Predictable Prospecting's Podcast

Carson V. Heady is an author and sales leader that I am really excited about talking to. He is in the trenches when it comes to sales. He is there digging in the dirt making sure that those sales are happening. I asked him to come on the show is because he is diving into an becoming an expert at social selling.

When it comes to prospecting, we are habit machines that block out times to do single tasks, and we get stuck when it comes to integrating all of the social tasks into our process. Carson is going to talk about best practices around integrating social into the sales process and specifically the prospecting side of things.

Episode Highlights:

• How social selling is bubbling up as something that we should pay attention to.
• Sales is still a relationship game, but social will enable us to build relationships and stay top of mind.
• How platforms have caught on and integrated into people's day.
• These platform enable us to target specific areas and when people make changes.
• We can keep at the pulse of what is going on.
• It also enables to continue the post sales relationship.
• Display etiquette and be succinct and state your desired value that you are bringing.
• It comes down to adding value.
• How social selling allows us to do a lot of experimentation.
• These social tools can help us take the cold out of cold calling and introducing ourselves in a relatively passive way.
• Consistently reaching out to 5 to 10 people a day and stacking it into your daily routine.
• How it takes a long time to craft and cultivate social relationships, but the returns are unbelievable.
• Gearing messages for your audience and understanding what is working and what is not.
• The stuff that works can be transferred over to your email sequences.
• Assimilate social selling into your evolving sales process.
• Finding the right tools that will work specifically for you and using them to be more effective.
• Begin with the end in mind. What your goal is? Social selling is a wonderful way to share and connect with people.

Resources:

• Birth of a Salesman (The Salesman Against the World) (Volume 1)
• Birth of a Salesman: Ultimate Edition
• Carson V. Heady on LinkedIn
• @cvheady007 on Twitter
• Crowdfire

The telephone is a vital instrument for us to use when having sales conversations. Telephone sales expert Art Sobczak is here today to share some of his amazing telephone sales knowledge. I consider Art Sobczak a mentor. I have been following him since 1985. He is the president of Business by Phone and the author of books like Smart Calling, Sell More in Less Time, and Telephone Tips that Sell. He is an expert in utilizing the phone for sales conversations.

Art shares how selling is the greatest profession in the world, and how he wakes up everyday knowing that there are people out there that he can serve in this profession. A lot has changed over the years, but people still buy from people, and aside from face-to-face, voice-to-voice is the best way to sell to those people. This is a great conversation, and Art shares tips and selling knowledge from his 35 years of selling experience.

Episode Highlights:

• Art wakes up everyday knowing that there are people out there waiting to be served.
• Making a difference through the greatest profession in the world which is sales.
• How a lot has changed over the years, but people still buy from humans and the most effective way to sell is by speaking with people.
• Other than face to face, the best way to sell is voice to voice.
• How sales enablement tools can be distracting if not used correctly or effectively.
• The importance of examining what your sales process looks like and who you are selling to.
• How using the phone is a permission based tool that can cut through a lot of the clutter.
• How fear of the phone stems from a lack of knowledge.
• The importance of having relevant and targeted messaging.
• Different calls require varying degrees of preparation and research.
• The problems of disguising call avoidance as research.
• When you get voicemail, your purpose is to leave a question in that person's mind.
• The importance of call quality and investing in good equipment.

Resources:

• Business by Phone
• Smart Calling
• Books by Art Sobczak

Henry Schuck is the Co-Founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg a platform for finding, connecting, and selling to more prospects using a accurate high-quality contact database. The company was founded in 2007, and Henry has led it through rapid growth going from the original three employees to over 500 today.

Henry is the list expert, so put your seatbelts on. We have a great conversation about lists. In this episode, he shares the story of how he and a friend founded DiscoverOrg and how they grew the company. They even had to refine their product to meet their own sales needs. Once they got the process down, their sales numbers went through the roof.

Episode Highlights:

• DiscoverOrg is a sales intelligence tool that profiles who's who in about 175,000 corporations.
• They use a mix of proprietary technology and a team of 300 human researchers.
• Maintaining the data is one of the most difficult aspects.
• It takes 70 hours to count to a million. They profile almost 3 million contacts across their database.
• Henry has been in this space for more than half of his life. He began with a small intelligence company called iProfile.
• Then he went to law school.
• In 2007, Henry and a friend from iProfile started DiscoverOrg and grew it organically.
• They were missing projections by 6 million dollars in 2010. They started thinking about how to plug that hole.
• Working backwards to reach a goal. They found the resources they needed, but they needed to build the list datasets for themselves.
• They realized they needed a team of English speaking humans to solve their information gap in their lists.
• They would score fits on a scale of 1 through 5 using what they called fit rank. Then they would have the human team build out the lists of the companies that fit.
• Knowing what companies and people to talk to and their contact information and what tools they use and then target the approach to them.
• Once they got the processes into place to deliver high quality information, they blew their sales numbers out.
• The biggest lever you have to pull is the data you feed your SDR team allowing them to focus on messaging and follow up.
• You want your datatool to cleanse and maintain the numbers, emails, and contact info.
• This is an investment that pays off through everything in your organization.
• They looked at performance metrics to see how many calls needed to be made to hit sales numbers and then worked backwards to provide that amount of contacts.
• If a company doesn't respond, you still continue to call them. They are still in your market. Organization priorities are constantly changing.
• List fatigue and a 30% attrition rate. Refreshing the lists is absolutely critical.

Resources:

• DiscoverOrg
• [email protected]
• 360-783-6800
• Henry Schuck on LinkedIn
• @HenryLSchuck on Twitter
• Salesforce
• Marketo
• HubSpot
• Pardot
• Outreach
• SalesLoft
• PersistIQ
• Yesware
• Steven Covey

Mario Martinez Jr. is the CEO and founder of a fantastic company called Vengreso. They are a B2B digital sales transformation company and they do their magic through content marketing, social selling, and a variety of things. Mario spent 82 consecutive quarters in B2B sales and leadership roles growing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually.Mario is one of 19 sales influencers invited to appear in the Salesforce documentary film "The Story of Sales" to be launched in 2018. He is recognized as the Number 1 Top Sales Performance Guru in the world, named 2018's Top 10 Sales Influencers by The Modern Sales Magazine, and in 2017 he was named the Top 25 Inside Sales Professional and the 6th Most Influential Social Selling Leader globally.As a renowned digital sales evangelist, Mario teaches marketing and sales professionals how to develop an engaging personal brand to attract today's modern buyer using the digital sales ecosystem. Mario is the host of the popular Selling With Social Podcast. He's been featured in Forbes, INC., the Examiner.com and is a contributor to the Huffington Post. He's a highly sought-after Keynote Speaker with brands such as LinkedIn, SAP, and Cisco. He is also known to open a keynote with a Salsa dance.

Episode Highlights:

• Social versus digital and how social selling to engage, build relationships, and create conversations will just become selling.
• Digital is just using your online presence to establish and create a personal and professional presence.
• It's about discovering a platform to engage with your clients.
• After engaging with clients, we need to connect with them to sell to them.
• Feeding your network isn't just putting content in your feed, it is also providing customized information to individual prospects and clients.
• It's also a good idea to automate what you can.
• The sales job is to prospect one-on-one. Marketing is one to many.
• The five steps to digital selling. Have the right brand. Correctly initiate, engage, and maintain a relationship. Do the research and use tools to effectively connect with buyers. Feed your network regularly. Measure your prospecting success through the number of conversations you have.
• The two, three, and four-week meeting request rule: "Here are three dates and times that work for me." Also look for when in the day the buyer likes to meet.
• Asking for a 30 minute as opposed to a 15 minute appointment.
• The sole purpose of identifying whether a prospect has a problem that you can solve.
• Three by three rule. Research the person, the company, and get to know the prospect a bit before the meeting. Find three things in three minutes to incorporate into the conversation that show that you did your homework.

Resources:

• Vengreso Home Page
• Vengreso Personal Branding
• Vengreso Content Sharing
• Mario Martinez Jr on LinkedIn
• Vengreso on YouTube
• @M_3jr on Twitter

Account based marketing or ABM is an alternative to B2B. It's a strategy where an individual account is treated as its own market of one. Brandon Redlinger manages growth at Engagio which provides software products for account based marketing and account based sales.

Brandon is going to share his experiences and strategies working in this funnel. I'm hoping that you will come away with some key takeaways and educational points that you can apply right away. Brandon also shares how account based everything may be more appropriate because bigger companies are now pushing account based success in all aspects of sales and marketing.

Episode Highlights:

• The account based approach is strategic marketing that is personal and relevant coordinated between different functions.
• It can be used in the top of the funnel to open doors or lower in the funnel for account expansion, upsells, and more.
• This concept is similar to strategic selling targeted at a smaller set of accounts but at bigger deals.
• Technology is enabling marketing to help sales open doors by using intelligence, predictive modeling, and engagement scoring.
• Casting a wide net with marketing, inbound, content, demand generation, and ABM.
• How account based marketing helps in all five levels of awareness.
• Large companies have global accounts with many divisions. This is why working with relationships within the accounts is important.
• How engagio allows tracking with a different customer touchpoints like SalesForce, Marketo, your CRM, or Google Apps.
• The importance of retention and how many VCs are looking at these numbers over growth numbers.
• How a lot of people will jump into ABM and get it wrong. How important it is to look at if it is right for you and fits within your business model.
• The importance of not executing before you have a plan.
• The co-founder of Engagio was actually the co-founder of Marketo, and he left because he feels that account based marketing is the future of B2B.

Resources:

• Engagio
• Engagio on Facebook
• @Engagio on Twitter
• Brandon Redlinger on LinkedIn
• [email protected]
• The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing
• Salesforce
• Marketo

Having issues with mindset and skill set can amplify issues that we may have at the top of the sales funnel. Will Barron the host of The Salesman Podcast is here today to talk about mindset. He has so many skills and there are so many topics that we can talk about, but I wanted to hone in on mindset because having the right mindset can amplify our sales success.

Will has interviewed so many people and has had so many conversations that he brings a wealth of knowledge to the show. The Salesman Podcast is the most downloaded award winning B2B sales show on iTunes. The reason Will started his podcast was because he was hitting his sales marks, but he wanted to go beyond that and smash it. Now he shares some of his deep dive sales knowledge with us here today.

Episode Highlights:

• How Will has personally beat his chronic procrastination through habits.
• His biggest sales mind hack was actually understanding why he wanted to work in sales in the first place.
• He worked in sales because he wanted to save up cash to start a business.
• Once he made this plan he worked harder, put his head down, and got things done.
• Having an end goal can be an underrated sales tool.
• How he started asking the questions of what he wanted to achieve through his sales work throughout his life and minimize regrets.
• Projecting your future happiness and asking if what you are doing now will lead to your happiness.
• Marginally acceptable goals, acceptable goals, and whoopie goals!
• Focusing on blocking out time for productive single focused goals.
• Will's passion is getting people excited about science. His motivation for doing the sales podcast is leading to his goal of starting his new Excited About Science podcast.
• He wants to break the mundaneness of life by giving people fun facts about science every morning.
• Will shares his routine and how he timeblocks and protects himself from distractions. Then it is habit and process.
• How getting a 25 minute pomodoro task done helps to build momentum.
• It is easier to carry on with the work then to change the task.
• Start in small blocks and work your way up. Start with 25 minutes and work up.
• Being specific with our goals and making sure you physically have the time to fill in the slots or else you have to be more efficient.
• Use trial and error to move your blocks around until you find the best nuggets of time to get stuff done.
• It's about highest impact and lowest effort.
• Working the way your prospects work to have those conversations.

Resources:

• Awaken the Giant Within
• The Pomodoro Technique
• Marinara Timer
• The Salesman Podcast
• Will Barron on LinkedIn

The top of the funnel and improving, augmenting, and optimizing the ability to start conversations with whales on a consistent basis for higher revenue and a higher lifetime value is at the top of most listeners minds. Hardy Kalisher is the Executive Director of Parallel Path out of Boulder, CO. He is here today to talk about more of the marketing side of things.

His focus is generating awareness and serving up those great opportunities for us. Parallel Path is a digital marketing agency, and Hardy shares his strategies for getting quality responses to bubble up to the top, so that we can get these potential clients into the pipeline and start those all important conversations.

Episode Highlights:

• How sports create a certain amount of discipline and focus.
• Getting too many minow leads that are muddying up the pipeline.
• How digital marketing is best implemented on the outreach side of things.
• How sales and marketing are both working towards the same goal of growth.
• Foundationally building a data collection infrastructure for marketing to feed the funnel so that the sales team can engage.
• Optimizing the marketing for a sales funnel that creates revenue.
• Optimizing for campaigns that actually close deals.
• Parallel Path has a proprietary solution structure that closes that loop.
• Holding on to clients by making relationships last and closing the loop end-to-end and continuing to optimize.
• Finding the lifetime value of customers.
• Finding a cost per lead threshold that makes sense.
• Creating solutions for sales and marketing people to work together to create the golden leads.
• Having a checklist that leaves no stone unturned.
• Working on process for efficiency and effectiveness even though each deployment will be custom.
• From data collection to implementation in three weeks. Challenges are related to allocated sales and marketing resources.
• The unlimited potential of the future state of digital and marketing.

Resources:

• Parallel Path
• [email protected]
• Parallel Path on LinkedIn
• Parallel Path on Facebook

George Bronten the founder and CEO of Membrain is here today to talk about sales effectiveness and how to drive winning behaviors. Membrain is a sales effectiveness platform that helps complex B2B sales. There goals are to make it easy to execute your process, enable your team, coach effectively, and optimize your strategy.

George is a lifelong entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. Because of the Internet and global competition, George knew the sales process needed to evolve. It is his vision to increase sales effectiveness using modern SaaS technology.

Episode Highlights:

• After failing to build a successful sales team. George realized that he had some wrong assumptions.
• George started Membrain to create a way of working and selling that gives a strategy for sales people to use.
• Everything needs to be centered around the buyer.
• How can we differentiate when everything looks the same.
• How we sell is going to be even more important in the future.
• Having a buyer centered strategy that is centered around the buyer.
• Making sure everyone has the skillset to execute things properly.
• Then empowering everyone with the processes to be successful.
• The huge importance of management and being a better coach.
• Sales people having multiple roles and problems that arise around that.
• Focus first by starting with the clients.
• Reducing the number of mistakes made and having technical people and sales people onboard with new technology.
• Getting the right people onboard in the right stage of the process. Systemizing this process.
• The importance of milestones and points of interest in a checklist. Go down the checklist in relevance of the goal.
• Autonomy and resistance to a checklist.
• How the sales process is dynamic and needs to be flexible.
• The process is living, lean, and constantly getting adjusted. The importance of analytics.
• Start planning what area of the pipeline you can address in the first quarter.

Resources:

• Checklist Manifesto
• Membrain
• [email protected]
• @georgebronten on Twitter
• George Bronten on LinkedIn

Jamie Crosbie is here today to talk about the top of the funnel. Jamie has experience all the way through the funnel and knows a lot about the pipeline. For the show, I asked her to focus on the top of the funnel, but if you like her processes and workflows by all means get in touch with her because she has a lot to share.

Jamie has over 20 years of experience in sales leadership and the talent acquisition industry. She founded ProActivate over 13 years ago. ProActivate partners globally with forward thinking leaders of organizations to achieve their revenue goals. We provide the top-shelf sales talent you need to amplify your message, leverage your position, and expand your base. Our unique model is the next generation of sales talent acquisition. We qualify talent through an in-depth, precise methodology based on behavioral modeling, digging deep into both skill-set, mindset and simulation evaluations. This allows us to offer only the most qualified sales professionals for your continuing strong growth.

Jamie is a certified speaker in The High Performance Mindset ® system, a revolutionary model that is elevating the performance of professionals ranging from athletes to executives to sales leaders. During these trainings she shares both the science and working tools that you can use immediately to enhance performance both for yourself and your team members. It's proven that human performance is limited not primarily by skills and knowledge, but by the nature of our thinking, our mental preparation for success and the environment within which we choose to operate.

Episode Highlights:

• The passion behind ProActivate is to help organizations achieve revenue goals, increase productivity, and maximize talent and performance.
• They help replace C players with A players and build talent to help organizations create a peak performance culture.
• They mostly focus on the people piece, but skillset, mindset, and toolset enable people to be successful.
• How mindset is a peak interest of students.
• The importance of mindset for any industry. We have 60,000 thoughts everyday and 80% are negative. The impact on a sales person who deals with rejection is huge.
• How engaging in higher level thinking enables us to perform at higher levels.
• How habits are something that you do. Moving from discipline and sheer will to habits of work processes.
• Hiring the best and upgrading the rest.
• How the workshop has a step-by-step framework for developing mindset skills in a tangible way.
• How rewarding it is to unleash someone's mindset to the highest level.
• For the next year, write down your goals and know your bigger why behind them.

Resources:

• ProActivate
• The Power of 2 - Exponential Sales Leadership
• @jmcrosbie on Twitter
• Jamie Crosbie on LinkedIn
• [email protected]
• (214)720-9922

Process and metrics are so important, but there is a whole other side to selling. In this episode, I have a conversation with sales expert Mark SA Smith. We talk about selling professionally and being authentic. We talk about polishing the saw not only with systems and frameworks, but when it comes to the conversational side and speaking from the heart.

Mark shares stories of exceptional sales professionals. Ones who have skills like caring about their customers success, having foresight, choosing who you do business with, and being pragmatic. He talks about the importance of trust, and how the number one salesperson is usually the most trusted salesperson. We also talk about the importance of customer motivation and more.

Episode Highlights:

• How life can be easier when you are in build mode because you have a path planned out.
• Moving from knowing what's next to being OK with uncertainty.
• Having a growth mindset and progressing in a way that is comfortable for you.
• How life is a series of challenges and triumphs.
• How the person who signs the checks is the person who actually closes the sale.
• Being a trusted partner as opposed to a sales person.
• Creating customer success through foresight. Making a mutually profitable transaction.
• Characteristics of a closer are caring about customer success, having foresight, picking your customers, and being pragmatic.
• Working consistently instead of working hard.
• The importance of trust and relationships with customers.
• The product line is only 10% of the sales equation. Most sales people focus on the product. Focus on helping the customer relationship instead.
• FAB charts or features and advantages. Attempting to map product to customer motivation. It should be mapping motivation to product.
• Stop pitching and start asking questions and listening.
• Offering permission to defer helps with building relationship.
• Where the empathy comes into play and being open.

Resources:

• Bo Burlingham
• Mark SA Smith LinkedIn
• Selling Disruption Show
• Dress for Success