Predictable Prospecting's Podcast

When you want to know how to sell effectively at the executive level, you need expert training and stories that sell. Today's guest has been called Australia's leading Authority on "C" Level sales. Steve Hall has sold to executives in more than 20 countries. He is a writer and speaker who focuses on executive sales. He also owns the Executive Sales Coaching LinkedIn group.

Steve Hall is Managing Director of Executive Sales Coaching Australia and joint founder of Executive Sales Forum International. Steve joins the podcast today to talk about how to use story when you're talking to decision-makers and how you can tell an effective story in less time – sometimes in just a few words. Listen to the episode to hear what Steve has to say about developing stories, finding the information that you need when you talk to clients, and his Executive Sales Forum International.

Episode Highlights:

• How Steve uses story when he speaks to decision-makers
• How it can be helpful to tell a story in only a few words
• How to get enough time with a prospect to tell your story properly
• The juxtaposition between what is and what should be in your story
• What Steve uses to help find information that helps in talking to clients
• Steve's thoughts on how new salespeople just out of college are assigned
• How much product knowledge is necessary to get in the door
• Steve's Executive Sales Forum International

Resources:

Steve Hall

Executive Sales Forum International

Everybody has a story. In fact, everybody has a number of different stories, and one way or another, most people wind up sharing their stories with other people at some point. Stories help us relate to others and make connections as well as illustrate important points. And if you work in sales, you can use your stories to help you connect with prospects and close deals. Today's guest has literally written the book on how salespeople should use stories.

Mike Adams is an engineer-turned-salesperson from Australia. He's also the author of the book Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell, a book that's designed to help those in sales discover the power of stories, what kinds of stories are important in sales, and how you can use stories to help you close. Listen to the episode to hear more about Mike's background, why he wrote the book and arranged it the way that he did, and how stories can help you connect with your prospects.

Episode Highlights:

• How Mike got into sales
• Mikes book, and why he chose seven as the number of stories to tell
• What kinds of stories are important in sales
• The different ways that different stories help you connect with clients
• Why Mike organized his book the way that he did
• Which stories can help salespeople close a deal

Resources:

Mike Adams

Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell

Sales automation tools can help at all kinds of different places in the funnel. Prospect.io is a sales automation platform that helps you start conversations and improve sales teams productivity. Today's guests, Forster Perelsztejn and Iulian Boia are Prospect's Head of Acquisition and Head of Customer Success respectively. They're joining today's episode from Brussels.

Listen to today's episode to learn more about Prospect.io, who they serve, and how their platform works. Forster and Iulian talk about their roles at Prospect, patterns in customer pain points, how onboarding works, and how the GDPR is affecting their work and platform.

Episode Highlights:

• Forster and Iulian's roles at Prospect
• How Forster and Iulian's roles at Prospect are aligned
• How customer pain points change or don't change depending on where they are in the funnel
• How to order customer conversations based on experience with previous customers' pain points
• The market that Prospect serves
• Prospect's onboarding procedure
• What kind of work Prospect is doing with telephone numbers in light of the GDPR
• How Prospect is using analytics with their data
• Testing smaller samples sizes before moving onto larger audiences

Resources:

Prospect.io

Forster Perelsztejn

Iulian Boia

Making a sale is rarely a one-and-done encounter. Instead, it's an ongoing process and a series of conversations, sometimes with multiple different people. In order to sell effectively, you need to be able to keep up with important details about each prospect, including what your last conversation entailed and when is the best time to schedule the next call or email. This can be a daunting task, but tools that allow you to streamline the process can help.

Outreach.io is one of those tools. Outreach is designed to help salespeople remember critical details and schedule ongoing conversations. Today's guest is Nick Hart, the customer success manager at Outreach.io. Listen to the episode to hear what Nick has to say about what's happening at Outreach and what he thinks about things like email personalization, referral strategies, and building and testing your processes before you implement new sales tools.

Episode Highlights:

• New things that are happening at Outreach.io
• Key things to look at for people who are looking for a solution like Outreach
• Understanding the different personas that you may be selling to
• How to approach sales from different channels
• Email personalization
• Referrals, and the benefits of a top-down referral approach
• Why it's important to test and experiment with your processes
• The importance of providing value with each interaction
• Why you need to build the processes that work for you before implementing a new tool
• Why understanding and mastering tech tools for sales is going to be more important as time goes on
• How marketing professionals can help pave the way for the sales team

Resources:

Nick Hart

Outreach

It may be possible to use manipulative sales techniques to sell people things that they don't really want or need. But do you really want to do that, and is it really a good strategy in the long run? Today's guest talks about the importance of centering the customer's needs, even if that means passing up an immediate sale, and how that strategy can pay off in the long run.

Andrew Priestly is a business coach, chairman of the Children's Trust, a publisher, and an author. In today's episode, he talks about his background in teaching and then real estate sales, his psychology training, and how all of that got him to where he is today. Listen to the episode to hear what Andrew say about sales tactics, the impact of the internet, the importance of personal relationships, and his new book that features contributions from experts in the sales field.

Episode Highlights:

• Andrew's background in real estate sales
• How Andrew started researching sales tactics and where they came from
• How the internet has affected the sales world
• The impact of Facebook
• The importance of personal conversations in selling
• Andrew's book
• How Andrew went about getting contributors for his book
• The feedback Andrew is getting from his book's readers
• The psychology of sales
• Why Andrew believes in the using sales tactics responsibly
• Why building relationships matters in sales

Resources:

Andrew Priestly

Sales Genius 1: 20 top sales professionals share their sales secrets

Today's guest is someone that you've heard on the podcast before. Donato Diorio joined us on a previous episode to talk about the virtue of voicemail and how to handle voicemail properly. Today he's with us to talk about a different subject.

Donato is the founder and principal consultant at a company called DataZ, and today he's going to talk about data. Listen to the episode to hear what Donato has to say about what led him to put together a strategy for assessments, where the data that he uses comes from, and the importance of considering sentiment in data assessment.

Episode Highlights:

• What got Donato interested in putting together a strategy for assessment
• What led Donato to build the systems and frameworks at DataZ
• How Donato differentiates between different roles
• How Donato can quickly assess the health of the pipeline based on the data
• Where Donato's data comes from
• How sentiment factors into Donato's work
• How to get a data assessment from Donato
• How Donato's services can help clients in specialized industries

Resources:

Donato Diorio

DataZ

Prospecting involves more than just one conversation. It's a series of conversations, and as the prospector, it's up to you to keep the interactions going. This can result in a lot of work. You need to remember when the last time was that you talked to a particular prospect, work out when the next good time to contact them will be, and figure out what to say – and you have to repeat this process for multiple prospects. Luckily, there are tools that can help streamline this process for you.

Today's guest is Nick Hart, a strategic customer service manager for Outreach.io. Outreach is a tool that performs much of the work for you. It can help you plan your follow-up conversations, make sure that the correct messages are being delivered at the right times and to the right people, and prevent you from forgetting or delaying crucial follow-ups. Listen the episode to hear Nick explain what Outreach does, how to use different types of messaging, and what types of email statistics Nick sees on a regular basis.

Episode Highlights:

• What Outreach does
• How Outreach helps salespeople get the right message across at the right time
• The importance of being both efficient and effective
• How certain types of messaging can help prospects see salespeople as real people, which can make prospects more responsive
• How asking permission can be a form of a call to action
• How to slow down and space out value ads across multiple emails
• The importance of crafting different messages for different personas
• Statistics for email open rates, reply rates, and bounce rates

Resources:

Nick Hart

Outreach

Email Nick at: [email protected]

When you're prospecting, having just a little bit of information can be the key to getting your foot in the door and growing your pipeline. Timing your call or email just right or having the perfect conversation starter can make all the difference when it comes to making a sale. If you know that the company you're looking at has just launched a new project that can benefit from the products you sell or is getting ready to evaluate solutions for the type of service you're selling, you're better able to strike while the iron is hot.

Today's guest is Alex Greer, the founder and CEO of Signal HQ. Signal is a type of technology that you can use to help you get the kind of information that you need to make your sales pitch more effective and help you strategize more easily. Listen the episode to hear Alex explain what Signal HQ does and how it can help with sales.

Episode Highlights:

• What Alex did before becoming the founder and CEO of Signal HQ
• What Signal HQ does
• Why Alex started Signal HQ
• Which types of signals Alex's company focuses on, and which types of signals might also get focus as time goes on
• How Signal HQ can help prospectors prioritize and make the most effective decisions about how to use their time
• Why sales teams are slower than other departments to pick up on some newer technologies that can help them sell more effectively
• How the data provided by Signal HQ can help sales people start conversations with prospects

Resources:

Alex Greer

Signal HQ

Great sales people and effective sales processes are pivotal for any organization to make money. But for startups, it can be difficult to transition from founder-led sales to establishing a good sales team and putting the structure in place for effective sales processes. This can cause some serious disruption in an otherwise good business. Today's guests understand this problem and know how to address it.

Rex Biberston and Kevin Hopp of help organizations build internal sales teams with their company, The Sales Developers. Although outsourcing is a small part of what they do, they built the company with the intent of giving companies the systems, and processes, and methodologies needed to improve their own sales companies. Listen to the episode to hear what Rex and Kevin have to say about what they do, tools that they use to improve efficiency and messaging, and what it's like to be a millennial in sales.

Episode Highlights:

• Kevin's and Rex's company, The Sales Developers, and how they got started
• How The Sales Developers help their clients by giving them the tools they need to build internal sales organizations
• The gap between the startup phase of a company and the time when the company is a fully-formed organization, and how that affects sales
• How Kevin's background showed him the difficulty of scaling a sales team inside of a startup
• How The Sales Developers can make sales people more effective by improving the company's sales processes
• Tools that can help companies handle both full and part-time prospecting
• Why the number of conversations is more important than the number of dials per day in sales
• How salespeople can focus on the things that are going to bring them closest to revenue
• The Sales Developers' Message Builder tool and how it can improve sales messaging
• The book Rex co-authored, Outbound Sales, No Fluff
• How getting the messaging right affects the closing ratio
• Why Rex mentioned that he and co-author Ryan Reisert were millennials in their book

Resources:

The Sales Developers

Rex Biberston

Kevin Hopp

Marketing and sales may intersect more than you previously thought. In fact, there are good reasons why sales should have some involvement in designing marketing for a product or service – after all, it's the sales team that ultimately has to convince their prospects to buy, so it makes sense for sales to have some input into the marketing process.

Today's guest is Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, a B2B market research firm. Sean is also the host of his own podcast, called B2B Revealed. In today's episode, Sean brings his perspective from the marketing side of things to talk about what's going on in sales. Listen to what Sean has to say about some sales terms that you may not have heard yet, how saying "no" can actually help you sell, and why the sales team should be involved in the marketing process.

Episode Highlights:

• What Sean's research firm does and how he got into it
• New sales and marketing terminology
• Why it's important for companies to define boundaries
• How saying "no" can help you sell
• Why sales needs to be involved in marketing
• The importance of choosing the right people for a sales research study
• How the GDPR is affecting email lists
• The reason why salespeople should send more tailored messages in narrower channels
• Why you need to have a waterfall
• How to stack good habits

Resources

Sean Campbell

Cascade Insights

Email Sean at [email protected]