1. Nice Guys Finish First: Kyle believes there’s a misconception out there that salespeople who are selfish are the ones who win the most business. He says It’s the other way around. When you sell with service on your mind (and heart), you will succeed. The best salespeople are the ones who care so much they’re willing to go out on the edge and work hard to make sure their organization accomplishes the thing or solves the problem it aims to solve. What that means starts with doing research beforehand and digging into the needs of the prospect, but it goes deeper than that. Be honest. Be upfront with them. Solve their problem, whatever it may be.
2. Practice Sincerity: If you’re not sincere about it, your job is over before it even starts. Instead, find ways to eliminate tasks that don’t require sincerity. Converting accounts is a process that requires empathy. That means finding not only the right people to call, but taking it a step farther and having meaningful conversations about how you can make their lives better. Finding something to love about what you represent will take you far. Knowing in your heart that what you’re selling with make someone’s life better can be the difference between a converted account and a dead lead.
3. Sell Yourself First: If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, no trendy sales strategy is going to help you. The first person who needs to be sold in any sort of engagement is the actual seller themselves. Because if you believe in something, if it is a fundamental belief of yours, you are truly representing it as best you can by using it to serve others. From there, you can convert target accounts to customer accounts because you have a belief system in place that empowers you to take on whatever obstacles and hurdles necessary.
4. Breakthrough the Clutter: Nearly everyone is on email overload these days, and there are apps and filters galore that stand between your message and your desired audience. While the first thing you need to do is stand out with a catchy email subject line, getting a response to your outreach should follow four steps: show the pains of the organization, hypothesize solutions, define clear next steps and demonstrate persistence.

https://www.salestuners.com/kyle-porter/

• The Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of RSVP Selling by Tony Hughes and Mike LeMaster
• The Truth About Leads by Dan McDade

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

1. Make Planned Calls, Not Random Calls: For many people it doesn’t take long to realize that quality over quantity matters. For example, sometimes it’s not about how many calls you make. It’s about making planned calls that target specific prospects. Instead of working your way through a list and starting over at the beginning, make calls to the same two or three prospects in the same account on the same day.
2. It’s Hard to Say No to Someone Personally: Face to face communication is huge and while you may not be able to personally meet all of your prospects at conferences, you can introduce yourself by video. It’s friendly and personal and offers you a different way to open up conversations. It’s really hard to say no to somebody when you see their face and they are more humanized.
3. Ditch the Buzzwords and Generalities: Quit trying to make everything scale. Paul Graham wrote a great blog post all about intentionally doing things that don’t scale. When you try to stuff a script with all the features and benefits of your product while combining that with every possible use cases you solve, you end up appealing to no one. Try to bucket your prospects into groups of known challenges and then speak directly to them in the phrases they use to describe the problem needing solved.

https://www.salestuners.com/lauren-wadsworth/

• Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

• Stop Trying to Wing It: Just because salespeople fall under the category of “influencers” doesn’t mean they’ve earned the right to wing it. Buyers will let you own the process if you’re willing to. Meaning if you have a structured process, if you’re working someone through a pain funnel and articulating your next step, your audience will typically let you work. It’s when you try to just ‘wing it,’ that the system breaks down and you ultimately lose control over the sales process.
• Know Your Weaknesses: Scott mentioned there being five major weaknesses that every salesperson has in some capacity. Need for approval, fear of rejection, low money tolerance, non-supported buy cycle and record collection. Knowing where you sit in each of these allows you to seek the coaching or mentorship needed for growth.
• Understand Your Identity vs Your Role: All of us have a unique identity comprised of our beliefs, values, principles, desires and emotions. We also have a plethora of roles that we play such as son or daughter, mother or father, friend, co-worker, salesperson, etc. If we confuse the performances in our roles with our identity, our self image can and will go up and down with each success or failure.

https://www.salestuners.com/scott-cramer/

• You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero
• Og Mandino's University of Success by Og Mandino

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

1. Figure Out a Growth Trajectory: One of the first challenges I see a lot of salespeople struggle with is their quota or actual goal. Regardless of what the number is, going from zero to that number can seem daunting. Instead of focusing on the end, find the unit of growth that makes your sales process work and then do the backwards math to develop your daily game plan. You’ll find this activity to be a lot more manageable.
2. Quit Being Afraid of Cold Calls: It’s so much easier to send out a quick batch of emails, but the simple (and harsh) truth is cold calling works. A personal conversation is more memorable, not to mention more open-ended, than the 100th email you prospect receives in a given day. First thing first, you can’t sound like every other salesperson on the planet. Instead of trying to get them to say yes, be skeptical and determine if they even have the problems your product or service can help. Second, create equal business stature -- tell them you’re only going to take 30 seconds of their time and then they get to decide if you should keep talking. And last, realize the whole point of a cold call is to set up a meeting, NOT immediately sell them something.
3. Find the Right Clients to Call: Ask yourself the following questions: Who are my acceptable clients? Who are my typical clients? Who are my ideal clients? Look at the demographics for the niche you’re in. Group potential clients by location, years in business, revenue, industry, employees, or whatever you can to narrow down the scope. Then, overlay that with the top reasons your last 3-5 customers bought from you. Being able to tell similar stories makes the conversation more fluid.
4. Write Emails that Get Responses: Your subject line is the most important piece with the sole goal of getting the recipient to open the email. A few of the things I’ve seen work include using three words or less, not capitalizing the first word, asking a question and using the prospect's first name. But getting a response is another story. The body of the email should be short and NOT about you. You prospects don’t care about you because they don’t know you. Instead, focus on what you think they’re problem could be and how others have solved a similar challenge.

https://www.salestuners.com/jim-brown/

• The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness by Jeff Olson

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

1. Nurture Wins: Nurture campaigns are an investment, but they can pay huge dividends in the long-term. In general, no one will ever buy less because you care more. Finding ways to engage with prospects at another level than simply making a phone call or sending an email makes a significant difference these days. What can you send a prospect to differentiate yourself and show them you really care?
2. Push Your Tone to the Limit: On a scale of one to ten, with one being beloved Fred Rogers and ten being brutally honest Joan Rivers, where do you fall? Being nice is nice and all, but sometimes it helps to step outside your comfort zone. Understanding where you fall on this tonal scale is important, but more important is finding the line of where your prospects sit. What can you say to move them to the edge of emotion and stand out in their inbox? If you upset some people along the way, so be it. It doesn’t make sense to dwell on the one or two people you may have shocked when you see the increased pipeline you’re able to build.
3. Understand the Curse of Knowledge: You know what they say about making assumptions, right? Don’t do it. Why? Because aside from the obvious negative consequences, the knowledge in your head may be harder for others to comprehend than you think. It’s easy to assume that because you have domain knowledge, everyone does. Unfortunately, that’s simply not the case. It’s always better to start fresh and build upon a mutual understanding than to assume you’re already on the same page.

https://www.salestuners.com/todd-muffley/

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

1. Everybody is in Sales: Personality can only take you so far. Introvert or extrovert doesn’t matter and doesn’t define you as a sales person. What does is how you sell. No matter what you end up doing, you are in sales. Whether that means selling your ideas to your boss, selling co-workers on a new approach to a problem, or directly selling a service to a customer -- everything starts with sales.
2. Break the Silence: I’ve been in a enough sales rooms to tell you the silence is absolutely deafening today. On one end, you’ve got a whole bunch of brand new salespeople with no business acumen and hole bunch of “tools” in their hands they have to try to figure out. On the other end you’ve got more experienced reps going into conference rooms to “make their calls.” All of this has got to stop. Let’s work together, out loud, to move the needle.
3. Go For No: It’s one thing to know you’re going to hear “no” a lot. It’s something else entirely how you approach it. Instead of making a goal to set five appointments, make a goal to get 100 people to tell you no. Now, even if you get to your goal of five appointments, you have to keep going, because you haven’t gotten your 100 no’s. Want to see the immediate impact of this? For the next week, try to get 20 no’s a day in your personal life. Ask for your coffee for free. Ask for a discount on your lunch. Ask your cable provider if they can lower your bill. You’ll be surprised what happens when you just start asking.

https://www.salestuners.com/david-dulany/

• The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson and John David Mann
• Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There by Richard Fenton

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

https://www.salestuners.com/keenan/

1. It’s Not About Learning: It’s about applying what you love and who you are to what you do. While you need to understand your product, It’s more important to know how to sell than it is to know all the technical features and benefits of your offering. Comparing sales to fitness… you can educate yourself all you want about what it takes to get a perfect six pack, but none of that matters until you start applying that knowledge. Application and execution are the most important part of the puzzle.
2. Be You: It’s okay to be inspired by successful salespeople, that likely why so many people listen to this show, but at the end of the day, you have be you. Everyone is different and what works for one person might not have the same impact on someone else. Whatever gives you energy, whatever makes you passionate, whatever gets you going in the morning - use that to build the YOU that you want to be. You have the power to make the choices that will empower you in the long run, so choose to be you from the start and you won’t let yourself down.
3. Compete With Yourself First: Success in sales comes from a burning desire to be the best. That doesn’t by default mean you have to aggressively beat other people, it just means that you are uncomfortable staying where you are. As a result, you put in the work it takes to push yourself in order to move, grow and advance. That has to come from within or nothing is going to change.

• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

https://www.salestuners.com/matt-millen/

1. You Get What You Give: The quality of what you put into a sale is the quality of what you get back. Success is in itself a habit and there are rituals that go into creating success. The numbers play a role and the tools available are important, but ultimately it’s what you put into a sale that matters. It’s who you are, what you have to offer and how you offer it that closes a sale.
2. Believe in Something: It’s different for everyone, but one tried and true belief system focuses on the importance of having a story, being active and having a positive mindset. Great sales reps live and breathe their business. They tell a story with a passion, conviction and soul. They are active in conversations and they believe in their heart that their product, that their business, is going to help whoever they are selling to.
3. Learn From What Works: Trusting the process matters. If there’s a process, run the process. Learn the script. Don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily when something is working. Once you master what’s in place, then you can look for new ways to learn and engage. Most importantly, understand that hard work defines what you do. It may not always be easy, but sometimes you just need to put pen to paper and do the work. There are no shortcuts for success.

• Conversations That Win the Complex Sale by Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

https://www.salestuners.com/mary-browning/

1. It All Starts With Data (But It Doesn’t End There): Data is the list of people you’re going to call and the industry or demographics of companies you’re looking at. Taking those numbers to the next level focuses on the people behind the numbers. What are their common needs? How can you help meet them? When you consider the current marketplace, and the ins and outs of each organization, part of being a successful salesperson is understanding and meeting clients where they are at.
2. Make Your Message Matter: It isn’t just about the numbers. What is the customer’s pain? You need to make it your job to find out, and quick! One of the biggest challenges in prospecting is that you generally have 30 seconds or less to uncover someone’s pain. That’s why it is so important to develop succinct ways to communicate a solution to that pain. Make it count.
3. Consider Your Cadence: Most importantly, how a message is delivered should be diverse. It needs to be communicated through a mix of channels, including phone calls, emails, social media, direct mail or whatever other methods you see fit for your business. Staggering different types of communication throughout a period of time, like two weeks for example, is one of the best ways to reach someone in the long run. In most cases, a phone call or two just won’t cut it.
4. Qualification Matters: What’s a scenario where a prospect probably isn’t going to move to a next step for you? Understanding that from the first time you take a meeting, allows you to really learn from the conversations you’re having and improve the overall conversation rate. If a meeting is disqualified, use that as an opportunity to grow by digging into why it didn’t work. From there you can structure qualifying questions to ask future prospects making you more knowledgeable and efficient in the process.

• How Remarkable Women Lead by Joanna Barsh
• The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr

• Costello – What if every sales rep inherited the habits of your best rep? With Costello, they do.

https://www.salestuners.com/bob-perkins/

1. Be Selfish In a Good Way: Top sales reps are usually at the top for a reason. They’re driven, focused and selfish - in a good way. They’re also not that concerned with the welfare of those around them. They need that time and space to focus on their accounts, run their sales process the way they know works, are dedicated to improving themselves all along the way.
2. Embrace the Digital Transformation: The role technology plays in sales isn’t going away. You can easily schedule meetings with apps like Calendly or completely automate it with services like X.ai. You can streamline the workflow for creating proposals with apps like our sponsor Octiv or simplify your outbound prospecting with tools like SalesLoft. There’s even a new product I recently demoed that brings better transparency and consistency to the discovery call process called Costello that you should check out.
3. Keep Sales Personal: Time to contradict myself a bit. Even though I believe we have to embrace the digital transformation, understand we are at the risk of de-personalizing sales. All the tools, data, and analytics should be leveraged when appropriate, but at the end of the day, people buy from people they like. Differentiate yourself from the both the AI movement as well as average sales person by showing your personality. Flip on the switch for your webcam and ask your prospect to do the same. Write emails like a human being. Truly participate in the “social” part of social media.

• South: The Endurance Expedition to Antarctica by Ernest Schackleton

• Octiv – Transform the way your sales assets are created, distributed and tracked around the world. Because a better sales process is a better buying experience.