrell Gehrt from Cvent, Randy Wood from Akamai. I want to thank our panelists for giving such great insights here. We’ve got a couple more questions here that have come in through the internet and these are all similar so I’m going to ask all three of these questions. It’s a good question right now and it deals with the whole concept of calling into new prospects.

Do you think cold calling people right now and let’s just say prospecting versus cold calling, cold calling people who don’t know you right now is a good idea or should we ask our team to stop that for the time being? If you do encourage them to be cold calling/prospecting, what guidance are you giving them regarding prospecting right now? DG, why don’t you start with that and then we’ll ask that to the panel? Should you be cold calling, prospecting? We talked about reaching out to your existing customers and seeing how they’re doing, empathy, etcetera. Should you call brand new customers today? If so, what should you be saying?

Darrell Gehrt: Our sales organization is bifurcated into two groups, one that focuses on existing customers, one that is out looking for new customers. Yes, we do still need to do that. Part of that is to Randy’s point, tough times don’t last, tough people do. One of the things I’ve been very bullish on saying is it is not business as usual but it is business moving forward and those cold calls that we’re making have to sound different, everybody has to pivot their message a little bit right now. It comes back with the servitude, I think Denise had mentioned this earlier as well, servant-based management and that’s to our customers, too.

What we’re doing with our cold calls is offering up, “If you want to hear what the industry is saying and what customers are doing with their events, we’ve got 20,000 customers so we’re in a unique position to hear a lot of things. If you’re interested in that then let me know and I’d be happy to schedule some time with you.” I’m not begging them for meetings, I’m offering to share with them. Sometimes with salespeople, we’ve got to think of ourselves as educators and that’s really the cold calls that we’re making, again with an end goal that hopefully they appreciate the relationship that we’re trying to build with them and they invite us back in for further conversations. If they don’t I’m instructing my team to move on and talk with some other folks and it will heal, but I guarantee you, those folks that you’ve cold called if you did it professionally and without the normal push that we might have as aggressive salespeople, they’ll remember that a month or two months from now when you call them again. I guarantee we’ll have people say, “Hey, I got your message before, thanks for reaching out. Timing wasn’t good but yes, I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

Fred Diamond: Denise, how about you?

Denise Hayman: I love the idea of first of all, changing the messaging. Clearly the message has to change, you can’t just do what was done even a month ago and I think it’s really all about selling right now or positioning to the need as opposed to the situation. In our business we’re very much against things that are called ambulance chasers, in the security world when you hear something bad and lots of people swoop in to take advantage of that. In this particular situation we’re doing things like our normal program is an annual program and we’re saying, “Maybe you have shorter term needs that you can’t even see a year out, maybe you can only see a month out. Let’s talk to you about something that you might be able to do for a month or two to get you through with where you are.”

Fred Diamond: Randy, how are you coaching your team right now to have those business conversations to new audiences?

Randy Wood: Good salespeople focus on ways to create and communicate value and positive business outcomes. I think there’s an opportunity here to create very positive business outcomes for our customers using our technology harnessing innovation. The amount of innovation that’s emerging from this situation is breathtaking. If there’s innovation, solutions and technologies that are relevant, that are pertinent to creating positive business outcomes for our customers then we absolutely should bring that to market but we need to do that as Darrell and Denise said, in respectful ways.

We need to be respectful of customer’s priorities and maybe right now it’s not the time to have that conversation but there are even in Akamai very compelling solutions that we can bring to market today, and in some cases in the free scenario that make a real compelling difference to our customers. We’re looking for opportunities to have those conversations but again being very respectful of where our customers find themselves and what their priorities are.

Fred Diamond: Once again, if you’re listening in we have time for a couple more questions, we have a few more questions we want to get to. Again, I want to thank our panel today, Denise Hayman, Darrell Gehrt and Randy Wood for really giving us ideas. We didn’t expect to have to shift our sales approach like this, it wasn’t part of the plans but what’s something new that you’re now doing as a response that is actually working well that you maybe see becoming part of your usual process? Denise, why don’t you get us started?

Denise Hayman: The biggest thing for us is I think the one that I just mentioned, changing our licensing model from an annual only or even a multi-year scenario to shorter terms, and even doing pieces of an architecture that we’re covering versus the entire thing. Really just flexing and as a component of that, I’ve done a thing where we’re putting in a triage sales deal desk because I can tell you, this past week there have been so many that are unusual deals that trying to figure out, “Do we want to do this one? Does this one sound interesting?”

One of our values is meeting customers where they are so trying to meet them where they are means that we need to figure out which things work for us and which don’t so this triage deal desk scenario we’re putting in place to be able to cycle through and filter out the ones that work for us. That’s a big one that we’re doing.

If I could add one other tip to the things that we were talking about in terms of the cold calling and the ways that we’re going about it, one of my sales guys came up with this and I thought it was brilliant. He has been sending out coffee gift certificates or gift cards and asking for a 15-minute coffee with people via Zoom and it’s a light touch, it’s collaborative, it’s different. I don’t know how many of you have gotten those, I actually got one the other day that was meant to support the local community, I thought it was great. Just doing things in a light touch collaborative way and getting our message out, it’s definitely working.

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you? Anything new you’re doing that’s been responses?

Randy Wood: Good, I want to use that idea, I’ve got a bunch of ideas about that. I think one of the biggest things that’s come out of this for us at Akamai is that we are beginning to really engage customers in a new digital way. Not that we haven’t before, but digital marketing, digital connection, an increase on social marketing is really the focus right now. We cancelled our live events globally through July at this point and it may extend into August and September. There’s a lot of sunk costs there so we’re not flush with cash on recouping that money from those events so we’ve got to find new ways to connect with customers in very relevant and compelling ways.

For example, on April 7th we’re having a digital, virtual Akamai Edge event and right now I think we’ve got about 1,000 customers enrolled and it turns out that it’s a fantastic lightweight, compelling, immersive way to connect with customers and to bring them very timely, very relevant, very useful content that they can apply now in the current situation. I think for us, that’s one of them and I think in terms of transformation, Fred, the world will change dramatically. What we’re doing right here is compelling. I have a college junior home right now who’s doing all course work online and I told her she needed to be off the internet at 2:00 o’clock, she was doing office hours to make sure I had sufficient bandwidth but that’s one example of, “We’re doing work, we’re communicating, we’re collaborating.” I think this is compelling so in a digital way the world will transform to the positive and dramatically.

Fred Diamond: Before we get to our final question, again I want to thank our panelists Denise Hayman, Darrell Gehrt and Randy Wood. Today is March 25th and for a lot of companies that’s what I like to call 6 days away from the end of the quarter. This question came in from the internet for DG and I’m going to ask DG this question, then we’ll go to the final question. I love what DG – Darrell Gehrt – said that business is not the same but there needs to be business continuity. With the end of the quarter approaching us, what are some of the best practices you’re using to bring deals across the finish line?” End of quarter usually this week, a lot of companies are chugging away trying to get some extra things in, obviously it’s a unique situation. DG, why don’t you take that? And then we’re going to ask the panel for their final thoughts.

Darrell Gehrt: I think one of the things that we’re stressing around Cvent is this is also an opportunity for us as sales reps and I’m talking introspectively, here. It’s an opportunity for us to all sharpen our sales skills so Fred, I think what you’re doing with the Sales Game Changers putting this together, giving thought leadership, I too have taken a couple notes, this is great, I’m enjoying the rock stars that I’m sharing the webcam with. But we have to sharpen our skills and I keep telling my reps, “If you want to close deals in Q1 you need to listen better.” I think sometimes we move too fast. Listen, what is it that they really want? What is really in their way? In today’s day, what is really giving them pause? What are you concerned about? Randy is a good example, he’s got events for the first half of the year that are gone, they’re not going to do it anymore and they have to pivot so we’re pivoting on virtual events but we’re also doing some things contractually. We’re allowing our reps to put some line within the agreement that says, “If there is an event you have to move, maybe you have to move that September event that you’re still planning on having today, you want to move it, how can we work with you to get the right kinds of concessions proactively so that you can sign this agreement and still have the comfort level that you need if this should extend out a little bit longer?” We still have to close business but we have to listen to our customers.

Fred Diamond: Again, I want to thank the panelists, I want to give them one final question. Also want to thank all the people listening on today’s webinar, I’m looking at the attendee list, we have people all over the world. A nice mix of IES members and people that have found us via LinkedIn and probably people that are also big fans of Randy, Denise and DG, Darrell Gehrt. Final question here. Last week everyone was dealing with the newness of working from home trying to adjust using Zoom and a lot of other remote technology. Again, we’re going to be doing this webinar every week for the foreseeable future with three different Sales Game Changers podcast guests but what do you think the challenges will be in the next week as we lead up to next Wednesday’s productivity webinar? Denise, why don’t you get us started here? What do you think the challenges are going to be in the next seven days?

Denise Hayman: I think since we’ve been at this as a company for three weeks we might be at the tip of the spear on this. One of the things that we are starting to see is this balance of life spirit. In the beginning it was like, “Mom’s home” or, “Dad’s home” and that’s nice, we can have access to them. Now kids are getting bored and babysitters aren’t showing up, daycare isn’t happening and life has changed. One of the things that we’re talking about regularly as a team is, “What do you need covered for you so that you can take care of your family today?”

This balance thing, making sure we have internet during the time when we need it, that was my biggest thing. I had to read the riot act to my family, “Everybody leave between two and three, you can’t get on, no Netflix, I don’t want the dryer buzzer going” all of that is just different. Balancing and recognizing new rituals and this has really been my mantra this week, talking about rituals. What are those things that you used to be able to count on before that are no longer true? What’s your new ritual for that? What does your new morning look like? What does your new lunch look like? What does your new time that the family knows that you can’t be disturbed? What are those rituals to make it feel more consistent?

Fred Diamond: Randy, how about you? What does the next weekend look like, what are the challenges?

Randy Wood: I think very much in step with Denise and what she communicated. I’m concerned, Fred, that we’re going to migrate, evolve from this idea of exuberance to disillusionment and I’ll give two metaphors here. What I mean by this is last week this was exuberant, this was exciting, the hard times notwithstanding and it’s new. In a week, two weeks from now I think we run the risk of hitting some level of disillusionment. If you remember the Tom Hanks castaway movie, that moment of disillusionment was when he began to talk and interact with a volleyball, with Wilson.

Metaphorically, I think we need to make sure our employees don’t begin to interact with volleyballs and I think that’s a real concern. We need to communicate in predictable repeatable, simple, compelling ways. The final metaphor I would give – and this is for everybody – I’d go back to the continental army and George Washington and the Revolutionary War. In that final winner they set up camp in Valley Forge and that army could have done two things, they could have hunkered down and waited for spring to come or they could have done what they did which is get out of their tents and they brought in, I think it was Baron Von Steuben who drilled that army every day and taught them how to fight. In the third week in June they went on to have their biggest defeat I think in Monmouth, New Jersey and that’s the opportunity. That’s the metaphor, that’s what we can do here.

Let’s not talk to volleyballs, let’s make sure our customers, our employees aren’t doing that and at the same time let’s get out of our tents and let’s prepare ourselves for the summer and the spring that’s ahead of us that’s going to bring the good times back.

Fred Diamond: Darrell Gehrt, DG, why don’t you bring us home here with the same question? What’s the challenges of the next week and what do you think people should be doing?

Darrell Gehrt: I was going to say fatigue, some part of what Randy is saying. Part of running a race, to use a sports analogy, is understanding how long that race is. The way you run a 10K is different than you run a mile sprint and there is some disillusionment I think still that, “Hey, we’re going to have this for a couple weeks and then I’m going to be back in the office” and I don’t know if that’s going to be the case. This might be more like a six week run of work from home.

To Denise’s point, you have to find your routines and I actually sent out a note to the sales team yesterday about, “Here are some tips for working from home.” They weren’t necessarily mine because I don’t normally work from home so I too am having to get educated on how to run this 10K. Finding your own space, finding a way to communicate, getting out and walking. I think people have to pace themselves and be realistic with how long we might be in this situation. Let me pair that with the opportunity which is to try to continue moving business forward. It’s not business as usual, it’s moving business forward and what I’ve been really encouraged by is as we’re talking to customers, they too want to keep moving business forward.

Again, empathy is a table stakes, you have to have that, you have to be authentic. Denise, I love that word as well. What I love about sales and at least I’ve done it for 30 years is that every day is different and everything is different. Our CEO said, “Don’t bite this, embrace this.” This is an opportunity for all of us to learn and to grow and as long as I’ve been around, I’ve never dealt with this and everybody on this phone call is in the same shoes so while I hope we provided nice tips today, understand you too, we’re all trying to figure this thing out. Together we’ll win.

Fred Diamond: Once again, the Institute for Excellence in Sales is going to be holding two webinars per week every Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock Eastern, we’re going to have three Sales Game Changers podcast guests. I want to thank Randy Wood from Akamai, Darrell Gehrt from Cvent and Denise Hayman from Expel who will be on a Sales Game Changers podcast in April. Every Friday we’re going to have a little bit of a different twist at 11:00 o’clock Eastern Time, we’re going to bring one of our Institute for Excellence in Sales sales expert speakers to do a 45 minute webinar on creativity in sales. It’s one of the key themes that just came up from our three leaders, you’re going to have to figure out how to be creative, how do you modify your day, how do you change up your conversations with your customers. We’re going to be talking about how you become more creative in sales especially over the next couple of weeks. Tom Snyder will be the guest on Fridays. First we’re going to be doing those every week, have Andy Miller, Bill Cates and John Asher, people like that on that particular webinar. You could find out how to register on the Institute for Excellence in Sales website, I4ESBD.org. One more time, thank you so much to our esteemed panel for the great insights. My name is Fred Diamond, now go out there and go sell.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 216: SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE LEARNING EVENT: Sales Transformation and Solutions During the COVID-19 Panel Discussion first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.