[SPEAKER_01]: This is the sales gravy podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, guest selling author, fanatical prospecting objection, sales EQ and ink.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the sales gravy podcast.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Jeb Blunt Jr.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm your host.
[SPEAKER_02]: And today's guest is a friend of the show, Mr. Jeff Bejork.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is a renowned sales advisor, author, and speaker who challenges B2B sales leaders to rethink the way you sell.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for joining us today, Jeff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, renowned.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, I've got to call you a lot of things, Chef.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure that that is not the worst.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I do know that you are renowned.
[SPEAKER_02]: At least to me, I've been following you for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've had some really great podcasts over the years.
[SPEAKER_02]: You continue to put out awesome content.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've worked with some of the coolest people in the industry.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've been outbound to conference and had sessions with our conference there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And today, we're gonna talk about something that you've had on your mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: This new is your kind of building on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I love that we have an opportunity to explore everything it means to look.
[SPEAKER_02]: the best that we can in our sales organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it starts with establishing what good looks like, a very simple idea, but I don't think it's as simple as it sounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I want you to kind of dive into this establishing what good looks like idea, where to start, how did you start to kind of contemplate how you were going to help sales organizations do this?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what good looks like is pretty well established out in the ecosystem, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There are enough people like me, like you and everybody at sales gravy who are putting out great content that makes people think that makes people change the way that they act in accordance with best practices.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the concept is pretty widely and generally available.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I feel that most companies do not do a good job of, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: is understanding what good looks like here for their organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for instance, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but there was a funeral procession recently for the phone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The phone is dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been dead actually for quite some time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are claiming it dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it keeps going.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are a lot of people who say, that's absolutely true.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one picks up the phone anymore and we see it in the data.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pick up rates are plummeting, response rates returns to voicemails, things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're falling through the floor because people are bombarded by messaging from a lot of different places.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you sit in an office or even at home and you sit in front of your computer all day and you would rather react with your fingers on a keyboard and ignore the phone, the phone is going to be long dead for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what people forget is that in some parts of the industry, the sales industry, that is, the phone is the great way to connect with people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still, we can argue among ourselves, the hampercher of the call, whether it's warm or cold, and whether or not that influences your success rate with it, or we can just really look hard at what is historically worked for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: what we believe will continue to work for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And make changes based on what we see and what we're experienced versus whatever talking head on the internet happens to be mentioning at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of those talking heads sometimes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that comment is fully aimed at me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I don't think is happening often enough is leaders and salespeople.
[SPEAKER_00]: actually thinking about the advice that's pertinent to them rather than the advice that is trending.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I want to help more companies do.
[SPEAKER_02]: You brought up this, you what is good look like for us as a template for helping sales leaders and organizations and even individual sellers, go about their strategy in a way that says, okay, we've got all these pieces of information on the internet, we've got all these books that are written.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's so much content that goes back 100 years plus that allows us
[SPEAKER_02]: are the best practices in general, but what you are trying to do is bring that back on to Earth a bit and say, look, your organization is somewhat unique.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have successful people in your organization that have different ways of being successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you just try and paint a broad stroke with say you pick up fanatical prospecting, well, aiming at sales gravy, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You pick up fanatical prospecting arguably one of the best books ever written on the game of prospecting.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you just took that and copied and paste it into your organization,
[SPEAKER_02]: and you went 90 days on the road you might not see success in the way you were expecting it and there's a key reason for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you're a leader in an organization you've had to go through this process of building up strategy and everything for an organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you measuring?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you supposed to be looking at when you say yeah I'm going to establish what
[SPEAKER_02]: Now go, what's step one?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before I answer that, I want to get to your, I want to make a quick point about fanatical prospect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there is a time behind you, post to behind you, it says one more call.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I could tell you that one more call, before I ever met Jeb or read any of his stuff, I made one more call.
[SPEAKER_00]: We call them sundowners, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just as the sun was going over the horizon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, I'm, on my way home, is there some, can I reroute myself to just stop by and see if maybe someone's available at the end of the day, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: One more call, that is, what good looks like.
[SPEAKER_00]: What good looks like here, and this is where I'll start to answer your question, is, who, how, what are you gonna say?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Things like that, what usually works?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cause I'll tell you what, the pitch on a sun downer is different than the pitch at 8 o'clock in the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we make sun downers or is that the worst time?
[SPEAKER_00]: To make calls in this organization because the last thing that people want to do at the end of an already long day is get stuck at the office a little bit more right I knew people to call on because they were wasting time staying at the office because they didn't want to go wherever they had to go next right so understanding not just make one more call but.
[SPEAKER_00]: how, why, where, when those are the things that you start to measure inside your organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thing that I go to first is I work with a lot of companies that, you know, they may have a team of 10 or 12.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they have 12 people on a team, three of them are carrying probably 40 percent of the revenue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they've been around for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a little longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a little less.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they've been around for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those people have this institutional knowledge
[SPEAKER_00]: This quote, instinct, it is anything but instinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's $100,000, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not $10,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's $100,000, maybe the math on it doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a lot of hours that have led to those things feeling instinctual, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the things that we start to measure are really the answers to the questions when we set those sellers down in a conference room, maybe over lunch, and you just say, okay, what makes you different?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I've got great relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did you build those relationships?
[SPEAKER_00]: Every time someone called I picked up and made sure that I was always around and I was ubiquitous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay, what did that actually look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you be a little bit more specific about that?
[SPEAKER_00]: What will give me an example?
[SPEAKER_00]: And why do you think that was impactful?
[SPEAKER_00]: and why do you believe that that led to an outcome?
[SPEAKER_00]: Your relationships that other people wouldn't have found or accomplished.
[SPEAKER_00]: And see, these are questions, Jeb, that we don't want to answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they make us think about stuff that we'd rather just assume, and quite frankly, as a top performer, it doesn't help me, at least doesn't feel like it helps me at first.
[SPEAKER_00]: understand or perform any better, like all this stuff is intuitive to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to keep rolling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you stop hitting me at all these meetings and just let me go out there and so?
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we think about an organization as a whole, when I can decode what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: what I've never thought about specifically, and you can pull it out of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, all of a sudden, we can write it down, we can put it on the whiteboard over there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can talk about whether or not the same way Bob built relationships 20 years ago is transferable to today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time, it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my job as a leader is to pull out the stuff that's made Bob successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's to codify it, document it, and update it.
[SPEAKER_00]: modernize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that Sally or Sarah or Emily, I just did a recent look at naming conventions and popular names from certain generations, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So Emily is a very popular name for someone who was born in the 2000s where Sarah wasn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Emily coming up.
[SPEAKER_00]: She needs to learn from Bob.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Bob just says build relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to help Emily, because I'm a leader.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I need to get that information extracted from Bob, codified document, and modernize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I can help Emily thrive, because I believe in Emily, but without context, she will not succeed.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does good look like here?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about really understanding the specifics that lead those top performers to be so successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not good at intuitively.
[SPEAKER_00]: examining or explaining themselves, because that's just now what we do, but the right kinds of questions unlock those discussions, and then when we can document that stuff, now we have what becomes a common language, what becomes a common standard, we can coach to it, we can onboard to it, and once we really can believe in it and dig our heels into it, and
[SPEAKER_00]: more people are using those best practices.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now we've got more profitable deals with better customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got happier customers, happy sales people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is the thing that a lot of people don't want to talk about.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I hope I'm not touching the third rail here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one day Bob will have earned the right to write off into the sunset.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to take his relationships with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Emily's not going to be able to pick up where he left off unless he does a great job of onboarding her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And quite frankly, you can't pay Emily to be Bob Shadow for two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we speed that up?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we onboard Reps faster?
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do we make sure that less of that book of business?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that risk when Bob deservedly decides to hang up his spikes?
[SPEAKER_02]: this is so interesting that you bring up the top performer who has a lot of nuance when it comes to how he has built his business over two decades.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's call it you know two decades ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: Say it's 15 years, say it's 25 years, Bob spent a lot of time figuring out that process.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he probably spent the first three years of his career struggling just like the rest of us and whatever he was doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then he spent the next five years kind of figuring out, okay, some things work, some things didn't work, is like a, you know, rat in the maze, they figure out the way to get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then 20 years in, all of the good stuff is sort of risen to the top because Bob found success and kept figuring out success.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now when you ask him those questions of who, what, where, why, how are you doing this?
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that sound like?
[SPEAKER_02]: What does a relationship mean to you?
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you go about building
[SPEAKER_02]: He's not just doing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a really important point that you make here, which is he's not just doing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's lots of hours and hours and hours that inform intuition.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not really intuition.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's actually data driven, but it's hard to quantify because Bob hasn't been tracking it on a piece of paper, like a data machine.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you get Emily and you have, let's call Bob Michael Jordan, for example.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we sort of have this hiring process in sales and I felt it too, where you're like, Bob is an all star.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bob is Michael Jordan.
[SPEAKER_02]: and you're just waiting for, you know, another Michael Jordan, LeBron James to walk in the door and then take Bob space.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the strategy.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's pretty tough strategy, you know, before for most companies, you're looking at Emily and you're working with Bob and you're building and like essentially a playbook that says, Emily, we're going to help you get better at XYZ skills the way the Bob executes these things.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you sit down with that top performer,
[SPEAKER_02]: What are the key maybe top three questions that you need to ask day one?
[SPEAKER_02]: You get them in the conference room lunch.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not going to be all in one go.
[SPEAKER_02]: You want to just ask them a couple of questions to get the ball rolling.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you don't waste a time.
[SPEAKER_02]: You got 30 minutes with this top performer.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are you asking them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if possible, I want Emily there too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully I hired her because she's a sponge and she's got a ton of energy and a great attitude and a bunch of what I feel is natural talent to the extent that we can understand or appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she was hired for a reason, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want her there too because I want her to soak up everything because I'm going to interpret her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to interpret those answers differently than she will.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to want to break down my conversation with her too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's an important call.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm going to ask Bob, what makes you different?
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes the way you do things different.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's going to say, oh, you know, Jeff, dog gone and I've had got some great relationships.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's a great relationship?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he'll say something like, well, I'm talking about someone that maybe I sent a holiday card to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sent a holiday card to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been invited to weddings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I go to graduations, you know, it's whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We go hunting together, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We vacation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We play golf together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is that so unique?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think it's helped you?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is so valuable about that relationship?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think is the outcome that it leads to?
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the things that make Bob start thinking about what he does differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like the most mundane, pedantic terms that you can even think of.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is uncomfortable in an awkward conversation for Bob, because in some ways, and the leader has to do a good job, I was saying, look, I'm not here to grill you, I'm not here to pin you down, I'm not here to make you feel bad, I'm really trying to understand what makes you so great, Bob, because I think the world of what you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I could bottle you up and distribute that to the rest of the team, this team would do a whole lot better.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm asking for a favor.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a key to all of these really valuable conversations that you have to have with people, whether they're your team or your customers, and oh by the way, if you're leading a team, your team is your customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to get vulnerable yourself so that they are willing to get vulnerable with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: They will not let their guard down until you let your staff.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they have to trust you enough to give you the answers you can actually do something with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you asked Bob to get a little uncomfortable himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You asked him to let his guard down a little bit and you give him all the reasons why.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he can trust where this is coming from.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you say, you know, I've got to Emily here to hopefully glean as much as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bob, one day you're going to write off into the sunset, and hopefully we give you a gold watch because of all the service that you've given us over the decades here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to see that happen at some point.
[SPEAKER_00]: When that happens, I'm hoping to have a small army of sellers like you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you help you with that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think a good sales leader should do good discovery.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not that there's a script of questions that you should ask, but it's, you know, a format
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, what does that really mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you be more specific about it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And can you give me an example of something?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that example gives us real-world terms that we can dissect a little bit further.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then curiosity runs the day.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you've got half an hour, maybe you can get two or three of those differentiators down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And let's say it could be as common as I've got good relationships, you know, maybe Bob says, well, I've got a membership at a gust of national golf club and I leverage it pretty regularly and people are willing to give me their time for that kind of access.
[SPEAKER_00]: And quite frankly, I can have conversations that other people won't be able to have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most people don't have that, but that's legit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you put that in your back pocket so long as it's legal moral and ethical in your industry and in some it's not, but then you lean into that and you do whatever you can to protect your access to August national golf club, even if Bob doesn't work for you anymore, it can be as big and in common as great relationships, it can be as finite as, you know, I've.
[SPEAKER_00]: gotten a gust of national membership, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, but we have to know what those things are so that we can leverage them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we also need to know what they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if they go away, we can replace them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the risks, in some cases, you know, you might have somebody who has a customer base, again, they love playing golf.
[SPEAKER_02]: Say Emily just doesn't know how to play golf.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe it's not the golf thing that gets them to the conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a mode of that conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Bob figured out that if I play golf with people,
[SPEAKER_02]: they tend to open up over that period of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, what can Emily do that gives her that space with somebody that isn't necessarily golf.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can start to see how there's like blue prints that kind of come off of this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to go back to Emily really quickly.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are a leader.
[SPEAKER_02]: You sit her in this room.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have this conversation with Bob.
[SPEAKER_02]: You finally got Bob to agree to have this conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: He finally feels good about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything's going well for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: But then you get to the
[SPEAKER_02]: three or four versions of Emily different age ranges and I struggle with this where I see what Bob's doing and I go he's really good at this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I assume it's only because he's special and I can't do what he does.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to do something new and figure out my own path for this.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we have this narrative I think, especially for younger people in America, which is be different, be unique, and therefore copying other people's about things.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, walk through as a leader.
[SPEAKER_02]: How do you kind of
[SPEAKER_02]: handled that from a you know you're actually implementing what Bob is done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love where you're going with this because more specifically it's okay Bob is winning because he plays golf at exclusive golf clubs, Emily has never held a golf club.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to ask you a question and I'm going to go somewhere with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is selling an art or a science?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we're doing is we are taking the methods and we are distilling from the methods or we are deducing from the methods a process once the process is understood once Bob is operating on a process hopefully the whole company is operating on a similar version of the process Bob's methods for accomplishing the process are what we're learning from Emily gets to choose her own methods for accomplishing the same process so what does that mean in English?
[SPEAKER_00]: Bob says he's built great relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, great.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need a relationship with people so that they are willing to have conversations with us that they wouldn't otherwise have if we were a total stranger.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bob says I play golf with customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: They then give me their business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, we got to connect the dots there because Emily doesn't play golf, but if Emily understands that she needs a way to make people feel comfortable with her so that they're willing to have conversations with her about potential business, that is the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: She may not leverage golf to get there because that's a really hard game to learn for such a relatively silly reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's got to find her own way there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that becomes the exercise for Emily.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Emily Bob plays golf.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bob has conversations with people that he doesn't otherwise have a reason to have conversations with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, Emily, how could you get there?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's really interesting was this was my story.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was my early arc in my career.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got into medical devices right after they said, you had to stop playing golf and taking your surgeons off to dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so where people had come before me having the toolbox of corporate expense accounts, I talked to reps to said, if we didn't spend our expense accounts, we got in trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't have that one.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was my own wallet.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't just some big corporation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And two, it was not allowed.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were reps that went to jail wearing county orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't going to be me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I had to figure out was, Am I worth spending time with?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's a stake dinner associated with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or am I worth spending time with?
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I someone worth talking to?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I have something worth talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that became my approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I ended up in a roundabout way becoming a challenger before that book ever came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because my relationship building was founded.
[SPEAKER_00]: on a meaningful conversation that they were not thinking about at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got to educate some people in some ways that were appropriate to their motives and their goals and their medical practices.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I brought new worthwhile information.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was pretty good at delivering it, that came with time, but in the absence of golf club, in the absence of a steak dinner or whatever, I had to get creative in my own way to fulfill that same process.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's what's at work here, is we're trying to dig into someone's methods, which are the art of selling, and from that to do say process, which is the science of selling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so once we have a meaningful process, which is different than just the stages, you decide to put into your CRM.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I can show Emily and all of her new younger, less tenured colleagues, how we get things done here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they can feel integrity with the way they do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: because I don't care how you get it done, could be the phone, could be email, could be in-person visits, could be carrier pigeon, just how are we getting conversations with people that we need to talk to?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is such a good analogy, and I'll add another analogy to this, which is, okay, so you and I talk about musical.
[SPEAKER_02]: I play guitar, you have play guitar, you play drums, your sound is learning guitar.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I sent you a video the other week, and I think I put it in some on LinkedIn too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where I can play,
[SPEAKER_02]: the blue scales.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can jam over an E minor track and E, you know, E major track.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can I can jam over A, B, C, all the chords.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can play the scales and I can jam.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the process is learning the scales.
[SPEAKER_02]: The process is understanding the fretboard and where the notes are and just kind of understanding some basic music theory.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the process.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got to understand the game, how it's sort of played.
[SPEAKER_02]: but me and Jimmy Hendrix are very different people.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has an art which is his method of going about creating the music is a completely different method than I do.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a different method.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a different method.
[SPEAKER_02]: So does SRV and so does all of these different guitarists that you have slash, I think, behind you on a little thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: He has a different method of going about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hard to understand the process of methodology piece without an analogy that tells you that the art and the science are very different and how you go about this are different especially within a team documenting this you've got these conversations you figure out how to talk to these different groups of people and you're like look there's a process here we're building we have the science now I just want to help you start to articulate your own art and getting there when you document this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it simply on like a Google Doc, are you just writing it all out and like, you know, just story format, are you filming videos?
[SPEAKER_02]: What are some best practices for leadership to start delivering this to their teams over time that that doesn't feel dated?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what you end up with is a very detailed outcome driven description of your sales process.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can store that however you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a CRM that you want to use this to document it somewhere in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a learning management system.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe your entire business operates on notion.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really, I'm software agnostic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what is important is the documentation of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like planning is priceless, but the plan is worthless.
[SPEAKER_00]: like the process of this to be aware of it, to know it, to have it documented to someone could pick it up if you didn't come into work tomorrow, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that is valuable, but really understanding the reasoning behind it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a client, this was a couple of years ago, and they sold surgical implants like I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: We get the conversation with the physician.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole goal is to get them to a lab where they can practice in a lab with other
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't care how you get them there, but regardless of the intermediate closes and which samples you show them and which products you talk about with them, we need to get them in front of other surgeons.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that that is the key.
[SPEAKER_00]: When that becomes your goal, instead of, did I have an introductory meeting, did I do some discovery, did I get them to try something, you know, whatever?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the mode or the intention behind your sales process changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would think about what you do differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of, oh, this guy's not picking up the phone or what respond to my calls, I say, okay, what am I doing that I can change?
[SPEAKER_00]: What can I tweak?
[SPEAKER_00]: What can I do to maybe get them a different response?
[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes less of this wrote.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to go through the motions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to do my job and it becomes more about, all right, I have a responsibility to be creative here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me think critically about what I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And let me learn from the best practices of others so that I can use that experience to then critically think myself against and in collaboration with those experiences.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now what we have this collaboration or this collection of best practices, now we can start to think creatively in a way that we have it in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: The documentation of these best practices, stone tablets, I don't care.
[SPEAKER_00]: That you document them is important.
[SPEAKER_02]: The thing that's a really important distinction here is that the planning is prices.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that quote, the planning is prices.
[SPEAKER_02]: The plan is worthless.
[SPEAKER_02]: The plan will change.
[SPEAKER_02]: There will be different ways and you'll change things over time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Put into a document.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's more of the process of getting your team involved and learning from the people who have successful new ones.
[SPEAKER_02]: and aren't just taking, you know, again, a video from Jeff for myself or, you know, Jeb Senior or, you know, anybody else in the sales group team or anybody else in the sales training world, we have great advice, but actually putting that into practice in your world is more important and seeing those real-life examples.
[SPEAKER_02]: We talked about the kind of the importance of this, what it means, how you go about it, the different kind of examples that you can talk about inside of these meetings.
[SPEAKER_02]: But your leader, I would imagine if you got to this point in the podcast,
[SPEAKER_02]: into this idea.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have some level of, yeah, I think these guys might be on to something, but I want to start this process and it's going to be hard for me to pitch it to everyone.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm in the business.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm the leader.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Alex I did.
[SPEAKER_02]: I come in Monday morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, we're going to change everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bob, I'm talking to you this afternoon.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to start documenting all the best practices and like literally everyone in the building just rolls their eyes and waits for like
[SPEAKER_02]: pass over because you're going to lose energy if no one gives you the fuel.
[SPEAKER_02]: What are the benefits of going to this process?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, let's walk through some of the just the things you can use as a sales pitch inside of your own organization to get this ball rolling.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got four answers for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's more if we had more time, but I'm going to give you four.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think are my big four.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, Emily's onboarding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say you're planned for her as to onboard in six months.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it takes seven, but you're planning six.
[SPEAKER_00]: Emily's a cost center for six months.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not her fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens if three months earlier?
[SPEAKER_00]: Emily moves from a cost center to a profit center.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's going to be highly company-dependent.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll let people do their own math with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's benefit one.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to get your people up to speed faster.
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, when Bob leaves, let's say Bob's carrying $3 million book of business.
[SPEAKER_00]: when Bob leads, how much of that is at risk?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've seen this before with my own customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sold different things since some of the other reps I saw in the operating rooms, things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember having a specific conversation with a good customer mine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he thought that one of his other reps was leaving and moving states, actually moving to Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that didn't end up happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, you know, I'm really glad that this guy's staying around because I love working with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was also really interesting to try some other stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't ignore that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Bob walks with three million dollars in business.
[SPEAKER_00]: How much are you expecting to keep?
[SPEAKER_00]: 60%.
[SPEAKER_00]: 70%.
[SPEAKER_00]: If 30% walks with Bob, that's a $900,000 revenue loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do the math on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The third thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying you're ruining the $20 million organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: What if?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we knew what good looked like.
[SPEAKER_00]: here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We called on customers who would respond to that and we had better messaging, better tactics, better methods to go about getting in front of them, keeping retaining, earning all that new business.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened if because of all this better behavior?
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll call it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were able to keep just an extra 1% on our top line revenue, which falls immediately to bottom line revenue.
[SPEAKER_00]: What if we were going to be more disciplined with our pricing?
[SPEAKER_00]: A $20 million company that holds a 1% price line is $200,000 in incremental revenue a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a real value to that, $50 million company.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's $500,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: This scales, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: One extra percent, that's a little bit more disciplined, a little bit less discounting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's real money because you're doing the work you're doing the exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think here's the thing that underscores all of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the fourth one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's the biggest one.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the belief that your team has that what they're going to do out there in the field or from behind the phones behind a computer,
[SPEAKER_00]: that it's going to work, not just because some sales trainer or expert or author or keynote speaker came in and said, here's what works out there, no, they can look around at their colleagues and say, no, here's what works for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it works for Bob and it's not yet working for me, guess what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to go talk to Bob and say, hey, what am I missing?
[SPEAKER_00]: That access turns into culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you have a culture of salespeople who believe in what they do every day, think about where that spreads.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing I can't quantify for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: but every leader listening to this at home right now can.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's three quantifiables.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love accelerating your onboarding, which we see at sales revenue, or teams all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are reps that their, entire onboarding cycle can be 12 months.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have taken them from 12 months to six months to three months simply because we spent time with them building the plan.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like we just walked them through, okay, what do they have to know today in order to be profitable as soon as possible?
[SPEAKER_02]: do they need to know how to negotiate at the highest level on month one?
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely not.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you have these different processes that you built with your team over time, you're like, okay, if I can get Emily to three months, I save myself, you know, $40,000, $50,000 and plus benefits, whatever that is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then Emily is going to make money for herself much faster, happier, happier person.
[SPEAKER_02]: You get risk reduction.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you reduce the risk of the business when
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not replacing them with duds or people who have no confidence or people who don't have the training or know what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're also increasing your average volume of deals by just to even like tiny margins, scales so high and then the team confidence if they believe when what they're doing and they can see it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love being able to go to different colleagues and say, okay, it's not just,
[SPEAKER_02]: and being able to ask questions is other people holding their team accountable to the right methods.
[SPEAKER_02]: They are saying, you know, hey, Jeff, I watched you go through the sales process and it was a really big deal.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was super excited for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was worried when you got to this stage of the process and you hadn't had a certain kind of conversation with the customer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't say anything at the time, but I, you know, I want to sit down and let's go through the process and I could just be another rep.
[SPEAKER_02]: that's excited for the team member to go in.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what good looks like here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I love that this is the topic here.
[SPEAKER_02]: What else should leaders be aware of and how might you frame this conversation up if you walked in as a VP of sales tomorrow with a CEO or, you know, an executive board.
[SPEAKER_00]: forecasting.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you understand what successful sales processes have looked like in the past, and then we can get closer to that model for the way things get done most effectively here, what good looks like here, it helps with forecasting.
[SPEAKER_00]: because there's just a higher level of certainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we're talking about here is standardization without any single rep, giving up any of their autonomy or integrity.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not here to tell you how to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm here to help you get more specific on what needs to be done and what that looks like in this office, not in the textbook.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's probably the only thing that we haven't talked about.
[SPEAKER_02]: just yet before casting.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, I think it's a pretty easy leap here to go from those four benefits of this process of this strategy and then getting into forecasting, but really quickly, you know, walk through some of the things that are going to bring VPs of sales and chief sales officers and directors piece of when it comes to forecasting here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Be in more certain in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And having more reliability in even if you are, I mean, okay, how many VPs or chief sales officers have been in this position where I'm not gonna hit the number this quarter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not certain when this other stuff or if this other stuff is gonna close.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I need to pull ahead orders by dropping my price significantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're giving away profit.
[SPEAKER_00]: in order to make the board of directors and the investors happy, and that's important.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not trying to underscore that, but what if we could tell a different story?
[SPEAKER_00]: and say, look, Mr. CEO, Ms. CEO, I'm bringing you bad news today.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna miss this quarter.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's what I know, based on the process, based on what we know, based on all the work that we've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The deals that are in flow right here have an 80% 90% and I'm willing to sign my name on that 80 to 90% likelihood of signing, they're just gonna sign middle in next month.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm so confident that they're going to sign that if we do discount, we may actually be able to move those deals up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we could hit our number.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, now I can actually quantify the cost of hitting our number this month.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can make a decision based on data rather than the gut feel of, hey, we're going to miss.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to try.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to try to pull the rabbit out of my hat again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry, boss, I got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And no one feels good when they have to say that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know what, that's we're never going to extinguish that from our profession, because it's just the way business works.
[SPEAKER_00]: I get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's one of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the most powerful conversations I ever had with my leader as a rap.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was trying something new.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was new at the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had hired me for a reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, I'm going to try this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is going to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you give me the leeway, I will do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it works, then we're going to be great.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it doesn't work, I'll do it the way you want to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my strategy there was I was willing to miss this quarter.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the upside was I was never going to miss another quarter because I was setting myself up for the long term instead of the short term and in some companies that's just not allowed in this company since I just been hired I asked for a little bit of permission and it ended up that I didn't end up missing that quarter nor did I miss very many quarters for the rest of my tenure there outside of some things that happened in the environment and in the industry, but setting yourself up for the long term here.
[SPEAKER_00]: to give up the ups and downs of the emotions and the brain chemistry that goes along with all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: You may be in a company that's willing to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a huge, huge value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if nothing else, when you set this up, maybe you still have the beg borrow and steal from next quarter to hit this quarter, but if you still have a long term mindset, the amount that you beg borrow and steal gets less and less every quarter, until finally, it's just not an issue, it's just what you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So many of the things that drive people like me out of those roles can be fixed by this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jeff, I really appreciate your time today.
[SPEAKER_02]: A where can people learn a little bit more about you from you and follow you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can follow me on LinkedIn.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm there just about every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I have good things to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to fun with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll learn some things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it makes sense, then there's a way to reach out to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I would advise you to reach out to your sales gravy trainer first.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're working with someone in this organization, then you're going to have a ton of access there and peak their interest with this conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jeff, thank you so much for your time.
[SPEAKER_02]: No why you win, go get that assessment right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you are listening to this podcast on Spotify, on Apple, on I Heart Media, on any place you get your podcasts and your music, please give us a five star rating and leave us a review, leave comments, you can do that on Spotify.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also leave a review on Apple.
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[SPEAKER_02]: If you leave comments on the youtube and you bring that little bell, I might send you something really nice because I'm trying to grow our audience over there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Go to learn.
[SPEAKER_02]: salesgrabby.com, use the code podcast to get a free course right now on me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, we'll catch you all next time on the salesgrabby podcast, Jeff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_02]: They ship.