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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on June 26, 2020. It featured sales expert and President of Funnel Clarity Tom Snyder,]

Register for Thursday’s OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET: Rewire Your Sales Brain to Be More Valuable to Your Customers with Klyn Elsbury here.

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EPISODE 266: Tom Snyder’s Six Keys to Thriving in Transition and How Being Proactive is the Key to Them All

TOM’S TIP TO SALES LEADERS: “The more sudden, the more unexpected and the more dramatic the change, the greater is the opportunity to thrive or fail. Survival is not a strategy. Starting today and for the rest of the time that we are adjusting to this new world, I want you to pick a block of time every day on your calendar. You determine whether that’s 10 minutes or 2 hours, I don’t care, but I want that block of time to be something PROACTIVE. Work on your skills, take some training, reach out to people who you don’t know, prospect through LinkedIn. It is the single collective biggest difference between people who are thriving and doing great against quota versus those who are barely getting there.”

Fred Diamond: Tom, your company, Funnel Clarity, works with hundreds of companies around the globe, you’ve personally trained tens of thousands of sales professionals to get better at consultative and professional sales and I’m very excited to learn from you today. Let’s get right to it.

Tom Snyder: Thanks, Fred and thanks, everybody who’s joined us, it is wonderful to be back with you. When Fred and I were discussing how we might put together this particular event, we both commented on the fact that there has been now three months of a continuous drum beat around how to survive. You’ve got this enormous amount of talk around empathy, you’ve got an enormous talk around the blending of home life and work life but I wanted to highlight some things today about how you can actually thrive, not just survive and that’s more than just a clever poetic reference. What we’ve done is we’ve begun a study by looking at people’s calendars and comparing their calendar activities to the degree to which they are on path to exceed quota.

The early results are interesting because what I’m going to be describing is something that is emerging from the research that says the greater the degree of proactivity scheduled in a person’s calendar the more likely they are not just surviving but they are really making an enormous advance. You’d be surprised how many salespeople we have found who are absolutely crushing their quota and in particular, those who are crushing their quota when compared to their colleagues in the same company who are suffering. I want to highlight some of the things we’ve seen thus far, by no means do we have enough data yet to say these are definitive but these are certainly things that look like they directionally will bear out and that you can adopt. There is no reason to think you need all six, no one person we’ve encountered have all six but each of these things appears to make a contribution to this idea of, “Let’s not just hunker down and make it work but let’s really get ourselves in a great position.”

The theme of today is this one, the more sudden, the more unexpected, the more dramatic a change, the greater is the opportunity and that opportunity is to thrive or fail. Deciding that you’re going to survive isn’t really a strategy because survival has with it the connotation of a lack of momentum, it has a connotation of sustainment and I’m not just trying to play a clever use of words here. You really have from what we’ve seen a binary choice, you can seek to grow your business and expand, grow your funnel and expand, become even more intimate with your ongoing clients or someone else will. Before I get any further into these six keys I want to make one caveat, if you’re among the unfortunate few whose companies have shut down temporarily or you’ve been furloughed or things like that, obviously my heart goes out to you and hopefully this will end very soon but this is really for the folks who are still working in our sales profession. I’m going to do a very quick review of what doesn’t work, I’m going to talk a little bit about thriving versus surviving, science is what tells us how to win, part of the science is looking at large data samples, we are doing that, we are looking at calendar activity against performance and that has resulted in our ability to understand what these six keys look like in terms of getting opportunity.

I’m going to periodically pause down, Fred, voice any questions that may have come across. Contrast is usually fairly useful, let me tell you, when we look at this comparison of calendar activity to performance the idea of hunkering down doesn’t really work.

What we’re talking about around hunkering down is being in an entirely reactive posture, going to the company meetings that are on Webex or Zoom, waiting for emails, waiting for things to happen, that is probably the single behavior trait we’ve seen reflected in people’s calendars that is the most dramatic in terms of poor performance against what they want to do. #2, continuing to approach their marketplace and their opportunities the same way they always did and just telling themselves they’re going to work harder.

One of the interesting things is how many times we see people booking lots and lots of check-in calls with existing customers. When you dissect what they mean by check-in calls it’s, “How’s it going?” whatnot without an agenda that really drives something. Incremental change, the world has changed and probably permanently in lots of ways and many of those things we’re not even aware of yet, therefore the person who can respond to the opportunity side of this sudden unanticipated, unusual, once-in-a-generation occurrence is the one who’s really going to win but they’re not going to win by just making minor adjustments. Waiting for the next phase, I was struck by the fact that every state has a different definition and sometimes every city and county have a different definition of what they mean by phase one reopening, phase two. It’s not about a phase, it’s about the fact that many businesses continue to move on. It probably means that you at least have to consciously look at refining your skill sets and it may mean actually learning something new. The other part of it is focusing on the problems rather than brainstorming new ideas and new ways of approaching the market. Fred, anything thus far before I get into the six tactics?

Fred Diamond: No, I’m excited. I liked all of those of course but I’m excited to see how people can move forward. Everyone’s business has changed, your plan that you had in January is gone, it’s totally invalid and the same thing is true with your customer and your customer’s customer, and your customer’s customer’s customer. The successful sales professionals that we’ve seen, Tom, are the ones who aren’t thinking about implementing January’s plan even incrementally like you talked about, it’s about rethinking how they’re bringing value to their customer. It’s interesting because you and I have talked about value so many times over the years and you have helped companies understand that sales is about continually creating value for their customers. Value is a word that got pushed away a little bit over the last couple of months because people have been adjusting to working from home and getting used to the meetings over Zoom and homeschooling and all those things. I’m interested to see how value purveys the conversation as we move forward but it’s almost been put on the shelf there for a little bit because everyone’s had to be responsive to all the new circumstance.

Tom Snyder: I would definitely echo that, I would say that the definition of value for everyone both on the selling and the buying side of every business to business transaction was a bit hazy for a while. It is beginning to emerge in a very clear way, you’ll see that reflected in these tactics but the other part I wanted to mention, remember, we’re looking at hundreds of calendars on a weekly basis looking at the activities and then measuring that against performance. One of the startling things is that for the highest performers there is a stark difference between what their calendar looked like even through mid-February and what it looks like today. In some cases it has fewer appointments but it’s interesting how those appointments are directed in different areas. Let me give you quickly what the six tactics are.

One, really active in finding new relationships be that on LinkedIn, be that in professional chat rooms, wherever. #2, using technology for what it is intended. We’re all familiar now with Zoom, Zoom fatigue, Webex fatigue, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about available technology that can briefly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness you have in dealing with folks. Digital marketing efforts have become ever more critical whether that’s on a personal level or a company level. Inside sales skills, I don’t think this should be a big surprise but maybe we haven’t thought about it. It’s phenomenal the degree to which these people who are most successful – let’s call it the top 5% – what began to emerge in their calendar was this idea of, “I’m now an inside sales rep whether I like it or not. I’m not going anywhere, I’m not visiting clients, I’m not setting face-to-face meetings, I’m an inside salesperson.”

Whether you call that digital sales or inside sales it is a different skill set, it is not the same skill set even when you are on camera, it is a different skill set in terms of selling on inside. Re-framing your solutions, obviously this is something that’s been quite startling. I’ll give you an example when we get there but really thinking through what are the problems that your solutions address against the context of today’s world? One of the things that’s really important is something we call brainstorming which is not the same thing most people think it is. There is a science to brainstorming but these three things, brainstorm, listen and be relentless, I think are also emerging from these things. I’m going to walk through each of these six so Fred, unless you have something, why don’t we go to the first one?

Fred Diamond: Yep.

Tom Snyder: The idea here I want to emphasize is proactive versus reactive, I could sum up everything I’m going to tell you by saying that if you look at the calendars of people who are doing extraordinarily well against quota versus those who are not, it’s actually those who are average. If you compare excellent and average you get much closer to excellent than when you compare excellent to poor. You will see a much higher percentage of proactivity as opposed to the meetings I’m forced to go to or the things I’m forced to submit, etcetera. Establishing new relationships, assemble at least 10 new targets a week, that isn’t that difficult. If you are doing LinkedIn Boolean searches, you pull out the key words and reach out to people. Remember, you’re reaching out to them with a personalized note, you’re not just hitting the ‘send an invitation’ button.

It’s amazing how many people in the top performers are adding a lot of new individuals every week, that means putting the time to do it in the calendar. Doing research on who among your client base may actually be doing very well and why they’re doing well. That’s important because it gives you an insight into who else you might reach out to because you look for those characteristics that say, “This is why they’re thriving.” More about that in a moment. The sweet spot of opportunity – if you think about a Venn diagram and that Venn diagram is one circle is the solutions you offer, one circle is the solutions that your competitors offer and that’s got a little overlap, and then the third is the circle of problems that a customer needs solved. Everybody’s tendency in this world is to look at the intersection of all three circles, that little thing in the middle that looks like a rounded triangle, that’s the land of commoditized selling.

The part that matters most is the part where the problems your customer base is trying to solve intersect with the solutions you have and the competitor doesn’t do it. This is a really important time to be thinking that through because in many worlds today, how you sell is more important than what you’re selling meaning how can you help the potential customer or the current customer understand their own business better? How can you help them anticipate problems they don’t see? It’s now a super critical thing to do, that means allocate time every single day to these two things, put it in the calendar. If you want to know the single biggest thing about what happens with the highly effective versus the average folks in this pandemic is they are scheduling time in their calendar for these proactive things and one little hint, they also leave themselves enough time between these obligations that life can happen.

One of the things that we always say is this idea in sales is creating value with every interaction rather than trying to communicate value, creating value is a skill set, creating value takes discovery on the part of the customer, not just discovery on the part of the seller. That means planning on how you’re going to do that in every case and one of the things everybody is hungry for these days are data. All of these prospects out there that are still functioning are looking for some sort of data-driven insight. One of the things that drives me crazy is how many people on LinkedIn and how many people on webinars claim to know a lot of things about how to deal with this pandemic and I say, “Nonsense.” I think it’s assumptive, I think it’s a joke, if you don’t have data you don’t really know and the person who can bring data is the person who is king. Fred, anything you want to ask me there?

Fred Diamond: I’m reminded of a number of things that you’ve taught the Institute for Excellence in Sales over the years and the science behind selling is obviously something that you’ve been a leader in. We have a question here, the question comes from Martin, “Should I be prospecting for new business?” You mentioned here assemble at least 10 new targets a week so let’s talk about that for a little bit. There’s been a lot of conversation, Tom, about going back to your existing clients and optimizing those, you’re one of the world leading experts on prospecting. Prior to the pandemic happening we talked all the time about new business strategies, prospecting, bringing value, bringing them data, should people be prospecting for brand new logos today? Give us some of your insights into why they should.

Tom Snyder: I can talk about this for three hours but I’m going to sum it up in a couple of things. #1, the last thing I’m telling you is to ignore your existing clients, that’s not the point. Of course you should be prospecting, change is the engine of opportunity. What did I say in the beginning? Every bit of science says the more dramatic, the more sudden, the more unexpected the change the greater is the opportunity to thrive or fail and I promise you, your competitors are doing nothing to reach out to new business. That doesn’t necessarily mean the folks out there that aren’t your clients are getting great service from their current provider no one has quite figured that out yet so it is the perfect time to be prospecting. #2, assemble 10 new targets means 10 new relationships, it doesn’t necessarily mean 10 new prospects, it means 10 new relationships. We can talk another time about how some of those may convert, but this is one of the things that if you look at people who are doing extremely well, they’re building their network of professional contacts. They are also prospecting but it’s a bigger story than that.

Fred Diamond: Lisa says, “Right on, right on, right on!”

Tom Snyder: I want you to forget what’s always worked. Again, what’s always worked is a nice history lesson, we can all sit back and say, “Remember the day so long ago in late 2019 when X, Y, Z?” Forget it, you’re going to write a new script, you’re going to write a new plan and that’s what it’s about. I want to talk briefly about technology, I don’t want to sound like I’m shilling for these technologies but what I’m using is examples. I don’t know if you’ve seen LinkedSelling, this is not the same company as LinkedIn, LinkedSelling Connect 365, a very interesting way of being highly efficient and seeking new contacts. ZoomInfo or – although it’s gobbling up all of its competitors – any of its competitors as a source for how to get in contact with people. Outreach.io on how to have an automated cadence of reaching out to people in a very efficient way to try to be memorable and contact them. SalesLoft, things like that, I’m not saying those technologies, I’m saying think about the technologies that you have in resident, are you utilizing them as much as you can?

Think about the technologies you maybe want to consider to take on. Part of your problem is that every bit of research will tell you that the volume of email has gone up between 200% and 400% that the average business person is receiving. The volume of voicemails has gone up equally at large so your challenge of getting in contact with people is twice to four times as difficult, therefore being memorable, being able to rise above it, that’s something you really want to look at so when you look at the excellent people in that calendar thing, one of the things you notice is they have refined and/or really leveraged the technology stack available to them.

Fred Diamond: You actually did talk in the very beginning about Zoom and technologies like that and GoToMeeting. One thing that we’re advising people on is become an expert on all those technologies. For example, I just learned last week that you can send handouts via GoToMeeting so you could always email them ahead of time but you can use GoToMeeting, you can use Zoom, you can use GoToWebinar to do things like distributing handouts. One thing I also learned last week was we shifted our video from 4:3 to 16:9, we actually did that a couple days ago with one of our webcast guests, become experts on this. Tom, in the very beginning people were getting used to using the dot and just communicating, now some of the companies that we’re working with are spending time on getting their people to be better at selling now because we’re going to be at home at least through the summer. Some companies said they’re not going to be bringing people back to the office until January potentially so people are looking for better ways to use this.

One of the people we had on the Sales Game Changers webcast a couple days ago said she has an edict, no more T-shirts when your camera is on even for internal meetings. You are now to wear buttoned down shirts or as if you’re coming to work so we’ve seen a lot of people getting more skilled on using the dot not just to communicate but to sell from as well.

Tom Snyder: There’s a wealth of things here. Again, each of these topics we could spend a great deal of time on but I think it’s a great set of points, Fred, and let me just march on here. I do also want to emphasize that anyone who is not using LinkedIn Navigator, I realize it can be pricey, it is a gigantic leg-up in this world of remote working in sales. Engage with digital marketing, what do we mean by that? Find real SEO expertise if you’re at a manager/senior/executive level, the world is full of people who claim to have SEO expertise. It’s like marriage counseling, anybody can claim they have it. Google changes the algorithm 700 times a month so somebody is going to be an SEO expert they need to understand how to keep pace with the changes that are going on real time all the time. It’s the perfect time to explore online advertising particularly on the forms of LinkedIn, perhaps on Facebook, that kind of thing.

Most people have also not realized that website optimization requires quite a number of things, we’ve been surprised at how many people have not realized that the Google crawlers aren’t even available to them, they aren’t even noticing their website, there’s a lot of behind-the-wall things that are going on. Innovative video – it’s funny, again if you’re a LinkedIn user you’ve noticed that over the course of the last year there’s just been this flood of videos, everybody’s doing video. What’s interesting is the degree of detail that people are putting into the production of those things when they have scheduled them in the calendar to really be thinking about them instead of doing them ad hoc. There’s a wealth of things you could do to set the background, as Fred said, to do things you can do and make those videos innovative, I think particularly the technologies that allow you to embed a video in an email without having the spam filter of the receiver catch it out. Fred, I’m going to continue to move ahead here a little bit just because I want to make sure I get through all this, it’s important stuff so let me have you hold questions for just a moment.

Inside or digital sale skills. The fact of the matter is that if we are reaching out to new people, our #1 job is to generate curiosity. We don’t do that by talking about ourselves, we do that by demonstrating that we know something about them they’ll be surprised that we know. We find that all over the place, that can be in news feeds, LinkedIn, Google, whatever. #2, effective listening, when I do get someone on the phone effective listening is not silence. Silence on the phone or on a Zoom call is awkward, effective listening is done by the things that you say, that means acknowledging by summarization, acknowledging by testing your understanding, things like that.

There is a new emergent aversion of objection handling, it is a modification of the one that’s always been taught. It has three components: acknowledge, empathize, inquire. Acknowledge, summarize what the person has just said, empathize without being saccharine and then inquire about details, inquire about clarification. There’s also an interesting thing that emerges from these calendar studies about the amount of time that these high performers are spending planning every single call. Most of the time that is done obviously mentally, people don’t have to write out everything but it appears to us – and we’re not sure of this yet, we’re taking a look at it – as though people who are high performing are really spending a lot of time. One thing I can tell you is they’re having less scheduled calls than a lot of the people who are not performing well. When you get behind that, the schedule and the calendar calls are mostly outreach calls for the people that are under-performing and those calls appear to have no planning. Again, more on that as we get the study done.

The key is to remember that professional sales is about guidance, not description. Professional sales is about coaching a decision that’s good for both you and the buyer, it’s not about describing how great what you have is going to be and when you’re doing this over digital as opposed to anything you were able to do before it becomes an even higher bar to climb over, it’s worth spending time on developing those skills. You influence, it’s good to remember, through inquiry, not description. The questions you ask, if all they are is to uncover information you need you’re not really hitting the high marks of what digital sales require, you should often be asking questions that you already know the answer to but that will cause the potential buyer or your customer to think more deeply.

I want you to be thinking about these things from the standpoint of ask yourself, “Am I sure that each of these things I can do as effectively if I might if I revisited them a bit?” Fred, have anything?

Fred Diamond: Why don’t we go through your remaining slides? Questions are coming in, we’ll take them after you go through so we don’t miss all the content.

Tom Snyder: Reframe your solutions. Change is an engine of opportunity but it’s an engine for the opportunities at the potential customer and existing customer also. I’ll give you an example, we have found a number of folks who sell IT services of one form or another to banks and credit unions, what happened when the government began the stimulus programs – payroll protection plan, the EIDL loans – and people could no longer or were no longer willing to go to the branch bank? The criminals had a heyday and things like online account takeover and theft of stimulus checks, this was a huge immediate and instant problem for banks, many of the folks who sell the fraud protection software were too slow to react, the sellers and the companies who were may have been making a fortune. That means you brainstorm, what is brainstorming? The brain does not do a good job of bouncing back and forth between creative ideas and judgement.

If you’re going to brainstorm you need to set a time, maybe it’s 3 minutes, maybe it’s 5 minutes and just let your brain stay on the creative side, no judgement. Write down any idea just as it comes to you, then when the bell goes off look back and strike out the 80% that were ridiculous or impractical, that way at the end of the week you’ll have a couple of really good ideas. One of the things I think and I mentioned this earlier, the really effective folks are working in bursts as opposed to scheduling a whole day or as opposed to scheduling even three or four hours at a time. They’re scheduling small increments so some of the things we talked about, they may only do for 20 minutes and then they have a break for 30 or they may only do it for 15 and they have a break for 15 because life happens and when you’re in this world that we’re in it’s good to be able to work in concentrated bursts. Also, there’s a really interesting trend in the day that we’re not certain of yet about calling not just existing customers but calling the folks that you know are big time fans of your solution and explore with them, brainstorm with them what new solutions, new problems you may be able to address.

Then this idea of not just looking at the industries you call on, reach across industries, talk to people who are in sales and other disciplines that maybe sell into the same customer. Really begin to look at intel as an important thing now that we’re all working at home and then this idea of “what if” thinking. I want to be careful there – not the, “What if the world fails?” or, “What if the pandemic continues?” It’s, “What if this could happen, what if we could perform this way?” Again, it’s an aspect of brainstorming. Then everyone is looking for the insights data can provide so any data that your marketing team has at your disposal, any kind of data you can find in industry studies, data from research organizations, that is all something people are hungry for. One thing you’ll notice in these folks that are performing well is they’re really falling back on using those data to drive value and create value for their customers and their prospects by giving them insights.

Mindset. If you know about the book Can’t Hurt Me, it was written by a guy named David Goggins who was considered the fittest man in the world, he’s the only person that ever was a navy SEAL and a US army ranger and a pararescue for the air force. One of the things that science tells these people who perform at an incredible level is that most of us only really use 40% of our capacity. This is not about the brain, this is not about the myth – which is a total myth – that we only use 10% of our brainpower, forget it, the science has proven that’s false. I’m talking about energy and focus, we usually only use 40% of it. This thing is here, spending time worrying about it is not going to solve anything, you’ve got to change and move. The fact is there aren’t any saviors, you are your own savior, you can think in terms of, “What am I going to do to hit a point of twice my own quota?” You have everything you need, you are smart, you are experienced, it’s a different world. Don’t just survive, I want you to thrive. Fred, questions.

Fred Diamond: Tom, thank you so much for the great insights. Someone asked here, Tom, “Should I be using Zoom or just use the phone?” You analyze thousands of sales organizations, we talked about that before. What’s your advice on that right now? Again, we talked about some skills for using Zoom for existing customers but from a prospecting perspective again we’re all home, we’re all in front of our computers. Should people be using Zoom to prospect or should they go back to the safety of the phone?

Tom Snyder: I’m going to answer this quickly, there’s a couple of different aspects to it. #1, there is an undertone, a hum of loneliness, not just loneliness about your social world but people are used to working in concert with others and therefore this isolation, the more I can see you, the more engaging it is. It’s difficult to prospect with Zoom, it’s difficult to reach out to clients with any sort of even Skype or any of the things like that but it’s not difficult if the call is scheduled. You can put yourself on camera, you don’t have to have necessarily them on camera. The more they see you, the science says the greater will be the responsiveness and the faster you form rapport.

Fred Diamond: Once again I want to thank Tom Snyder for the great insights today, I want to thank you all for watching today’s webcast. Tom, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales we like to give people an action they can do today and you’ve given us so many great ideas that people should be implementing. Give us an action step that the watchers of today’s webcast and the listeners of today’s podcast must do today to take their sales career to the next level.

Tom Snyder: Starting today and for the rest of the time that we are adjusting to this new world, whether the world opens up again tomorrow or in 2 years, I want you to pick a block of time every day on your calendar. You determine whether that’s 10 minutes or 2 hours, I don’t care, but I want that block of time to be something proactive. Work on your skills, take some training, reach out to people who you don’t know, prospect through LinkedIn, take something proactive. It is the single collective biggest difference between people who are thriving and doing great against quota versus those who are barely getting there.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 266: Tom Snyder’s Six Keys to Thriving in Transition and How Being Proactive is the Key to Them All 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.

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EPISODE 058: Sales Performance Improvement Guru Tom Snyder Shares Strategies to Ensure Funnel Clarity

Tom Snyder is the founder and managing partner at Funnel Clarity.

He’s a sales training and performance improvement expert and has helped companies around the globe with their sales performance improvement.

Tom’s also a published author of several McGraw-Hill bestselling business books and has spoken at the Institute for Excellence in Sales several times.

He has also mentored thousands of sales professionals as it comes to sales improvement topics, prospecting, account development, and sales strategy.

Find Tom on LinkedIN!

Tom Snyder: The most important thing to convey about me is that I have an incredible passion about the profession of sales and if you’ve ever heard me talk one of the things I emphasize over and over again is that I feel like too few of the folks in our profession have pride in the profession and I’m trying to be one of those voices in the world that says, “This is a profession to be absolutely proud of.” Being proud means doing it to the best of your ability.

Fred Diamond: Tom, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you sell today and why don’t you tell us what excites you about that?

Tom Snyder: Funnel Clarity is the name of the company, we sell sales training and sells performance improvement. Now, that is a very crowded field and if you’ve been in sales for more than 5 minutes you’ve probably been through training and I will tell you a little secret about my industry. My industry is larded with charlatans! Most of the people in it will claim that they know what great selling sounds like, looks like, the process of it and most of them had made it up.

Our company has the pedigree in content where nothing we teach people comes from the self-anointed wisdom of any of us. What we teach comes from the hard won results of field research, collecting hundreds of thousands of examples of the interactions between sellers and customers, dissecting that to determine what’s a statistically valid best practice and that’s what we teach people. Fred, the thing that I love about it most is we change people’s lives. Not a day goes by that I don’t get emails from people who’ve gone through our training and the process that we use after the training’s completed to tell me how much their life has completely changed, joy of the profession, amount of money they make, promotions, etcetera. That’s what gets me excited.

Fred Diamond: I really need to tell you that one thing that you’ve helped me understand is the science behind selling. A lot of the data that goes into the process and a lot of the process along the way and how that mobilizes how sales professionals can be professional and can take their career to the next level during challenging times.

Tom Snyder: No question about it. That science is actually something that started in the 1950’s at Harvard University. The research baton was handed to various researches as time has gone on and in 2004 was handed to me.

Fred Diamond: Tom, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the beginning of your career? How did you first get into sales as a career?

Tom Snyder: It’s a funny question. I got out of graduate school and I was determined that I would make a contribution to saving the world, nothing arrogant about that. I went into politics and I ended up working for the president of the United States at the White House, on the White House staff for nearly a decade. I learned quickly it was the worst job anyone could ever have in the history of mankind, left there and became a serial entrepreneur.

I started and sold several companies and became really focused on the question of why sales seems so difficult, having a background in the sciences I was sure some scientist had studied the subject. That led me to a search that I will dispense with the details but ended up some 22 years ago landing me in this world that I love so much, the world of improving sales performance.

Fred Diamond: You have a company called Funnel Clarity, it’s a very successful sales performance improvement company. What’s changed in sales over the years?

Tom Snyder: There’s a couple of things that have been significant, I call them more or less the tectonic changes in sales. Starting about 20 years ago, maybe a little longer than that, the target of what great selling looks like changed. It used to be that you would win by being the best talking brochure because the only place people could get information about your product or service was from a sales person.

The internet changed all that and the bar got raised. Now, to be an effective sales person you have to actually create value for the customer before they ever buy anything from you. That’s one of them. The second tectonic change that has happened in sales is the explosion of technology has allowed the world of inside sales to grow exponentially and it’s actually begun to eat into the growth in field sales. Inside sales many years ago was something that was the domain of time shares and magazines, today there are extraordinarily complex solutions in business to business being sold entirely over the phone.

Fred Diamond: What does that look like? Who’s selling over the phone today? You mentioned 20 somewhat years ago, someone who’s successful in their sales career, let’s say they’re in their 50’s, 60’s potentially, are they also going inside? What are they doing today to continue to be successful?

Tom Snyder: The funny thing is the dividing line between inside and field sales is very blurry. If you think about it, there isn’t a sales person in the world who’s not on the phone for a significant portion of the effort in any given opportunity. There’s also a broad use – again even in field sales – with screen shared technology, conference call, video conference technology so a lot of it is not just phone versus field.

Even those that are, I think, well tenured in the career and enormously successful have begun to find the advantages of not always doing things by flying to a city or being on rubber tires but the ability to be highly efficient with their time using these technologies.

Fred Diamond: Tom, let’s get audience a little more knowledge about you, specifically. Tell us what you are an expert in. Tell us a little more about Tom Snyder’s specific area of brilliance.

Tom Snyder: [Laughs] Areas of brilliance? I don’t know if I’ve got any of those.

Fred Diamond: Hey!

Tom Snyder: But I would say, area of expertise, my expertise lies in the science of persuasive conversation. Now, I need to emphasize when I say that it’s not about trickery, it’s not about chicanery, it’s not about falsehood or manipulation. The persuasive conversation is really about how can we as sales people have dialogues with our customers that lead the customer to make a decision that’s best for both of us.

There are a lot of aspects to that, both the planning of that, the memorializing of that and the conduct of that. I would call that the area of both my passion and my expertise.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us something that we don’t know about that? I know you could talk for – matter of fact, I’ve actually brought you into some of our members and we’ve done day long seminars on this topic but – why don’t you give us a little insight for the Sales Game Changers listening around the world? Give us a little more insight into the concept of the science of persuasive conversations.

Tom Snyder: Sure. Let’s think about this for a minute, the research that I spoke of earlier, the 70 years of continuous research into the interaction between customer and seller, one of the fundamentals that was revealed there we call the collection of rules of conversation. The best summary of them is to say that rule #1 would be customers put a much higher value on what they tell a seller and what they conclude for themselves than they will put on what a seller tells them. The second rule is that customers will put a much higher value on things they ask for than things that the seller freely offers.

Now, if you stop and think about that for a minute, it runs counter to what most people naturally do in the sales profession. We tell the customer what’s important, we tell the customer about the benefits, we tell them about what our solution will do and we offer freely proposals, demonstrations, opinions, insights not being asked. We actually have a tendency to work exactly opposite to what that science says would be in our own best interest and in the best interest of the customer.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us two things that the Sales Game Changers listening on today’s podcast – and I know I’m selling you short here because I know you’ve forgotten more in the last 10 minutes than we’ll ever know about this – give us two or three things that Sales Game Changers listening can do to get better at that particular concept.

Tom Snyder: I’ll give you two pretty easy ones to adopt. One, among the many behaviors that strikes rapport the fastest and builds rapport continuously is what we call testing understanding. Testing understanding is exactly what it sounds like, it’s something as simple as saying, “You know, Fred, let me make sure that I’ve grasped the key points to what you’ve just been talking.” And I offer back to the customer a summary of what they’ve said looking for either validation, clarification or denial. Now, we obviously will naturally do that when we are confused but it’s important to do it occasionally even when we aren’t confused because the act itself creates in the person we’re addressing a sense like, “This person is really trying to grasp what’s important to me.” It is the single fastest pass to rapport.

I’ll give you another one, everybody in sales – I mean, you’ve been in sales 5 minutes, you’ve been taught a questioning model. It’s important to recognize that if that model has any legitimacy, all it is is a taxonomy of every possible question in the language. Spin, Richardson, I don’t care which one you’re using, there’s simply a way of organizing all the possible questions one person could ask another. The magic lies in understanding who am I going to ask that question of, when am I going to pose that question and what evidence do I have that the answer will be valid. There’s no magic in the questions or the model, there’s magic in those items that I call the connective tissue.

Fred Diamond: Tom, maybe down the road we could do a little more intensive podcast on that particular concept. I’ve actually seen you do this live in sessions with some of the companies that we’ve brought to you and it’s actually quite a fascinating process to watch people make the shift from understanding what sales is to what it truly is, is helping with the persuasive nature of the conversations. Tom, why don’t you take us back to an important sales career mentor for you, and how they impacted your career? Tell us about one of those people.

Tom Snyder: Sure, gosh, this is near and dear to my heart. The first real guru I ever met in sales – and I mean this is the real thing – is a guy by the name of Dick Ruff, R-U-F-F. Dick was a PHD organizational development graduate, significantly older than myself but just a guy who was absolutely spectacular. A rugged disciplinarian, it was hard to please him. #2 a complete master of this science. #3 a master of how to convey this science to sales people and a really in depth understanding of the organizational requirements to get these kinds of sales improvement things to work. I used to say, of every dollar ever earned, 50 cents of it should belong to Dick Ruff. I’m not going to give it to him, but it should belong to him.

Fred Diamond: Has he asked you for the money?

Tom Snyder: No, never asked me. [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: Tom, you talk to thousands of sales leaders on a yearly basis. What are two of the biggest challenges you believe that sales leaders face today to be effective?

Tom Snyder: There’s a couple of dynamics going on in the world of sales leadership. For one thing, the explosion of technology, applications built on top of the CRM has reached a peak and has begun to create what I would call either license fatigue or application fatigue. There’s just enough apps build on top, by the time the sales stack gets to five, six, seven applications on top of the CRM not only is that an expensive proposition per sales person but it also requires so much learning of just the system that it’s now stretching out to tying to productivity so one of the challenges is people are looking for a much easier path towards how technology can be a force multiplier for sales.

The second piece of it is that there is a real recognition amongst sales leadership that the idea of sales skills has been dormant for too long. By that I mean all of the money and attention has gone into the technology and infrastructure side and there is now a real concern about the quality of dialogue and the ability to have these conversations that sellers are having. Particularly people new to the profession. Nothing was ever more damaging than calling something the challenger sale and then having people never read it because somehow young sellers have gotten the idea, “If I just challenge you, I’m there for doing the right thing.” Which of course, wasn’t the message from the authors.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to talk in a few minutes about some of your tips but since you’re touching on that, if you meet or if you come across some young professional who really shows aptitude for sales, what are some of the advice you would give them to think about really hard, to have a ten, fifteen, twenty year successful career?

Tom Snyder: It’s interesting, Fred. There are data here in the United States that show that 50%, half of all college graduates in any given year regardless of nature will have their first job in sales. That means if you were poetry, history, chemistry, psychology, half of the graduating class of most universities end up in sales. Now, many of them that don’t sustain that career I think it’s a shame because I don’t think we give them the right opportunity.

First thing I would do if I were brand new in sales is I would read books because unfortunately there’s too few places where at a university level you can get the education.

Second thing I’d do, and I don’t say this to shill for you, I would join an organization like IES, there is none better, an organization dedicated to excellence in sales. There are a number of – maybe it’s just even a support group – of fellow young sales people but I would get to a peer to peer learning environment and the third thing is I would interview as many successful sales people I could. Not to ask them what they do that makes them good, but to ask them about the career steps that have brought them there. Forget them telling you what they do, they don’t even know what they do that makes them good, but I’m telling you to understand the career steps is a really important piece.

Fred Diamond: Tom, you’ve helped like we’ve mentioned over the course of the podcast thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of sales professionals being successful. We typically ask at this point what is the #1 specific sale success or win from your career that you’re most proud of. You can answer that question by talking about one of the sales performance improvement companies you worked for or perhaps even something where you’ve helped a client become successful and achieve a huge successful win.

Tom Snyder: I’m going to answer with two answers. First, I’m going to give you the sale I’m proudest of. We got a call from what turned out to be a customer who started the conversation with me by saying, “Tomorrow I am going to sign a deal with…” And he named one of my biggest competitors. To make a long story short, that conversation resulted in another hour-long conversation, several meetings and we ended up winning the deal for several million dollars despite the fact he started by telling me he was hours from signing a deal with someone else.

In terms of outcome, I’ve got so many but there’s one that jumps to mind. There’s a firm that we’ve been working with now for several years, we’ve taken the sales force from a point where the hundred and forty odd sellers, only 22% of them were making quota to where at the end of 2017 more than 90% of them had beat their quota, even though quotas had gone up. That is a pretty extraordinary result and was a lot of fun doing that.

Fred Diamond: Tom, I need to go back to the first example that you just gave, because this comes up all the time. Customer comes to you and maybe they return your call but they finally say, “We’ve decided to go with company B, thank you very much.” You just told us that one of your greatest successes was that scenario where the customer said, “By the way, we’re going to go with your competitor.” You were able to turn them around and get them to become a multi-million dollar customer. Give us some ideas on what the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast can do in that situation.

Tom Snyder: Remember that the scenario included the first time I ever talked to the person, they called us. That’s important. And they started by telling me that they were about to sign the deal with someone else, those are important in my answer to that question. I guess I started by saying, “First of all, love to hear folks call us in. How’d you find out about us?” I got the answer and I said, “Well, what concern brought you to talk to me if you’re about to sign the deal tomorrow?” He mentioned what that was and what I was listening for is to see if he was just checking the price discipline of the person that they were going to sign the deal with or the company. That was not part of the answer.

My next piece of it is something that we train people on, I took him back to help me understand why the whole initiative got started in the first place, what change in his business caused him to look into this kind of an initiative. I then walked through a series of steps, “Gosh, once you solve that initiative, what are you going to measure as success? What’s good going to look like?” Once I had that definition from him I then began to ask questions about how the solution they were about to buy connected to that and I began to probe with questions around, “What concerns do you have? If this trend happens, what?” And that was what resulted in him then saying, “This is interesting enough. I’m not going to sign the deal, let’s have another phone call.”

Fred Diamond: You’ve helped thousands if not tens of thousands of sales professionals perhaps even many listening on today’s podcast take their career to the next level and achieve a greater degree of satisfaction and happiness in their lives. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard, it’s just not for me”?

Tom Snyder: Well, anybody that tells you they never had that moment of doubt is probably in my theory lying. Sure, I think there are times of frustration. Let’s think about what those frustrations look like. You work your tail off, you do everything right, it’s a big sale, a complex sale and at the eleventh hour the customer picks the alternative even though maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. There are times when you’re walking through a decision cycle with a customer and their organization changes. You can’t be in this profession and not have frustrations. Was there ever one of them that got me to reconsider the career?

No, there were several that got me to reconsider whether I was doing well or not and there’s always lessons to learn, there’s no single sale that gets done perfectly and there’s never a time you can’t learn lessons. But no, I guess I never really doubted the career. I got frustrated, I got tired but man, all you have to do is hit that one good sale and it’s the most invigorating thing in the world.

Fred Diamond: What would you tell someone today, someone who’s had success, who’s been in sales for twenty years who wants to stay valid for another 15, 20 years?

Tom Snyder: That’s great. Again, you know me, Fred. I’m going to have to divide the answer in various sections. If you are a sales person who’s been in the career for 20 or 30 years and you’ve worked in anything from mid-size to fortune 1000 size companies, the likelihood is you have moved into management. One of the great mistakes in sales is we take great sales people and hand them the keys and say, “Congratulations, you’re a manager.” If that’s the case, I would certainly study recent research on the world of sales management because it is not intuitive, there is a science to it and it’s something that I think you would be well served to study.

But let me take the spirit of the question which was, “What if I’m a sales professional, I like this career, I’ve had some success, I’ve been in it 25 years, what do I need to do to change?” Ironically, Fred, I get these calls a lot and I always tell people, #1 you have to recognize that the fundamentals of the science of communicating as a sales person has not changed an iota but the context of those conversations has changed enormously. Today, customers can find out tons of information without ever talking to a sales person. However, that information can be incredibly confusing, misinterpreted, misused.

So #1 is be a learner, explore and examine what you’re doing. Understand is it in the context of the modern buyer. The other thing I would encourage anybody that’s been in the career for a while to do is to stay current with regard to the movements in the profession. Don’t get bedazzled by a whole lot of applications and technology but don’t be ignorant of them either. Don’t be worried about things like artificial intelligence, you’ll see all kinds of stories about how it’s going to take over the sales field, trust me, it’s going to be a long time before AI takes over. However, AI may take over a piece of the decision and so get very skilled and very informed on that would be my short answer to that.

Fred Diamond: Tom, what are some things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

Tom Snyder: The most important thing is I’m coached so I’ve spent a career doing research, teaching sales, putting together sales programs, I’m in this field every single day. We eat our own cooking which means we execute according to what we teach but the most important thing is coaching. I always say, “Do you know any top performer in any discipline who isn’t coached?” LeBron James, the greatest musicians, the greatest singers, anywhere there is a execution aspect, not just knowledge, if you find a top performer, they will be coached. #1 is I am coached once a week and will be for the rest of my life.

The other piece of it is I try to make sure that I read articles and books. Some set aside period each week so that I’m staying current on what’s going on in the marketplace.

Fred Diamond: What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

Tom Snyder: For the company Funnel Clarity that’s about moving towards a multimedia delivery platform. We now have our training available both online, in short video format, in classroom format, lots of things. But I guess the most important thing for us in terms of our current initiatives is to make sure we’re creating routine, inexpensive and easy to use processes of reinforcement so people don’t just learn what we teach them, they’re able to continue to hone their skills without too much cost or intervention.

Fred Diamond: Tom, we have a couple more questions here for you. You’ve given us some great information. If a sales professional were to get a great deal, a great success with a customer, what are some additional ways they could show their appreciation?

Tom Snyder: There’s a couple of things. I think one of the things that people in sales sometimes forget about is we land a big deal and we kind of get this sigh of relief and go on vacation and now it’s the company’s job to implement that. I think nothing shows a greater sense of appreciation to a client than staying very in touch with both the client and whoever is going to be on the client’s side responsible for implementation to ensure that everything goes just right. I don’t care about the confidence you have in the people in the company that deliver, this is about demonstrating – if only for optic’s sake – how much you care.

I think another thing to do is to be sure you’re checking back 30 and 90 days after the sale has been completed and implemented to ensure that things are going well, they’re getting what they expect. Beyond that, I think given the policies of today and the environment of today, the gifts and that kind of thing, they don’t really carry as much right as just demonstrating through behavior a concern for the outcome as opposed to a concern for your invoice and your commission.

Fred Diamond: Tom, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls or your emails. Why have you continued in the sales performance improvement space? What is it about sales as a career, when we started today’s podcast you talked about how your commitment is to raise the bar of the profession, to raise the professionalism of people who participate, to raise the level of the conversations. What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

Tom Snyder: If there are no sales there is no company. No matter how fancy the Ferrari might be, without gas in the tank it doesn’t go anywhere. We’re the gas in the corporate tank. I love the premise, people don’t return your emails, they don’t return your calls. That’s our fault. We don’t have anything interesting to say, provocative or curiosity inducing. There is a science to how to do that. I get a lot of my calls returned, I get a lot of my emails returned. Without the training most people are just wasting the customer’s time so not getting the returns, for the most part, is the fault of the sales person. That gets to the root of it. Have pride in the profession and when you’re in that frame of mind, pride in the profession, you invest in getting better. Not in making a living, you invest in getting better.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us one final thought for the Sales Game Changers around the globe to help them get inspired?

Tom Snyder: I would say two things. First of all, this is a career built on one of the most noble things you can do, helping people make good decisions. See yourself as a decision coach, not as a person pitching product or service, and the world will be a better place.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 058: Sales Performance Improvement Guru Tom Snyder Shares Strategies to Ensure Funnel Clarity first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.