Companies are made up of many departments all working together with one central goal. How does valueselling apply to departments like Product Management, Sales Engineering, Channel? Where do things like titles come into play when building persona-based prompts such as playbooks and sales call frameworks?
Category: Podkast
Building with the Buyers Journey in Mind
I value what I would call the three P’s: the people, their processes, and their pain points. And understanding that second, is work with your account management team or whoever maintains that relationship with your customers.
How to Measure the Dirty Deal Details that Seem to be Neglected!
Working collaboratively, sales professionals and customers find the right solutions, while driving additional sales success for your sales team. Individualistic approaches may create top sales performers that become heroes. But how does Sales Management encourage top performers to share and transfer their knowledge to the rest of the team?
How to be an Effective Storyteller (and increase your sales!)
“I would say you can’t afford *not* to tell stories now in a cold call. We have to use common sense. But essentially, we want to be relevant and relatable. It’s very easy to say “Hey Greg, I was talking to John who’s just like you were right down the road in Arizona. John and I were speaking about this challenge… have you faced that at all?” Now I’m able to relate now that I’m sharing this story. I’m giving the intro and I’m trying to pique your interest and from there it’s either “hey tell me more” or “I pity the fool”.”
Teaching Sales Representatives to Fish
This podkast with Mike Fisher discussed asking questions on the front-end of a conversation and determining what the customer’s needs are early in the process, rather than “showing up and throwing up”. Mike has been training business development teams across the globe for about 20 years.
The discussion centered on “closing deals”; the goal of every sales leader, wanting their team to close deals, bringing in revenue for the company. Mike teaches from looking at the selling perspective, and helping the sales representative learn to hear the customer, and be able to get the customer to articulate what it is that they like about your product, diving into selling themselves on the product, helping to ease the way toward the close. Part of this critical technique is sincerely listening and not talking. Once a sales representative learns how to listen and not talk, business increases naturally.
Mike talks about he used a Manila folder when he was selling books. His was a unique idea and tactic that ended up onboarding new clients. It wasn’t a “technique”; it came out of his sincerely listening and reading what the customers were saying, uncovering desires.
Salespeople should be taught how to discover what differentiates products and articulate the value proposition in a way that helps them translate to uncovering and solving their customer’s needs.
Listen as Greg & Mike discuss the merits and pains of requiring sales reps to be fully trained on their organizations’ products and the importance of having emotional intelligence.
This podkast will have sales reps wanting to rewind and listen again!
How to Build Your Own Career Progression in Sales Leadership
ABSTRAKT had a great opportunity to talk with Florin Tatulea about How to Build Your Own Career Progression in Sales Leadership. They dove into how strategically making choices about career decisions helps to drive what you do in your career. How can a person help drive results that are most impactful to an organization that results in a win-win? The person grows their career while helping the company achieve (or exceed!) their goals.
Being more conscientious and helping figure out unselfish characteristics to ultimately help build a group of people who all are kind of in it together. Everyone has the same goal of helping others to win. To be patient with yourself, to be patient with your employer. Delayed gratification. You cannot achieve much if you’re always jumping from job to job every 2 years. Give yourself time to really know the vertical, to know the products and services.
Finally, make management knows your plans for your career progression. Ensure your plans are clearly defined, and that your clear deliverable goals are being met, providing the opportunity to interview for that next open position wherever that might be!
Roadmap for Career Progression in SaaS Sales
I’ll put in the extra hours. I’ll put in the extra time and really just kind of did whatever I could in the interview process is to reassure that recruiter, or that that sales manager that like you know, hey, I’m the guy you should bet on and here’s why. And something to reassure that recruiter or else that I think folks can do as well. Even though I wasn’t in tech sales, a lot of the work that I did at my previous company was still very transferable.
Making cold calls, you know, prospecting, running my own sales calls and all of those things that I can absolutely leverage that experience into as well. So, I think there’s a few different ways you can go about it, but at the end of the day you got to be able to put and change their perspective in that person’s mind a little bit and just kind of say hey, like you know I can do this and really persuade them and let them know that you know you can do it and give them that confidence to pull the trigger.
The Importance of Measuring Effort and Value
It goes back to knowing your why. Is it (the time you spend) for career advancement? Is it for hitting your quota? Is it for just making your day-to-day easy or is it just so you don’t feel like you have to know your why and you have to have an independent and dependent variable? If anybody has their old homework from middle school about this. What is science ******** that you learn you know like refer back to that assignment you took when you were 13 years old and apply it to this because it still works.
Knowing Who You Are, What You Want, and Having a Plan to Get There
You want to take ownership of what’s wrong. Whether it be personally or creating an environment where you’re facilitating people being open to taking ownership of what’s going on. Learn from your pain. I think pain is a valuable teacher in life and I know it’s not always fun in the moment. But as we learn from it, we can make sure to not experience again and we can also help others not experience that same pain and then third, we are all just a bag of bones.
Most importantly, be who you are, know what you want, and make a plan for how to get it
The Psychology of Running Away from Pain Instead of Toward Pleasure
Thank you Keenan for sharing the psychology behind running away from pain rather than toward pleasure – a tenant of successful selling!
Should we sell to the root cause (pain)? Listen as we discuss addressing business problems, through determining technical problems and root causes.
“Old school selling like … old school sales training. I believe Sandler talks a lot about finding the pain. I believe value selling may talk about it. I have to be careful about which, but it was a central tenant in most pieces of training in the 1980s ’90s, and early 2000s. Let me be real. It’s the tenant in about 99% of most training.