Future-Proof Selling

Master storyteller, author and sales mastermind Mike Adams returns to the Future-Proof Selling podcast with...you guessed it, a plethora of valuable experiences and insights around the concept of story-listening in sales.

Mike is an expert facilitator and story consultant who has helped numerous national and international companies, across many industries, to tap into story-powered sales.

Before working at Anecdote, Mike was the CEO of The Story Leader and had leading marketing and sales roles at Schlumberger, Siemens, Halliburton, Spotless, and GM Minerals and Energy.

Mike has sold more than $1 Billion worth of products and services and has spoken at many major conferences around the world.

Key Points of This Discussion

• Mike's early emergence into sales
• The epiphany of recognising storytelling as a problem solving tool
• Listening to your customers comments in order to seek stories
• Changing the nature of sales conversations
• Having a deeper conversation with your customers
• An example when story-listening won Mike a multimillion dollar deal
• The consequence of sticking to standard sales talk
• Stories that help your customers close deals
• Handling objections as a story-listening opportunity
• Anecdotes program for sales organisations - "Storytelling for Leaders."

Visit the Anecdote website to learn more about Storytelling for Leaders, and you can find Mike on LinkedIn.

Pree Sarkar is an executive recruiter, career coach, author and keynote speaker. LinkedIn rated him in the Top 1% Recruiters for Search Excellence and Talent Pipelining. Prior to recruitment, he was a top performing account executive and sales director with Fortune 500 companies, including Xerox and FedEx.

Since 2008 he has been advising leaders and professionals at global technology companies and pre-IPO start-ups to help them build winning teams and great careers.

We really need to up our game and fight smarter and harder for the roles we really want. How can sales executives and management manage their careers more proactively.

Key Points of This Discussion

• Current trends in career management
• The impact of digital transformation on sales careers
• The the keys of a solid 2020 career management strategy
• How to best present yourself on LinkedIn
• Managing your career through COVID
• Tips on demonstrating significant value in your CV
• Pree's 4 step recruitment process
• The importance of a strong personal brand
• Creating a 'market map' or career prospecting list
• How to approach your prospective future employers
• The two pillars to consultative interviews
• Creating interview influence and connecting with your employer
• What not to do as an employer conducting interviews
• The most powerful way to communicate value in an interview

Visit the website to learn more about Switch and you can find Pree on LinkedIn.

Jeroen Corthout from Antwerp, Belgium is Co-Founder of leading CRM Software Salesflare, developed specifically for small to medium B2B. The company is known for making CRM 'human.'

We discuss what's important in a challenging tight market, and how salespeople can take this as an opportunity to become more productive in a remote selling environment.

Some Key Points of This Discussion

• Jeroen's background and launching Salesflare
• The complications for Salespeople trying to utilise a CRM
• Efficiently curating information yet making CRM human
• How Salesflare works by populating contacts and reducing data entry
• Creating audiences and automated email sequences
• Prospecting and following up in a personalised way at scale
• Requesting reviews and valuable feedback from customers
• Why remote selling is really a great thing for the industry
• Maximising productivity through remote selling
• Leveraging data to create opportunities
• The biggest issues salespeople face with remote selling
• How remote selling can help us be more human and authentic
• What SaaS and tech companies can do now that face-to-face events are gone
• Virtual event software options and opportunities
• The challenge of building pipeline in an economic downturn
• Jeroen's personal advice on wellbeing when working from home

Visit the website to learn more about Salesflare and you can find Jeroen on LinkedIn.

Aaron McCormick should have been a casualty of his upbringing, "destined," as he says," to be crippled by almost every externally imposed and therefore, self-imposed limitation you could imagine."

Raised on the south side of Chicago, in poverty by a single mother with no education, deserted by a father who was likely an undiagnosed bi-polar schizophrenic, and tightly controlled by an extreme fundamentalist religion that allowed no personal freedom whatsoever, including getting a college education or playing sports, Aaron ultimately defied those expectations of failure.

In fact, he succeeded spectacularly! With no college education, beginning in his low twenties, he became a hugely successful corporate enterprise software salesman, making millions of dollars for his employers and himself, climbing from company to company until he was honored with the prestigious "Best of IBM" award bestowed on only 1% of the company's 400,000 employees. Along the way, he also earned an MBA (without an undergraduate degree!)

We discuss Aaron's life and sales approach in depth :

• His early life and challenges.
• The unlimited opportunities of the sales profession.
• Having the right mindset and looking inside yourself.
• Being the sovereign of your own life.
• Aaron's sales philosophy which saw him generate massive success.
• Being the CEO of your territory.
• Prioritising opportunities systematically.
• Getting inside your prospect's head and uncovering their pain.
• Focusing your efforts on the best and biggest opportunities.
• Doing deep research on fewer prospects.
• Crafting effective and concise messaging.
• Running the Discovery meeting.
• Analysing the audience.
• Identifying the Assassin in the room.
• Dealing with fear and the current lockdown challenges.

Discover more about Aaron and his book Unbounded.

Tom Pisello, The ROI Guy, is a serial entrepreneur, popular speaker and author, focused on value marketing and selling. Tom's new book, Evolved Selling - Optimizing Sales Enablement in the Age of Frugalnomics (available on Amazon) is a follow on to The Frugalnomics Survival Guide - How to Use Your Unique Value to Market Better, Stand Out and Sell More (available on Amazon).

Some Key Points of This Discussion

• Why Tom focuses on ROI.
• Why we need to build and quantify value.
• The power of Discovery assessments in building the business case for change.
• Walking into customer interactions with a hypothesis of their potential problems.
• Aspects of "The Challenger" sales and how to implement it effectively.
• The power of Socratic dialogue to help customers become more aware
• Closing for a Discovery meeting vs a Product Demo
• How slowing down early in the sales process actually speeds up the whole sales process
• How sellers must help customers to buy
• How there are still positive opportunities in this difficult market
• How Mediafly helps companies to guide customers, turbocharge presentations and produce business cases to be more effective.
• Why pain is a stronger motivator than gain.

Check more about Tom's company and latest book Evolved Selling and the Mediafly solution for presentations.

Karen Tisdell is ranked one of the top LinkedIn Trainers across Asia Pacific in 2018 and 2019. Karen began writing LinkedIn profiles in 2009, facilitating LinkedIn strategy sessions on how to reposition your career & attract the work you want. Karen has since worked with many businesses to empower employees to broaden brand footprint, attract & retain clients.

Key Points of our Discussion

• Using LinkedIn to build touchpoints with our potential clients.
• Substituting face to face contact with digital interaction.
• LinkedIn as a demand generation tool.
• The right approach to nurturing prospects on LinkedIn.
• The explosion in LinkedIn activity since lockdown.
• Key LinkedIn functions for salespeople.
• Researching our prospects and relevant content.
• Using LinkedIn messages.
• Focusing on customer problems not our solutions.
• Presenting ourselves as industry experts not sales professionals.
• LinkedIn prospecting cadence.

To learn more connect with Karen on LinkedIn

Jason Cutter, CEO of Cutter Consulting Group, is an author, podcaster and sees himself as a sales success architect for companies and individuals. Even though he didn't have a sales upbringing or background (his bachelor's degree is in Marine Biology), he knows what it takes to be successful in sales. His new book – Selling With Authentic Persuasion - is focused on helping anyone in sales transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker.

In This Discussion:

• What authenticity means in the sales profession.
• Self-awareness and being human in sales.
• The keys to long term sales success.
• Jason's journey into sales and his early experiences.
• The importance of our intention.
• People don't buy drills, they buy holes!
• Uncovering underlying customer needs.
• The Sales Success Iceberg.
• Why even top performers need ongoing coaching and development.
• A high level overview of Jason's new book Authentic Persuasion.

Jason's Links:

Main Hub/Link: www.jasoncutter.com

CCG Website: https://www.cutterconsultinggroup.com/

Authentic Persuasion: https://authenticpersuasion.com/

Paul Ross is an author, speaker, Master Hypnotist and Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He teaches already successful 6 and 7 figure professional salespeople and entrepreneurs how to easily add multiple 6 figures to their revenue through the power of subconscious selling.

This is a really interesting episode that delves into the modern sales techniques top sellers are using, that can leave traditional sales methods well behind.

Key Points of our Discussion:

• Reframing what we sell away from products to decisions and good feelings.
• Why we should consider ourselves 'decision service technicians'.
• How most sales presentations are boring and don't engage customers.
• How to get audiences focused.
• How we can align ourselves with our customers vs being in an adversarial position.
• Techniques for destroying objections.
• Utilising pattern interrupts.
• Reframing cold calling to sharing opportunities.
• Reframing prospecting conversations.
• Qualifying leads effectively.

Check more about Paul Ross and his book at the following links.

To learn more about Paul Ross visit his website and find his book Subtle Words That Sell on Amazon.

David Masover is a global sales thought leader and sales process expert. He is also the author of several sales books. David is back on the Future Proof Selling podcast to discuss his four level sales process that has made a significant positive impact on the organisations he works with.

Some key points of our discussion:

• Getting field input into your sales process.
• Involving other key stakeholders.
• Process iteration and buy in.
• Implementing new sales technology.
• Sales coaching and reinforcement.

Learn more about David and his company via his website, and/or connect on LinkedIn

Qwilr was co-founded in 2014 by designer Dylan Baskind and ex-Googler Mark Tanner, who were friends since high school. Dylan became frustrated when trying to win new business — he wanted to make sure he was putting his best foot forward but found it risky to put so much time into each proposal, meaning days of waste if he didn't win business. Mark saw the coming future of productivity tools during his time at Google and together, they agreed to work on a new way to create, design and send proposals and business documents.

Prior to starting Qwilr, Mark Tanner worked as a Business Development lead for Android & Google Play.

Have you considered how important the presentation of a quote or proposal can be to a sale?

Key points of our discussion

• The challenges of traditional proposal generation methods
• How Qwilr has re-imagined proposals leveraging the cloud
• The importance of the "engagement" phase of the sales process
• Improving conversion rates with effective proposals and collaterals
• The challenges of reaching members of the buying committee
• Using interactive proposals to progress B2B deals
• Thoughts on effective remote selling
• How Mark manages his global sales team

For more about Mark's company visit Qwilr Contact Mark at [email protected] or connect with him on LinkedIn