Mark Kosoglow was employee #1 at Outreach and is now the CRO of Catalyst Software. Mark, as a teenager, started watching videos in the back of a storeroom on a seven inch black and white TV to learn how to sell shoes.
Mark is pretty much everywhere on LinkedIn, pushing close to 20M+ views on his content. After sales people around the world started clamoring for him to put these little nuggets together, Mark partnered with Andrew Mubourne to convert them into courses. You can access them at https://www.digitalsalescollective.com.
Mark’s first course is on how to do deal-winning discovery; it includes techniques he’s taught to the top reps and leading sales managers at some of the world’s best companies. The course is universally acclaimed and if you’ve read this far, chances are you will find it useful too.
In this episode:
Host Collin Mitchell and Authentic Sales Leader Mark Kosoglow cover a range of topics pertaining to sales and sales leadership in the very first episode of the Authentic Sales Leader podcast. Some highlights:
- How Mark Kosoglow got into the world of sales (spoiler alert: toys were involved)
- About Mark's first outside sales jobs that taught him plenty of real-world lessons
- Player-coach sales leaders that Mark looked up to and learned from
- What are the non-negotiables at the workplace for sellers and sales leaders alike
- How to deal with different personalities in sales
MARK KOSOGLOW: On his entry into sales and sales leadership
“So I am a habitual lifetime salesperson. The rumor is, according to my parents, I started selling when I was seven years old, on vacation with my parents at my uncle's beach house in Delaware. I took all the toys that I didn't want to play with anymore, put them in a wagon and went door to door and tried to swap them with the neighbors for toys that were more interesting to me. So that's where it all started.”
About sales leadership, he says “I moved into sales leadership when I got tired of developing accounts and wanted to develop people.”
MARK KOSOGLOW: On making a plan and sticking to it, the only way to achieve sales success--
"Planning is hard for a lot of salespeople. I'd say, well, there's two types of salespeople. One is the ‘I plan more than I actually sell and I never actually sell to my plan’. And the other one is ‘I sell and don't plan and planning gets away of my selling’. And what you're trying to create is somebody that is in the context of their strengths and their personality, where along that spectrum do they need to lie? Because we know that both selling and planning are productive behaviors, but how do you find the balance for a person? And so there are certain things that you need to figure out and that should be part of the system that a company gives you."
MARK KOSOGLOW: On leading people with different personalities--
“Sales leadership is like parenting. If you give kids guide rails, they're infinitely creative inside those. But if they have no guide rails, then they just are searching for something the whole time, and they never kick into creativity. It really is the paradox of choice. So that's where I think rep personality comes in, create the guide rails – make the non-negotiables clear – and hire people that are willing to work within those guide rails. You need to have a diverse team that approaches the same problems in different ways so you can all learn from each other and represent the people that you're going to be selling to. But that's how I deal with personalities, is to get some guide rails and then, hey, let's figure out what works for you inside of those.”
