sales and marketing alignment

#96: Chet Lovegren joins Outbound Sales Lift to discuss account-based selling — building a strategy, working with your customer success team, and developing your outbound messaging. Chet and Tyler explore sales strategies like Challenger and Gap Selling, and how no matter their strategy SDRs still need to do the work to educate and entertain prospects through their outreach.

Lastly, they dive into how SDR managers can coach reps in areas like accountability and time management to improve their overall account-based selling techniques.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• 0:57 Tips for developing an account-based sales strategy by building on your inbound function and working with your customer success team
• 5:42 The importance of good messaging in an outbound sales strategy, including a discussion of Challenger and Gap selling
• 12:55 How to coach reps to build relationships with prospects through teaching and messaging
• 18:12 Framing better questions in outbound messaging
• 23:12 Developing the process behind account-based sales — time management, accountability, and SDR managers modeling behaviors

#95: Outbound Sales Lift host Tyler Lindley outlines his 5 pillars of SDR management — hiring, onboarding and training, coaching, data and reporting, and leadership. He explores what successful SDR managers should focus on, starting with the vetting process when hiring new sales reps and continuing through everyday coaching responsibilities from core sales skills to mindset coaching.<br>

Tyler shares advice from his experience managing SDRs to ensure that future leaders are equipped with both the soft and hard skills needed to train and coach teams to achieve their goals.<br>

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS<br>

[1:03]: Hiring new sales reps

• Specific qualities SDR managers should look for during the hiring process
• Who should be involved in hiring
• Tips for questions and exercises that will uncover traits sales reps should (and shouldn’t) have to be successful

[4:55]: Onboarding & Training

• How to set new SDRs up for success at the outset
• Tyler explains the difference between training and coaching

[7:41] Coaching SDRs

• Advice for SDR managers coaching reps in specific skills such as cold calling
• Skills coaching versus mindset coaching

[12:21] Sales Data & Reporting

• SDR managers need to stay connected to the data
• Why tracking every sales metric possible isn’t always the best path forward

[14:59] Leadership as an SDR Manager

• Moving into the SDR manager role after being a top performing SDR
• Considering your team above your individual performance
• Being fulfilled by team success

Host Tyler Lindley introduces Outbound Sales Lift, a rebranded podcast focused on elevating your SDR team and transforming your sales development efforts. 

#94: The second part of Outbound Sales Lift’s Interviews at INBOUND includes Tyler Lindley’s conversations with sales leaders at HubSpot’s INBOUND conference. This episode discusses how to approach social selling on LinkedIn and using a multichannel approach for prospecting. Additionally, Tyler talks with guests about the importance of establishing trust with prospects, taking advantage of your network, and building your personal brand through authenticity.

#93: Host Tyler Lindley attended HubSpot’s INBOUND conference and had the opportunity to talk sales with some of the leading minds in the industry. 

This episode is part one of the compilation of his conversations, covering topics including advice for first-time SDR managers, personalization in outbound prospecting, and whether or not LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool is really worth it for sales reps.

Guests include:

• Bryan Mueller, ID3 Consulting
• David Mattson, CEO & President of Sandler Training
• Gray Winsler, Account Executive at Qwilr
• Jesse Lipson, Founder & CEO of Coffee
• John Rosar, CEO of REVGEN
• Dan Mott, Founder of SIX3MEDIA

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

[1:00] Tyler shares key themes from his time at INBOUND — building relationships, leveraging your social networks, and the power of community.

[2:25] Brian Mueller of ID3 Consulting discusses:

• How inbound and outbound strategies complement each other
• Building personas
• SDR management tips for coaching and training sales reps

[11:50] David Mattson, CEO & president of Sandler Training shares his thoughts on:

• How first-time SDR managers can focus on growing themselves and the business while also training sales reps
• Developing a common sales methodology across roles
• Changes in outbound over the last few years including a reliance on technology and a lack of attention being paid to onboarding and training new SDRs

[20:53] Gray Winsler, account executive at Qwilr explains:

• How Qwilr can help SDRs and AEs in various stages of the sales process
• The importance of creativity in sales

[25:52] Tyler discusses pattern interrupting in sales and how he leveraged this tactic at INBOUND.

[26:29] Jesse Lipson, founder & CEO of Coffee discusses:

• Why companies are bad at outbound
• How the SDR role has changed over the last few years
• Why he built his company, Coffee, and how it can help sales professionals

[32:31] John Rosar, CEO of REVGEN explains:

• What outbound means to him
• The importance of educating prospects
• The tools and resources he suggests providing to new SDRs

[39:45] Dan Mott, founder of SIX3MEDIA talks about:

• Why he doesn’t think LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that valuable for SDRs
• The importance of content to continue nurturing leads
• How SDRs can get started creating content

[46:17] Tyler closes the episode by exploring the power of a personal brand and how to scale from one-to-one communication to one-to-many content creation.

#91: Listen as JJ Russell, the Co-Owner and Director of the Best Damn Agency Mastermind, discusses building an offer. JJ helps agencies worldwide grow and scale their organization with a fantastic mastermind program and shares how to make building out a sales organization a lot easier.

Click here for full episode show notes, transcripts, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Intro (0:00)

Your offer is your differential for any company, especially a sales team at any company in general.  

It’s the unique value you’re bringing to the market, how you’re uniquely positioning yourself to me. A solid offer can make or break a sale before it even gets into motion.

Tear down an offer into a “foot in the door” offer or a tripwire offer you could set your sales team with. 

If you’re solely competing on price, you’re just trying to do the same thing one iota better than the person standing next to you. 

Positioning your offer unique to your market gives you something fresh to sell. Don’t want to sell the same thing as everybody else in the same way everybody else is doing it.

Part of this is really educating your buyer. That’s a rapid way to differentiate yourself from what everybody else is doing. 

Now suddenly, you’ve positioned yourself as an authority and somebody who has the goods. You’ve got a process and Intel into this business that will allow you to sell at a much higher ticket than you would otherwise.

Setting Yourself Apart (5:36)

You want to be more strategic with the services you provide. You’re probably running a two-week strategy session. You’re getting into your clients’ tools or whatever that means for you and your industry.

Sending it on the front end makes the full engagement way more enticing. 

Your prospects are comparing you against the five other competitors. They’re trying to basically understand the strategy they should be thinking about during the sales process before any money exchanges.

Sometimes people get confused, and they think for this process to feel robust enough for this engagement, they need to feel like it’s worth their time. What they want are results.

If you’re selling to small businesses, what you’re putting into our offer is 1000% of your proposal.

Sales Reps have to understand their market and their services well enough to explain outcomes or soft problems in the sales conversation. They can say- Here’s how we solve your problem. But first, we’re going to step in. 

Foot in the Door Offers (14:39)

What they’re doing from day one is sitting in on these backend calls where you, as the founder or as the senior salesperson, are walking them through this massive proposal. 

That essentially is the foot-in-the-door offer.

They’re hearing all the questions answered, all of the details of the services you provide, and hearing you go back and forth. 

So really, what they’re gaining is very in-depth product market training throughout the foot-in-the-door process. Even if they’re not the ones closing the full engagement on the back end.

So it accelerates the timeline within which they can be selling the full thing. 

Another key component to successful delivery is shrinking the cost and shrinking the timeline to actually delivering. Bring in the roadmap or present the roadmap to your client.

JJ Russell’s Bio:

Former senior sales guy for Sales Driven Agency. Co-Owner and Director of The Best Damn Agency Mastermind, the most elite community for growth-minded 7 and 8-Figure digital agency CEO’s.

Important Links:

JJ’s LinkedIn Profile

The Best Damn Agency Mastermind

#90: Listen as Jill Fratianne, Channel Account Manager at HubSpot, discusses building a resilient sales mindset and balancing the demands of sales with life. She and Tyler share personal experiences in work-life balance, handling major life events, and tips for being an effective sales manager and leader in unforeseen circumstances.

Click here for full episode show notes, transcripts, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Intro (0:00)

Top performers in any profession, especially sales, are all wired differently for perfection. But unfortunately, high standards are the norm, and they can be detrimental as your career progresses. 

So what happens when life and you’re thrown off your game? You’re at the bottom, and that’s where resilience comes in.

Today’s salesperson is a person who is helpful because anyone can shop you out on the internet. 

By the time a customer gets to you, they know they will be talking to someone. And they want to know what’s behind all of the marketing jargon.

Work-Life Balance (5:35)

Eventually, you’re going to burn out. If your company has any form of a culture where you’re going to get fired, you can try and do it again elsewhere. But it’s a short lift.

A sales career is riddled with ups and downs. If anyone says that it’s not, they’re lying,

Jill was four or five deals away from achieving “founders club” HubSpot. She was heading into Q4 when she had to give birth, and she remembers sitting at her desk crying.

It was a difficult transition for her because she was used to having the flexibility she needed to be at the top of the boards. Now she had this huge responsibility and all the other things she was trying to balance. But this was a different type of responsibility.

Often we’re nervous about bringing up life outside the dashboard because it feels like we’re not “all in.” And God forbid your manager thinks your eye isn’t on the prize. It’s terrifying.

This is why the sales manager role is so important. Many sales reps’ experience at a company lives and dies by who they report to. It’s not the VP, the director, or the CEO. It’s their manager and the relationship between the sales manager and the sales.

Jill’s adrenaline held out until her daughter turned six months old. Then she hit exhaustion. 

Sales Management and Leadership (13:50) 

Our kids are us. They become a huge part of our lives, and either a manager accepts that and incorporates it into the way they treat the frontline sales rep or ignores it.

There is a level of trust. If this manager has your back, they get you as a human being. They understand your personal goals. 

You’ve got to develop trust with the reps to have a two-way relationship. And that relationship becomes significant. 

If folks are going to find this level of balance of self-forgiveness, empathy, and resilience to maintain a sales career. You can fake it for a few years, but eventually, that catches up with you.

Grief can also destroy a personal life and career, so you have to give your employees space. If you hear someone die, your job as a sales manager is to shut down the computer.

The worst thing a manager can tell you is that you’re giving excuses when you are actually vulnerable.

Jill Fratianne’s Bio:

Jill Fratianne a.k.a “JillyFrat” has been a top performing sales rep at HubSpot for going on 13yrs after switching careers from a concert violist and can still be seen on state with the Portland Symphony. She’s held various sales roles at HubSpot and is currently in Channel Sales. Her passion lies in helping cultivate resilient sales cultures as well as coaching and uplifting business leaders to be their best. She also has a significant stake in real estate, is a mother, and wife of a hot sauce entrepreneur. Fun fact, er Great Danes have been seen on Animal Planet

Important Links:

Jill’s Website

Jill’s LinkedIn Profile

#89: Listen as Tyler Lindley, Sales Coach and Podcast Host of The Sales Lift, discusses sales onboarding. He explores how playbooks, planning, knowledge, tools, and sales processes all play into setting reps up for success.

Click here for episode show notes, transcript, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Intro (0:00)

Onboarding is one of the most pivotal moments. That first impression; it is that first introduction to you and your company and their experience.

Companies need to get this right because companies that do onboarding. Retaining their new sales reps and retaining great sales reps is key to growth. It's so hard to scale and maintain your sales team and efforts if you always have turnover.

This is a really pivotal time for sales reps because this is how you get out of the gates quickly.

The Five Pillars of Sales (2:39)

The first key pillar of sales onboarding is you need a playbook. You need something to give that new rep on day one. It should be an overview of everything, and it doesn't have to be a super long document for those just getting started.

The second key pillar is enabling reps to plan their day and teaching them some best practices around time management. 

The third key pillar is product industry and company knowledge. We need all of this product knowledge because they need to be talking to customers innovatively and efficiently. They need to have all these conversations and answer all these questions from day one. 

Highlight the problem. That you solve for your prospects and highlight the key differentiators that you have against your competitors. If a new sales rep knows the key issues that your company solves, they know the key ways in which your company is different from the competitors.

The fourth key pillar is tools. We've got to enable our teams with tools. There are a lot of tools out there that you can arm your team with, but just make sure that's a part of the consideration and getting folks up to speed on those tools. 

The fifth key pillar is the sales process. What does an ideal process look like from start to finish regarding what I'm doing? Make sure that you have that process outlined and make sure that your CRM is clear on how they navigate.

Outro (14:51)

The first impression is so important for all the reps out there listening. So make sure that you're taking advantage of these resources. 

Sales onboarding is all about building a strong foundation that you, the rep, can build on. So you want your reps to have a really strong foundation, and all these things create that foundation.

#88: Listen as Natalie Furness, ​​CEO of RevOps Automated, discusses revops and aligning marketing and sales. She covers why alignment matters, how to better balance systems, and the key goals for sales teams.

Click here for the full episode transcript, show notes, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Importance of Alignment (1:00)

Alignment promotes a better customer experience. You’ll process people and data more efficiently, more people will love your product, and you’re just going to generate more business. 

Put prospects at the top of the marketing funnel, and they drop into the sales funnel, then revenue, and then success like a one-way system. 

Whereas if you think about a flywheel, this is like a cycle. The client or a prospect can join that flywheel at any point.

The customer experience is never-ending because they stay in a flywheel. The growth flywheel is all about retention, referral, and increasing every customer’s lifetime value. 

Make sure you have enough leads in the funnel or flywheel to manage losing customers to the churn.

It’s hard to know why a customer leaves. The largest point of churn tends to be activation and the onboarding process.

We need to stop taking our attention away from the point in which we generate the first point of revenue and switch our thinking to lifetime value. At the end of the day, revenue operations are all about this ratio of cost per customer acquisition to the lifetime value. 

Balancing Systems (7:33)

The handoff between any department of systems is the key. This includes multiple areas of your revenue and operations funnel and between sales and customer success. 

It’s also important that you’re not only just looping these people into your customer success, but you’re getting a product in bulk part of customer success.

Demand vs. under sales aren’t something all companies are doing. It’s a new way of thinking.

Start automating the calls, so reps can start dialing straight out from HubSpot and then record or transcribe that information. 

Make sure the sales teams actually receive compensation for their generated leads.

Key Goal for Sales Teams (15:04)

Custom integrations are as simple as going onto the HubSpot marketplace, searching sales tools, and then looking through the list of all the native integrations that are available.

If people are familiar with no-code tools, such as Integra mat or Zapier, these tools can integrate no-code or low-code, then there are bespoke integrations. 

There are three ways either off-the-shelf low-code, no-code, or bespoke. 

The fewer tools, the better where possible because, the more tools you have, the more things that can go wrong.

Natalie’s Bio:

Natalie is an award-winning entrepreneur and CEO of RevOps Automated the HubSpot partner consultancy providing Revenue Operations as a Service. This self-confessed data geek helps B2B SaaS businesses get every ounce of value from HubSpot. It’s her mission to help businesses bring all of their data into one place, and unlock insights to help marketing, sales and success make better business decisions.

In her spare time, you can find her surfing on the UK south coast or fighting in the boxing ring.

Important Links:

RevOps Automated Website

Natalie’s LinkedIn Profile

Click here for full episode show notes, transcripts, and more!

#87: Listen as Stephen Beach, Co-Founder and CMO at Vantage Impact, discusses following up and nurturing prospects who may not necessarily be ready to buy right now.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Adding Value (0:22)

It’s more valuable, faster, more efficient to nurture your prospects that you’ve already done a lot of the leg work to get them out of the gates. So it’s a more powerful channel to put a lot of time and energy into.

We feel like nothing’s happening on their side, and we don’t want to be the annoying salesperson.

But if you truly believe in your product or your service, you know, deep down, that it’s going to help. That’s your mindset. If you don’t have that belief, then all this nurturing and trying to stay in touch with them will probably feel a little bit desperate. 

It’s embracing the customer-centric mindset. 

Tactically speaking, share with people. Talk about industry news articles. Find an article that’s relevant to your client. Come across it on your LinkedIn feed or whatever it is and your Google alerts and copy and paste the URL and send it over to them.

​​Compile a database of this type of stuff that you could pull from.

These can start conversations that otherwise would be hard to start because that isn’t very pleasant if you’re checking in. So if you’re adding value, now you’ve got that open space for dialogue that maybe can take place.

Ask yourself- how do you close the deal? A lot of the time, the answer is to continue to show value to the prospect repeatedly.

Nurturing Prospects (9:33) 

Stay in front for as long as possible with them, and as you keep showing them value, as many things as you can are directly related to them. 

As we’re nurturing prospects, we’re trying to build a relationship, and we’re trying to add value continuously.

Is there anyone in your network that would benefit from talking with me or just having a 15-minute introduction? And a lot of times, you get a good response to that. 

Adding value activities, especially I love giving them a referral, introducing someone to them that they might help, or they might work with or whatever that to me is huge.

Podcasting as a Way of Connecting (13:05)

We reach out to a prospect, somebody I’m already talking to, and ask if they want to be on our series. That way, it’s a blend of marketing and sales, but who will say no to that. And all of a sudden, you’re in front of them.

Again, they’re talking to somebody on the team, so we’re developing the relationship. It’s very natural for them to be like, oh yeah, by the way, you should talk to this other person. Interview them or tell them a bit about what you do.

It doesn’t matter if you work with all these folks you’re helping, and you’re building that network. You don’t always have to build. 

In a one-to-one relationship, with the advantage of social media and podcasts and all the available tools, you can build these one-to-many style relationships.

Stephen’s Bio:

Stephen is a sales rep turned inbound marketer, giving him a unique perspective on marketing-sales alignment and how marketing can best support a company’s sales efforts. Stephen is CMO at Vantage Impact, helping clients set up and optimize HubSpot’s tools to market better and sell more effectively and efficiently. His unique modernized approach to marketing and sales is a game changer for the financial services industry, helping advisory practices move beyond cookie cutter content and hand shaking at events, to be more digital and automated without losing personal touch.

Golf, cold brew, bourbon (in that order). Big fan of goofy t-shirts and craft brewery trucker hats. ——

Last year Traci Beach and I started a second business with our brother-in-law, Boston Cardinal. In the middle of a pandemic with a bunch of little kids running around felt like the right time 😳😁…so we formed Vantage Impact. We are excited about this business because the model we’ve built is very unique.

Yet what we did was very simple really: we combined our Craft Impact: A Growth & Communications Agency business with Boston’s 10+ years of financial advisor recruiting experience, where he managed 1500+ financial advisor transitions.

Vantage Impact exists to guide financial advisors through big changes for their practice. We have two sides to the business: Transition and Growth.

Once we help advisors find the right firm, talent or custodian, we leverage strategic marketing and change communications, so they can grow a practice that’s profitable, impactful and life giving.

Cheers 🍻 to 2 “Impact” businesses 😛 and 3 little kids…what a ride!

Important Links:

Stephen Beach’s LinkedIn Profile

Click here for full episode show notes, transcript, and more!

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Gaps in Sales Coaching (0:22)

Duane spent the last decade in sales, half specifically in SaaS, and has helped companies grow. He took that and turned it into a consultancy, working with SAS founders and sales managers.

One gap we still run into is the stereotypical way we promote into sales leadership by picking top sales reps where they end up not getting education. 

The biggest gap in sales coaching is that there's no one there leading the charge to help these managers understand all the different aspects of being a leader.

You've got a challenger mindset even in sales, and you do commercial teaching. But, that's still different than an ongoing relationship with your team and holding them accountable. 

It's a completely different skillset from putting in the activity close and fine-tuning your sales process to being okay with resting your commission and checking on someone else's efforts.

Finding Good Sales Leaders (5:52)

One of the reasons previously successful sales reps can become truly great sales managers is because they can tap into their experience of when they were going through that phase and then channel that through a leadership strategy. So they can speak from a position of experience. 

Many reps don't get exposed to understanding what it takes, levers to pull, and what to pay attention to as a leader. As a result, they don't have a good leader they're following, or they just never thought of reading leadership books to get better at their job.

If they're coming from a larger organization, they may have been so specialized and in their lane that they don't have that ability to see the forest for the trees. 

Generalized vs. Specialized Reps (10:42)

You can't just be specialized in one thing; you have to know enough about everything to be successful these days, 

It's becoming a much more desired trait in well-rounded salespeople to be a deep generalist because you need to be agile. 

You need to be able to pivot, and you need to be able to act on your feet while on the call instead of needing to grab your sales engineer.

A lot of sales reps tend to just keep on talking. But when they speak less initially, they end up talking a lot more at the end because they're gathering information.

One-On-Ones vs. Coaching Calls (15:02)

One-on-one is for the sales rep and is about 30 to 45 minutes. Don't bring an agenda. It's for them. It's their opportunity to ask you questions about the organization. 

If they want to talk about career development, this is their time where they're not being coached.

It's a time for them to be heard and express things that are going on. 

A lot of times, you learn so much more about the team. In addition, you have the privilege to lead from those meetings than you do on tactical coaching calls. 

Duane always likes to check-in to see how they're doing in their role in their career, focus on scheduling their next PTL, and set goals and competitions around vacations.

The one-on-one stuff is interesting, and it's something that needs to be more intentional on every sales team.

For coaching, choose one thing instead of three to five things for them to work on. What is the one thing that they could have done better? So that if they try to focus on one thing, it's less overwhelming. 

Duane's Bio:

My name is Duane Dufault. I'm a college dropout construction worker who made a complete shift in my life over a decade ago so I could be home for my kids. I've sold just about everything from newspapers, toilets and flooring, to printers door to door, SMB Saas, Mid-market, and all the way up to fortune 100 Enterprise Software. You name it, and I've sold it, sold into it, or helped someone sell it. If not, chances are, it won't take me long to help you figure it out 

AND - Ive taken startups from 17 employees to over 60, from 2mill in ARR to over 11mill in ARR while bring bootstrapped, AND having an acquisition under my belt of over $320Million...

Important Links:

Duane's Website

Duane's LinkedIn Profile

Duane's Twitter Profile

Click here for full show notes, transcript, and more!

#85: Listen as David Ledgerwood, Managing Partner at Add One Zero, discusses gathering sales intelligence from the front lines in sales development.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Gathering Sales Intelligence (0:22)

David’s firm tracks the close ratio as one of their critical KPIs because it saves time and it gets more money for the client, which gets more money for them.

They pay attention to metrics from the call and annotate every recording. Those recordings flag four different things: a need, a question, an objection, or a positive response.

They record everything into a database before compressing and normalizing that data. Then communicate with marketing at the top of the funnel and give that information.

Interestingly, it became less about sales intelligence than it became about customer discovery meetings.

David wants to inform and grow a business because he works with service companies, premium marketing companies, professional services, consultants, etc. They’re not SAS. 

Being Front and Center (7:35)

If everybody wants to know something, it’s critical to put it out front and center.

Enroll prospects in an email sequence to help them get everything they should know before the call. 

Send them emails over the next few days before the call, and feed them information framed in a way to help save time behind the scenes.

If they didn’t book a meeting, send them the booking sequence, and enroll them in the pre-call sequence. 

Expanding The Four Buckets (11:19)

Know what they’re looking for and what they want in every call. If you do it right and ask the right questions, you’ll elicit information. Almost every call is very need-heavy on the front. 

There’s a difference between “I need more leads” and “I need more prospects to talk to.” 

We exist to understand why a prospect might like your product and then action. 

It doesn’t matter if you call it marketing or sales; it’s the commercial revenue engine we need to build.

David’s Bio:

Prior to starting Add1Zero, Ledge led Sales and Services for Gun.io, during which time he sold and managed more than 100,000 hours of development and 10x revenues to a mid-7-figure run rate.

Ledge’s 20-year business career began in professional services at PwC where he carved out a weird niche as a Bash developer and checked the Fortune 500 box with UPS, JPMorganChase, and Aetna. If you’ve received a package or deposited a check, there’s a pretty decent chance some piece of code he wrote was somehow involved.

He moved to a major publishing company right about when Web 2.0 started to eat newspapers and periodicals for lunch, giving him a front-row seat to disruption and honing his taste for entrepreneurial pursuits while learning how Sales and Operations must gel for customer success.

In 2007 he walked out of his stable job and moved from New Jersey to Nashville to start a company, which he grew to a $500K run rate before crashing and burning in the Great Recession. Without taking a day off, he joined an EdTech firm and ran efforts to drive $2M to $20M growth. Then he took a COO role while side hustling to coach, mentor, and build his network of founders and execs.

Important Links:

David’s LinkedIn Profile

Add1Zero’s Website

Click here for full episode show notes, transcript, and more!

#84: Listen as Felix Krueger, the CEO at Fast Forward Revenue Performance, discusses random acts of sales enablement and how you can better streamline the sales process.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

What is Random Enablement? (0:22)

Unfortunately, random acts of an ailment are still something that you see more often than strategic sales enablement. 

If sales leadership is not thinking strategically and is just running around, trying to fix the most urgent problem right then, you end up with misaligned enablements that are random.

These are so reactive that they even have that much of an impact? There’s a lack of understanding of sales as a structured process.

As soon as you create understanding, you suddenly create that alignment needed to create ongoing support. To have that alignment and buy-in on a leadership level is required for sales to be genuinely enabled and set up for success.

3 Stages of Sales Enablement (5:03)

There are three stages of the evolution of sales enablement within an organization. 

If you spend too much time on sales enablement initiatives, and especially if cash flow is an issue, that might cause problems for the organizations 

Formalize the coaching approach across an organization and create the structures necessary to implement a coaching program effectively. 

Often we want to try to keep any client forever. Still, we also support the client in managing that transition from the lowest maturity stage to ultimately hiring a senior sales resource. As a result, they can drive that strategy effectively and maintain that alignment across the company.

Streamlining the Process (10:05)

Often organizations fall into the trap of analysis paralysis because they spend so much time analyzing all the moving parts, mainly because there are so many.

Unless you’re dealing with major corporations that are very established and interact with markets that are changing very frequently, you don’t want to spend too long analyzing. 

Felix has a streamlined process for the study of development that takes about four weeks. So it’s a very full-on and involved program on that front.

Companies often miss out on hiring full-time senior sales and admin resources because sales enablement is a new discipline.

There are probably many definitions of sales and amens out there as people use the term. But what it certainly means is strategically aligning all the necessary components for sales to succeed. 

We typically look at buyer acumen or essentially understanding what matters to the buyer and the problem you solve.

The buyer journey has to be core to anything done around sales enablement. 

Felix’s Bio:

Over the last 15 years, Felix Krueger has worked as a sales enabler, seller, and buyer with some of the most recognized names in B2B technology and online media. Today he is the host of The State of Sales Enablement podcast and the CEO of FFWD, a global sales enablement consulting firm specialized in optimizing the revenue performance of SaaS, IT, and media companies.

Important Links:

Felix’s LinkedIn Profile

FFWD Website

Click here for full episode show notes, transcript, and more!

#83: Listen as Brian Smith, Revenue Enablement Manager at Vendition, discusses balancing work-life with home-life in sales. He shares how he managed to overcome specific struggles and offers insight into how to show up for the people that matter.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Importance of Work-Life Balance (0:22)

It was a lot of trial and error in the very beginning. Balance is a hard thing to do in general. The biggest thing when walking into that stage of life is to surround yourself with people who have been there.

The best thing we do right in our careers is setting expectations, and the key is setting them for yourself and those close to you.

Engineers think about the end goal and work backward. It made Brian be more disciplined in his day. 

The most important thing is that we show up for the closest people to us. There’s eventually going to be a time when you’re going to have to choose to be intentional about that balance.

You must show up because people depend on you to get them to school, practice, or the doctor. It’s important. 

Finding Balance (5:45)

The important thing is to carve out time for yourself and your family. 

Making a lot of money is excellent, but is it worth it if you’re not doing it to give yourself a fuller life and have some great experiences?

Whenever that time happens, pause whatever you have in the tubes that demand your attention. Hone the ability to be a little flexible and pliable, but give yourself space for life to happen because life always happens. 

There was an initial shock, and it’s always hard. There’s a lot of change, and you’re trying to figure it out. Sometimes you can get complacent. 

Implementing Balance in Your Work-Life (13:27)

Get done with the action items you need to take the next step of your career and then be done. 

Maximize space when everything else is quiet, such as early morning, night, or even lunch. 

Block out time and don’t talk to anybody. Knock out those most important things that are job critical first as early as you can,

Everyone has expectations for who your group is – whether it’s family, friends, spouse, etc. They want you to show up, and they want you to be intentional. 

Don’t be afraid to reach out to people, and don’t fail at the work-life balance slow: fail fast and learn.

Brian’s Bio:

Important Links:

Brian’s LinkedIn Profile

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#82: Listen as Matt Austin, Head of Global Inside Sales at Comfy, discusses the sales mindset. He shares his experience with building high-achieving teams, the importance of setting concrete goals, and how to break goals into achievable parts.

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Importance of the Sales Mindset (0:26)

Tactics are great, but if you don’t look at how they fit into an overall methodology, you can get lost trying too many things at once.

Some tactics will work, some won’t, but we never know which way to go if we don’t have some consistency.

Part of the biggest problem is that people don’t have a set way to implement these tactics in their day-to-day lives. So it becomes this nebulous thing of, “I know I should show up as my best self today, but I don’t don’t know how.”

The first part of developing a strong sales mindset is being clear about your “why.” Why are you doing what you’re doing? 

Get down and ask it for several different reasons you want to be in sales. That’ll get you down to the core of what you’re doing.

Then remind yourself of those whys every day. That’s what will keep you going, so put physical reminders on your desk.

Concrete Goals (5:12)

Having concrete goals allows us not to get overwhelmed by the big picture because it can sometimes be intimidating. If we can break them down into smaller bones, that will enable us to feel good about ourselves when we’re in the process. 

It’s not just goals- but concrete goals and breaking them down step by step. This gives us actionable pieces we can take a day or week at a time.

It helps to focus on what we can control because there’s so much in sales that we don’t.

The numbers don’t lie. If you want to succeed, look at the math of what you have to do. It makes everything a lot more black and white. Sometimes you have to let your goals come to you. 

Putting it into Practice (12:08)

Every time a deal slips or someone would tell us “no,” it’s easy to take it personally.

We can’t worry about the rejection we had yesterday because it’s about what we need to do today to take the next step toward those goals. 

If we can stay focused on today, show up as our best selves, and improve a little bit from yesterday, it allows us to remain focused on our process. That will get us closer to accomplishing concrete goals.

Focus on small goals. Write them down and put them in front of you on sticky notes on your monitor or desk. 

Know your math. And keep a continuous learning mindset. Finally, stay curious and focused on your professional development.

The ones that control all of these things take ownership of a sales mindset.

Matt’s Bio:

I am an accomplished sales leader with a passion for bulding high-achieving teams. There is nothing that brings more joy in the workplace than to be able to watch professionals grow in an environment where being human is the center of our interactions.

Now on my third sales organization build-out, I have developed a deep understanding of the metrics that drive a SaaS business and the requirements necessary components of a Go-To-Market organization to drive growth.

Important Links:

Matt’s LinkedIn Profile

Comfy’s Website

Jess is working through Doug’s greatest hits, and today is one he’s excited to talk about - alignment and specifically alignment between sales, marketing, and success. On top of it, Doug has something new that he’s going to bring up on the subject, so you definitely want to listen in for that insight.

Questions answered in this episode: 

• Why is alignment important? 
• Is alignment a myth? 
• Where does RevOps come in?

If you're liking the show, please make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends and/or coworkers. Follow us on Twitter: @dougdavidoff, @JessDCardenas & @demandcreator to receive updates on when new episodes publish or to get other great insights. You can also watch the video version of the show on our page. Thanks for watching and remember you can't solve your upstream problems, downstream.

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Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Getting Information Out (0:22)

Whatever your sales process is, an important foundational piece is not just marketing but really selling.

You’ve got to help the process by pushing back, which furthers the sales conversation. But to get back to it, ideally, you have at least a couple of pieces that are cohesive and compelling to your target prospects.

Companies need a place to start. They don’t even have a single one-pager and might just be thinking- what do I send? 

Having specific examples based on one particular company or situation is great to pass on to a prospect to further that conversation.

Many sales happen in between the conversations, so what are you doing in between that first and second call?

Those are such important times where you can reinforce what you’ve heard and validate a lot of what you bring to the table. Then, you can really set up the next call. 

Importance of Deliverables (6:05)

At each step, there’s a deliverable or outcome that the prospect or client can expect to earn from you. So that’s where you shift it in a way from “here’s what we do” into “here’s what you get from working with us.”

You don’t want to put onboarding as your first stage on your client’s success map because that’s not super valuable to the client. What’s beneficial to the client is the output of your onboarding. 

Sometimes it’s in the framing. For example, it might be onboarding or internally, or it might be we’re onboarding this client. But in the client success map, it might be called that strategic roadmap or that audit of where this relationship can go.

We do messaging is twofold: we follow the StoryBrand messaging framework and then move the interview process to Zoom. So interviewing these people is where the golden nuggets are for your messaging. 

Marketing vs. Sales (13:40) 

There’s a lot of thought leadership between marketing and sales and how those two departments come together. We just refer to it as a revenue team.

It’s a blend of marketing and salespeople. So you need to be diligent about how you do it. It’s not just saying let’s have marketing support sales. 

The role as a marketing agency is really to support the sales effort. So the best marketers are close to sales. They’re attached to the hip of sales. So it’s not just part of what we call the revenue team, which is let’s drive to a shared revenue goal.

Stephen’s Bio:

Stephen is a sales rep turned inbound marketer, giving him a unique perspective on marketing-sales alignment and how marketing can best support a company’s sales efforts. Stephen is CMO at Vantage Impact, helping clients set up and optimize HubSpot’s tools to market better and sell more effectively and efficiently. His unique modernized approach to marketing and sales is a game changer for the financial services industry, helping advisory practices move beyond cookie cutter content and hand shaking at events, to be more digital and automated without losing personal touch.

Golf, cold brew, bourbon (in that order). Big fan of goofy t-shirts and craft brewery trucker hats. ——

Last year Traci Beach and I started a second business with our brother-in-law, Boston Cardinal. In the middle of a pandemic with a bunch of little kids running around felt like the right time 😳😁…so we formed Vantage Impact. We are excited about this business because the model we’ve built is very unique.

Yet what we did was very simple really: we combined our Craft Impact: A Growth & Communications Agency business with Boston’s 10+ years of financial advisor recruiting experience, where he managed 1500+ financial advisor transitions.

Vantage Impact exists to guide financial advisors through big changes for their practice. We have two sides to the business: Transition and Growth.

Once we help advisors find the right firm, talent or custodian, we leverage strategic marketing and change communications, so they can grow a practice that’s profitable, impactful and life giving.

Cheers 🍻 to 2 “Impact” businesses 😛 and 3 little kids…what a ride!

Important Links:

Stephen Beach’s LinkedIn Profile

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#80: Listen as Tyler Lindley, host of The Sales Lift Podcast, discusses social selling in 2022. He looks at the everlasting presence of LinkedIn, the boom of video content on TikTok, and how other media like podcasting and private social groups can up your selling game.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

LinkedIn in 2022 (1:00)

LinkedIn is still the predominant B2B professional networking site. If you are a B2B seller in this day and age, you have to be active on LinkedIn. 

Your profile is your opportunity to showcase your background skillset and tell a story. You want to make sure your profile is speaking to your target audience.

A lot of sales reps just repost. However, it’s best when sales leaders give their spin on that content and add a little bit of context about why that material resonated with them or create your organic content. 

You have to have the confidence to write some of those and post them. It will take some time to get some traction, but it starts with just having the confidence to start.

Whoever’s looking you up on LinkedIn, make it easy for them to find you and organize your content with maybe a hashtag. 

It would help if you tried to connect with your prospects to make it easier to message them on LinkedIn, obviously, and share things with them.

Importance of Video Content (6:22)

Get involved in discussions because many discussions are happening, and a lot of sales reps are sitting around lurking versus getting involved in those conversations.

Video is critical. TikTok is now one of the most popular websites globally, more popular than YouTube, which is crazy.

It’s easy to create video content on TikTok, and you can post it on TikTok or repurpose that content for other social platforms. 

Repurposing content is straightforward. You can add in the text boxes, making it easy to use. So definitely don’t sleep on TikTok.

The more you click publish, the more videos you create, the better you’re going to get no matter which platform you’re using, whether you’re dropping in at any time.

Podcasting and Other Media (12:16) 

Bucket podcasting podcasts are blowing up, they’re really popular, and they’re going to remain popular. 

All B2B sellers could have success creating a podcast, talking to their prospects, bringing them on as, bringing on industry experts, and just starting more discourse around topics your prospects might find.

It’s hard for you to stand out and build relationships with folks because there’s just so much noise on LinkedIn and Twitter.

People who post on Twitter naturally tend to be a little bit more off the cuff. It’s a little bit more personal. A lot of people e their Twitter content for LinkedIn.

Get involved in that conversation if you find an active prospect on Twitter.

Private Social Groups (15:46)

These groups have a slack group attached to them or some discord or Facebook group element.

Private social groups are a place to learn as B2B sellers. We need always to be learning and honing the craft. There’s a conversation about the sales process, development, leadership, and sales management. 

Private social groups are great for networking and meeting people, either in your space or people you can learn from and the sales.

You need to get involved and try to find opportunities. Many people post in those private social groups and not in a public forum or social media.

It’s a great way to meet people because everybody in those groups has something in common. 

Tyler’s Bio:

Hey y’all, I’m Tyler.

I’m a dad, husband, sales leader, podcaster & sales coach.

I help scale up CEOs & revenue leaders grow their business with a reliable revenue engine.

I also coach new SDRs in tech & SaaS sales to succeed in their roles early on and lay the foundation for a career in sales.

Important Links:

Tyler Lindley’s LinkedIn Profile

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Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Having A Plan (0:22)

A lot of stress comes with entrepreneurship, but being in sales and leading territories teaches you many things about becoming an entrepreneur and how you could eventually start your own business. Sales is a great place to start.

Writing out a business plan teaches you if the business is viable and to put it all on red and risk everything and do. It’s always good to have a plan. 

It’s hard when you have dreams in your head, but you can see them on paper when you take the time to write them down. Then you write a plan, and then you go, “oh crap. I’m actually going to have to do this.”

There’s a lot of pressure there, and that’s not taught in schools.

Crossover to Sales (6:14)

Salespeople, in general, are the most risk-tolerant in a company, which comes in handy when opening your own business. It’s an individual decision. 

If you’re this great hunter that can always open new accounts, what’s a blessing becomes a curse. 

Many folks think you’re only as good as your last quarter and sales. So you always have to be a student of your craft, but you also have always to watch your back because the pressure gets high as you succeed. 

You always need to be talking to people. You always need to have mentors. You always need to be in front of people and their advice. 

Everyone needs to be well-educated on money.

Salespeople have a lot of guts to plan their day. They have to be disciplined with their schedule and time, and they have to fit everything in between many sales jobs. They also have to have customer service components.

The anxiety of Sales and Business Ownership (14:28)

Owning a business gives you flexibility and control that you otherwise wouldn’t have in sales, but things happen in life. You’ll get fired, you’ll get territorial realignments, etc., so control is an illusion.

Anybody can do entrepreneurship. 

Always have those conversations, always investigate, and look at businesses. Understand how they’re run, how financing works, how profit and loss works, and all the business components because it will help you be a better salesperson.

You can’t run off your natural ability all the time; you have to hone your skills. And if you want to start your own thing, it’s certainly a path to do that. 

Joe’s Bio:

Joe Sponcia comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience from a varied background including, Sales, Sales Leadership, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship.

He has worked in small, family owned companies as well as large, corporate entities, and has packed all of his experience into the three companies he now co-founded: Holston Logistics, Sunshine Transit Group, and Mobile Wrench Works.

His goal is to help people who want to make the leap into being a business owner, not so daunting.

Important Links:

Joe Sponcia’s LinkedIn Profile