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On today’s show, Fred interviewed 2025 Sales Guru (from Global Gurus) Tom Searcy from Hunt Big Sales.
Watch the video of this podcast on YouTube here.
Find Tom on LinkedIn.
TOM’S TIP: “Always solving, never selling. The best salespeople don’t see themselves as sellers at all. They see themselves as problem-solvers. You’re not building a relationship; you’re building a community of relationships, your community with their community. That’s how you win the big deals.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Tom, it’s great to meet you. First of all, congratulations on being a Global Gurus’ Sales Guru. We’re excited to talk to you today. For people who don’t know you, introduce yourself and tell us what we need to know about you.
Tom Searcy: My business is called Hunt Big Sales, and we focus on very, very large sales. I’ve been out in the marketplace. I ran four companies that went from 0 to 100 million, or from 10 million to 200 million. Four of those four different times, all very rapid growth and all of them in less than five years each. We didn’t buy anybody, we didn’t merge with anybody, and we didn’t get bought by anybody. That’s all organic growth, large account selling.
I look at sales. My whole background is to look at things actually operationally. I look at building a new client, developing a new relationship as a procedure or a process just like you would build a new car. Of course, the relationship is all part of it, but the systemic approach to making something happen, that’s where that’s been. I’ve been fortunate, had an opportunity to write about half a dozen books on that and speak around the world. It’s been great and worked with some fantastic companies. We focus on companies that are between $10 million and $100 million in size. Those are our customers, and they’re going after big opportunities, and they’re competing against much, much bigger companies than they are. I’m a huge fan of David beating Goliath. Love that.
Fred Diamond: Just curiously, the four companies, what kinds of things did they sell? What kind of companies were they?
Tom Searcy: Two of them were customer service and outsourced business processing. Two of them were new customer acquisition and lead generation. They’re all in that family. Back in the world of telecom days, the financial services side of the world, insurance and so on, and doing both sides of the house, customer service acquisition, and then leads for people.
Fred Diamond: As we’re asking the sales gurus from Global Gurus, what are the biggest challenges facing sales professionals today? For our listeners, we’re doing today’s interview in the middle of March of 2025. What are the two or three biggest challenges that you see?
Tom Searcy: I would start off with the ideas around this prospecting, getting to the senior executive buyer. I’m sure the gurus that you’ve talked to are talking about the same thing. The books that you’re reading, the articles, et cetera, everyone’s saying it’s very, very hard to get the senior executive buyer, and they have different strategies on that. I’ll talk about mine here in a couple minutes, but 92% of the large deals, which is the folks that my companies go after, 92% of those only happen because you get referred in through a referral person or some outside contact. Cold calling into a senior executive inside of a company, maybe 8% or less. That’s not the way it was 10 years ago. Trust me, I’ve been around more than 10 years. People used to have phones. That’s the first part, just getting the first meeting.
The second thing is regulation, and really inside of that is the world of uncertainty. We can talk about uncertainty as it does on all sorts of global issues, whether they be war or tariffs or enforcing or non-enforcing regulations. That issue, I call it regulations, but I should really call it the world of uncertainty.
The third thing is AI. There is a great opportunity in AI. There’s an enormous amount of speaking about AI and PowerPoints and all sorts of those things that are out there. But AI falls into that same bucket of uncertainty. Does it remove jobs for salespeople? Does it accentuate them? Does it expand them? What does it really do? I think that those are really the changes and challenges that are out there. Again, my bailiwick is very large sales. You’re talking about sales that are between $100,000 and $1 billion in size. The challenges that occur there are different than they were in the more traditional sales that are out there.
Fred Diamond: What can people be doing to solve those problems?
Tom Searcy: Of course, you can’t get smart enough about AI. You cannot get smart enough about AI. Now, let’s just agree that you and I are in the same neighborhood of age. I’m not technically inclined. However, I’ve started to buy courses that I learn from AI and I invest time in every single day. It’s because the tool sets that are out there are the tool sets that customers are talking about. You cannot be smart enough about them, about their customers, and about their working environment, and AI is touching all of them. If that’s the case and they’re touching my customers, and then they’re touching those people’s customers, I have to know.
Second thing is the issue around uncertainty. We talked about that a little bit a couple minutes ago around regulations and tariffs and wars and all these other kinds of areas of uncertainty. I think that the salespeople that are out there need to focus, and this is what I’m recommending people to do, is to focus on the language of certainty. Focus on the timelines of certainty. I may not know what’s going to happen five years from now. I may not know what’s going to happen five months from now, but my customer has a problem or a challenge that they need to work on with some level or some degree of certainty. We know that it expands out into an infinite uncertainty. But for the moment of the day that they have right now, they need to move forward with some certainty. It’s my job as a salesperson to speak in that language and to show people where they can find that certainty.
As far as prospecting goes, I just wrote a blog that’ll come out really soon, which just says, “Prospecting is dead. Long live prospecting.” There’s only one way to make this work, and it is that degrees of separation. Recently I heard someone speaking and they talked about that there’s no six degrees of separation anymore. It’s down to four. It’s shortening that if you and I and the people that are listening to this podcast right now, hold out all of us together, our laptops, open them up to LinkedIn, put on the wall a list of names of people that you and I wanted to talk to, senior, fill in the blank, people, within three to four touches, just us in the room, we could find someone who could get to that one person.
I saw a tea towel in a person’s house that said, “At our parties, friends are always welcome. At our parties, friends of friends are sometimes welcome. At our parties, friends of friends of friends are never welcome.” This issue comes back to this, how far out can you reach? How do I take my three touch distances and turn them into two touch distances and turn them into one touch distances for me to develop an outreach and a conversation? We’re talking about that everywhere we can. Of course, Sales Navigator on LinkedIn is one of the tools that we recommend people to do.
Fred Diamond: Those are true great things. I’m in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC, and you talked about the second category. It’s a challenge right now. A lot of the companies that we work with, a lot of people listening to this podcast are in the B2G, the business to government space. There’s a lot of layoffs happening as we speak, and there’s a lot of agencies that are losing people. People that might have been your customer have decided to take the early retirement, whatever it might be. Those are three great ideas.
For people who don’t understand what it means to go after whales or big customers, if you will, give us the one-minute elevator pitch or story about what is it all about? Can the average sales rep, someone just out of school, close a billion-dollar deal? You said you work on $100,000 deals to $1 billion, who’s teed up to get a billion-dollar deal? Can anybody get it? Do you have to be for the right company at the right time? Tell us everything you know in one minute.
Tom Searcy: Let me give you a couple of just simple touch points. Start off with item number one, and that is that no one buys anything alone. If you talk to Larry Ellison, or if you pick anyone inside of an organization, you may be sitting in front of the CEO and our dream, everybody’s dream is I walk in there, give them a great idea, they agree, and they sign a million-dollar check, and I move on my way. It doesn’t work. No one buys big alone. They’re going to have to have other people that are going to be mapped in. Their CFO, their CIO, someone who’s a vice president of something really important, whatever it is, you need to know. We call that group the buyer’s table. You need to have that buyer’s table. Starting off with item number one, it’s not enough for me just to reach out to what the contact is. I need to know that spiderweb of everyone around them.
Second thing is, is that most people get the idea of what the real problem is that you’re solving and that you’re talking about. They don’t speak about it in the language. You get sent to whom you sound like. If you sound like a manager, you’re going to talk to a manager. If you talk to a manager, you’re going to talk about managerial level problems. If you want to talk to that senior level buyer, you are going to have to speak that language. Now, I would say as far as age goes and background goes, experience and relevance is more important than age. How relevant are you to the problem that that customer that you’re trying to present to, or more importantly their customer has? Depending upon that, then you have the language and the ideas and the understanding of people in the world.
I spoke to a group five years ago in Silicon Valley, and all the people that rode in were like 15, 20 years younger than me. They were coming in, I’m not kidding, on skateboards. They’re wearing old t-shirts and Tevas, I can go on. I’m talking to the head of that group after these guys left, I said, “Who were these guys?” He said, “They’re all billionaires.” In Silicon Valley, the cheaper you look, the richer you are. I’m looking at these people and saying, “Why am I talking to these guys? They don’t look like CEOs to me.” Point being is that in their world, they were widely relevant, specifically understanding, but they were not necessarily of a predictable age.
You got to get to the right person to do that. You only get there if you’re speaking the right language about the right problem. When you get there, don’t think that those folks are going to buy alone, and make certain that you’re not going to go into the sales presentation and the process and et cetera alone. Understand that along the way, you will be not building a relationship. Consider yourself, you’re building a community of relationships, your community with their community. That takes a lot of work. That’s what we teach people how to do. It’s because people don’t traditionally see themselves when you’ve got that kind of a community as salespeople. But in fact, they’re the best salespeople out there because they solve problems. My favorite salespeople are engineers, but for God’s sakes, do not tell them you’re selling. If you tell an engineer that they’re selling, they’re going to run. If you say, “I need to take you to this meeting because they’ve got a problem I need you to help solve.” Engineer just closes up their thing and they’re like, “Let’s go.” Always solving, never selling.
Fred Diamond: Also, I guess you probably need partnerships from other entities in a lot of cases. Then your company, your company has to be set up to be able to go after these large deals with the buying process and contracts and legal and finance, I guess, as well?
Tom Searcy: It does. You do have to have those partners. There’s always the issue of trust transfer. Will my partner transfer the trust of their current customer to me? While I do the same back. We’re all very parochial about this. Once we get a customer, I don’t necessarily want you to touch them. Inside of that role, you wind up becoming more of a facilitator, a project manager. In doing that, you’re able to maybe exert a little bit more authority over your partners in that conversation and then be willing to exchange that roll back, because you’re right, you’re going to probably have to partner with someone along the way.
Fred Diamond: Once again, Tom Searcy, congratulations on being a Global Gurus’ Sales Guru. Thank you so much for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Great espisode and advice from Tom Searcy!