Predictable Prospecting's Podcast

Today's guest is Marc McNamara, Chief Enablement Strategist at The Value Shift, a company that presents a unique solution to the sales productivity challenge. We're here to talk about Marc's experience with team enablement, how to get the best out of your top-of-funnel conversations, and finding the root of your buyer's behavior.

Episode Highlights:

• Introducing Marc McNamara
• What is a Chief Enablement Strategist?
• Understanding buyer behavior
• Generating meaningful conversations
• Finding the next step as a rep: Training and continuing education
• The nuts & bolts of building a repository
• How to track your best conversations

Resources:

Connect with Marc McNamara on LinkedIn, through The Value Shift website, or by emailing him direct at [email protected]

Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler

Quotes/Tweets:

"Selling is an art and a science"- Marc

"Realize your prospects have a problem that can be solved, and then figure out how to uniquely add value to them." - Marc

"Salespeople are about helping the customer"- Marc

"People, once they're trained, will forget it all a week later"-Marylou

How do you become a strong leader? How do you encourage your team to be not just good, but great? My guest today is an expert on managing sales teams and the author of Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers: A Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team Through Collaboration. Max Cates is here to discuss why sales managers should focus on continuous improvement, what separates the good managers from the bad, and using the Six Sigma process for eliminating defects and improving your team.

Episode Highlights:

• How Max Cates got started in sales management
• Discussing Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers
• Why sales superstars make poor managers
• Implementing a tactical plan for your sales team
• The millennial sales team
• Six Sigma for sales
• The McKinsey Issue Tree
• Setting good stretch goals

Resources:

• Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers: A Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team Through Collaboration by Max Cates
• Six Sigma
• McKinsey Issue Tree
• Connect with Max Cates on Linkedin

Quotes/Tweets:

"Great salespeople usually make poor managers" - Max

"The lone wolf manager can't manage a millennial sales team. They like collaboration." - Max

'It's a lot easier to be a successful leader than it is to be a poor manager."- Max

"Stretch, but don't overstretch when you're making goals" - Max

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin – there's a huge chance that your ideal customer has an account on at least one of them. As our role as business developers continues to evolve, the technologies and techniques we use to connect with prospects has changed as well. My guest today is Kurt Shaver of The Sales Foundry, an expert on leveraging social selling and using Linkedin as part of the sales process. We discuss how to research and connect with prospects on Linkedin, becoming an business expert on your social media platforms, and the essential skills all new sales development reps need to have.

Episode Highlights:

• Why is social selling important?
• The evolution of Linkedin: Outbound prospecting and inbound marketing
• Inbound marketing for the new SDR
• Broadcasting and curating
• Essential outbound marketing skills for the new SDR
• Working in time blocks while prospecting on Linkedin
• Researching and using Linkedin as a disqualification machine
• What does Kurt Shaver do?

Resources:

Connect with Kurt Shaver on Linkedin, follow him on Twitter, and visit him on the web at The Sales Foundry

Quotes/Tweets:

"The primary function of Linkedin is lead generation"- Kurt Shaver

"When everyone is on a social network, each person is essentially a mini marketer"- Kurt

"Your number one priority is to leverage a common connection with your ideal customer"- Kurt

"Ten connections per day, 22 business days per month, means 220 more connections. That's how you build your network" - Marylou

On this episode, I'm interviewed by my longtime friend and colleague Gabriel Padva. Gabriel is the founder and principal consultant at 30,000 FT Strategies, a company that focuses on helping companies communicate with their prospects. He is also a CRO at Revenue Accelerator Inc. We go in-depth into the role of the sales development rep, including how to hire them, train them, and promote them into upper management positions. We also discuss the do's and don'ts of cold emailing, my must-have tools, and the best sales advice I've ever gotten.

Episode Highlights:

• Marylou's process for identifying new prospects and driving sales
• Why is sales team specialization important?
• The evolution of the SDR
• Client metrics
• Understanding the ideal account profile
• Building your list
• Is the phone still relevant for the SDR?
• How to work the internal referral system
• Hiring the best SDR: References, interviews, and skill tests
• Critical KPI's
• The do's and don'ts of crafting cold messaging
• Must-have technology tools of 2016
• The best sales advice Marylou's ever gotten

Resources:

Gabriel's question checklist for checking references of potential SDRs

Tool Recommendations:

• Outreach.io
• Tout
• Sales Loft
• Marketo

Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler

Quotes/Tweets:

"Always be testing, measuring, and pulling out data. Tell the truth." - Gabriel

"Using the phone in combination with email and social selling is a great way to 'warm up the chill' of cold calling" - Marylou

"You are as equally important as the person that you're trying to convince to try your product or service" - Marylou

Are you catching minnows when you want to be catching whales? Netting the high-value prospects requires engaging many different people in the organization in conversation. In this episode, I'm interviewed by Joseph Dager of the Business901 podcast. We discuss my new book, Predictable Prospecting, why cold calling is the best method of prospecting available for netting those whales, and how to encourage your sales team to embrace the cold calling process.

Episode Highlights:

• Mary Lou Tyler's background and career path
• How to best use Predictable Prospecting
• Cold calling, personas, and outbound marketing
• Why do salespeople resist the cold calling process?
• Other methods of prospecting
• Leaving voicemails
• Getting past the gatekeeper
• After the sale: Reselling, renewing, and getting referrals
• Warming up the chill: Software recommendations
• How important is a process to a company?

Resources:

Joseph Dager and Business 901

Yesware

Outreach.io

Toutapp

SalesLoft

Follow Marylou on Twitter and connect with her on Linkedin

Our guest today is Keenan, who is a sales expert, speaker, and owner of A Sales Guy, a leading sales management consulting company. We discuss his unique process for identifying the problems your business solves, the personal buying motivations of your prospects, and the key exercises and role play scenarios for connecting with your clients.

Episode Highlights:

• How to get your prospects to want to talk to you
• Selling to the current state, the gap, and the future state
• What critical problems does your business solve? Dissecting the product
• The buyer persona versus the personal buying motivation
• What should your first conversation with the buyer be about?
• Keenan's epiphany moment
• The "wake up the chill" campaign
• Filling up your table
• The mobile dry cleaner: a practical example of Keenan's philosophy

Resources:

• SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
• Visit Keenan's website, A Sales Guy, for his blog and more information on booking Keenan as a speaker, consultant, or recruiter
• A Sales Guy Univesity
• Keenan's Youtube channel

Quotes:

"If you want to get someone to pay attention to you, you have to know something they don't know. You have to be the expert" - keenan

"The greater the gap, the more value there is to what you're selling"- Keenan

In this episode of Predictable Prospecting, I'm interviewed by TinderBox on my predictions for the future of the world of sales and sales technology. We also discuss training sales teams to have meaningful conversations with prospects while using sales acceleration technology and the rise of social selling.

Episode Highlights:

• What's going to change in the world of sales in 2017?
• Using technology to create meaningful conversation
• Client tiers and personalizations
• How do you train a sales team to connect with prospects?
• Sales and the call center mindset
• Social selling
• Predictions for the fourth medium of selling

Resources:

SalesLoft

Outreach

Inside Sales

Are you running a "one-man show", where you do absolutely everything yourself – from building the pipeline to closing the sale? How effective is your current system?

On this episode we're joined by Pleasant Rich, the Director of Enterprise Sales at Outreach, a team-based sales communication platform. We discuss the benefits and challenges of separating roles on the sales team, why you shouldn't try to fill every role yourself, and how to make the transition between roles as seamless as possible.

Episode Highlights:

• Challenges with having more aware buyers
• Passing the baton from top of funnel, to sales, to close
• Working through the four categories of authority
• SDRs and BDRs
• The evolution of the 15 minute call
• How many opportunities can you really generate?
• Planning, testing, and executing
• Doing every role versus following a separation model: Pleasant's experience
• Training and roleplaying
• Challenges, tips, and tricks to separating roles

Resources:

Outreach.io

Connect with Pleasant on Linkedin

Quotes/Tweets:

"Salespeople love to close and we love to put out fires and we love to hop on the things that are in front of us"- Pleasant

"Multitasking is common place in every company but it's never the most effective thing to do."- Pleasant

"The first opportunity you have to separate sales roles is when you should do it"- Marylou

Plenty of companies struggle with crafting the perfect cold email. It's either too long, too short, too impersonal, or it just doesn't connect with your buyer. Identifying what's missing and how to fix it can seem impossible, but our guest today has the process down to a science.

We're joined by Bob Kelly, my partner at Strategic Pipeline and contributor to my new book Predictable Prospecting. Bob is a leading chief strategist and sales expert, and an absolute genius at helping clients achieve maximum growth by writing the right messages to the right buyers. We discuss our work with Strategic Pipeline, current trends in account-based selling, and Bob's best tips for crafting cold emails that engage your buyer.

Episode Highlights:

• Introducing Bob Kelly
• Common marketplace trends: Products and ideal customers
• Sales conversations and buyer personas
• How to make the most of the current trends in account-based selling
• Engaging with the ideal contacts in a company: hyper-personalized selling
• Selling to multiple tiered accounts v.s. Selling to core accounts
• Strategic pipeline method
• The major faults of the CRM tool
• Bob Kelly's top content generation techniques
• Upcoming challenges and predictions for the future

Resources:

Predictable Prospecting: How To Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline by Marylou Tyler

Contact Bob Kelly by emailing him direct: [email protected] or by visiting the Strategic Pipeline website

Recent studies have shown salespeople fail to make quotas when they don't have the knowledge of their product to have a value-adding conversation with their clients. Where does this gap come from, and how can we close it to connect with our prospects?

Today's guest is Max Traylor, a marketing consultant who specializes in sales enablement. We discuss how to best close the gap between marketing and sales, why millennials don't trust the internet, and how to best personalize your sales content to target the prospects who matter the most.

Episode Highlights:

• Introducing Max Traylor
• What are the biggest obstacles for sales professionals to overcome?
• The gap between marketing and sales
• Why millennials prefer speaking to sales reps over researching on the Internet
• The technology gap in sales
• Knowledge is power: Learning to close the gaps
• Defining and tweaking the buyer persona
• Personalizing sales content on a small and large scale
• Targeting at the top of the pipeline
• What's next for Max Traylor?
• Working on three tiers of accounts

Resources:

CSO Insights' 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study

Visit Max Traylor's website for blog posts, coaching and advising information, and video content

Email him at [email protected], connect with him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter

Quotes/Tweets:

"Marketing's number one consumer of their content is the buyer. But in fact there are two important audiences for the content: the buyer and the sales team"- Max

"Millennials don't trust the Internet. We're the first generation who grew up with it, and we don't trust it"- Max

"Conversation is king"- Marylou

"We have a choice of who we sell to. We should put the work in to find out who's going to be the most profitable and who aligns with our solution" -Max

"Stop going after the minnows. Go after the whales!"- Marylou