Lessons Learned from Insight-Led Selling

Darryl: How's everybody doing? It's another episode here on the INSIDE inside Sales show. I missed you guys. I want you to know that. I really do. It's funny because summer is always awkward. I don't know about you guys, how your summers are, but if you're like me, that's when I want to take all my vacation. Now, granted, I'm in Canada where we actually have four seasons. I know many of you live further south where you have the hot and then the less hot seasons. So maybe for you, summer is completely different. I understand that. But for me, I like to actually take some vacation and go hang out at the little cottage, go booting around on the boat, and just relax and unwind and get away as far as possible from anything tech. So it's interesting because I'm sitting here today inside recording and it's raining out nonstop. It's the gloomiest weather going, in fact. It's my understanding that the month of July, which is when we're recording this, this will be airing, of course, early in August, is the gloomiest July in the history of inaudible in Ottawa. But with that said, we're going to not be gloomy today. We're going to have some fun. I want to talk to you today, folks. It was interesting. Here's the thing. I've got a team, you're part of a team, it's all sales. Summer's when we kind of... I just got off of a midyear summit where the sales and marketing leaders all came together and said," What worked in the first half? What are we doing in the second half? Is this still on track? What do we needed to change ourselves?" And we talk about things. We talk about things like," Well, are our emails converting properly? Do we have the right formula for the context of the emails? Are we doing enough activity? Our phone calls! Our phone calls are down. Well, people are answering less. Well, maybe the phone is becoming less relevant. Maybe we shouldn't use the phone at all. What do you say about that? Hey, you know what we need to do? More social selling. That's what we need to do. It's all about social selling." And we sit and we do all of these machinations in the sales game, thinking about" How can we engage better with our audience?" Now, that's cool. We should do that. But let's just walk that through a little bit. One of the things that really came up again, when we were doing our first mid- year review, are some of the things we learned in that first year. And one of the things that jumps to mind was a few months back on social media. There was all this discussion around SDR shaming. And we've talked about this before. But if you missed it, what do we mean by SDR shaming? Well I mean, it's the whole point of buyers and, hey, while I have a sale sales team, I am a CRO, I own sales and marketing. I've got a sizable budget, I'm a buyer. And so it's about buyers. Buyers like me, buyers like whoever you're trying to sell to getting annoyed that sales development reps, SDRs, are sending them emails and messages that are nothing but pitches. So even in social," Hey, let's connect," three seconds later once the connection is accepted," Hey, my product does this, this and this. And you should do this now." And when we respond back and say," What are you doing, Nick? We just connected!" You're all offended. The SDRs are like," Well, dude, that's my job." And no, that's not how social media works. It's got to be before it becomes a selling. It's social selling. The first word is social. Email's the same way, right? We're getting all these emails from all these sequencers and cadences and nobody's spending any time doing any kind of customizations or personalization or contextual messaging in the email. So I understand why you're messaging me. And instead what I'm getting from you is the exact same template out of the box and latest Josh Braun version formula that everybody's ripping off. I'm getting the exact same formula from every single one of you. And then that's how SDR shaming comes on because people like me go on social media and say," Let me show you this crappy email. Sales reps, be better." Then all the SDRs go and say," Hey, you know what? You should tell us so we can be better. So this way excuses our bad behavior." Now I don't bring all this up to chastise you. I actually really, really don't. What I'm bringing this up for is brings something really, really clear to the form. You see, buyers are cool getting those messages, but buyers don't want to hear from you is that they're just a transaction. They don't want you to just to be pitching your wares. They want to know a couple of things. They want to know" If you're going to reach out to me, can you help me? Can you help me? And if you can help me, then will your solution help me both achieve my goals at the same time, make my life easier? If you can do that, I'll talk to you." But too many of you don't understand that. So imagine as I'm reading this book the other day, it's called Insight- Led Selling, and it's how to adopt an executive mindset, build credibility, communicate with impact. And it's a couple of things there that jumped off the page at me when I first saw this on Amazon. The first thing was communicate with impact. And I'm like," Oh, I got to read this because if I can help my reps communicate with impact, I know my audience, my buyer will be a happy, happy, camper." But then the thing that really jumped out at me... it's always the second thing that jumps out at you, I find, that really you go and dwell on... was insight- led selling. Think about what I just said. I just said," Do you know something I don't know, and can you help me?" In other words, I'm willing to let you sell me if you give me some insights, because I got a problem that needs to be fixed and I got a budget. So I reached out to the office and I said," Who are these authors?" And I said," Look at them. It's Stephen Timme and it's Melody Astley. And they're with a firm called FinListics." So I said," Well, we have to get these people on." And lo and behold, here they are. Stephen, Melody, how you doing, folks?

Stephen: Doing well.

Melody: Good to be here with you. Thanks for having us. Darryl, real quick, on your note, on your thing about personalization of emails or lack thereof.

Darryl: Yeah.

Melody: I'm on someone's campaign, right? Same thing, hit up all the time. And instead of saying" Zoom call with Melody, it says zoom call with there. T- H- E- R- E. So it will say" there" comma instead of my name. So I'm guilty of a little SDR shaming because my name is not there.

Darryl: It's not! crosstalk inaudible.

Melody: It's not my name.

Darryl: It's not your name. And that's why a lot of people... I shared this, I think coincidentally inaudible in the very last podcast I just did. A lot of people this year started putting emojis, or emoticons if you will, in their LinkedIn name so that we knew when it was a total bot just sending the content, right? Then we could just tune out. Anyway-

Melody: We digress.

Darryl: No, we digress, but this is the world of the buyers. This is why we're here today. So guys, thank you for joining me today on the INSIDE Inside Sales show. Yeah, you have to say it that way whenever you're talking to anybody, you can't just say" INSIDE Inside Sales." So you've got to have the emphasis in the first word.

Melody: Inside!

Darryl: You got it! See? There you go. You're a natural. Now I got to ask... loving the book. What prompted you to write this book? Let's just start there.

Melody: Well, we have been threatening to write this book for a long time because we have a lot of good content. We've learned a lot of lessons working with our clients and they've said," Hey, can you put this? Can you distill this? Can you do this for us?" And we said," Sure, sure, sure." But everything gets in the way. The business, the time and it's just we didn't have time. So Stephen said, at late 2019 he said" If we don't do this, if we don't do this now, let's never ever talk about it again, because it's just chatter that's annoying all of us. So are we going to do it or not?" So," Yes, we're going to do it." Well, then we know what happened in early 2020. COVID came and we found ourselves with just a lot more time at our desks where we could really concentrate and focus and get it done. So that's what we did during 2020. Our productive task in 2020.

Stephen: Another part of it, Darryl is we all know the statistics. Only half of sellers make their quota. And 73% of executive buyers think sellers don't know their business. It goes on and on and on. We're like," We're sick of this." We have a lot of friends that are in sales. They're smart people, and there just needs to be a framework for them to follow. So it's like," You know what? I'm tired of hearing about this stuff. Let's do something about it."

Darryl: Okay. So I still love that because it's funny. And I'm building out, I'm expanding my sales team and hiring a whole bunch of reps, and I'm having a hell of a time finding reps because I think the last I saw, there was 1. 7 jobs right now, sales jobs, for every one rep that may be on the market, if you will, open to having a conversation. And I had that conversation as recently as yesterday with my recruiter. I woke up this morning, I opened the Wall Street Journal and there it is in the Wall Street Journal. Another article on the exact same thing about what this is. And in fact, there's a bit of a corollary happening, and this is we're going to tie it back to what you said, Stephen, which is that because there's such a demand for it, the price, the compensation for sales is going through the roof. And if you're good at this, forget the base. Your commissions alone, you can make some serious bank these days, which is why we have the show in the first case to make people better reps. So let's talk a little bit about what are some of the issues you're seeing over and over again? For example, I know your book talks about mindset. That's a big part. We've covered that before, but let's just spend two or three minutes there about mindset and then we can go on to some of the other bullets that your book really speaks to.

Melody: Well, it's executive mindset. So mindset can mean a lot of things. It can mean how do I pump myself up? How do I have rigor and perseverance and curiosity and all those things, right? When we talk about executive mindset in the book, what we're saying is your buyers don't really care what your product is. They've got their whole list of problems to solve. And so how can you help them? You talked to that a little bit earlier. So early on in the book, we want to orient the sellers around how their customer buys and what their customer's top care abouts are. So how do you adopt your buyers' or the executives' mindset so you can better walk in their shoes and have an empathetic conversation?

Stephen: Yeah. And a big part of that is, even though I'm a finance type, I love finance and we cover looking at your customer's financial performance and netting out some insights, the most important thing... and having worked with a lot of buying execs in my life, fact I started off when my hair was dark, and I've worked so many is now not dark... anyway, is" What are their goals?" And you mentioned it, Darryl, I get this generic email," Blah, blah, blah, would you like to grow your business?" And all this other kind of crap, they never make reference to what is the goal. So for example, a consumer products company has this goal of taking out$ 600 million in costs so they can put it back in the company. Well, if you're reaching out to me, make reference to that. So the executive mindset is understand what their goals and strategies are, what kind of problems are they trying to deal with, those type of things. So to reach out to me, be relevant. Because otherwise it's swipe left.

Darryl: Okay. So I want to drill down on all these topics and hopefully I have enough time. So I want to come back to the whole idea around financially driven points, as you were alluding to, Stephen, because I think a lot of reps that is probably one of the biggest shortcomings they have. Is understand the numbers and the consequences and why it matters to them. But I want to go back to what Melody was saying there about the whole idea... I think, Melody, you used the phrase" Put on that executives coat." You want to put on that executives apparel. You want to kind of become the executive. And I've talked before to the audience about how important it is to have a really solid understanding of who your ideal customer profile is and then who all the personas are within each one of that. And I think a lot of people will nod their head at that, but I actually don't think many of them truly embrace themselves in who that executive is and their mindset and their pains and their challenges and their dilemmas and the anxieties and the fears and the concerns that they're living with every day. Because they're as anxious to keep their job and their income as you are to keep yours. So how do you teach a rep how to get into an executive mindset when they themselves may either A, never have been an executive, B, never had done that role that they're selling to. How does a rep do that?

Stephen: Well, one of the cool things about the book, it's just not me and Melody saying" We've got combined 2000 years experience working with sellers." We interviewed about a dozen executives, buying executives. And so the one thing we do is we say," Okay, look. Here, Dawn Garibaldi, former VP of supply chain at Proctor and Gamble," pretty good position. And so we asked Dawn" What do you expect from sellers?" And she's like," Well, I expect them to know what goals I have. And granted, at the level I'm at, ask me what their specific goals are." And she also said," Look, I expect reps to know how I'm performing financially." So the one thing we do is say," Look, this isn't us making this up, because it's in our self- interest to do so, but here are the people that you want to talk to, and they're asking you this." And then what we do is we break it down into the smaller pieces like," Here's what CMOs are most focused on. Here's what CEOs are most focused on. Oh, and here's their common goals and strategies and those types of things." So we just don't tell them to go do it. We actually given some pretty detailed template saying," Oh, well, at this level, this buying unit or line of business, is here are the three or four things that are most common. Oh, and by the way, here's how they're going to measure success." So very, very practical insights into that. So one is," Hey, y'all to go do this because here executives combined with billions of dollars worth of stuff over the years. So I think you should listen to them. And then here's a framework for thinking about it." And we give a lot of it to them because we want to be successful.

Darryl: So for the audience, you guys have been great. You've been with me over the years. Let me ask you a really hard question. If I were to say to you right now," You've got 15 seconds to tell me who your buyer is. And then the top issues they're facing and why those are issues." That's that second level, could you do it? And if you're feeling a little uncomfortable, then you need to go and address this because it comes across in your delivery and your discovery and your opening conversations. And people like me and Melody who actually have budget, we're buyers, we smell this out when you guys are uncertain. And then right away, when you're uncertain, then we start to go" Then you have nothing to add. You're not going to tell me something I don't know." So.

Melody: That's a nice segue. I mean, the build credibility, right? I mean, that's exactly one of the things that we want to demonstrate. It's, how do you construct this point of view? How do you tailor the point of view for the industry? How do you tailor the point of view for the buying persona? And how do you begin to dynamically pivot that? Because even if you've got 12 stakeholders, more stakeholders than ever in these complex deals, every person is going to have a different perspective of what is valuable. And you need to understand what those are.

Darryl: Oh my goodness, my goodness. Melody, you're my best friend right now. We were just having this conversation recently about how not enough reps are truly seeking out those who are involved directly in the buying committee. And those who are influencing consensus in a purchase decision, because they all have different things that they value and they measure and they're looking for answers for. And I watched too many deals fall apart at the finish line because they get blindsided because there was another stakeholder with a bigger point of view, the more influence that they didn't see coming, because they didn't understand that. Okay.

Stephen: Well, and that's what inaudible has said. There's now 10 plus stakeholders. Right? Let's take, for example, e- commerce. One retailer I know would grow revenues by having a differentiated e- commerce experience. Okay, well, you got marketing involved, you've got merchandising involved, you've got store operations involved, you've got distribution logistics involved. And so the point is, even though they're working to the same common goals, their initiatives are different. Their scorecards are different, and so you really do need to pick out the alpha buyers. But that store operations person, if you're selling customer insights, probably isn't the main buyer. But if you could tell" Oh, here's how I think I can help you improve your comp store sales." They're probably going to," Hey, let's vote for Darryl." So absolutely positively. And one thing I want to note about this is it's really a team sport. You can not ask one individual to do all this. And so it has to be a team sport, marketing sales, industry experts. But the point being it's also very scalable because a lot of companies have got the, within the industry, same goals, same strategy, same initiatives. So there's a lot of economies of scale to this.

Darryl: You said something I've never heard before in any of the years of doing this podcast," Pick out the alpha." And I love that, but here's the thing about picking out the alpha. There's two comments going to make. One, back to Melody's point, it's big buying committees. You have to talk to everybody in the buying community before you can determine who the alpha is. That's point number one. Point number two, how many of you think you're already talking to the alpha? I cannot tell you how many reps that say" Ah, no, no, I'm talking." They've got budget, they've got authority, they're the decision maker. They're the alpha. And then again, they lose the deal at the end because they've weren't the alpha. All right? Stop fooling yourselves, guys. All right? Stop, overcome your fear, and actually go seek out the buying committee. Now, Stephen, I'm going to come back to you. You made a point about earlier mentioning about building credibility by developing financially driven points of view. Okay. I find sales reps. They know how to count their commissions, but they're not the best when it comes to actually understanding metrics and KPIs and what motivates a buyer. So what can you teach us here? And then what can the book teach us more if we were to read the book?

Stephen: Yeah. So what we do is we say for different industries, even though there's a lot of different metrics... So this was years ago, I coauthored a book with American Bankers Association. We had 200 something metrics. You don't say crazy, but within every industry, there's three, maybe four key metrics. So if I'm in manufacturing, I'm going to look at direct costs. Everyone looks at how fast I grow the business, or I might be looking at inventories where my... so there's only about three or four that you're really needed to know. Who cares about the calculation? And then talk about how you could influence it. So just focus on those couple areas that executives are most focused on, and then overlap that with what..." I can't help with all of them, but here's the two I really can help with." And get your house statement down. Even though I'm a finance person, I learned from Tom Schoewe, who was the CFO at Walmart, I'm dropping some names, he taught me to talk about the how, and then the how much. And so what folks need to do is say," Here's the couple of metrics that are most important. We can influence them. How can we influence those?" And get that story down before jumping in all like," Hey, hey, Darryl, do you know your profit margin drop?"" Hey, hey, the meeting's over. Leave, please." So, yeah, it's not as hard. And the other part is, it's not just the numbers. Take revenues. One of the things we teach is think about how marketing looks at changes in revenues. Think about how sales look at that. Think about how product development. So they're the same number, but they're looking at from different perspectives. So who's your buyer and how do they think about these metrics? I'm not going to say this right. It's about the numbers, but not really. It's about what's behind the numbers and how you can help. It's not as hard as people think.

Darryl: The numbers become the excuse to drill down on what those numbers mean to that individual. That's the real big thing, right? If you know the numbers, you can start asking them questions." Why is your number this way?" Then shut up.

Melody: Well, here's the thing. I mean, this is the way they're talking. So if you aspire, you want to call on executives, this is the way they're talking. And one of the things that I say is," Okay, does your CMO likely have a degree, a PhD or an MBA in finance?" No, probably not. But guess what? They're still talking that language anyway. And so the thing about this is when you begin to understand it and internalize it and make it part of your sales motion, this is a skill that has no obsolescence. It's a skill that will port with you through your whole career, regardless of, technologies that come and go, regardless of business models that come and go. When you learn how to speak this language, it puts you ahead and it keeps you ahead.

Stephen: Yeah. And you don't need to make inaudible the numbers. Hey, Darryl, I noticed that your margins have dropped, but I saw that you also... This is like Tesla, not this most recent quarter, backing up a couple of years, I saw," Hey, Elon, my brother, I saw that margins have dropped, but I also saw you talked about you change, inaudible show fewer asses and you sold more of the model threes, which have a lower margin." This is how they talk about it. They don't want a bunch of numbers.

Darryl: The best analogy I can give folks, I know you guys are tired of the sports analogy so I'll try to keep it light. You can have two teams, two players competing against each other. What do they do? They talk about A, the score. That sound like revenue, all right? And then they go into the numbers that drive that number, right? So every sport's got a whole bunch of... baseball, RBI's an example, right? Or on- base percentage or their batting percentage, et cetera. These are all the numbers they talk about all the fricking time to drive the conversation. And work is no different. Corporations are no different. Stephen is right. Melody is right. Do you know, folks, do you know the numbers that your prospects... remember it changes by the individual title or persona. Do you know the numbers that your people care and talk about? You can use that to work backwards, to drive a discovery process, which is dynamite. And I'll tell you this, when you do that, I love you. I love you. Because you're talking my language. You get my world and not all the other reps didn't and you... and yeah, I'm going to go another half hour longer with you. No problem. I'll cancel the meeting. You're my new best friend because you might be able to show me something I don't know. Exactly.

Stephen: Darryl, I'm going to add something to this real quick, because in a previous life, I was a professor of finance. And I know that most people would say," Hey, do you want to learn a little bit of finance or shove bamboo shoots up your fingernails?" They grabbed the bamboo shoots every time. Every time. What I'm telling folks out there now, I'm telling" I know you're probably traumatized because those professors want to be the smartest people in the room" and blah, blah, blah. I wish it'd be like Men in Black, Darryl. I want you to forget everything you ever knew about finance and just start over. Start with the basics. What are the couple areas that are the most important? In the book, we give a lot of templates about you're talking to them, they want to talk about these metrics. Here's how they're going to measure success. And just think about the how part not so much the how much.

Darryl: So kind of recap here, kids. And we talked through a lot of things today. It's been very fast action of course. What I totally suggest you do is go... I'm sure you can get the book from lots of places. I'm lazy. I went to Amazon. It's right there. I can get the Kindle version, hard cover, the paper back. Remember, it's called Insight- Led Selling. So that's what you need to know. It's got five stars across the board. Number one, new release. Congrats guys. That's pretty cool. So check that out. All right. So you got a Dr. Stephen Timme, and then you've got Melody Astley, they're both FinListics. The one thing I do like about this is we covered all the things about adopting an executive mindset. It's not just your mindset, it's their mindset. That's huge. So put yourself in their shoes. We talked about building credibility by developing financial different points of view. All right? And that leads to discovery. And Stephen especially talked about this, how communicating with impact by speaking your buyer's language. And as Melody said," Yeah, you're my new best friend." Absolutely. So that is Stephen and Melody. Now finally, I got to ask and then we'll wrap it up. What does FinListics do? I want to guess because of the first three letters, it's something related to numbers.

Stephen: Well, actually it's stands for Financial Linguistics and-

Darryl: There we go!

Stephen: Finance is the language of business. I'm sure you've been to executive committee meetings, different points of view. Bottom line, the common denominator is speaking the language of finance.

Darryl: All right. So check it out. Finlistics. com, folks. I mean, I'm looking at it." Our top rated client insight platform provides quick access to company and industry financial trends, peer comparisons that help your team better understand your prospect's needs." Every single rep right now is going" What's that again?" It's finlistics. com. Okay kids, we're done! We're out of here! Time has gone by. It's another week, another episode. Thank you, Melody. Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen: You're welcome. Thanks, everybody.

Melody: Thanks, Darryl. It's been fun.

Darryl: Folks, they're both on LinkedIn. Give them a follow. If you love this, give them a follow. Reach out to them the message. Remember, it's all about the language and the numbers." I heard you talk to Darryl on the INSIDE Inside Sales Show. And when you said this, that really resonated with me." And then you pitch the numbers, pitch whatever. See if you can sell the rockstars themselves. For another week, we're done. We're out of here. My name is Darryl. You know the show, it's INSIDE Inside Sales. Tell your friends about it. Thank you for joining us, folks. We'll talk to you soon next week. In the meantime, be good. Take care. Be less gloomy. That's what I'll do. Talk to you soon. Bye- bye.