EPISODE 293: Darden Business Professor Tom Steenburgh Says Sales Professionals Can Increase Their Performance By Applying This Approach to Learning


Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!

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

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS LIVE Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on November 18, 2020. It featured University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor Tom Steenburgh.]

Register for Friday’s CREATIVITY IN SALES: Getting Your Creative Ducks in a Row to Ensure Sales Success Right Now webinar here.

Learn more about Tom here.

EPISODE 293: Darden Business Professor Tom Steenburgh Says Sales Professionals Can Increase Their Performance By Applying This Approach to Learning

TOM’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Make it new. The question is, “How do I refresh my sales approach in a way that makes it better?” Because of the pandemic I’m forced to do things in a different way so is it possible for me to make it better? Then my life goes back to normal, if you have made it better keep doing the new thing and if it hasn’t become better, go back to the old one but always try to make it new because that’s how we learn and grow and get better. Ask yourself, “Maybe there’s some possibility here that I haven’t been exploring” and it might get you unstuck.”

Fred Diamond: I’m excited today, let’s get right to it, we have the Richard Reynolds Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, it’s Tom Steenburgh. If you recognize his name, it’s probably because he’s a well-known sales expert and a very well-known professor in the business school ranks. He also was a guest on the Sales Game Changers podcast about a year and a half ago, we asked him to come back on, a lot of things are happening in his world so we wanted to talk about how to continuously learn during challenging times.

Tom Steenburgh: Thanks so much for having me, Fred, I appreciate it, it’s great to be back with you.

Fred Diamond: Learning in challenging times, obviously you’re at Darden so you guys have had to adjust so we’re going to take some of those learnings. When we talked to you on the Sales Game Changers podcast back about two years ago, we talked about strategies for selling new products and that was a very well-regarded podcast that we did. I encourage everybody to go to salesgamechangerspodcast.com to read that. Learning in challenging times, what are some of the things that you’ve seen?

Tom Steenburgh: Fred, I’m going to talk about a couple things today. First I’m going to recap the relevant research that we’ve done about selling new products because there are some parallels that I want to make to learning in challenging times that have been presented with COVID. Then I’ll go through and talk about how that research project actually has shaped some of the work that we’ve done at Darden and what we’ve seen in terms of helping people learn at all levels, from the MBA student up through executives. We’ve completely changed the way that we teach and we’ve encouraged people to think about their learning differently. I’ll talk about both of those and the parallels that I see between those two things.

Let’s start with what we found with some of our sales research in selling new-to-the-world products. One of the main findings that we had is that top performing salespeople, people that can navigate new markets, new products have different traits and characteristics. These are people who are defined as being able to sell new-to-the-world types of products. What do they do differently? Every rep actually has a great understanding of product knowledge, the things that the stars really distinguish themselves on – yes, they have some product knowledge, but they also have more market knowledge. They have a learning mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. They have a stronger customer focus so a predisposition to meeting customer needs and they think outwardly rather than inwardly and they’re very adaptable. Those are traits that we found that help stars become stars when selling new products.

How did we learn that? What we did is we had our stars find customers and we had them both rate themselves on these various dimensions that lead to success. We knew that these dimensions led to success because we did some behavioral studies, tied that back to which salespeople had the biggest increases in volumes for new products and then we saw which ones were correlated with success. Then we said, “How do stars see themselves and how do other people see themselves?” Another key thing that we found is not only do stars behave differently than the normal sales reps but they see themselves differently than the normal sales rep because they’re willing to go out and talk to customers and get a different perspective on what they do well. What was really interesting is that when we initially did the study, we did the initial take on how stars see themselves relative to how customers see themselves, when it came to something like product knowledge both the star and the customer saw themselves roughly equivalently.

The stars rated themselves being very confident and then the customers rated the stars being very confident on product knowledge. When it got to other traits like adaptability and mindset what we found is that when we initially looked at it, the customer didn’t rate the salespeople all that high but the salespersons looked at themselves and said, “I’m really great on that trait.” I show you adaptability because there’s such a big difference between the two. I guess these data actually come from average salespeople, some are true for the stars. The salespersons see themselves as being really adaptable, what does the customer see? “Not so much, this is not a very flexible type of person.” If you go through all of the other traits, the growth mindset and everything else, the way we see ourselves is very different than the way a customer sees us on the more emotional characteristics.

Through training and other things we can boost that up, one of the things I’d say to the people on the call it’s always useful when you think about how you want to develop yourself to get some sort of outside perspective. I don’t know if you have something that you’d share with that, Fred, or if you find this similar sort of thing with people that you work with.

Fred Diamond: A lot of the sales professionals that we work with are member companies. The Institute for Excellence in Sales has companies that join and I’ll give you an example, we obviously keep a list of everybody who attends the webinars and then we send the list to the companies, “FYI, here’s the people from your company this month who attended our webinar.” Sometimes I’ll go through that list with my main point contact, the customer and they’ll say, “Yes, this is a top performer, top performer, top performer, not yet but I’m glad to see that they’re applying.” It wasn’t a random mix where people who were devoting the time and energy, here it is again, it’s a Wednesday at 2 o’clock and people are devoting the time and energy. I see a lot of similar people, we have three types of people who log onto our webinars every day. I get some who I see every day, the same names and they know who they are and they’re great and they ask questions, they ask me if I can introduce them to the speaker sometimes and I always say, “Just go to their LinkedIn.” Then we see some people who maybe once a week, once a month they’ll log in and then of course we see some people who are brand new. Right now we have a bunch of people on the call that I don’t recognize so I presume they’re here because either they went to Darden or they know you, they’re connected or they just happened to see the topic. I think there’s a corollary between people who are devoting time and energy to their growth, to their energy level.

Tom Steenburgh: Let me show some data exactly on that topic, that’s perfect because we did another study where what we did is we looked at how new product sales progress overtime and then we compared that against different types of people. People with a growth mindset and then people with a more performance-based mindset. I think its nice, this parallel you’ve made between top performers that you’re seeing and their dedication to learning, we found something very similar. What we found when we did this study is here’s a baseline curve of how people perform, the new product gets launched, what happens, there’s a period of learning. When you spend time learning it means more time with the customer but it means you’re not closing business, you’re just learning about how a new product is going to change a customer’s business. This was a big ticket sale so business to business type of product, long sale cycle. You launch a product, you spend more time with the customer learning about their business, what happens to your sales? It goes down and then over time this new product sale starts to pick up and overall sales picks up because not only are you selling your existing products, you’re selling this new product. Not only is the revenue going up but your profitability goes up because that’s where often the money is for a company.

Then we said, “Who does really well in this type of system?” and what we found is that when we looked across the different types of salespeople, when you have a performance-based person, what happens? If I’m the type of person that feels like it’s really important for me to meet my numbers, I never miss and I’m going to be very focused on that, what happens is their dip in the beginning is not that big but then their recovery and their overall performance later on doesn’t really go well above the line, it doesn’t really take off. If we split this and looked at a different type of mindset, a person who has a growth mindset who focuses on learning as opposed to outcomes, we saw a very different pattern. We saw in the beginning right after the product was launched, these people, their sales overall went way down because they’re spending more time at the customer count trying to figure out how to make this product sale, doing a lot more experimentation, trial and error and that just takes time and it takes energy. You’re meeting with more people, we find a whole bunch of things that I won’t go into about the different types of behaviors that are going on but these early behaviors that led to learning, big dip in sales early on. When you play this out over time what happens is once they figure things out, things really take off and they have this amazing set of performance where it goes way over the curve. You just see this different thing, it takes a totally different mindset to sell this new type of product and it’s a very emotional sale. If there’s anything that I was surprised about as we did the research was how big of a part emotions played in people’s performance.

I’ll just show one more thing before I get your perspective. One of the things that we found in terms of effective sales managers – and maybe you have a few managers on the call as well – is that it took work for the managers to figure out exactly how to help their sales team manage emotions as they went through these turbulent times. And new product sales are turbulent because you don’t know exactly how the market is going to react, you don’t know how customers are going to react, you don’t want to be embarrassed. The really good management teams, what they figured out was different ways to help their reps cope with the stress and to learn at the same time. This one manager I really love the quote that we got from him about how he thought about this. He said, “Our salespeople could assess the customer’s needs and offer appropriate solutions so they knew what it took to sell the product but the disruption in the digital market was so overwhelming that they did not feel clear about what they’re supposed to do. They were stuck in place until we could get them over this hurdle. To help them cope, we asked them to reflect on what their role was and what their role wasn’t, essentially making problems smaller. We found it was helpful for them to write down their thoughts in a journal and we needed them to recognize that they did not have to be an expert in all things.” I think this aspect of the research, helping people control their emotions, staying centered through a turbulent time was really helpful to me as we made a transition to this digital learning environment, digital teaching environment and it shaped a lot of how I approach the problem. I’ll draw some parallels to how we’re thinking about teaching now and I’d just be curious to get your reaction to this and what you’ve seen with the salespeople that you’re working with.

Fred Diamond: We’ve done a webinar every single day since the end of March and we’ve gone through the beginning of the pandemic and then of course a lot of the social uprising and then of course spikes as it relates to the pandemic, then things related to the election if you’re in the United States. There’ve been so many things that the sales team have had to go through as human beings let alone as sales professionals so one question that we always ask when we interview sales leaders is, “How are you coaching your senior people, how are you coaching your junior people? How are you coaching your mothers, the women in your sales team that are now having to be homeschool teachers as the school has closed down and you have to do all these things that you have to balance?” Tom, that’s a great point, there’ve been so many things that sales leaders have had to realize and then they’re also dealing with these things as well. One of our first guests said that when he went to business school there was not a class called Leading Sales Teams During a Pandemic. There’s been a degree of stability at this point than we’ve seen at various high-stress times but there’ve been some times along the way when you just couldn’t say as a sales leader, “I need you to make these phone calls and ask these question and find out about who’s the economic buyer” and all those things. It was more based on, “How are you doing? Let’s talk about how you’re doing” and they’ve had to develop some new skills as well. The good ones that we deal with have been very responsive and have also had this learning mindset about, “How can I be a better sales leader right now as well?” During very challenging times.

Tom Steenburgh: It really is and I think that emotional component, in normal times we tend to overlook it a little bit, I think but now if there’s any sort of COVID silver lining, I think it helps you refocus on some of the things that matter.

Let me talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve done to help both our faculty and our students cope with this difficult time, it helps them focus on learning. One of the big things that I’ve done over this last year is spend time both with the students and with the faculty reflecting on values. If I think about values at Darden, we’re about creating transformational learning experiences for people, that’s what our mission is, that’s what gets the faculty up and excited and our values and principles that are critical to this is that we want to help people develop judgement. That’s one of our fundamental goals, we want to have insightful research, we want novel findings that make an impact on practice, we care about being inclusive of many people and we care about establishing relationships, relationships with individuals and relationships with companies to help people grow. That’s what we really care about.

We started moving into this COVID transition and it totally changed our learning model and our teaching model, one where we’re discussion-based, we spend time getting people to talk to each other and moving online was very scary for us. We spent time reflecting on, “What’s critical to our mission? What do we not want to lose?” and that would become our touch stone. If we could enumerate what our values were, we could always go back to that and when we had to think about adopting technology or think about adopting a different technique we could ask ourselves the question, “How can we get that thing that we really care about, how can we make a change to help transform an individual even though our environment has changed?” Do we adopt a technology? I don’t know, it just depends, does it support our values? Is it consistent with our mission? If so, then we’ll take it, if not, we’ll say no. That’s one of the things that we started with just to give us a touch stone, something to come back to and reflect on to make sure that we were doing the right things.

The second thing that we did was develop a roadmap for learning. I had two different phases where we’ve changed our learning model, there’s a time in March where basically in two weeks I was asked to help my faculty transition from being all in-person, never having worked online at all to delivering a transformational educational experience 100% virtually. They were scared to death, we all were, I ran a session and talked about, “Let’s get our fears out, let’s articulate that, let’s come back and think about what our values are” and then within two weeks we transformed and got ourselves online, we learned a whole bunch of stuff by doing that. Then there was a second transition that was much more orderly to happen because by the time we got to late April, early May I realized we’re not going to be back in person in September. I put together a plan with my tech team and said, “Let’s figure out everything that we have to do to get people ready for this transition” and you can see I put together a roadmap here on a Gantt chart outlining all the things that we would want to do. One of my goals in doing this was A, to give us a plan so that we could get ready but B, to give the faculty a plan to let them know, “We’ve got help for you, I know you’re nervous about this right now, you’re in good hands, I’ve got a great tech team, I’m going to spend time with you and here’s the way that we’re going to interact. Here’s where we’re going to interact one-on-one.” I ran weekly meetings with my faculty every Friday and we just got everyone prepared letting them know that I’ve got a plan. I think at an individual level, bring this back to the people on the call, what I would suggest for you, you should have a personal plan of, “I know I’ve got another 4 to 6 months of this environment, what are the steps that I want to do to get better and how can I take those things early on that make me successful? Those principles that I want to uphold, those personal characteristics that make people successful, how can I put a learning plan in place so that I develop myself in that time period?” I’d be curious what you’ve seen that’s effective that’s like this.

Fred Diamond: I think there are two sides to it. There are the, “What is my company or my leaders going to do for me?” versus, “How do I take responsibility?” There are so many words, Tom, that have come up over the daily webinars that we’ve been doing since March, preparation, courage, empathy of course, but the other one that’s come up a lot more recently is accountability. Prior to the pandemic I used to tell people all the time, “You’re the VP of Sales for your career.” People ask me for advice all the time and I tell them this all the time, “Treat yourself as if you’re the VP of Sales for your career and right now you’re working for Salesforce, Oracle or whomever it might be.” You’ve got to be taking that responsibility, same thing now as well, a lot of things are out of our control but at the same time how you’re going to respond right now is really up to you. Also, at the same time we’re working with a lot of sales leaders to figure out how they can lead, how they should be leading right now, how close they should get, how much coaching they should require, those kinds of things. Accountability is a word that’s really risen up and going to doing things like this. For example, every day we offer our members a webinar, every single day for one hour we’re bringing someone like Tom Steenburgh or tomorrow we’re bringing Jeffrey Shore and Friday we’re bringing Karen Galvin, we’re bringing world-class sales professionals and sales thought leaders and authors to help you navigate through this time. You would think that we’d have 10,000 people logging in every single time and by the way, I have a license with GoToWebinar that goes up to 10,000 people. [Laughs] feel free to tell more people about this but we’ve got a nice crowd, a lot of people who show up every day but would love to see three, four thousand people every single day, but it is up to you. It’s a unique circumstance but it is up to you to figure out like you have here, what is your roadmap going to be to get you through this?

Tom Steenburgh: What you just said about bringing friends into the environment with you, I think that’s really effective. One of the things that we’ve found to be very effective for us over the summer was that as a faculty, as a group we got together, I held workshops once a week, I brought in a different faculty member who would lead the workshop for most of the time. I led probably 3 or 4 but I’d get other people to lead some and then we would learn together. The thing that I was absolutely stunned with, you talk about accountability, we held each other accountable to get ready for the fall. We would have 80% of the faculty even though there’s vacations, even though it’s the middle of summer and people are nervous about a lot of things, they would write down on their calendar and they’d show up. It just built upon itself in lots of ways because not only was it important for my other faculty members to see us all working together and we feel a responsibility to come, our students learned about this and they thought, “They really care.” That’s something I think in a sales organization, if you can hold each other responsible it can be really effective. Forums like you’re creating are terrific for that, you can bring a friend and you can both say, “Let’s show up and let’s talk about the ideas that were presented on that day.” I love that.

Let me show you a few other things I think are important, I think it’s easy particularly in times of chaos or trouble, challenging times, to be overwhelmed and it’s also challenging particularly in a group setting because you tend to watch other people and you worry about, “How much do I know?” I knew that this would be a problem for us in particular in our organization going forward because some of us had taught online, we’re pretty confident with it already. Others had never done it at all, in fact, they’d never seen a Zoom meeting before, didn’t want to know Zoom yet they were going to be asked to teach in it. One of the mantras that I had was to tell people to make the problem as small as possible, what you have is enough. You have it within you to do well so make the problem really small. In the beginning maybe it’s just Zoom and Canvas, you pick two applications – the applications don’t matter here – and you just think, “Let’s try and make this problem as small as possible, I know I’m going to have to present to clients, what’s the easiest way for me to present to a client?” Let’s just choose one thing and then as you get more comfortable, you can add the technology, you can add other things to make the experience rounder.

I’d always tell people in the beginning, your first week of class just worry about Zoom and the front blackboard, that’s where your job is. After that, we can start to build out a whole bunch of different things that are useful, create a richer experience for the students and in the world of sales it’d be create a richer experience for the customer. The primary thing that they want is you and then after that you can expand out and use the tech to become bigger. By the end of the semester, again we’d come back and learn from each other about how to use it, we found some really creative solutions and we got to new places. One of the things that we found, there’s this product – I think this is MURAL – that allows you to do some team learning. We had faculty put together a mural board and they put together an exercise and see the exercise put there, then they send students off into learning groups and they’d go through an exercise, learn and then come back and talk about it. In a normal classroom this would be more difficult to make happen so by moving to virtual we learned some new things and we were able to find ways to collaborate in different ways. I didn’t want people to do this on the first day, didn’t need them to do it on the first day, I had them do it later so having that plan and having an organized way to learn I think helps you put things into perspective.

Fred Diamond: Simplifying things made so much sense. During the Optimal Sales Mindset show a couple months ago we had a consultant named David Morelli and this comes up all the time. He said the average human being can only focus on three things so everybody’s focusing on COVID, the health, quarantine and all those things, everybody’s focused on the economic impact of COVID so there’s two, so what’s the third thing? For everybody it’s different but everybody in the world is dealing with those two things together. We’ve said this so many times, how do you simplify your life? How do you simplify your communications right now to your customer? How do you focus on them? How do you focus on a nice crisp message on how you can provide some value? One thing you said before that I really liked, you talked about the learning mindset and how people went way down before they came way back up, you said part of it was because they were talking to customers about the new product and how it might fit in their environment, the deep learning. What are some things that you’ve seen these days with talking to customers? For example, we have a lot of conversations about empathy, that was a big topic for a long time which is ironic because every good sales professionals is an empathetic listener, an empathetic sales professional. What are some of the trends that you’ve seen with how you’re working with some of your leaders and engaging with their customers today? Again, it’s the middle of November, we’re approaching Thanksgiving and the holiday and everything else related to that.

Tom Steenburgh: I think with the holiday you have the normal slow-down of life, of course. I think what I’ve seen with good sales leaders and good salespeople, when they’re working with their customer they’re using this time to provide education in different ways for their customer about their markets, about how they think the market is going to change and nobody really knows how the market is going to change post-COVID. We’re all taking guesses about what’s going to happen in every business but what the good salespeople are doing is collaborating with their customers trying to get out ahead of how things are going to change once we get out of this period which is looking like it might happen sometime within the next 6 months. It’s not going to be perfectly normal but within 6 to 9 months we’ll probably return to a more normal state and people are trying to navigate. How is the world going to change? In so many different ways but the good salespeople are spending time on webinars and finding other ways to provide value to customers through these types of engagements among other things.

If I move ahead just a little bit and talk about what we found in terms of teaching and learning, the technology itself actually is not all that important. It sounded like from the poll that you had, most of the people on the call here have worked out, “I’m okay with the tech.” I think that many of the people have probably figured out exactly what their comfort level is with the technology but what we found this last year is that no matter if you talk from your kitchen table or you had a bigger setup in your home or you even came in – we did some hybrid teaching. Companies are finding interesting ways to engage with customers, very different types of learning spaces and we’ve done it in our exec ed and in our MBA classroom, we have really fancy tech. Regardless of the tech though, if you feel comfortable managing your environment you’re going to be just fine and you can get your ideas across. If you focus mostly on the ideas you’re just fine, you just need to be confident in it and you can expand out and do fancier things as you get more comfortable. We found people would be successful all the way across the spectrum, it didn’t have to be the fanciest technology. The more important thing was your internal emotional confidence than anything else.

Fred Diamond: We actually have a question here from the audience and the question comes here from Susy, Susy is in the DC area and Susy is actually someone who attends our webinars pretty frequently. Susy wants to know, “How has Tom been interfacing with his students as a teacher?” It’s an interesting question. I know you have some classes that are hybrid and you’ve talked about how you’ve made the adjustment but how have you seen people respond to you in this world? The sales professionals are the same way, they want to educate the customer, they need response so just curiously, as an educator, how have you found the best way to be successful?

Tom Steenburgh: I think for me, the biggest change that I’ve made is to make more space and time, more opportunities for people to talk about whatever emotional trouble that the might be having at the time or just to make a connection with people before you get into the content of whatever it is you want to deliver. I hold office hours at different times, I’m always fairly available but I make myself even more available and give people more time than I used to and usually start discussions with, “How are you doing? Tell me about what’s going on in your life” trying to figure out why they’re here to see me. Sometimes they’re here to see me to learn about sales, other times they’re here to see me because, “I’m just damn lonely and I need to do something to get my mind off of my problems” or, “I need someone to talk to and I don’t actually want to say that but I’m not going to be able to learn about selling or I’m not going to be able to learn about marketing until I’m able to get over that stuff.” That’s probably been the biggest change for me, just helping people manage problems that are going on in their personal life or emotions and then doing business and being much more mindful of how those interactions take place and just listen more carefully for trouble.

Fred Diamond: We have a comment here from Neil and Neil is in DC as well, Neil says, “Some of my customers just want to talk.” As sales professionals every time we engage with a customer it’s hopefully moving things forward even if they’re a customer or a prospect, you cherish the opportunity to have a conversation. I presume Neil’s saying that he’s taken some conversations with his customers and some of them just want to reach out because they’re looking for how you’re doing and they want to engage something different than what they’re going through.

Tom Steenburgh: I think that’s right, just to get a new idea or finding a way to connect is really helpful and what we found with our students, we’ve been incredibly successful this year, our students are so happy with where we are in general. A lot of that comes from them understanding that we’re trying to make the connection with them, they understand that we care about them as people. If you can make that connection and show that you care about someone as a person, that’s how you build trust and loyalty. You’re developing a relationship and really emphasize the importance of relationships, you can’t have a relationship if you’re not willing to spend the time with someone as a person, I think that’s even more important now.

Fred Diamond: Tom, I just want to congratulate you on all of your success, you’ve helped so many business students and companies for that matter achieve success in sales and you’ve achieved a lot of accolades in your career so I just want to acknowledge you for the role that you’ve played in helping so many students take their careers to the next level and bring value to the companies they eventually go work for or go back to work for, however it might be. Thank you and congratulations on all your success with that. Tom, give us one action step. You’ve given us a lot of great things to think about here, give us one thing that people should do today, something they need to do right now to take their sales career to the next level.

Tom Steenburgh: I’ll give you this little template that I put together to talk about how to reframe an idea. In this world with new technology, new things that we might be able to do I like to think positively. “What is this new world going to teach me?” One of the things that I’ve reflected on that’s made a big difference in the way that I teach is thinking about, “How can I get the same idea across in a different way?” There’s things that matter in an idea and then there might be barriers with this new technology that this new learning or communicating environment puts in place. What I encourage people to do is write out your original challenge, “How could we do this sort of thing?” Ask yourself the question, “Why does this matter? Why do I think this is important?” This might go back to the principles that you have. “How does this fit in to what I want to do?” and maybe there’s multiple things, those are the things that go up. Then ask yourself the question, “How can we get this across in a different way and perhaps in a better way?” You can think of that MURAL technology that I showed earlier, that’s a way to have some collaborative learning for us, that might be an example. You might think about that with your customers, “How can I engage with my customer in a new way? Could I get this idea across to them in an even better way by using the tech?” Then you might ask yourself what the barriers are and again ask yourself, “How could I overcome that?”

If there’s one thing I could leave people with at the end, I think it relates to this quite well. I tell people always, “Make it new.” This model here is in that spirit of making it new. The thing that you really want to do, your principles, your values, that’s what’s important, that’s what’s enduring. The question is, “How do I refresh it in a way that maybe even makes it better?” I would never have thought to do this but because of this outside event, because of the pandemic I’m forced to do things in a different way so is it possible for me to make it better? Then my life goes back to normal, if you have made it better keep doing the new thing and if it hasn’t become better, go back to the old one but always try to make it new because that’s how we learn and grow and get better. I thought I’d just show this challenge framing of a problem, it might be something that a person could do in the near future with one aspect of their sale that they want to improve, work on, maybe that’s slowing things down. Go through this framework and ask yourself, “Maybe I can get to a new way, maybe there’s some possibility here that I haven’t been exploring” and it might get you unstuck.

Fred Diamond: We do our Friday webinar, we call it the Creativity in Sales and you need to be thinking about different ways. This is the first time in history that we’re aware of that every customer is also dealing with the same challenges that we’re dealing with which is again, getting out of the COVID from a quarantine and health perspective and then also the economic implications. Not just our companies but our customers as well and some worse than others. Tom Steenburgh, I want to thank you so much. Everybody who joined us today on the webinar, thank you. If you’re listening in the future to the Sales Game Changers podcast, thank you all so much.

Tom Steenburgh: Thanks, Fred, I appreciate you having me on.

Fred Diamond: You’re welcome.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.