Jonathan Friedman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Demostack. How quickly should your prospect see a product demo in their buying journey? How do you make your demos more memorable to your prospects? Jonathan shares valuable insights on these questions and how to create impactful demos consistently.

He talks about the many functions and features of Demostack. He also digs into the power of storytelling and using stories to make your demos a reflection of your prospects and their needs. Above all, being consistent with the stories you tell throughout your buyer's process.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

Demo platforms help the seller bring the product into the conversation - Jonathan: "I can do a million things to know a little bit of who you are before we go on the phone. If I can translate that into the product and make you feel comfortable because you see yourself in my product really well, then I can do that. As I do discovery and as we discuss, I can customize it in subsequent calls more and more to make it feel as if you've been using the product for years."

Helping prospects see their story through demos - Jonathan: "The currency that humans use is storytelling. And stories are the only currency that can jump between minds. If we have a conversation right now and I tell you a story, that story can remain with you and you can duplicate it."

Jonathan on why you should get the congruency right: "For every different product, there are different pieces on that but if you can get the congruency right then you kind of accelerate your points. Then people interact, go to your website, when they talk to you, you say the same thing, and your presentation says the same thing, then they can say this is a real story."

Connect with Jonathan in the links below:

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Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Brian Souza is the Founder and CEO of ProductivityDrivers, Inc. and the Author of the New York Times Bestselling Book The Weekly Coaching Conversation. There's a correlation between the quality and quantity of coaching that one receives and his/her level of performance improvement.

Today, Brian shares about the situation of constructive coaching in teams and how most individuals report never really getting any developmental feedback. He dives into the reality of coaching and how to prepare yourself to be a remarkable coach whether you’re in a manager role or not.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

There's often no incentive at the top to be better at closing deals - Brian: "It really boils down to efficiency versus effectiveness. I think that, as an industry and as sales leaders, there's this outdated paradigm that they're coming from. 'I need to have 3-4x the pipe in my funnel for my reps. I need to hit these activity metrics and all of these demos.' The metrics play a role but as sales leaders, they're not focused on the effectiveness side of it."

How are sales leaders evaluating performance? - Brian: "What if I close the big deals, I'm number 1 and crush my number, but 70% of my team aren't making their number? So I think we have to take this holistic view of performance and understand that if you truly want to build a world-class, high-performance team and organization, you have to take that holistic approach to performance and evaluate it at all levels."

One of the mindset shifts that need to happen for a manager - Brian: "The operations part of your job and the people development part of your job are not separate and distinct, they're one and the same. If you have the right framework, the right skill set, and the right mindset, you can transform almost any conversation with your team member into a constructive coaching conversation."

Find out more about Brian and get his book in the links below:

More on Andy:

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Learn more at AndyPaul.com

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Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

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Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Chris Pennington is the Chief Customer Officer at SugarCRM. Creating the best experience for customers in their buying journey doesn't only fall on the one person facing them but on all the tools, strategies, and support behind the scenes. Chris talks about the roles and responsibilities of a Chief Customer Officer and how they measure customer experience.

He shares his insight into the elements and overall process of building trust. By prioritizing trust, you're less likely to face customer churn and you also get proper feedback that enables you to deliver even better customer experiences. He also talks about how to use CRM most effectively to measure and improve the buyer's journey.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

Using data and experience or intuition together - Chris: "It's very important to make sure you're applying some thought process to information that's being surfaced through data. Even though it may be dismissed, having an understanding of what the gut is saying and interpreting it is still a very valuable thing." 

The importance of empathy in building trust - Chris: "It's important not to forget the human factor. We're on a customer relationship management basis. The relationship part is super important and empathy goes a long way to drive that. You need to be able to respond in a time frame that is appropriate. You need to demonstrate empathy, you can't be in a business of relationships without deeply understanding that."

Filling the gap between knowing something and understanding it - Andy: "We don't train sellers or support people in this idea of cognitive empathy which is really the form that's most useful to our customers. Because we go beyond just empathizing with how they feel but actually understand why they feel the way they do and that, then, gives us information to take action to solve the issues that have got them in pain."

Connect with Chris in the links below:

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Mercy Lee Bell is a Sales Enablement Manager at Webflow. There are distinct differences between traditional selling and product-led growth. Mercy digs into how PLG frames questions with insight and how to tell a story that visualizes the buyer's vision of success.

Mercy shares how to frame discovery calls as more of a listening exercise than a speaking opportunity. She talks about presenting points of view that add value to your prospect and the need for sellers to adapt to the present environment of recession fear.  

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

PLG discovery extracts value from product Andy: "The difference is that the user's experience of the product in product-led growth is not just a demo or necessarily a trial. It's they're actually using it. There's a value being extracted from the product and that's sort of the premise you go into is that yeah, we're able to create... a proposition, that short time to value for the end user, and it's being driven by the end-user, as opposed to being driven by a manager."

Adapt micro conditions to macro conditions - Mercy: "This level of instability or uncertainty is in every buyer's mind. So when we have these macro conditions, we create new micro or mental conditions for the buyer. And that's who we're here to, in a perfect world, support on their buying journey. In PLG, they've already been touching the product potentially. And so there's a new way to think about how do we sell well."

Tell a story that highlights your buyer's vision of success - Mercy: "If we think about this idea of authenticity and PLG selling, in a moment where it's easier to go fearful or talk a lot or try to convince, the real opportunity here is for sellers to get very, very, very quiet. Ask the questions with insight. Have a mental model in your head before you step into a call of what you think the challenges are or the vision for success might be."

Connect with Mercy in the link below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mercybell/

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Chris White is a business coach, entrepreneur, and author of The Six Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers. SEs are one of the most underserved roles in sales enablement and training, and Chris shares the increasing role of the SE as a solution consultant in winning new business.

Chris discusses his goal of getting technical wins, which is to help buyers see beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular solution is the right choice for them. He also digs into the 6 behavioral patterns of the best SEs, including how SEs can partner more effectively with their sales counterparts and how to conduct effective discovery.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

Realize what the buyer needs that is agnostic of your product or service - Chris: "He or she who buys a shovel, doesn't want a shovel. They want a hole. But they just don't want a hole, they want a fence or a tree. But they just don't want a fence or tree, they want privacy or they want shade. But we get so focused on the shiny shovel. We want to talk about the blade and handle. Reality is most people don't care about the shovel."

The 2 purposes of a seller are to sell and to understand another person’s needs - Chris: "To sell is to solve, and to sell is to serve. And if you're not at peace with that, then maybe you're not in the right profession... We talk a lot about this notion of servant leadership. I think more and more of us need to think of servant salespersonship, if I can say that word... If we think of ourselves as servant salespeople, we are going to do much better." 

Find out more about Chris in the links below:

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus are the Co-Founders of The Presentation Company and Co-Authors of the book Everyday Business Storytelling. In connection to the basic elements of stories, sellers almost always focus on the resolution without even building the foundations and actually understanding their prospects.

Today, Janine and Lee share their 4 basic elements of a story and why every story needs a big idea. They talk about applying these principles not only in presentations but even in some things as common as emails. They dig deep into the magic of storytelling in that you could even integrate data to deliver the best narrative for your prospect.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

The basic signposts help sellers build a story - Janine: "To me, it's like giving people a common language. It's letting them learn how to speak a new language, it's called story. And if we all talk the same language especially as we work and collaborate with teams, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to put together narratives and iterate and collaborate with others." 

Empowering people to realize that they are the storyteller - Janine: "When you get these playbooks, templates, and scripts, that's awesome as a starting point. I think salespeople need to feel empowered to ultimately own the story. Because every time you get in front of that audience, the story may change a little because time has passed, things have transpired, and developments have been made."

Your storytelling should support the buyer/prospect's journey - Lee: "Let's take the methodology but let's package it up with some storytelling fundamentals and even some visualization concepts. Because if I'm going to weave data into my story, then where does that data live and how do I unpack that data in a way that it's digestible and isn't just firehosing my audience?"

Find out more about Janine and Lee in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janinekurnoff/

                        https://www.linkedin.com/in/leelazarus/

More on Andy:

Connect on LinkedIn

Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon

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Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Matt Melymuka is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at PeakSpan Capital. Growing a business does not follow a uniform path. Matt shares their different approach to venture investing that is, in his words, sane rather than shooting for the top at all costs.

He digs into their incremental value creation method that aligns with where the company is and where it can reasonably go. Their philosophy is anchored on self-awareness and it is this mindset that they bring to the table when working with businesses in the emerging growth phase of their development.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

Be self-aware that not every company is a billion-dollar company - Matt: "We are just huge believers in real transparency, thinking about not what are you going to tell people at a cocktail party about how much money you raised or what your valuation was, but rather what kind of company goals are associated with this growth plan, what's the resource you need to get there, and let's talk about how we get there together." 

"And, let's talk about a two, two and a half year sprint because the fog of war is so thick beyond that that presenting your billion-dollar case to my partnership in five years is just crazy. That's trying to pick up the Powerball winner. So we just really pursue things incrementally and iterably"

Assess companies from the ground up and be reasonable with expectations - Matt: "We're setting up these sessions with these operating advisors to really just diagnose and get a baseline check of kind of where each functional group is, where do we have holes, where do we need to supplement the team, where do we need to build better process and infrastructure.”

“And the sane and rational point from all of that is really coming out of that work, we will kind of build from the ground up what does this all imply in terms of the resources we need for the next year and a half, two years, and a reasonable expectation of where we could scale to. And so that work will dictate what the plan should be and what we should all align around versus starting with the plan."

Find out more about Matt in the links below:

More on Andy:

Connect on LinkedIn

Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon

Learn more at AndyPaul.com

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Fred Diamond is the Co-Founder of the Institute for Excellence in Sales, Author of Insights for Sales Game Changers and a nonsales book called Love, Hope, Lyme: A Book about Chronic Illness Support, and the Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Top sales professionals have a mission to the customer—nurture the relationship and help them achieve their goals. 

Fred shares that every sales interaction is a conversation that can lead to indispensable relationships which pay off for decades. He discusses how to develop an optimal mindset founded on curiosity, authenticity, and creativity, and shares some of the best sales quotes he has learned over the years.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

The mission of a salesperson is to help the client achieve their goals - Fred: “It's magical when the prospect and the salesperson both have urgency. There's alignment and the sense is that they are collaborating together to get something important done. When only the salesperson has that urgency and the prospect doesn't, the salesperson will be seen as pushy and tone-deaf.” - Dave Kurlan

Practice empathy because everyone has a desire to be heard - Fred: “Empathy, it's not only critical to understand what it is, it's critical to understand what it's not. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else's emotions, their feeling and their situation. It's critical in my relationship with my wife, with my children, with my co-workers, with my partners, and with my customers, and it is critical because we all want to be heard.” - Howard Brown

The greatest sales leaders have a genuine curiosity about their customers - Fred: “I feel that you're passionate not because you want to sell a lot but because you know that you're helping the world become a better place. Isn't that what sales is about? Service at the end of the day?”

Find out more about Fred in the links below:

More on Andy:

Connect on LinkedIn

Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon

Learn more at AndyPaul.com

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Drew Neisser is the Founder of Renegade and CMO Huddles, host of the CMO Podcast, and Author of the new book Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands. Marketing has become more complicated without necessarily becoming more effective. 

Today, Drew talks about the tough environment of CMOs and delves into why a single clear and consistent message is far more likely to get the sale over a matrixed approach. He also discusses how and why clearing away the clutter of your messaging makes a world of difference for your buyer.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

A CMO focuses the organization’s product and messaging - Drew: "A great CMO, who is a leader, recognizes the sort of emotional impact of choice of words and visuals and design and will use that to inform communications across the organization, internally and externally. And they often will be the only one in the organization who won't just say ‘Well, let's just tell them it's cheaper, faster, and better’, right? They might be the only one in the organization that will say, ‘You know what? I know we have 15 features but I can only comprehend 1 big one and 3 subsets of that. They're the only ones who can bring focus to this thing.’"

Your brand must have a single message in 8 words or less - Drew: "You have to have a big idea to begin with. And if you don't have a big idea and you don't have what we call purpose-driven story statement or something that encapsulates the, I'm going to call it the sort of the purpose of the brand and a promise of the brand all put together magically in 8 words or less, if you don't do that, then there is no hope that the rest of the stuff is going to hang together."

A single unified message produces higher rates of sales success Drew: "Brands that put 1 message in the marketplace can make it easier for the customer to buy them based on 1 major promise. I have a higher success rate than ones that offer 25 things."

Find out more about Drew and get his book in the links below:

More on Andy:

Connect on LinkedIn

Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon

Learn more at AndyPaul.com

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

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Mike Bosworth is the author of Solution Selling and co-author of CustomerCentric Selling. Buyers have resistance to sellers and today, Mike shares 2 kinds of avoidance known as proposal avoidance and negotiation avoidance. 

He discusses why sellers must work towards a pre-proposal review instead of dropping all the details and decision-making at the moment of the actual proposal. He then talks about negotiation avoidance and what you as a seller can do to get in the mind of the buyer to reach an agreement without ever having to negotiate.

HIGHLIGHTS

QUOTES

Proposals shouldn't have any new information in them so sell the pre-proposal review - Mike: "By selling them on the idea of a pre-proposal review a week before the proposal is due is when you do the surprise close. They haven't been thinking about risk. And if you leave, if I can, I'll probably say, 'see you next week with your proposal, Andy.' You're going to wake for the next 7 nights thinking about all the things that can go wrong. And so, we're avoiding that."

Before negotiating, provide 2 to 3 polite, business-logical nos first - Mike: "If, on the rare occurrence that the 2 or 3 polite nos wouldn't work, okay now we have to transition to a real negotiation. And, again, this all has to be thought about in advance. Then the transition is, ‘Well, Andy, the only possible way I could do anything for you is if you can do something for me.’"

Find out more about Mike in the link below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebosworth/

More on Andy:

Connect on LinkedIn

Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon

Learn more at AndyPaul.com

Sponsored by:

Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io

Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com

Blueboard | World’s leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com

Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe:

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RevOps Podcast

Selling with Purpose Podcast