- 80 splits, that's everything you do.
And I mean that.
Like if you're going after CIO's in the healthcare industry
come up with two different messages to CIO's
in the healthcare industry.
You have 20 phone calls with this approach,
and 20 phone calls with that approach.
See which one gets a higher response rate.
Going after gatekeepers, be really nice to them
in the morning and be really direct to them in the afternoon
and see which one yields a higher response rate.
With the split test mentality and leveraging the team
to focus on one thing and see if it works or not
using approaches, you become this engine
where every single week you pick something new
that the team is going to work on,
and you never have to hire any of us ever again.
(upbeat music)
- (Michelle) Hello everyone welcome to our
Ask the Experts Sales Editions Panel discussion
from HubSpot, focused on how to nail the start of your
2019 sales year.
My name is Michelle Benfer and I am
a Vice President of sales here at HubSpot.
We have something very special for everyone today.
We have three of the industry's leading sales experts here
that'll be answering your burning sales questions.
Now a couple of housekeeping notes.
The agenda we are going to go through today
was built by sales reps globally,
and by the people who are actually
watching this panel discussion.
People have up voted these questions to determine
the order in which we will cover them
over the next 45 minutes.
The first person I would love to introduce is Keenan.
Keenan is the CEO, President,
and Chief Antagonist of A Sales Guy Inc.,
one of today's top leading sales consulting
and recruiting firms.
He's also the celebrated author of Not Taught,
what it takes to be successful in the 21st century,
that nobody's teaching you.
And he has a second book coming, Gap Selling,
which will be launching on December 3rd.
All right our next Sales expert that we have is
Lori Richardson.
Lori is the founder and CEO of Score More Sales,
a sales strategy, consulting, training, and coaching firm,
and she's also the president of Women Sales Pros,
the first online community dedicated
to helping smart, savvy women get into B2B Sales positions,
and to help companies find and develop great women sellers.
Finally, our next expert panelist we have is John Barrows.
John is CEO of Jbarrows Sales Training.
He's a published author and a sales trainer,
to some of the world's fastest growing companies
like LinkedIn, Drop Box, and Google.
Well all of these panelists speak all over the world,
so we're lucky to have them share their advice
on how to set yourself up for success in the new,
what tools do you think that managers should look into
to help their teams to become more efficient?
What are some of the tools that
sales teams are looking at today and using
to be as efficient as they can be in the selling process?
- I don't really want to answer it as tools.
It's more of a mindset.
It's a mindset that you're investing in your reps.
Your leader, your CEO, your head of the company,
or your head of the division, the team,
you need to invest in your reps,
and we all develop over time and we need support.
So I could throw out some tools that would help do that,
but I don't want to talk about tools.
I want to talk about the fact that either make time
to help your reps develop or you don't.
And the companies that don't, reps leave, they burn out.
They're not as loyal to the company,
and the company is at give time where you can, you know,
plan your next week on Friday,
because some companies will do that.
Where you actually have time in your calendar to do that,
or you have time to go to a conference,
or to listen to podcast, different things like that,
or to do online learning that some of us offer.
It's important to have that mindset.
If I was a rep I would wanna work
for a company that does that.
From day one I wanna know that I can develop professionally,
and people will invest in me to learn and grow.
- I love that, I love that.
What about you John?
- Yeah I'm gonna go right with Lori,
I think mindset's everything.
And also creating a mindset in a culture internally
of continuous improvement.
So one of the things, and this is what I think
managers should do and this is where you don't have to,
by using this approach, by the way you don't have to hire
Keenan, you don't have to hire me,
and you don't have to hire Lori to do your training.
You can become your own training organization.
And I wish more people would do this.
This is what I used to do when before I was a trainer,
when I was managing my group of
six, seven reps in my first start-up.
We'd literally pick on Monday morning
during our sales team meeting, we'd pick something,
and say all right, what's the challenge we're
trying to address?
What's kicking everybody's ass right now?
The present object, John Gatekeepers, like whatever it was,
right and you'd go yeah the price of injection
is really kicking our ass right now,
so who wants to own this?
One of the reps would say, "Okay cool."
And I'm not talking about doing a whole bunch of homework,
like I'm taking three days off and
going and researching this,
I'm talking about lighting up your laptop
while we're having this conversation,
and typing in best way to handle present objection, right?
And read a few articles on it or whatever it is,
and then coming up with an approach,
and then batting it around a little bit with the team.
All right let's role play this a little bit.
Let's see how that flows, that type of thing, cool.
Now and I would do this, and I would recommend
everybody do this, I would take a notepad,
all my team got a notepad, and they've wrote down
across the top challenge equals whatever it was,
personal objection, approach equals put up to the strike.
Then I'd take a look, I know we're not
the cheapest solution out there,
so let me tell you why, so we address it before it's done,
but that's an approach to an objection.
And then no matter what happened that week,
that every single time that came up,
so everybody else did whatever they wanted to do,
right, like throughout the week,
but when that pricing objection came up,
they would all use that approach,
and then just keep a little backing out in the thing,
it worked, it didn't work, a plus or minus,
plus minus, plus minus, and then what I would do
as a manager, I would collect all the pieces of paper
at the end of the week and then if I would invite you on
Monday or the next Monday, I'd be like all right everybody
look we faced that pricing objection
like 50 times this week.
We used that approach we got 30 pluses and 20 negatives,
like that actually seems like a pretty good approach.
It works, cool, next week, what do you want
to try to figure out,
and the whole mentality of the split testing,
and this is my biggest recommendation to anybody out there,
this is the number one thing if you ask me,
I'm 42 years old if I could go back and tell
my 22 year old self something, what would it be?
It was 80 split test.
80 split test everything you do, and I mean that.
Like if you're going after CIO's in the healthcare industry,
come up with two different messages to CIO's
in the healthcare industry.
You had 20 phone calls with this approach,
and 20 phone calls with that approach,
see which one yields a higher response rate.
Going after gatekeepers, be really nice to them
in the morning and be really direct to them in the afternoon
and see which one yields a higher response rate.
With the split test mentality and leveraging the team
to focus on one thing and see if it works or not
using approaches, you become this engine
where every single week you pick something new
that the team is going to work on,
and you never have to hire any of us ever again.
- That's great advice.
I don't know about for your business,
but it's great advice for everybody who's
(mumbling) (laughs)
So we'll finish it up, this last one here.
I'd love for all three of you to be able to answer it,
but what advice would you give yourself when you were
three to five years into your career?
Keenan, if you could go back to your younger self,
what advice would you have given yourself
as a young seller when you were three to five years in?
- Nothing.
I get asked this question all the time, nothing.
Nope.
- Just live and learn.
- Yep, that's it right there.
That's it right there.
Live and learn, live and learn.
It's interesting, just this morning,
I did a video, dropped it on LinkedIn,
and I called it stop outsourcing your learning.
90% of most people, let me rephrase this.
About 20% of people actually learn
anything frigging new in their lives.
So I'm just gonna, 80% of people they just don't even think.
They just cruise through life like a bunch of boneheads,
right?
They stop learning.
The other 20%, they allow their life to be outsourced,
their learning to be outsourced.
What I mean by that is they show up and work,
and they watch television,
and whatever they're being told, they listen to.
So I applaud them better than the idiots
who block the world out right.
And literally just allowed to be outsourced.
They're told what to think.
Their company tells them what the training is,
they listen to it, they applied it.
They watched something on TV they listen to it and apply it.
Very few actually take a deliberate learning approach
that starts with self-assessment,
aligns that to a desired goal,
and says what's the gap?
- Yep.
- So therefore, if I want to be a CEO,
if I want to be SVP, if I want to understand
the issues better, if I want to understand
women's issues and sales better,
I don't just accept what I happen to hear by
pop instance, the war civilization on TV or
(mumbles)
I say where am I not?
What am I missing?
Where am I weak?
When do I struggle?
And I go find learning.
I literally built a learning plan for me,
based on my personal objectives,
and goals, and shortcomings.
- I love that that's great.
- Yep, that's the way to do it.
- That's great advice.
Lori, what about you?
- Yeah.
- Yourself.
- I would definitely negotiate my salary
when I came into a company
because I just didn't even know you can really do that.
And so the guys that I work got paid more than me.
I got into sales so that I could get
a similar, you know, make the same amount of money,
and I thought commission would do that for me,
but I didn't know about the salary piece.
So that's an important thing for anyone on the call
that may not be making the same as their counterparts.
But also, I had that lifelong learning ingrained in me early
I don't know why, I'm not sure how it happened.
I'm really appreciative that it did.
I would say I was a young single mom when I got into sales
and I would just say you know enjoy the ride more.
You know because it is very,
it's very stressful in the beginning,
and so maybe for the reps that are on the call that
you know you're super stressed out,
it's like don't be so stressed out and
sell products and services that you appreciate and respect.
Work for companies that are good companies.
- Yeah.
- And if you do that you know you can have a career,
a very valuable career in selling your entire life.
(applause)
- That's great advice, I love that.
I got that advice on salary early on,
which has been offered me.
- Yep.
- And John what about you?
What advice would you give your younger self?
- Yeah it kinda follows around with
what Lori just said there.
It's just give a shit.
- I have a t-shirt that says that.
Damn it I should of wore it.
- I need one.
- I'm gonna send you both one of give a shit t-shirts,
send you both one.
- I will buy it.
So and the reason I say that is because in the beginning,
it duck tails off of what Lori just said there.
Make a very long story short,
when I sold my company to Staple's, I got fired.
And I was even in panic saying what am I supposed to do
with my career?
I'm an IT sales guy because that's what I did
for seven years, I was an IT sales guy,
I don't even like computers.
But one of the things that got me to realize
like what should I be selling now,
because I didn't have a Plan B,
it was like oh crap now I have to go find a job,
and my wife was the one who helped me realize this,
you look back at my career and said
why was I one of most successful reps at each job I had?
I developed power tools, and xerox copiers, and thrive,
right?
Du wall Power Tools are bad ass.
And so I have no problem selling Du wall Power Tools,
because I fundamentally believe in them, right.
Xerox copiers, I didn't care about copiers,
but I believed that Xerox was the best company out there
when it came to copiers.
My company Thrive, I didn't care about the technology,
I cared about the people.
And so somebody told me this early in my career,
which I hold true to this day
that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm.
I still believe that.
But as long...
If you believe in what you sell,
this is a brutal profession,
an absolutely brutal profession.
If you don't believe in what you sell,
it is a thousand times worse,
and you're part of the problem of sales,
because you're just doing it for a commission check,
and you're the one giving us a bad name.
But if you genuinely believe that your product or service,
or whatever it is makes a difference for the right client,
and ooh I'm not saying sales is easy,
but damn is it easier and to lure these points
are a much more enjoyable ride.
So just go find those companies that you care about.
Instead of just submitting a job
or a resume in to just get thrown a pile,
why don't you go identify the 10 client,
the 10 companies that fit your ethos.
Go look at their mission statement.
Go follow their VP of Sales.
Go follow their CEO.
And then craft a message to that CEO saying,
you know what I'm looking to my next career change,
my next challenge, and I read your mission statement,
and it aligns directly with what I genuinely believe in.
I'd love to talk to somebody in your company
about coming on board there and representing you
because you represent the same things I represent.
Fact, your career will be so much more enjoyable
than just going through the motions,
selling just because you're looking for a commission check.
- I love that.
- (upbeat music)
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