On this episode of our Women in Revenue series I was lucky enough to have Kristina McMillan from TOPO join us to talk about executive presence.

As VP of Research she spends every single day having exciting, interesting, and sometimes challenging conversations with revenue leaders across a lot of well-known organizations.

She’s the perfect person to dive into executive presence and unpack how salespeople can aim to develop it.  

Today’s conversation is a little different from some of the other discussions we've had before on The Sales Engagement podcast. Our guest on this episode is Adam Steinberg, CEO of 10xFinders. He has spent almost a decade working in the recruiting industry.

What you might not know about recruiters is that they’re really just expert salespeople.

And there’s a lot of great lessons that we can learn from them.

So, I wanted to focus this discussion on the parallels between sales and recruiting, on key principles that sales organizations can take from the recruiting industry to be more effective.

Unlike many leaders, Kevin Dorsey figured out his sales team doesn’t have a work ethic problem. When they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, it’s not because they’re lazy.

It’s because they’re scared.

Kevin is the VP of Inside Sales at PatientPop. One of his biggest passions there is coaching salespeople beyond their fears. But, he’s coaching them in a way the industry has yet to see.

Kevin had an epiphany one night as he was thinking about why his sales reps just wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do. At the time, he was reading a book that advised, when it comes to solving a problem, throw your first answer away and see what answer #2 is.

His first answer was the same one most leaders have: The problem was the salesperson’s work ethic. They just don’t know how to work hard. He decided to follow the advice of the book and rule that out. After two whiskeys, he thought, It has to be fear. What else could it be?

With this realization in mind, and a little more research, Kevin started doing three things with his team that has seen tremendous results. Tune in to hear more.

What would it take to reach President’s club more than six times?

Tom Castley, VP of Account Management at Apptio, is one of those rare finds who’s actually lived it. He always worked in the software industry and held numerous leadership positions, but part of him always knew he’d end up in sales.

We’re so glad he did. Because now, we get to soak in the wealth of wisdom he’s gained on his journey to becoming a top 1% seller. On this episode, Tom walks us through the four Ts to consider if you want to reach President’s Club, specific habits that helped him, and so much more.

We haven't done a lot of account executive focused episodes on The Sales Engagement podcast yet.

But we want to change that.

Rebecca Feiten is Senior Enterprise Account Executive at Outreach. In her role, she’s selling to accounts with 2000 people or more. And a lot of them involve a complicated array of internal stakeholders, large teams, or selling a multitude of products.

Nevertheless, Rebecca is one of our top performers, executing well on a daily basis.

How does she do it?

Well, that’s what I invited her on this episode of The Sales Engagement podcast to talk about. On this show Rebecca is sharing the three things she credits with her daily success.

Here’s what she said about managing follow-up, account planning, and building a coalition of internal advocates.

Over the past six years, one of the biggest things that's changed is the way we communicate as people. Six years and prior we communicated primarily through our phones. But now, we have so many other options, like video, chat, text, and voice.

The landscape now is that we have different pockets of people who prefer to communicate in different ways. Some people still like using the phone while others only want to communicate via message.

As a salesperson, you need to be tapping into all of those pockets to reach your true potential.

One of the newer channels through which you can reach people is social. So, on this episode of The Sales Engagement podcast, I interviewed social selling expert, Daniel Disney. He’s built an incredible presence on LinkedIn, and he’s also the Founder and CEO of The Daily Sales. And yes, that’s his real last name.

Daniel gave us his best advice on how to use social selling to increase engagement with your customers.

Whether you like it or not, your career is based on how good of a company you choose to work with.

You could be an unbelievable sales rep, but if the company you pick is bad, you're just not going to have a great career there.

With so many options, and so many places to choose from, how do you even think about starting the decision making process of where to take the next step in your sales career?

Well, that’s what Sam Jacobs came on the latest episode of The Sales Engagement podcast to talk about. Sam is the Founder of Revenue Collective and host of The Sales Hacker podcast.

On this show, he talked about the two criteria you should focus on when choosing an employer: market size and the quality of leadership.

So often in sales we're focused on winning, scoring the deal, and getting out of it what we want. But the person on the other side of the deal is thinking about winning, too.

And if you can help them score a win, you’ll probably score one, too.

Tip Moore believes that winning starts with connecting — you’ve got to connect with the client to truly understand how to help them. So, how do you do that?

Well, that’s what I invited Tip to talk about on the latest episode of The Sales Engagement podcast. Tip is the Enterprise Sales Director at Pushpay. These are his thoughts on connecting with clients to find the win.

On today’s episode of The Sales Engagement podcast I talked with Jeff Bajorek about how technology can actually make the lives of sales people more complicated. What does that mean? And how can you ensure you’re using technology to enable your sales teams to be more successful? We cover all of that and more in this episode.

You’ve seen the movies. Coffee’s for closers, right?

It’s a fun concept, a bit tongue-in-cheek. You close a deal, bump chests, and feel accomplished. The problem is, some salespeople actually mean it when they say “Always be closing.”

Instead, Josh Jordan, Founder of preHIRED, says you should “Always be clarifying.” It doesn’t matter if you close a deal if you don’t know why you did.

Listen in to get yourself out of a closing mindset and into one that will help you win more sustainably.