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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on August 26, 2020. It featured Veeam Public Sector leader Mike Miller and VMWare Public Sector leader Bill Rowan.]

Register for next Tuesday’s Women in Sales: Using LinkedIn to Build a Brand and a Following During Challenging Times with Brynne Tillman here.

Find Bill on LinkedIn here. Find Mike on LinkedIn here.

Listen to Bill’s original Sales Game Changers episode here. Listen to Mike’s original Sales Game Changers episode here.

EPISODE 265: VMWare’s Bill Rowan and Veeam’s Mike Miller Offer This Sage Advice for Sales Professionals Serving Public Sector Customers

BILL’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “You need to figure out a way to celebrate about your successes and your accomplishments in this new world. It used to be again, going back several quarters we were in an office, we would pull everybody together and you’d recognize someone. We still try to do a little bit of that online but I’ve encouraged people, “Listen, you had a great week, you got a big order in, share a bottle of wine with your loved one or significant other. Go make yourself a big dinner, turn stuff off, turn the computer off, put the phone down and use it as a way to celebrate the successes that you’re having along the way.”

MIKE’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy is the most important quality that anybody can have whether it’s in sales or in life. I think that the most important thing that we can do as sales professionals as we leave this, as we go into the rest of the week, as we go into next week and as we continue in our career is to bear that in mind. Also, have an athletic approach to how we manage our business. We have to make sure that we’re maximizing the time that we put towards this, that we maximize the amount that we’re able to interact with our customers, the amount of information that we’re able to convey, the amount of information we’re able to get from those customers so we can be respectful of their time and that we can get back to them much more rapidly and quickly with good key answers to help them solve mission problems.”

Fred Diamond: What are the big priorities that you’re working on right now? Again, we’re about six months into the pandemic and everything related to that and you guys both focus on public sector, federal specifically today and the end of the federal fiscal year is coming up in about 30 days so it’s a busy time usually for you, your team and your resellers.

Mike Miller: It is. We’ve got five weeks left till the end of the government fiscal year so we are extraordinarily busy. There’s obviously a balance, all the reps are busy focusing on closing up the pipelines, they’ve been working in some cases multiple years but certainly all year long to build up a pipeline. Those that have done a really good job and have been working really hard are able to reap the rewards and earn the process of doing that. They’re also having to balance that with what is always a key requirement which is making sure that they’re continuing to grow the pipeline. It’s a delicate balance this time of year.

Fred Diamond: We had Mike Durso on your commercial side back on the Sales Game Changers Live, back in early April when things were beginning to get a little bit interesting, I encourage people to go back and watch that.

Bill Rowan, it’s great to have you hear, VMWare. How about you? What are some of the big things that you’re working on right now?

Bill Rowan: Fred, first off, thank you very much for having me, Mike, great to be with you. I will tell you, along the same lines as Mike referenced, it’s been an extraordinarily busy time inside of the sales organization. I think by note we saw one of the largest reprogrammings ever by DoD in getting up here to the end of the government fiscal year. There are still dollars available in some of the agencies so it’s really been a multi-pronged approach not just to try to ensure that you’re satisfying those current requirements, but also we’ve seen a fairly significant shift in the way government is doing business. Much like all of us are working from home, many of them are working from home or if you’re intelligence community you’re working on a colored schedule. You’re not only adapting to what the mission requirements and how those are changed, you have to completely adapt to the way you communicate with your clients on a regular basis. Hats off to the folks in the organization and the industry in general because I think we’ve probably adapted as well as any industry could have possibly adapted. I give credit to maybe one of my competitors from time to time, Microsoft, commented in their earnings release that we’ve seen basically two years’ worth of digital transformation in about two months. I think that’s showing itself in the market right now.

Fred Diamond: What is it like and how has it been to physically work with the government customer? You mentioned a lot of them have gone home as well but talk about some of the interactions and what that’s been like as a sales leader and a sales team.

Bill Rowan: It’s funny, I remember a number of years ago in a major snow storm that we had here in the DC area, and basically it shut everything down in terms of the interaction with the client for a number of days. I probably went into this with the thinking of, “This is going to really be a complex challenge” and for many customers, it was. Many customers are not only trying to do their day job but their kids are at home so they’re trying to do homeschooling, they’re trying to do before and after care and much like us, the days can be very long especially when you’re in front of a screen.

I give a tremendous amount of credit to our public servants who have adapted not just here in the DC area but to be very fair, across the country and across the world. It’s interesting to pivot, I think that the government customer was one of those customers that really enjoyed and thrived on the face-to-face meetings and going through the detailed discussions about how something was going to work. In some cases had not maybe adapted a lot of the technical or the webcast or what have you type interactions, they liked that face-to-face, they liked to understand who they’re working with. That option really wasn’t available in terms of face-to-face so they pivoted very quickly and in many respects, probably were teaching us things and willing to do things maybe a little bit earlier, sometimes later in the day being able to schedule multiple sessions throughout the day.

I think as an industry, again, I only get a chance to hear from my counterparts about what they’re doing in the state and local markets, the healthcare markets and others. I think they’ve done an extraordinary bit of work. The other part too I give them a huge amount of credit, the government is known for a very paper intensive business or industry still, and their adoption to being able to get electronical authorizations and the moving of funds, clearly their internal communication has picked up greatly. If it’s something we’ve learned positive out of the pandemic, it’s that our government, as big as they are and as challenging as they can be from time to time, has really adapted almost a war-type footing in terms of they way they responded to the citizens of the country.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? How have you seen those interactions going as well?

Mike Miller: I think Bill summed it up really well. I think all of the reputational mindset that is sometimes out there about the government being slow and not being as nimble as you would expect, did an extraordinary job in pivoting to be able to manage the pandemic certainly with regard to their mission support whether it’s supporting the war fighter, whether it’s citizens. From a business interaction standpoint we’ve definitely had to have some unusual shifts because some parts of the government are still whether it’s paper intensive as Bill points out, which is exactly right or having to be in the same room or having to be together intensive. But some of the processes with regards to moving some assistance along and being able to do mission support have been a little bit more complicated and a little bit slower.

We’ve had to be doing a much better job as salespeople and as business consultants being able to help the government to shorten some of their own processes. I’ll give you an example, a person might ask for a quote and they’ve got an environment where they’re used to having half a dozen people that they need to be running things by nearby. For us, if they’re working remotely we have to sometimes think in advance to some of the questions they might need to be thinking about like do they have to have a J&A done? Do they have to be speaking to existing customers? Have they identified small business? We’ve got to be doing a better job from a sales process standpoint of thinking on behalf of some of the things that they might have to do to help them be as efficient as they can be. That’s something that we’re doing better at and it’s something that we’ve had to do a little pivoting ourselves on.

Bill Rowan: I think Mike hits on a great point. That thinking about what are their next steps, the more I think that our professionals have looked at that, they’ve pivoted, it’s making them better, they’re asking those questions up earlier, they’re lining those pieces up which is allowing us to compress the sale cycle over what we might have otherwise expected. So as much as we’re having to think about, the more we can include some of those things in our DNA in terms of the way we manage our opportunities going forth, I think that’s going to lead to a real positive on the back end when all this hopefully calms down a little bit here.

Fred Diamond: Mike, you make a really good point there. We’re doing a webcast every single day with sales leaders such as yourself and sales thought leaders and one of the messages and lessons that’s come through is that for sales professionals to be successful moving forward, you need to be ahead of where the customer is so that you can bring them the solutions before they ask. Questions now like, “Tell me the pain”, you can’t ask those questions anymore because we should know what they’re going through because everyone on the planet is going through the pandemic and things related to that. We have a question that’s come in here, this question comes from another Mike and he’s also in Virginia. I don’t see you texting here.

The question is, “How personal have you been with your customer being that we’re all going through the pandemic and things related to it?” That’s an interesting question. Talk a little bit about maybe empathy and knowing that everybody, like Bill mentioned before, is now a homeschool teacher or they’ve been a counselor for the last two months. Your marketplace is a very structured marketplace in a lot of ways, there are literally laws that your companies have to follow to be able to sell to this marketplace, how they purchase and how they procure and things like that. But at the same time, we’ve all just gone through this human challenge that we’re still going through in so many ways. Bill Rowan, why don’t you talk about that first? Have your people been able to engage on a more personal level knowing that we’re all going through the COVID and things related to that?

Bill Rowan: I think they have. What may have frustrated somebody 5-6 months ago because maybe there was somebody in the background, a dog or whatever the case might be, people are a lot more accepting of that. In fact, probably can relate in many respects to exactly what a client or business partner is going through. One of the changes that we made inside VMWare was we’ve been using technologies like Zoom and Teams for a while prior to the pandemic. We really asked our folks to try to make an effort whenever possible, go on video with your customers and your business partners, create that personal connection because otherwise we’re just a bunch of voices that are going back and forth over a conference call and you don’t really get a chance to understand some of the issues. I’ll tell a funny story that I told to my team, I was doing a call with the CIO of one of the intelligence communities and I had actually forgotten that the call was the next day and it popped up on my calendar and I only had about 10 minutes before the start. I really wasn’t dressed the way I would want to have been dressed so I apologized when I got on the call, I went on video and I said, “I apologize, I meant to get a little bit more  prepared but the call was important and I’ve just been busy throughout the day.”

Then that person said, “Well, then I’m going to go on video also” and there they were wearing a baseball cap and T-shirt and said, “I’m in the exact same boat you’re in.” So, I think that if you’re willing to put yourself out there a little bit with your client, you’ll find that they’re in the exact same boat. I think that while we can’t be in person and share a cup of coffee or something as a result of the meeting, we actually can make almost a different level of a connection and those will ultimately pay us benefits. The listeners who are listening to this podcast, that’s going to pay you benefits over the long haul with your client base.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? How have you directed your team to go above and have those types of less formal? Are you encouraging your people to break through and talking about, “How are you doing?”? Those kinds of things that as human beings we’re doing.

Mike Miller: Absolutely. In fact, as you may recall although you do an awful lot of Game Changers podcast, so you may not remember mine precisely, one of the things that we talked about, one of the things I think is most important from a skill standpoint in any sales rep is their sense of empathy. It’s actually caring about the mission, it’s caring about the people and it’s not just being empathetic towards the institutions but it’s the people that are part of the institutions. I think Bill is exactly right, I think it’s extremely important and we find ourselves doing much more of this where we’re actually on calls and we go to video. By the way, I look much better on a 4-inch screen than I do face-to-face, just for the record. It’s extremely important to try to have some level of eye contact and it also gives you a chance to have some of the more human moments that Bill’s talking about – the dog barking in the background or my son coming in to give me a high-five when I’m in the middle of a meeting, or their children doing the same thing.

I think that’s great. It also translates a little bit into what we talked about before, being empathetic especially with our government customers who are slammed, they are still doing an extraordinary job meeting some really difficult challenges and they’ve got was always the busy time of the year for them anyway. You compound that with COVID-19, it’s really us doing a better job as sales reps and people, frankly it’s being more respectful of them and their time, that’s being empathetic. If we can knock out, for example, a whole series of questions that we’ve got and understand what customers need better in one phone call, then we have a chance to save them half an hour or 45 minutes or two other phone calls, or trying to pull multiple people together. We do a better job for ourselves, we do a better job for each other and we do a better job for our customers.

Fred Diamond: I want to follow up on something you said a few moments ago, Mike, and Bill, I want to ask this question to you. You talked about how as good and even average salespeople now, you need to be ahead of the curve. You need to bring the customer solutions before they ask you, before they even know that they need it and one of the other key words that comes up not infrequently is preparation. Could you both talk a little bit about how you came up, Mike, for example, with the notion  that you needed to get those forms to the customer before they even knew that they needed them way ahead of the curve? Because that’s where we’re seeing a lot of the distinction and value coming from right now, it’s not just bringing value anymore, that’s like hardly worth it, it’s the added value that you’re bringing by being like 2-3 steps ahead of where the customer is so that they could do their job more effectively. And of course as a sales professional, that will tie you deeper. Bill, if you could talk about preparation a little bit and maybe some of the things that you changed or some of your observations on how the sales professionals watching today’s webcast or listening to the podcast can be much more proactive? Where they’ll need to be, to be successful moving forward.

Bill Rowan: If I replay back to my time in January, February and before this, it wasn’t uncommon that if one of my reps or one of my managers was going to be involved in a briefing with a client or had an important meeting. Maybe we were working on helping a customer shape an RFI before it came out, we would a lot of times sit around the table and say, “Let’s figure out how we’re going to run this, what are we going to say? If we say this, how is this going to play out?” That opportunity really doesn’t present itself anymore, so how do you take those same type of interactions and apply them to this new format that we deal with on webcasts or videocasts – it’s amazing some of the skill sets, by the way. I don’t know of a single person inside of my organization who’s ever taken a class in whether it’s GoToMeeting to Zoom to Teams, but they have figured out how to use these tools and do different things with these tools that quite frankly, I’m blown away with that there are skills they developed.

A lot of it is just playing around but they shifted and started to say, “Okay, let’s make sure we’re really prepped” because the client, much like us, is probably going back to back with a bunch of these meetings. You’ve limited the time that you’re in the car or in the subway going down to visit the account, getting through security to get into the building, sit down, go through your discussion and then again that same process exit. In many cases, all of us have probably picked up at least 30 minutes on the front end and the back end of every single meeting so how are we using that productively? Not just to plan how we’re going to go about the discussion, what we want to be the outcomes but also the debrief afterwards to make certain that we have captured things we did well or things we didn’t do well and feed those back into the process so we’re going to be that much more effective on the next sales call or the follow-up activities that revolve around the opportunity we may be working on.

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you? You do a lot of sales training in your career, you’ve taught a lot of people, again you’ve worked in some great companies like Juniper and CA for a long time, you’ve worked with thousands of sales professionals to make them better. What are some of your bits of advice on how to be more prepared to again, not just to show up well but to be 2-3 steps ahead of the curve?

Mike Miller: That’s a great question. Preparation from where I sit comes in a couple different varieties, the first is about sales process, it’s making sure that we have got really good habits and that they are consistently being executed by us on a regular basis. That’s good qualifying, it’s having empathy so that we can have a good rapport with our customers and prospects and our partners. It’s making sure that we understand that piece so that that’s second nature to us going through the discovery process, the qualifying process. If we’ve been doing this for any amount of time in government sales, it’s hard as you said, there are laws you have to follow and as Bill and I know painfully well, it’s the sort of thing that can take a long time to get good at.

But once you do get good at it, once you have done that then you have the ability to start doing the other bits of preparation, the other bits of preparation are understanding our customer’s mission. It’s understanding if we’re working with a systems integrator, what sort of things are important to them? How do we increase their probability of winning for a major program? The same thing with our partners, it’s being able to put ourselves in the place – being empathetic – of  our customers and our partners and making sure that we’re prepared so that when we go in there it’s not to talk about what we do, it’s to be out there relentlessly looking for the kinds of problems that we can solve. And when we find those, making sure that our customers understand that and knowing where to look for it is a key piece of it.

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Judy and Judy is in New York City, Judy wants to know, “How have you both changed as a sales leader over the past five months?” Again, both of you have worked for great companies, Bill, you were at EMC before you moved over to VMWare with an acquisition, you both are well-known in the public sector space leading great teams, leading great companies. How have you changed? Mike, why don’t you go first? Tell us one or two ways that you’ve changed.

Mike Miller: As a person who’s been selling for my entire career, the last job I had before I was in sales I also was waiting tables so it’s been a long time that I’ve been in sales. My happy place has always been in front of customers, it’s with my team in front of clients whether it’s at events, whether it’s in an AFCEA event, whether it’s in MeriTalk Cyber Smoke, whether it’s at the Pentagon, I like that for multiple reasons. #1, I like the motion of being out solving problems, that’s what gives me a thrill of being in sales in the first place, it’s finding a problem that you can solve. I also like coaching them, one of the things I like about being a sales leader is that you get to teach people how to change their life. I think that’s a pretty amazing job to be able to have and the best way for me to be able to do that I’ve always viewed as being out on the field with them.

Now this is out in the field with them, at least for now so I’ve had to adapt everything and do the same thing that we’re doing with our customers, it’s all online. That doesn’t change how we’re preparing, we still do role plays, as Bill correctly said, we don’t have time to do a pre-call meeting outside and a post-call debrief when you get outside, “What did I do right? What did I do wrong? What did you do right? What did you do wrong and how are we going to follow up?” and doing all those other things. But we have more time to do it in this kind of environment so whether it’s on GoToMeeting or whether it’s on Zoom or whether it’s on Teams, making sure that we’re spending that time and doing the debrief, doing the calls and doing the call prep. I’ve been doing a lot more of that online. I’ve also been doing what I never used to do before, we would have weekly calls from a Webex standpoint, weekly one-on-one’s, I never turned on my video prior to six months ago. In the last six months, my poor team has been suffering with this just like I have.

Fred Diamond: Bill, how about you? How have you changed as a sales leader in the last couple of months?

Bill Rowan: Fred, it’s interesting, much like Mike, if you gave me a choice I would take out in the field with a rep making sales calls every day of the week and twice on Sundays. Being in the office from time to time, the paperwork, some of the meeting stuff, I understand it’s a necessary evil but it’s not really the reason I got into the role and it’s not really what I enjoy. One of the things I really missed a lot was I have a very geographically separated sales organization. They’re in just about every state of the country except I think the Dakotas and Arkansas we don’t have anybody but we’ve got people pretty much all over the place.

One of the things that I really miss was if I was out in San Diego, go out and have dinner with the rep the night before or sometimes with a rep and his significant other or have lunch after the sales call and just talk about them and what’s going on and it not be about a deal. It not be about their forecast, it not be about pipeline, it’s how do you strengthen those relationships with those people that you don’t get a chance to see every day that might be in our home office either corporate or in Reston where the government office is. I miss that, so one of the things that I’ve tried to change is schedule just brief one-on-one’s with those folks and make it clear I don’t want to talk about numbers, I don’t want to talk about what the pipeline looks like, I want to talk about what’s going on with you, your family, I want to understand are there issues that I can help with? One of the things the company has done very well is the CEO has had a couple of days off, September 4th, this upcoming is going to be a company-wide holiday and I make it very clear to my reps. “I don’t want to see you on email, I want you to set stuff down, I want you to disconnect, there’s no excuse, we’re all working plenty of hours.” That’s a difficult thing for me to adapt, I’m one of those guys that if I look down on my phone and I see emails in the inbox, I want to get on and I want to see what’s going on, I want to respond. So I’ve had to adapt myself as well to say, “It’s the end of the day, these people need a break, they’ve been going all day long.” To be fair, it’s been a little bit of a tougher muscle memory for me to do that as well.

Fred Diamond: We have a related question that comes in here from Ken, and Ken is in Kensington, Maryland. Thank you so much, Ken, good to see you again.

Bill Rowan: Represent.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] Bill Rowan just gave you thumbs up, Ken, if you’re listening to the podcast. The question he asks is not just about your team but Mike, you eluded to this before that there are a lot of trade shows and industry type of events where there’s one every day. For people who are watching today’s webcast, listening to the podcast, outside of DC you can pretty much go to an event almost every day and see people in the industry and that’s probably one of the reasons how the two of you have reached the ranks that you did, by participating in a lot of those entities or organizations. I’m not going to ask what you’re doing but what are you encouraging your team to do? The salespeople on your team that aren’t able to go to an AFCEA or a DoDIIS event or any of the other events that are happening all the time around the DC area, Institute for Excellence in Sales programs. How are you coaching your team now?

They’ve missed five months of being in a hotel or a conference center with customers and peers, a lot of the success in the federal space is the co-petition or cooperation, if you will. How are you encouraging them? What are some things you’re telling them to do to build their networks when it’s a challenge and you can’t go meet people now? Nobody’s having events, there’s probably not going to be any in-person events at least through the end of 2020. Mike, how about you? What are you telling your people to do or what are your people telling you that they want to do to build those networks?

Mike Miller: As far as building the networks, there are more events online than you might imagine, probably a few too many. It doesn’t drive as much customer intimacy as we’re used to but there are certainly some that are better than others. All the events that have normally been happening whether it’s AFCEA Augusta or any of the other events that are happening and should have happened all summer long, many of those have had online components. I’ve been going myself and encouraging my team to go as well, I’ve also been setting up adjacent things. One of the advantages, for example, of going to an AFCEA and building those is because it has a much bigger marketing budget so they can afford to sponsor some of these happy hours. But to do something adjacent to that which is a little bit more private and a little bit smaller and you can actually have more realistic conversations. We’ve done several of these that have been adjacent to some of these other events and it’s invitation-only.

We had one that we did in partnership with some folks that you’ve spoken to, Bill Rucker from Trustwave, for example and Sanjay Sardar. We had an event after one of the recent civilian events and we did a private invitation-only cocktail reception and we had a lot of government CIO’s show up, it was really interesting. A lot is a relative term because we only had a dozen total but it was great and it was much more interactive and interesting. I’d encourage being creative, trying to find ways to do that so if there’s something going on and you have a handful of people that you know, reach out to those folks, sponsor an online Zoom thing and then have each commit to bringing three customers or three partners there.

Fred Diamond: Bill, we have a related question and the question comes from Erin in the DC region, I’m going to read out her question. “I work in public sector as well and today I ran into a situation where a customer wanted to meet in person, their whole staff is back at the office, I was very surprised. What are your organizations’ philosophies on in-person meetings right now? My company is saying no in-person meetings through the spring.” How are you handling things like this and what are some of your recommendations?

Bill Rowan: It’s a great question, Erin, and obviously some of this gets down to beyond company policy, there’s obviously an aspect that’s a personal choice. We have a broad blanket approach that says no large gatherings, gatherings of 20 or more do we want employees to attend. However, we have a couple situations where customers have asked us, it’s been only probably the intelligence community where they want us to come on site so we can discuss some matters that are relatively speaking, sensitive. I’ve left it up to the reps and the engineers and asked them if they feel comfortable with this, I’ve made it clear to them I do not want them hanging out in the cafeteria or something like that afterwards. Even though they may see that as a good bonding opportunity, I think that you’re showing your commitment both to the client and the mission as well as the company by doing the meeting in the first place.

I do think at some juncture you have to also appreciate the customer’s asking you specifically, they have a certain amount of trust they’re putting in you as much as you are putting trust in them and that can be something that obviously you’ve worked hard to build that trust level. Do what you feel comfortable, say, “Listen, we can meet in person, maybe we can meet someplace outdoors by your office” if that makes you feel more comfortable than maybe in a confined space. It’s a little bit what Mike spoke about, customers are really missing the interaction they get to have with us on a regular basis. We are in many cases their educational tool where they learn about what’s going on, they get trends not just to what’s going on within their organization but what are other organizations doing? Maybe it’s in logistics, it’s financial services, other areas, they may hear what their competitors are doing, what their competitors are working on so we’re in some cases a source of intelligence in the market industry as much as we are the product piece and they miss that interaction. Hats off to Erin because you have to look at this as you’ve built a certain amount of trust with that client that they’re asking specifically for you to come in and sit down. As with anything, it becomes a personal choice and what you’re comfortable with, at what point you say, “I’m comfortable here but I’m just not comfortable in this particular spot.”

Fred Diamond: We have a question here that comes in from Louisa and Louisa is in Illinois right outside of Chicago. Thank you, Louisa. Her question is, “What are your expectations for your sales professionals right now?” We’ll take that in two chunks: what are your expectations for your more senior sales professionals? I’m not going to put an age there, you can define it yourself, probably where we all are – at least you two [laughs] – and then secondly, what would be your expectations for maybe your more junior salespeople? This has been a really interesting time, we’ve had a nice run for about 10 years in sales especially enterprise and B to B sales and you’re absolutely right, Bill. You just mentioned we’re not with them every day so they’re having to figure things out, there’s a lot to be said by sitting in a conference room and just doing a one-on-one. When you’re looking at the Zoom or GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, there’s a different type of interaction no matter how honest you try to be. Before we get to your final action steps for the day, what are your expectations for your more seasoned people and what are your expectations for your more junior people? Mike, why don’t you go first?

Mike Miller: That’s a really interesting way to look at it and it’s a smart way to look at it. I think one of the challenges across the board is to balance work with burnout. I think what Bill’s company is doing as far as having people take a day off and forcing themselves to unplug is a great idea. I think to take it down to the more granular level of our team, what I would like our more seasoned people to do – again, obviously we have to balance all this with having to do our jobs – I’d like them to make sure that they are doing a really good job of reaching out and encouraging the rest of the team, keeping in touch with the rest of the team. Not just from a ‘how are they doing’ standpoint but making sure that they’re not feeling alone out there, there’s a lot of that where people are feeling isolated and you can get detached from the team.

One of the things with our corporate culture is we really want to be very focused on the team, that’s something both from a federal perspective and from a Veeam at large perspective. It’s really helpful when the more senior sales reps and more senior partner managers and people that have been here for a while do that and reach out and they’re inclusive and they’re part of the team. I think for everybody, especially if you’re new, it’s really important because we can’t work together, we’re not sitting across the desk from each other, it’s important for them to feel comfortable asking for help. Whether it’s help getting up to speed because they’re running into challenges with pipeline growth, whether they’re uncomfortable with some of the mandates that are put in place which is being vigorous with regards to pipeline and making sure that also when they need a break that they’re comfortable saying it.

Fred Diamond: Mike, I’m going to ask you for your final thought in a second, you have a second to think about it. Bill, how about you? What are your expectations for the people on your team right now? Again, it’s August 26th, you’ve got about 35 days left of the federal season and we’re 5 months into this pandemic.

Bill Rowan: Interestingly, I think some of my more senior people are probably more cautious about how this is going to work. We were going to ask them to go back to maybe where they were earlier in their career and become a rep who works the phone or a Zoom session, Teams, whatever the case might be and I think some of them maybe had some self-doubt about that. “That’s never been my skill, my skill has been in front of the client articulating the message.” What I’ve tried to encourage both my most junior people and my more seasoned folks is ask questions, ask your counterparts, we have leadership folks not just on the sales side but the technical side, the partner side. Don’t be afraid to reach out, run by a scenario, watch on the video pieces, watch your client’s body language, they’re giving the same tips often in video they might give you in person. I also think that customers are willing to share sometimes a little bit more insight, they’re a little bit more confused, “I don’t know this.”

I have a rep the other day who said, “We’ve articulated the issue three or four separate times of how they could solve a specific problem” and finally the rep did something I’ve never done, “I sent them a couple YouTube links and said ‘here, there’s a couple YouTubes that describe exactly what you’re trying to do with the technology'” and the customer said, “It was fantastic, it was two minutes, it was visual, I got the message.” People are utilizing different skills than maybe they otherwise realized they could have used or other tools that are out there. So my expectation is probably sometimes lower, a lot of your more senior reps put the bar very high for themselves so they’re trying to come up with new creative ways to continue to move the bar up, that’s what’s always made them A players. I’m sure Mike has got a group of the same sort of things so at some level it’s probably more bringing them in a little bit and going, “We’re going to be in this for the long haul, let’s continue to pace ourselves here.” At the end of the day, we’re always learning, we’re all learning new things so ask questions whenever you can ask questions.”

Fred Diamond: I want to thank Mike Miller from Veeam and Bill Rowan from VMWare. You can go back and you could learn more about Mike and Bill, their careers, go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com/mikemiller to hear Mike’s original interview or salesgamechangerspodcast.com/billrowan to hear bill’s original interview. Gentlemen, give us an action step, give us something that the audience can take away with to be more successful today. We’re beginning to get a lot of nice thoughts, Michael says, “Thank you”, Nick says, “Thank you”, Pam says, “Thank you so much for this.” Give us an action step, something nice, crisp and succinct that our audience can take home to be more successful today. Mike, why don’t you go first? Then Bill, you can bring us home.

Mike Miller: Fred, it seems like the word of the day is empathy and I’m just going to close with that because I think the most important quality that anybody can have whether it’s in sales or in life is to be empathetic. I think that the most important thing that we can do as sales professionals as we leave this, as we go into the rest of the week, as we go into next week and as we continue in our career is to bear that in mind. Also, have an athletic approach to how we manage our business. We have to make sure that we’re maximizing the time that we put towards this, that we maximize the amount that we’re able to interact with our customers, the amount of information that we’re able to convey, the amount of information we’re able to get from those customers so we can be respectful of their time and that we can get back to them much more rapidly and quickly with good key answers to help them solve mission problems. I think the key to remember is that we all own our successes and we all own our failures.

Fred Diamond: Erin says, “Thank you so much, great episode.” Sandy says, “Great episode”, thank you all so much for watching. Bill, give us something to take us home.

Bill Rowan: I couldn’t agree more with Mike on the empathy piece. I think there’s another component to this and this goes back to the actual people themselves. You need to figure out a way to celebrate about your successes and your accomplishments in this new world. It used to be again, going back several quarters we were in an office, we would pull everybody together and you’d recognize someone. We still try to do a little bit of that online but I’ve encouraged people, “Listen, you had a great week, you got a big order in, share a bottle of wine with your loved one or significant other.

Go make yourself a big dinner, turn stuff off, turn the computer off, put the phone down, make yourself a really nice dinner at home and use it as a way to celebrate the successes that you’re having along the way.” This is a stressful time on all of us and I think it’s just as important if not more important to recognize the accomplishments. We’re all using a lot of different muscles that we haven’t had to use before or haven’t had to use in a long time and that’s something to be celebrated that we may not have realized. We have the skills that we’re utilizing day in and day out, we can’t let that opportunity pass without taking the time to recognize those.

Fred Diamond: Once again, Bill Rowan from VMWare, Mike Miller from Veeam, thank you both for the great insights. Thank you both, be well and stay safe.

Bill Rowan: Thank you guys, appreciate it.

Mike Miller: Thanks, Fred. Thanks, Bill.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 265: VMWare’s Bill Rowan and Veeam’s Mike Miller Offer This Sage Advice for Sales Professionals Serving Public Sector Customers first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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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 July 30, 2020. It featured author of “Go For No,” Andrea Waltz,]

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EPISODE 264: Go For No Author Andrea Waltz Explains Why Getting More Noes Is a Gift That Can Drive Your Sales Efforts to the Top

ANDREA’S TIP TO SALES LEADERS: “Your reaction to yes and no must be equal. You want to get in the neutral zone so don’t over-celebrate the yesses but you also don’t badger yourself, beat yourself up when you get a no. More than ever, there are a lot of noes out there and more rejection. You have to stop yourself and shut down any negative self-talk about whether you feel that you didn’t do a good job or whether things aren’t working and get yourself off that emotional roller coaster to be most effective.”

Fred Diamond: We have the author of Go for No! It’s Andrea Waltz. Andrea, it’s great to have you here, I read the book, it’s fascinating. You created such a name for yourself in telling people just to go for no, so good to have you here, thank you so much. Why don’t you tell us first of all, what does it mean, “Go for No!”? and then let’s get right into it.

Andrea Waltz: Go for No! is a little bit of a marketing challenge because we teach people to hear no more often and of course that sounds weird because in sales everyone wants to hear yes. But like the subtitle of our book says, “Yes Is the Destination, but No Is How You Get There.” The entire premise of Go for No! is that if you don’t avoid hearing no, if you don’t avoid those “failures”, you open a lot more opportunities to get those yes’s. That’s the strategy, I call it a strategy, it’s also a mindset because when you start talking about intentionally getting more no’s, inevitably questions like, “What does that mean?” and, “What about fear of rejection and how do I deal with that?” and all kinds of nuances come up. It sounds like a simple straightforward topic but there’s a lot to dig into.

Fred Diamond: We’ve actually got some questions ahead of time. Andrea, I have one quick question for you and it’s a saying that we’ve heard so many times at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, “The second best thing besides a quick yes is a quick no, and the worst thing is a drawn-out no.” First of all, is that true? Second of all, give us a little bit of insight into why that is.

Andrea Waltz: It is absolutely true, a quick no is so much better because it frees you up to pursue opportunities where there could be a yes. I think too often all of us in sales one time or another, we want something to be a yes so we will play these psychological games where we don’t ask the really hard questions to just get that no quickly and move on. We divert our attention and don’t just get that no so that we can save all of that time, we’d rather pretend that that sale is out there. It happens, we see it in people’s pipelines where they have all kinds of opportunities where they think, “Maybe the yes is out there and if I can just hang on long enough, it will change” and the reality is it doesn’t. That is such an important saying and it’s so true.

Fred Diamond: Another interesting point is we work with some of the best sales companies around the globe, they’re members or sponsors of the Institute for Excellence in Sales and I know when I talk to a sales professional or a business owner and he says, “We’re doing great, our close rate is 75%” the first thing I think to myself is, “You’re not in the game that much.” If your close rate is so high, you’re going after so few opportunities that you’re cutting yourself short.

Andrea Waltz: Absolutely, I love that. We have something called the Five Failure Levels and level four is what we call Going After Big No’s, going after those big fish. When you go after those big opportunities then your close ratio will go down. Like you said, if you’re closing that many opportunities then what kind of deals should you be going after where they are those big opportunities, those big fish?

Fred Diamond: I want to ask you a quick question, I know you have a couple slides here we’re going to get to and I’m very excited to get into the meat of this. We’ve been doing four webcasts a week like I mentioned in the introduction and we pretty much started doing these when the pandemic started. We do 50 live events per year at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, now we’re doing 5 webinars a week so we’re talking to experts like you every single day. How have things changed for you? I know you speak around the globe and obviously those have gone away but from the Go for No! perspective, how have you seen that modify, shift and change since we’ve all been in this COVID pandemic world?

Andrea Waltz: That’s a great question. First of all, we’ve seen this whole idea, sales has changed over the last few years just with the advent of technology. The funny thing is that when you add in the technology piece, now we’re all selling virtually, the strategy of having to hear no and valuing no and dealing with no, making sure that you’re in the right mindset of overcoming that fear of rejection is more important than ever. That applies no matter what technology you’re using so now as social media came on, Go for No! works for that and now here we are trying to sell over Zoom, it works for that.

Really it’s about applying the same mindset which is not avoiding the word no and doing the things that we’re going to talk about today but doing them with these new technologies. Unfortunately, and I’m glad you brought this up, Fred, is that with what’s going on in business and so much disruption, there are going to be a lot more no’s out there. That is just the reality, people are not going to make fast decisions, they’re going to have far more objections which are in many cases well founded so you have to have that persistence. You have to have that long term attitude and you have to have an attitude of willing to push through those no’s knowing that in the future they’re going to be yes’s. That’s probably the biggest thing, there’s going to be a lot more no’s in the market right now.

Fred Diamond: I want to do a quick poll and the question here for the audience is, “Do you like it when prospects say no?”

– Yes, because we’re on our way to yes.

– Sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

– I hate it.

– I really, really hate it.

Andrea, I’m actually kind of curious what the results are going to be here so let’s take a look at the results. Most people are above the curve where they do because they think they’re on their way to yes but most people say, “Sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” The good thing is nobody really, really hates it. What do you think about this, is this in line with what you’ve seen in your research?

Andrea Waltz: Not really, we have some Go for No! devotees here today [laughs] which is great. Actually, it kind of does fall into a bell curve to be honest, Fred. It’s a 20-60-20 thing, 20% of the people, I’ve found, do fall into that ‘really, really hate, total anxiety’ around no. 60% really dislike it, they truthfully hate it and then I’ve found that it’s only about 20% that really can see the value, that really like it. I’ve apparently done my job fairly well so don’t you love that I’m taking credit for this? [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] it’s the leading edge. One thing we talked about before we started the webcast is over the seven years that we’ve been running the Institute for Excellence in Sales there are three words that come up all the time: mindset, creativity and courage. Could you talk for a second or two about what that means? What does courage really mean? Again, I’m glad that you talked about the essential mindset because once again, this is the Optimal Sales Mindset. Andrea, once a week we do a webcast on mindset. Prior to when the pandemic started we did one session a year for three hours in October, now every single week we’re bringing on a world-renowned expert like you who studies this, who helps companies around the globe and organizations really get to that optimal mindset. Could you define what courage means in sales for us?

Andrea Waltz: I think for us, selling courageously is about being willing to face a no and help a prospect or customer face a problem and solve that problem, and being willing to go through that even if you are going to hear a no. You put solving the prospect’s problem ahead of maybe your own fears, your own anxieties and hesitations. That’s how we define courageous selling and I completely think that you have filled a gap in the marketplace around mindset because here we are and there’s only so many tactics and so many tools, scripts and strategies.

Probably the biggest hang-ups that we all face as salespeople, sales leaders and as human is it’s mindset issues, it’s our own self-imposed limitations, it’s our own hang-ups and beliefs around things. It’s battling that mindset that if we can do that, then I find that the skills and talents that we have are unleashed so it’s not so much where we need more skills and we need more responses to objections, I don’t believe that’s true. I think we need to constantly be working on our mindset and especially during this time, just working on keeping that positivity because we’re all tasked with that. How do we stay positive when things are not going well and we do have a lot of bad news on the news?

Fred Diamond: My apologies for hijacking your slides but this is a fascinating topic. What’s so fascinating is that you’ve been speaking about this for the last 20 years, you’re known for this particular angle of sales and like I said, mindset, creativity and courage. Whenever someone asks me, “What does it take to be a successful sales professional” I always say it’s courage. On our Sales Game Changers podcast we interview successful sales VP’s and they’ve had 15, 20, 30 year runs of success and they’ve had courage along the way; courage to ask for the deal, courage to work for great companies, courage to get help, courage to bring in partnership. There’s so much that goes into courageous. Quick question, what prompted you when you first wrote the book Go for No! with your partner? What was the instinct that you had that led you to publishing this? It’s given you 20 years of opportunities to speak to some of the best companies around the globe on this particular topic.

Andrea Waltz: When we launched our company we were doing training of all kinds in the area of sales, our specialty was retail and we were training retail salespeople, managers, we were teaching them sales coaching, sales development and customer service, leadership, all of these topics. Of everything that we would teach, and sometimes we were doing half-day workshops, full-day workshops, Go for No! was the thing that people loved and we could tell that they loved it. It’s so actionable, it’s so ‘implementable’, if that’s a word, I’m making up words here [laughs] It’s so easy to implement, let’s put it that way, so we saw that and we said, “Go for No!, there’s so much more to it and we’re giving it short shrift, we’re talking about it for 10 or 15 minutes in a workshop. Let’s write a book specifically on this topic.”

There’s a lot of books on sales and they tackle the entire sales process from beginning to end and everything in between and we just decided, “Let’s just tackle this one issue and be the STP in your gas tank”, it’s the little additive that you need with all of the other training that you’re doing. That was really the impetus, taking something that we were hearing and seeing from our clients that we knew was important and that it was really our favorite topic as well.

Fred Diamond: It’s brilliant, it just did so many angles of sales. I know you have some things you want to say specifically so if you want to start moving through the slides. We do have some questions coming in but let’s get started with what you want to tell us.

Andrea Waltz: My pleasure and I want to say I do love questions, I love challenges so fire away. It’s this idea of this process and this is something that we talk about in the book Go for No!, we talk about this idea of failure and success. If you want to think of this as a process, this idea of changing your mindset and creating a mindset to overcome fear of rejection, it starts with this idea of your definition of failure and success. There’s a model that we show in the book and it looks like this where you’re in the middle, failure is on one side, success is on the other and we’ve all been taught and trained to avoid failure, to not hear the word no. As salespeople, that’s why I joked in the beginning, we’ve created a marketing challenge for ourselves because salespeople don’t like the word no, they don’t want to hear the word no. We’ve all been taught and trained this old model where it’s like we have to choose one or the other, failure or success, yes or no.

The new model, the model we all should be operating with is where we’re on one side, failure, rejection, hearing the word no is in the middle of this process and the success and the yes’s that we seek are on the other side. What we find is this idea of the strategy of Go for No! which we’re going to talk more about in a minute of hearing no more often, people think, “That sounds interesting, I think I could do that” but then they start doing it and they think, “I must be on the wrong path, this must be wrong because it doesn’t feel right.” When people embrace the idea that the rejection is part of the process, yes and no are on opposite sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other, in order to hear more yes’s you’re going to by default hear more no’s until you get so skilled that you hear fewer no’s. This really is so foundational to the mindset of accepting rejection and being able to move through it and making it work for you.

Fred Diamond: I want to talk about that for a second. We have a lot of people who are early in their sales career and even though we’re all inside sales now, the traditional SDR, BDR type of a person who starts out in sales, they may make a hundred phone calls and get one person to even pick up the phone so it’s very challenging. What is your message to someone who’s a young sales professional, first job or two out of school that they’re really mainly tasked with picking up the phone and dials? Just by definition, you’re going to have not even no’s but maybe even some aggressive no’s, what would be your encouragement to those types of people at that stage of their career?

Andrea Waltz: When you are operating in a quantity world, there’s a big part of Go for No! which is quantity is important as far as we’re concerned. We think that having a lot of numbers, in other words, going out and prospecting often and a lot will increase your chances, increase your opportunities to get more yes’s. In that process, though, the best thing to do and my advice is not to look for validation during that process, that quantity where you’re sorting through and your whole goal is to disqualify people, that ideally is what it should be. So to not look for validation and to really focus on the behavior of making those calls and not the result. You have to reward yourself for the activity that you do and in this case it’s the behavior of making the calls and not the results because when you execute the behaviors and you get better and you get more skilled, your results will improve and sometimes the numbers, like you said, you make a hundred calls, 99 you won’t get anywhere, one you will. If those are the numbers and they just bear out that way, it really just becomes where you work on your mindset and you power through those knowing that that one is out there.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. You mentioned focus on the activity versus how people are responding, let’s talk about mindset, let’s get real specific about that. Is the mindset to embrace the no and to, “Yes, I want to more no’s because that’s great because according to Go for No!, that’s what I should be doing”? How do you deal with the human aspect of the continuation of the no’s?

Andrea Waltz: There’s a couple things, detachment is probably the biggest thing, to detach from the outcome and detach from the result. That’s something that I think you get from practice so it is harder for the newer person because when you’re in it and you’re just starting out you’re incredibly attached to what you’re doing. It does tend to come with experience, it also comes from quantity so the more calls you make, the better you get, the more you’re able to detach and say, “I get this, it’s not about me.” The funny thing about taking things personally and even in our Go for No! coaching group on Facebook, we talk about this all the time which is when it comes to taking things personally, taking rejection personally it’s never about you even if it’s about you. [Laughs] that’s just something that’s sometimes hard to embrace and that’s something that I learned by studying a book called The Four Agreements. You have to learn how to not take those things personally because often times, let’s face it, people don’t want to be interrupted, they’re having a bad day and if you are the person cold calling them out of the blue, often times they’re going to take it out on you. You really have to depersonalize that, detach and stay focused on just your activity and remember to reward yourself for your activity.

Fred Diamond: We have a couple questions coming in here. This question is from Louisa and Louisa’s from D.C., thank you so much. Her question is, “Where does empathy play if the customer keeps saying no?” That’s interesting, one of the big words that we’ve heard over the last four months of course has been empathy. Obviously being an empathetic seller is something that has always been critical but now we’ve had to be even more empathetic because of all the situations that we’ve been pressed upon over the last couple of months. Where does empathy play into this where someone keeps saying no and you’re being aspirational, you want them to eventually say yes?

Andrea Waltz: I think it comes in where you really have to pay attention and ask good questions, so I’m glad that Louisa asked this question because it’s not about just going out and throwing things at people. Initially I think that the disqualification process gets through some of that and I think it shows a lot of respect to prospects if you can quickly figure out if you can solve their problem or not, if you have something that they want and need. If you can get through that qualification process and now let’s say that you do have someone who’s really highly qualified for what you have but they’re still saying no, where does that empathy come in?

I think the answer to that question is you have to just be human and you have to try to figure out and ask some questions to learn about their situation and if they are struggling and you have something that you know can help them. Sometimes I think you have to be an advocate, sometimes you have to help people off the fence of decision, people are afraid of change. If you can help someone in that moment make a decision that might be ultimately best for them whether you make the sale or not, I think that’s the greatest most empathetic thing you can do. Always helping people make that decision whether it’s a yes or no is how you show the greatest amount of empathy and that’s certainly where we’re coming from. No is a perfectly acceptable answer, the idea of avoiding no is not.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of great questions coming in here today. We got a question from Al, actually Al’s your friend, he’s in Calgary, Canada and he says, “What if the person is really being mean, abusive or arrogant about the no’s? How do you deal with such severe rejection?” Someone also asked here, “What’s a nice no versus a really mean no?” Let’s talk about the severity of no, how should we handle the really aggressive, “Get the hell away from me, get off my phone, don’t ever call me again” versus the, “We’re not really ready right now”?

Andrea Waltz: That’s unfortunate and if you’re in a position where for whatever reason you are contacting people and you’re getting those really mean no’s, first of all, let’s say they’re a qualified prospect and they’re someone that you want to do business with but you called them a couple times and they’re always really mean and nasty to you. I think life is short and I would never do business with anyone who was really vicious like that or really attacking so if it were me and it was my company, my own business, they’re off, that’s it. I just don’t call those people back even if they are having a bad day.

Now, sometimes people are having a bad day and they will be unnecessarily rude and unfortunately that’s just part of the job, that’s part of what we have to deal with as salespeople, as interrupters if we’re interrupting them or we catch them at a bad moment or maybe three other people have called them from our company and we didn’t realized that and now we’re getting the wrath of this person. That is unfortunate so again, this comes back to mindset of staying positive and putting good things in your head and not taking that person’s anger personally.

Fred Diamond: We have a couple other questions here that are coming in. Do you believe it’s July 30th, isn’t that crazy?

Andrea Waltz: It’s crazy.

Fred Diamond: We’re four months into this. How would you coach a first line manager to help their people be more successful on this? That’s been one of the big challenges that we’ve heard from the companies that are members and that are participating on our webcast every single day, “We’ve put our first line managers” which is probably the hardest job in sales. Usually it’s somebody who was promoted because they were a high performer typically, and now their team is all over the country if not all over the world, they’re not sitting in the room, you can only coach somebody so much virtually, you always see them from here up. What would be some of your advice for first line managers, probably someone who’s been in management for one, two or three years to help their people and then also to help themselves get past this?

Andrea Waltz: That’s such a great question. We actually created a product during this pandemic because we have the extra time called The Go for No Leader, it’s specifically dealing with people who lead and manage teams for how they can implement Go for No!. I think when it comes to managing salespeople, you have to be both coach and cheerleader, and you can cheer so much but eventually people have to take action.

Our advice is always to really focus on behaviors, getting people into action, focusing on the specific things that they can do, that they can implement and then I think what’s so key is to constantly be cheering people and rewarding people for that action regardless of the result because so much benefit will be gained from taking the activity. Learning will happen, progress will happen and as long as people continue to engage in the behaviors and they’re tweaking as they go, eventually those things will turn into actual tangible sales results. For the first time sales manager it’s really understanding what it is to be a coach of behaviors.

Step two is to intentionally get no more often and this is the fundamental core Go for No! philosophy, to intentionally hear the word no more often and depending on your business, this is what we call a Go for No! moment. If you are selling let’s say insurance products, your goal might be to have an appointment – virtually, of course, now – and meet people and share with them all of your different products and find out all about them and ask them all the questions about all of their needs, or maybe you’re in a retail situation. It’s less about appointments but it’s more about recommending all kinds of additional products and services but again, like Louisa brought up, using empathy so it’s asking good questions and making recommendations that make sense for that client or that customer or that prospect. It’s really asking those good questions so you’re not just throwing things at people but you are going for no in such a way that you’re getting those no’s but you’re also getting the yes’s. This is based on the main story that’s in the Go for No! book.

Fred Diamond: Talking about stories here, we have a request from Dan, Dan is in Northern Virginia. He would like to know what is the greatest victory in overcoming no that you have seen, and maybe you could even take that example from the book or maybe there’s one that you want to throw out where it was, “No, no, no” and it eventually became yes.

Andrea Waltz: There are so many and there’s two categories of success here. One is actual numerical results, just dollars in for someone and the other success that we see – this is what I feel is really important and it’s what’s missing from most business owners, we do a lot of work with independent business owners of employed people – having that confidence to face those no’s. In those Go for No! moments where you have the opportunity to ask or not and half the time because you’re operating with that old model, you decide, “I’m not going to ask this person.”

Not going to ask for the appointment, the meeting, not going to ask for the sale, in that Go for No! moment you do not execute so it’s changing your confidence level. Probably our greatest success story is a guy named Ray Higdon who went out and decided that he was going to get 20 no’s a day and that he was just going to do it almost like a machine. Just go out, get 20 no’s a day, ask, ask, ask and he became the #1 earner in his company, he ended up leaving that company and founding his own training organization which ended up on the Inc. 1000 of Fastest Growing Companies. I think for two years he was on the Inc. Fastest 1000 list and he’s one of our big success stories because he just did it without overthinking it and he detached from the outcome, his goal was just to hear no as often as he possibly could.

Fred Diamond: Dan says, “Thank you very much.” We have a question here from Douglas. Dan also asked another question here, he says that every no is a milestone, every time you’re hung up on, you’re never called back and rejection, gets you closer to yes. Quick question on that, is one of your suggestions to maybe get small yes’s along the way? For example, one of our previous guests, John Asher, and he was our guest last Friday, his suggestion is when you go to a meeting you always ask, “Can I take notes?” and the answer is always going to be yes. You don’t ask, “Do you mind if I take notes?” because the answer is going to be, “No, I don’t mind.” The ascension to yes, if you will. Is that a part of your philosophy and how does that play into Go for No!?

Andrea Waltz: It is not specifically part of our philosophy and it doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting and impactful strategy that could work. We fundamentally approach it a little bit simpler especially in terms of those type of meetings and presentations where there’s all of these little strategies such as getting those micro-commitments, getting that person to say, “Yes, yes, yes” because towards the end they will be more amenable to saying yes. Nothing wrong with that strategy, it’s funny because it sounds like it’s the opposite of Go for No! but I understand what they’re saying. We don’t tell people, “You want to Go for No! just to get no’s, you want to Go for No! for no’s sake.” That would be crazy, that would be sabotaging your progress. Our strategy just happens to be asking good questions, sharing information, making those asks in those Go for No! moments and being not expecting to hear a no but accepting of it. If somebody can get those micro-commitments of yes, I think it’s a good strategy.

Fred Diamond: I know you have a couple more points that you want to make here so we can move on.

Andrea Waltz: Alright, let’s keep moving on here. We’ve talked about changing your definition of failure and success and intentionally hearing no more often, this is a really important idea here and this is about changing how you respond to no. This is your emotional reaction and we talked a little bit about this as well, about dealing with those mean no’s or those people who are really angry or whatever and they respond poorly. This idea is just to keep you as the salesperson off the emotional roller coaster so we often times get a few yes’s and it’s like, “Yay!” and we celebrate and then we get a couple no’s and its like depression and speaking out loud that we’re not making it and this is horrible.

Especially these days more than ever because there are a lot of no’s out there and there’s going to be more rejection, you want to get yourself off of that emotional roller coaster so when you get that no, it’s not the moment where you want to respond poorly either to the prospect, of course, but even in your own mind. You have to stop yourself and shut down any negative self-talk that you’re speaking to yourself about whether you feel that you didn’t do a good job or whether things aren’t working. You have to shut down that negative self-talk to get yourself off that emotional roller coaster and to be most effective. Your reaction to yes and no must be equal, you want to get in the neutral zone so don’t over-celebrate the yes’s but you also don’t badger yourself, beat yourself up when you get a no.

Fred Diamond: Douglas asks here. We talked about first line managers but to people leading teams in general, what would be some of your specific advice if you were talking to a group of sales managers? Not just your first line managers like we talked about before but leaders and managers in general to get their people motivated, encouraged. What would be some of your sound advice for them? Thank you for the question, Doug.

Andrea Waltz: Great question, Doug. A cultural shift, Fred, is what is needed, a cultural shift around the idea of what is failure and are we okay with hearing no, and do we as a sales team talk about those no’s and do we bring those no’s up and say, “I’m having difficulty hearing no, I’m having difficulty with rejection”, something that needs to be able to be shared with your front line sales coach. But also culturally, is it something that we talk about? Is it the elephant in the room or do we talk about, “I’m getting no from this person, what can I do to move past it?” both tactically, what can we do as an organization to get better about handling those but also being willing to talk about those things, psychologically. I think leadership in general needs to shift the culture.

Fred Diamond: I think also one of the things that leaders can do is help their people understand if it will become a yes. One of the most frustrating things when we talk with sales teams is – you mentioned this in the beginning – things on the pipeline that really should not be on the pipeline. It’s interesting because one thing that we talked about frequently prior to the pandemic was one of the big challenges in sales was getting inside information, hopefully having a champion that was going to tell you, “We’re trying to get you on board” or, “You’re in third place right now.” As a sales professional you’re always trying to figure out, “Where do I play?” and get that inside information. Now post-start of the pandemic, everyone’s in the same situation so we all know where almost every company is and what they’re dealing with which is recovering from the economic fallout of the pandemic. I’m just curious again, helping sales leaders really clarify pipeline, that’s one of the sales leadership challenges that I see is even sales leaders don’t really know what a great pipeline looks like. Do you work with that, do you give them advice on how to clean up the pipeline so that a no might become a yes?

Andrea Waltz: No [laughs], in no way. That is a little bit more tactical than the stuff that we do. However, I completely agree with you 100% and I think salespeople and sales managers have to be willing to challenge those things in the pipeline and to pull those things out and to say, “What is the situation here?” Part of it is the courage to talk as openly and honestly with your prospects if they can give you that information. Then if they won’t give you that information to say, “This person or this company is not qualified, we’ve been spending all this time, we’ve spent all this effort, it’s just a dead lead, let’s cut our losses and move on.” Sometimes I think to a detriment we hang onto those things because it’s like, “We’ve spent all this time cultivating this, now we really have to make it work.” No, you’re just better off to cut your losses and go.

Fred Diamond: I’m going to be asking you in a second for your action recommendation, what people watching today’s webcast or podcast can do, something specific. I think you maybe have one or two more slides?

Andrea Waltz: Yes, we want to talk real quick about valuing no as much as yes, and that is a big part of how you get off that emotional roller coaster. When you get those no’s, when you value it, it has some kind of tangible property so see it almost like you were given a gift and then figure out, “What am I going to do with this? What’s the next best step?” If somebody literally handed you a gift, where would you have to put that? If you think about it with that analogy it really puts it in your lap as to, “What am I going to do with this and what questions can I ask to maybe move this forward and turn it into a yes, now or later, or to just accept that no as a gift and then part ways completely?

Fred Diamond: It’s absolutely a gift and I like what you said before, take out the meaning. If a lot of people are stuck on the no’s and the question asked before about a very mean no, so to speak, that’s not a meaning. It’s yes or it’s no so what do you need to do to not just move this deal forward but your sales career? Take out the meaning and keep doing the right stuff.

Andrea Waltz: Absolutely. This is just a fun quote that I wanted to share with everybody, “If everybody said yes, they wouldn’t need to pay you very well so you really get paid for the no’s, not the yes’s.” That’s so funny, isn’t it? The great sales trainer Joel Weldon said that.

Fred Diamond: Joel looks a lot like our good friend Einstein.

Andrea Waltz: He does, yes [laughs].

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] Andrea Waltz, thank you so much, you’re the author of Go for No!, you’re one of the top speakers in the world on helping sales professionals get the right mindset to take their business to the next level and to be successful. We’ve flown through today’s webcast, I want to thank everybody who’s given us an hour of their time on July 30th and all the people who are listening to the podcast. This was a perfect Optimal Sales Mindset webcast, I want to thank you for not just being with us but for also the great ideas. Before we wrap up here we do have a question from Al, he’s asked this question a couple times – my apologies, Al, for not getting to you – the question is, “Andrea, could you please share some tips on how to leave an almost ‘perfected’ voice message? As most times sales cold calls end up into an automated voice bucket.” Is that something you might be able to fix? Do you know what he’s referring to?

Andrea Waltz: Tips for leaving a perfect voicemail. One is go ahead and leave that voicemail, that’s one because I know a lot of people don’t believe in that. #2, brevity for sure and #3 is you’ve got to have that call-to-action. What do you want them to do? I would say when you do those voicemails it’s got to be part of a campaign. If you can follow that up with an email and maybe even follow it up with something on social media if you’re connected on LinkedIn or you can message them, that’s going to be so much more powerful than just that one message.

Finally, you just have to be persistent. In terms of scripting, I’m going to leave that open because I really feel like depending on your industry, seeking out those industry experts for exactly what to say because what it comes down to is why are you leaving the voicemail and what do you want that person to do? Keep it brief but make sure there’s that call-to-action. What do you want them to do?

Fred Diamond: Give us an action item, give us something that everybody watching today’s webcast or listening on the podcast can do today to be successful.

Andrea Waltz: Set a no goal. This is the opposite of setting a yes go, we all typically set goals, set a goal for the number of no’s you’re going to hear either today or maybe it’s set a goal for next week. We do something we call a 21 day Go for No! challenge and people set goals for 21 days, one type of goal throughout the entire challenge. Maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s 5, see how many no’s you can get and count them and make it a goal.

Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. Once again, Andrea Waltz, thank you so much. Everyone who’s watched today’s webcast or listened to the podcast, thank you all. We have a whole bunch of people saying thank you, Andrea, so thank you for your time, stay safe.

Andrea Waltz: Absolutely.

Fred Diamond: To all our listeners, thank you all very much.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 264: Go For No Author Andrea Waltz Explains Why Getting More Noes Is a Gift That Can Drive Your Sales Efforts to the Top first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on May 13, 2020. It featured sales leaders Dan Cole (The Spy Museum) and Steve Richard (ExecVision).]

EPISODE 234: How Sales Leaders are Leading Teams and Customers Moving Forward with The Spy Museum’s Dan Cole and ExecVision’s Steve Richard

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Dan Cole’s Podcast . Listen to Steve Richard’s Podcast.

DAN’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “If you feel your empathy to your customers is getting stale I would say take a day or a week off because nothing’s changed in sales. Empathy should always be a part of what we do whether we’re in a pandemic or not. It is what is going to allow us to move our business forward.”

Fred Diamond: Dan Cole, it’s great to have you today on the webcast. You’re with the Spy Museum, you’ve been on the Sales Game Changers podcast. First of all, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? As we look at the results of this poll, 30% of the people are concerned about their job and the future of their company and 40% are challenged with connecting with customers. Dan, why don’t you give us a little bit of a welcome and give us some thoughts on what the results of the poll say?

Dan Cole: Fred, thanks for having me and it’s great to connect with you again and Steve as well. I appreciate being here today and welcome to all of our guests as well. I’ll just keep it in a brief nutshell, I’ve been selling all my professional career, started selling copiers in the late 80s and then for the majority of my career went into the events business. Trade shows, worked here locally at a company called National Trade Productions and then for the Consumer Electronics Show at the Consumer Technology Association, spent a great deal of time there. Went to the other side of the business to Hargrove on the supplier side and I see friends from Hargrove around this call today.

Now I’m at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. at our brand new gorgeous location that we hope to open soon. It’s interesting, the poll, I think one of the things that we’ll get into today and I think Steve would agree, the 30% that are concerned about their jobs and their companies, I know empathy is a word that does come up often and we’ve got to remember that our clients are dealing with the same concerns. They have the same concerns about them personally so I’m sure that our clients are dealing in the same type of world as well.

Fred Diamond: Steve Richard, it’s great to have you on today’s webcast. We’ve had you on the Sales Game Changers podcast before, we’ve also had you speak at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. I like to say that you’re a savant when it comes to prospecting and understanding customers and their conversations. You’ll talk about your company here in a second, ExecVision, but you’ve listened to over a million sales conversations and sales calls, I’m curious what you’re seeing today. Give us a little bit of introduction about yourself and give us your impressions of the results of the poll as well.

Steve Richard: I’m very passionate about studying and understanding buying and selling. As someone who accidentally got into sales, sales found me, I didn’t find sales. I was supposed to be in finance, couldn’t get a job and didn’t want to work for our family septic tank business so that’s how I got here, Fred. Along the way I feel in love with it and I think that what’s going on right now is that some of the rules of selling and buying are being re-written a little bit. I’m observing because I’m a founder of two companies, one called Vorsight, the other called ExecVision. ExecVision is a technology company and what we do is help people with their call recordings to use call analytics, speech analytics and then use that to help train and coach people to actually get better to improve behaviors.

That’s what Fred is referencing with these million calls. What I can tell you is right now a lot of these roles are getting re-written, people are struggling. Believe it or not, they’ll talk. The ability to get a customer or prospect to talk is quite possible, of course you have to have their mobile numbers these days or other methods of communicating, certainly social media but what we’re finding is that sales cycles are dragging on, people are generally speaking dragging their feet unless it’s something that they absolutely need to have to keep the lights on. It’s hard to keep them engaged in the process and you can understand why, because there’s a lot of concerns just like what we saw in that poll, people potentially losing their jobs are not going to buy anything, it wouldn’t make any sense.

Fred Diamond: Dan, what are your priorities right now?

Dan Cole: We’ve got a lot going on. Certainly, as Steve said, it’s a weird, bizarre, somewhat unsettling or very much so an unsettling time for our entire staff at the museum. From a priority standpoint as it relates to the sales team, there’s some main ones that I would call them engagement, encouragement and excellence. Not only with our clients but with our staff as well, staying connected to each other, motivating one another, staying connected with our clients, engaging with them, again that empathy knowing that they are most likely going through the same challenges as we are and also.
Staying connected with our partners, our service providers whether they be a caterer or AV company or a florist or a general contractor, staying engaged. That’s the engagement part, the other three are sustaining revenue, trying to build upon revenue, building pipelines and looking to 2021. Q3 and Q4 are obviously a challenge, can’t take our eyes off of ’21 so prospecting in that direction as well are our priorities.

Fred Diamond: Steve, how about you? What are the big priorities for you in what you’re doing?

Steve Richard: Making sure we keep going. What we’re seeing is actually pretty interesting. One of my companies is called Vorsight with about 35 employees, 25 folks on the phone doing something called outsourced appointment setting. What that means, it’s companies’ contract with us, with Vorsight to get appointments on their behalf and I have an opportunity to swap notes with memoryBlue as a customer of ours and they’re another appointment setting firm as well as market sourced in Atlanta and many others. The funny thing with that business is we’re actually seeing that the clients are sticking around for the most part and actually, new clients are signing up so there are portions of the economy that are hot and it’s really unfair.

Dan, you found yourself at the coolest job ever at the wrong time which is just so sad and unfortunate because I can’t wait to get to that rooftop, I’m going to take you up on that. Likewise, there are some clients that are in things like cloud computing where they compete against AWS and they couldn’t be any hotter right now and their demand is off the charts and they want to keep going. What we’re seeing is if you do have reps that continue with the engagement – I think that was a key word, Dan – keep engaging prospects and customers without the hard sells stench, to quote my friend John Barrows. If you can do that, then you’re going to be in a much better place coming out of this than if you don’t. Sadly, one of our customers for our ExecVision technology is Madison Square Garden, can you imagine that? And they were absolutely doing fantastic before all of this hit with the Knicks and Rangers having some trouble but the Rangers being a little bit better than the Knicks, but then this all hit and they had to completely retrench. They’re not allowed to call any customers right now with the exceptions of providing refunds and those kinds of things. There are certain things like that but ultimately if we don’t keep going the global economy stops. I think the reality is sales is the engine of the global economy, salespeople and we all have heard this at your events before, Fred, nothing happens in the economy until something gets sold. If we don’t keep engaging and keep our activity levels up, we’ll have problems.

Fred Diamond: Last Friday on our Creativity in Sales webcast we had Lee Salz who wrote a book called Sales Differentiation and he told a great story that sales is going to lead companies out of this. You’re absolutely right if things don’t get sold. Again, on today’s webcast we’re talking to Steve Richard with ExecVision and Vorsight and Dan Cole with the Spy Museum. Steve, what’s a positive thing that’s come out of this? We’re going to get into some of the details here but tell us a positive thing or a compelling surprise that has come out of this situation and Dan, I want to hear your answer on that as well but let’s take Steve first.

Steve Richard: Real easy answer, there are dozens and dozens of people that I haven’t talked to in years that I’m reestablishing relationships and connections with that are very meaningful and will serve all of us in the future. Then opportunity to meet people like Dan that I never would have crossed paths with at all so that’s really positive and certainly spending a lot more time with the family and people not having to commute as much so there’s an opportunity for learning that in many cases didn’t exist.

Fred Diamond: How about for you, Dan? What’s been something positive that’s come out of this that maybe will have some legs for the future?

Dan Cole: I think there’s a tremendous amount of good will between ourselves and our partners but I’ll tell you what, our clients as well. People are rooting for us as we’re rooting for them so the good will that exists, I want to say it’s somewhat surprising not in a negative way. We’re all rooting for each other, I think Steve touched on that, that from a sales perspective we have the privilege of being on the front line, we have the privilege of carrying the torch and I think clients and prospects alike appreciate that and appreciate that sincerity. For me personally, I think Steve nailed it as well. I got to meet Steve through this and meeting others at the Institute as well. Fred, you’ve been a really good friend and especially at times like these, meeting new peoples and maintaining relationships with those that you’ve been with for a long time makes us even more important. I think the most pleasant surprise is the amount of support that clients give to vendors and vendors give to clients. This is where the word ‘partnership’ really gets tested, we throw around that word a lot but I think now in a time like this, this is where one can really determine whether they have a true partnership with a client, a partner or with one another.

Fred Diamond: Dan, I’m curious, again when we first met you, you were at Hargrove, now you’re with the Spy Museum, you’ve been with event companies, you’ve been with conference companies, you’ve been in the technology space, you’ve led and managed if not thousands, at least hundreds of people. How have you seen yourself change as a sales leader in the last 6-7 weeks since we’ve been in this temporary new world?

Dan Cole: I think that’s a great question, the distance that we all experience. I come from an office so a lot of people work virtually in other industries but we all work with one another and that is an advantage that we see each other every day, we can read each other’s body language, we can have meetings with one another, we can sit down with one another with clients. This has changed completely and I don’t know if it’s changed me but what provides a greater emphasis and a greater focus with me is remembering to remember that everyone is dealing with this in their own separate way.

My conversations and my availability is custom tailored to each person on my team. First of all, they’re a bed rock for me as I want to be with them. There are some on the team that don’t need a phone call every five minutes – not that everybody does at all – there are others that appreciate a phone call once or twice a day just because this is something different. I think what it’s caused me to do is to create place and greater emphasis on remembering that people deal with adversity in different ways. If that’s a change from what I’m used to face to face, I think that change is a change for the positive.

Fred Diamond: Steve, before I ask you that question I’m curious how you’ve changed as well as a sales leader. You’re also a business owner as well, you’re one of the principle owners of two companies right now. Once again, if anybody has any questions for Steve or Dan, submit them via the question panel. How have you changed? Again, you’ve been home, I don’t want to disclose how many kids you have with you at home but I know –

Steve Richard: I’ll disclose it, it’s four, ages 4, 6, 8 and 10 and even though I’ve got the door locked they might find a way to bust in here any minute.

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much, it’ll be cute if one of your kids comes up to you with something and they sit on your lap. Has that happened, just curiously or have you been able to lock yourself away?

Steve Richard: Yeah, they’ve figured out how to take a paperclip and pop the door open.

Fred Diamond: [Laughs] How have you changed in the last 4-5 weeks as a sales professional, as a sales leader?

Steve Richard: A couple things. I think the first thing is I come from an inside sales background, a lot of people think of inside sales as just the folks that get the appointments which is called sales development commonly now. It’s also people have been closing deals and I’ve been involved with the association, Fred, you know too, the AISP for many years. This isn’t that different in many ways than what most people who carry big quotas and sell with an inside sales model have dealt with and really, if you think about it, pretty much every field person is now an inside sales person so oddly what I found is that in many cases I’m giving people advice and tips and insights on, “Here are the things you can and should be doing when you’re essentially an inside salesperson.”

I think the other part of it is I have been going back to the fundamentals and the basics and sometimes you get on a role and you’re doing your thing and you’re getting your deals, sales are coming in and you’re serving your customers and they’re renewing and everything is fine but then the bad habits creep in and you don’t sharpen the saw. What I’m seeing is the best sales teams right now are using this as an opportunity to go and sharpen that saw. We’ve seen the metrics in our system in ExecVision, we can track call coaching. Now it’s anonymous so we don’t know what company it is but we can see how much call coaching is happening, comments, score cards, all that. It’s up double since before the pandemic so there is absolute evidence and proof in saying that companies are really working on their craft that they weren’t before as much.

Fred Diamond: Dan, I’m going to ask you in a second, Steve mentioned habits, some of them are beginning to grade a little bit. I’m going to ask you a question about what habits could sales professionals be working on but as I would presume, we just got three people who quickly jumped in and said, “Steve, what are those tips that you’re now giving the outside people who are now inside?” Dan, think about that for a second but Steve, let’s address that for a second or two. You’ve always been a guru on inside sales but now everybody is in inside sales so what are some of those tips that you’re telling people right now that they should be doing?

Steve Richard: Spend some money on technology, for example and actually I have to do this at my house because I’ve got four kids with three devices each, wireless speakers, now all of a sudden my network’s taxed, I’ve got to upgrade my router. $250 bucks on Amazon, you get a Black Hawk, it’s cheap. Get yourself a Yeti Speaker, it’s $130 dollars on Amazon, you can get the low end ones for $70, it looks like a legitimate podcast looking thing, get one of those, it’s a no-brainer. Get a better camera, it’s a no-brainer. Set expectations that the camera is going to be on all the time, it seems simple, most people don’t do it. Record your calls, Zoom you can record, other technologies you can record in a compliant way so the people know they’re being recorded and it’s state laws and everything. Record your calls, absolutely 100%. The thing that’s actually nice about Zoom is you can get a lot more decision makers involved, easier, faster with less friction than you could before. Sometimes you can’t get them in the same room but it’s pretty easy to get them in the same virtual room.

Fred Diamond: We’re going to address that in a few moments now, everybody being at home. Dan, you’ve also done a lot of sales training in your career as well. By the way, we didn’t say this but you’re also known as The Sales Rhino, someone just chimed in here. Dan’s known as the Sales Rhino.

Steve Richard: Why?

Fred Diamond: [Laughs]

Steve Richard: Hang on, I’m sorry, Fred. Why?

Fred Diamond: Dan, you can tell us why and then you can answer the question about habits that sales professionals should be focusing on right now.

Dan Cole: First habit is charging down opportunities, there’s your Rhino answer, Steve. I’ve taken this opportunity to encourage but I’d also say working on myself, I’m developing systems and routines because I’m stuck here at home so I might as well develop a higher degree of discipline throughout my day. I told some people I have not worked from home in the past this day to day and I always wondered what would stop me from going outside and looking at the beautiful weather and not slacking off, but being distracted, it’s just the opposite. I have to force myself, I’ve told members of my team that are on the call, they experience the same, we encourage each other to go out, take walks, take breaks, what have you because if not, you are staring at a screen all day long. Developing disciplines and routines and systems, there’s a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear that many I’m sure in this audience have heard.

He said it’s all about your systems, it’s not necessarily about habits. Steve, you brought up sharpen the saw, Stephen Covey has been a mentor of mine for my entire professional life so professional development, we don’t shy away with that on our sales team. We encourage everybody on a daily basis to participate in some form of professional development whether it be reading a book, leading a role play or watching a video. Every Friday we have something called ‘book club’ where someone shares either a chapter from a book or an article and we all discuss it so sharpening the saw, I think, is absolutely the most important habit which includes everything I just explained.

Fred Diamond: One question that came in here that said, “Is it better to use a video conference or the phone for client calls?” Knowing that people are home. We’re all dressed up, we’re wearing nice shirts and all that but we’ve seen the memes and pictures of people who haven’t showered yet or shaved or whatever, people who are accidentally hitting the potato button on their Zoom, if you will. Talk to us a little bit about that, Steve and Dan, mention your thoughts about that as well. People are home, we know they’re home, what are some best practices to be contacting them?

Steve Richard: I’m going to give you three, the first is going to be for a scheduled call. When you’re doing scheduled calls like on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting, etcetera you absolutely want to have the video on and it’s not my opinion. I’ve looked at various sets and research that companies have done, on average your win rate will increase by about 2% so if you’re winning 16% of your deals, you’ll win 18% and by the way, if you turn your camera on and the other person does not turn their camera on, it doesn’t make a difference because it humanizes you.

You have to see the person. I think that we’re never going to go back to work where people weren’t doing this now, this was the nudge we all needed because before everyone got on these and no one ever put the camera on, now everybody puts their camera on. The second is if you’re doing an unscheduled call. If it’s an unscheduled call, obviously you can’t really use video as part of it but instead, this is kind of an odd website, it’s completely free, it’s called truepeoplesearch.com and it’s essentially a database of mobile phone numbers of folks. If you don’t have the prospect contact information, there are other paid resources too like Zoom Info and Sales Intel and Seamless that provide that. Obviously in that case it’s going to be a phone call. Then the third thing is the value of social media and social selling is way higher, to borrow a line from Jill Rowley, the old Queen of Social Selling, the old eloquent sales professional who now is a talking head, she says, “Not always be closing but always be connecting.”

Connect with someone on LinkedIn, don’t ask them for anything and then reference something like a common connection. So, if I connect with Dan and I reference Fred, my probability of him connecting is much higher. Once he connects if you click on the contact info in LinkedIn, they usually have persona email and personal cellphone number sitting right there. Let’s be connecting, let’s be informed as sales professionals now more than ever.

Fred Diamond: Dan, I’ve just been informed that you’ve been the Rhino since 1988, FYI, one of your fans just let us know that. How about you, Dan? Again, talking to people, we know that they’re home, we know they might be in their garage, they might be in the makeshift in. A lot of people that you talk to probably don’t necessarily work from home so how are you engaging your people to interact with them?

Dan Cole: I’m going to give the credit to the sales team that I know is on this call right now. This is a really challenging time for them because our bread and butter in terms of how we articulate benefits of our events space that Steve was alluding to earlier, the events we have, my team sells a space at the top of the Spy Museum on the roof and these are gorgeous panoramic views of D.C. It’s an emotional sell as it were so taking people around on “site visits” is a natural part and a very important part of our sales process, we can’t do that right now, we can’t be in the office and certainly our clients and prospects can’t be participating in site tours. With the help of our AB team we do have the opportunity to view space virtually, that is available on the website and the team is also proactively sending out those links.

We just did so a few minutes ago with an association that’s taking a look at our space so that’s how we’re dealing with that particular tool. I would also echo on a general standpoint what Steve said, this is a great opportunity for humanizing the experience, it does not mean that the other person has to turn their camera on, as Steve said but we hear this cliché about relationship building. This is the ultimate way to do it, it shows that we’re willing to take an extra step, put the camera on us, the onus on us and be able to at least do the best we can through body language and sincerity, develop that relationship or sustain that relationship. Again, don’t have to pressure the other people to put their camera on but it is an opportunity for us to continue to build and develop relationships. I hate this term, “The new normal”, I don’t want to be normal but young people coming up in this profession like Steve said, they’re not going to know any difference. They’ll be face-to-face selling but I think this virtual element is here to stay so this is something that we all need to become accustomed to whether we are in the field or we are leading the sales team or both.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about relationships for a second here, we have a question that came in through the panel. Steve, you’re one of the most well-known people I know in the inside sales world, whenever you host something you get hundreds if not thousands of interactions. Dan, you know everybody as well, you’ve been selling to people, you actually introduced us to 10 people that we’ve had on the Sales Game Changers podcast. Let’s talk about relationship building now, we can’t just go meet somebody for lunch. People are doing virtual lunches but let’s talk about building relationships right now. I think, Steve, you mentioned before that this has been a great opportunity to connect with people that you haven’t connected in a while. Give us some of your ideas on how people can be building relationships. Besides the people in your house, your spouse and your children, you’re really not seeing too many other people because we’re being very conscious of physical and social distancing. Dan, why don’t you go first? What are your recommendations on building relationships now and in the foreseeable future? They’re talking about some offices not opening up until September and then Steve, you deal with people around the world, I’m interested in your thoughts.

Dan Cole: Do you want me to go first, Fred?

Fred Diamond: I do, yes.

Dan Cole: I think now more than ever this is a time to take people by surprise and I’ll tell you what I mean by that. I think that often times when we’re trying to contact people, the first inclination we as human beings have – and it doesn’t have to be from a snarky standpoint as, “What do you want, why are you calling, what happened?” we’re used to that from normal time. I think now more than ever especially going back to this format, one of the things that I try to do and I know that our sales team does because they have unbelievable relationships is really put the other person first in terms of what we can do for them. It doesn’t have to do anything with the Spy Museum. In fact, I think that’s the most sincere way of doing things, pay it forward to me is a way of life and what you put out in the universe, it gives back to you.

I think that absolutely applies to relationships with clients and prospects alike. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care, that comes from listening, that comes from a genuine, sincere interest and I think the way you do that is you don’t necessarily have to concentrate on your product or service immediately because most people do. I want to be one of the ones that say they were getting in contact with me and I know Julie and Stephanie as an example are in touch with clients and just letting them know through emails, “Here’s some of the online programs that are absolutely free for you and your clients to listen to, have a listen.” Not one word about selling space whatsoever and that’s where I think relationships come from, that sincerity and that genuine interest in others.

Fred Diamond: Steve, what about you? You’re a big relationship guy. By the way, if you’re watching today’s webcast there’s tens of millions of people also accessing some of the online mechanism so if you see a little bit of a jitter, just bear with us, the audio seems to be pretty sound. Steve, relationships, what are some of your thoughts on continuing to build relationships right now in this virtual world?

Steve Richard: Write down all of the topics, and a great way to do this is talk to people where you already have a strong relationship so they’ll talk to you. What are the topics that they’re thinking about now? If they’re tangential to what you do, great and if they’re not, that’s okay too. I’ll give you an example for us. I spent a lot of time with people on call recording laws and what you can do, how do you record all your calls if they’re unscheduled outbound cold calls and do it in a compliant way. Most people don’t know what’s possible with technology so there’s an education and by the way, that’s not our technology so it’s not what I’m selling.

Another example is using call dispositions. Again, not our technology but the sort of thing where if I can bring to bear the call dispositions of 10 other companies just like them and that’s something that they care about right now because they’re trying to get more data on what their teams are doing working from home, that’s going to help them a ton or our sales process. They say, “I’m looking at refining my sales process while I have an opportunity, what do you know about sales process?” Quite a bit, let’s take a look at ours and some other ones and do those kinds of things. You’ve got to bring that knowledge to bear so that people look at you as someone who cares about them and who’s going to bring value.

I had a question come in from one of our customers, companies called Superior Glove, they sell gloves, literally gloves to safety managers so not so much to consumers but they sell them more like in an industrial setting. He came back to me and asked me a question about sales compensation and then I’m connecting dots because one of our investors sent to our CEO this article about how people are revising their forecast and their sales compensation so I sent him that link. That’s going to create a bigger, stronger bond with Joe and by the way, I also bought his book and I’m going to write a review on Amazon. Those kinds of things, all these things really make a difference.

Fred Diamond: Steve, I want to follow up with you. We’ve got a couple questions coming in here from the audience. Again, if you have a question for Steve Richard or Dan Cole submit them via the question panel, they’re great, we appreciate them. Steve, you’re an expert on sales process. Flow, email, text, call, those types of processes. A question comes in here and let’s get specific if we could. Of course it differs based on industry, company and who you’re talking to. Dan, I’m interested in your thoughts after Steve gives his insights, “What’s the best way to touch base with current customers or prospects today? Should I be emailing, should I be texting, should I be calling? It seems like everyone has put everything ‘on hold.'” Again, if this pandemic had never happened we would have a flow that you guys have developed and refined millions of times with your processes. Again, it’s May 13th, by the way we’re not using the P word or both C words anymore but what are your thoughts on that? What is the best flow for customers and prospects?

Steve Richard: If you know your customer’s optimal communication channels, obviously go for that, that’s the first thing. If you know them and you have a relationship with them, for me and a lot of our customers it’s text, it ends up performing the best and then the message, you want to say something about them or their business to start. An easy way to do this is if they’re active on LinkedIn or other social media, Twitter or whatever, what’s the thing they posted or commented on recently? That’s essentially what’s in their brain. It’s simple, everyone can do it, shame on us if we don’t. If you don’t know what their communication pattern is, if they’re an existing customer obviously ask them but you’re going to have to run a test we’ll refer to as a cadence or a sequence.

A cadence or a sequence is touch one is going to be a voicemail, touch two is going to be a social media connect and this might be cold, it might not be an existing customer, it’s a prospect. Touch three is going to be an email and there are certain rules that we know based on the research that we’ve done, based on the research I’ve seen other people do. One is if it’s cold, it’s a 30 day period, you don’t want to go more than 30 days so you burst your activity. This comes from a company called TOPO that was acquired by Gartner, SiriusDecisions, a similar company acquired by Gartner – Gartner buys everybody. That shows the burst of activities, within that burst of activities you want to have two voicemails and at least two social media touches and then it is fine to have calls where you don’t leave a voicemail and depending on how heavily solicited the prospect is, you can go up to like 10 emails in that 30 day period.

That’s an optimal on average but it’s going to differ from company to company and based on who you’re selling to. If you’re selling to someone much more junior they’re going to be like, “It’s overwhelming” because they don’t get solicited that much but if you’re selling to someone who’s more senior you’ve got to do that to rise above the vendor static and noise that’s in the marketplace.

Fred Diamond: Dan, slightly different question for you. Again, you’ve managed a lot of outside sales professionals over your career. Again, Steve, a lot of his experience has been inside sales teams and appointment scheduling, things along those lines and business development. Dan, what skills should historically outside sales professionals learn today? It’s interesting, everybody came inside about almost two months ago, I’ve been working from home for almost 20 somewhat years so it’s almost second nature even though I’ve learned some things like the chair that I’m using, I need to replace this chair [Laughs] it’s a dining room chair. But even now, you would think that people have probably gotten it down but it’s hard and a lot of people we’ve heard and talking to the sales leaders we’ve spoken to, a lot of the traditional outside sales professionals are struggling with being inside and the new world and not being able to go and travel and do all those things. What are some things you recommend that historically outside sales professionals learn now to be valid moving forward?

Dan Cole: I’m going to go back to the fundamentals and I think the most valuable talent or attribute that a salesperson can have outside or inside is the ability to listen empathically. I have found there’s nothing more important than that. We can present features and benefits all day long but if they have nothing to do with our client or prospect it doesn’t matter, so asking the right questions and understanding what challenges and pain points are that exist for clients gives us the opportunity to sit back and listen, no more important skill. That doesn’t change whether I’m working inside now because of this pandemic or whether I’m working on the outside. I do think, to Steve’s point, we do need to develop for a field the comfort level of who we’re talking to in terms of how they like to be communicated with going back all the way to selling copiers and I know Steve [Inaudible 39:10] on this call who was my manager would agree. This is a people business, at the end of the day we are communicating with fellow human beings and listening to me is the most important skill one could develop. If there’s something that I could spend my entire life in terms of learning and re-learning it’s the ability to listen empathically.

Fred Diamond: A question comes in from the audience, “My empathy is getting stale. What should I be doing now to have fresh outreach to my prospects?” That’s a great question. We’ve been doing this webcast for almost seven weeks now and we’ve seen the evolution of the answers. The first two or three weeks it was obvious, get used to being home, start being empathetic. “How are you?” Simple types of, “How are things going, are you okay? Are you home now?” type of things. Here we are, we’re two months in. During the initial poll that we did, 30% of the people listening today said they have concerns about their jobs in the future.

It’s almost like, “Can we start selling again?” We’ve all spent the last two months getting used to being at home understanding what’s going on in this world that no one foresaw, without getting into politics. What can we be doing now as our empathy gets stale? Dan, you just mentioned empathy and Steve, you’re the conversation king. Dan, why don’t you crack at that one first and then Steve, I’m interested in your thoughts on what should we be talking about now. It’s two months in and we have quotas, we want to sell. I know there’s a lot of quota and compensation relief, it’s a whole different topic that we’re not going to address today but Dan, what are your thoughts on how can you be fresh? What should you be doing to be fresh?

Dan Cole: If your empathy is getting stale I would say take a day off or take a week off because nothing’s changed. My question is why is empathy even more enforced now? Empathy should always be a part of what we do whether we’re in a pandemic or not and get used to it especially now. It goes back to what I originally said before, this comes to authenticity and sincerity and if you can’t exude empathy despite what you’re going through, because we’re all going through it, we’re all nervous, we’re all anxious about this. Find a way to get it, take a day off or do some real serious thinking because that is what is going to allow us to move our business forward, it goes right back to listening.

Everyone to a degree, although everybody handles this differently, is terrified somewhat so to have a degree of empathy is absolutely necessary. You’ve got to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and develop that empathy or recharge yourself so it comes back to you because that isn’t going anywhere, the need for that. When we come out of this pandemic and especially now, you’ve got to be sincere and I think Steve gave great examples of that. You have to be sincere or you might as well not try to be empathetic. We’ve had deep discussions on our team on what our clients are going through, what we’re going through and now’s not the time to drone on obnoxiously, but empathy creates that environment and the basis for continued business. That’s my take.

Fred Diamond: Steve, again I keep referring to you as one of the conversation kings, you’ve listened to more sales conversations than anybody I know and most people I know combined. Talk about that for a second, the shift in conversation right now.

Steve Richard: It was all about acknowledging it before, we’re actually seeing that there’s a negative relationship now if you bring it up, too much are in the wrong context or certainly lead with the two C words, like you said before. Instead, what we’re seeing working is just level with people. None of us are so foolish to think and you can literally say this on a call, if I’m cold calling Dan, “Dan, I’m not so foolish to think that you’re in a position to buy anything at the Spy Museum, I can only imagine what’s happened there because I know you have that event space and I know that everything’s closed, I totally get that. At the same time, I have a job to do and I can bring value to you. Let’s schedule some time so we can talk.”

That leveling with them is very powerful and putting you on that human level, and I’m going to give a nod to Linda Richardson and something I heard from a guy named Kevin Vanes who’s a VP of Sales at Terminus the other day. He talked about the six critical skills, Linda Richardson has the six critical skills. Presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning and checking. If you’re having an empathy crisis, in addition to taking a day off, read a book and I would read a sales book. Go recharge, go back to the sales mothership. A lot of people have studied this profession, my mentor, Tom Snyder spent years studying the profession of buying and selling and he imparted that passion for it back to me so recharge your battery, it’s like you’re an electric car. Then go back out at it and then honestly, if you can’t be empathetic and you’ve lost that authenticity, you just don’t care about these people – and I mean this with all due respect – maybe get out of sales, maybe do something else for a while and then you can come back to it later on.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point and actually a great book is Alan Stein Jr.’s Raise Your Game. One of the things that we’ve learned over the 8 weeks we’ve been doing this webcast is you’re a sales professional and if you’re watching today’s webcast, we have a lot of people here from all over the globe. There’s some names I recognize, people in the IES community and there’s a ton of names that I’ve never seen before so thank you so much for participating on today’s webcast. Again, we’re going to be turning this into a Sales Game Changers podcast, keep your eyes open for that. Also, I just want to acknowledge our sponsors of the IES, we have Cvent, Asher Strategies, DLT, ImmixGroup, Red Hat and SAPNS2, they’re our platinum sponsors. You are a sales professional, this is a very difficult time to be in sales but you’re a sales professional. How are you being professional? We have time for two more questions. Do you guys have a couple more minutes? We have a couple more questions that came in, then we’ll wrap up here. How are you taking care of yourself? Again, we have a lot of sales leaders on today’s call. Steve, you look great, you got the beard going here, I told you in the beginning of the call it looks like you’ve lost a little bit of weight but what are you guys physically doing as sales leaders in the midst of this to be sane, to be healthy, to be fresh? Steve, go first.

Steve Richard: In the morning, frozen blueberries in a smoothie with some spinach, protein, ripe banana, unsweetened almond milk with a peanut butter bagel, and I run every day. That’s pretty much it, I do some planks because my back hurts me but if you do that every day, for me at least it works.

Fred Diamond: Eat healthy and get out there and be active. Dan Cole, how about you?

Dan Cole: I’d like to meet you at a centralized location because I’d like to pick that up every day from you, if you don’t mind. My daughter who’s to the right of me has been encouraging me to eat more avocados and that’s something I’ll do as well.

Steve Richard: Dan, I eat one a day, I eat an avocado a day.

Dan Cole: Costco, if you wear a mask and go in there, they’ve got the best deals on them. This is not an Apple watch, it’s my Fitbit, I am obsessed with walking and anybody who would like to join a challenge with me, I’m also a competitor as I’m sure the other two gentlemen on this podcast that you’re looking at are as well. I do a ton of walking every day and on the weekends try to do 10-11 miles, just sharpening the saw with the headphones and listening to podcasts and webcasts and what have you. To answer your question, Fred, lots and lots of walking.

Fred Diamond: What are going to be the challenges over the next week that the sales professionals need to overcome?

Dan Cole: Okay, thank you, Fred [laughs] sorry, Steve. Mine’s a review of what I said before and I think Steve covered this. I think it’s a challenge to assume that clients won’t buy. In other words, and Steve touched on it to, to over-empathize. It’s important to empathize but the authenticity that Steve talked about was basically what I wanted to say, to stay authentic, to understand that we have a job to do, to encourage our sales teams in a very difficult time, to remember that we are of value to each other and to our clients. Then what I want to remember to do and hopefully I’m being effective in doing so is to make sure that I am communicating with each member on my team in the way they want to be communicated with, the way they want to be led, everybody approaches this crisis in a different way, truly, including all of us. Those are my challenges and ones that I hope to overcome.

Fred Diamond: Dan, you just made a great point that comes up not infrequently at the IES. Don’t make the decisions for your customers, don’t presume that they’re having a challenging time, they’re not going to buy, they’re not looking for solutions. Sales professionals out there, do not put your head in the mind of the salesperson and make those assumptions. Steve, why don’t you bring us on home?

Steve Richard: Get out of autopilot if you haven’t already. Take a look around, use your business acumen, look around the economy, there are lots of companies right now that are absolutely thriving and you can sell to them in many cases or be prepared to sell to them when you come out of this. Go subscribe to an email newsletter called The Hustle, every morning they deliver long form journalism and they’re explaining situations of micro industries that are flourishing you’ve never thought of before. Building pipeline and doing the right activity day in and day out when you know it’s not going to close, I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge. It’s like, “How do I keep getting myself to my activity levels when I know for a fact that these deals are not going to close in the ways they were before?”

That can be a mind game, get yourself over that mind game. Then finally, manage up and managing up is not making excuses. If you’re going to manage up, you better not show up saying, “There’s no way I can hit this number, boss” and then they look at your activities and go, “You’re right, there’s not, you didn’t try.” This is not a time not to try and I am absolutely flabbergasted right now how frequently I’m talking to sales leaders and business owners and they’re saying that even in the midst of 15% unemployment we’ve got salespeople who are not essentially trying. Now, I empathize with depression and those kinds of things, I get it, at the same time this is not the time not to try and I know the unemployment is very rich right now and a lot of people are making more on unemployment than they were making before, it’s not going to last forever and that’s not a way to build your career. Find a way if you care about your profession and what you’re doing to get the activities done you need to get done. Dan?

Dan Cole: I want to pay you back on something you said, Steve. Now is not the time, I go to YouTube and John Maxwell talks about the concept of failing forward. We’re not failing but we are redefining challenges that we face. Thinking that we’re failing, we have to ask ourselves, “Is it true?” What you just said, so much speaks to me. Now is not the time, it’s an opportunity as difficult as this is.

Fred Diamond: Gentlemen, once again thank you so much, thanks everybody. If you haven’t taken a picture of the screenshot we have three seconds. Three [laughs], two, one. Thank you so much, thank you to all our guests, again Steve Richard, Dan Cole. Again, this will be repurposed as a Sales Game Changers podcast. Thank you to our transcriber Mariana who is finishing up as we speak. Gentlemen, thank you so much, stay safe.

Dan Cole: Thank you all.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 234: How Sales Leaders are Leading Teams and Customers Moving Forward with The Spy Museum’s Dan Cole and ExecVision’s Steve Richard first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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

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

Watch the webinar here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Diamond: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Salz: Go for it.

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

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

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

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

Lee Salz: Okay, 82%.

Fred Diamond: My first inclination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Salz: Great guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee Salz: She’s wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on May 6, 2020. It featured sales leaders Patrick Devlin (Meridian) and Jennifer Fisher (WorldStrides).]

EPISODE 232: Sales Transformation and Success Webcast as the World Re-Opens featuring Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Patrick Devlin’s Podcast . Listen to Jennifer Fisher’s Podcast.

PATRICK’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Somebody said we’re all on the same boat with this thing but I’m a sailor and I’ll say that we’re not in the same boat, we’re in the same storm. The situation on anybody else’s boat might be very different than yours so try to really tune into that. You have some customers that are flourishing and you have some that you think might be but they’re not. The economic impact is not equal and you really do need to understand that.”

Fred Diamond: Patrick Devlin, it’s great to have you on today’s webcast. Why don’t you introduce yourself, Patrick and tell us what your top priorities are right now?

Patrick Devlin: Thank you. I think if you had given people an option of ‘all of the above’, it probably would have been the #1 choice [laughs]. My name is Patrick Devlin, I’m the Chief Business Development Officer at Meridian Knowledge Solutions in Reston, Virginia. In terms of what my top priorities are right now, I think like most, it’s our existing clients and the existing opportunities in the pipeline and making sure that you’re spending as much time as possible with those and maximizing the opportunities there.

When I talk about our existing clients, one of the things that we’re seeing as a learning platform is an explosion in utilization. We are seeing in some cases on a same store sales approach from year over year, we’re seeing individuals that are just seeing explosive growth, 3, 4, 500% type of growth. Across the board we’re seeing more like 250, 300% growth across the board with utilization, I think a lot of people are being told, “You’re at home, this is a great time for you to be catching up on your certification training, on your compliance training, that new professional development. You’re here and you’ve always wanted to get here, this is a great time to do it.”

We’re definitely seeing that so making sure that we have the infrastructure in place to make our clients look like superstars as these volumes go through the roof. The other thing that we’ve done is we have waved any licensing restrictions for this period of time so if clients want to bring on new learning communities, the sky is the limit. That’s meant a lot of good background work that we have to do to make sure that the infrastructure is in place to support it.

Fred Diamond: I remember, Patrick, when we interviewed you for the Sales Game Changers podcast, a lot of the people who commented when we posted the show said that you’re The Metaphor King. I’m not sure if you have one or two but I’ll give you a few moments to think about something as well.

Jennifer Fisher, you’re in Charlottesville, Virginia, the company is called WorldStrides. Tell us what your priorities are. You’re obviously servicing a customer that’s going through a lot of challenges right now as we all, but yours particularly so what are your priorities right now?

Jennifer Fisher: We do study abroad at colleges and universities – so yes, it’s a very tough time. However, with that being said, we have exceeded our targets in March and we’ve exceeded our targets in April so right now my top priority is to exceed our targets for May. I feel very confident that our team is going to be able to accomplish this.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, what’s been the biggest surprise? Again, the biggest positive surprise that has happened for you coming out of this situation? I know you just said you had a great March and great April and hoping for a great May but you’ve also had to furlough some people, I guess. But from a positive perspective, again, one thing we’re trying to be here on the weekly webcast is aspirational, we’re also going to talk about some of the challenges that everyone’s dealing with, of course but give us a positive surprise that’s come out of this for you.

Jennifer Fisher: I think that one of the good things that I was very excited about is even when COVID was happening throughout China and Asia, I was keeping a very close eye on that because that does affect our business going through Europe and of course anything that comes into America, so I’m definitely keeping a close eye on it and even by the end of January going into February I was able to put together what I called my COVID Strategy, just thinking ahead, “If this happens, here’s how we’re going to react to it.” We wrote all this up hoping we don’t have to, but we obviously have, but having that all in place when things started to shift we were right on it.
We got the team going, they were motivated, they were behind it, they were excited and we were able to shift, work from home and do this or that and we had the plan, we had the road map in front of us and off we went. Because of that planning ahead of time and the strategic plans in place, that’s how we were able to establish our best March, best April and going into our best May.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? Again, you’re a pretty aspirational leader, I remember both of you actually when I did the Sales Game Changers podcast, you’re both very high-energy conversations, a lot of optimism. Patrick, for you, tell us about a positive surprise coming out of the situation or perhaps something you’re most proud of.

Patrick Devlin: I think the conversations that we’re having with our clients has probably been the most positive surprise of this whole situation because a lot of times they can be the hardest people to get in touch with, you have these built up agendas over a period of time where you want to get to this, you want to get to that and you want to do more of this and a little less of that, but then the current situation overwhelms you and you never get to these things, they always seem to be just on the back burner.

We’ve had some fantastic dialogue, our clients are so much more accessible than they’ve been in the past because they’re not getting hit from a lot of other angles so plans that we’ve had on the table for a while are now finally starting to move forward. I would say the trust that is evident in these conversations has been really positive and it’s reciprocal, and we’ve seen a lot of evidence that they appreciate the candor, the trust and the empathy that we’re showing for their situations as well. That sort of thing has been fantastic.

Fred Diamond: As a sales leader, I’m curious, for the first time in everybody’s history we know where everybody is. We know where all of our prospects are, they’re most likely at home unless they’re essential and they’re probably going to be in their office, they’re not traveling to a trade show so we know where everybody is. How are you encouraging your people to reach out to people right now knowing that? I guess you still need to be respectful, but Patrick, let’s start with you. A number of people who are listening on today’s webcast and are watching our show today have asked, “Is it okay just to call somebody because we know that they’re at home?” What are some of your thoughts on that?

Patrick Devlin: I think it’s absolutely okay to call people and the interesting thing that I’ve seen is that the ones that seem that might want the call the least, ones that are home schooling three kids or have this issue going on and all these other things, they just seem to be dying to have a conversation with an adult. I just find that you have a much longer lead in before you need to get to the business side and the conversations are longer, deeper, broader and it’s been a great relationship building exercise. I would tell people not to hesitate at all. People have caller ID, if they don’t want to talk to you they won’t pick up the phone but so far that has not been an issue for us at all.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, along those lines, how have you changed as a sales leader? Two months ago when we started doing this webcast of interviewing sales leaders it was not uncommon to hear people say, “I’ve been through 9/11” and, “I was through the recessions of 2007-2008, so this is just another one.” This is not just another one for anyone on the planet but how have you changed as a sales leader?

Jennifer Fisher: What’s interesting, besides the obvious of working from home that everyone in the world is doing right now, in some aspects we really haven’t changed. The basics of selling hasn’t changed, the medium may have changed like we’re not sitting doing this the way we did but the basics are right there. We’re here to support our prospects, we’re here to work with our customers, share resources and again, just like Patrick was saying, we’re that trusted adviser. Again, the basics haven’t changed, we’re just doing it a little differently.

Fred Diamond: How about you, Patrick? You’ve been a sales leader for a long time, what’s changed for you? Has anything changed or do you agree with Jennifer that it’s a continuation as it were besides circumstance?

Patrick Devlin: I do agree that sales is sales and the mediums change, the situations are always different but the basics stay the same. I do think that from a leadership perspective I’m not only a sales leader but one of the corporate leaders of the organization as well. While I’ve always tried to implicitly be there for people – call it the open door policy, everybody can come in and feel comfortable talking to me about anything – I think I can say for myself and the other executive leaders of the company, we’re trying to be more explicit about that right now.

We’re reaching out to people and encouraging the conversations, we’re asking them how they’re doing. Are they having any difficulties at home? Is there anything that we can be helping with? And ensuring especially people that are not used to working at home. The sales reps, that’s not a big issue. Most of them even if they’re not today, they’ve had that experience but it’s the other support people in the organization and the marketing team and the like that aren’t used to this sort of environment, so freeing them up to know that, “If you are home schooling right now or you have a special needs child, you don’t have to be available from 9 to 5.

You need to get your work done but you can be more flexible and you can come to us with stuff.” The reaction has been terrific, the things that we’re learning, the needs that people have and the accommodations that we’ve put in place to try to make them comfortable are building long-term much more loyalty and an understanding that we care more about them than just what they’re doing at work. That’s been great.

Fred Diamond: Again, one out of five people who were polled said they’re having difficulty connecting with customers. We know what’s going on with our companies, we don’t necessarily know everything that’s going on with our customer because they’re dealing with challenges with their customer, we’re dealing with challenges with their customer. Tell us a little more about what you mentioned, the conversations that you’re having, tell us a little more about what you’re directing your people to engage, how are you telling them to have conversations and what are they hearing from their customers? Give us a little bit of a perspective – without getting into obviously intimate type things – what are your customers telling you right now? Are they as stressed as 26% of the people who took our poll? Jennifer, why don’t you go first?

Jennifer Fisher: Yes, I think they are very much stressed out, too. I will say that the biggest shift that we’re seeing and that I’ve been given a directive in working with our team on is the shift to virtual. We’re not even making phone calls, everything is through virtual. We’re doing Zoom calls with everybody, our prospecting calls are Zoom prospecting calls, we’re sending some resource emails out asking someone, “Do you want to chat, have a virtual coffee meeting? We want to see how you’re doing, what’s happening.”

Same things we’re putting with our employees, we’re working with our customers that way, too. I’ll tell you, the response has been phenomenal. Everybody loves it because I think we’re all at home, we’re balancing all sorts of things and they’re like, “I’d love to have a video conference, I’d love to chat with you over a virtual coffee” and they get a kick out of that. Then when we’re working with them over video it’s so deep, we are really building very strong relationships by that. They’re going to see us, they’re seeing our home office or our cat running by and it’s been incredible, there’s been incredible response, the team loves it, our clients love it so it’s been really good.

Fred Diamond: I want to remind people, if you have a question for Jennifer Fisher or for Patrick Devlin just submit it via the question panel, we’ll get to all your questions today. Patrick, how about you? What are you hearing from customers that they’re telling your salespeople and what’s going on with your customer base?

Patrick Devlin: You hit on it, everybody’s dealing with a different situation so if you have clients, for example, that are highly dependent upon, you have to think about their clients, their markets. If they’re highly dependent upon, for example, we have a clients whose clients are exclusively high end radiology and medical solutions, and that industry is really impacted by all this. You need to be sensitive about that and have those conversations and be proactive about it, don’t wait for them to come to you when they really have a problem and need a solution. You can predict these things and I’m learning a lot. I’ll throw out a metaphor, somebody likes to say we’re all on the same boat with this thing but I heard I’m a sailor and I heard somebody else say that we’re not in the same boat, we’re in the same storm.

The situation on anybody else’s boat might be very different than yours so we’re trying to really tune into that and I’m learning how uneven the economic impact is of what’s going on in the economy right now. You have some that are flourishing and you have some that you think might be but they’re not. The economic impact is not equal and you really do need to get to understand that. I’m being very specific right now about customers versus prospects, I said before, customers I have found to be so much easier to get in touch with right now. It’s not the same if you’re making that initial prospecting call, that initial introduction call, that has been more difficult and we’re having to get creative about that but those customer conversations have just been… I’m very curious and I look for intellectual curiosity and people who are genuinely interested in what’s going on with our clients and it’s just been fascinating for me. It’s been like having an MBA program where you’re talking to all these people in different industries and learning so much about how the broader economic drivers impact their individual businesses.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, Patrick just eluded to people are getting almost an MBA. I remember when we interviewed you for the Sales Game Changers podcast, you got your MBA at the age of 40. We talked about –

Jennifer Fisher: [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: You said it, it’s on the transcript right here [Laughs]

Patrick Devlin: Congratulations, you just got it [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: It was last year, she just finished. I want to ask you a question about that right now. This is a unique time, everyone is at home, everyone has these opportunities, Patrick, you mentioned how people are using the opportunity to get certifications or they should be. Jennifer, again, I have an MBA as well, it’s hard work to get an MBA. What would you recommend to your sales professionals right now to get them to take their careers to the next level from a professional development perspective?

Jennifer Fisher: A couple things. One of my teammates actually did just get accepted to an MBA program and she’ll be starting at the end of August so I’m super excited for her. She took that upon herself and said, “This is the direction I want to head.” I am a big sales junkie, if you will, so I love getting my hands on any books, any webinars and I encourage that in my team. I try to lead by example so very much I’m having the team come to me with some of the things that they’ve found and let them present that to our team as a whole. Whether it’s a different strategy or, “We thought about doing this”, these are the times that we can tweak some things a little bit and try something different.

Encouraging them to look for those little nuggets, I just saw one of my other teammates just finish a course on Coursera, she finished her course on there and is super excited. I’m thrilled hearing what the team is doing, a lot of them are taking it upon themselves to use this time to better them, then come back and help us in the business and are coming back with their ideas and saying, “I learned this, can we try this? Can we do this?” Now is the time to be innovative so I’m super excited for the team.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? You’re also a big professional development guy so specifically, what would you tell some of the people listening to today’s webcast? We have people on today’s show from around the globe, sales professionals, sales leaders. What might be a specific thing or two that you would urge them to do today, May 6th, 2020 to take their careers or lives to the next level?

Patrick Devlin: In that respect, it’s not different than I ever have been with the advice that I give to my people. I often use the example, you find a lot of people in sales that might be into various competitive sports, maybe running, biking, swimming or all three or whatever hobbies, they get pretty intense about it. I ask them to think about the amount of time and effort that they put into that and just ask them to put an equal amount of time into developing what they do for a living.

Think about what magazines do you subscribe to? Do you subscribe to outdoor life and do you do this and do you do that? You need to balance that and be sure that you’re always spending just as much time outside of work with developing your skill set that you use for a profession. I think that’s a reasonable ask and that never changes for me.

Fred Diamond: A question comes in here, again, we have a lot of people here who are in the early stage of their sales career. “I’m dealing with a lot of anxiety right now and stress. What do you suggest I do as a sales professional to balance this?” Patrick, let’s start with you there. Most of the people who answered our poll in the beginning said they have concern about their job and the future of their company and then Jennifer, I’ll ask you as a follow up, what should they be doing to alleviate the stress that they’re going through?

\Again, you mentioned before they may have kids at home, there may be other things, they may have a parent that they’re concerned about. What are some of your advice for people watching today’s webcast to focus on alleviating on some of the stress they’re dealing with?

Patrick Devlin: I’ve had these conversations and part of it is just letting people know it’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to be unsure. You can’t be perfect, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to do things and to not feel like you have to be some Rocket Gibraltar all the time, it’s okay. Then the normal stuff, quit focusing on things you can’t change. If you don’t have any control over it, then just try to put it aside and focus on the things that you can control.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? How are you helping your team deal with the stress or anxiety that they might be going through right now?

Jennifer Fisher: Very similar with Patrick, for me personally the easiest way for focus is to focus on what I can control. Let’s not focus on, “Is college going to be back in session in the fall? When will they start study abroad programs? How is this going to impact?” That stresses me out right now thinking about that, but what I can do today right now are some basic day to day things. I want to lead by example and again, letting the team know, “Hey, we don’t have any control over what’s going to happen on the college campuses. I hope things get better soon, but we don’t have control over that.” What we do have control over right now is that we’re killing it out there with our prospects and with our clients, let’s focus one day at a time, focus on what we can control and let’s just do that one day at a time.

Fred Diamond: One thing that’s come up on the webcast is the fact that I remember the very first show that we did, one of our guests said we all have new jobs and a lot of our customers are changing how they go about their business. Jennifer, a question came in for you. “How do you see your organization, your company pivoting given the possible impacts to post-secondary institutions that may come this fall?” Again, that’s out of your control but what pivots might you see coming? Again, the markets that you serve, every day they see something new. What do you see on that sense?

Jennifer Fisher: Again, I really come back to what it is that we do on the day to day basis but with our business, the study abroad and working with college and universities, we work really far in advance so we’re actually working on programs that are traveling next spring. There’s a lot of concerns like, “Are these programs going to be able to travel in the spring?” I don’t know, we don’t know but we’re still going to work with our colleagues and we’re still going to work on these programs because there’s also a chance that they will travel. Even if they’re not back on campus in the fall which – I have a college age son, he’s home right now so I get that [Laughs] – but again, we have to come back, I’m excited because we also learned this whole virtual thing which is going really well and we’re building those connections. We have a very big industry conference coming up at the end of May so it’ll be good to see people virtually. It’s not the same but again, just focus on that day to day and there are going to be shifts, we know that, that’s part of being flexible, adaptable and being able to persevere through this.

Fred Diamond: I have a senior who’s preparing for the fall as well. Patrick, again, we’ve had to implement a lot of new sales strategies, obviously. Zoom, video, those types of technologies, everybody’s home, etcetera. With this situation we’ve been going through, how do you see that changing the way you sell moving forward? Do you see this being the standard for the next couple years? I know you don’t have a crystal ball, per se but what are some of the techniques that we’ve had to deploy over the last 6-7 weeks and how do you see that changing the way we sell moving forward?

Patrick Devlin: I heard somebody say one time, “I’m terrible at making predictions, especially on things that are going to happen in the future.” The answer is I don’t have any idea what will be permanent and how this will change. The only thing I can reflect back on is what happened after 9/11 and how much more acceptable what we’re doing right now became. It used to be that the virtual meeting were more the exception and it was viewed as somehow that you as a vendor weren’t even committed enough to the process, perhaps, because you didn’t want to come on site or something.

That’s certainly changed but at the end of the day there’s probably still not one of us here that would raise a hand and say they would value an online meeting higher than they would a face-to-face encounter. The answer is I don’t know. I do think that if anybody has ever traveled to different parts of the world that have already adapted to some of these things, I think we’ll see some of that. We all travel for a living, I think we’ll see people wearing masks a lot more often, I think we’ll see people less inclined to go to work sick, I think we’ll see more people sitting down in their plane seat and wiping everything off and just being more conscious about things of that nature, but I don’t know, really. Whenever this is really over, how much of that sticks and how much of it is just in the rear-view mirror, I don’t have any idea.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? What are some of the things that are happening today that you think are going to stick around?

Jennifer Fisher: I spoke a little bit earlier about the basics of selling. It still comes down to me about the medium, these virtual coffees that we’re having. Many of my team members are like, “Can we continue doing this when things are back to normal?” If this is the way it works and our prospects and clients love meeting us this way, absolutely. What I also know is in general when anybody and any team goes through very tough situations like this and very tough challenges, it makes you stronger when you come out of it.

Something like this is going to make me a stronger sales leader and is going to make the sales team a much stronger sales team because we’ve learned about perseverance, flexibility and adapting. Every week we have to pivot a little bit, even on some of the strategies I’ve put in, I wasn’t expecting to go onto week 8 doing this so it’s still flowing. But again, that ability to just persevere and learn, we’re going to come out better and stronger.

Fred Diamond: What are your expectations right now, Jennifer, for your sales teams? What kind of conversations are you having with them today?

Jennifer Fisher: Probably with me and with our sales teams right now, again, it’s a tough field that we’re in right now but I lead with compassion. Compassion, open communication and dialogue, I’m thrilled we had our best March ever, our best April ever, my expectation is to have the best May ever but not at the expense of the team. It’s important that they are feeling good about what we’re doing, everyone’s going through something, they have family members who’ve been laid off or furloughed and kids working at home and home schooling, we’ve got to have that compassion. They know “my door is open”, we do teams, we have videos and if they’re struggling, they come talk to me. We’re going to work through this whether it’s personal or whether it is professional and we’re going to come up with some innovative ways to work through it. That’s the good part about it, we can be flexible, we can be innovative with our teams and I think that’s what’s so important.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you? What are you talking to your team about on a daily basis? What kind of conversations are you having?

Patrick Devlin: I can tell you this, I’m having a lot more conversations. I think we talked about this earlier this week where I said the things that we were doing on a quarterly basis we’re doing on a monthly basis, the team meetings that we were doing on a monthly basis we’re doing weekly, the weeklies are now daily so all of that means that we’re creating more opportunities for collaboration and communication than we’ve ever done before. Whereas it’s more organic maybe in the past, we’re much more structured about creating those opportunities now. I think in general salespeople are resourceful, optimistic people. I expect them to stay that way and you mentioned lead with compassion, I always believe that you have to be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and I think you have to be a good listener. I think perhaps now people are buying into that a little more so maybe people that were afraid to put themselves out there like that, people are finding it almost like the expectation now and maybe they’ll be more comfortable doing it in the future.

Fred Diamond: We have a question that came in here through the question panel. The question is, “What are you both doing for yourselves right now to stay sane?” You both are pretty sane people as it is but what are you doing as sales leaders? [Laughs] That’s true, there’s definitely a lot of alcohol being consumed in the sales world. Seriously, what are you both doing to keep yourselves sane, to keep yourselves healthy for your people? There’s got to be demands on you from the people who you report to and from your boards, from your C-suite. Patrick, why don’t we start with you? What are some things that you physically are doing on a daily or weekly basis to stay as sane as you can be?

Patrick Devlin: I will say this, you meet people that when they get exhausted can just take a break, I’ve never been that type of person but there’s been moments where I’ve been more fatigued and just exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life. Sometimes I just have to shut everything down and go take a nap, just lay down for a little while and understand that that’s what’s going on right now. I’ve always been very active, I play tennis, do golf, get out, I’m always doing something so I’ve set up a stationary bike and I ride my stationary bike more often, that sort of thing. I’ve actually started playing video games which I’ve never done before. I got a VR headset and I play golf, I do things like that that I’ve never done before. A little bit of everything but just not having unrealistic expectations sometimes.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? What are you doing to take care of yourself?

Jennifer Fisher: What’s funny is obviously before all of this, I’d be at the office and I’m a very high-energy person and I absolutely love what I do, so put those together. I’m the kind of person that’s always coming home late for dinner because I’m like, “I love this, let me finish this up” or, “Let me have one more call with our client or helping our teammate”, I absolutely love it. Now that I came home and I’m working from home, I can easily work 24/7 because I love what I do and I’m so excited, I’m always coming up with ideas. I really did have to put some boundaries on my home time because even now, I’m still working hard and bless my husband, he’s like, “I’m still waiting for you to come to the table” but at the end of the day I have to say, “Okay, let’s step away and walk from my little office into the kitchen. Let’s sit down, have a family dinner and watch TV” and I have to force myself to do it mainly because I just love what I do. You have to put some of those boundaries in there.

Patrick Devlin: Fred, if I could, I also had to because I do a lot of working from home even though I’m in the office. I generally do it on the dining room table and I did find that it was really important to go reestablish an office like when I worked from home full time, have an office, that’s where my work computer is, that’s where everything else is and then to turn it off and get out of there. You were saying the same sort of thing, you do have to establish those boundaries.

Jennifer Fisher: Absolutely.

Fred Diamond: What are going to be the challenges that sales professionals are going to need to deal with over the course of the next week and how do you suggest that they deal with it?

Jennifer Fisher: Again, it’s focus on the basics, focus on what we do day to day, we do it very well, this is what we need to do. Not only focus but now we actually will be making sure that we execute flawlessly. If we stay focused and execute, we’re going to be phenomenal. We’re going to continue to exceed our targets and just continue to be a very strong team. I couldn’t have asked for anything else.

Fred Diamond: Patrick, how about you?

Patrick Devlin: To take it a little outside the box, I think one of the biggest challenges we’re going to be dealing with over the next week is actually the change in the weather. I think everybody has been so restless and I think they’ve been able to put a cap on it, they’ve been able to monitor their behavior and do all the right things and stay home. I think it’s going to be really difficult for them to keep doing that. So far, fingers crossed, we’ve done very well in terms of everybody staying healthy and safe and that’s a big challenge I think that everybody’s going to be dealing with, not just salespeople but I think people are going to want to get out of the house. Hopefully, I want everybody to do it safely and keep their priorities straight.

Fred Diamond: Once again, Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin, thank you so much for the great ideas, the great insights today. My name is Fred Diamond, thank you so much to all the viewers and listeners on today’s webcast, it’s been great talking to you both. Everybody, stay safe and keep focusing on your sales. Thank you so much.

Jennifer Fisher: Thank you, Fred. Thank you, Patrick. Take care.

Patrick Devlin: Thank you.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

The post EPISODE 232: Sales Transformation and Success Webcast as the World Re-Opens featuring Jennifer Fisher and Patrick Devlin first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connor Marsden: Five years, that’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Diamond: Mike, how about you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Diamond: I’ve got another question.

Mark Hunter: That’s okay, jump in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Hunter: There you go.

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

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

Fred Diamond: This slide or the next one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Hunter: Thank you, I appreciate it.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

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

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

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 on April 17, 2020 2:00 PM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 15, 2020. It featured sales leaders Susan Lee (MOI), Christopher Ware (NAIOP) and Joe Alvarez (NOS).]

EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Susan Lee’s Podcast . Listen to Christopher Ware’s Podcast. Listen to Joe Alvarez’ Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Empathy starts from the top down. It starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.”

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you tell us what your top priorities are, Joe Alvarez? Why don’t you get us started?

Joe Alvarez: Thanks, Fred. Thanks to everybody listening to this podcast. I’m with a company called National Office Systems, we are a firm that is in a niche product, we do specially storage such as high density storage and specialty lockers, we also have a technology division that does document imaging and asset tracking using RFID technology. We have a division that does installations and installs many of our products, we’ve done a tremendous amount of glass walls so that’s NOS.

When you ask about the priorities right now, aside from being a sales leader in my company I also work in managing the entire firm and my top three priorities have been #1, take care of our #1 asset which is our employees, keep them all employed has been a goal of ours during this crazy time that we’re living making certain that business is running financially sound. It’s a crazy time of year to be doing business where people may be open, may not be open, may be paying you and the third thing that is really important to us is to provide a very safe environment to our employees.

Fred Diamond: Christopher Ware, you’re with NAIOP, why don’t you give us a 20 second overview on NAIOP and tell us what your top priorities are?

Christopher Ware: Thanks for having me on. NAIOP is an international trade association, we have members throughout the United States and Canada and our members develop, own, invest and manage commercial real estate, primarily office, mixed use and industrial. Of course, when we say industrial we talk about warehouse and distribution space so if you’ve ordered something from Amazon, you’ve ordered something that’s passed through one of our members’ buildings. I’ve been with NAIOP for 19 years now and sales career is over 20 years.

As far as our top priorities, of course employee safety as Joe mentioned is extremely important, also keeping people’s spirits up is extremely important as well dealing with the mental aspect of things. Sales is a stressful job anyway and then you add what’s going on now on top of that, it can be overwhelming so that’s a priority. In terms of our customers, for me it’s really about maintaining relationships and reaching out even though we may not have a whole lot to sell right now, the relationship is essential. That’s really the #1 sales priority for me, to keep our connections up with the people that we do business with.

Fred Diamond: Susan Lee, it’s great to have you on today’s webinar as well. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about MOI and tell us what your top three priorities are right now as well. It doesn’t have to be three, what your top priorities are.

Susan Lee: MOI is a company that partners with design, commercial real estate, project management firms and clients. We furnish their spaces, we do everything from the front door to the back door and we do this so that employees are engaged, they can build cultural strength in their organization and businesses can be very productive. I’m happy to be here, happy tax day for me because we don’t have to file taxes so I’m excited about that. Our priorities are staying connected as well with our people, from an executive team communicating and staying transparent with the rest of the organization, everybody is a little worried right now so open communication, open dialogue is important. Also connecting with our clients, we work with a lot of people that are essential businesses so making sure that our employees are safe and our customers are safe as we engage in projects with them.

Fred Diamond: A quick question here. Susan and Joe, you both have worked together. Your companies work together and have worked together frequently over the years. I’m just curious, how are you talking to your partners right now? Again, you’ve both done a lot of business together. Is that also a relationship that partnerships are getting together, talking to each other and trying to figure things out? Susan, why don’t you take that first?

Susan Lee: We do talk on a daily basis. One thing that we are in the business of is providing furniture and furniture comes from states all over the country. As you’ve seen over the last few weeks, we’ve experienced shutdowns of states and shutdowns of businesses so staying in touch with our manufacturing partners is important to understand what products they’re producing, which factories are open. Also, making sure that our design partners, we’re honoring the work that they’ve done making sure that we’re talking to commercial real estate partners to make sure that if they have timelines of projects that need to be done, construction companies we’re connecting with as well. Joe, I know you’re probably experiencing the same thing, aren’t you?

Joe Alvarez: Yes I am, Susan. Interesting you say that, we have a lot of the same issues with our manufacturers, in different states different rules are being set in those different states. One thing we’ve done is also we’ve done a weekly meeting on Zoom with partners to hear what they’re going through and to understand. I want our folks to feel what they’re feeling and it’s a great communication hour that we spend talking to our business partners.

Fred Diamond: What’s something that’s been a big positive surprise that has come out of the last weeks that we’ve been through this situation?

Christopher Ware: I think being an association professional, associations is really about community, it’s about building relationships and the strength of those connections really have shown through recently. To give you a couple of examples, I posted some Zoom chats with regular sponsors and advertisers and other participants and people really appreciate that level of connection and that level of touch, and people really want to reach out, they want to connect. The association industry is uniquely positioned to help us be able to do that.

We also have been on the forefront of getting quality information out to our members so I’m very proud of our organization being able to pivot very quickly from bigger picture trends based type of reporting to information that our members can use right away. We’re providing almost all of that free of charge to the commercial real estate industry and that’s something that we feel is very important for us to do, but it’s also enabling us to reach new customers who maybe haven’t taken a look at NAIOP before. It’s a great opportunity to show our thought leadership, to show our expertise and also to connect people who desperately want to stay connected in this time.

Fred Diamond: One thing that we’re telling people is, “Now’s the time to show leadership to your constituency and bring them things that are going to help them.” How about you, Susan? What are some of the positive results that have happened for you and your company at this time?

Susan Lee: I’ll speak more about talking to the sellers, connecting with them. We run so fast every single day and I rarely get to talk to the sellers, we have about 30 sellers on staff and we rarely get to connect or talk. I’m seeing their kids, I’m seeing their pets, we’re being able to connect. This is a scary time for all of us, it’s so much uncertainty that we’re finding that we’re building strength together through this adversity. I think that’s one of the big things for us that we’re connecting with and also, our baseball hat game is really strong. A lot of baseball caps in these calls, that’s pretty cool.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? Why don’t you tell us something?

Joe Alvarez: It’s funny because a lot of what Susan just described, our companies work a lot together and talk a lot and we mimic a lot of the things that are working for each other so we’re doing a lot of the same things. One of the things in addition to getting to know your folks better, and I’m talking about all the employees, is to see how they come together. When things get tough, people come together and it’s actually awesome to see our folks taking care of each other. They’re sending lunches to the installation guys, they’re taking care of each other asking, they’re doing things that on an everyday situation they don’t have the time, they’re running too fast. It’s one of the good things that’s come out of this, you realize what’s important, Fred.

Fred Diamond: One of the reasons why we brought the three of you together is because you all sell things to customers who have offices.

What has changed for you? The interesting thing here is your customer has changed. I’ll give you an example, I talked to one of our members earlier this week who sells to state and local governments and he said they’re working around the clock because now they’re helping with getting medical supplies, medical devices and things supporting that. We have another member who sells to the entertainment industry and he said there’s nothing going on right now selling to them so they’re having to figure out, but what has changed for all three of you as sales leaders? Again, your customers have offices, in the past four weeks. Joe, why don’t we start with you? Your customers have offices, you excel in helping them optimize their space. What’s changed?

Joe Alvarez: Obviously a lot of our customers are not at their offices so how do you manage your folks and how you connect with them has been different. We’re using a lot of technology, we’re using a lot of Zoom, GoToMeeting, it’s been interesting to me that getting ahold of a client today is so much easier than it’s ever been before. One of the things that I’ve heard someone say, I think it was Susan before the meeting was that you know where they are, they’re available, they’re going to talk to you most of the time which is a wonderful thing. The second piece, there’s no travel time so you can go from meeting to meeting without worrying going from DC to Virginia or whatever. Like I said before, people seem to be willing to talk to you so it’s about building and developing those relationships right now to make sure you have empathy with them and being ready so that when they’re ready to take care of business, you’re going to be there for them.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? Again, obviously you furnish offices in the real estate as well, so what’s changed for you as a sales leader?

Susan Lee: I believe it’s accessibility, being accessible for questions that come up. Also, we’re starting as an organization, our design team, our project management team, our sales team are all now working together to look at what’s next. We have a new normal, it’s not normal so how do we start looking at going back to work and what does that look like? What are our clients going to expect from us? We work with the federal government, they’re still installing right now, we work with construction companies.

Construction is essential, people are at work, how do we support them in that? We’re looking a lot at, “Where do we go from here where we are?”. I think it was a shock for us over the last four weeks just to figure out what is our new normal but now it’s, “Where do we go from here? What are we looking at two weeks from now to a year from now?” We’re really starting to talk about that and again, coming together, bringing people together to talk about it.

Fred Diamond: Chris, what has changed for you as a sales leader in the past four weeks?

Christopher Ware: Certainly the fact that we can’t meet in person is very impactful for the commercial real estate industry. If you can’t meet with your clients and show them a space that’s available, that certainly is a traditional way of leasing or selling commercial real estate. I’ve been really excited to see how inventive our members have been using virtual platforms, virtual tours, connecting with people online and facilitating transactions. The deals are still happening in the commercial real estate space, obviously things have slowed down and are going to continue to until we find out what our new normal is, but business is still happening and the commercial real estate people in particular are very entrepreneurial, very creative and we’re really seeing the best of that right now within the industry.

Within my own space, not having in-person meetings as we normally would has been a challenge but again, we’ve been able to pivot very quickly, very effectively offering this content online in the near term. I think that’s going to be one of the legacies, additional online engagement as we begin to blend that back in with in-person conferences and events as soon as it’s safe to do so.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to follow up with something that you talked about before. Again, if anybody who’s listening to today’s webinar has a question please feel free to submit them via the panel. People are home, as a matter of fact I’m going to guess that 99.9% who are watching today’s webinar are home. How have you responded to that and how has your industry changed?

Joe Alvarez: There’s a lot of schools of thought on that discussion. From my perspective, this has been a huge business disruption and it really has changed the way people think and do things every day. From a sports perspective I look at this almost like a forced tryout in telecommuting. You have to do it and now people are starting to realize what it’s like to be able to work away from the office. The generational divide is becoming closer, you have all the baby boomers that wanted to live a certain way and you have all the Z and X generations being different, this has really forced that divide to come closer.

My perspective is that as we move on, there’ll be a lot more home offices than you have today, there’ll be technology driven towards them, there’s still going to be a lot of offices. A lot of the discussion today is we need to be 6 or 8 feet away so before it was, “How can you densify an office with as many people as possible?” now it’s, “How do you do that and also provide the space?” This new normal is going to be different. I know that Susan probably has a lot of studies about how they’re going to do the furniture but I can tell you this, from our business, our technology division that does digitization of records, we have gotten a spike up in calls saying, “We were thinking about this, now we really need to be completely virtual because we don’t know how we’re going to end up in this new normal moving forward. There’s been a lot of good things for it that are going to happen off of this.

Fred Diamond: Susan, let’s follow up on that. It’s interesting, the first four, five weeks of the pandemic people were getting used to working from home and all those kinds of things. Now what we’re hearing is a lot of people are starting to plan for what might be the return and we don’t want to get into political discussions right now, but back to what Joe was just alluding to, people are looking for advice on how they do go back to the office safely. You are experts on that, what are some things that you’re telling these people?

Susan Lee: What I would like to address is that we’ve spent years selling the open environment and community connections and common areas where people can come together and socialize. Now we are facing a situation where we have to look at the complete opposite. You’ll see articles that are starting to come out that are posted all over social media that are talking about, “What does the office look like coming back?” and we have to start thinking. We were on a call today with our team, with the president of the company. We were talking about you’re starting at hand sanitizer at the front door and then you’re walking into the space and you’re completely open so we’re starting to work with our manufacturers and looking at solutions they may have to separate that open environment.

We’re talking a lot about distancing, we’re talking a lot about alternating days of working but we are going to have to go back into those interior spaces, those common areas that we put where people can socialize and we’re going to have to start reevaluating it. Part of this is – and we talked about this today – it’s going to be a phased type of solution because the challenges that we’re facing today are not going to be the challenges we’re facing a year from now or two years from now. Just like when we faced 9/11 and we had to regroup on how we look at safety and how we looked at international safety, we’re looking worldwide at how people work across the world. This is a situation where we’re really going to be evolving over time and the environment will change as well.

Fred Diamond: Chris, you work with a lot of companies that are very involved with real estate. How do you think real estate will be impacted by this?

Christopher Ware: I think it’s going to have, in the short term, certainly a significant impact but I think you’re going to see an extended impact over time. A statistic that I just read that I think is worth noting is in the 1970s, the average office worker had about 500 square feet of space on average. That was down to about 200 square feet of space a decade ago and most recently it’s 150 square feet of space so that trend I think is going to be halted and maybe reversed as people are going to want to have a little bit more separation than otherwise was the case.

I also think, however, that you are going to see an increased number of people working remotely, as Susan mentioned maybe some staggering out of space in the short to mid-term. Honestly, you also have some businesses that unfortunately just aren’t going to make it through this crisis so I think in the short term there is going to be some vacancy as a result but the long-term health of the industry certainly is very strong. We went into this crisis with very good fundamentals from a commercial real estate market perspective whereas the last downturn there was a lot of over-building, we really didn’t see that this cycle.

Once we get our footing underneath us as an industry, I’m very confident in the long term success. However, like I said, the densification trend I think probably is going to halt and maybe start to unwind a little bit and then of course the work from home options I think you’re going to see more of that.

Fred Diamond: Again, you’re sales leaders, we’re talking about how you’re managing your sales team and your customers but how do you find a work-life balance in these times especially as a parent? There is a follow-up question, Susan, the question is how do you tell your other kids that your oldest child, Courtney, is your favorite? [Laughs] obviously thank you, Courtney for that question. Susan can take the second part offline unless you want to tell the world… No, but seriously, how are you managing your lives? Let’s talk about that from a human being perspective. You all live at homes, Joe, you have a beautiful house down in Annapolis and Chris, you’re in Centerville and Susan, you’re in Olney. How are you managing your lives as sales leaders? Susan, since Courtney directed that to you, why don’t you get us started there?

Susan Lee: [Laughs] I will tell you that Courtney is an essential worker so she has to go to work. Courtney, you’re working right now. The second part of this is there is a balance so I’m looking right now and one of my kids is walking around doing like this in the screen, we’ve embraced our sellers that have kids, it’s very stressful to try to balance your kids with your job, you’re constantly on calls, they’re constantly coming up wanting things. We’re letting our sellers know it’s okay, I think that’s one of the things that you feel with your job that you have to be fully engaged but part of the engagement is actually incorporating your family and one of the things that our organization is doing, we have a really good marketing team – shout out to my marketing team – they do webinars for the kids. In the middle of the day they’ve colored masks to symbolize the mask, that it’s okay to wear a mask and masks are good.

We’ve done things like The Price is Right, I am not good at The Price is Right, I actually don’t know anything about pricing but we’ve got employees that are really good at understanding what the prices are at Harris Teeter, Safeway and Giant. We’re also just taking the time to let everybody know we have new sellers out there, people that recently joined the organization. It can be stressful, you try to prove yourself, you come to a new company and you set up the strategic plan and you really want to show them that you can do the job, and then we face a pandemic where you can’t go out and sell.

We’re trying to reassure them that it’s okay, we understand, we hire you for your potential, we understand that it’s going to come in time and we’re trying to find creative ways to sell and connect outside of your traditional being in front of a client. That’s a little bit about how we deal with stress.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how are you balancing things? I know you’re a big sports fan, you’ve gone to a lot of minor league and major league baseball teams. As a matter of fact, on your Sales Game Changers podcast we talked about it at length as well so what are some things that you’re doing to stay sane during this very challenging time?

Christopher Ware: That is one of the challenges of work from home is that you’re technically always at work, so certainly setting boundaries for yourself and saying, “I have office hours and then I have hours where I’m at home” is very critical. I think being creative and reaching out to friends, staying connected with your community even though you’re not able to maybe go out and watch sports with your friends or go out and do what your normal activities would be, but one example that was a lot of fun was my friends and I enjoy playing Golden Tee which is the game at a lot of sports bars.

There’s an online app version of it and we have Golden Tee virtual tournament, we use Zoom so we can do a little trash talk with each other and we’re playing each other in the game. It’s certainly not as good as the real thing but we had a great time, had a couple beers and just had some fun and stayed engaged. Just thinking along this term is maintaining those relationships and those friendships is certainly vital because everybody, no matter what industry they’re in, they’re all having a lot of stress right now and just being there for people I think is essential.

Fred Diamond: Joe, I want to go back to something you mentioned before. Again, we’re calling this a Sales Game Changers webinar where we’re talking to some sales leaders. Of course, you’re a business leader but you mentioned empathy a few moments ago and that was a big theme the first couple of weeks after the pandemic kicked in. This is a sales webinar and I’m looking at the hundreds of people who are watching today’s webinar. I’m going to presume that most of them are sales professionals. How do you be in sales right now? Again, you mentioned empathy in your past answer. Is it okay to sell things right now? Is it okay to ask people for business? Is it okay to prospect or should we just be empathetic and helpful? I’m curious in your thoughts in that and I’m also going to ask that to Susan as well.

Joe Alvarez: That’s a really good question, Fred. I think you’ve got to be good enough to read the client. Some clients today are in dire need of what you have to offer from a service or product. We sell by relationships, we build relationship so we get to know our clients pretty well. The empathy word has been one that is needed for everybody whether you’re selling to them, whether you’re calling your sister or you’re calling anybody. In this time there’s a lot of stress and anxiety in our world right now and it’s important to obviously have empathy but also to be a solutions provider. If somebody’s got issues, you want to be there for them.

One of the things that we’ve asked our folks is not just to sell but also to connect, so for instance if Susan is my client and she’s looking for something that I don’t provide but I know you provide, my job is to connect you, to help Susan get rid of that anxiety. It’s not about me winning, it’s about me helping her get to the point where she can get some result. There’s different ways of addressing empathetic perspective with a client, I think people think of sales like real hard sell kind of thing. Sales to me is you’re a solutions provider, if you can provide a solution that is a win-win for both sides it’s a great scenario, it’s not about pushing or selling something. That’s how we’ve been dealing with this, it’s changed a little bit in that you want to know how that person is first as opposed to talking about what you do or what your solution is. It’s, “How are you doing, Susan?” first. “How’s your family, how’s everybody doing?” and there’s a lot of personal discussion before you get to, “If you need what I do, let me know.”

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? You manage a team of sellers, you need to sell things. You have products and services that you sell so how are you selling right now? Do you feel comfortable selling? What’s your follow up to that?

Susan Lee: What I would tell you is just as we’re all at home working, so are our clients and the ball doesn’t stop bouncing in the process. When you think about a selling cycle there are various points in the selling cycle so a lot of our projects will be in various points in the selling cycle. When we’re looking at our forecasts, when we’re looking at our pipelines, a month ago we stopped but we were already at different points in time in the selling cycle so what we tried to do is continue to provide that information for our clients.

We still have people that are bidding projects, we still have people that are planning for the future, we still have people that are looking for budgeting prices and they’re also starting, as Joe mentioned earlier, to look at what does ‘work from home’ mean and what solutions will you have for that. As Joe mentioned also, those relationships are everything. We’re a trusted resource for our clients and for our partners so making sure that we’re available, making sure that we respond quickly to them, being sensitive, that time is about the essence and understanding that their time is short too, because they’re on conference calls all day as well, making sure they have the information they need to continue to do their job.

Empathy starts from the top down, it starts from the president of the company and it goes all the way down. Communicating, connecting, letting people know that we understand, “We’re challenged just like you’re challenged in your business” is everything to the empathetic part of supporting your clients.

Fred Diamond: Chris, we’ve implemented a lot of new things in the last couple of weeks. Everyone now is an expert on Zoom, at the Institute for Excellence in Sales we’re doing a webinar a day and we’re getting hundreds of people per week who are coming onto our webinars. Joe mentioned before that no one’s really traveling right now. Do you see the pandemic changing the way you sell moving forward? A lot of people are saying ‘the new normal’, whatever that means. Is this the new normal? Are we going to be doing Zoom all day or people are not going to be going to offices, less face to face, travel? Where do you think sales is going?

Christopher Ware: I certainly think in the near term, yes. Until there’s a vaccine, this probably will be what normal is going to look like, it’s going to be more virtual meetings, more phone calls, more emails, that sort of thing. I do think there’s a fundamental need for people to connect and real estate is still a face-to-face business so I think as soon as it’s safe to do so, the in-person connections are going to continue. We look forward to making that happen as soon as it’s safe to do so but I think the legacy of this experience is going to be how we incorporate some of these online technologies with in-person events and with in-person activities. Hosting video meetups in advance of an in-person meeting so you can get to know people ahead of time, things like that, we’re trying to think very strategically about not just coming up with immediate solutions but how we are going to use these tools going forward after it’s safe for everybody to get back together again.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for Joe and for Susan. Once again, if you’re on today’s webinar, if you have a question for Joe Alvarez, Susan Lee or Christopher Ware submit them through your panel. Once again, if you can take a screenshot and send it to me, we’re having a contest, that would be great. Susan and Joe, you both manage sales professionals, you manage sales teams. What are your expectations right now of your salespeople and what are you telling them? You’re also sales leaders, again Joe, you’re managing partner at your company and you both manage large numbers of people, teams that you have expectations of. What do you expect from them right now and what are you telling them to do? Joe, take that first and then Susan, be prepared.

Joe Alvarez: Back to the question, you asked before how they’re working today. I’ve got two thoughts there, one is to stay focused and to stay visible. The focus part is you need to have a daily and weekly plan and follow it, it’s easy to work at home and forget that you have a plan, you get stuck with the kids asking you for something or whatever and you get hooked on something else because you’re not used to working from home. You have a plan that actually tells you what you’re doing hour per hour and at the end of they day you judge yourself whether you accomplished the goals of the day or not or the goals of the week.

The second piece is to stay visible, stay in contact with your clients and your prospects whether it’s through email, Zoom, webinars, social media, LinkedIn, whatever it is. You need to stay in touch with them because if you plant the seeds today, when we go back to the new normal, whatever that means and however that happens you’re going to have projects that are going. If you just sat around and didn’t do that, you won’t have that coming to you so that’s our goal, that’s what we’re trying to get our guys and ladies to do.

Fred Diamond: Susan, how about you? What are your expectations of your sellers?

Susan Lee: My expectation, Fred, and if my sellers are on this call, keep your forecast updated. The one thing about a company in planning for the future is making sure you have accurate information so keeping the CRMs updated, keeping your forecast updated, as information changes, put it in. You have the time, I’m telling every seller in America and around the world, you have time to put that information in, take the time to do it because that’s how your company plans their resources.

That’s one of the major things that’s critical for sellers, we don’t like to sit in all the time and do because we are busy people, we’re always connecting. If you have time now, stop and take the time to keep your forecast updated, your CRM updated. You can prospect, think of creative ways to do it. We have team calls every week with our sales teams in each of the locations, we talk a lot about what are they doing, what are they hearing, information is power so continuing to bring information back to your sales team that’ll help your teammates as well is very important. It’s just that ongoing communication, idea of sharing and keeping that forecast updated.

Fred Diamond: Chris, I’m curious, are you prospecting for new business right now or are you constantly going back to your existing members and sponsors to make sure they’re okay? How about prospecting? Is it okay to prospect for new business now?

Christopher Ware: That’s a great question and our focus is maintaining existing relationships right now as the situation continues to unfold. We are in effect prospecting for new business in that we’re updating and cleaning up our database, that’s one of the things that constantly we talk about doing and because we are always selling we never get around to actually doing. That’s a priority for us right now, to make sure that our leads pipeline has been cleaned up and people’s contacts are accurate. Maybe they haven’t been in that company for a couple years and we’re just now getting around to updating that information so that’s a key part of it. Then yes, we do have in our plan to start to prospect and start to add some people to the pipeline, if you clean some names out it’s time to add some back to take their place so that definitely is a part of our near term plan.

Fred Diamond: Obviously we’re all doing Zoom now, but what is something else new that you’re doing that you think may have some legs past this pandemic that you’re now doing as a sales leader? Susan, why don’t you go first?

Susan Lee: Fred, to take no attention away from the fact that you do a podcast, we actually have a business developer that started a quick podcast. It’s like 5 to 10 minutes, it’s a young man by the name of Alvarez, his name is Brian Alvarez and he does something called Between Two Screens, it’s a takeoff of Between Two Firms and it’s connecting with industry experts across the area from clients to project managers to designers. He’s getting their feedback, these are thought leaders that are prominent in the Washington DC metropolitan area and he’s connecting with them and asking them questions about what do they see, what’s the forecast out there.

I do believe that’s something we’ll continue to do, he did his first one about a week ago, he did an amazing job and I know we’re going to continue to do that, that’s just something that will keep us all connected not only with our company but with our competitors. One of the things that we’re in the business of doing is helping each other to succeed, we all succeed when one succeeds so I think this is something that’ll be useful in the translate over.

Fred Diamond: Chris, how about you? What’s something new that you’re doing as response to this?

Christopher Ware: Our organization has started a series of online round tables of very specific commercial real estate industry topics and we’re getting groups of 20 to 30 at the most together to be on a Zoom call with an industry expert and of course, the expert leads off the conversation and guides the conversation. It’s an opportunity for people to have very in-depth conversations, to build their networks over the online platform and really learn more about how best to do their job in the process. Its something that we’ve done in person before, we posted similar type events in a live basis, giving this an opportunity to go online and deliver that value to our members and to the industry is something that’s new and it’s something that I very much hope will continue to be successful and that we’ll continue even after we can meet in person again.

Fred Diamond: Joe, how about you? What’s something new that you’ve now implemented as a sales and business leader as a response to the pandemic?

Joe Alvarez: Fred, I think that what we’re seeing is that telecommunications with Zoom and GoToMeeting are going to become bigger and bigger tools for sales. There’s a lot of time saved between me going to your place and meeting with you as opposed to having that conversation remotely specifically when you come to design. You could have a design posted on the screen and the three of us could be talking about changes and it can be done like that instead of me coming to you, going back to design and going back to you. I believe that in the near future you’re going to see a lot more of that. This force tryout is going to make people get smart about how to do business as opposed to the way we’ve been doing it for a long time. One of the things we’re doing is perfecting our ways of communication with all those different pieces of the pie that get involved in a decision to perhaps shorten the sale cycle by having less time between decision makers.

Fred Diamond: What do you think the challenges will be for sales professionals in the next week? Susan, why don’t you go first? What are going to be the key challenges facing sales leaders and sales professionals in the next week?

Susan Lee: I know Christopher mentioned Zoom, you guys have mentioned Zoom quite a bit. I think it’s challenging sometimes as a sales professional to sit in front of the computer all day long and look at screens on a box. I know as a sales leader I’m challenged by that on a daily basis, you get fatigued from that so I think one of the challenges is making sure we can keep our energy up, keep our engagement up, staying hopeful. If we’re listening to the news and it’s telling us we may be 6 weeks out or a year out, we’ve got to continue to stay hopeful. I’ve got some amazing directors that are constantly working with their sellers to keep them engaged.  They’re talking on a daily basis. I think next week we’re going to continue to have to do that because we’re going into week 5 or week 6, we’ve got to continue to do that.

The one thing that I’ll tell you personally that I’m battling with myself is whether or not I’m going to be able to let my husband cut my hair because you guys were mentioning haircuts earlier, I just don’t know if I can do it, though. I’m working on it, I don’t know.

Fred Diamond: If he’s going to do it, let him just go, you know what I’m saying? You’re going to be in your house for another 4, 5 weeks. Chris, how about you? What’s the big challenge for the next 5 days?

Christopher Ware: I’m going to take an even bigger picture approach but we’ll distill it down to five days in that we have an entire generation of sales professionals who have not sold in a down-market, who have not sold in a recession. Sales is a mentally challenging, difficult job to have and when the economy has thrown us for a loop like this it can be very psychologically challenging. I encourage everybody who’s on the call right now to reach out to maybe someone who is newer to the industry than you who doesn’t have the experience of going through a downturn like you may have and just check in on them.

See how they’re doing mentally, see how they’re hanging in because it’s hard right now and it’s okay to admit that, it’s okay to talk about that, it’s okay to say how frustrating things are and I think that is going to be best for the mental health of everybody and it’s going to add to your own resilience. Reach out to folks, let them know that it’s okay to feel the frustration, to feel the discouragement right now but understand that there are things you can be doing to lay the groundwork for your future success.

Fred Diamond: Joe, why don’t you bring us home? What’s going to be the big challenge over the next 5 days that we’re going to need to overcome?

Joe Alvarez: Every day that goes by is one day closer to the end of this thing. You’ve got to keep that perspective, every day is one day closer. Each week is going to bring new challenges and new opportunities, we’ve got to stay flexible, you’ve got to focus on what you can control. You can’t focus on stuff that happens that you can’t do anything about, you can only focus on what you can control and if you take that approach, it’ll be a lot easier to deal with the hard times. Doing what you think you can do, that’s the most important thing. Thank you very much everybody, for having me.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 224: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Susan Lee, Christopher Ware and Joe Alvarez first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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

Please register for Creativity in Sales: Mark “The Sales” Hunter Presents Daily Habits and Practical Strategies to Succeed During COVID-19 on Friday, April 17, 2020 11:00 AM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 10, 2020.]

EPISODE 223: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Using GRIT to Pivot During Challenging Times with Andy Miller

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Andy Miller’s Sales Game Changers Podcast here.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “GRIT is doing whatever it takes to get the job done, as long as it’s moral, ethical and legal.”

Andy Miller: Today we’re going to talk about GRIT. Part of GRIT is called growth mindset and to me, creativity is a subset of that but we are in challenging times right now. We’re seeing things that none of us have seen in our lifetime no matter what age you’re at so I want to talk about the hard part first. I want to tell a story about how they catch monkeys. The way they catch monkeys is they take a banana, they put the banana in the cage and they lock the cage so the monkey cannot get into the cage and part of this is monkeys are smart enough to know it’s a trap so they’re not going to go in. You put the banana in there, they lock it and then they leave it out in the open. What happens is the monkey comes up, reaches through the cage to grab the banana but the bars are tight enough that the monkey can’t pull the banana out. Then they go and they pick up the cage with the monkey hanging onto the banana and that’s how they catch the monkey.

All the monkey has to do is let go of the banana so the monkey can run away and be free, and the hard part about what we’re going to talk about today on GRIT and creativity is we all have a banana that we don’t want to let go of and in times of adversity, hardship and challenge we got to let go of the banana. What might the name of that banana be? The name of that banana might be we have spending habits at home that causes us to live at or above our means and we need to cut back on that. The banana might be called ‘I need to do more prospecting than I’ve been doing’ and I need to let go of whatever else I was doing and start picking up the phone or get on LinkedIn or however else you market and increase your marketing activity. That banana might be called ‘the need to be recognized’ or ‘the need to feel important’ or ‘the need to have others say that you’re the best’ but you’ve got a banana, we all have it, we all got a banana that we’re holding onto that is getting in our way and sometimes you got to let go to let other things happen.

That to me is part of what GRIT is about. Let’s talk about what GRIT is and actually, Fred, do we have any comments or questions on what I just said?

Fred Diamond: No, we’re good for right now. I’m really interested in GRIT, GRIT comes up all the time. You and I have spoken about GRIT and I look forward to your definition of it. I know that you disagree with some of the more common definitions of GRIT as well so I’m curious on your thought about that.

Andy Miller: This is my definition: doing whatever it takes to get the job done. I can expand on that a little bit as long as it’s moral, ethical and legal but let’s talk about health for a second. Why does somebody have a heart attack and one guy changes his life afterwards because the doctor says, “If you don’t change, you’re going to die” and why does another person not change their lifestyle? To me it’s doing whatever it takes to get the job done, it’s fueled by passion and perseverance and it’s doing what you need to do. I may sneeze here, allergy season, so I apologize for that.

Fred Diamond: Sneeze into your elbow, by the way (laughs).

Andy Miller: [Laughs] I will, hopefully not into the microphone. I look at it and go, one person loses a job and they quickly downsize their life to adapt and another one doesn’t and ends up putting themselves in a pickle, that’s the banana. Why does a child in Rwanda walk 10 miles with a pot on their head to go get water and bring it back? Clean drinking water. Fred, you and I were talking about sports and I do follow mixed martial arts a little bit and there’s a woman named Ronda Rousey, one of the best mixed martial artists in the world amongst men and women. She only had so much money to spend and she had to make a choice and her choice was, “Do I get an apartment and pay my rent or do I live in my car and pay for the training that I want to get from the best trainer that I can find?” and she chose to spend a year living in her car so that she could pay the trainer to get the kind of training she wanted to get so that she could become the best in the world. I think that goes to Mohammed Ali, this quote from him on the slide, “I hated every minute of training but I said, ‘Don’t quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”

So it is doing whatever it takes. He didn’t say it would be easy, he didn’t say it would be without stretching, he didn’t say it would be without sacrifice but what are you willing to do to get to where you want to be? That could be health, it could be relationship, it could be in the business but that’s what you need to do and I think right now today, based upon what’s happening a lot of people are in fear mode and it’s hard to be creative and productive when you’re fearful. The faster you can get out of fear mode and get into a ‘find a way’ mode, the better off you’re going to be. That to me is a good example of that and I’ve lived it, I’ve lived it in my health, I’ve lived it in my businesses that I’ve had. Let me pause there, any questions or comments?

Fred Diamond: Just curious, we’ve been into this about four weeks now, what would you say would be a success? If I’m a sales professional right now, what would be an idea or two of something that would help me get past the fear that I could say was a success that I’ve accomplished during this particular time?

Andy Miller: In a minute I’m actually going to get to what you can do to get past the fear. I’m not sure how to define what success is, I do think and I’m coaching my clients to what you can do now to build bend strength. If you’ve got a [Inaudible 11:42] in what you’re doing, can you build bend strength? Can you differentiate yourself a little bit better? Can you change how you’re working? I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself but I think there are things you can do to put yourself in a better position and by the way, not everybody’s stuck right now. If you’re in the food industry, you’re growing. If you’re in the medical care industry, you’re growing. If you’re in the transportation business, you’re growing. If you are in the energy business with maybe the exception of oil and gas, you’re growing.
I talked to a guy last week and I’ll talk about this now since it’s come up. He just landed a call center contract to hire 600 salespeople in the next two months and part of what this pandemic is causing is a shift. What he realized was a lot of companies offshore their call centers to India and Philippines and they’ve got the pandemic, too. With their pandemic they’ve had to shut down their call centers which leaves an opportunity.

What this guy realized was call centers are shutting down, they’re not able to fulfill their obligation so he called up companies that had call centers overseas and said, “I’ve got call centers here on the mainland, let me do fulfillment. They were able to break their contracts because nobody was servicing them in India or China and now they’re hiring salespeople and doing well. There are industries that thrive during more difficult times. Any other questions?

Fred Diamond: No, let’s keep going.

Andy Miller: I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit. That’s an opportunity slide, so let’s go next. What does GRIT stand for? GRIT is actually an acronym and to me, it’s growth mindset and no matter who’s model of GRIT you follow – Angela Duckworth is the one that’s most popular, University of Pennsylvania professor. Her GRIT was research done on kids in the academic world, she’s venturing out that a little bit, I follow Paul Stoltz, he studied GRIT in the business world especially for investment bankers and there’s other GRIT models out there. No matter whose GRIT model you follow, the G in GRIT, whatever acronym it may have, always stands for growth mindset. Next is resilience, how resilient are you? I’ll get into that in a little bit.

Initiative, it’s taking action. Some others will call it instinct or they’ll have others for the I but for me in the sales world, in the business world it’s taking action or initiative and then tenacity. When I think of a good example of this, if anybody watched the movie Apollo 13, here you had the accident happen in space, they’re going, “What do we do now? Because we can’t get back to earth, we’re going to die up here.” If you remember, there was a flight team that they pulled into a room and they’re all panicking and fearful going, “This is impossible, this has never happened before, nobody’s ever done this” and then walked in the head of the team and that was Ed Harris. Ed Harris walks in and he says, “Guys, we don’t have an option, we’re going to find a way” so they went from ‘is this possible’ to ‘we’re going to figure it out’ and I really think that’s part of the shift we have to go through of the mindset, shifting from ‘can I’ to ‘how do I’. It’s a very different perspective. ‘How do I’ implies it can be done and now you’re trying to find a way, ‘can I’ implies it can’t be done so you should be asking yourself in this situation ‘how do we’. Again, I don’t care whether it’s personal or in sales or in business, the question really is ‘how do I’ or ‘how do we’.

Fred Diamond: Andy, a comment that came in here through one of our mutual friends, Pramod Raheja, also a past guest.

Andy Miller: Hey, Pramod.

Fred Diamond: Pramod says, “We’re speaking to all of our important pipeline customers as it keeps us top of mind despite the fact that things keep getting pushed back. Just checking in can go a long way.” Thanks, Pramod. Again, if anybody has any other ideas, thoughts they’re doing today, feel free to submit them via the question panel and we’ll discuss them here today.

Andy Miller: I would encourage you to do that if you haven’t done it but you can only do that for so long before it becomes routine so I would encourage you to say, “What value can we be bringing to our clients right now?” I don’t know if anybody gets the Washington Business Journal but they sent out an email right before Fred and I jumped on the computer together and I didn’t get to read it but the subject line was, “What can we do for you?” and that’s exactly what it should be. Touching base is one, “What can we do for you?” is another. Again, I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit but what things do you wish were available but aren’t? You’re going to see some opportunity in there. Let’s go ahead to the next slide. First thing you need to do in terms of growth mindset, in order to be creative you’ve got to put yourself in a good place and – I know they say we shouldn’t touch our face but I did wash my hands – you need to get sleep.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on health but I do need to set the foundation. When it comes to health, the biggest thing you can do for your immune system is 7 to 8 hours of sleep. You can take supplements and all those things but your body starts producing things that fight a disease at the 7 hour mark. Also, I don’t know if you’ve realized this or not but your brain actually relaxes and the little channels or canals between different part of your brains takes out the dead cells so it’s like the trash collector coming along to take out the trash. That immune fighting ability and the brain taking away the trash through the spinal fluid does not happen until the 7 hour mark so you need to get sleep. Exercise, somehow when you’re stressed there’s stress chemicals running throughout your body, exercise burns it off. I don’t care what kind of exercise you do, just do something. The body needs movement, the body needs to burn off those chemicals and exercise is the fastest way to do that.

A little bit of meditation every day, I get up, I do 30 minutes of meditation every day first thing in the morning and part of my meditation is just being thankful for what I have and where I’m at. No matter how bad things get, there’s always something to be thankful for and you’re going to find you can be more creative and you’re going to have a better day if you just spend a little bit of time going, “I’m pretty thankful because there’s people out there who got it way worse than you do” so a little thankfulness and meditation. Diet, garbage in, garbage out. If you’re putting junk in your body, think of the mind-body-spirit connection. Your spirit’s sending you a message, your mind is the receiver and the body is the wire or the airwaves that it goes across so if you’re putting junk in your body that’s like listening to AM static radio. If you’re eating reasonably clean, you’re going to get that clear FM signal. That’s the mind-body-spirit connection. Smoking, let’s be real about the Coronavirus, it attacks your lungs so if you’re worried about getting the virus and you smoke, you may want to stop to give your lungs a fighting chance. The last thing is drinking and sugar, alcohol and sugar impact your immune system so this is purely of health, it’s not a value judgement conversation but there are things that you can do to put yourself in a good place.

Now, once you’ve done that you’re going to be in a better place to do some problem solving and get creative and do some innovation. Let’s talk about growth mindset. To me, some of the things you want to think about is how do I pivot? I’m going to give you some examples here. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with ozone machines but if you’ve ever gone to a hotel and somebody smoked in the non-smoking room or you got a rental car and somebody smoked in the rental car and they shouldn’t have smoked, the companies have an ozone machine. They’ll put it in the car, they’ll put it in the hotel room and they’ll run it for a couple hours and it kills germs, bacteria, viruses, odors. I was talking to a client of mine and I said, “You’ve got a bunch of ozone machines, don’t you?” he said yes and I said, “These hospitals are having trouble, they’re using disposable protective gear that they can’t dispose of because they’re out of supply. Could you create an ozone room like the hotels do where people can go put their protective gear in there, you could run the ozone machine for a couple hours or whatever’s required to kill bacteria and viruses so that they could reuse the disposable stuff? I know it’s not ideal but it’s better than what they have to work with now” and he’s like, “That’s a really good idea.”

Now he’s able to give back to the medical community and he can use that for a little PR. That’s a way of being creative. Could he rent that stuff or sell it probably or donate it? That’s totally his call but if he wants to do something in terms of innovation, that’s innovation. Another one, fraud. This was a couple years ago before the pandemic happened but we had a client who sold business checks and they wanted to sell more of them and I said, “You realize everybody’s going electronic and we’re talking about you’re trying to become a bigger fish in a shrinking pond?” and they said, “Yes, we got a strategy but we need you to buy us a year or two for us to have the other strategy kick into place.” We did a little research and we discovered, since their target audience was small businesses, the large percentage of small businesses will experience $50 thousand dollars in fraud so we had them add fraud insurance to their checks and charge a premium. Their upsell went from 6% to 75% by educating their clients about fraud and telling them, “If you buy our premium checks, fraud insurance is already covered in that and if fraud happens, you’ll have a $50 thousand dollar check sitting in your bank account within 3 days.”

What you’re seeing now, a lot of restaurants are doing curbside delivery or other stores are doing curbside delivery. UV lighting, I don’t know if you know that a lot of heating and air conditioning companies have access to install UV lighting in your heating system and air conditioning system. Basically they put it in the blower unit and that kills germs, viruses, mold, bacteria, mildew and I’m hearing some of the smarter HVAC folks are running ads saying, “If you’re worried about germs, mold, mildew, call us up. We can easily come install UV lighting that will kill all that stuff off.”

Virtual tours, you’re seeing that in real estate but think if you were at Marriott Hotels, they have around 350 sales reps in Florida saying time shares. Nobody’s getting on airplanes, nobody’s coming to hotels, nobody’s coming to Florida, everybody’s worried about quarantine and stay home. It depends on where you are, all of us have different orders but it’s be safe. “We have 350 sales reps that can’t be productive” and I said, “Why don’t you do virtual tours?” It means changing the way that you’ve done it before. “Come on down for a free weekend, come hear our pitch for a couple hours, we’ll lock the door, do our pitch and give you a couple gifts” but now they can do virtual tours. Zoom, this has been a boom business for Zoom and anybody else, GoToMeeting and Webex because now you’re staying at home and we can still do meetings, we’re doing it now. I already talked about the call center shifting from offshore to onshore and entrepreneurs being smart enough going, “You need some help? We can handle that contract for you.” Web design, this was a client a couple years ago, it’s not right now but it’s still applicable with innovation and innovation doesn’t have to be a radical change, it could just be a slight shift. We noticed that he [the client] had done a lot of web design but there were for hospitals and we were like, “Why do hospitals use you for web design?” What he didn’t realize was he had built a website that allowed doctors to log in with different levels of security but each one was HIPAA compliant and nobody else was building HIPAA compliant websites so that was a unique differentiator.

Did he have to go out and radically change his business? No. Did he have to pivot what we has doing in his business? Not really, all he had to do was change his messaging and tweak his target a little bit, be a little bit more hospital-centric and change the message to, “We do HIPAA compliant websites.” Just trying to give you some examples. Here’s the key about innovation, this is something that you need to do with others. You can’t sit down in a room and do this by yourself. You could, but it’s more difficult and I’ll give you an example. I had a client, owns a sign business, he called me up and said, “I think I’ve got to shut down” and I said, “No you don’t, let’s talk about your target audience. You’re focused on parking lots and nobody’s driving right now so parking lots are cutting back on their hours, they don’t have attendance, the ones that are open because they don’t have attendance they’re not taking cash, they’re only taking credit cards.” I said, “Well, there’s a number of things you can do, let’s talk about the kind of equipment that you have.

First of all, you could call up all your garage operators and saying, “Do you need some signing saying ‘limited hours’? Do you need some signing saying ‘cash only’? Do you need to say ‘closed until the pandemic is over’? You can go out to your existing base and do that. Another option you have is restaurants. If they’re doing curbside, it’s really hard to know where to pull up on the curb or I see people getting out of their car, walking up to the door of the restaurant, they’re reading a little piece of paper taped to the window on what do to. You could actually do that in signage so that people didn’t even have to get out of their car, they could call their order in and wait there till somebody brings it out. You could actually go to restaurants and I know you don’t have a list of restaurants but if you get in your car and just drive down the main street, I know you got three blocks of nothing but restaurants. Is that going to set the world on fire and bring in huge cash flow? No, but it brings in some.

Next, I know you’ve got a machine that does wraps for trucks, wraps for cars, you can do magnetic signs. If you’re a real estate agent and still driving around, you could change your signage, a magnetic sign on your car that says ‘come see our virtual tour’ or your HVAC, you could do magnetic sign or change the wrapping, but magnetic would be temporary of ‘worried about germs, bacteria and viruses in your house? Call us for a UV lighting install’. There’s things you could do.” I said, “Next, you’ve got another option. Be a little patient and see what’s going to happen with congress and what stimulus they’re going to put in place and the last thing is, and I know you don’t want to hear it, you could actually shut down. When I think about your passion, your passion is fishing and mountain biking. I’ve heard friends who’ve gone bankrupt say this, when they’re going through bankruptcy it sucks but once they’re bankrupt, they’ve all said this phrase that’s stuck in my mind. Every single person I know that’s ever gone bankrupt has said ‘I feel free.'”

I said, “What would happen when you feel free? You would be free to do anything you’ve ever wanted to do, you love fishing and mountain biking, you could become a fishing guy, you could become a mountain guy, you could start an adventure travel business, but you would be free to do other things that you’ve always wanted to do.” Fred, I’m going to pause there for a second on growth mindset because I just threw out a whole lot of stuff. My point is this, if you get in a relaxed place and you’re willing to brainstorm with others, you have options.

Fred Diamond: Andy, that’s great. We have a lot of people on the webinar who are leading corporate sales teams. Again, the Institute for Excellence in Sales, our mission is to help sales leaders retain, motivate and elevate top-tier talent. A couple people had commented here, “I manage a team with a large corporation” and there’s a couple people who are bag-carrying sales professionals. You gave us some great examples for business owners, let’s shift the conversation a little bit to bag-carrying, quota-carrying sales leaders and sales professionals. On the concept of innovation, individual sales reps, the individual contributor, someone who’s an account manager or new business development person for a $5 billion software company – we have a couple of those people on the line here – what might be some of the things they could possibly be thinking about right now to be more innovating during this time?

Andy Miller: Pick up the phone and call your customers, just have a conversation with them. You would be surprised what comes out of that, they will tell you what they need. Don’t go lock yourself in a room and try to figure this out on your own, this happens by having dialogue with others. It may not be that you have to innovate, it may just mean a slight change in your messaging. You may already have what they need, they just don’t know it and you’ve never thought about it that way.

Fred Diamond: Same thing if you’re managing the team. We have two people who suggested, “I manage a team of younger sales professionals, some of them are brand new in their career.” If I’m a sales leader, let’s say I’m a first line sales manager, let’s say I just got promoted in the last year and we’ve talked about this many times, one of the hardest jobs is first time sales manager because you’re not getting trained. A lot of times you get promoted because you were very good at what you did so now you’re managing a team, you’ve probably never gone through a pandemic before as nobody on this line has. What would be some suggestions if I’m managing a 6 person team, maybe people who are spread out across the country, how can I be innovative if I’m not necessarily talking to customers but I want to keep my sales team motivated and energized?

Andy Miller: That leads to this next slide, Fred. That was a great segue, here’s things you could be asking yourself or you could be discussing with your team. When it comes to innovation, what questions should we be asking? What questions should we be asking ourselves, what questions should we be asking our customers, clients, prospects? To me it’s that Washington Business Journal email I saw of, “Where do you need help? What can we be doing for you?” Next question. What skills do we need? Do we have all the skills that we need or are we missing something? Is something an easy lift but we’re missing the skill? Maybe you’re all used to going face-to-face and now you got to go virtual and you need something like Zoom or GoToMeeing. Let me teach everybody as a leader how to use GoToMeeting.
What knowledge do we need? Are we missing any knowledge that we need right now? You could fill that in, it’s easy. You’ve got podcasts, you’ve got YouTube, you’ve got books you can buy, Amazon is still shipping. Again, the purpose of this is out of discussion will come some realizations of things that you can do. What resources do we need? That’s another question. What options do we have? I would explore the options. Some options you could do yourself, some options you need the company to change, some options are probably too much of a stretch right now but we should consider it for the near future and then other things is who else has done this? Is there somebody that I could call who’s been through this before and have them talk to the team? There are things that you can do to start thinking, “What else can we do here?” and all these are to generate what options we have because there’s always options. I don’t care how bad it gets, there’s always options.
Now, the outcomes may not be ideal but you always have options. Does that answer the question?

Fred Diamond: Yes, that’s great.

Andy Miller: Let’s go to the next, what can you do? Again, this is on generating ideas and innovation. Modify – can you modify your current offering like the UV guys did? Look for what’s missing, is there something that’s missing? Marriott Hotels was started because the original founder, Bill Marriott senior did it because he was traveling with his family and couldn’t find a place to stay. Frustration – Identify the frustration that your clients are having and then find a way to fulfill that frustration because out of frustration becomes opportunity. Use the chance to reinvent yourself like we’re seeing, you could pursue wishes, hopes and dreams, that’s a personal thing. Diversify – do you need to be in other markets? Change the game. Kia did this years ago when they offered a 10 year or 100 thousand mile warranty. If you believe in what you built, why wouldn’t you extend the warranty?

Here’s one thing I would have all of you do and that is watch the curve, they keep talking about, “Let’s flatten the curve for the pandemic”. Once the curve has flattened I’m not sure what happens next but business is going to pick up to some extent so there’s a website you can go to, the website is worldometer.com and you can watch the curve by country or by state. I would encourage you as you see the curve flatten, don’t wait until it’s flat and the news is talking about everybody’s back at work, get ahead of the curve, watch when it starts to flatten and then ramp up your efforts before anybody else is catching on, the curve is flat and it’s now safe to do business. Meditation counsel – this is a little technique that I use when I’m trying to figure out an answer, I will sit down and meditate and then I will bring in three or four, I’m going to call them council members.

I pretend that I have access to anybody in the world that I want access to throughout the ages. If I want to pull in Einstein into my council, if I want to pull in a doctor or nurse into my council, if I want to pull in the greatest salesperson that ever lived into my council I get into a meditative state because that puts your brain in a different place and then I bring in these world-class thought leaders based upon what I want and I ask them their advice. I know it may sound a little woo-woo but the fact is your brain has the answers, you just need to find a different way to access it. The last thing I would do is if you use Net Promoter Score, even if you don’t, Net Promoter Score is a three question survey, 0-10 how likely are you to recommend us, the next question is primary reason that you gave us the score. Here’s the one question that I would ask today: what’s the most important improvement that we could make that would get us to a 10? Forget about the 10 piece, I would be asking my clients what’s the most important improvement that we could make today that would help you? That I can do as a salesperson talking to my clients, talking to my customers, talking to my prospects, that I could do right now. Fred, let me pause there.

Fred Diamond: Someone asks, “Can I ask for business right now?” What are your thoughts on prospecting to people you don’t know? Let’s say you have a target list of a hundred companies or something like that and there’s 80 of them that you don’t know. Is now a worthwhile time to make outreach or is it just going to fall in deaf ears? We had some suggestions before about talking to your existing customers, people you were already in relationship with. What’s the likelihood of being successful right now of going after new business? Let’s say it’s random new business. We’re obviously not going to go after the airline industry or maybe you do, I don’t know. What do you think?

Andy Miller: Maybe you do. Do you have something to provide the airline industry that would really help bail them out right now? I don’t know what everybody sells that’s on the webinar but the question that I would ask is, “Do I have something that would help my target audience based upon what’s going on right now?” It’s a conversation of where they’re at in their industry, where they’re at in their business and what they’re trying to accomplish. Do I have something that would help? I hear this question, Fred, at least twice a week and I guess I’m surprised by it. Why wouldn’t we be reaching out to people right now? When I think of sales, I think of sales as helping others get what they want. I don’t think of sales as selling something to people that they don’t want or they don’t need, it’s helping others be successful.
Do I have something that will help them be successful right now or not? I’m still selling, I’m having last week and the week before 5 CEO conversations a week with people I don’t know. Out of that I got two sales last week, two sales pending this week so I don’t know why you wouldn’t call people. I would be sensitive and say, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out if we should be talking.” When I look at companies, some companies are saying, “Right now we’re playing defense, we’re pulling back a little bit.” Some companies are saying, “We’re playing offense and we’re gobbling up market share” or, “We see opportunity.”

Which position do you guys see yourself in? Here’s what I do for companies in your position, is that something worth exploring? I really think it’s that simple, I think we make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

Let me go to the next slide. GRIT – I knew we were going to spend most on innovation so we are on track for what we need to be doing, but GRIT is an acronym. The R in GRIT is Resilience and I think of Fred Smith as an example of this. Here’s this guy who is Chairman and CEO of Federal Express but what you don’t know is the story of how he got there. When he was 4, his father died. His father was an entrepreneur, he was raised by his mother and his uncles but as a kid he got a crippling bone disease, he was crippled and it took until he was 10 years old to regain his health. As a result of that, he started playing sports because he knew he had to build his body back up and by the time he graduated high school he was a high school football star. Then you probably heard this story if you’ve heard anything about him, he went to Yale and he wrote a paper. The paper was supposed to be about a feasible business idea and his professor gave him a C for the concept of Federal Express saying, “I’m giving you a C because I wanted a feasible business idea, not the hair brain” – I’m making up the hair brain phrase – “Not some hair brain idea of what you came up with.”

As we know, it went on to become Federal Express. Then another example of resilience is in the very early stages of the business he ran out of money, he was down to $5 thousand dollars and the jet fuel bill was $24 thousand so he took a little gamble. He went to Vegas, he played blackjack and he won $27 thousand dollars. Do I recommend that? Not necessarily, but desperate times require desperate measures and he won $27 thousand, was able to pay the fuel and to keep going. The last example of resilience was 9/11 happened, and what people didn’t know is we know them for flying packages everywhere but they had a fleet of trucks all over the country and could still deliver coast to coast via his truck fleet.

When 9/11 happened he went around all the cable shows and said, “The planes are grounded but our trucks are still shipping. Don’t let the terrorists win and keep on doing business, stick it to the terrorists.” That’s what he did. What questions can you ask yourself on resilience? Questions you’re going to ask is what’s the biggest challenge we’re going to face? Have that discussion with your salespeople. Control – what elements do we think are out of our control? Have that discussion, acknowledge that because you have a lot more control than you think you do. What things can we influence the things going on right now? Even the things we think are out of our control, how can we influence those? What’s the worst case scenario and what’s the best case scenario? Talk through that and in terms of what’s going on, how can we minimize the downside and how can we harness what’s going on and push through it quickly? The faster you push through it, the better. Then what does the final outcome or result look like? These are things you can ask yourself on resilience. Fred, I’m going to pause there before I go to the next topic of initiative.

Fred Diamond: Why don’t you go on to the next couple slides? Then we’re going to wind us down in about five minutes. Again, if anybody has any final questions for Andy, please submit them and we’ll get to them.

Andy Miller: Next is initiative, taking action. I think Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. I don’t know if anybody read her book but I think we all know who she is. When you think about her, she was born in Mississippi in poverty, her toy was a corncob doll, she was born to a single mother and she had a lot of hardship. She was raped at 9, became pregnant at 14, the baby died in infancy but somewhere along the way she ended up moving to Tennessee to a guy she now considers her dad and in high school she decided she wanted to get a job in radio. She took the initiative and found a way to get a job in high school which then led to her being a co-anchor on the local news.

She asked for that at age 19 so there’s lots of examples of what she’s done but she didn’t have a mentor to help guide her, she just took the initiative and today she’s considered one of the wealthiest and most influential women in the world. What can you do to ask yourself about initiative? When do we get started? How do I get started? What actions do I need to take? Who has ownership? How do I take ownership of this? Because if we say who, that allows us to placate and put the blame on somebody else but I like the phrase, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.” Then the last one is how do I get traction quickly?
My last example of GRIT, the T in GRIT is Tenacity. I love Richard Branson for this. Again, you may think, “Here’s this guy who’s rich and famous.” What’s cool about Branson is people don’t realize he’s dislexic and he made a lot of mistakes. In college he started a newsletter that was called Virgin. His team was working together, “What do we call this business?” and one of the guys suggested, “Let’s call it virgin because we’re all business virgins” and that’s where the name Virgin came from. His second business was Virgin Atlantic Records, Virgin Records first and he didn’t collect taxes on the records so the tax authorities came after him and his mother had to mortgage her house to pay his tax bills so that he didn’t go to jail. Interesting, right? Let’s talk about what can we do in terms of tenacity. First thing is refuse to give up. You should be asking yourself, “How long is this going to take?” It may take a long time but that’s okay, get in it for the long haul.

Next, anticipate excuses. What excuses can we anticipate? The next is how do we eliminate that excuse making? Because it’s easy to find excuses. There’s a number of guys that I coach in my business and I’m hearing a lot of excuse making and my belief is there’s still opportunity. If your belief is, “We can’t make it” then your behaviors are going to follow that. If your belief is, “We’ll find a way” your behaviors are going to follow that. Then the last is commit. How do we increase our strength and our efforts and our commitment level to make this happen? I’m going to end with this quote, and you might have heard it before. My question for you is do you believe in yourself? Because Henry Ford had this quote of, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” and I absolutely believe that

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 223: Creativity in Sales Webcast: Using GRIT to Pivot During Challenging Times with Andy Miller first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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Please register for THE RIGHT SALES MINDSET WEEKLY WEBCAST: SEIZE THE MOMENT on April 16, 2020 2:00 PM EDT here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 1, 2020. It featured sales leaders Eric Trexler (Forcepoint), Jennifer Ives (3Pillar Global) and Matt McDarby (Fidelus).]

EPISODE 222: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Jennifer Ives, Matt McDarby and Eric Trexler

Watch the webinar here. Listen to Jennifer Ives’ Podcast . Listen to Eric Trexler’s Podcast.

MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Be incredibly empathetic to the challenges that they might have on their plate today, those challenges are going to be different from 8 weeks ago and be very aware of it. Do not waste your customer’s time, understand where they’re coming from, add value in that conversation.”

Fred Diamond: Today we have three great sales leaders on the panel, Jennifer Ives is with 3Pillar Global, Matt McDarby with Fidelus Technology and Erix Trexler with Forcepoint.  What are your top priorities? Jennifer, let’s start with you. What are your top priorities right now as a sales leader?

Jennifer Ives: It’s the health of our own internal teams as well as of our clients. If our team members aren’t being cared for and if they’re not being supported and if they’re not taking care of themselves and their families it’ll translate to our clients. One day this pandemic will end and we’re going to come out of this on the other side and we’ve got to be caring for our teams and our clients along the way. The help, the insights, the knowledge shared now more than ever is important and we’ve got to take time to take care for our teams, they’re on the front line, they’re with our clients every day, they’re under a great deal of stress, the clients are as well as our teams in order to pivot our business in the current environment.

We view this as an opportunity to lean into those conversations with our teams and our clients so I really want to touch on both of those, it really is taking care of your team, taking care of your clients. Give straightforward, simple advice, simple reminders are so powerful, they’re more obvious than you would think. During this time those teams and clients are going to remember you one of two ways, that you were either trying to help or you took a backward posture and weren’t there for them. It’s really about leaning into teams and clients making sure they both have what they need to be successful during these unprecedented times.

Fred Diamond: Eric, how about you?

Eric Trexler: I couldn’t agree any more with Jennifer. Customers and employees. I was reviewing our values the other day and optimism, trustworthiness, commitment to the customer came to mind. We’re spending a lot of time – all of our time, quite frankly – understanding what they need and helping them. Customer priorities are changing right now, I do a lot of DOD and intelligence business internationally and in the US, there’s a lot of fear out there, there’s a lot of uncertainty. We’ve got an aircraft carrier parked off the lawn right now which is basically combat ineffective because of the virus. Understanding what these customers need and responding to it in the way they need, not bothering them when you can’t help. Those are the big ones for me, customers and employees.

Fred Diamond: Matt, you’re in a relatively new role, you’ve been a sales leader before, you’ve been an independent. By the way, Matt is also a twice published author, so it’s good to have you on today’s webinar but how about you? What is your #1 priority right now?

Matt McDarby: It does tie into what Jennifer and Eric have said, it’s keeping the team focused on executing our sales process as effectively as they can in the current environment. If that sounds in any way self-serving or too inwardly focused, the thing I’d have to add is our sales process is a distinctly client-focused process. The entire thing is driven by an understanding of how buyers make decisions and where do we have opportunity to create value for them. At a time like this, because a lot of our clients are ranging from concerned to panicked about the state of our business, we can get pulled into the very same sort of behavior. I think maintaining the rhythm and focus that we have which is very much about executing that sales process with excellence, planning, executing, reviewing some more planning, it’s just maintaining that steady rhythm. That’s really my top priority, it’s very easy for us to lose focus and go off in a direction that we don’t want to head.

Fred Diamond: One of the key words that’s come up a lot over the first week of the transition is empathy, be empathetic to your customers, be empathetic to your partners and we’re going to shift. One of the interesting things is we also did this webinar last week, we had a great panel of three sales VPs and we’re also going to do it again next week and the week after. Things evolve, things change, empathy was a big word but how do you be empathetic and at the same time move business forward? We just ended a quarter yesterday, March 31st, we’re doing today’s podcast April 1st. How do you be empathetic but still moving the business forward? Jennifer, why don’t you get started with that one?

Jennifer Ives: I mentioned before it’s about sharing simple perspectives. Empathetic leadership and empathetic sales, you need to be human with your teams and you need to feel where your clients are and understand from a human perspective and from a business perspective where they are, where’s their pain, their pain may have shifted from the pain they were in 6 months ago to where’s their pain today. You’ve been working with them, they’re your current clients, you know better than anyone what they were experiencing in the past and then where they are today and if not, then it’s really important to be part of those teams, their tiger team almost, and really lean in and help them understand and help guide them through that.

I would say that persistence, persistently check in with both your teams and check in with your clients. We’re hosting lots of conversations with our clients, we want to be sure that we’re offering the simple pieces of advice because many times when you are in a state of crises or you’re in a state of panic, and it really depends on the client, sometimes those simple reminders, simple pieces of advice are really important. The simple advice doesn’t mean that it’s not complex and that’s why they’re having challenges thinking through that. Actively make offerings, don’t just say, “Is there anything I can do to help?” It’s, “Here are the things that I see that you are struggling with, here’s what is going on in the industry, here are the ideas that I have for you” and I think it’s really important to always talk about, “Here are the four things we’re seeing, here are two that apply, how can we help you implement these?”

To be honest, it’s not about growing the business, it’s about supporting them and understanding where they are and making sure that you can add value to those conversations. Again, be proactive, do not wait for the call, call them, it’s empathetic leadership. Call them, hear where they are today, really understand where they are today and make those very specific offerings. It’s really going to be interesting because there’s going to be a before COVID-19 and then after COVID-19. You want to be sure that both your internal teams and from a business perspective the clients that you’re working with, that they don’t sit back at the end and say, “Where were you?” You want to be their first call and if they’re not calling you, you need to call them. You need to help them through this.

Fred Diamond: I want to go back to your employees, to your staff. The first question we asked, all three of you said that your #1 concern is your team so what do you think are the main concerns for your people? I’m curious, how are the younger people handling it? This is the third week that we’re involved with this so the whole newness of working from home and everything with Zoom is kind of worn off at this point a little bit. There’s different challenges, how about your more senior people? I want to pose this question to Matt and Eric. Matt, why don’t you take it first?

Matt McDarby: We happen to be in position to help clients who are dealing with a lot of that remote work, work from home issues because we’re in the remote work collaboration and communication business. The main concern that I have for my team is their ability to respond to clients’ needs. Some of those clients, by the way are literally on the front lines of the health crisis in New York, how do we use the precious little bits of time that we have with our clients to help them? I think Jennifer said it earlier, they are absolutely going to remember what we did for them in this time or what we didn’t so balancing all the demands, servicing immediate needs and being responsive to all of our clients is tough, that’s tough for everybody.

For the younger people on the team, I think we have to remember younger people maybe haven’t been through anything like this before. For those of us who lived through 9-11, super storm Sandy, the global financial crisis, any one of those, we know that we will come out of this, it’s a question of when and how it will be different but we really have to help our younger teammates prepare for when we do because we know it’s going to happen. Keeping them focused on what is it going to take to make sure we come out of this a little bit stronger, a little bit better, a little bit more close with our clients, I think that’s the thing to get them to zero in on, rather than worrying about, “My god, is the sky falling? There’s no precedent for this.” There is, we will get through it.

Fred Diamond: Eric, how about you?

Eric Trexler: When I look at the main concerns of my people, it’s been an interesting three weeks or so. They’re worried about their customers, they’re worried about their health, they’re worried about their family, they’re worried about their jobs. What I’m not saying is they’re not necessarily worried about burning out, we have tons of people that are on Zoom 12, 14 hours a day back to back or go to meeting or whatever it may be, they’re working too much, they’re not exercising. You mentioned younger people, we’ve seen an interesting dynamic that we’ve observed in our business where a lot of our younger employees who traditionally don’t need as much assistance from HR, from the business, they don’t necessarily have parents who are ill, they don’t even have kids in many cases where the kid’s sick and they’re staying home from work, they live in high rise apartments and they’re scared to go outside. They can’t go outside depending on what state they’re in to exercise. They may have a balcony or they may have a room, depending on what city they’re in and the dynamics have really changed on the impact. They’re cooped up.

I’ll tell you, in a conversation with my son Michael who’s 12 today, I said, “Do you miss your friends?” and he goes, “No, I talk to them all the time.” The younger personnel are different in many ways but they’re cooped up and they want to get out so we’re watching that very carefully. We’re mandating breaks, one of the early on observations I made was our executive teams working like crazy right now trying to adjust to our customers and everything. The younger employees, the individual contributors are modeling that and they’re burning out, they don’t want to stop working, they don’t want to plan for breaks because they see their boss is not planning for breaks and they’re scared. That over-communication is really critical, I think as we go forward here a couple weeks in were going to start seeing people who have family illnesses, they have illnesses themselves and we’re going to see the concern change and we need to be available for them and for the business.

Fred Diamond: What are you hearing from your customers? Again, we asked the question in the very beginning, “What level of stress do your customers have?” and 94% of the people on today’s webinar said it’s either somewhat or extreme. Jennifer, tell us the actual conversations you’re hearing from your customers. Are they communicating this stress? Obviously everyone’s going through everything, we’re all going through this in the world unlike some of the previous examples we talked about before. You might not have felt some of the things outside of DC or New York around 9-11 after it happened. What are you hearing from your customers? What are they telling you? Then we’ll get to Matt with this question as well. Jennifer, you go first.

Jennifer Ives: It’s a great question. Our culture is one that both internally and also with our clients, we’re very open, we’re transparent, we have very deep relationships as I think that Matt and Eric do as well. We’re trying to one, as I mentioned before, proactively reach out, not wait for them to call us because if they’re under a great amount of stress and pressure sometimes it’s hard to figure out which way to go, which way is up on that. We’re calling, we’re making proactive calls, I think it’s really important, I believe in that strongly, I recommend it strongly to everyone listening today. Proactively reach out, understand, have those conversations because again, we’re either going to emerge from this with a better relationship or a more disconnected relationship and you want it to be on the better side, you want to be the call that they made to you.

We build digital technology, we build digital software so we’re working with companies that have digital products in the market that are consumer driven so many of our clients are actually doing really well, they are needed right now. Some of them have virtual platforms, some of them are in healthcare IT, the list goes on so they need us because they need to double and triple down on their digital product in the market. We have a few customers who are related to hospitality in some industries that are really hard hit. Those conversations are about how can we keep product going for you and how can we be supportive? How can we strategize with you? How can we offer some of our brains on from conversations, some of our really smart and talented people that maybe you haven’t had contact with before because you haven’t needed them. Putting them on the phone for half an hour and then of course I think everyone probably will touch on this on the call and in future conversations, but what do you do about the contracts and payments especially when you’ve got clients who are really going through major changes in their industry and their industries in particular have been hit hard?

Our conversations are really centered around how can we lean in, whether that company is actually doing better because their technology or their digital product is needed during this crisis or if it’s not needed, how do we lean in and share those ideas and thoughts with them to help them through this? Again, I’ll just repeat: don’t wait to be asked, don’t be generic, be really specific in your offers of help and help them gain clarity whether it’s contracting, whether it’s pricing or whether it’s ‘what do I need to do next’. Be very specific and proactive in those conversations.

Fred Diamond: Thank you. Matt, how about you?

Matt McDarby: Our customers are asking them to help them pivot a bit. We did our jobs really well going into this year, we were clear about what their big strategic initiatives were and what the big issues were in their environments and what they were trying to achieve over the next year or two and lo and behold, three months into the year all of that had to shift. What we’re hearing from some of our clients, and this is true where we have our strongest relationships with people at senior executive levels, is they’re saying, “Look, we clearly have to rethink what our priorities are. Can you help us?” That’s a great conversation to be invited into.

No organization would have that with every client, but they think about the mid-level managers, the director level folks that we work with saying virtually the same thing. “I know what I said I was going to be able to commit to mid-year or later this year, but that has to change.” We have a choice, are we going to try to push them if that change doesn’t suit our own agenda or are we going to stop, listen and try to be in position to offer ideas even if it means we don’t necessarily have a solution then and there because we know that they value those partners who are really focused on helping them achieve whatever outcome they want to achieve? That might mean backing off, that might mean helping them to reprioritize so I think that’s the thing that our customers are looking for from us right now.

Fred Diamond: What would you say the #1 skill you would tell a sales professional who works for you should be. If you had to tell them one, what should they focus on right now, today April 1st, 2:21 Eastern Time? Eric, how about you? What’s the one thing you would tell your people to work on?

Eric Trexler: I think you should know it, I’m not sure about learning it, but I think setting goals. The whole world has changed, come into each day, each week, month, set a goal for that day, set a goal for that week and make sure you’re on it because we’re working a lot. The question is are we working on the right things, are we doing the right thing? That forethought I believe for a sales professional is the most important thing they can bring to the business right now. “This is what I plan to accomplish today” and then evaluating and the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of that month, “Did I accomplish that?” The world as we know it has changed, what we did three months ago is not going to work today, we’ve got to evolve and we have to do it quickly so I think setting goals and holding yourself accountable measuring is probably the one thing I’d recommend.

Fred Diamond: Matt, how about you?

Matt McDarby: This one is universal, I think listening. Really listening, understanding what your clients are saying, why they’re saying it, what do they really mean. I think that’s a skill that all of us, even those of us like many of us on the line here have been selling 10, 15, 20 years, it’s the thing that separates really great sellers, people who execute great sales calls consistently. It’s not about my value statement or the question I plan to ask, it’s “Am I really tuned into the answer? Am I present?” In a time like this it’s especially important, “Am I really hearing what my customer is saying or am I drowning it out because there’s something I’d rather hear?”

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, how about you? What would be the #1 skill you would tell people to work on?

Jennifer Ives: Eric and Matt just hit on two incredibly important skills and I think this makes a nice layer on top of it, get really comfortable at on-camera conversations. That might not be a skill, it’s more of a tactic, it’s more of something very easy to learn. Understand where your computer is, understand where that video camera is, understand what sound is like and isn’t like, understand the bandwidth in your house. I think those are really important tactical pieces not just in sales but everyone really needs to understand over the last couple of months as everything has turned virtual.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, I have another question. We just got a question that came in from one of our listeners and again, if you’re listening to today’s webinar just submit questions through the panel. This is a great question. People aren’t meeting right now, you’re not going to meet someone for a cup of coffee, how would you approach new partnerships? How would you reach out to someone pretty new that may be ahead on your list that you have no contact with, maybe you’ve seen them on LinkedIn but they’re brand new. Is now the time to reach out to new people to start developing those types of relationships? Matt, I see you shaking your head so I’ll get to you after Jennifer but Jennifer, why don’t you take that?

Jennifer Ives: I say yes. You should be talking, sharing knowledge at all times whether we’re going through COVID-19 or we’re going through virtual meetings instead of in-person meetings. A good sales leader is a good leader as a good leader is a good networker. Continue to build your network, I continue to talk about freely giving your information and your insights and your advice, your thoughts, continue to do so. I would be very careful about how you reach out to new prospective clients at the moment.

One, you want to be really hyper-focused on your current clients and two, if it makes sense to reach out to new, I’m SVP of Global Partnership so my job is to reach out to new all the time and I’m finding that those conversations are very different. Knowing the industry that he or she is focused on, but what I would suggest is really understand what that industry is going through and come to that conversation listening, empathizing with where they might be and I would go in with a warm introduction or leveraging LinkedIn and understanding how you’re connected, why they would want to talk with you at a time of crisis, why is it that they might want to give you 30 minutes of their time even more so than 6 or 8 weeks ago if you were calling into someone new for the first time. I would approach the conversation differently, again, be incredibly empathetic to the challenges that they might have on their plate today, those challenges are going to be different from 8 weeks ago and be very aware of it.

Do not waste their time, understand where they’re coming from, add value in that conversation. These are things I would recommend 8 weeks ago, more so now but understand where they are today.

Fred Diamond: Matt, how about you?

Matt McDarby: That’s good advice from Jennifer. I think the key is it’s tempting but we can’t get into the idea that people don’t want to talk right now. I think about conversations I’m having with colleagues and every one of us has some version of, “You know what? I thought to pick up the phone and call so-and-so, haven’t talked to them in a long time.” I know the question was about new people and that does carry a certain degree of requirement for prep and really being tuned in and trying to understand where this person is coming from, but think about also that next level or next layer of people in your network that you just haven’t engaged with in a while who might legitimately value the call.

This is an unprecedented time, I can’t think of a time when I’ve been secluded in my office by government order and there are a lot of people right now who are looking to stay engaged. Just because they’re prospective buyers doesn’t mean that they’re off-limits, they may very well value the human interaction so I think it’s a really good idea to reach out and let’s face it, the thing that’s still true is people love to chat especially if they can talk about something that’s important to them. Combine that with everything Jennifer said about prep and understanding the market, I just think it’s as good a time as any, maybe a better time, in fact to have that live interaction with people because we need it.

Fred Diamond: Eric, I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Today is April 1st, happy April Fool’s today, everybody. We’re all essentially living through the biggest April Fool’s joke in our history. Prospecting, today’s the first day of the new quarter, I wonder how many companies were paying attention to the fact that it was the end of the quarter yesterday and a lot of companies traditionally do. Are you directing your team to prospect for new business and if so, what are you telling them to do?

Eric Trexler: I am but you have to be very careful here. I fully agree with Jennifer and Matt but you have to be very careful, we’ve seen in the cyber security space a lot of what’s appearing to be profiteering, a lot of people who are out there just trying to take advantage, we’re seeing it from the adversary, we’re seeing it from the companies. We have a very strict policy, anything we’re doing whether it’s sales plays, you name it, has to go through the CEO at this point to ensure that we’re not coming out and looking like we’re taking advantage of that because trust is so valuable to our business.

You’ve got to provide value, if I gave you one word it would be value. If you’re going to talk to a customer or prospect, you better understand what that value proposition is. You’re sharing something somebody else in the industry is doing like them, you’re bringing them something that you perceive to be value. If you’re calling up and saying, “Hey, I don’t know you but how can I help? What can I do for you?” I probably get five of those calls a day, they’re a total turnoff for me, I’ll never do business with that company again unless I don’t recognize that they called me during this time. I need value and I need it now and I think so do our customers.

Fred Diamond: That’s a common theme, of course. There’s a couple common themes that frequently come up on the Sales Game Changers podcast, adding value is by far #1 and #2, Matt brought this up before, is listening. Matt, you spent a lot of your career as a sales trainer working for some very successful sales training companies. Let’s talk about new prospecting right now as well, what is your opinion? Are you directing your people to do new prospecting?

Matt McDarby: I am. We have to do the work now to make sure that we’re in position to grow when we come out of this. We are coming out of this, we can’t simply turn off the pipeline development effort. There’s another way to look at this, we all are probably getting messages in our inbox and in our LinkedIn message stream from people who are hitting us with very much messages entirely about them. Every once in a while they’ll get creative and they’ll start a message with, “These uncertain times” or, “COVID-19” as the subject line and it has absolutely nothing to do with my concerns in this current environment, it’s just a cover for their very seller-centric message.

If we pay attention to their examples it gives us a very clear vision of what not to do and what not to do is approach people with what is clearly a blanket message that is clearly meant to take advantage of a topic and a subject line that everybody is going to automatically pay attention to because COVID-19 is everywhere. Instead, what I’m recommending the team do is we’re taking rightful shots here for lack of a better analogy, we have to reach out to the right targets with messages that are relevant. If they have a tinge of how to address a problem that our customers are dealing with right now and this everybody-working-from-home environment, that’s cool but let’s get to the point really quickly right in the very first sentence, keeping it above the fold, as they used to say or as my old [Inaudible 30:42] would call the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid. First sentence, you’ve got to be talking about something, that there’s an outcome they can’t achieve or there’s an issue you know is going on in their industry. Say it quickly, do it in a way where you avoid using the ‘I, me, my’ language and you have a shot. If you don’t do that, you’re going to end up in the trash like most of the other prospecting messages that we’re getting today.

Fred Diamond: Once again, if anybody has a question, feel free to submit it to the panel. Right now you know where everybody on your team is, everybody is at home. Maybe they’re going for a walk or something but for the most part we’re getting government mandated orders to stay inside unless it’s essential, so we know where everybody is. Everybody is in their home office or probably looking at a screen so you know where everybody is. I’m curious, let’s start with you, Eric and then Jennifer, I’m interested in your thoughts on this. How often are you now communicating with your team? Do you stop everything at 5:30? I’m just curious, how are you communicating to your team? You know where they are, you know that nobody is on physical sales calls, nobody is going to events, nobody is going to meetings. Let’s start with you, Eric and then Jennifer, take it. How often are you communicating to your team and how?

Eric Trexler: I used to go to the office 4 to 5 days a week. Obviously the method of communication has changed drastically. Fortunately, I have team members across the globe so we’ve always communicated via Zoom and phone, we’re having a lot of Zoom sessions as I’ve mentioned, as we’ve talked about here. The first thing I’m doing is keeping the standard weekly support cast calls, one-on-ones, leadership team calls. What we’ve done after that, though is we’ve added fun, we’ve added happy hours, we’ve added biweekly lunches where we don’t talk business, we just talk about what’s going on. I just got a game psychologists recommended called Table Topics. Stupid topics to start dialogue not work-related to make people feel okay, feel like they’re part of a community. We’re working as much as we used to, maybe a little more, what we don’t have is that water cooler time.

We’re doing Zoom yoga here at Forcepoint, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at noon. We’re doing everything we need to do, I’m doing random check-in calls so I have a contact list of my entire team and I’m just checking in to see how people are going randomly as of my leaders in the business. We’re inviting executive leadership, the CEO is invited into some meetings so that he can be involved, we’re keeping people very up to date, we’re very candid and transparent here on what’s happening, what’s going on with the business because they’re worried, they don’t know what’s happening. They don’t know if they’re going to have a job tomorrow so we’re over-communicating on the state of the business.

We just completed a very good quarter, what we’re doing, we’re asking for help is the final thing. Our business relies on our companies, our people’s abilities to do their jobs effectively and service their customers so we’re asking them for help, too and we’re asking them what they need. We’re doing a lot.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, I’m curious, is your team’s day ending at 5 o’clock? You know where everybody is, everybody is at home, no one’s traveling, no one’s going to the beach. I’m just curious, has the day expanded? I know a lot of people listening on today’s webinar and obviously the sales leaders we have here, I know it’s not a 9 to 5 job, you all do a lot of hours and a lot of work but I’m just curious because we’re all at our desks in our houses now. Has the day expanded? I’m curious on how you’re managing out there today.

Jennifer Ives: I think this is so important as leaders to make sure you’re checking in with your teams regularly. I do believe the day has expanded and what I’m hearing more and more is that people are sitting in place for 4, 5, 6 hours sometimes not realizing it because they’ve gone from one meeting to another, to another potentially with clients, internal meetings, client, client, client, internal meeting. As leadership at 3Pillar we are proactively reaching out from the CEO founder, David DeWolf all the way through the company to say, “Here’s what my day looks like, this is how I’m making sure that I’m setting boundaries between work and my family.”

This is a unique situation where it’s not just that you’ve chosen to work from home and you’ve got children or others at school or maybe a partner at work, you’re all home together, it’s really important. Again, it goes back to empathetic leadership, understand where your team is at the moment, help them delineate, make those delineations, I was just having a couple of conversations with some team members this morning and sharing how I was now blocking off my lunch time during the day. Also, I’ve learned from other leaders that I’ve reached out to that have been working from home for many years and I’m now blocking out two breaks during the morning and in the afternoon. They’re getting filled in but I’m filling them in, the very least is allowing me. You try to model for your team members what it is that you can do.

We also have team members who have little children and they’re trading with their partner, they’re taking care of the kids in the morning, they’re working in the afternoon and then after children go to bed they’re sending emails at 10 and 11 o’clock at night and they’re doing a piece of their work much later in the evening and sometimes in the middle of the night.

We want to be sure that those folks are being taken care of in that they understand and they have support around the boundaries that you can set. I think it’s really important to set those boundaries. It’s really important as Eric and I think Matt has also mentioned in the conversation as well, it’s really important to bring fun and silly into the conversations. We’re hosting happy hours, we’re hosting lunch roulettes where we sit down and we put our names in a Google doc and at random three people are chosen to have lunch with each other. We’re hosting Netflix movies where you can watch them together, lots of different ways that you can bring some fun back into the virtual but to your very specific question, really important to help your teams understand that it’s alright. You should encourage them messaging you and having those open conversations and they open dialogue with you as to, “Here’s what my day looks like, this is when I need to do this for my family, this is when I can be working, I’m going to be working from 10 to midnight on X, Y, Z project.” That over-communication goes both ways.

Fred Diamond: Tell us something new, one thing each that you all are doing as a response to this. We’ll go from my right to left with Matt then Eric then Jennifer. One thing new that you’re doing.

Matt McDarby: Me first? Boy, we’re doing a lot of things new, let me think about the one. I’m surrounded by people who are experts at using collaboration technology so we get ideas regularly from the team. One of the things that we’re doing new is creating team spaces to share everything from little bits of competitive intel and things that are going into the marketplace to another team space that’s about the very specific situation we’re in right now with COVID-19 and then there’s one that I’m kicking off here shortly. We have a team standout twice weekly, 15, 20 minutes where I’m going to interject a quick challenge for people so we’re using our team space to throw a little fun, creative challenge out to the team that we’re going to talk about live during the next team standout.

Fred Diamond: Eric, how about you?

Eric Trexler: I think I’d like to give my marketing team some props here. We’ve been talking about our customers going through digital transformation. A massive amount of my marketing budget annually goes to shows, the government is big on shows. Obviously the shows aren’t happening, they’re cancelling. My marketing team has done a phenomenal job transitioning to digital from the physical shows that we used to do and they’re even ahead of the budgets, we can’t get our money back until the show actually cancels, there are several hundred thousand dollars ahead on the digital transformation from a customer outreach perspective compared to what we’re getting back from the customers’ shows that are cancelling. We’re expecting to see a lot more customer communication, a lot more contact as we have to pivot, that’s probably the biggest or most significant thing where I’m just seeing leadership from the front from the marketing thing.

Fred Diamond: Jennifer, one thing that’s new that you guys are doing as a response to this.

Jennifer Ives: It’s similar to Eric, we are freely putting information out into the world through live chats. We’ve been hosting many live chats for our clients for those who lean on 3Pillar Global for product information and up to date information. They’re going so well that we will be doing them when everyone gets back to normal, when the uncertainty changes to certainty and we’ll be doing them then as well.

Fred Diamond: From a sales professional perspective, next 7 days, what are going to be the big challenges? Jennifer Ives of 3Pillar Global, what do you think that big challenge is going to be?

Jennifer Ives: I think that as time passes and with the new lockdown orders in place not only here in the DC region but around the world, this is going to start wearing on people and the frustration is going to start to set in so it’s really important to stay creative with our teams about ways to connect as well as ways to stay connected as well as reminders to them about that work-family balance and boundaries. As leaders we need to proactively share and demonstrate those work-family boundaries and continue to support the teams who may be struggling with the family needs and ongoing concerns. Things are changing on an hourly and daily basis so it’s staying true to being transparent, communicating actively with your teams and in your company as leaders and it’s about being empathetic with your teams and what they’re struggling with to deliver to clients. Then that empathy extending to your clients. Fred Diamond: Matt McDarby, how about you?

Matt McDarby: I think helping people to focus on their work in a way that’s healthy right now. Everybody’s gotten some commuting time back, there’s a silver lining to this and the work itself, the work day does create some normalcy even though a lot of us find ourselves working at home 5 days a week when maybe we never do that or we only do that a couple of days a week. Helping people see that the work is still somewhat normal even though the environment has changed and when you get that commuting time back maybe it means looking around my own office, maybe there’s something you can do to reorganize. Maybe there’s that little project that you have the extra hour or if you’re in the DC area, two and a half hours of commute time back to focus on something you just haven’t been able to get to. That’s what I mean by focus on this work environment in a way that’s healthy, the balance is important, you’ve got to get away from this stuff. The final point here is draw the line, if you’re not accustomed to working from home know that when the work is away, it’s away. Don’t keep coming back to it, separate yourself from it because you can develop a very unhealthy balance of the work if you’re not disciplined about drawing hard lines between work and the rest of your life.

Fred Diamond: Eric, why don’t you bring us home? Again, I want to thank Jennifer Ives, Eric Trexler, Matt McDarby. Eric, final thought here. What do you think are going to be the big challenges for the next 7 days from a sales perspective?

Eric Trexler: For me it ties into mindset, you mentioned it here at the end of the show. I think mindset is going to be so critical, going back to what Jennifer talked about, this is a new world. Things are changing, the novelty of it is wearing off, we’re now in solitary as opposed to, “Hey, this is kind of cool, I don’t have to commute to work anymore.” I think we need to focus on action versus activity, I think it’s too easy to get lost in the fact that, “I just worked 12 hours, this was great.” We need to fail fast, we need to look at what’s working, what’s not, we need to be able to evolve very rapidly. The new normal, as I call it, is changing constantly. Understand what that is, work with friends, work with peers, try to figure it out. If you’re experienced you’re changing it up, if you’re new you might have an advantage, you’re learning for the first time and you don’t know what should or shouldn’t work so you might be more creative. I agree fully with Jennifer, the next couple days, the next couple weeks we’re going to settle in and this becomes real for people. We’ve now been at home four weeks and we probably have 6 to 8 more to go. It’s all about mindset.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 222: Sales Game Changers Learning Event: Sales Transformation and Success During COVID-19 featuring Jennifer Ives, Matt McDarby and Eric Trexler first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.