Revenue Harvest

This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Nancy Duarte and Koula Callahan. Today's guests break down the different facets f sales presentations and share their expertise in becoming better communicators.

Nancy is the Principal at Duarte, Inc. and she shares the persuasive power of Slidedocs, while Koula is the Senior Director of Content at StoryBrand and she teaches a communication framework that positions customers as the hero.

Nancy explains how empathy plays a big role in connecting with clients and how sales leaders can take the mentorship role for effective communication. Nancy has published several books like Data Story and Illuminate and she goes through some golden nuggets found here to apply to your sales presentations today.

Koula shares the importance of creating a larger overarching story, which includes data and statistics as support, to connect with the pain points of your client. She explains how to create a winning sales presentation using a simple step-by-step process, and creating calls to action which gets the customer's skin in the game.

HIGHLIGHTS

03:45 Empathy and storytelling are powerful tools in sales presentations

10:36 Slidedocs are persuasive for their modality

14:15 Data Story: Explaining the 3-act executive summary

24:33 Illuminate: Become the mentor to effectively communicate change

29:25 How to connect with Nancy

32:38 Getting comfortable is the first step to a successful presentation

36:43 Frame data into a larger more relatable narrative for effective sales

43:43 Speak directly to your customer's objections and present a solution

47:09 A step-by-step guide to creating successful sales presentations

52:28 Create a call to action that gets commitment

56:36 Ask questions to gain insight but let the customer do the talking

1:00:17 How to connect with Koula

QUOTES

05:07 "You can't make it all about your sale, you can't make it all about your agenda, you can't make it all about you. You should show up and enrich your customer's life or your prospect's life in some way."

28:52 "Your sole purpose and your sole role is to help someone else get unstuck. That's your job is I'm going to bring a magical gift, a special tool, and help them get unstuck. Those are the three things a mentor does."

37:40 "In this digital world, when you just add to that noise of statistics and data and things that somebody has to remember and this is what you need to know to think that I'm interesting enough to give me your money, it just gets lost in the noise."

41:52 "When you start with the problem, it then frames all of those data points and statistics as important to them because it helps them solve their problem."

44:44 "If you know the top 3 objections that the person on the other side of the screen has, then I would speak very clearly and directly to those objections and then come up with some sort of statement or case study or testimonial."

52:58 "You want your customer to, as they get closer to the buying decision, you want them to have had put skin in the game so that they are more likely to chase down that investment so that they see a return."

59:55 "It's your job to guide that conversation in such a way that you pull out what it is your customer is struggling with, what future they really long for, and then once you know those things, it allows you to enter into the narrative with that relief."

This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Alice Heiman, Founder & Chief Sales Energizer at Alice Heiman, LLC. Good selling is still good selling even without geographical territories.

Alice shares how to transition your sales around the customer and do business the way the market wants to do business. She explains the benefits of aligning your sales people with buying methods and how to use team selling to service larger clients.

She shares her process of segmenting prospects and rating and ranking accounts based on metrics other than territory. Alice also discusses the importance of having a CRM and how this can be used to manage relations and measure salespeople on the level of their client relationships.

For your sales reps, Alice explains that leaderboards should display how deals come in, perhaps via referrals, to show the quality of the deals coming in.

You can connect with Alice in the links below:

• Website (Alice Heiman) - https://aliceheiman.com/
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/
• Twitter - https://twitter.com/aliceheiman
• Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/aliceheiman/

To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.

You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links:

• Website (Revenue Harvest) - http://www.therevenueharvest.com/
• Website (Nigel Green) - https://nigelgreen.co/
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/revenueharvest/

HIGHLIGHTS

04:10 Adapt to video selling: Communicate with your hands

07:37 Sales is adapting as it veers away from territory

10:36 Segmenting prospects and aligning sales people with buyer buying methods

16:00 Using team selling to create customer trust and continuity

20:59 Transition your sales structure around the customer

24:27 Rating and ranking your current customers

28:07 Rework the book of business during transition

36:03 Measure salespeople with the number of relationships and referrals

43:57 Tips for recruiting in account management versus territory management

47:50 Connect with Alice

QUOTES

07:03 "Some things have changed but mostly they haven't changed. Good selling is good selling."

13:09 "What you have to know is how your customers want to buy. That's what you have to know. And you can figure this out by looking at the customers who already buy from you and maybe asking them."

13:47 "The main thing is set it up in a way that works best for your customer, not a way that's easy for you necessarily to track and manage."

22:25 "Rank them by what they spend. But then, I want to rate them also because just because they spend the most, doesn't mean they're the best customer or that they have the most potential to buy more."

28:34 "You could triple or quadruple that 8 million if you would spread those accounts over more people who could actually interface with them and manage them and talk to them because 1 rep cannot touch all of those accounts."

44:15 "In our hiring process, we really have to figure out what the strengths are of each seller and their propensity to figure things out and build their own little business. So they have to treat it more entrepreneurially."

This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Justin Welsh, Co-Founder of Audience & Income. Creating a meaningful personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn can have significant impacts on your corporate brand.

Not only can this significantly grow your network, you can also meet other leaders who can shortcut your career goals. Justin stresses the importance of investing in yourself especially through courses created by market and thought leaders.

While becoming the best at what you do is certainly admirable, Justin also explains that you don't always have to be the guy and that other people can certainly be the best person for a certain job. He also shares that taking time off to decompress before taking on your next big role helps stave off burnout.

You can connect with Justin in the links below:

To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.

You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links:

HIGHLIGHTS

04:20 Leveraging personal LinkedIn brands alongside corporate brands

08:20 Control the narrative of your personal brand

13:48 Copywriting a compelling story and becoming a social media magnet

17:45 Invest in yourself and reap multitudes of returns

22:20 Keep building your knowledge through courses and master guides

24:43 Managing burn out, taking time off, and knowing when to move on

32:13 Guide your career with an ideal opportunity profile and liquidity event

QUOTES

05:25 "I was the SVP of sales, Kevin Dorsey who worked as the VP of inside sales, we both had meaningful brands on LinkedIn, still do to this day. And that made recruiting easier. It made going and finding really top sales talent much easier."

10:29 "I highly recommend that sales leaders go out start controlling the narrative. Much like why small businesses have websites, they get to control the narrative… versus relying on third-party information."

16:22 "When you get better at writing, you know how to hook folks in. When you can hook folks in, you get engagement. When you get engagement, your posts grow, your following grows."

19:17 "I believe that when I put a dollar into myself, it generally comes back both short term and long term in a high multiple. And so, I invest myself. I keep my expenses low. I try not to live a lavish lifestyle."

31:35 "For me, it was taking a little bit of time off. I wish I had taken off more and being very specific with the customer base that I serve."

This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Andy Raskin who helps CEOs align their teams around a strategic narrative. This strategic narrative shows how there used to be an old game of how to win in the world, but now there's a new game and look how all the winners are starting to play it already.

Andy shares how he helps CEOs form leadership groups that can shape the strategic narrative of the company. It is important to show the winners and the losers of this new game and how CEOs can become winners too.

He uses the example of ownership versus subscription and how the unicorns have all shifted to providing services instead of selling products. Andy also advises companies to ask their customers what can change their life and how you can align yourself to that.

You can connect with Andy in the links below:

To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.

You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links:

HIGHLIGHTS

04:39 Creating a strategic narrative with a CEO

11:27 Strategic narrative disrupts changing the game for everybody

12:53 Create a strategic narrative: Form a leadership group and implement in sales

19:45 How companies can use strategic narrative

27:23 Show the stakes that make it about life and death

32:29 Talk to customers to know how you can change their life

36:00 Use slides with takeaways only

39:34 Covid was an accelerant that reshaped strategic narrative

QUOTES

03:02 "What is the asset that we should use to define the story that everyone's telling? I came to the sales deck, that the sales deck, the sales pitch is really the core narrative of the company."

08:38 "Look at the great strategic narratives, they all have this structure which is there was an old game that used to be a great game that was the way to win in the world, and now there's a new game and look all the winners are starting to play this new game."

28:35 "Look at all the companies that are thriving. In terms of the incumbents, if they haven't shifted from selling stuff to selling services, they're dead. Like the IBMs of the world and the HPs."

42:59 "Opinions to reality was a shift they were talking about before Covid and part of this is because hey now you have the sales calls recorded. You have them as data that you can mine with artificial intelligence or whatever."

This episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast with Nigel Green features Rory Vaden, Co-Founder of Brand Builders Group and bestselling author of Take the Stairs. Managing time is a misnomer as the only thing anyone can really manage is their own self.

To truly multiply your time, you must choose the activities you do today that will lead to more time tomorrow. Rory discusses some mental prisons of our own construction which include procrastination techniques that can cleverly look like productivity.

Rory also explains the data they found that people are more likely to work for, buy from, and recommend someone with an established personal brand. This has far-reaching consequences for companies and the metrics they use to recruit top talent.

Some benefits of finding talent with personal brands include credibility from being associated with your company, higher sales, more trusted recruiting, and increased brand awareness.

You can connect with Rory in the links below:

To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.

You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links:

HIGHLIGHTS

04:28 Choosing what you spend your time on is what multiplies your time

10:21 Accept that your choices have led to outcomes you are living in today

16:46 Recognizing priority delusion and creative avoidance

24:36 Recruiting versus hiring: A leader with a personal brand has higher value

39:17 Employees with personal brands should be celebrated not feared

47:58 Navigating mental prisons and adding value to other people

QUOTES

04:54 "There is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. You manage yourself. You choose what you're going to do."

11:27 "The prison sentence, it's a mental prison of our own construction. Almost every limit we bump up against in life is a mental prison of our own construction. We think that we are somehow helpless victim of circumstances forced upon us."

23:11 "Am I being intentional, conscious, deliberate, aware, and disciplined about spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow?"

31:20 "We define personal branding simply as the digitization of reputation. That's what it is."

34:12 "If you can help your people build a personal brand, what you're doing is adding trust to your organization. It means you can sell faster. You can sell at higher prices. You can recruit better people."

50:49 "We know that from being in sales and from being executives and entrepreneurs, the more people we add value to, the more value shows back up at in our life."

This is the debut episode of the Revenue Harvest Podcast season 2 with Nigel Green. Joining today's conversation is Nicole Moberg, CEO of Thrive Senior Living, as she breaks down the 3 phases of hiring a great sales team: you select us, we select you, and the alignment of expectations.

Nicole uses 5 main elements to guide this decision-making process, such as identifying the core competencies that you require of a sales role, building a bench, using a framework to inform hiring decisions, requiring character references, and using tools like Predictive Index.

Hiring the best salespeople takes more than just HR recommendations. It requires constant work to build your sales network, strategic use of compensation negotiations to finally make an offer, and following a sales success framework. Nicole also shares some red flags sales leaders should watch out for when hiring new talents.

HIGHLIGHTS

03:43 5 core elements in the selection process before hiring

05:08 Identifying core competencies and building a bench

15:28 Don't rely on HR recommendations and do character checks yourself

18:27 Using Predictive Index and spotting good character references

23:25 Other factors that affect hiring: Biases, experience, and intuition

29:42 Navigating the question of compensation and making an offer

36:24 Assessing new hires: 4 to 5 week training program and quarterly assimilations

39:07 Recognizing red flags: What to watch out for and noticing nonverbal cues

QUOTES

05:46 "Looking at the outcomes and then defining, working backwards in a sense, and defining okay, with that outcome that we're looking for, what is then the criteria? What is the competency that we're looking for?"

08:34 "This may or may not be unusual for some people, but we'll sit down and have dinner or lunch or coffee not only with the candidate but with their support system. And that could be a family member, that could be a partner, a husband, wife."

19:18 "If I believe that they could potentially be coached on that gap, Predictive Index has a really good job of offering up areas of opportunity in the form of interview questions. So I usually do it in what I would call phase 2 of the selection process."

25:46 "Staying true to your system that you've laid out can be challenging especially if you've not built the bench and you're trying to catch up with an opening and fill it quickly. You tend to, at that point, feel a little bit more desperate."

39:17 "That victim mentality, that I versus they, that skipping around without a great explanation, and that mentality of the grass is always greener, I think those red flags are really important not to ignore."

You can connect with Nicole in the link below:

To hear more episodes of The Revenue Harvest Podcast, you can visit http://www.therevenueharvest.com/ or listen to major podcasting platforms such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc.

You can also connect with Nigel by visiting the following links:

Email is not dead. The phone is not dead. Yet so many sales teams but all their eggs in the LinkedIn basket. It's the person and their content connected to the email and phone that’s broken. Although sales processes have shifted with new tools, the opportunity in understanding how to structure outreach in a way that gets people to want to engage with you in a conversation hasn’t.

Join Marcus Murphy, the CEO of The Five Percent and Board of Advisor member to LinkedIn, in a conversation around building sales teams from scratch and making the most of LinkedIn.

Show notes:

• When you're coming in to build a brand new sales team at a company that's never had one, you have to understand and fall in line with the momentum they've already built. And you have to find a way to amplify what already works.
   
• Email is not dead. The phone is not dead. It's the person and their content connected to the email and phone that’s broken.
   
• You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don't see the value of LinkedIn with your people and how they're using it.
   
• Engaged/open conversations is a great KPI for LinkedIn InMail as opposed to an automated spray and pray model. Send 20 personalized, intentional, targeted messages that are going to result in a much bigger response than 100 automated ones.
   
• If you've taken yourself out of the teacher role, then you are killing your team slowly.
   
• If you’re growing out of cash capital, then you have to home grow your talent. Take high performers in the customer support team and graduate them into an MDR, SDR, BDR type roles, working them into being a well-rounded senior account executive.
   
• If you’re growing a team from scratch, be the first person that goes through the sales process so you create a wash and repeat process. Be mindful that if you are senior in your sales role, there are tactics you may try that are not repeatable for someone less polished and experienced.
   
• The sales process is shifting, however there are some tools in your inside sales playbook that have remained the same such as a CRM to organize your current customers and potential. Zoom, chat, LinkedIn and some type of outreach software should be investments for your sales processes if they’re not already there.
• Followup tends to be the least amount of effort and energy exercised by a sales leader, but it seems to be one of the most beneficial and crucial parts that leaders constantly overlook.
   
• If you're going to be a thought leader, be a thought leader in what your prospective customer cares about.
   
• Good thought leadership focuses on answering questions for the customer and addressing pain points.
   
• Having a personal brand is only helpful if you have built a large enough platform that you have more credibility to introduce your reps and your people to conversations that they normally would just get rejected on.
   
• The same things that make you really competitive, and make you a successful sales leader, are also the same things that have this ability to unleash the darkness that's in you, and you’ve got to do the work to keep that in check.

For links and resources, visit https://nigelgreen.co/revenue-harvest/

More often than not, the relationship between marketing and sales is siloed at best or it's adversarial, at worse.There’s no better time to lean into digital and for these organizations to unite. In this episode, Andrew Dumont draws on ways for sales and marketing organizations to be aligned on their shared revenue goals.

Andrew Dumont is a serial technologist with a passion for building, growing, and investing in early-stage companies. He's currently the founder of Curious Capital and has worked as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Betaworks in New York City, a startup studio that has invested in companies like Tumblr and AirBnB, and has created companies like Bitly, Giphy, and Chartbeat.

Show notes:

• Marketing should be goaled on revenue and top level business metrics as opposed to vanity marketing metrics.
   
• Weekly pipeline conversations between marketing and sales leaders is critical to maintaining that relationship. A standing agenda could include pipeline updates from the sales organization, performance from the marketing organization, activities attributed in terms of leads generated, or attributed revenue.
   
• One of the big tensions in conversations between sales and marketing is ensuring that marketing is filling in the gaps when it comes to collateral and that the sales teams feel they have the materials and support for them to be successful. Marketing should set goals for that and then benchmark against whether they were able to help sales reach those goals.
   
• At a minimum, a website should be making the life of the seller easier. A visual website experience is a key component of the brand and how reputable you look as an organization.
   
• Marketing should be responsible for building predictable, repeatable processes for generating qualified leads for the sales organization
   
• As a marketing organization, revenue is the key determining metric of whether you're successful or not. If you're not creating leads that turn into revenue, then you're just spinning your wheels.
• A lot of strife comes from marketing vanity metrics, and marketing organizations being focused on leads and getting people into the funnel, however if those leads aren’t qualified, that's where the disconnect happens between sales and marketing.
   
• Attribution is a huge challenge for sales and marketing. When the shared focus is on revenue and growing the business, you don’t have to worry as much about whether sales generated the lead or marketing generated the lead.
   
• A good sales and marketing alignment meeting may mean walking through the campaigns and activities for the week, looking at the timing, and pipeline, and uncovering disconnects. That’s when these meetings are valuable.
   
• Marketing should go through the sales process. They should be a sales person for several days, try to sell the product and have conversations with customers to understand where they are failing in terms of their messaging, and the way the product is being served.
   
• Modern marketers today are very tactical. They know a lot about SEO, content marketing, they know about all these channels that exist on how to generate leads and generate new customers, but they actually step over the core of it which is: what is the value proposition? What is the benefit to the customer? What are the objections to why this product wouldn't work well for them?

For links and resources from the episode, visit https://nigelgreen.co/revenue-harvest/

Too often, the role of sales development is minimized in an organization. By celebrating this role and valuing each function of sales teams equally, organizations that celebrate and reciprocate that feeling of how important sales development reps are to the broader organization have higher performing and more productive sales teams.

In this episode, Alea Homison, Vice President of Sales Enablement and Sales Development at AlphaSense, talks how to celebrate sales development reps and the importance of valuing each function of sales teams equally. She specializes in building sales enablement programs for organizations focused on growth and scalability and has developed and managed a variety of high performing teams throughout her careers in sales, sales strategy, client service, corporate strategy, and investment banking.

Show notes:

• Put your people first. Make it a priority to deeply understand the people on your team. For example, understand what motivates and inspires them, understand their personality, and how you as a leader need to make certain adjustments for certain individuals based on their personality profile.
   
• Be intentional about how you interview sales reps, so you can be sure that you are identifying and attracting the right talent to your team.
   
• We all have our own biases in the hiring process. You need structure to be able to compare like for like.
   
• The four key criteria to focus on for hiring is: general mental acuity, curiosity, conscientiousness, and grit. Data tells us that these characteristics move the needle with respect to success in roles. Chemistry is also an important competency piece to consider during the hiring process.
   
• People that are leading a function should be obsessed with that function. Know the impact that you can have on someone's career by being a great mentor and leader of a sales development team.
   
• Value each function of sales teams equally. Don’t minimize sales development and their contribution to the organization based on how long they've been doing sales. Elevate and celebrate them in an equal way to account executives and customer success managers.
   
• Hire sales development managers that love sales development and understand how essential it is to the success of an organization. The organization should reciprocate that feeling of how important sales dev is to the broader organization.
   
• Data from Leading Sales Development says if you're a former athlete from a team sport, you're no more or less likely to be successful than a non former athlete, however, individual sports athletes have an even greater chance of being successful in a sales roles because it is your solo work and ethic that contributes to your success.

• A weekly cadence with the chief revenue officer, their direct reports, the customer success leader, and account executive and sales development leaders allows you to have consistent alignment and move things forward on a consistent basis. By doing these weekly syncs, you give each other that time back at the end of the month. So at the end of the month, you'll actually reprioritize time and be giving bandwidth back to each other as much as possible.
   
• Conduct internal quarterly business reviews. Account executives should be treated as though they’re owners of their own business and so essentially, it's a readout of the prior quarter: what went well? What didn't go well? How do they believe they need additional resources or support across the organization going forward?
• You owe your team systems that will allow them to be successful. Hire smart and capable people and give them creative freedom within those systems.

For resources and links from the episode, visit https://nigelgreen.co/revenue-harvest/

The world of work has essentially changed forever with virtual selling. Many organizations may not have the luxury of augmenting their salesforce with talents that is more naturally suited for this environment, however there is a real opportunity to use this new medium to make our sales teams even better. Ted Olsen leads this conversation in helping sales leaders understand how to coach individuals who are struggling in the new environment by continuing to tap into their natural strengths

Ted Olson currently leads the rapidly expanding partner activation channel at The Predictive Index (PI). Prior to this role, Ted built the direct sales team at PI that broke every record in the 65 year history of the company.

Show notes:

For links and resources, visit the episode's webpage: https://nigelgreen.co/revenue-harvest/