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16 Unconventional Sales Tips and Tactics with Scott Plum
257 Plays2 years ago
How do you get through to that perfect prospect? Are the leads weak, or is it what you do with them? Join Professor Scott Plum with the Minnesota Sales Insitute as we put the dialing back into DialItIn. Learn essential techniques for making connections, gaining trust, and creating collaborative and committed sales teams.
In this episode, we cover:
- Time management for sales
- How to relate to a sales team's goals and find ways to get better outcomes
- How to understand the problem your company solves, and translate it to your prospects
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Challenges of Weak Leads in Sales
00:00:24
Speaker
Dave, the leads are weak. Leads have always been weak.
00:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I hear about, especially from our marketing teams. But I think we have a guy to help us weed our way through that. All the time. How many times a week do we hear that as we're talking to businesses? Two, three times a week from sales teams? Yep. The leads are weak. Leads are weak. Well,
00:00:45
Speaker
You and I are in a unique position in that sometimes we understand that leads aren't always weak. Sometimes it's a question of what you do with them. And sometimes when you've been a salesperson for a long, long time, or if you're just getting started in it, you just really don't know what to do. And it's good to have a process. It's good to have an idea what to do. So what does a business typically do in that scenario? Well, they hire a coach.
00:01:10
Speaker
And I would say a lot of the coaches that you hire, they have their own patented nine-step process in order to achieve success. And then if you don't follow it, then you're an idiot.
Challenging Existing Beliefs in Sales
00:01:22
Speaker
But there are people out there who are good coaches, and that's who our guest is today is Scott Plum from the Minnesota Sales Institute.
00:01:31
Speaker
Hey Scott, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Great to be with you and your listeners. And I'm anxious to share some of the skills, the advice, my beliefs, opinion when it comes to sales and for the sales people to really scratch their head and go, you know,
00:01:46
Speaker
I'm not sure if that works or sometimes they say, you know, I used to do that. Why did I ever stop? Or the company that I was working at before did that. How come we don't do that here? And I want to really create some inspired friction where people are kind of scratching their head going, you know, I might give that some thought and might consider applying it. So if we can just start with consideration.
00:02:07
Speaker
And then go from there on applying new techniques. We're on the path to growth. And change is inevitable, growth is optional. And stuff that I'm going to share today is so new that not even Oprah knows about it. I mean, fresh stuff, exclusive. Release here first.
00:02:22
Speaker
Can't wait. So let's do some level setting.
Building Collaborative Sales Teams
00:02:25
Speaker
Tell us, Scott, what the Minnesota Sales Institute is and what your day-to-day life is. I just celebrated 20 years in the business and I've been selling since I was 21 years old and I work with companies or individuals on creating more collaborative and committed teams.
00:02:41
Speaker
through training, classes, workshops, coaching, seminars, and work on the introduction, the application, and the reinforcement. And we need all three steps. We need the introduction of new content. We need to go through the application of that new content so that when we get a situation where we can apply something new
00:03:03
Speaker
And better, we're going to get a different outcome. A better outcome. Different is not always better. We want a better outcome. And then just like any other change, we need reinforcement. Constantly reinforcing our healthy habits to be able to get the predictable
00:03:20
Speaker
outcomes. Sometimes we feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. However, I think sometimes there's a little bit more unpredictability because we're comparing the present with the past. That's unpredictability. We can make things more predictable in the future if we feel like we're in control of our time.
00:03:36
Speaker
Too often salespeople just don't feel like they're in control of their time. You have to make good time trades every single day and get an investment in time and a return on your investment of time. That was probably a little longer than you were thinking of, but it started preaching to the choir about losing track of time.
00:03:58
Speaker
I made the joke in our intro about the patented nine step process and the special sauce. So you don't have a special sauce and a patented nine step process, do you? My special sauce is really leveraging my experience
00:04:13
Speaker
being relative to a sales person's challenge or goals or a sales team's goals and challenges, and to really be able to find out where the kink in the hose is. Where are we not getting the throughput that we need to be able to get a predictable better outcome?
00:04:31
Speaker
I'm a little untraditional when it comes to sales training or sales development and that is that I work a lot on uncovering the unsupportive beliefs that salespeople have. We all have experiences in our life and the interpretation of those experiences creates beliefs.
00:04:46
Speaker
Our behavior is determined by what we believe to be true and not true. And obviously our behaviors give us the outcome. There's a ton of sales books on techniques and skills and nine steps and everything like that. But if you can't get through the conceptual barriers of dealing with some head trash, you're not going to apply anything.
00:05:04
Speaker
no matter what I say it or you read it in a book or watch a podcast or webinar and podcasts, et cetera. And there's a lot of beliefs, common ones in sales is that, you know, a lot of us were raised in a young impressionable age. It's not a place to talk about money. Okay. Well, I'm guessing that your number one objection is money. Is the price is too high? Cause you didn't talk about money in comparison to the cost consequences and risk of inaction.
00:05:28
Speaker
Another one is don't talk to strangers. Well, how's that going as a salesperson? I mean, we're just in here waiting for the phone to ring because, you know, we want them to call us. We don't want to call them. And if you can take a call, you can make a call. How about that for a concept of a new sales skill?
00:05:44
Speaker
That's certainly true. So what are some of the indicators you talked about head trash? And really one of the overall questions I want people to take away from this is why you would want to hire somebody, an outside source to come in? Because there are certain instances where it's incredibly valuable. So talk a little bit more about head trash and what does that mean and how can people identify it in their salespeople?
00:06:07
Speaker
Well, if we look at head trash within an organization, the leadership within an organization, do they believe that there are more opportunities in the marketplace right now? And a lot of the listeners, I'm sure, that are with us today are independent contractors. They are self-employed.
00:06:25
Speaker
Their head trash is maybe listening to the news and thinking that we're in inflation or a recession and everything's going to clamp down and then they adopt that belief and the outlook of the marketplace is negative so they don't see opportunities. The other side
00:06:40
Speaker
of it is looking at companies that believe this is a great time to gear up when it comes to marketing, when it comes to developing salespeople, because they feel there are more opportunities in the marketplace. And there's going to be refinement of companies that are going to be able to survive and not survive. And if you have a belief there's more opportunities, you want to convert those conversations to commitments. You believe you have the right people, and sometimes that can be another step in the development. And if you don't have the right people, let's get the right people.
00:07:10
Speaker
Let's hire the right people. Let's train and onboard the right people. And then let's create an investment of time and energy and resources in developing the skills, managing the behavior, offering consistent reinforcement to the salespeople on what they need to convert more conversations to commitments. So it's really three steps. Do you believe there's opportunities? Do you have the right people? Are you willing to invest in creating those opportunities into commitments?
00:07:39
Speaker
What are some of the first things that you do when you come into an organization?
Understanding Company Problem-Solving
00:07:43
Speaker
The first question that I ask the leadership of the company is define the problems you solve. Tell me about the problem you solve. And this is the first step of sales change, you know, culture development, a sales culture within an organization. Often,
00:08:06
Speaker
they cannot define the problem. Leadership in the company cannot define the problem. I just read an article in the Harvard Business Review a couple of issues back and they said the reason that startups fail is because they don't know what problem they solve. They have a solution, but they don't know what problem they solve.
00:08:28
Speaker
Leadership needs to know what problem they saw because if they don't know that you cannot instruct and lead the sales team and this happened to me in a company that i was doing some work for last year and i was working with the sales people and i was asking sales people what problem do you solve and i was working on really a foundational question and i realized
00:08:50
Speaker
The salespeople don't know what problem the company solves. And I go, whose fault is that? Well, that's leadership, not setting the definition of here's the problem that we solve. And if sales leadership doesn't understand the problem that the sales team has,
00:09:08
Speaker
I come in, I'm trying to solve a problem assuming that there's some fundamentals that are in place and I end up frustrating the sales people more because I'm talking about stuff that's at a higher level than where they are. And that's very frustrating for them and for me because I really want them to be able to take what I share with them and apply it that day. But if they become more confused and they're more distracted and frustrated, it's a setback for everybody.
00:09:34
Speaker
Is it often where you find that the leadership of the salespeople, when they're answering that question of what exactly do you, what problem do you solve? What do you do when you get two different answers? I start to role play it a little bit through a sales call in how a sales conversation would go with a salesperson in a prospect to be able to weed out how does a salesperson
00:09:58
Speaker
reframe and reposition their solution in a way that sticks to a problem that a prospect has that makes the company that the salesperson is working for be put in a better light, a better light. Different is not always better. I want to be able to work with companies developing the salespeople where their solution is presented to be a better solution for a prospect.
00:10:25
Speaker
And it comes into that conversation. And through that conversation and role-playing it out, there's a refinement to it that really comes upon what is it that we really do? And what do we do first? Who's the best target that we should be reaching? Who's the best universe that we should be selling in? And then there's also secondary markets that we go through. So sometimes it's a prioritization. Why do salespeople fail?
00:10:52
Speaker
Oh, this kind of goes through the process of change. The first step is awareness. I mean, do the salespeople know that they're failing? Are they frustrated when they don't make their goals? I mean, think about a scenario where you're three weeks into the month,
00:11:09
Speaker
You're at 50% of your goal. You have one week left. What are you going to do different? And are they going to step it up and make the goal? Probably not. I mean, it's a bit of a long shot at that point. But the point of that exercise is to go through the situation that you're in right now. And let's just pretend like I say it's March, you're 50% of your goal is just finished the third week of the month. What are you going to do different in April?
00:11:36
Speaker
Now, the awareness is I have to change my strategy and I need to beef it up so that the first week of the month, I'm at 33% of my goal. The second week, I'm at 66% of my goal. The third week, I'm at 80% of my goal. And then the fourth week, you bring it in and you just put it over the top and you end up reaching the goal. So how are you measuring your productivity every single week? That's awareness.
00:12:04
Speaker
The second thing is getting into knowledge. If you're not making your goal, why are you not making your goal? What do you need to know and do? And so often I work with salespeople that know but don't do.
00:12:21
Speaker
If I find a salesperson that doesn't know, they can't do. And I'll work with them. So the knowledge is the second piece. You get the knowledge. The second part of that question is, you believe the knowledge will work. Do you believe the knowledge will work?
00:12:37
Speaker
I share something with you, you scratch your head, you say, that'll never work in my industry. You have no idea what it's like to be in my industry. You have no experience in my industry. Yeah, I got a lot of experience in influence and persuasion and selling. And it's applicable when it comes to human nature, no matter what the role is. People go through the same process. The third step
00:12:56
Speaker
is do you believe you deserve a better life? The third part of the second question, do you believe you deserve a better life? If you don't believe you deserve a better life, you're not gonna apply anything that I share with you. You're not gonna apply anything that you learned on a webinar or a podcast, period.
00:13:12
Speaker
Now, once you believe you deserve a better life, the third step in change is application. So now you take the application and you apply the new technique. And once you apply the new technique, you get a different outcome. Now it might not work perfectly the first time, but it's a different outcome. And you're on the road to recovery at this point and improving that technique is going to improve the results. So why do salespeople fail? They know, but they don't do.
00:13:40
Speaker
and or they don't know so they don't do and then the last step is the reinforcement it's the internalization it's us really believing that this process is our new truth this is us this is the new you when you go through those four steps awareness knowledge application and reinforcement and internalization so that's that's why they fail and they can't get out of their head
00:14:04
Speaker
that they deserve a better life or better results or more success. That's where I find the biggest problem
Overcoming Sales Pitfalls
00:14:10
Speaker
is. So the doing is the most important thing.
00:14:14
Speaker
The doing is the application, action, it's always action. There's a lot of smart people, a lot of smart people that don't do anything with their knowledge. And I look at salespeople and it's really two categories. There are some salespeople that just love selling, period, love it. I mean, you've met these salespeople no matter what they do, they love selling. The other type of salespersons is that they love what they sell.
00:14:39
Speaker
You know, they, they work for a dealership and they love Porsches and you just go and you talk to that salesperson and they could talk to you, you know, for hours about Porsche and what a great car it is. And they love what they sells or passionate people, smart, passionate people.
00:14:56
Speaker
One of the things that we like to talk about on this podcast is for people in our industry or the folks that we serve, B2B services folks, which there's a lot of selling involved in that, manufacturing tends to be bigger, ticket items. One of the big things that we run into it as we're trying to help them dial it in is
00:15:20
Speaker
maybe something's just a little off in their sales process. As we try to merge together sales and marketing and get working together, what are some of the common things that you see that are maybe symptoms of, okay, well, either this is a bad fit for our sales team or in this individual case, the person's a bad fit, or that there's just a little bit of tweaking that we can do to get this person just really rocking in the sales role.
00:15:51
Speaker
I think every conversation that a salesperson has with a prospect, there are some undiscovered expectations. And a salesperson is in charge of controlling the conversation. I think that that's their role. That's their obligation.
00:16:07
Speaker
They wanna be considered a trusted advisor. We've heard that term for 20, 30 years. And in order to be a trusted advisor, you need to lead the prospect and you need to challenge the prospect on thinking differently. And if you can't lead and challenge them to think differently, the prospect's not gonna come upon a different outcome when it comes to a decision that needs to be made. They're not gonna make a change. Salespeople compete within action. It's prospects doing nothing.
00:16:37
Speaker
So we need to be able to overcome some of our internal weaknesses of salespeople, and one of them is a high need for approval. So there's a lot of sales training out there that says, you know, you want to be liked. Go out and be liked and be like people that people like to do business with, that they're like, that they like to be, you know, whatever. And we need to move past like and earn their respect. We've all heard the saying that, you know, people buy emotionally, they justify it intellectually.
00:17:04
Speaker
Being emotional is challenging them. So you might say something or ask a question that makes a prospect uncomfortable and they might get a little bit defensive. I mean, you don't want to disappoint, have them be disgusted with you or they throw you out of the office. But you need to be able to demonstrate enough confidence in what you have to lead the conversation to challenge a prospect to think differently.
00:17:26
Speaker
and to be able to be frustrated with the current situation enough where they're going to go through the process of change. Where's the knowledge? That means a solution from another salesperson. What's the application? The prospect buying the solution from the salesperson. What's the internal reinforcement? It's the customer being satisfied with the decision that they made from the salesperson.
00:17:47
Speaker
So getting into overcoming a high need for approval is one. Number two is salespeople can be negatively assumptive. Negatively assumptive, they walk into a business and they say, hey, I can save you 25% on your electric bills. You're assuming that the moron that's in charge of the facilities doesn't do a very good job. That doesn't go over real well. That's negatively assuming.
00:18:12
Speaker
Or you can walk into an organization and you say, I'm going to kind of assume that when it comes to making financial decisions, making the best financial decisions and saving money might be one of your motivations. Is that a safe assumption? So you're being positively assumptioned.
00:18:28
Speaker
And most people say, yeah, I mean, who wouldn't want to do that? So they buy into what you're talking about. But we have to be careful in situations when it comes to money is to not turn our own product into a commodity. So don't be asumptive. That's the second one. The third one would be, this is one of Trigby's favorite topics, is my relationship with the word help.
00:18:47
Speaker
I just do not like the word help. And a salesperson that comes into a company and says, hey, I help companies do this, that, and the other thing, it's like prospects don't want to be insulted that they need help. They don't want to lose control of the conversation. And when salespeople go into a prospect and they use the word help, they're enabling in action
00:19:12
Speaker
and salespeople compete within action, they're enabling the prospect to do nothing because the conversation has started out with the salesperson is gonna help the prospect, which means a salesperson is more committed to making a change than the prospect is. And then we wonder why we as salespeople get frustrated when prospects don't return our calls or emails or voicemails, et cetera. How did you start the conversation? Are you working with them or are you helping them? They're sitting back waiting there, waiting for you to come in and help them.
00:19:40
Speaker
It's not a good start to a beneficial, mutual, committed relationship conversation when we use the word help. A better way to say that is probably we work with companies who do that or we partner with companies who do this, right? A partner can be a common one. I think that can be misinterpreted on the other side with the prospect. I've used that in one situation and I didn't get paid for
00:20:10
Speaker
six, seven, eight weeks. And they said, well, you said you're going to partner with us. And right now cash flows a little light. So we're going to pay our bills before we end up paying our partners. Cause we're partnering together, which means we're both sacrificing cash flows. So, you know, I'm running a little low. You're going to have to run a little low cause we're partners in this and saying, I don't like the context of that word. Quite what I meant by partner. Yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
One of the other words that I find myself using, and I'd love to get your take on this, is that I'm trying to completely erase it from my vocabulary as the word just.
00:20:49
Speaker
I do that on emails, I do that on phone calls, as people say, well, I'm just checking in. I'm just calling to say hi, just touching base. You know, I'm calling for a very specific purpose. I want to know a specific piece of information.
00:21:08
Speaker
Right, right. I just need that one thing. Right. Yeah, that's good to be conscious of that. I recognize that when I write an email, I just say, I just wanted to follow up on our conversation and go over some of the, you know, takeaway items. And so I start off with just, and just is kind of a defining. It's just this, it's not something else or it's not addition to. Sometimes we defeat that when we start adding really long emails and it starts off with just.
00:21:36
Speaker
I agree with that position. I'm not a fan of touching base and circling back without an agenda. Your intent is to follow through on the conversation and follow through on your commitment
00:21:56
Speaker
and to be able to demonstrate that you are leading this change and that prospects can feel comfortable relying on you that you're going to follow through. And when you do that, that creates value. I think about that when I get voicemails from people and they don't leave a voicemail message or they call, they leave a voicemail message that's not very intriguing. And then I go, I'm just not inspired to call them back.
00:22:22
Speaker
Then I want to see if they call me back and leave another message. If they give me three messages and they're not very good, I'll give them a call back because they were persistent enough to leave more than one message. The behavior was there, the technique and the content was not. But what are we really looking for sometimes with salespeople is to commit to the behavior, we can teach them the techniques.
00:22:47
Speaker
And that's where I see a lot of salespeople fail. And we talked about this earlier, is that they know, but they don't do. And I can teach them what to know, but they got to be committed to what they do. I mean, I get called into companies and they say, Hey, Scott, you know, my sales are declining. I really believe that I got the right people. I want you to come in. And can you guarantee that you're going to increase the revenue 20%?
00:23:11
Speaker
That's a really difficult situation that you would be putting me in because you're asking me to guarantee your sales people's commitment. I can't guarantee somebody else's commitment. I can't guarantee what kind of culture you have within an organization. I can't guarantee what kind of resources you're offering them in order for them to be successful. I cannot be in charge of that. I cannot guarantee that. I can deliver the same content, the same information to 100 people
00:23:35
Speaker
And there'll be people that walk away with it and start applying it that day and they become successful. The other 90%, just go check the box. Management sent me here and I get sendees. They're not going to do anything different. More to that point, I think when people ask you that question, what they're really saying is it's a risk management. And my answer is always, well, if I could create 20% more money in a company, what would I need you for?
00:24:05
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Right. Fine. Do it. Go out and do it. I get calls from business owners and, you know, they pepper me with questions and I give them my responses and my answers and I sell a little bit, you know, wanting to say, you know, why don't we start there when you hire me? But I also give them a lot of content and a lot of information so that they can really get a snapshot of my experience
00:24:29
Speaker
and what I would be sharing with their salespeople. And then they say, wow, Scott, you're really giving me a lot to think about. I really appreciate your time today. I'm going to go back to my team and I'm going to talk to some other people. We're going to talk about what we can do based on what you shared with me and we'll get back to you if we're going to need to hire you. I said, I appreciate that. Thank you for letting me know and thank you for being up front with me. I'm kind of curious. What are you going to do tomorrow that you didn't do yesterday that's going to give you the results that you want that you don't currently have?
00:24:54
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. And they don't do it. They don't
CRM Systems and Productivity
00:25:00
Speaker
do it. I can share the information with them, but they will not take the lead. So it's almost like you need to bring me in to take the lead so that I can work on reinforcing it with your salespeople and define a culture then I can hand over to you as leadership so that you can maintain the momentum from that point forward.
00:25:19
Speaker
One of the things that we noticed in 2020 in the marketing space is when the pandemic hit and everybody had to go digital and everybody had to go virtual and all of a sudden Zoom became a nomenclature of the same on Xerox and Kleenex is so many people did some stuff that we've been doing for a long time, like webinars, and they're all almost universally bad at it.
00:25:44
Speaker
So how is selling changed since the pandemic and how can salespeople adapt?
00:25:51
Speaker
Well, I think there's one thing that's the most important part of the sales process that we cannot overlook. And that is really building that trust and rapport in front of the conversation. And when we're on Zoom, in most cases, I'll be assumptive, in most cases, it seems like we're working with somebody that is in a home environment, a remote worker is out of their home. So we're having a conversation when somebody is in their home. That's a very personal conversation. And we saw that right away when COVID hit.
00:26:20
Speaker
And we need to be able to take some time to build the trust and rapport with the people that we're working with on a conversation to discuss challenges, problems, and goals so that we deliver the right solution that sticks to a problem that gives them a better outcome. So when it comes to an in-person meeting, we still need to do the Zoom or we still need to do the rapport.
00:26:41
Speaker
but we also need to work on asking them good questions to prove that we are relevant. In these marketplace right now, it seems like a prospect can go through two or three or four steps within the purchasing decision and never talk to a salesperson. I think a salesperson has
00:27:00
Speaker
a chance to have more meetings within a day via Zoom versus in-person. I think that's a fact and looking at time. And if they can have more meetings and they can make them more efficient with shorter meetings, higher amount of content and information exchanged, they can get into more conversations within the prospects. But we need to use that time wisely
00:27:20
Speaker
so that we inspire the prospect to create interest and curiosity in the conversation so that they want to learn more about what we do. And we slowly start feeding them more and more solutions that they can adopt and purchase and apply and get a better outcome with that. So in some cases via Zoom or in person, it hasn't changed, but we need to follow the same sales process regardless. And sometimes salespeople are just don't prepare for sales calls.
00:27:47
Speaker
I think that's so interesting because we get that question all the time doing web development that we do at Busy Web, where people are like, well, how come it's not done? How come it's just squares on a page? And that's not the point of it. The point of it is, just as you said, those individual prospects are
00:28:10
Speaker
examining everything, they're doing all their own due diligence to figure out whether or not they even want a Dane to speak to you. And so you're being judged and all that takes time. There's such a market difference between just okay and really great. That companies who really get that not only invest in marketing, but they also invest in their salespeople to get them continually better.
00:28:38
Speaker
I think one thing that you offer that was really tremendously important is HubSpot and the ability to manage more than two conversations in my head. Salespeople have got to become very accustomed to a CRM and manage 300 conversations with a CRM versus two in my head. It's amazing how you can use a CRM to keep track of conversations and information,
00:29:05
Speaker
and to be able to be personal in the next conversation that you had. You know, you told me the last time we talked that your mother was going through a hip surgery. I'm kind of curious, how did that work out? And to be able to have that person, and then it's like, wow, thank you for asking. I'm impressed.
00:29:23
Speaker
You don't sound like every other salesperson that just wants to cut to the chase and get to the business. I had enough trust and rapport with you to share that personal information with you and you took notes and you kept track of that and then you shared it back with me? Wow, we must be really good friends if I shared that with you, because that's very personal information. You can't do that if you don't put it in the CRM. I mean, come on, people. You have to take the time
00:29:51
Speaker
to enter stuff into a CRM. It frustrates me with companies that don't use a CRM to manage conversations because you can't do more than two in your head. I think the other thing that frustrates me with CRMs is salesperson adoption. Older salespeople especially will say, well, no, I don't want to have all my stuff written down.
00:30:08
Speaker
It really is if you pick the right tool, it's easy. Now, all you need to do is connect your e-mail and remember to make your call from the system and it's all there. So compare that and contrast it against trying to keep post-it notes on your computer or running an Excel spreadsheet or something where you keep all your data together. At some point, you really need to look at what's the investment that's worth my productivity.
00:30:34
Speaker
I've actually met with sales teams that our management doesn't actually want us to use HubSpot, but I have my own account and I just use it. Don't tell them. It's free. The HubSpot is free. They're just doing it and more power to them.
00:30:51
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. I worked for a very large legal publishing company in town and I brought in my own CRM at the time and they installed it on my computer. I was a top sales rep. I doubled my code in one year. And nobody else was even interested in the CRM. And when they, when leadership saw what I was using, you know, they asked if, you know, what the name of it was and then other sales reps had it installed on their computer. But that's back in the time when we had three and a half inch disks.
00:31:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Well, and the converse is true, I think, too. And I'll share a personal story is I came into the office one day and Dave made a kind of an offhand joke about how somebody called and complained about me. And then he went and filled up his coffee. And I was like, Oh, wait a minute. You want to back it up here? He's like, no, no, it's fine.
00:31:43
Speaker
No, no, no, no, no. Back it up. And he said, okay, well, you know, this client of ours, they sent somebody to us. And then I think what happened is the guy that they sent to us was mad that you wouldn't give him a 50% price discount. So the guy called and said that you wouldn't give him the time of day.
00:32:03
Speaker
So I looked in the CRM and, uh, cause the customer called and complained about you. And I said, well, it said you were, you were mean and rude to the guy and didn't get, didn't help him. And I said, well, here's three emails, trigger be sent. And if a 45 minute recorded phone conversation, the guy spent with the guy, what more do you want?
00:32:21
Speaker
So in that particular instance, having Big Brother over my shoulder actually saved my bacon because he was able to identify that the problem wasn't in my interaction, it was that I wouldn't cut the guy a deal.
00:32:43
Speaker
It can't help and it's helpful to manage. Sales management needs to be able to see what people are doing because maybe you're having an off day. Maybe something's not happening right or maybe there's something that you can coach people on. We all agreed that our agreements inside of our organization are that you're going to call a prospect within
00:33:04
Speaker
three hours and then you're going to do five follow ups over the course of the next two weeks. I'm seeing that you're only following up once. So what's going on? And so you can work on that with people because you said it before, Scott, you know, people will either do it or they won't and sometimes they get it, but they just refuse to do it. And so that's something that you need to coach and accountability is the only way to get there.
00:33:29
Speaker
Yeah, you bring up a very good point, and that is that culture is defined by what leadership is willing to tolerate. Yeah. And you have to set that expectation real quick on the onboarding of a sales rep, a new employee. I have a three-step onboarding process. Number one is make sure that all expectations are clear and in writing, first of all, and you have that as part of the promises within the organization. The second is
00:33:58
Speaker
that you create consequences for not delivering on the expectations. There are consequences. I mean, we always think determination is the major consequence, but the other consequence is maybe we need more time on training and development. Maybe we need to be able to give them a script that they feel comfortable using when they're on a phone call so that at the end of the script, when they leave a message, they say, if I don't hear from you in two days, I'll call you back. That's a promise.
00:34:26
Speaker
And when they call back in two days, they're delivering on a promise that they said earlier and not having that feeling that often feeling that salespeople have is I don't want to appear desperate. So I'm not going to call them back. And I just talked to, you know, I just left a message two days ago. So I'm going to wait three weeks before I call them back and give them a chance to really think about what I said on a voicemail message. I got news for you, buddy. They forgot about a 45 seconds after they hit cancel and delete.
00:35:00
Speaker
What are some of the ways that salespeople can create unique identifiers? I know I've had a few in my day where I've created unique experiences to get people to
00:35:15
Speaker
to call back, but that's sort of the job, right? What do I need to do to get people to call back? It sounds like you're creating memorable experiences that cause people to remember their engagement with you. And I think the first goal that a salesperson has to have is to not sound like a salesperson. So you've got to do things that are a little bit outside the norm of what prospects expect from people that they've never talked to before that want to talk to them.
00:35:45
Speaker
which in most cases is a salesperson if you think about prospects calling people that they don't know they're interested in talking about things that they want to talk about the prospect and we need to sound different than a salesperson and when we start a conversation off with saying you know i work with companies that that wanna
00:36:03
Speaker
Kim are committed to improving this that and the other things we possibly being positively is something i don't want to assume you have any problems in this area with your company interested in having a conversation i can share with you some of things that we've done that we started within the last six months that.
00:36:19
Speaker
are often not provided by other companies like ours. And then with that conversation, we can see if there's any reason for us to continue it or not. I welcome a call back at this phone number when you have a couple of minutes. If I don't hear from you in two or three days, I'll give you a ring back. Thanks for listening to this entire message. Have a great day. You know, one of the things that along those same lines, Scott, that one of your famous blogs that I've always enjoyed is getting people to call you back isn't the problem.
00:36:47
Speaker
It's getting them to call back happily. Salespeople complain to me, how do I get a prospect to call me back? Well, call them and tell them that you're their neighbor and their house is on fire. And you know, they might call you back pretty promptly. Now they're going to be a little hot and you're misleading and you're not being really truthful at all with them. They'll call you back. But I don't think that that's the intent that salesperson has.
00:37:12
Speaker
But or the other one you see is is uh, well, maybe you're not high enough up in the company I need to be talking to you Yeah Now that's a technique that if you leave six messages And they don't call you back and you can say, you know, i've left six messages i'm kind of thinking to myself
00:37:29
Speaker
You may or may not be in charge of this project anymore. You may or may not be with the company anymore. I don't know since we haven't been able to chat. I'm going to call and see if there's somebody else that's in charge of this project. If I'm wrong, please call me back by the end of the day. If I don't hear from you tomorrow, I'm going to try to find out who's in charge of it.
00:37:45
Speaker
Now, you're getting to a point where if there was a productive conversation in the beginning, in most cases there are. Prospects can be very persuasive and convincing on getting free information and consulting out of salespeople. Salespeople love to share what they know with prospects because that builds confidence in them. Let me tell you everything that I know.
00:38:07
Speaker
and we educate the prospect enough to do it on themselves, or we educate them enough to be able to shop our proposal on the street and break it down and to end up investing less, or we can educate our prospects to influence them on making a better choice. So educate to influence, not educate to teach.
00:38:29
Speaker
And when we really concentrate on the questions and the information in those first calls, and we create enough interest and curiosity, most likely we're going to have a second call. But the prospect saying, you know, the first 15 minutes that I spent with you was kind of a waste of time and I'm not interested in spending another 15, 30 or an hour with you because I got no value out of the first one.
00:38:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the things that we sort of glommed over and I want to spend the rest of our time talking about is you mentioned in brief about how people buy emotionally. And so if the selling isn't about what you say, it's how you make people feel when you're saying it.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah. A little Maya Angel quote there. I think it almost came out of you Trigby. It flowed just like Maya. It's so eloquent. Write it down. But there's such a juxtaposition, I think, between the cliche of a salesperson of the Glengarry Glen Ross School of Man and Hell. Is this from your nostalgic file? Yeah.
00:39:32
Speaker
you know, or the quote of like, who told you you were allowed to come work with men? Who said you could talk to men? Yeah. That's so not true anymore in 2022. So how do salespeople harness that feeling? And I have a follow-up question, and I don't want to keep pontificating, and I want to make sure that I leave this for you. But
00:39:56
Speaker
One of the things in sales that you learn is eventually you start getting callous to the idea that if a deal doesn't close, it has nothing to do with you. You start your career and it has everything to do with you and then suddenly it doesn't anymore.
00:40:09
Speaker
Right, yeah. There seems to be that, what they say, detachment. Salespeople start to get this detachment and they're detached from the outcome. And in a way that's good and that's healthy when you're really practicing healthy habits and a healthy behavior and you're constantly getting new qualified leads in the pipeline. And for one reason or another, a company didn't buy from you for their reasons and whatever they were doing that had a higher priority
00:40:37
Speaker
then the problem that they shared with you or the solution that you're offering, there was something that was of a high priority. That doesn't mean that what you sell is not important. It doesn't mean what you sell is not valuable. It's just in the priority list right now, it's not at a point where they want to make a decision. And that detachment is healthy so that we don't
00:40:56
Speaker
feel like we're losing and we're getting emotionally beat up and we're a failure. I mean, people fail, but they're not failures. And getting into conversations where we become sort of desensitized to any growth is where it really starts to get dangerous. And again, change starts with self-awareness. And I've met some professional, smart, smart people that have no self-awareness at all.
00:41:23
Speaker
They have no concept of how they're coming off. They have no concept about how other people feel when they engage with them. And they're not even interested in changing. And they're just going, you know, that's the way I've always done it. And that's who I am. And you're just going to have to tolerate the way I behave.
00:41:39
Speaker
Okay, I guess you might want to be at least plus one in value that you're worth tolerating. So you got to be delivering a little bit more than the expense of tolerating you. So it must be plus one at least.
00:41:54
Speaker
and that's the difference between IQ and EQ, emotional intelligence. So if you at least understand and have a little bit of empathy and can think from the other person's perspective, and I think that's table stakes for any good salesperson. Certainly, you can be a good salesperson in engineering or something highly technical if you're super, super smart and you can make those connections, but you're never going to get very far unless you can build some sort of rapport right away with personal dialing.
00:42:24
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, definitely. And that's going to make the biggest difference. The EQ, I mean, being empathetic is really looking at a position from the prospect's point of view. And you as a salesperson, if you can practice empathy, and I have empathy as a strength out of the five strengths, so I think of it as kind of a liability at times, because sometimes I can be empathetic when salespeople are not making
00:42:49
Speaker
the behavioral goals because of excuses that they're giving me versus reasons that come up in a person's life. But if I as a salesperson can see the challenge and the frustration and the commitment from the prospect side, it makes it easier for me to relate to them and to be able to lead them through the challenges of making a commitment to a change
00:43:12
Speaker
That's going to give them a better result. I mean, change is not easy for people to really adopt and accept. And in some cases, people are looking for relief instead of a cure because a cure is too much work. And this is Covey that comes up with this. Are you looking for a cure or are you looking for relief?
00:43:31
Speaker
And people come to me wanting relief. And I can do that, but it's not going to change the culture within the company. We need to work on a cure, which is going to change the entire sales culture from the CEO down to the frontline salespeople.
00:43:49
Speaker
One last question before we take off on the feelings game is when you're evaluating companies and trying to help them with their Salesforce and coach their Salesforce, talk about the role of ego on the positive end on the
Emotional Intelligence in Sales
00:44:04
Speaker
negative.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think salespeople are generally highly emotional people. They go out and work on persuasion, influence, they risk rejection constantly. They need to be confident enough in their self-worth to be able to be emotionally risking every single day with every single person that they talk to. And they need to be able to have that self-worth and have that ego
00:44:33
Speaker
and have that confidence when they're talking with somebody. That's a style that a salesperson has. I want to improve the style. I never want to step on a salesperson's style, but I also want to introduce a process that everybody can follow.
00:44:50
Speaker
When it comes to projecting goals and projecting revenue and to be able to shorten the sales cycle and increase the closing ratio and improve the profit, we need to manage a process in order to do that. And every salesperson has got to manage and implement the same sales process in order to make outcomes predictable.
00:45:10
Speaker
Now the challenge is some sales leaders don't lead a team on the same sales process. And they let everybody go out and do it however they want, as long as they make their number. We're talking about the reputation of a company in the marketplace determined by these ambassadors. These salespeople are going out representing the company's reputation. And if they're all doing it differently, it's very risky to be able to define a reputation in the marketplace and
00:45:40
Speaker
It makes customer service almost impossible to manage because you can never reduce the expense of customer service. You want to invest in customer service to retain customers and to be able to sell additional products and more products and get referrals through customer service experiences. But you want to be able to manage the expense of having an increase so much that you're taking on all of these problems that salespeople are creating in the marketplace. They create these problems that cost
00:46:10
Speaker
company's money and customer service cleanups. Well, especially when you're dealing with someone that wants to build a relationship and is highly emotional and engaging, they might over promise and wind up selling something or telling the prospect that they can do something that they would need to way over scope for.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. That's sort of an extension of that idea that we talked about earlier about having, getting people to call back isn't the problem. Getting people to agree to the thing that you want them to do is the problem. Like I can make sales all day long if I just give people whatever they want or whatever price they want, but that doesn't help anybody.
00:46:51
Speaker
Well, you look at some of the companies. I remember when, was it a payroll company? This was probably about five years ago where they said, everybody's going to make $72,000 a year. And the CEO said, everybody's going to make $72,000 a year. That company's not around anymore, by the way. I mean, that didn't work.
00:47:06
Speaker
It went under within a year.
Consumer Behavior and Value Emphasis
00:47:08
Speaker
You just can't do that and just make everybody feel good by paying them sometimes twice what they were making before because you want to make everybody feel good. That's not good business. And you look at it going, you just didn't survive. You'll never last if you race to the bottom and cutting a price. You just won't.
00:47:31
Speaker
Unfortunately, customers do it to themselves. I look at booking a flight from here to Denver. I've got a few options to pick. One of the airlines will give me a nickel and dime, and I've got to pay for a seat, I've got to pay for a bag, I've got to pay for a ticket, I've got to pay for a spot in line, and all of a sudden I add up all of those expenses. And it's the same as the other one, that everything's included. But the customers do it to themselves.
00:47:53
Speaker
figure out what's most valuable as a customer, as a consumer, and then be willing to pay for what you find valuable. And you're going to be satisfied in the transaction because people love to buy. They really do. They hate to be sold, but they love to buy.
00:48:11
Speaker
Scott, thank you so much. I know I could probably go on for another two and a half, three hours talking shop and swapping fish stories.
Where to Find More from Scott Plum
00:48:18
Speaker
I would enjoy it. Where can people find you if they're interested in learning more about Sales Institute and how you can help them?
00:48:25
Speaker
I think the easiest thing to do is go to my website mnsales.com. I've got blogs. I've written a book, if you're interested in the book, called Taking Off Into the Wind, Creating Lift Out of Life. I've got all of the chiclets, I think, to social media. So if you want to watch some YouTube videos, you can get some snippets, you can get some
00:48:45
Speaker
kind of improv videos on different topics like budgets is a popular one. One of my most popular blogs is I'm a first responder to a no soliciting sign. That's a good one. Yeah. And also another one on, you know, stop turning your product into a commodity is another one that sales people do commonly.
00:49:07
Speaker
And there's a podcast. Oh yeah, I do a podcast called Winning a Selling. So go to winning a selling.com or find it on any platforms that you get your podcasts. And there's a special episode that we did with Dave and Trigvi. What number did we do together? 515. Yeah. So if you go to mnsales.com and search Trigvi is probably the easiest.
00:49:31
Speaker
You'll find our podcast on there. And it was so much fun, Scott. Thank you for returning. Thanks for coming, Scott. We'll see you next time. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everybody.