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The Sales Evangelist

I believe in doing BIG THINGS! You should be earning 6 figures easily as a sales rep. But chances are you are not...yet! Sales is the most important department in every company but many sellers are never taught how to effectively sell, much less how to earn their way to high-income status. My own career limped along until a company I worked for invested in sales training to help me succeed. Immediately afterward, I closed a deal worth 4X what the... I believe in doing BIG THINGS! You should be earning 6 figures easily as a sales rep. But chances are you are not...yet! Sales is the most important department in every company but many sellers are never taught how to effectively sell, much less how to earn their way to high-income status. My own career limped along until a company I worked for invested in sales training to help me succeed. Immediately afterward, I closed a deal worth 4X what the company spent on me and saw hockey-stick improvement in my performance. So I started a podcast to “Evangelize” what was working. Today I interview the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now: folks like Jeffrey Gitomer, Jill Konrath, Bob Burg, and Guy Kawasaki to name a few. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to top income status. If you’re someone looking to take off in your sales career and earn the income you deserve, hit subscribe and let’s start doing BIG THINGS!

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You have about ten seconds to grab a prospect's attention on LinkedIn. If you’re spending more time scrolling than positioning yourself as a thought leader, you’re not using your profile to its full potential. Here’s how to turn it into the perfect “first discovery call.”Profile Positioning· If you ... You have about ten seconds to grab a prospect's attention on LinkedIn. If you’re spending more time scrolling than positioning yourself as a thought leader, you’re not using your profile to its full potential. Here’s how to turn it into the perfect “first discovery call.”Profile Positioning· If you go back to episodes 1941 and 1088 with Brynne Tillman, you’ll hear her explain why it’s time to move past the resume mentality.· Your profile is prime real estate. Start with a compelling banner that clearly shows who you help and how. Use a professional, up-to-date photo, and try LinkedIn’s name pronunciation feature to add a personal touch.Headline & About Section· Craft a headline that’s punchy and credibility-building—skip the job title and highlight the value you deliver.· In your About section, speak directly to your ideal client’s pain points. Use storytelling and short testimonials to build trust and connection.Target and Engage· Create micro-lists for targeted outreach—CFOs, CEOs, COOs—so you can personalize your messaging around real problems.· Before pitching a meeting, engage thoughtfully with your prospects’ posts to build rapport and show genuine interest in their needs.Homework Challenge· Update your banner, headline, and profile photo. Rewrite your About section to focus on the problems you solve, and build a micro-list of prospects. · Also, don’t forget about using my LinkedIn Sales Navigator trial to jump-start your outreach.“Your profile needs to be a lead-generating tool. It needs to attract prospects; they need to see it. And within five seconds, know what you have to offer.” - Donald Kelly.ResourcesIf you want to try LinkedIn Sales Navigator, start your 60-day trial here. My LinkedIn Prospecting Course will show you exactly how to start attracting more prospects right away. And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn!Sponsorship Offers1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.3. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here:
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their custom and here's a perfect example more house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update to thirty minutes to publish breeze hubspot collections of ai tools help them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the result thirty thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven more time on their website ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only a acting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator let's be honest if your linkedin profile reads like a resume you ain't prospecting you are a hiding in b2b sales your linkedin profile is your first discovery call and today i'm gonna tell you why and specifically how to fix it check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with today and on this episode we're gonna be talking about linkedin as you know i'm a big fan of linkedin i like using linkedin linkedin makes me money and i hope that i can give you some ideas i can help you make money as well and this your first time i'm listening to my podcast please subscribe and i'll make sure to notify you every time we drop a new piece of content today is one of those golden gems that i'm just gonna go to market i you should be paying me for this episode but i get it i'm just giving you free content here so check it but if you do wanna learn deeper how to utilize linkedin i do have a linkedin prospecting in course you can find details down below this program we guarantee that you will be getting the least three appointments per week using linkedin that's just a bare minimum but let me give you some secrets on the strategy here's what i want you to understand when it comes to linkedin your profile is your first discovery call i talked about that in teaser but if you think about this everyone is going find you you're gonna see that here's what happened what most salespeople people where they send out a slew of messages they go on navigator and build a list and they just feel that this is like don't know kid in a candy store for goodness sake i wanna just eat everything so you're gonna send a message out to everyone and their mom not understanding that there are other people out there doing the same exact thing they're doing and they don't prospect don't like it let's pretend let's just say of the ten messages you sent through let's say a hundred messages you send out you'll get ten people come back to your profile those ten people what are they going to see and let's say you did send a really remarkable dm and they actually turned into a really good somebody that was actually in the market and you're interested and they came to your profile what did they i see your profile needs to be a lead generating tool it needs to attract them they need to see it and within five seconds know what you have to offer and i'm gonna give you the first thing that people make a mistake with and that's the banner off their linkedin profile it is free real estate for goodness sakes think about this if i land on your profile and i see just a blank thing not even a template not even your company logo instantly lightness this person care about objectively squat they're out here just spamming people but if i go to your profile you sent me this amazing dm and i actually am in market and your profile tells me that just right on the banner i held coaches make money with linkedin then in my mind i'm like this guy clearly is branded himself towards that i have interest you want when people look at your profile that they keep going to the next area and when you do that on linkedin the next area underneath your banner is your picture of course you wanna make sure that's good and if you have a hard to pronounce name like donald kelly used to name pronunciation feature obviously my name is not difficult to spell or to pronounce but if you use that name pronunciation tool it's a free asset to the people to just hear your name and hear you talk mind if you go click on it i'm not gonna tell you what it says go to buy linkedin profile and click on it and you see what how i utilize it i'll give you a hint i tell people what i can give them in a few seconds do you have ten seconds to say your name on that platform you listen to what i did and what's mine and see if you can borrow that and use it by by far you can do it but the next component is zen at deadline they're gonna no one know what do you do so on my banner you have your explanation of what you do on your headline that first major line next to your name you wanna tell them what you do as well assisting sing sentence now when you have that part set up the next thing you wanna do is to make sure that you're about me section and that headline tie together let me give you an example let's use something many of your in sas let's say that i'm reaching up most of my clients or in the saas world software world so i might say something to the nature of i help saas companies shorten their sales cycle by forty five percent that's gonna grab your attention right off the bat in my head next to my name i don't need to tell you my title that stuff you can see down below but here the other the piece down if you look at mine mine is a credibility builder i have been recognized by salesforce linkedin and hubspot so in that i put that because i'm trying to to show you down i'm the boss right for my category so you you're gonna automatically see that credibility builder but you for you most of you don't necessarily need that just tell us exactly what you do i help manufacturing companies reduce downtime by fifteen percent whatever that thing as you do put it there in that part truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in part wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you any answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing the next section you wanna do is you're about me section your about me section shouldn't be a it shouldn't be about you and i know sounds crazy it should be about the problems that you solve for that ideal customer because again i'm landing on your profile and i'm not recruiter i'm lining on your profile and i'm looking and seeing what you can do for me because your message was just so intriguing now everybody want to necessarily read you about me section but at at least at the very beginning of the first paragraph or two can you tell me a little bit about what problems you you solve you can talk about how you do it you can include stories about your client but that about me section should be about the problems you solve for me and utilize your client testimonial now here's another secret in that positioning step right below that you have a section where you can put like highlighted post this is where you can put some video clips linkedin allows video nowadays so you can just go ahead and do a simple video introduce yourself put a video there or maybe it's a video like for me i made a post it's i'm not just a sales guy because i wanted people understand there's more to depth to me than just a sales trainer or even just a sales guy or a guy who spills water on his table while he's recording a podcast you know what we're gonna keep going because this is straight fire and this water ain't putting it out literally he's not but i'm what let's keep going so the next component with this so with that area you could put a highlight a post or you can take an audio clip maybe your company has some really big celebrity name that did a an ad or did something on insert or tiktok take that video and put it right there it just helps to build credibility or again if you introducing yourself or you talking about a problem that you solve or you just had a video highlighting a problem that your it has so let's go back to something different say i'm a in a bookkeeping world i sell software comparable to a quickbooks maybe i can talk about you know the top five things mistakes people make when it comes to april fifteen for those outside the uss tax filing day or how to extend your how to get an extension without getting in trouble with irs well that's a video that my ic might be interested in so i'm gonna put that video right there because it may be a popular topic so you're positioning yourself from the top with your banner from the banner then your beautiful picture not something from your cousins wedding then you have your headline and then you also have this bop me section that's a story about the problem you saw for me and then you have this wonderful these wonderful clips that you're highlighting to show credibility and also the value that positioned you right off the bat as someone that can solve my problem and i am intrigued so now let's go to the next part what do we do after that now that you have amazing profile step there were two is targeting the right prospect now when you can think about it when it comes to linkedin there are millions of people billions of people on a platform that you could go after and this is where people make mistakes they'll send damn messages to everyone that looks like their ic what i want you to do is i want you to focus on the right people and focus a targeted list you can use navigator and if you have not utilized my free navigator a six navigator typically gives you a three month trial but i have work with linkedin for years and i have a sixty day trial you've heard it on the episodes but you can do a sixty day free trial go to linkedin dot com slash t s linkedin dot com slash ts e link is down here as well and you can get a sixty day trial and this allows for you a thirty more days to practice with the platform without pain the thing that i want you to do is you can build micro list of your ic and i want you to build a build that out maybe for different types of organization you go to so let's go back to let's say the quickbooks example of the software well it's gonna be to see and maybe the ceo for the small companies but instead of me trying to get all of those individuals and one list what if i broke it down for my ceo list and my c list and then i also have the coo list but i have three different groups of people within organizations that i'm going for and i can use that targeted list to make my messaging when i'm focusing on ceos or i'm focusing on cfo where i'm focusing on ceos they each have different types of problems when it comes to the accounting software but it's important that i make sure i keep my messaging sing towards those people as i do micro outreach to them that's the next the the biggest component you don't want you can make a list of a thousand people but you and i both know you're not gonna get to all thousand people and what you're actually going to do with those thousand people you're gonna spam them and that's not cool you need to make sure your list is smaller and i've talked about this on other episodes when it comes to prospecting but you need to make sure that list is focused you do that money in the bank all the time are you struggling to close deals b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash ts s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when this get started now your third step is to engage with people now most people at this point they feel like i have a list of people donald i wanna just go out and i wanna blast all of them to set up an appointment the more a appointments or a request i can send out the more messages i send out the higher chance i'm going to have of actually getting some deals and yes that is true to some extent but do you know what you're gonna burn your profile the more people that hit you as spam the more likely you are to get blacklisted on linkedin so you go and do the math what you wanna do i don't feel to do that way i've done it made mistakes in a past and i'm telling you it's not cool when linkedin gates you or put you behind a you know slow you down and blacklist you it ain't fun but here's what i would tell you to do when it comes to engagement i have a list of individuals what i would recommend when you build that list find people who are posting on linkedin this is linkedin is gonna give you this in sales navigator people who have posted in the past thirty days all of those individuals are fair game for you to go wanna engage with their content whether they re repo something or to share something if somebody repo some jobs that the company have and say it to cfo what i might do is comment on that post be like you know maybe tag one of my friends who's is in finance or i might say hey at that person dave thanks for sharing us post we're gonna share with some people in my network because obviously i work in a finance maybe some people i'm gonna add to share my network so add some visibility to my network so it can grab some attention but all i'm doing is something that dave posted that his company is trying to do is trying to grab attention and all i'm gonna do at this point is just to comment on it to get help give some visibility even if i don't get dave anyone to you know apply for the job the fact is i grabbed his attention because that's something that matters to him right now and that's where like i feel that people make a mistake when it comes to linkedin it's usually about me what i want but what is that person trying to do and that's why i talked about building the list based on the individual roles because those cfo those ceos those ceos all have different things relative to their role what is the ceo trying to do trying to generate more money for the organization the cfo was trying to save money for the organization the coo is trying to increase operations and output for the organization if you look at it in this sense you're focusing on what they want and if you give them what they want you're gonna separate yourself night and day i promise you for most of salespeople people because they're going out there with what can i get and you're going out there what can i help you with so again even if i'm not in a recruiting space but if i'm selling a quickbooks software and do this trying to get somebody for a job you best believe i'm going to do that in goodwill and good faith not even in the idea that he does business with me but i'm trying to make sure i get engagement but also if i can bring good to him as well and help my network again money in the bank for both of us we're gonna help people to succeed so that's where i wanted you to understand the first thing again step one is i want you to position yourself right step two i want you to make sure that when you have positioned yourself and you have the right information i want you to write information in your profile i want you to start targeting the right people because now mister cfo is gonna go look at my profile and he's gonna say dang this man helps people it comes to to read my headline we help you know smb with streamlining their software with their accounting without spending a fortune cfo is gonna like that messaging ceo is was gonna like that messaging and coo is gonna like that messaging so then they look at my bat my headline and they see the stuff they look at my story and they to see a video about what i posted about you know filing for taxes or maybe a video about how to streamline operations nothing about my quickbooks type software but i'm just educating dude's gonna have some interest but maybe he's not ready to buy anything or in market yet but what's gonna happen is that when i do my outreach i've just became memorable and he already had the disco light already because he saw that information on my profile the discovery light and then when i send that email come on man i'm in in like flint i haven't always talked about messaging yet and i'm not gonna give you everything i give you three and that third step i mentioned there after to list is make sure you get engagement start engaging on those profile the post that they're doing start commenting and thoughtful comments not again if somebody posted something i'm excited for my new job don't say congratulations maybe you say something intriguing like just read upon the company it's done some amazing stuff congratulations on this sounds like you know this you're a perfect person for this job can't wait to hear about all the success that you do out of curiosity what's your first order of business i'm gonna read that because it's more than two lines and i'm gonna say who is this person what are they writing and i wanna check them out you're gonna go to my profile have mini disco and then they're gonna obviously start that engagement thanks donald i appreciate it my first order business is blank blank as you know whatever this is a cfo saying this stuff but now all i'm gonna do is utilize that in my conversation and when i do my outreach to him the point here is do engagement first before you actually start pitching people and i promise you don't tell you how to sell to them next episode i'm gonna go a little bit deeper we're gonna go into three more steps so you got the first three i'm gonna give you some more so you got an idea here and the action step that i want you to do now right now it's the simple i haven't wrote it down for you one your homework i want you to create right update your headline profile if you don't have a banner for your linkedin banner that's probably the first one just get a banner put a banner up there and put what you do and it also put something in your headline number two i want you to change out that picture from your that cri wedding photo like you'll don't need to crop people out anymore this is twenty twenty five you got some a thousand dollar camera in your pocket and use that and take a nice picture you're about me section i want you to write about me section about what you saw for your prospect not about what your company does and do that it's gonna make it easy and then i want you to build a list of just twenty twenty prospects that you're gonna go after build them if you don't have linkedin sales navigator use mine my link you can get two months free and then over the next two episodes you'll get some ideas that can help you out if you wanna get more details about my linkedin prospecting course you can find more details on the sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin the sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin listen i want you to thrive you don't have to do my course to get some results you can do these things i want you to be able to have success i want you to build better pipeline because i didn't have people that could help me out when i first started off like this and i give all this value away because it's works it's helped me and i wanna help you most importantly i want you to raise your level of thinking i want you to go out and do big things stay tuned for monday when i drop three more tips that's gonna help you when it comes to your linkedin profile see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our a podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yes sales podcast network
21 Minutes listen 10/17/25
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I’m digging into The Sales Evangelist archive to bring you another gem! One of the best parts about this podcast is that so many episodes share timeless sales strategies you can use for years.This rerun features Brynne Tillman, CEO and “LinkedIn Whisperer” at Social Sales Link, and author of The Lin... I’m digging into The Sales Evangelist archive to bring you another gem! One of the best parts about this podcast is that so many episodes share timeless sales strategies you can use for years.This rerun features Brynne Tillman, CEO and “LinkedIn Whisperer” at Social Sales Link, and author of The LinkedIn Sales Playbook. If social selling feels like a mystery, you’ll want to hear Brynne break down her 4 LinkedIn Pillars for business development.The Value of a Great LinkedIn Profile· Your LinkedIn profile isn’t just an online résumé—it’s your first sales tool.· When prospects visit your page, they’re not looking for your mission statement or how long you’ve been in business. They want to know how *relevant* you are to them.· Head to getmyssicore.com for a personalized score that rates your social selling skills.· The higher your score, the more likely buyers are to see your value.· Write your summary like a mini blog post—something that instantly helps your reader.· Highlight the challenges your buyers face, and share three to five insights they can use right away.· When you lead with value, you build credibility faster and move through the sales cycle with less friction.Pillar 1: Establish Your Professional Brand· Your professional brand is your profile. By positioning your profile to offer insight and value, you build credibility and spark curiosity.· You’re getting prospects excited to take your call. If they can learn something just by visiting your profile, they’ll imagine a conversation with you will be even more valuable.· Position yourself as a subject matter expert and thought leader.Pillar 2: Find the Right People· How are you using LinkedIn to find your buyers and influencers? If it’s true that an average of 6.8 people are involved in every major buying decision, how are you identifying all the right people within an organization?· Instead of focusing only on the champion, who else should you reach out to or engage?· Prospecting and relationship-building go hand in hand. It’s about offering real value and leveraging your network to get introductions to your target prospects and buyers.· Create search strings using your buyers’ titles, tailored to your target location or industry.Pillar 3: Engage With Insights· How are you sharing, commenting on, and engaging with content? Are you using hashtags to find the right conversations? Are you feeding your network with valuable insights that move them closer to your solution?· It’s more than just liking or sharing. LinkedIn rewards consistent engagement—sharing, commenting, and contributing to conversations.· Avoid “random acts of social.” Anything done without intention or purpose rarely leads to success, especially on LinkedIn.Pillar 4: Build Relationships· “Connecting and forgetting” is like collecting business cards that just sit in a stack on your desk. How valuable is that? That’s not a network.· There’s more value in genuinely connecting with a few people at a networking event and having meaningful conversations than there is in collecting every business card in the room. Bring that same thoughtfulness online.“There’s no reason to network differently online than you do in person.” - Brynne Tillman.ResourcesYou can also check out episode 1088 to hear the rerun with Brynne Tillman....
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors hubspot makes impossibly growth impossibly easy for their custom and here's a perfect example more house college needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update to thirty minutes to publish breeze hubspot collections of ai tools help them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the result thirty thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty seven more time on their website ready for impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only a acting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator linkedin is by far one of the most powerful platform b b sellers can take advantage of however most people use it wrong because you're spamming and today we're gonna tell you four pillars for linkedin b success that you could utilize starting today check it out hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c be sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today and on this episode i have b till and she's this is going answer archive but b is gonna point out something powerful with linkedin i mentioned this in a teaser but this is something that many of us are trying to master especially in our b sales careers can you utilize linkedin the phone is more challenging emails getting spam and it's difficult to be able to grab people's attention but linkedin is a powerful way to get engagement but you have to do it right not spam so we're gonna point out today four pillars to leverage linkedin leveraging linkedin for business development we're gonna give you easy ideas at least b is gonna give you that if this is your first time listening to our podcast i encourage you to subscribe because we're gonna notify you every time we drop a new piece of content just like today as we dive in find at least one nugget that you can take and apply to your business development success with this episode welcome to the show b oh my god don't thank you so much for having me here i am so excited i am so excited to chat with you because here's what i why i'm so excited for this i love using linkedin but i can tell you i've used linkedin never since i first gotten sales select about fifteen years ago but i've just never been to effective at it i have always wanted to always increase so i always try to learn so whenever i can get something new about linkedin i am all over it and as many of us who are listening to fall at same boat so i'm looking forward to dive it into this and learning a little more about you and your experiences why don't you give us a little bit of insights i brag about you been the pre recording there i talk about you and your experiences but tell us more about what you do b well i am by trade actually a sales trainer and producer and then early let me just a little over in years ago i found linkedin and we fell in love with it as a prospecting tool even though at the time it was really only being used for job search and recruiting so i started to develop a sales curriculum around linkedin and now obviously social selling is such a big thing but feel like was a real early adapter an adapter of linkedin for social selling and so that's really what i primarily focus on is how to leverage it to stand out to attract teach and engage your buyers to leverage your clients and more market to get conversations and appointments so generally that's what i do what you you said something that really just stood out and brought back memories i remember when i was using linkedin early on it was one of my first sales gigs and my manager was not too pleased with us use in linkedin and it's exactly what you emphasized the branding of linkedin was finding a better job so they were always like apprehensive against us salespeople taken advantage of linkedin i was you're missing the point and if many people fall fell into that category and sometimes the profile that we've had developed around that let's speak to that for first off you mentioned something about we're gonna talk about a four pillars of leveraging in linkedin business development but many of us have you watched videos we've heard about you know your profiles but maybe you can just lightly go over this are there mistakes common mistakes that people need to adjust with their profiles when it comes to linkedin if they're using it a biz absolutely and by the way linkedin actually has their own rating their social selling index that you can get to actually if you go to get my s ssi score dot com it'll redirect if you're logged into linkedin you'll get your score and that first one is established your personal or your excuse me establish your professional brand so that's linkedin number one grading of your social selling acumen and so as you mentioned that profile is really where that lies and the mistake i think that's sellers may is they stick to that mentality that my profile should be a resume mh when in fact if you really wanna be a good social seller it should be a resource talk about that let's give me an example of what you mean by that like a resource so by positioning your profile to provide insights and value to your buyers you are actually gaining credibility pretty early on you're creating curiosity and you're getting them excited to take your phone call because if they can learn from your profile they will imagine how valuable a conversation would be with you and so you're really positioning yourself as that subject matter expert in that thought leader and getting your buyers excited to take your call there's a stat out there from corporate corporations that seventy four percent of buyers choose the sales rep that provided value and insights early on in their fire journey and so why not start with our profile often this is their first impression on us so let's do it right and let's provide value they don't care about us yet they don't care about our mission our passion or even our years in business right now all of that may matter down the road as you start to build relationships with your buyers but initially all they care about is the value you can bring to that and how relevant you are and so we really wanna make sure that we're positioning our profile that way i actually so the best tip in doing this is look at your summary not as an extension of your experience almost like a blog post mh what kind of value can you bring them from the very first time they start reading about you and typically i would start with identifying the challenge that your buyer is facing providing three to five insights that can make immediate impact a vendor agnostic impact meaning these insights they can use even if they never talk to you or buy from you with a mistake we often make is that we create this to be a pitch so we tell them how to buy from us or why to buy from us instead of really attracting them to us and getting them to want to actually ask the question how can we work together and now you've really positioned yourself with a very high level level of credibility and you know move the sale much more quickly through the sales cycle so before us to look at this in from an example standpoint maybe if i sell office furniture it wouldn't be in my best interest to talk about you know how wonderful i've been in the office supply industry and all about what kind of furniture we use but maybe i can address well the top five challenges as people have that comes around office furnished maybe i can speak to some way speak bring some of that ex i guess value out in that summary is that work you guys well yeah so let's just go with that example for a moment so if you were selling office furniture the first thing i would ask is is your buyer and what's their biggest challenge right now or generally speaking of all the people that buy from you you know what are they facing when they have this need so potentially let's say they say to me well they're expanding they're growing they used right like these are all the different challenges and then i would say so what's the challenge of them using other companies so is it minimums is it the inability to trade in your old furniture to get new furniture if we look at what's your differentiator what helps you stand out and then educate don't talk about it being differentiator but educate them on how we how that point is really important when choosing an office furniture company mh then you know so maybe some of the issues they might find with choosing off office furniture companies is guarantees right like or i mean there's could be a million things i don't know that industry too well but whatever that is so now we what we do is we'd start to teach them how to buy but we'll teach them how to buy office furniture in a way it certainly leans towards us as the solution but that's providing insights that can help them make better decisions to them and their company as well yeah i'm all about that i love that so if you're listening to this as a sales rep i want you guys to just go back and replay that last two minutes there and see how that portion there just just jumped out it's way much more about benefiting my buyer in a conversational manner as opposed to features and benefits and our company is the best we've been around for fifteen years yeah it's a lot different truth lies and work is brought to you by the helps podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing well let's continue this conversation here along the lines of the pillars let's highlight like what are those top four pillars that you would recommend that we yeah so i'm just gonna mention them based on linkedin how linkedin defines them so the first one was establish your professional brand the second one is fine to the right people the third one is engaged with insights and the fourth one is build relationships but when i teach this i actually flip the last two so the order in which it teach is establish the brand which is your profile yeah find the right people which is how are we leveraging linkedin to find your buyers find your influencers the challenger sale will tell us the on average or six point eight people that are part of almost every large buying decision so if that's the case how are we identifying all the right people inside of an organization that we wanna be touching not just the one champion that takes our call right so how are we finding those folks and how are we engaging with our new and existing connections in a way that gets them interested to chat with us the build relationship piece is really the prospecting and this to me is so vital it's a combination of providing great value and leveraging our network to get introductions to our our targeted prospects and buyers and then engage with insights is how are we sharing content commenting and engaging on content using hashtags to find the right content and feeding our network with really valuable insights that moves them closer to our solution so what i a couple things there i one had a friend they shared this video and it was just my like it opened my eyes because i was doing linkedin all wrong when it came towards content i thought you know you've have this idea well if i just like stuff then that's gonna help but i found out with the linkedin algorithm obviously it wasn't just like like and linkedin one to see you fully engaging so not you're liking you're commenting or even like you're you know sharing someone that that stuff share the content and so forth and that help because it's natural right if you truly are engaging in if you're truly connecting with someone and you truly appreciating their content and you're probably gonna have discussion with them and you're probably gonna maybe send them a private message you're probably gonna share their stuff and that helped tremendously where sometimes i find sellers who say well linkedin doesn't work because it's the fact that they jumped on and they just send out a bunch of invites and then they may do the like thing that i do just go down like like like and then obviously because they're spamming they're not getting that return is that your things you've seen as well when it comes to sellers quote unquote engaging yeah so i think one of the biggest mistakes that sellers make is the random acts of social even just like it's anything that we do without a purpose or a plan is rarely going to see success right so and certainly not on a consistent basis so we wanna have a plan put together now one of the mistakes people making you mentioned that you know they connect to all these people we they often connect and forget so to me that's like going to a networking meeting walking up to someone handing the your business card shaking their hand and walking away that right select lots of business cards with lots of rubber bands around them in the corner of your desk but at the end of the day how valuable is that that's not a network no and so it's really important that there's a process in place and the other thing is you're at a networking meeting it's like you're walking around and you wanna collect every single person's business card you wanna you know pick a few have some conversations see if there's a connection maybe connect and and set up an additional one on one coffee meeting later on if it makes sense so we wanna take that thoughtful and bring that online there's no reason for us to network significantly different online and in your life so take everything that we know logically when we meet people we start a conversation we learn about them we ask them questions we try you know to get to know them a little bit and if we can do that really well then all of a sudden linkedin becomes our most valuable networking tool what do you say when you you see we talk about you know getting connected with the right people what do we say when we go about doing that like do i just back up from that let's go back to the strategy what are some of the strategies let's say you're a sales rep and we're gonna use our office furniture none of us sell office furniture but if somebody out there sell an office furniture you're gonna get some education today let's say office furniture is the thing that we sell i have this we just created an amazing summary but then now how what's the strategy you should i take advantage of and say i am and work in a company where decently small there maybe five of us and we do our own business development as well as account management how do you what strategy would you put in place for me well so the first thing we do is we want to establish what your goals are right yeah so i don't wanna likely say we're gonna put you know i this is exactly the strategy so i'm gonna go through sort of an example of a strategy which may not necessarily be the right strategy for everybody but the first thing we're gonna do is establish your goals and your kpis what are we gonna measure success against so maybe you know and this is what we would do with any sales goal right so maybe your goal is i need to sell one client a month in order to sell one new client a month i need to have four proposals a month in order to have four proposals a month i need to have eight or you know eight first conversations a month in order to have eight first conversations a month i need to have sixteen introductions into my targeted buyer like you back that up obviously this is you know i'm just gonna make this out but i need to have sixteen introductions from a targeted buyer that's four week to targeted buyers that's four introductions i need to get a loop so let's say that becomes my goal and my key performance indicators are every step we look you know is my sixteen converting to eight converting to four converting to one client so those are my kpis that i wanna look at at for that particular goal so i need four introductions a week i probably need to ask for twenty mh so that means i need you know that's and again you know i'm kinda guessing here right so if i need to ask for twenty i need five a day five a day i could get five from one person or one from five people say we just said i'm gonna get five from one person every single day and that's gonna be my goal and maybe it's you know i recognize it takes me about two hours a day to get get five introductions a day what do i need to do that well i need a good solid network of referral sources and i need to have great relationships with my clients now i'm gonna go in and maybe let's say we have i have personal relationship with fifty clients over the years if if i'm a a seasoned professionals i'm not there's a you know we go with a different route a different strategy so now i'm gonna reach out to maybe i have fifty clients and there are three people in each client that i can that i built relationships with now the hundred and fifty people to ask over the next you know i'm not that it math whatever that works out to be right usually i do this on paper so now i know that my goal if i wanna get five introductions a day is i'm gonna reach out to one person a day or to try to set up a appointment with one person a day go through and i now i mine their connections and i put twenty or thirty names mh and i reach out and i said mister client it's been a couple years since we work together i hope you're still loving your furniture and everything's great i hope you don't mind but i noticed you're connected to a few people in linkedin and i'm trying to get in front of would you mind setting up just a you know brief fifteen minute call where i can these names with you and get your thoughts around whether or not it's someone i should reach out to oh i like that and now we have these conversations so two things happen one if they need more furniture this is a great opportunity to re engage in a way that's not always sales it right yeah but you're gonna have this conversation with them the twenty names you can talk it through become five and depending on your relationship there's two ways to do this we can ask for the introduction or if it's a ceo of a very busy company we may wanna ask if permission to name drop so those are the two ways to do so one is with the introduction the other might be you know so donald thanks so much for taking my call today and reviewing these names with you we've you know identified nine people that you think would be good for me would you be okay if i mentioned we had this conversation when i reach out to them love it alright see yeah and i i think what that does for me too as the as a sales rep it i don't know just sometimes that we have these podcast episodes and we share the insight but people don't get that specific example i mean something like this gives you an understanding of why it's crucial for you to not only because you can't just go up to everyone and just ask like that you gotta have somebody that you're building this relationship with that you brought value to the table to that you you know that they know they remember you and they know who you are because if i don't remember you say you did business with us fifteen years ago kept using fifteen throughout the whole day but so you using fifteen years ago that means it doesn't necessarily mean that i still trust you or have that connection with you and so it's it's crucial that you're building that that engagement like we talked about earlier and that you comes with some specific guidelines that you have your kpis and that you have a specific strategy like you're sharing now we could go on for days with this brand my goodness this is a good stuff i know sometimes i do are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers linkedin surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash t s e that is linkedin dot com slash t s e for sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e and let's get started here's one question i have what about when it's a new person because i have sellers sometimes we're trying to get to find new contacts how do they what do you recommend they say as they're reaching out to someone how long before you send an invite to connect with someone and after i mean after you i do send an invite how long before i engage about a potential opportunity or whatnot yeah so that's a good question i mean i'm gonna again every client that i work with we have you know we come up with their to plan based on their current goals and their current philosophies and so we try to align it as much as possible so i'm sort gonna throw stuff out there as an example but it's not the only way so what say it's a brand new person never been in sales before just got out of training and now they're on linkedin and they have you know eighty five connections on linkedin so what do we do well the first thing we wanna do is identify the right buyer so we develop if you get the free linkedin we develop a search string which mh literally is titles of your buyers with using modifiers like or and ultimately create a search string which is really a mathematical equation that delivers you a list of the closest possible buyers in whatever geographic location you choose or industry and so on so now we have this list now i do wanna look at second degree connections and i do like to start there because there at least when you eventually reach out you have some people in common and it doesn't feel quite as cold but there are things that you can do to warm them up before you actually reach out so you can look at the profile they'll probably get a notification that's says you looked at their profile mh you can actually follow someone most people think you can just connect with them but if you click the little more button on their profile there's a follow button they'll then get a notification that you followed that or then if i would look at their recent active activity read it engage and if there is something i mean sometimes there's nothing there but if there is something there you can start a conversation by engaging on the content that they shared and now you really become relevant to them the fact that you took the time to do that now if you don't have content to re engage with when you do reach out you make it really relevant to them and sometimes i'll say something like because now i follow you know if i engaged i followed them i looked at their profile they're scratching their head gone who is this person that i keep getting notifications and if you do this over a couple of days it gets really creates curiosity and then you reach out and you know donald your name keeps coming up on linkedin so i thought i'd reach out in mouth right and they're like oh well your name keeps coming up too right so it's kind the you know although you a little bit of flirting going on right across the style yeah and then once they connect you know thanks very much for connecting i noticed you're this ceo of a facility or you know whoever buys the officer furniture at the ceo of a growing company i'm not sure if you are currently in the market for furniture but if you are i wanted to share this blog post with you you're not selling them yeah that can help you pick the best furniture for your you know that creates better employee productivity or whatever it is that you wrote you wrote about and that's where content really becomes important right and then you know ps if you have any questions i'm only you know around your office furniture needs and always happy to chat so it's still soft i'm not seeing anything but i'm providing real value mh and any point i mean this is where you have to start to build relationships you don't wanna jump in and pitch right like you just don't wanna be that person but keep providing value if you can get a consistent stream of great content you know it's maybe how the ver dust can help you get ten percent more productivity out of your employees and then you send them a blog even you might sell the ver desk for whatever you know the movable desks or sustainable desks but you're not saying hey buy a stand desk from me you're saying hey like this is really interesting information that might help your keen productivity now once you've got some conversation going you you know i'm not don't ever sell but bring value and then when appropriate maybe you say hey congratulations so this is where you do alerts to make sure if you've got a couple of these people you know on your radar so that if you see anything happening in the you know they have a press release that they moved that they've built on that whatever that is you have some triggers where you can reach out to them and say it noticed that you moved you know we've been kinda chatting for the last few months and i thought maybe this would be a great time to talk to you about you know how to best leverage your new space with furniture even if we don't work together i'm happy to provide some insights around that man i'm just loving this this is awesome if there's a one major piece of advice that you would give to someone that new seller or even just a seasoned seller listening to this who was having this tough time with linkedin what's that one major piece of advice you'd give them build a strong network and have conversations with those people don't just build a network that doesn't know you and was so hard to say one thing i know right you definitely need to have content and content by the way doesn't have to be a blog post all the time mh content could be your podcast is a piece of content right so if you have a great podcast i have a friend that does a podcast specifically for certain targeted companies so they're targeting a company and they'll bring in a thought leader from inside that company that they're prospecting yeah interview them and then send that interview to the powers that be just wanted to let you know we interviewed your sales reps they did a really great job but you'd wanna hear this right and so that's how he actually prospect so podcasting you could do interviews you can create now with linkedin you have made a video you can do these you know three second to ten minute videos don't do ten minute videos but in thirty seconds to like one minute videos that are create tips and tactics and hacks and and things that really get the attention of your buyers and make sure you're really providing value don't do a whole lot of notes make sure that every time they click through it was worth their click i love it well if folks out there listening to episode i wanna get in touch with you what's the best way for them to go about get in touch with you brendan well currently i am the only b till on linkedin that is the best way to get a hold of me but you know i mean you know what i'm on twitter b till at b till so but linkedin really is the best way and let me know that you found me on this podcast and i'll send some additional resources well we truly appreciate it we'll go ahead and do that thank you so much you're very insightful and obviously it shows that you have this experience and knowledge and clearly you've helped many organizations and i highly recommend guys that you go out and connect with brand we have some links back into the show notes brand we truly appreciate it thank you so much thanks for having me this was fun hey that was brent till if you haven't done so already go ahead and connect with her tell her you found her here on the sales evangelist podcast and if you need help or some guidance with linkedin check out our linkedin prospecting course you can find more details at the sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin again the sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin will break down and show you a path of how you can maximize linkedin to your sales success as always i want you to thrive i want you to succeed but most importantly i want you to raise a level of thinking build stronger a pipeline close more deals faster and go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das k guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yeah pod sales podcast network
28 Minutes listen 10/13/25
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The stories you tell your prospects can either win you deals or cost you money. And with the fourth quarter here, you don’t have time to get crushed by objections. That’s why I’m bringing back storytelling expert Matthew Pollard. He shares a practical framework and proven tactics to help you move de... The stories you tell your prospects can either win you deals or cost you money. And with the fourth quarter here, you don’t have time to get crushed by objections. That’s why I’m bringing back storytelling expert Matthew Pollard. He shares a practical framework and proven tactics to help you move deals forward faster, avoid the pitfalls of group decision-making, and position yourself as a trusted advisor to your clients.Meet Matthew Pollard· Known as the Rapid Growth guy, Matthew Pollard is responsible for five multimillion-dollar business success stories. · Today, Forbes calls him “the real deal,” Global Gurus lists him as a Top 30 Sales Professional, and Selling Power Magazine just named their 2023 Sales Kickoff Speaker of the Year. · He’s also the founder of Introvertu.com and the bestselling author of The Introvert’s Edge book series, which has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into 15 languages.Why Deals Stall & How to Accelerate Them· We start off the episode about why so many deals stall out in today’s market. Since COVID, buyers have gotten way more cautious, which means more people are involved in every decision—and sales cycles keep dragging on. · Matthew breaks down the real problem: sellers overwhelm prospects with too much jargon and detail, and that just pushes them to bring more decision-makers into the mix.· He shows us how to flip the script by giving buyers a clear, personal reason to champion you and move forward now, instead of letting fear and red tape slow everything down.Storytelling: The Ultimate Sales Tool· Rather than relying on dry case studies or testimonials, Matthew emphasizes the power of emotive, client-centered storytelling. He breaks down his story framework:o Focus on a real individual (not just a company or title).o Highlight the emotional and opportunity costs of inaction.o Paint a vivid transformation, showing personal and professional wins.o Explicitly state the moral, inviting the listener to see themselves in the story’s success.Implementing the Framework· Matthew demonstrates how stories can turn hesitant prospects into proactive champions determined to advance their own careers—while making the organization look good. · He provides practical, memorable examples, and explains how even small details (like missing a family event) can make your narrative resonate.“Nobody cares what you do until they see that you care. And then they actually care far less about what you do. They just want you to do it.” - Matthew Pollard.Resources· Find Matthew’s storytelling framework in his books, downloadable PDFs, or connect via LinkedIn. He also shares a bonus tip: use LinkedIn voice notes to break through stalled deals with empathy and personalization.· Be sure to check out my past episodes with Matthew: ep 1426, ep 1246, and ep 193. · If you like more guidance with improving your sales skills, join my
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator the stories we tell ourselves the stories we tell our prospects the stories the stories the stories can help us generate loads of money or they can help us be broken in this episode today we're gonna talk about stories that can help you in the fourth quarter to get past that elusive we need to think about it or we need to go to a committee you're gonna love this one check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm a host donald c kelly the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today on this episode we have a fantastic guest mister the matthew matthew and i go way back back in the days is like twenty fourteen i had him on a podcast you could hear some of his episodes but one of the things he does he is just a darn good storyteller and he has an amazing aussie accent as well that that helps you to be able to get controlled into his messages but one of the things that he teaches simply is that we don't have to conform to the the way that most people do selling we don't have to go to the the same way like in this particular episode of of go into the collective bargaining sessions and he goes into the psychology of how we can get why people go into that world why did they say we have to go to committee and how can we get past that is it a possibility you're coming into q4 four and you're gonna get some of that we wanna accelerate deals to the pipeline but we don't wanna make it about us you wanna make it about a prospect in today's episode he's gonna give us a master class on how to do that i love the story that he shares on this electrician and you're gonna hear it in the episode if this is your first time i'm listening to our podcast go ahead and subscribe we're gonna notify you every time we drop a new piece of episode and the other piece to this too is that i wanna make sure you understand this show is designed to help you one either build pipeline or two to accelerate deals through that pipeline faster and today this concept is gonna help you to get deals moving faster as we dive in you get a chance to learn about matthew but you get a chance to understand why he's so passionate about stories and about how we can utilize stories to help us get past some of these homes check it out matthew welcome back to the show excited to have you made i'm excited to be back thanks for having me oh you know this is a good stuff man it's always exciting to bring someone on that brings a lot of value to the show what you did was i know if you way back in a days you came on my show and grace me with your presence and what i love about it you told amazing stories that afterwards everyone feels like they can actually go and do something yeah sometimes you talk to people and they're like you know you look that was a lot of theory but you was very practical and inspiring that i was like crap i can go do some of this stuff so i appreciate a motivation give to me as the hosting and also to our audience so you are no brainer to bring back on the podcast well thank you i think that you know it happens all the time right i when i speak at events one of the things i hear all the time is you know the advice we got from stage was like so if you spend the next eight months you might be able to operationalize this like no no let's something that people can apply tomorrow yes give me now a little exact well which goes g greatly to i thought because i wanna give something that people can apply right now we are right now recording this episode september twenty second we are literally eight days from q four and it is going into crunch time october is like i find that that is the month to make things happen because november comes really iffy in december is like two weeks out of the month you have people there i want in a corporate situation in a sales environment that we have in enterprise level selling you have multiple decision makers we know that to be true but is there a way come that i can accelerate the deals faster nowadays do you have any tactics strategies that i could utilize or seller am my i you know listen to z so can utilize maybe to get past that collective decision making or collective bargaining so to speak that committee and to help them to accelerate deals that's a big ass so hopefully you have something if not we're gonna talk about cold cola no so i think that one of the biggest things that happens is if you think about the past people used to be gun h about being the decision maker and taking that risk and they wanted to be seen as the reason for why the initiative succeeded and these days and i'm especially since covid people are a little they shy away from being the one that makes the decision they want that collective decision making but the reason being is a lot of the decisions they're making feel like they're a lot more technical now a lot more confusing a lot harder to decide on and especially if you're selling something complex like finance or technology or you know something in the medical field like what happens is the seller from what what i see happened way too often is the seller comes in and says let me educate you on everything you need and then i'll bring in solution space or s they'll educate you even more let us download thirty years of experience into your head so you can make a decision and i mean my brain would say actually let me get sixty five other people in bulk because i don't understand a thing you say and the truth is or it drives me nuts that people don't understand it's like a lot of times i do think from stage where i invite somebody up on the stage to tell a story and they'll then tell this story and it's usually about them or you know they you know how they locked in this deal and then eventually i get to the point where hang on a second who's the customer and they're like i just can pick a name random oh it's microsoft microsoft isn't a customer a person buying who's the person that's buying oh it's the cto again position title isn't a person who is the person oh it's john john is the person that's scared when they're getting hit with all this information yeah john is the person that's overwhelmed and that's why he wants to get sixty five other people involved to say let's all decide together so my job's not at risk yeah other is john is looking to advance his career but if you're talking about how you can solve the problem as opposed to selling to the person that's making the decision why would they want to make that decision themselves so what i find is that the best way to decides to collective decision making is giving the person you're speaking to a reason to champion you to help them realize that you're on their side and the best way to do that is through stories that absolutely highlight that you understand them so what i find is and by the way i hate case studies and testimonials right right no salesperson should use them they sound drag and the whole marketing department writes them because the marketing department has learned about storytelling from a marketing storytelling trainer the sales team needs stories that aren't brag that come from a natural i work with this customer i got an amazing results they needed a story that in a lot of ways is almost a theatrical masterpiece that talks about how you met a client the best example i can give you is i worked with a billion dollar cloud company and occasionally i will tell stories from stage like i work for them so that everybody that's new at selling that thinks they need thirty years we experience to sell can see me do it and go well if i sound like i've got thirty years of experience and i external i imagine what they could do and this time i interviewed gosh it would have been seven people in the room and at the end of twenty minutes of to put it politely an interrogation to get the jargon out of them i then told him the story back in about forty five seconds well how did you do that well using more emo storytelling that's far more individual specific i said but who's the customer and of course they started talking about government organization than see eventually going down to david and we got to the point where david i said why did they wanna move into the cloud and they were like well what do you mean and i'm like why did they make the decision and the answer of course was because it was such an amazing salesperson they chased up and they fallen up and eventually submitted the person buying i'm like that's not why people make a decision why did they move into the cloud they didn't know they had to go find out it turns out it was a government organization and david had this if i ain't broke don't fix at mindset which worked perfectly well right up until the server crashed right before thanksgiving biggest spending season into the year they couldn't run payroll demons by ruined thanksgiving now when you think about that and you think about the fact that he had to go into work during thanksgiving and leave his family behind and had to bring his team in to do the same and the fact that they all probably will learn about losing their jobs can you imagine telling that story afterwards saying i understand you wanna have on prem resources but let me tell you about david and then telling the story about how david ruined thanksgiving and how we moved to the cloud and how we got a promotion at the end because how will we handle the situation you're like you know what that makes sense forget about collective decision making i am doing this no matter what because i'm never gonna be responsible for this or sudden you skip past the collective decision maker now if you're thinking about somebody that they've gotten an issue that saves money or increases productivity especially in today's world you can go to a collective decision making group and say okay let's make this decision together because if it doesn't work i want everybody to share that responsibility but if the story is about has a line of this person took responsibility and got a promotion at the air this is career advancement i'm gonna be the one that makes this decision yeah that's the difference and then you go beyond your single point solutions which is the other problem that so many people have it's like well people call us and they say they want this one thing we start talking about a fuller solution they freak out because that's gonna make you know they've already decided collectively that this is what they wanna do so as soon as you could talk about how this one person came for a single point solution they made a decision to step beyond that and here's why and they became to hero to their organization and that's why they got promoted or hit their kpis or then got head hunted all of a sudden the person listings is like oh my gosh i don't want anyone else to touch this i want to take full credits to this initiative truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife tina allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listen to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you any answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to state so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing so list on unpack a bunch of that which i love that story david wherever you're listening congratulations on a promotion but you know there's a couple of pieces that i the thing that i kinda went from the undertone and i see this you've seem like what you call it i forgot the the guys who wrote challenges sailed math dixon and one of the things that they pointed out that a new book jolt came out a few years ago was this idea that collective decision making process and how we do so the fear is what drives that right the fear that i might do something that's not going to work or the fear that my career is on the line it but i love how you reframe that with stories by giving examples of the person instead of me shu it me not being fearful because i'm no longer guinea pig you just motivated me by sharing examples of people that have done this already and how these individuals doing it have been successful therefore i could do this too because it's work for them and that's what i took from that you're absolutely right so if you think about the decision making so people do wanna move towards pleasure yep they'll do a lot more to protect themselves against harm so if you're hitting them with a bunch of jargon their rep till brain is freaking out now i need more people to be involved in this this yeah instead if you speak to them about other people that have had this successful initiative now it doesn't feel like a risk so now i can feel positive and i'm like oh i wanna move towards pleasure now i don't wanna say that all sales strategies are being created by a bunch of matt but matt dixon work is great and one of the things he talks about and you know he's endorsed my book and i think the world of his yeah and at the end of the challenger sale he talks about the fact that people's buying behavior is shifted and i'm gonna put that through a lens of since covid especially but people these days aren't willing to take as much risk unless their paradigm is being shifted so the challenger sale the whole book thesis is if you can challenge them on the reasons why they're making this decision and then confront them with that and help them see things differently then they're far more likely to make a decision and they're far more likely to not fight you on price or timeline because they see you as the person that can supply a better solution something that hadn't occurred to them before and that creates a whole lot more loyalty as well so for me i believe that storytelling is one of the best approaches is funny like i see a lot of people on thirty minute calls and it drives me nuts the first piece so i'm get a segue for a second because if you're a seller that's doing this please stop the number of people that say at the beginning of the call oh you know oh i'm so glad we can get on a call together today tell me a little bit about your business my friends are sure i'd love to after checking out my website what questions do you have and you watch them fall apart they've done money research and you'll see these people that the organization has spend thousands getting them this sales phone call but then they don't come prepared because they don't wanna invest a huge amount of time until they know it's a worthwhile prospect it takes seconds these days to say something like oh you know i'm so glad we can meet i'd take a moment to look at your linkedin profile i've checked out your website of course you know there's a lot of context there but it doesn't really tell me specifically about this initiative so what i'd love to do is take a step back you're a little bit more about you what you're struggling with it how it can be the most helped you and the time we have to get this today so if you set up the call differently to say hey i've done my research so we can skip past by the way the last thing you want is a thirty minute monologue on the business before you get what they want so it saves you a ton of times spent seconds doing your research but then once you have what you wanna do is listen which for the ex listening you might wanna learn to do that more effectively right i do a lot teaching introverts you know how to be successful introverts have the ability to listen amazingly need coaching but listen to what they're saying don't listen to speak listen to what they're saying and listen to what they're saying from a perspective of did they have a collective decision made that this is the single point solution that they want or what was the driver behind the decision because what you're usually here is they've said i want this piece of which led us to decide we want this piece of technology or we want this solution and then what your job is to do only one that is to ask one question to help them realize they haven't understood the foundational piece of what that decision should have been or they haven't considered something or make a statement to highlight that and say actually you know what the reason why i'm asking this is because i'm worried about piece of information and then to actually know what let me give you an example and then tell a story of someone else that came looking for that single point solution and how you got them to a different result and choose matt's work what i've done is i've actually confronted them i've challenged them on the way they see the world but instead of hitting them with jargon which most people do which in a lot of ways engages the logical mind by telling a story the science says i short serve the logical minds speak directly the emotional brain now the emotional brain assumes all the data is fact which is amazing for a seller and all they're listening for is the moral secondly because story activates the re ridiculous activating system of the brain if you're an year what because what happens is it creates artificial report the introverts can turn into report extra by the way when you use story it will work better than your small talk that you do upfront and then on top of that people remember up to twenty two times more information so by remembering more by feeling like they've got a better connection and by short so getting the logical brain speaking to the emotional brain all while challenging the way they see things and giving them a case study that's not a marketing case study but a real story that helps them see them in the story of someone else that got a promotion while delivering the result for their organization like don't get me wrong i would like to think that people care about their organization they care about themselves getting promoted more and more importantly if they can have their cake and eat it to why wouldn't they you put a forward that you it's assigned you know it's an emotional cocktail that people will jump to say you know what i want to be responsible for this one i normally wouldn't feel comfortable but this time round i'm gonna take a jump i believe in this person feel an uncanny connection after for the first time i actually remember some of the stuff he said because it's easy it's like i see you're tell a story to me i wanna go back into this part and go deeper into what you're sharing here what's the frame of that story how would you outline this process of telling that story because you again you took it from the client you share you brought on stage or what whatnot you trunk brought it down to like you know forty five seconds that they took six whatever minutes to decide or whoever long they took it to tell you how can you make that simple so that i could follow this if i'm listening to this episode or am i making sense sir absolutely yes so the first thing is to realize the story is about a person not a company k and it about the transformation not the technology nobody cares what you do until they see what that you care and then they actually care far less about what you do they just want you to do it so the framework actually is gonna push sellers to think differently because a lot of times when i ask sell certain questions they actually don't know the answers like why did that person go into the cloud i don't know i need to go and find out or it doesn't occur to them that that piece is important so if you think about the initial piece of the story what you really need to think about is and i like to break it down into three pieces so i look at the stories as four parts you've got the first part of the the initial problem or outcome they're trying to achieve you've got the implementation you've then got the result and then you've got the moral of the story and most people think the moral is self evident but if you don't explicitly say it firstly is you can't say so what you can get from this story is this does that make sense and that's a perfect lead to them saying yes and now you're in yes questioning you but and more importantly you can't be sure that they're taking from at what you do because your thirty years of experience is telling you one thing and their point of view might be different just if they've had their morning coffee or not but if you think about the beginning most people talk about the real cost of the problem and was that realized but there are three elements you really need to focus on and the best example i can give you this gosh this goes back there was a time i used to sell customer service train and every now and then what i was working with my sellers they would tell me the leads are rubbish or the market has changed and i couldn't convince them that that was wrong so i would just say look do me a favor pick any lead out of the deck i will go and sell to it and they would always honor my willingness to prove a point by picking the furthest lead away so this time round they picked the lead it was gosh it would have been forty five fifty minute drive this was before i move to the united united states so i i this was when i was in melbourne australia and then when was out in lily which gosh it was a drive and so when i got there back then i used to ask the question so what problems do you see in your business and usually at back then we will focus purely on you know people in the trades mostly electrician and they would always respond with well we don't really have any problems yet up is you think of themselves i'm sure who's this guy in a suit tell me i've i've got problems and i would say really because the last sixty electrician we've spoken to in the last sixty days say they've got this problem this problem this problem you sure you don't have any of these and it would always lead them to go well actually i've got all those problems at all these as well because another that i understand them i'm not just some random stranger and this is the importance of knowing your avatar but this time round it didn't happen this time around he looked at me and said well actually no i don't have any of those problems and i went oh gosh i've got a lot writing on this i've driven all this way i've got the sales team hoping that i don't close this deal so i feel like my voice broke at this point that was like really you don't have any problems at all and it was like you get it took pity on me and he's like well you know if i've got a think about a problem i guess it would be that occasionally my staff cleanup up app themselves so like i get good sales i jumped on that how much is that costing you and he said well i mean if i thought about it you know not much i mean i pay my staff about twenty eight dollars an hour occasionally they don't include maybe a couple hundred dollars a month i'm selling a ten thousand dollar per head trading no chance of closing that deal no this is the world of real cost and a lot of times people's whole world exists in this so i went one step further i said okay let me think about this for second what do i know about electrician well i know that a lot of electrician they wanna get off the tools as much as they can but a lot of times they end up having to go and do jobs so i said do you ever go and see clients yourself and he said well i mean yeah but not as often as my team i said well how many people do go as well you know my team probably sees about forty people a month i probably see only about ten is it okay do you ever get any referrals of those people yes yeah i mean all the time like if i go see ten i probably get say through referrals is it okay and you make a small amount or a larger amount on the referrals and he's like well no i mean always a larger amount you know somewhere between i know sometimes we get a hundred thousand dollars i'm just doing a factory rewire right now of somebody we did a cool white for at their family home said you but if you picked a minimum what would it be let's call it a thousand dollars great so if you were to see ten people it would be fair to assume at a minimum you'd make three thousand dollars in referrals it's like well yeah that's fair said okay what about your team do they ever get your referrals oh not as many let me they'd be lucky to get one or two and i said oh one or two like in forty so seeing forty people you would be getting twelve referrals and i'm not saying you'd have time for that but there seems to be a discrepancy of ten referrals said how many staff do you have it's like i've got five oh my goodness so hold on that's like fifty referrals that you could be missing that's at a minimum fifty thousand but you said one lead was a hundred thousand i can't i mean all told i mean i had no idea how much money but a minimum of fifty thousand dollars this is the word of opportunity cost that you didn't realize so now when i'm talking about opportunity cost fifty thousand means on a ten thousand dollar training per head it's a return on investment in thirty days now yeah my ability to close that deal is huge but that would still result in if it was a larger corporation collective decision making because why not get everybody to agree to it and getting him to make a decision at some point in the future because he's motivated but let's face it trades people tend to hate education so they'd put it off as much as they could so i need to mobilize action this is where i move into emotional cost and i feel like this is the most powerful thing in the world i said does it never get to a friday night and all your team has clocked off and you get his phone call from a really upset customer that because one of your staff members last job didn't clean up rushed out to the pub maybe and you know you've been left with the bag you know what my wife's and daughter aren't talking to me right now he said it just happened last friday i i got a phone i'm an a irate customer who was really angry because they didn't clean up i had to go i mean i pay all this money for digital advertising and if i get one bad review that puts my average down i'd it cost me money forever i had to go clean and i miss my daughter's dance title now how motivated at this point as he want is it for him to make this decision he's hyper motivated he knows he can get a return on investment in thirty as if i'm half as right two months and his wife and daughter aren't speaking to it so when i tell a story let's say i'm in a networking event a sale and somebody says they don't have any problems i'm like actually you know what you remind me a lot of so and so so and in this occasion let's call them trevor you don't like me a lot of trevor and when i met trevor he said that he didn't have any problems either here's what happened real cost opportunity cost emotional cost the implementation was customer service train the outcome was real cost he doesn't have to send people back anymore so what small amount of money opportunity cost will actually only got about thirty seven leads instead of fifty but he made hundreds of thousands more not fifty thousand and he's never missed at kids dan title all football game since moral the story so while you may think you don't have any problems sometimes the problems that are costing our business and our personal lives most of all are the ones that we don't see so would you mind if we did it took a moment to do a deep dive into what problems that we may not be able to see exist in your business who's gonna say no to that you did probably like oh my gosh okay now i'm willing to take a lot of tires when when we get phone calls people want a single point solution but the same objective can be the case you can tell a story about how they had this single point solution that would have been expensive hard to operationalize but if they had a fuller solution implemented they would have looked like a hero and it would have saved money and it would have led from instead of technology potentially being the problem in our business that's retroactive to the first time people like wow i go to this partner for innovation which of course gets the cto promotion or an invite to the boardroom are you struggling to close deals b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash ts s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when let's get started amazing amazing i'm still stuck on just like the first part of that story like i don't have any problems and then now looking at the end of it this guy and it just all ties back to the very beginning too of how we can go about you know how we can go about looking at you know getting past that collective decision making and one of the things you said early on is that if you can help people to feel like i don't want that to happen to me and i'm the person in charge of it it just makes it it sidestep a lot of the risk so to speak so this is it like you said way better case study because it's real and the thing is that i love morals to be far more about and it doesn't matter if you work with us or not i really believe that you should do this like when you sit down with somebody you tell them a story like that and you say so whether you decide to work with us or not i just want you to know that if you consider this full of solution here are the results you're going to have and you owe it to your career and your organization to do this for them however of course if you just want this single point solution i'm of course very willing to quote on that we should fix egg just on that because i wanna make sure that you get what you want i just don't wanna do you i don't wanna hurt you or not give you the best possible outcome as part of this conversation so what would be your preference do you wanna stick to the single point or do you wanna talk about how we can help you in a full away somebody's always gonna say actually talk to me about the full away or they might say actually know what i would love to talk to you about the full away but really i know our organization's only going to agree it this but i'd love to collaborate with you about how we could do that as a next step but at that point they're still gonna lobby for you because they've got two proposals that are the same but one gives them a pathway to a promotion the organization a pathway to full implementations and one doesn't why wouldn't they pick yours what you want them to do is go to that proposal you know as a part of that collective decision making if it has to happen and instead of looking at both and going that one's cheaper let's to do that they'll say you know what this group feels like the right choice because and the other thing i love about storytelling is if you talk about how you're there to hold people's hands the whole way through and you're there to support no one's gonna believe it when you just say we provide great customer service but if you include it in a story about what people are worried about they go home and their spouses says last time you did a technology transformation or the last time you bought something like this you ended up working weekends for the next six weeks to do the implementation because it didn't work out so so if you talk about the fact they were worried about that at the front end of the story and how you prevented that for being the case they'll believe that their weekends are going to be free if they hire you and they don't know that's true about the competitor yeah and i i it's such a small thing that people would assume that is not a critical component but just like what the sky missing the dance for sad for his daughter and so forth that little thing is what made you know can make a a huge big difference but i just feel that most sellers don't understand how to do that i don't know this was masterfully done today i love that i thought it was perfect and very easy to be able to follow matthew i could take up a lot more of your time today but i i wanna get from you if someone has listening to this episode they loved the way you describe this love the way you masterfully went through this what's the best way for them to connect with you to see if this you something you could teach them or teach your team yeah i appreciate you asking so i mean i do a ton of sales kickoff so if you're planning one at the moment you know definitely reach out but even if i'm not the right fit i'll be able to at least point you into some in the direction of somebody that would be for a lot of the the people listening you know i have a storytelling chapter in both of my books and you know it's funny my first big technology sales event or sales kickoff that i did the reason i was hired for that was because they tried to operationalize a storytelling framework for the last eight months and it failed and they said look you haven't written a book on storytelling telling you've written a chapter on storytelling so we feel like it would be simpler how long will it take you operationalize i'm like well in instead eight months i'll show you how to do it on stage in eight minutes and i'm like well how are you gonna do i'm do it for you right now and i the framework is in chapter five of my sales book or chapter four of my networking book but also there's a pdf download of the exact framework that you can just get at matthew poll dot com forward slash storytelling i also share an a ton store about storytelling on my youtube channel and if you have a specific question connect with me on linkedin and once we're connected if you don't know this tool exists by the way it's the best sales tool on the planet to get people from ghost you to actually having a dialogue with you again you can actually send voice notes directly on linkedin most people don't use it but for me i love it because most people don't know what is yet so i will always send someone a message like donald if i hadn't heard from you in a while and you weren't getting back to me on the deal i would reach out to you via an audio voice note now i wouldn't say hey on what's going on with that deal feel a little bit more empathetic than that i would reach out to say hey donald i haven't heard from you a little while and someone like you don't worry about the deal just let me know that they do okay yeah and your person will get back to you via a text message with saying hate you know matt thank you so much for for reaching out i'm so sorry they'll give you the reason for why they haven't got back to you i e family things don't assume that it's gonna be because they had decided not to go with you and then they'll say how did you do that and the biggest reason for why they'll get back to you is because they wanna know how you did that because they wanna do it themselves so because of the combination of you leading with empathy and rather than a sales pitch and doing something that they wanna know how to do they will get back to you amen to that i love it matthew this is awesome thank you for taking the time to come on a show thanks for letting us feel to get connected with you appreciate you man tremendously my pleasure mate thanks for having me on that was d one and only matthew pal i hope you enjoyed the episode i hope you got a lot from his insights today i loved it loved it loved it and in particular i love how these stories are just so simple it's like you you reframe the thinking for this person to rather thinking it's a risk for them to not have a committee to make a decision to i have this opportunity to make a decision and it was just like brilliant loved it listen if you wanna connect with matthew you wanna learn more about him go on linkedin and send him a voice note and tell him you heard him here on the sales evangelist or you can go to website we have in the show notes speaking about website if you wanna get help and to improve your sales game and join our mastermind go to the sales evangelist dot com slash mastermind the sales evangelist dot com slash mastermind this is where we get a chance to practice each week and help you overcome some of the biggest sales struggles you're facing in addition we have our linkedin prospecting course where we promised that we can help you to generate three appointments per week using linkedin without spamming people it works i do it and i know you can to find more details in the show notes as always i want you to thrive i want you to raise your level of thinking i want you to go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales of evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our a podcast production manager is nancy paul audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly pod sales podcast network
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Most sellers tend to get caught up in the technical side—asking the “right” questions, handling objections, and checking all the boxes. But in the process, we often overlook something just as important: the emotional side of selling. That’s why I invited Alex Kremer, founder of Alluviance, to join m... Most sellers tend to get caught up in the technical side—asking the “right” questions, handling objections, and checking all the boxes. But in the process, we often overlook something just as important: the emotional side of selling. That’s why I invited Alex Kremer, founder of Alluviance, to join me. He breaks down how the right mindset can help you close more deals and build lasting relationships.Meet Alex Kremer· Alex Kremer is the Founder of Alluviance, a community and organization dedicated to transforming sales and leadership through authenticity, purpose, and performance. · With over 15 years of experience, he has worked with top companies like Salesforce, AWS, and Gong, and played a key role in scaling Outreach from $25M to $250M. · He’s hired, trained, and led over 100 Account Executives and Sales Managers, earning President’s Club honors 7 years in a row.· Alex is known for helping leaders build high-performing teams and purpose-driven cultures that achieve lasting results.Beyond the Tactics: The Role of Mindset in Sales Success· Alex pulls back the curtain on his journey, opening up about the hidden struggles he faced even when he seemed most successful. · Despite hitting top quotas and leading major accounts at Microsoft, he battled depression, highlighting a key truth: salespeople can meet every external standard and still feel empty inside. · Alex explains how mental, emotional, and even spiritual health are often overlooked but absolutely crucial to sustainable, fulfilling sales success.Practical Strategies: Filling the Void and Mastering the Inner Game· Alex introduces the concept of “parts work,” a therapeutic approach to identifying and relating to various emotions without self-judgment. · He stresses the importance of self-awareness, inviting reps to treat their emotional states with the same curiosity as they would a sales prospect in discovery. · Simple practices like mindful breathing, walks without phones, and reflective journaling can create the internal space needed for clarity.Leadership in Action: Bringing Mindfulness Into Sales Teams· For sales leaders, Alex suggests starting meetings with grounding exercises such as box breathing or gratitude practices. · Investing a few minutes in presence and connection sets a more productive tone than jumping straight to numbers.“When you connect more deeply with yourself, it allows you to connect more deeply with other people, which is very interwoven with sales.” - Alex Kremer.ResourcesAlex’s company, Alluviance, hosts regular retreats blending sales tactics with inner game work. Reach out to Alex on LinkedIn or the Alluviance website for future retreat details.Sponsorship Offers1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator oftentimes the salespeople we focus on we focus on the technical side did you open a call right did you answer a question properly are you are you doing great job of overcome objection we tend to forget about the mental side the emotional side the thing that goes on inside of our brain that can catastrophic halt our deals and today we're gonna talk to you about how you can move past that you're gonna love this one hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c kelly these sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today and on this episode i have the one and only alex kramer now let me tell you what happened alex was working for a company called outreach back in the days twenty eighteen ish and he was brand new to the organization he reached out to me try to sell outreach it wasn't a good fit for us at the time we ended up you know i told him not a good fit passed on and later on we connected again on linkedin and long story short now he has his own company he was able to reach out to and we was having him on a guess on a podcast and in this episode he talks about that but a company he runs right now it's all around helping salespeople get to the mental game how can we perform at a higher level what are some of the things that hold us back and all of us have done that whether you're depressed because you're not making sales or you're depressed because you're making tons of money and you go into substance abuse he's actually done all of that every last one of us have fallen into to trap up the depression part of sales is a tough game but how do you get past it how do you have the tough mental game to be able to help you throughout the situation that's what my good friend alex does on a day to day basis we're gonna dive in and you're gonna hear how he starts off this episode and and to help us to frame the story he's gonna tell the story too we'll talk about it how i totally rejected him if this is your first time listening to our podcast subscribe because we know we'll notify you every time we drop a you youtube of episode and the shows are designed to help you either learn how to build pipeline or how to accelerate deals through the pipeline faster and this episode falls in both of those categories listen to one the story about how i rejected alex and how he became amazingly successful not because of my rejection because he's alex take it out alex welcome to the show man what's up brother good to be here round two round two so people don't know our inside joke on that we recorded like fifteen minutes of an episode guys and there were some tech issues and you know alex had some he had some stuff that worked out great beforehand but then i got on the episode with him and messed it all up apparently but you know we we got it all sorted now so we're here but we go way back was it twenty i think twenty eighteen twenty i think twenty eighteen when i first connected with you so i was so in twenty i think it was may ish of twenty eighteen may or june april april okay april okay so i was literally three weeks into my job at outreach as an account executive and i was taking all of the inbound we call them micro deals meaning one two three c opportunities just to get my feet underneath me and i think you were either my second or my third meeting that i took and i just remember talking to you i was like wow like i'm also just genuinely interested in who this guy is and you know let's just say you did not buy outreach from me so casually broke my heart but i still do remember i don't remember all my sales conversations but i did remember that conversation guys this is this is real so i'm gonna share the screen now if you're not watching the video of the podcast you should go ahead and check it out but here let's go into my junky inbox for a second she's got to receipt right here april sixteenth twenty eighteen and and that was an hour demo mo too so i think i was literally two weeks into yeah my job and demoing you maybe being and all a sudden an expert on when our product does welcome to sales that's how it works man that's how works we you did great back then so now all the sales people are gonna be like dk so why didn't you buy outreach is an amazing tool at the time for what we were doing i i i it was just more than i needed at that point so and that was fair enough it was me you can it was like it was my face he just didn't like my face and that there you go yeah right dude was awesome and he stayed on unconnected on linkedin too he did he did all the motions it was just like it was a good sales motion so it just goes to show sometimes you you may do your part but it's just on my side right the client wasn't you know it's funny it's something to be said about you never know who you're gonna meet i mean i i sold i was at microsoft for about five years and i sold microsoft products people and i also lost deals at microsoft and those people now are current clients of mine now that i've started my own company ten twelve thirteen years later so amazing you know make connections you know see and that's i think there's a critical go back deeper on that this is not what the episode is about but i i think there's in subset we'll transition into it though in a sec but there is something about never burning a bridge and then also when you have there are people out there to have a lot of connections on linkedin but they're not connected to a lot of people on linkedin and you can do an easy litmus test and fall in that category sometimes too where people ask me do you know mary oliver like we have a connection but we're not connected you know we don't know each and i think there's a a certain level of one we don't have enough time to do all of that but i think there's something though when you try to make a high level connection for us you made a connection back then though we're not fishing buddies there is still a level of respect that we have for each other that allows for us to bring a conversation up you know what mean and i think that's that connection so it's critical when i've managed many sales reps and you know it's all it's always something that goes into alright what are we gonna say how are we gonna you know overcome the objection what the next steps are driving but one of my favorite questions i would always ask and it's usually the last question before we hopped on a sales meeting i would say alright they're leaving this meeting how do you want them to feel right and it's like if you want them to feel excitement are you yourself feeling an excitement right and sometimes you actually want them to feel a little bit uncomfortable after the call because like that's just what their call is is inviting you into and so it's just like having that like what's the feeling that's you want because you know sales is a transfer of emotions and feelings there i love that i love that a transfer of emotions and feelings which which is i mean if for for real don't it is true but i think it's often overlooked and especially on the mindset component i feel like so often we look at and we fall in this world too we'll train you on the tactics we'll train you on the cold call the opener the linkedin strategy but one piece you know you can make all the money you can as a seller and still end up like you know mentally broke or spur you know just like feel a devastated like you know don't like give accomplish anything but that comes from having the right mindset and that's where i wanna transition to because you've discovered something and you had a story you had a one of your companies you're working at and things didn't work out so great there but you pivoted once you tell us that story and then can dive into this you know just to kinda of lead into it i've worked hired coach you know whatever you call it trained over three thousand reps at this point and you know the people who i see who are both crushing their quota right being the top leader board starting their company making a ton of money all stuff and also feeling a level of purpose fulfillment joy meaning spacious ness first off people are doing both of those things they're rare let's name that but they're not unheard of and typically i found is is there's three things that are they have and i'm wanna talk about two of them specifically number one they're committed to the craft right you talked about it like there's a skill set necessary there's the left brain how do i drive an effective sales process do great discovery give a great demo get my prospects into a state of commitment right there's that component but what i've found is if there's not this underlying foundation that's built upon mental emotional physical even spiritual health like i don't care how good your cold call script is it's going to fall flat if you're not coming from the right place and you know this really came for me of i was at microsoft and for about the third year in a row i was number one on my team and work with silicon valley customers on paper i was crushing making more money than it ever had yeah and on the inside though i was deeply struggling with depression i was having suicidal thoughts i mean i was really in a in a very dark place and i was very i was confused because i said wait i'm doing what i was told to do would make me happy why is it not in fact is actually leaving this i call it this void within me it's like i was looking for things externally to fill the void where you know technically the only thing i can actually fill it is yourself is love is you know what they called god or whatever it is but like how do you actually fill this internal thing and you know that really you know caused me to go and you know quote unquote do the work i work with therapist i work with coaches i now study under a teacher i've attended over a hundred retreats in my life i now throw retreats for people because you know it's just really about how do you connect to yourself how do you feel your own emotions in a healthy and a safe way and sometimes i needs to come out in tears sometimes that needs to out and you screaming into a towel because you gotta let your anger like be felt and be seen and when you can do that underneath that something comes out within you i call it your essence it's your light the thing that makes you different and unique and from that place really what happens is you start to gain clarity in terms of who the hell am i and what am i really doing in this world outside of just trying to hit my quota yeah and that caused me to go through you know leadership and build teams that way and eventually it it caused me to essentially take the jump and to leading my own company which is called il now and supporting sales professionals and leaders on how to both match the craft but really how to transform what i call the inner game which is how do you fill that void in a sense truth lies and work is brought to you by the helps podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to stay so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing this maybe double tap and go deeper on that inner void and filling that a little bit more i'm a sales rep i find myself backup i i think it's it's very easy on podcast to overlook some of these things when you give these amazing in response like congratulations and being so vulnerable in a first place to like recognize there was something and not going to substances to kind of fulfill that but you you know kinda did the hard work no i did i didn't go to substances i did go to social media i did go to working harder to try to fill that void the beautiful part about it was none of it worked yeah what do the you're here so i'm i'm glad i see yes thank you you know and so you you know it's awesome though like and that's that's commendable and i think i know there are people listening to this who are in that same boat that you are in she or he right now making more money that they ever did more money than their parents combined probably did how did i fix that inner game where should i start or maybe it's the opposite i was told sales was gonna be great and i can't catch a break because the company i was at would laid me off and i never got a chance to get to the next level and you know just it's tough but i i'm doing depression in the yard i'm following the depression the other way how does my mental game for both of those situation get started to be adjusted do make making sense on that yeah a hundred percent you know it's really about how do you relate to all these i'm gonna call it parts of yourself there's actually this really powerful form of therapy called internal family systems ifs it's also called parts work which essentially says as opposed to saying that i'm scared you say there's a part of me that's scared as opposed to saying i'm angry you say there's a part of me that's angry and it allows you to actually connect in a different way to these things and when you can actually start to relate to them as opposed to like gosh damn i'm feeling sad again i'm so tired of feeling sad it's like oh there's a part of maintenance feeling sad okay first off awareness beautiful second off what do i do right how do i actually allow this sadness to be felt and to be seen and and the way i don't wanna describe it it's like these parts of you are like a five year old version of you if there's a part of you that's really sad and it's five years old and let's say it wants to cry you don't go up to a five year old and say hey get over it move on dang they have some i need to go change some things like it right so what do what do you do you go say oh what's wrong what happened oh give me a hug great you actually create safe space for it to be felt and we've seen in oftentimes that five year old version of you just needs to kinda like cry it out for a second and i'm using crying as an example it doesn't always need be crying but just needs to be felt and to be seen and then it's like oh wow i i kinda just okay i'm good now you know but what do we typically do as a society we push it down and instead we try to distract ourselves right because heaven forbid i actually allow myself to feel whatever this is and that's where we use substances we use social media we use video game we use work right any people are literally addicted to work because they hate sitting in stillness because that brings up the things that they have been suppressing for so long and so really it's about awareness and then how do you relate to it and really at its core how do you then create sacred revere space to feel it and that can come in the form of meta patient it comes from a breath work it comes from of journal the hell it could come in the form of walk your dog in the forest without your phone and just simply be with it and you know it's kinda funny i've always described it to people it's like if you're a sales rep you do discovery on your prospects who how long has this been going on for what first causes this what have you done it try to solve why do you feel this way what do you want do discovery on yourself yeah off to that part of you and say what's going on how long if you felt this way when did this first start what do you feel like what is this like and literally just kind of it's weird it's like create this internal dialogue and relationship with these parts because it's unfortunate it's like these parts of us won't go away i've still sat that times i still have a part of me that's struggles with depression i still have an angry part that comes up but i recognize that when these parts come up oh these parts have medicine for me they're actually inviting me to deeper connect with myself and the last thing i'll say is when you connect deeper with yourself that allows you to connect deeper with other people mh very inter woven with sales yeah have open heart to it i feel like this is on unpack some of this year i wanna go back to the walking the dog in the forest the the phone now saying a man it's hard to walk with that phone man but i've been on hikes you know some we have some lifelong i have like four lifelong long buddies from like we're were teenagers and every so often time we do like a you know something cool together but one of the we've done like you know going on a hike and one of the things like a you know backpack and trip and one of the things was like when you're out there and you're nowhere near anything you're away from technologies is one of the most i don't know like refreshing moments possible and in somebody like myself where you have the business and you know the fast paced life it's a sacred moment for me and i often just love that so couldn't agree more and even like doing my run or going out when it's dark in the morning nobody's around and you to go do some exercise like you know providing that time and i think that's the the first comp like what you said being aware and then starting to do something and it doesn't have to be anything crazy big but just that little piece can give you a sense of sanity it made my days alex was i when i went into say oh do my sales activity or just in doing business when i have a clear morning and i do that sacred moment in the morning and for me i'm a a faith based guy too so i will spend time like in scriptures as well but when i do my workout spend time outside so to speak and do that script like it just transformed my day and i think that's one of those first things to help get me enough mental clarity necessary to do that yeah and and you know what i love about what you're saying and this is where i think there's a there's option for a big reframe for many salespeople they say well if i go on the walk if i meditate if i read the scripture if what about my job don't i i have to do my job and my loving challenges like dog that's actually part of your job it is it is like and the best companies will recognize that and give you that yeah like recognize what if you waking up and you working now like literally sweating and then you meditating on your cushion is actually you preparing for that big sales call you have this afternoon what a reframe that first is like oh i have to should i do this or should i it's like no it's actually the exact same thing yeah one of the pieces that i did was and again some people may not miss you know whoever you believe in or whatnot but for me i used to tell myself in the mornings i did my you know the routine but i used to tell myself pray say have any father helped me to be led to those who were are in search of our solution today you might the first time i did it was kinda like can i really do that but for me it you can say it like was like a mantra or whatnot but i it set an assurance in my mind for that day alex that i was gonna get in contact with someone and i believe in divine help that it was helping me you may say it's believe in whoever but for universe but for me it would divine help was the assurance like yes it's gonna be tough but you're gonna find someone today so i knew because of that assurance that it wasn't gonna end until i found someone and my day performed better and so you go back to what you're saying they're like that mental reframe changes it as opposed to well the day sucked everybody said no one responded my linkedin messages the stupid donald guy book a demo and even buy anything waste my time like you know all of like you can look at it at that sense but because of the mental frame that you have in the clarity you're like great what did i learn from that that's gonna help me because i know there's the one that i'm gonna get today what know i mean yeah you know i i actually just attended a a retreat this past weekend with a is called the count conscious founders group and it was really powerful i was led by this guy scott brit and one thing scott said that i love he's like manifestation is a true thing yeah and the weed it doesn't work is when people are trying to manifest something for their own self serving i want to manifest closing this deal so i can hit quota okay yes but if you say i wanna close this deal so i can truly help the greater good of this world it's actually like that energy you're putting out it's not just for you it's actually starting to say it's four making this overall world a better place and whether you're spiritual or believe that there's like a field we're all connected to you're actually feeding into this field and there's more power to that yeah so just like you said it's like hey i'm i'm gonna show up and i wanna you know enroll somebody today not just for myself but so that i can better serve this person i can potentially actually change their life in one way or the other yeah and and i i didn't think about that when you until you shared it like the way i the thing was i knew people were i had to frame mine belief that there many are kept for the truth simple because i don't know where to find it so i saw my software as that or the solution that we had it was great it helped solve hundreds of other clients problems there many who are still a that challenge this could solve it for them they don't order to find it my job is to help to find them today to solve a problem for them so dude love this alright so i i got awareness i have some a little bit of clarity what else can i do to if i'm in that frame of mind alex in twenty twenty or where that was you know here's probably been the most important thing for me is where do we live most for our time in our head right we think about the thoughts that we're thinking about and we loop and you about seven of your physical body that you are not leveraging right your neck and below and so when you can actually start to feel into this somatic experience of what's going on with your body and just bring awareness into it so much changed so let me give you an example if i am on a sales call and the prospect says your price is too high right immediately what most people do is they're gonna go right put it how do i overcome the objection which i do oh my god god right what you know what a practice is for you to say oh and actually feel what's the somatic experience oh man when right when you said my press do you have my gut cl right and oh wow my gl gut what cl and then to say cool what's the emotion that's going on in there oh there's anxiety that i just felt and here's the unique part and i learned this from my zen teacher and and it's been so powerful and it's the opposite what you think as opposed to pushing the anxiety down okay get away anxiety i'm gonna try to over overhaul this with enthusiasm right actually take that somatic experience and take that awareness and the anxiety and actually move it around your body alright it's here it's almost like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube alright let me just like let it move it up my chest down my arms down my legs alright anxiety is here and it changes because the anxiety you can actually kinda use it to ground you in a way here's oh you're here okay beautiful i'll give another example i'm a a pitcher on my softball team sure and the other other week we were up by about two runs we were going into the last inning but if we got three outs we would win as i go up i realized their best three batter i yeah that like oh great and i feel fear right in my sternum chest area and typically what most people do be like okay get out of here fear i'm gonna over power it with you know confidence i'm here i'm gonna over and i said oh i feel fear and i actually allowed my myself feel and i spread that fear as weird as it sounds around that okay fear hello fear what's up thank you for being here you just want what's best for me and what happened is it like relax me when i just let it and it actually dropped me deeper into my body which is it says kinda weird deeper into like almost my gut in a way was say okay and i went one two three and and they were out but it's like not being afraid of the quote unquote bad emotions allowing them to be felt and to be seen and they use them to ground you deeper into who you are are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin hills navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts e is linkedin dot com slash t s e for sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e and let's get started i did speaking and my speaking coach used to i used to you know no matter what level whether there's a stage of ten thousand people or a thousand or five hundred people being an outgoing person like i am i still get nervous right but what she taught me was going back to that grounding and i'm gonna do this on camera i did it before i i'll get lame but you know the wonder woman post she's like due to wonder woman pose where you just like open your legs put your hands on your hips and like you're saying just get grounded and like kinda focus on that not saying no you know get away get away but just recognize that there is a you can use that emotion and converted it in its energy so whether it's nervous or one can i use that and transferred into something else internet energy that how we perform so anyways that helped me to be able to get into that zone so it's like you're saying that grounded notion there's this great stat that says of your influence ability seven percent of your influence comes from the words that you say right this is your script this is your product information which means ninety three percent of your influence comes from something else which means thirty eight percent of it comes from your tonality right if you think i'm like ever split the difference chris v calls us late night dj voice right are you speaking from a lower place and then fifty five percent of it comes from your body posture your energy truly the state from what you're coming from yeah most sales reps say focus on that seven percent talk track there's ninety three percent other and that's comes with your emotions that comes with hey are you standing like wonder woman right well it is that you wanna be but that plays that's a crucial role in how you relate and whether people trust you and whether you're coming off of i'm trying to close you versus i'm trying to actually genuinely help you solve whatever your opponents and by the way my the byproduct that is i usually win as well i love see and i feel like the a practical way with this too is before we jump on that call because we have our calls back to back to back we all do it are we prepared for that call and do we prepare getting the right state of mind before we go into that call sometimes and times we don't so you're carrying around this just negative energy because the last one didn't go so well and you're not doing any anymore anything in the morning to ground yourself like you're saying or to you know get into the right frame of thought so there's bunch i wanna do one last question before you wrap up i'm a sales leader i'm listening to this and maybe you can tell me in a minute or so i'm trying to i get the stuff i love what you're sharing here alex and i wanna get my team to start buying into this adjustment of their mindset what's one thing i can do today's monday but let's pretend like it's friday and i can do this on monday morning yeah you know the easiest way that i brought this into into my team when i initially started to do this and i gotta call forward from one of my coaches is he's like hey alex you're kinda tech sales leader by day and like spiritual guy by night like what does it look like combining those two and i was like i let's look get and what i did is i actually started out each team meeting with the present practice right hey guys we're gonna do box breath right four seconds in four seconds hold four seconds out four seconds hold we're gonna do that for three rounds or we're gonna do you know i did wim hof on my team which is like big heavy into the mouth out through the mouth and it was weird it was different there was initial pushback yeah but eventually the team bought in because found it to be powerful maybe it's a gratitude practice it's honestly when you start your team meeting don't say alright guys let's talk numbers i'm like hey guys this time that we have once a week it is sacred and we i really appreciate your team let's just drop in here real quick we've probably had calls earlier today you probably got calls after today how do we be present let's have some three to five minute practice that drops us in the presence i'm loving this man alex you're doing some amazing stuff you have a retreat i believe coming up for you doing them regularly mh i'm listening to this and i'm like this guy knows what he's talking about i wanna get grounded wanna come to one of the retreat so to get connected with you how do i do so yeah we throw a retreat once every two months so we got one coming up in aspen in three weeks which we is full actually our next one after that is in december that's gonna be in austin texas then we got one in florida in february and essentially what we do at our retreats is we talk sales tactics and strategy like we do go over left brain here's how you should approach your sales calls then we bridge in a lot of what we call the inner game and the inner game is a lot of kinda two sides of the equation one which is who are you what do you really meant to do what's your vision and your purpose and also the other side of the equation is hey how do you deal with this anxiety stress earn out all that sort stuff and and we have a community that's a part of that as well so if to answer to check us out shoot me a dm on linkedin or or check out our il website then love to talk to you alex congratulations again thanks for coming on a show today man i appreciate it appreciate it donald i'm telling you alex knows what he's talking about and you probably can go to that event now go to the one in austin think you'll appreciate that alex thank you for coming on the show today and for you you're probably feeling like you know you have this mental fatigue the mental struggle mental block you can get past that and we wanna help you to get past that and that's why we have this podcast if you'd like to learn more about alex and of ways you can get past those mental blocks go ahead and connect with them tell him to heard him here on the sales evangelist podcast and if you're looking for ways to improve your sales game you wanna get better at you know practicing and you wanna get into the sales mindset said check out our sales mastermind where we help you overcome objections we do weekly coaching session group sessions and you're able to get to practice it's like a a sales practice environment just check it out go to sales evangelist dot com slash mastermind and as also if you wanna check out our linkedin prospecting in course go to sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin we'll teach you how to book three appointments per week using linkedin without spamming folks listen i want you to thrive i want you to succeed but most importantly i want you to raise a level of thinking and go out and do big thanks see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal are graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly he'll yes pod sales podcast network
34 Minutes listen 10/6/25
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Can research-backed data really help you sell better? My guest, Lorenzo Bizzi, author of Myth vs. Science of Selling, spent four years studying what actually drives sales success. In this episode, he uncovers the gap between popular sales advice and what the data reveals, sharing practical insights ... Can research-backed data really help you sell better? My guest, Lorenzo Bizzi, author of Myth vs. Science of Selling, spent four years studying what actually drives sales success. In this episode, he uncovers the gap between popular sales advice and what the data reveals, sharing practical insights you can start applying right away to close more deals and lead more effectively.Meet Lorenzo Bizzi· Lorenzo Bizzi, Ph.D., is the author of Myths vs. Science of Selling: When Research Reveals the Opposite of Common Belief. · Professor of business at California State University, Fullerton, he has helped over one hundred businesses increase their sales, taught in programs in 18 countries, trained over 100 CEOs, has spoken as a distinguished speaker at major international events, and has been cited over 1,000 times, in academic and popular press, such as the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine and many others.Debunking Popular Sales Myths· Lorenzo’s research highlights several common misconceptions in sales, such as the overemphasis on likability. · Contrary to what many gurus suggest, traits like agreeableness and warmth do not have a significant impact on sales performance—especially in B2B environments. · Instead, the data shows that buyers value organization and conscientiousness over charm. · Lorenzo emphasizes that being organized not only builds trust but also showcases reliability, which reassures buyers and helps close deals.The Right Kind of Excitement and Care· Another key finding: not all excitement is created equal. While feigned excitement falls flat, genuine enthusiasm shown when presenting real value or solving client problems can be powerful. · Also, customer orientation works best in moderation. Salespeople who focus too heavily on caring for each client can neglect crucial prospecting activities, which ultimately hampers performance.Tactical Insights: What to Say and How to Say It· Lorenzo shares research-backed advice on specific tactics:o Openings like "How are you?" are less effective than asking for permission or using more thoughtful, personalized introductions.o Personal disclosures help connection, but too much isn’t necessary.o Exaggerated adjectives or humor should match the buyer’s mood—scripted or forced approaches usually backfire.The Power of Self-Improvement and Mindset· Lorenzo explains that the most transformative advice isn’t about quick tactics, but about developing the right mindset. · Focusing on continual growth, reflecting on what works, and becoming a true master of problem-solving makes the greatest long-term impact. · Sales leaders should encourage team members to assess tactics, debate what works, and find intrinsic motivation.Practical Advice for Sales Leaders· For sales leaders, Lorenzo advises a blend of tactical training and deeper coaching.· Rather than dictating actions, foster a culture of questioning, reflection, and personal growth. This helps team members internalize new practices and truly elevate their game.“What will truly make an impact and allow you to succeed in sales is the way you approach problems and reduce uncertainty for your buyer.” - Lorenzo Bizzi.ResourcesFind his book, “Myth Versus Science of Selling,” on Amazon and visit his website,
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator what does a science tell us about selling if you could have the science the actual data help you to perform better selling do you think that you could generate more business or is it just hog wash well let's have a discussion about it check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald cal the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today on this episode i have the one and only lorenzo busy and now lorenzo did four years of research on the actual science of selling what is the data telling us about sales performance and there's a couple things that i have done not gonna lie that he shares that you probably shouldn't focus on and we make mistakes on this we all do it but this is why we look at the data so we can get better listen if this is your first time listening to our podcast know that the show is designed to help you to be able to one build a stronger pipeline and two teach ways to accelerate deals to their pipeline faster in this episode we're gonna go full throttle on several ideas that lorenzo did a research and he has like thirty points that he put into a new book one signs of selling but he actually gave us three or four of them because we just didn't have the time to go through it i want you to check out the book there's a link in to show notes but the first one that he got into is like sometimes we feel that we need to be outgoing and we need to be likable by our prospect but the data is actually sharing something totally different i didn't think about this and it's not not being light it's something else as we dive in listen to how you can apply this to your sales efforts lorenzo welcome to the podcast thank you donna we're looking forward today this sometimes we find that sales people will they will give idea or authors and and sales guru will give thoughts and ideas and oftentimes they miss out on the tactical details and in your case what i love about it is that this is backed by science you did a lot of research and this is a conclusion you came with that research and that's why i'm really excited for this episode yes thank you donald i spent four years my last four years to compare popular advice with research findings and just to find out that several times what popular by says is different from what research findings suggest and the reason is that you see a lot of times nowadays it's so easy to create content so people tend to exaggerate how do i stand out in a world in which everybody has access to social media and producing content so easy by exaggerating by being sensational and this somehow creates a gap a difference between what popular advice says and what research shows and and i did write a book if you don't mind me showing in middle versus science of selling that exactly collects of these pieces of evidence with a goal of stimulating the mind of the reader so donald let me tell you my goal of the book is not a criticized popular advice i adore popular advice i think it's very interesting but i believe it is important to open the minds of the reader to more open the minds up your audience of the salespeople of everyone in sales and try to understand create a debate mh when popular advice says one thing and then research sees y'all out who is right who is wrong at the same time you're forced to think and the very same moment that you think and you're more likely to implement a recommendation i tend to believe don on that if you tell people to do something they don't do it but if you make them think if you make them reflect then they're more likely to implement any action towards change so that's why it's important to try to stimulate people's minds alright i like where you're going with this i would love for you to tell me some of the findings that you have from the book i mean we could go and only have twenty minutes but i'd love to for you to identify maybe some of the top findings you got from the research and then maybe we can dive into some of those on the episode here beautiful thank you donald so for example one of the most popular pieces of advice you hear is that you have to be a likable person right sales you have to be likable this is the normal one recommendation you hear all the times likable though is intended in terms of warm greg generous these are all beautiful things don't get me wrong but while we look at evidence we actually find out the agreeable ness warmth greg ness all these things actually do not have an impact on sales so you're telling me what does it mean that you don't have to be liked absolutely you have to be liked but there's a difference between being liked and being like and as a matter of fact in the b world at least the buyers will like you more if you're organized rather than if you're trying to be worn and greg garrison and for example buyers don't really like it when you ask for their interests and then you say that their interests are awesome that whatever they do is great but you don't really believe it so it doesn't really help build trustworthiness what helps build the trustworthiness is that you're organized the only personality variable that consistently impact sales is conscientious which is primarily the ability of being organized so showed that you're are mindful of the time of the buyer shows that you're investing to reduce uncertainty around the benefits or the risks of the product should that you're clear reducing uncertainty the essence and it's more important so be like yes but be liked by being organized rather i've been trying to be inspirational try to be overly nice this doesn't work out and another point donald you see being liked does not also immediately impact sales what it does is that it makes the buyer listen to you more pay more attention to you so if a buyer doesn't like your they're not gonna listen to anything you say no matter what you say they're not gonna listen to that if the buyer likes you they're gonna listen to you more but that doesn't mean that you automatically sell if the product is good than you will sell but if the product is bad and they listen to you more than they're less likely to buy it so that's why it's important to be able to be organized so that you can create solid arguments explaining the advantages and it disadvantage of the products so that the buyers is clearly able to see why the former are better than the latter moderating the decision to purchase truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this stay so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing i like what you shared on this concept to like versus like but also on the organizing component i found i think that goes overlooked and here's one way and maybe you can validate this for me but when i did software sales one of the things that i before we have ai capability i would do like email like a a meeting recap and send this over to the prospect and i've i know that i've lost deals because i came back into a meeting and a client felt like i wasn't structured or the company wasn't organized enough because it doesn't give you trust that you can continue to go with them and i feel if i'm going on a a hike to mount everest top i want somebody that's done it or at least to have a clear plan that shows me that they're gonna guide me on that as opposed to somebody is saying yeah you know we're just gonna go up and you know bring some warm stuff and yeah we'll be back in a couple weeks but yeah we'll be good we'll get you to the top i don't want that person i want the person who can clearly outline for me and help me to prepare am want make sense on that and i think that small subtle thing makes it such a big difference with the likable versus like yeah i absolutely agree and and you say something related to this i like your metaphor of the mount everest and i take you all the way there the idea that you're leading someone towards a process and another interesting idea is the fact that a lot of times sellers salespeople spend too much effort explaining the benefits of the product which is great but comparatively less effort helping the client understand the problem now this is an important issue because there tends to be a perception that you asked them so what's your problem then you listen and you nod and then you para phrase and that's it so i understood your problem let me move on to this solution and display the benefits and that's completely wrong i totally believe that in the discovering part that's truly when you win clients because you helped them understand better their problems so that you can explain the solution the benefits that's execute but the idea helping them understand the problem so that they feel smarter i believe that a salesperson persons goal is primarily to make the buyers feel smarter feel that they better understand their problems so if they better understand their problems then i feel so good about it and then i wanna do business with you so it's no longer a sales conversation that becomes a partnership you help to understand better my issue i just wanted do business with everyone that helps me better understand my issue and that ignites better report much rather than again just saying oh what are you interested in and built something that is fake and artificial this is interesting i'm curious what are some of the other findings that you got because i mean we can go on for it seems like we go deeper into this one but what are some of the other things that maybe stood out that i may not be aware of yet that you in the book on your research beautiful yeah thank you donald so for example explain excite you always hear what a salesperson has to do is say i'm excited about this i'm excited about you i'm excited about the situation as a matter of fact donald there are three forms of excitement one is good one is bad and one is irrelevant mh the one that is bad is when people use excitement as a sales tag they you're not actually excited but you're saying you are excited with the expectation that is gonna help you close and this is terrible buyers can sniff it out and it doesn't work out then there is site because you generally tends to be an excited human being so asked to deal with your personality sometimes it's related to extra version for himself that too does not have an impact when sales paradox at supervision even if everybody in sales tells to be extra is not on any impact in sales then there's a third phone of excitement now that one that one matters to sales which is excitement about the situation you see donald there's actually two forms of emotions one is an outcome in emotion i feel good after something nice happens and one is emotion i feel good before something is happening so if you display excitement while you aren't discussing the positive aspects of your product while you're helping solve the problems of the client and while you're bringing insights that signals that you're expecting and the conversation is going to be conducive so in another words that helps build trust so never say you're excited about this an excited about there's a excited at the medium excited that is no display excitement perhaps interest of your voice or what you want to do while you're saying exciting things so in other words while you're bringing insights that help client understand how solve their problems or while you are discussing the benefits of the problem you do with that that's where excitement is likely to lead to better sales and that's where you're likely to build more trust with the buyer interesting i like that part a lot because it's more of the i feel that makes it more genuine than just saying if i'm excited but if i behave exciting about the situation that you have i mean you wanna be real right it just needs to be coming from a place of authenticity and i feel that makes it so much better i've gotten excited on calls with salespeople because they showed me a solution to a problem that i had and it made me as the buyer get excited and i could see on their face that even though they demonstrated like they're like a rock concert you know an artist that artist may perform that same song like you know hundreds of times per year but they're doing it for that first time for me and they're genuinely exciting because they see that it's someone my problem i think that's the level of excitement that i got from way you're explaining it you know what i mean absolutely true and related to excitement there's another thing donald that a lot of time is recommended which is to say that you care for the customer right so you want to say all the time i care for you aren't i'm doing this for you so saying that you care again related to what you were saying the issue of authenticity does not matter as much as displaying that you care but displaying that you care requires effort so that is something very curious which is that those who have the strongest customer orientation so the salespeople people who spend a lot lot of effort displaying care actually tend to have a lower performance see customer orientation in the middle too little is bad but too much is bad too in the metal customer orientation is best when it comes to sales performance and the reason is that if people spend too much and too much effort caring for each single customer do you know what happens donald they spend the last time prospecting so research shows that if you are too much focused on the final part then you may neglect the first one because it's the toughest one is the most difficult one so you even tend to say in your mind i am doing well the last part so i don't need to spend on the first one which is the most difficult and this is where unfortunately then sales end up being less i've seen that a thousand times and this guy has been one of those proponents of that where i didn't do it because you know you get easily distracted and i think as an entrepreneur it's even more prevalent because when i didn't have accountability to my boss but i was the one that i have accountability to it was so easy to get distracted by the end and not the the most important and the harder things i have a friend similar situation they started a business recently and same thing it's the marketing side some of those other sexy sides get the most attention rather than the sales side but it's yeah get distracted on that are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin hills navigator listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash t s e for sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when this get started i know for time purposes said i would like to cover one more of the findings because these are all just like really exciting from the research and that's why i love research research gives use stuff that you probably aim think about before but you're able to get that would that be okay give us one more so thank you very much i'd like to say one last thing which is you see there are two types of recommendations two types of actions one is the easy ones just tell people what they have to say so there's a lot of research on what do you have to say for example as opening for a cold call that's fine so if you're saying i are you it's terrible if you say have you been it's a little bit better if you use this the social social support the fact that i've been working with this company and i wanna talk to you that's fine even better if you're asking for permission and permission marketing versus interruption marketing that's another interesting conversation so there are some very easy thought play recommendations of what should you say in this situation of you answer to this question of have you answered to that question these are good these are very easy don't get me wrong some examples for instance is it good to tell something personal about yourself mh it is good but the volume of personal disclosure is irrelevant so just say one thing to help build a connection and you don't need to say too much is the use of exaggerated it's good so you know this is amazing this is glory this is fantastic or should you use more the moderate adjectives it actually depends on the mood of the buyer or the prospect if you feel that the mood is good then you can actually use exaggerated adjective but if you feel that the mood is neutral or even bad then it's better to be sober so yes there aren't a lot of these little ends right should you use humor or that's another one important that it varies depending whether it's you know fend or a scripted scripted humor terrible so a lot of these things work but see the issue donald that the easier it is implement advice it's a less impact it's likely to have in the long term because the real reason behind advises that you do it to stand out of the crowd so if everybody does the same that it does not really help you stand out of the crowd so unfortunately and most powerful piece of advice is that you have to work on yourself people don't like to hear but you have to work on yourself to better shape your mindset you see something research says also is that if people are too much focus on their performance and i'm comparing themselves with the others they're likely to perform less in the long term in sales they focus on getting better than your previous self so constantly learn and constantly grow that is really when they're likely to have an impact and they can sell more so see working on your mindset becoming stronger becoming better able to organize yourself becoming a master in solving the problems of your bias this is what you have to become an a master of solving the problems of the buyers and yes of course you can implement all those little things say this say that answer question here but indiana truly will make an impact and allow you to succeed in sales is to work on the way in which you approach the problems and you lower the uncertainty for your buyer i love it even though i'm not supposed to be too excited but i'm just it's just you can't help it but if somebody because i'm a sales leader i'm listening to this episode and i'm like those concept they sound great i wanna implement them with my team what advice would you give me to help me to do so so i think the delay for the short ones you can still say it's still good to have trainings in which you tell them use the sentence use the other sentence use this opening use these that are opening or not for the other one it's probably more of a long it's not a simple thing you have to say but it's more a process you have to work with them you have to do a lot of coaching with them but it really goes inside understanding the limited beliefs that you have and constantly getting knowledge and questioning the knowledge i believed donald the best way for you as a sales leader to help other people and to train other people is again to stimulate their mind and make them see different points of view and make them stimulate and make them reflect on the possible reasons and other possible solutions of issues it is a longer work easier work of course you have this go on there say this say all this but mind work requires a lot of coaching the coaching which you've don't work together and primarily constantly assess each single tactic and there's many of them assess each one of them the situation in which works a situation which it doesn't work what really gonna make a difference is the extent to which you're stimulated by those things the more you enjoy this the more you find that that figuring out what works and doesn't work it's something that makes you excited cited it in a good term that's what it's gonna work okay so the whole idea is that people need to find enthusiasm associated with debating what works and what doesn't work in some situation when does humor work when does it work does it not work there's a lot of possibilities the more people reflect on more that the more they enjoy that the more they're going to be affected when they're talking in front of customers indeed indeed if somebody is listening to this they wanna get the book and even to connect with you what is the best way to go about doing so oh yeah it's myth versus sign some selling so remember just my name where in the tata you can go on amazon you could find science selling and it probably comes out and i hope you enjoy so took me four years of hard work to compare it everything so it was a lot of work but it does level a lot of this i just set a few of them but there's actually thirty different chapters each one of them try to stimulate your thinking it one way or another with the same premise that telling people to do something leads to no result but making them reflect on them that's where you can trigger change actions so that i can actually implement whatever you say because you make it yours yes so just tell something even before you and tell me as a sales leader whatever you tell people to do they do it but then it doesn't but if you made it then think about it that's where something clicks yeah too beep come on man let's go i love it well if folks are listening to this they wanna go to connect with you amazon but can we put also linkedin for them to chat with you there as well yeah at linkedin is my lorenzo busy and you can find even lawrence lorenzo busy dot com so there's is a website too would actually it put a lot of every other day i put some new tactics so there's a little bit of something interesting so lawrence lorenzo busy dot com is also my website anyone is interested can just go there and have a good time and chat with me too if need be well lorenzo we appreciate your insights all you did for this thank you so much it was a pleasure donald thank you very much was great to be here with you anytime that was lorenzo busy and man he was busy for four years he brought some insights here that we didn't think about and i want you to get the full book because you can get the thirty different ideas and you don't have to implement these overnight you just apply them little by little in your training in your team meetings and so forth but the promise is that when you do this it will help you in the long run to be able to perform your role a lot better and you master and improve on your skills now if you would like to get more details about lorenzo so you can find information in a show notes you can connect with the one linkedin or you can take advantage of his book find it on amazon or whatever you get your books listen my goal is to help you to thrive i want you to build a proper pipeline i want you to be able to get real deals i want you to close deals faster most importantly i want you to raise your level of thinking i want you to go out and do big things see on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our a podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yeah pod sales podcast network
29 Minutes listen 10/3/25
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Do you ever struggle to explain what you do in a way that clicks with prospects? My guest, Zoltan Vardy, is here to help. In this episode, he walks us through a live roleplay to demonstrate how you can clearly articulate your company’s value and get your message across with ease. Grab a pen and pape... Do you ever struggle to explain what you do in a way that clicks with prospects? My guest, Zoltan Vardy, is here to help. In this episode, he walks us through a live roleplay to demonstrate how you can clearly articulate your company’s value and get your message across with ease. Grab a pen and paper—you’ll want to jot down his simple, practical framework.Meet Zoltan Vardy· Zoltan Vardy is a B2B sales advisor, author, and speaker who helps founders accelerate their revenue growth by sharpening their focus and structuring their sales to scale faster.· He’s generated $2 billion in sales over his 30 years as a C-suite executive and entrepreneur and has helped 200+ startups in 26 countries close high-ticket deals using The Launch Code sales framework — also the foundation of his book on founder-led sales. · Zoltan has had successful exits as a founder and investor and is chairman of Antavo, an enterprise SaaS tech company.The Sales Messaging Problem· Salespeople and founders often list features and benefits when talking to customers, but this can overwhelm prospects with technical jargon, leaving them feeling confused.· With so much noise in today’s digital world, clarity and brevity are more important than ever.Zoltan’s Five-Step Value Proposition Framework· Zoltan shares his five-question framework to craft a powerful value proposition:o Identify the Problem: What is your target customer struggling with? What question are they asking themselves that your business answers?o Define the Target Customer: Who are you trying to help? What are the key traits of these companies or individuals?o Describe Your Product/Service: What is your offering in clear, simple terms?o Highlight the Key Benefit: What is the main advantage your customer gains from working with you?o Clarify Your Competitive Advantage: What makes your solution uniquely compelling and difficult for competitors to copy?Live Walkthrough: Crafting a Value Proposition for Blue Mango· I volunteer my own production company, Blue Mango, as a case study. Together, we dive into each step, discussing:o The challenges faced by traditional manufacturing companies in creating engaging contento The needs of marketing leaders at these firms for more lead generation and greater brand authorityo The importance of defining Blue Mango as a content production agency with a sales focuso The main benefits: saving clients time and generating qualified leadso Blue Mango’s competitive advantage: expertise in integrating sales strategy with content productionThe Final Value Proposition· Using Zoltan’s structure, they draft a clear, compelling value proposition for Blue Mango:o “Blue Mango is a content production agency that helps traditional manufacturers generate leads by building a turnkey service that delivers social media and podcast content focused on supporting sales.”· Zoltan emphasizes that this message is succinct, easily repeatable in any setting, and serves as a launchpad for deeper conversation.Tips for Refining Your Message· Keep the language natural—imagine explaining what you do to a bright 12-year-old.· Avoid cramming in too many details or buzzwords.· Test your value proposition in real conversations and refine it as you go.· Remember: the purpose is to spark curiosity and open the door to further discussion, not explain everything at...
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator you're at a networking event you connect with prospect you start having a deep discussion with this person and then all of a sudden all of a sudden they ask you tell me about what you do and then you start to mum over your words because you can't really articulate it and you got done and they walked away and you felt like i just wasted five minutes of the person's time and mine because i don't think they know exactly what i do and you gave them the business card hoping that they'll go to the website but you know that business card is gonna be left in a stack or get thrown in a trash how could you fix that today we're gonna tell you actually we're gonna demonstrate it check it out hey hey hey welcome to another great episode of the sales evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c kale big sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you jay on this episode i have the one and only z var and z and i we connected he was you know about coming on a podcast we got a chance to chat before we started recording and one of the things that we quickly came to realize was what he's teaching today is money and this is gonna be best through demonstration we didn't do any prep on it but it was just before the call and i threw him in a hot seat and he said donald impromptu to we'll go through it because he believes this process so well it's about creating that value message that value statement that value proposition to explain what you offer so su that people can't help but want to learn more about what you have to offer and again you can talk about this in theory or you can demonstrate it and today he brought receipts and he brought is some money to the the table and so to speak and we were able to demonstrate it in this episode the first part you'll see is that he did some he explained what the four steps of his process were and then he did we used a real life example with my production company that we have been developing you've probably heard about a blue mango and we started to break it out in the conversation and use it as a real life example i want you as we go in this episode to think about your service no matter what you sell your product because it's it will work no matter what industry you're in and listen to those questions of four things and you answer those questions and create a value proposition for you he does have a free gift the end but i won't tell you what that is until we get there if this is your first time listening to the show you know it's gonna be dope every single time so want you to go ahead and subscribe and will notify you every time we drop a new piece of episode do so on audio or do so on youtube listen i am pumped for this episode i'm excited to go back through this so let's jump in together and let's go answer some questions and get a better value proposition by time we're done z welcome to the show thank you very much donald pleasure to be with you today dude i am so excited for this and as i brag about nit teaser guys he's gonna bring some real good stuff for this episode sometimes he i get on a prep call with the clients and with the guests and they're like you know we're just gonna have a good day so it's alright but he came on say you know he he just brought up a lot of energy before even started so i tell you it's a precursor to something amazing fantastic brag about your little in the teaser and i told him that you're the the specialty guy that's gonna help us with our messaging but particularly that value prop and just like how do we help to to shape that idea and we we could go deeper into that but i feel the problem i see right now is z is like as a salesperson as a sales leader and i work with companies and they're trying to identify their messaging or try to identify how they're going to market to explain a solution it's often falling back just on features and benefits and i feel that we are seeing so much noise with that especially with so many ways of us getting information out the people chats and slack and you know linkedin and emails and and it's just a overload of noise i wanna make sure my message is clear and as possible and that's why i feel this episode will be great so could you help us solve that problem in twenty minutes yeah yeah absolutely i mean you know my my focus is is really helping folks who fundamentally are not you know into sales and marketing so tech founders to figure out how to explain their amazing product or their amazing solution in a way that an average person will understand and so that in itself is always a is a challenge to kinda get them to shift their mindset appropriately i'll just give you a very typical situation i'm that sure that you have faced i'm sure many of the listeners are faces is like when you're at an event or a party and somebody comes up to you and ask you that you know sixty four thousand dollar question so what do you do right or what is what does your company do right and it's like i often find myself listening to people just going on for five minutes about random stuff features and technology and you know just like a bunch of stuff and you kind of politely smile and you nod your head and after five minutes you're like okay well thanks very much have a nice day when you walk on out of if this sounds familiar to you right but it's like it sounds perfect in the and that's the problem i wanna help founders solve right like if you're at an event how do you encapsulate in literally in a ten second sentence what problem you solve who you solve it for why you're a better choice than the competition and then add layers of detail as and when it's appropriate given the situation right so yeah so that i think is probably one of the the most important and oftentimes one of the hardest things to do right because when you're in your own head and you think everything's equally as important it's difficult to decide you know what you should actually communicate and that's where you try to try to solve them yeah and i think that's where oftentimes we fall into like we fall into the trap with like we think in our head that i know the solution to the problem i know what that is but then when i start to explain it like right now i just sound like a fool and can't can't get that across so i i wanted to be able to get that synced and to help fix it how do you help people with that problem how like how do you guide them to start even just dressing it i'm in the first place so so oftentimes what i'll find is that you know in an initial conversation i'll just ask people to tell me what you would say about your company and then i'd get a gauge for how serious the the patient to is and you know what they need to be how this should be treated so to speak and then after that did you purposely use the word patient well i guess i was trying to use a metaphor but you know i think what i try to do is i try to break the process down into kind of five simple questions that you kind of answer and then you use the answers to that question to do his questions to put together kind of a sentence that makes sense and then inevitably what happens is you kind of have a basic draft and then you start fine tuning it in at the end of the the the process you have something that you can work with i'd happy to do that with you if you got something in mind kinda take you through the process trying to pull up some ideas here because i i think we have stuff we can play with but before even get into that i i wanna ask like is this process nimble enough that i can use this for like a message on linkedin as well as content from my website or it was just thinking from a salesperson i know i'm definitely wanting to i'm looking at it for more communication with my prospects and then does it is it work with any the framework does it work with any industry if i'm an a attack or completely industry agnostic because it's built on fundamental print pools of communication and and you'll find that once you actually capture it and you do it well is actually an interesting impact because oftentimes what i'll do is i'll have a chat with a founder and they'll go through there their kind of pitch and and then i can see them sweating a little bit right so getting a difficult to situation where they have to express themselves and once we go through this process and they actually are able to articulate in very very simple terms you know why people should care what they're building and what they're selling they literally have physical you know they relax their muscles and their face relaxed they you know their shoulders start you know you know be relaxing and and you can just see this kind of like oh finally i can get it out and i can understand it i can explain it in in a clear way and oftentimes the knock on effect is that not only are you able to communicate better with customers but actually you can articulate your vision a lot more clearly to your team to your investors to a lot of you know to a bunch of people that are stakeholders and whatever you're building and so in that sense it is quite universal i found it to be quite useful in many many different context truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this state so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing so the framework let's do this guys we wanna make sure i didn't give him any prep i told him that we may or may not do a a live scenario with the formula so i want us to go through that right now yep that's cool okay so let me gonna get my and he's for so just need to make some notes for myself so my first question to you is if you were sitting and it will be real well be alto one sec i want for you guys too if you're not driving to do this practice with us like to write down your company because we wanna help you to fine tune a message even if you say i'm great my message is perfect i want you to just be able fine tune it you're getting free coaching here so let's go through this absolutely okay so first step i want you to think for a moment that you're sitting in the chair of your target customer whoever that may be what questions are they asking themselves as it relates to the solution that you're selling like what is the problem that they're articulating in their mind if you had to express it in certain questions so we're gonna do this for our production company called blue mango so one thing that they'll gonna tell me is that they are trying to build authority they're probably gonna tell me that they have looked at doing content in the past but they haven't been successful at it it didn't gain legs so if they were expressing that in the form of a question what are they saying or statement say are they saying i wish i had yeah i could really use like what is it that they're saying donald i wish i wish there's was a way for us to be able to stand up more everything has just seems so noisy out there with all of our but everything won't okay stand out more okay what else to what purpose are they what do you wanna instant stand out yeah they're trying to get more leads it's harder for them to get leads nowadays some of the traditional methods are not as successful so they see social media as a landscape that they can take advantage of or just content in general it's a place they can take advantage of okay so i guess they're saying something like i wish i had a service or solution that would help me create content that helps me stand out is that that a good way to mh okay alright are they asking for in their minds are they asking for a a service do you think or are they asking for some sort of click and play solution like what what is it that they're thinking in terms of the the type of solution they're looking for in this case is i think what they're accustomed to is a service because like you know most agencies can do it i don't know if they're in my experience it's more of a service they're looking for because they don't have the band power probably in house to do what they want okay alright and they're assuming that they are gonna generate leads by creating content that stands out from their competitors got it okay alright that's fair enough okay so that's kind of like one part of this and we'll return to this later the second is how would you describe and can you tell us each time what step we're on right so the first step was to identify the problem that you solve okay right so in the form of questions that or are thinking that the the client has the next step would be to identify who is it that you are actually trying to whose problem are you solving like how would you articulate that it's the marketing leader's problem at the company so and okay and how would you define the company you say company what what are the characteristics of that company so usually they have a technical offering technical solution something that they have it's not as easy to explain like maybe say like you know we have a crm that's absolutely amazing but maybe they're manufacturing and or perhaps they're in a boring industry like a finance or fintech and they want to be able to explain to people bit more bring about brand awareness and that is just a harder part for them to be able to articulate without doing a webinar each time and how would you define these companies in general if you were looking at them from a facts and figures perspective what industry are they and what size of the company are there any other characteristics that you would define probably say manufacturing they've legacy companies have been around for a long time they figure why is they're making north of to say low end fifty mil and they that's the low end they have website they probably do a lot of traditional marketing going into trade shows having booths oh okay they have a blog but a blog is just feature rich description of their solution okay the industries that they go after it just depends on what product that happened but they are the manufacturer or and what what's the relevance of being a manufacturing company from your perspective why is that a target customer for you they tend to be the ones that are lag be as far as for traditional marketing space is concerned okay so what you're actually describing is a kind of traditional manufacturing company that needs to create a presence in modern fast paced social media driven environment yeah okay got it alright and the person that you would be speech trying is to reach at this company you're saying you call the marketing lead leaders so these would be the companies see i'm i okay got it okay alright so we've identified the target customer in certain bullet points what we're gonna be doing is at the end we're gonna go back we're gonna capture the essence of each of these particular blocks of information that will then used for this value proposition okay so we've gone through the problem we've talked through the target customer let's go to the third step which is identifying how you describe the product or service that you're providing and when i been described it i mean what three or four words would you use to describe your product to service that an average person would understand like a customer loyalty platform or a digital marketing tool or a business application developer like what how would you describe that so content production agency okay content prevention yeah okay and that encapsulate podcast production short form or you know shorts surreal reels production okay and then also podcast guessing okay okay so but in podcast guessing you're not actually producing you i guess not representing companies we help them to get placed on podcast but then we take the content from the podcast that they see and then produce short form content they can use as well got it okay alright that's straightforward enough okay let's go to step four which is identifying the key benefit right so what is the key benefit that your target customer is gonna experience when they use your product to service let's go just with all of the benefits and then we're gonna identify the key benefit later so okay what are the kind of the benefits that you would say are gonna come out of this the big one for them awareness leads it some of the other parts for the team is that they usually don't have a big bench so they're able to multiply we're able to use the get manpower that they're able to get from us okay so so better use of resources or or okay alright and they just don't have you know and this one i hear all the time is the time you know reason why we're doing we don't have the time i wanna do a podcast but we don't have time we wanna do more content we just don't have the time okay and they don't have the time because the individuals involved don't have the time to devote this or they don't have the resources to hire people to do the things that they wanna do this is a bolt because if you're it's more so on they don't have the people internal because then if you're gonna add on a production podcast production it's you're adding more cost than so do i need to hire people and to teach them what to do to produce a podcast we get an agency that can do that but if we can do in some companies do in house podcasting but the challenges is they don't have a video engineer so they have to outsource that anyways or go hire talent like you're saying so it's like you're gotta bring the head count to hire people to produce content to try to gain leads it's a risky because you've never done it before can you get a company that's done it improved they can do it to help you and that's where we come in so and is the benefit also the fact that you're somehow kind of pulling all these different parts together into a a turnkey service exactly a hundred percent okay alright so somehow the the ease of just having somebody who's gonna take care of all this stuff and don't have to worry about it out all the time and they're gonna generate leads for me and build awareness yeah all they have to do is show up and record we take care of everything the strategy the team members the content the production editing producing all their team would have to do is maybe publish it on their social media platforms the copies that we do for them okay and day have to show somewhere and record okay so we've now covered the problem the target customer the description of your product service and the key benefit and we haven't identified the key benefit but i've got some ideas on there we'll go back to that moment let's go to the step five the competitive advantage so what makes your product service unique or more convincing than that of of your competitors and again there could be multiple ones yeah so this is one that we use a lot right now and we've seen that we've won deals is because of this podcast i'm a sales classified sales expert that's why they'll put us in a category of right we're a sales training company and we've done sales and i understand marketing and we've done it our podcast grew as a direct result of me just doing content and then we created a people started asking got leads so to speak can we create a training a coaching for them which i did and created the sales of evangelist and then you know four years into that one of our clients saw what we did with using content to generate lead to create our company and they said can you do that for us and we did we turned them down but then we saw the genius of doing it and residual income so we did that and created a second company so sorry so that competitive advantage is more related to your proof that you have you can deliver what you're promising but if you had to go back but is there some sort of special process mh that you're using to deliver your your solution or is that one of the benefits you would listed earlier one particularly important i probably said the biggest thing is that we've done there's probably one we've done it and then also we do it with a sales focus so a lot of marketing agencies don't have a b b sales component to their stuff so this creating content so in our process the way that we go to market with our client we go with a sales focus first and then marketing next to it and that allow and how does how does that realize that sales focus what what makes that sales focus come to life in practice in a sense of we know how to target the the right people for their brands and we also know how to create the sales copy the content we know how to land them so we know how to sell the idea of their podcast more so and especially when it comes to lead generation we have a internal process that we focus heavy on with seo the way that we create their show as well so what i'm hearing is you you have a bunch of different tools or quiver in your arrow or whatever or arrows you guess that you would then you can use to basically create this very sales focused content strategy yeah does that make sense that's yes that's fair and is the sales focus something that is meaningful for your target customer is it matter to them that what you're offering is sales focused yeah i'll give you so one example with this we had a one of the deals we won the reason why the guy went with us was he knew he wanted to create content and a part of his process was can two major deals they wanted to actually three of them they wanted to have sponsorship because most podcasts if they're doing independent they wanna have way to generate money from their show and because we were able to show them ways of how they can win sponsors and put that into the process anyone can help you to generate a podcast but also some companies can help you to generate the market for it like the people to the listeners but not all of them know how to help take all of that and turn it into money and because we share with them a sales process in that that was able to help with us three major deals actually okay alright so so so there so it matters and you're comfortable that you can deliver this right so you hundred percent okay alright and how defend is it other words how much how can other potential competitors say the same thing they can say it for sure i think they can i think for in the you know talking outside of it the thing that's gonna help us one it'll give us a little bit of edge but other people will say well i'm just gonna hire a sales consultant in our company to help us to do that component they probably can but i guess for us we have to get more of the market share before it they do but i think the piece that allow me to defend it is the clout that are already built and the some of the large companies that we have partnerships in association with just kinda helps us to separate us from that but maybe something else i need to look deeper on on how we can have them so that's always the most difficult one right so competitive advantage has to have three character success to be meaningful it has to be deliverable and has to be defend right and defend is always the difficult one right that's the one that's but oftentimes people get hung up on because you know a lot of people may be able to say the same yeah the same thing but now let's go back alright so we've covered these five blocks let's go back to each of them and just try to capture in one thought the essence of and i'll just remind you of the things that you said so okay for the problem you said that your customer saying something like i wish i had a turnkey content production provider that helps me generate social media and video content is that sound right yeah okay alright that's fine target customer you said that you were focused on manufacturing companies is i think that's where we also talked about the leads on it because again it wouldn't in the first one so it generates social media content okay helps me make get leads that generates leads okay okay that generates leads okay alright that's fine and the second one was it's target customer manufacturing companies right that was something that you said you were focused on manufacturing are there in particular industries within manufacturing or are there characteristics that you would say yeah some of them are usually the ones that we've had more success with this like technology in a manufacturing space so maybe to create batteries or they create was one of the examples one and another one that was created like a security solutions that you know they sell to wholesaler and to retail stores so they're to oem so is the fact that they're focused on technology a relevant distinction for your target customer no we just had some we've just seen a little bit better for us from that standpoint okay but there is some natural pools right i mean you're okay so is it because they've got more complex things to produce or maybe producing yet for them it's not that match doesn't come naturally a hundred percent for all of them it's just not a unnatural thing and it makes it they do have complexity the idea of getting something to the masses as well because they can do the they wanna get the consumers to see something great but they are selling directly to the you know like the wholesaler so when the wholesaler buy from them you know they already had coverage the product is already out and it's they have awareness from it so right okay and so if we call them traditional manufacturing companies would that be an accurate description yeah that's fine okay alright and then we said for company product service you called yourself a content production company mh now company a little bit broad i mean to me an agency is agency is a is a service provider right so if you say call yourself a content production agency would that be accurate yeah okay then the key benefit we talked about building awareness and generating leads are those the two most important benefits those are the two is there one later that that's very important okay leads like the name of the game right now everybody wants to have like real leads okay so generate leads is number one benefit no doubt and then the other thing we talked about under benefits was this kind of time savings right or something like about like you're offering basically or maybe that's reflected in this concept to like a turnkey solution right like a time efficient solution yeah it definitely it has to you're saving them time and you're doing it in a timely manner because mean obviously you gotta move fast so yeah okay alright okay alright so i think generally leads seems to be like it's the the key benefit and then competitive advantage what i took away from our conversation was that your sales focused yeah and sales focused comes to life in what ways like your sales focus because you do what yeah the whole process becomes more thinking of it like from a sales the end which is to generate the sales most will stop at like well we're gonna get a we're gonna get you content that's flashy that looks good but we come with the from the very get go before you even create the content how is this gonna help us to generate leads and turn into sales for the organization so it's just very tactical throughout the whole process your content is designed to lead back to sales and that's okay so how is that different than generating leads being sales focused i think it's probably the biggest difference is like getting think any salesperson complains about this marketing can say i'm gonna get you in front of the you know get you a bunch of leads which would go to trade shall we can get a bunch of leads but are those leads actually qualified to be turn into actual sales and i know i've always rejected leads back to marketing because some like these are garbage just somebody who showed up bit of boots but is there something that actually leads to sales and obviously we get some of that you get a wide you know variety in this case but it helps us as we target and design content that the ic would like and then they'll also ways to be able to encourage them to turn into revenue i me turn into sales qualified leads or you know early stage m sql based on a type of content that we do so like say for instance most of the salespeople people have objections that they're facing on a day to day basis and those objections we use in content format to create is one example so our content tie back to the objections our salespeople people are facing so usually when people are searching or we're trying to you know in an awareness stage the content that we're producing falls very closely in line with their sales as opposed to just the marketing side of things and then we also use that to create short form content the sales can use on their outreach to help to convince someone to do business with us because we've may have answered it or one of our executives answered it on one of our podcasts or whatnot so everything is really built around sales rather than just marketing okay are you struggling to close deals b b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high value customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an allies so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash t s e that is linkedin dot com slash t s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash ts e and let's get started so i think the way i would because i think this is this is the only missing piece for me is you're get ahead of advantage so what you're doing is you're building a turnkey service that captures all forms of sales generating content alright let's run with that i like that okay so what i'm gonna do now unfortunately this is difficult when you don't have you see what i'm doing but i'll i'll read this to you okay so here's what i've done so basically what you have is you got these five different blocks and i've tried to capture each of those and just as a reminder the first one was you know the problem i wish i had turnkey content production provider that helps generate social media and video content that generate sales target customer traditional manufacturing companies i think you can say traditional manufacturers only companies company product service is a content production agency and then the key benefits generating leads and the competitive advantage i put a sales focused turnkey service for now alright so what you do is you apply those different building blocks to a sentence structure which i'll describe its company name is a product service definition that helps the target customer to arrive at a key benefit by some sort of competitive advantage right so that's the structure and the way that i filled that out currently as a draft one is blue mango you said is the name of the agency yeah blue mango is a content production agency that helps traditional manufacturers generate leads by building a turnkey service that captures all forms of sales generated content dope let's go does that sound about right that sounds about right sales generated doesn't work because as you've already generating lease like building turkey said that captures all forms of sales the eyes that chills generating or sales focused yeah that it's probably a bigger part i think that's where all i mean if even if it's not just with the manufacturers but most marketing agencies i think that's where we missed the bar sometimes do obviously everybody wants to get to the end of sales can we generate sales but i it's very easy and tantalizing especially with something like podcast podcasts where we get lost in the you know shiny object just we got the episode we got the audio we got the video those are shiny but can you really deliver on the end and we stress that and we've seen that to be able to be a key that helped us and if i just had to think it through so are obviously you're creating the content are you putting together some sort of strategy around that okay so it's not just you're delivering the content you're actually building a strategy around it as well yep and it's one of the first things that we go through with to all of our client is that end goal strategy and we design a strategy for them so their their team can actually understand and follow with us okay and the fact that it's social media and podcast content is that something that you're kind of putting on your flag so to speak that you're focused on scotia okay okay so it's basically you're delivering social media focused on generating sales or focused around supporting sales support sale alright so i've been kind of working on the edits here but something along the lines of blue mango is a content production agency so far that's a right that's clear sure yeah that helps traditional manufacturers we're happy with traditional manufacturers as a focus of targets generate leads right that's key benefit by building a turnkey service that delivers social media and podcast content focused to support sales alright that's way more fluid yeah yeah right so if you just pick that apart company name that's clear are you your a content production agency what are you doing you're helping who traditional manufacturers do what generate leads how by building a turnkey service that delivers social media and podcast content focused to support sales i love it yeah so the way that i would normally imagine this right so if you're sitting at a party and somebody comes up to you say so donald tell me what is your company do well actually we're content production agency we focus on traditional manufacturers you know the ones that aren't not comfortable with sort of social media and we help them generate leads by putting together this turnkey service that's focused on social media content podcast content all for the purposes of supporting sales right and so hopefully what you achieve with that is you get a very very clear idea of what your company does why somebody should care and if somebody says oh that's interesting well we're in the process of looking for somebody well we've worked with x and why well normally what we do is this right so you can use it as a way to then build a story to kind of engage your potential prospect to learn more and this is versus rambling for five minutes about all sorts of my product features and stuff where you lose people's attention yeah now a hundred percent and what normally happens is we'll come up with like a draft this you kinda put away and you sit on it for couple days you play with it a little bit you see use it in a couple of your emails and you start working with it and oftentimes what will happen is well actually traditional manufacturers is a interesting target but you know we definitely want to focus on maybe a different target or it's more relevant for another the target or or actually the turnkey element of it isn't that compelling it's really just you know focusing on sales right so you kinda play with it and i think the the most important thing i would say is one you know write this sentence as if you're speaking to human being right because what happens a lot of times is people start you know putting up all this mum jumbo marketing you know buzz word stuff that doesn't really connect with people right so make sure that it sounds like a human being talking to a human being my litmus test is if you can read it to an intelligent twelve year old then they understand then you've kind of hit the the level hit the that you need yeah the second thing i would say is what will often be the case is once you start working with you you say well we should also include this well we should close well let's not forget this and then turns into this monster which you kinda defeats the purpose of the the entire process and so you have to be very careful that you could keep it essential in you know the one thing i would say is your purpose is not to shove every single possible message into this one sentence it's to get to the essence of what you offer explain to people why they should care and then you can use this as an entry or gateway to of talk about all the other stuff that build social proof and builds you know detail and understanding i love it i love it listen guys i wish i could keep the z on for like another hour to to we can go deeper into this but i would love for you guys to do one thing if you played with this example why he was doing it with your company i want you to drop him a message and me on linkedin or if you just send it to him and i'm sure you old and you'd look at it and you know give him a thought but absolutely and in fact i'll do one thing i'll do one more better actually if i need the listeners to found this process interesting what i can offer is if they go to z var dot com which is my website forward slash podcast just podcast it'll actually take them to a free thirty minute training where they can download a video of me explaining this process they'll actually get the worksheet show that they can apply it to their own business and they can kinda put it to work i love it z this was fun this was simple and it was amazing and i think any seller or sales leader can take this and apply it so i appreciate man thank you so much for coming on the show today absolutely and thanks very much i appreciate your time oh my goodness z came through and i love the example that we did i felt that it was he clearly knows this stuff and he used my company which he has never ever heard of that production company and was able to help us to in that example go through that process i hope it's able to guide you and give you some good value but i'm telling you this stuff was dope it was absolutely amazing i highly recommend you go connect with z you can find them on linkedin and also take advantage of that free offer i mean it's super super super easy to go through that free little cor there and get all the downloads you don't have to try to reinvent the wheel if you don't do it yourself not necessarily to your wheelhouse take it to your sales leader and then have them do it or your marketing folks but you could teach them i'm sure this episode with them but this one is one for the ages that will go down as a legendary i would love to connect with you man if you haven't done so reach out to me on linkedin you could find me donald see kelly donald c kelly and as always i would like to help you in your sales game you could check out our sales mastermind or our linkedin sales course find all the details by going to the sales evangelist dot com slash linkedin or to sales evangelist dot com slash mastermind i want you to thrive i want you to succeed i want you to raise your level of thinking but most importantly i want you to go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales of evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is ob our video engineer is guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our content writer is karl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer on donald c kelly network pod sales podcast network
40 Minutes listen 9/29/25
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Can LinkedIn really influence 50% of your company’s pipeline? The short answer: yes. My guest, Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder of Chili Piper, joins me to share exactly how she made it happen. You’ll hear how she leveraged LinkedIn to drive more deals—without needing a massive following or traditiona... Can LinkedIn really influence 50% of your company’s pipeline? The short answer: yes. My guest, Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder of Chili Piper, joins me to share exactly how she made it happen. You’ll hear how she leveraged LinkedIn to drive more deals—without needing a massive following or traditional influencer status.Meet Alina Vandenberghe· Alina Vandenberghe shares how her personal LinkedIn efforts drive an astonishing 50% of Chili Piper’s open pipeline. · She busts the myth that only people with massive followings can have impact—her 42,000 followers create over 6 million impressions thanks to targeted, authentic engagement.Influence vs. Influencer: Changing the Narrative· We discuss the difference between “influencing” and being an “influencer.” She shows how you don’t need to be a celebrity or content-creator archetype to influence potential customers and pipeline—focus instead on genuinely impacting your audience. Overcoming Hesitation: From Fear to Purposeful Posting· Alina opens up about her initial fears of posting online, shaped by a quiet childhood and introverted tendencies. · The turning point came during the Ukraine crisis, when her desire to help others outweighed her fear of attention, reframing the idea of influence as a force for good. The Core of Content: Authenticity and Helpfulness· The secret to Alina’s successful posts? She removes the pressure to generate leads, focusing instead on providing value and helping her audience. · Alina emphasizes starting with the right intention—if your “why” is to help, your content will naturally resonate.Inspiration for Any Industry· Even in “boring” industries, Alina encourages sales reps to post what they learn daily, insights from customer conversations, or improvements in their sales craft. · As you gain confidence, share customer stories and industry trends relevant to your audience.Posting Frequency and Building the Authenticity Muscle· Alina posts two to three times a week, ensuring she’s inspired and has time for real engagement. · She stresses that authenticity is a muscle built both online and in everyday interactions—accepting quirks and being real, with yourself and others. "It's not the number of followers that counts, is the right kind of follower." - Alina Vandenberghe.Resources· Want to reach Alina or learn more about Chili Piper? Connect with her on LinkedIn.· B2B Social Media GuideIf you’re trying to grow inbound and don’t know how to use LinkedIn for yourself or your team, this is for you. The most straightforward quick guide on how to turn B2B social into viral, buzz‑worthy content that builds brand and generates pipeline.Sponsorship Offers1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day...
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator is it possible to utilize linkedin to influence fifty percent of your company's pipeline what would that look like is that even possible well it is and my guess today is gonna tell you how she did it check it out hey hey hey welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c cal be sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today today's episode we have van lena is the coast founder and c ceo at chili piper and she has influenced fifty percent of her company's open pipeline from her linkedin she has forty thousand over forty thousand followers on linkedin and she has been doing something remarkable when it comes towards capturing attention and i feel that's where we are right now we are in this attention grabbing economy and i feel that there's so many things that we can do to be able to do a better job of getting people to come to the table and to have real discussion with us and to help move needles when it comes to deals for so long we have utilized linkedin but so many people just utilized he has a lead generation source in the sense of using sales navigator or spamming but there's more that we can do and as you heard on the other episode what michael men and as you heard on the other episode when i had folks from executives from other a large organization influence is critical and it's important nowadays as we dive into this episode though you would get a chance to hear why she's so passionate about this you can go on linkedin and see some of the things she started off from an intern now she and then she grew up to be sv of sales and now c cofounder of the of an organization she knows what she's talking about when it comes to sales but even more so she knows what she's talking about when it comes to influencing people to do things and oh my goodness is such a powerful episode if you haven't subscribed to our podcast go ahead and do so we'll notify you every time we listen we drop a new piece of the episode and especially on this one you need to listen to it all the way through because she has a playbook that she's gonna give you and you'll see how you can utilize this let's dive into the episode see why it's so important to be an influencer into your prospect and how you go about doing it ali welcome to the show it's so excited to have you lucky me well this is a i brag by a little bit in a teaser and you're with chili piper doing some really cool things but one of the things that you've done yourself and i just had a conversation recently with two people around this idea you are mastering linkedin your personal linkedin as a lead generation source rather than to rely on a company alone and i i wanna tap into that have a conversation is that okay hundred percent that just published the post that says that my linkedin activity influences is about fifty percent of open pipeline right now piper which is terrifying and accelerated all at the same time your linkedin post are influenced fifty percent of the companies pipeline on five that would you that's nuts all the ceos all the executive listed this right now the cro are like we need to know what she's doing donald ask her so before we go into this i was gonna ask why you're so passionate about linkedin and is this an anomaly that is just linkedin and you must have a big audience like six million people following right i have six million plus impressions but i have only have forty two thousand followers it's not that number follower the account is the right kind of follower and i think that's where most people get the mix up like they feel that they have to be like i don't know like some gary van vaynerchuk or somebody big on social to be able to have impact but here's one of the complaints that i get from folks and i'm working on a blog post that we're publishing on this i have people who tell me if had healthy discussions say to speak the idea is influencing versus influencer because sometimes people get wrapped up in the title i'm not an influencer or they see this as someone on youtube or on tiktok or you know shaking their bomb on tiktok or something like that but they're seeing that as an influencer and say i'm not an influencer but what you just shared is the numbers the details that you're fifty percent of your social media is influencing fifty percent to open pipeline in the company and that's where i think influence get mixed up with influencer you should be influencing your potential customers by the things you share and that's why i love what you share do your list doesn't have to be big i'm not making sense on this a thousand percent and i know what you're saying around the bad connotation with influencers and how it's hard to imagine where we see ourselves someone like kardashian who sells lipstick and seeing that like the influencer and then there here's is ali who influences pipeline is a different influence sales on lipstick right sort of on a very abstract product also i wanna do two things lin i'm doing this from a curiosity print standpoint those make the best episodes i wanna get it from what do you do what's your process for doing this and then just even identify what you're gonna write about and so forth or what kind of content you create and then i wanna get if a leader or a sales rep is thinking about doing it what can they do but i wanna go how long have you been doing sharing content on linkedin specifically around two years and a half and i want to preface that i was completely terrified by posting before and i definitely hate attention also why were you hesitant about posting i was terrified not hesitant like i was fear of death and fear of posting it wasn't like something in i was slightly afraid of was it because you didn't want you you didn't feel like you're you you didn't wanna sound like you like you knew too much or was it you didn't feel like people are gonna resonate with it what was it biggest hesitation though just my childhood traumas i would i never stick to be in the center of attention because i if i was then i would get into trouble walls so i learned to shut up as a child you know but deeper than that i had very typical engineer personality where i would not look people in the eyes i would never seek to have conversations with people i was like very introverted and and very terrified by public audience and being on stage or anywhere but that changed in twenty twenty one close twenty through when the war broke in ukraine and i got really passionate about the subject i really passionate about wanting to help i help mothers at the borders with their children and i deployed money in the service of the cause and i saw oh shoot by not talking i'm missing an opportunity to help and that's where things like god refrain from me okay talking doesn't equal with punishment or vendors or labeling talking can also yield in positive outcomes me helping these mothers and the children and the border and and making sure that people are are in safe places so i stopped seeing influencer as a negative part but as a positive impact truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in part wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcast for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcast podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing so first off congratulations on getting past that and pushing through that trauma and also the you know the difficulties there and and actually doing it because from doing that obviously you see great results so congratulations if i'm an individual though and i'm thinking about doing this enormous i'm a sales leader well walk me through your process of when you're are gonna post a piece of content what do you start looking at first and then are you a video person versus an you know a text based person or does that need matter so in my case what really helped is that i don't put pressure on myself to create opportunity or pipeline out of it if i would put pressure on myself i think i would not do well instead i reframe it and i think of myself okay what positive impact can i have today on my audience what can i help them with based on everything that i know and that refrain of being helpful and having a positive impact to the ecosystem allows me to have it be a lot less stressful when i post i can't emphasize how important it is that your why is not selfish because if you're in the mindset of i want to create things for myself and i want to close a contract or i want to get this account you appear selfish so then the post some selfish if you approach it from a place of giving and from a place of helping the community around it it's then provided that you give enough to the community then you are allowed to ask back mh i love that so do you just like identify needs you're saying and then you create something around that or see where people might have interest a pain that people might have and then you try to help solve that problem because that's the why that you're doing there are two parts to it so one part is i imagine myself as the audience so i talk back to myself a year back or six months and if i learned something new i post as if i'm writing a letter back to myself and then because i have myself in the past as as an audience i know that i won't use fluff words i know that i won't exaggerate i know that i don't need to give fin to my egos there are certain things that allow me to post very raw and and then very actionable there's no intricacies in in what do i write and that's one track where i i share parts of myself with myself in the past and i know that if it was helped from in the past could to could be helpful to others and another part is because i talked to so many people in my space but i really do talk i have i don't know at least dogs the conversation a week with people that i'm targeting i can give back things that i'm learning so if i see a mistake again and again repeatable and then i see something that could unlock that or i see that people struggle with something and i am getting asked ask the same question again that i write to post around it so the conversations that i have with my audience plus myself allows me to write back things that i know that are helpful so you're you're right is that that's a piece of content that you you do i'm mostly right i i do some video as well but i feel a lot more competent when it comes to writing yet and i think that's what the piece that i'm get you know from do the thing one do something you love and that you can you have a y behind you can give something back two due to the avenue that you know resonate more with you you're a writer versus you know versus of you do video but you're not necessarily out there being like one of these other can't think of these influencers influences maybe yes theory doing a big detail stuff you're just doing being raw and churn from it and i think that's a the authenticity is hard to be able to it's hard to teach authenticity because sometimes people wanna figure out what's exact format but just be yourself and i think that's the right audience will resonate with you and not trying to copy others well so let me get an i like an average like you could do a post and you share a piece of content how does that lead to pipeline though i would say that so if i look at my post in the past month i might post invitation twenty events say hey i'm organizing an event here where don't you join us like it happened some francisco what inbound so that's an example of the top of the funnel activity that i invite them in and then that leads eventually to pipeline hopefully i also post product announcement hey there's this thing this new thing near feature that we've launched go check it out so there are moments where i share things that are conducive directly to pipeline i would say in a month towards three or four post like that and the rest are mostly insight either for from my audience or for myself things that i'm going so yeah she's just stuff that matters most to you at that point the so let's say if i'm if i'm a sales leader i'm listening to this or individual sales rep but i'm like man she's developing a lot of pipeline for it when you look at the influencing of the deals let me see how that works like is it because the people that you're going after are seeing and content and then maybe you're doing outreach or you get a lead and people go back to that piece of content and say well you know did comment or engage on it i'm trying to see how when we say influence fifty percent of the deals right now were influenced by your post how does that you define that the mechanics of it yeah yeah so there are a couple of tactics that i have to make sure that i reach the right audience first i go outbound or actually reach out to people in my target audience we have a short list of accounts that we really care about closing because we know that those are the accounts that we can help most because they're are the ones with higher lt tv and the right ac asap as well so i have some outbound outreach i reach out to them then even i might invite them to dinner to lunch or to an event and hopefully by just connecting with them they might engage with me in comment and and have a conversation then i also comment a lot i actually spend i would say about half of my time linkedin commenting and i think that that helps a lot my reach because it's not these ing it's me commenting and then then being there for audience understanding what they care understanding what they post so it from its education in addition to something that that's good outbound and it can be simple things it be just cheering somebody on getting a new job or an event you know we all need support so it's it doesn't have to be highly complicated what i do a lot is joke which i know can get me trouble but they i make a lot of bad jokes and i don't know so sometimes i get like once i'm on a bad job i got like sixty thousand impressions on a comment you know and got a lot of followers a out of that so i i crack myself up actually think that it's one of the main reasons why i'm able to be successful on social media because i really enjoy it like i really have fun with it and it's and if i would be half the lukewarm about it and i would just do it because my team asked me to i would not get any results for me it's generally fun so i crack myself point have conversation i i i learn back back to the funnel so if somebody then engages in a conversation in my comments and i do that a lot like my post have a lot of conversations and we talk about all sorts of things but if someone has a conversation we track the account that had a a conversation with me we don't track the person we track the account and then we see if that account that's how we actually measure influence we see that account has an open opportunity with us and if that conversation has influenced to some extent to the the open by it's not fully precise but it helps us to identify that touch i do this all the time i get an email from somebody i copy their domain and then i go and see if i can find anything about them or that company so i think it's probably is it's probably more accurate than you probably can imagine right with that influence it's probably more but that's a powerful mechanism to look at it if the count is in your system that account in some way is being impacted and i so i love that are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin until navigator listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash t s e for sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when let's get started i'm a sales leader i'm listening to this or i'm a sales rep and i'm thinking you know what i just don't feel like i have anything worth posting so let's do an experiment i mean manufacturing industry and we do make the knives i know a client in this space this sounds boring right they cut toilet paper essentially like you know the big big factories and they cut toilet papers in they're different roles well they sell the knives in a paper industry that type of world big big knives let's experiment what could i work on if i'm gonna do content to my niche in that on linkedin without saying hey check out knives or buy our stuff well first of all i think a lot of people will be curious what a sales role looks like when like what the objection handling for notes is and like how do you identify and that that would be super content for us for geek like that on the sales process what i would do and what i do is that every evening when i go home and i put my kids to bed i think okay what is it that i've learned today what is some insight that was interesting for my day today and i write it down on my phone and i have a lot of things that i learned through today and what happens in the morning is that i pick one that has resonated with me later and i write back to myself oh i can't believe that i've learned this piece and this piece and this and this is how i i think about it now or i got so much better at the objection handling because i did this one thing or i used this particular language because i've ever learned this book anything that makes you better as a salesperson that you realize that you've improved your craft that's something that you give back to the community it might not be to your first but still someone that you understand really well so you can start learning how to write and learning how to get engagement just for the things that you know how to do well and then once you get better at that and take some time for me to took a year to post again and again and again before i start it to finally read somewhat decent i still don't post myself provider i still don't think i write really well think that the reason why people resonate is because it's just raw like i put notes from my phone it's not edited it's not just the and then as you get better with the writing then you can start telling stories for your customer that's i i met joe he was so particular about this particular way and he was saw with efficiency driven i've never seen someone who this particular passion and i think that this is why it is so you can start telling the stories of your customers can start observing some trends that people are in in this particular industry they're thinking about this priority is not they're shifting because of the tariffs have impacted them any kind of insights that you get from your audience you can just give back to the community and you teach the type of things that you're learning on the way it doesn't have to be big and i i love that component it doesn't have to be big how often are your posting i observe that whenever i post because i have to the posts are kind of wonky and they're half asked so it don't sound really good so i only post if i have the time to post and engage and i have passion for this subject and i was observing that these days is like two to three times a week that's what works from me in the past i post a lot more because i still learning to write i would post seven times a week maybe even more but it was only because i was really just learning yeah the biggest thing i took from today is be authentic and to help people if you can be authentic could help people you can create whatever formula after that but if you can do that it leads to the end results and i'm absolutely just i love this congratulations on the success that you guys are seeing in chili piper if there's one major takeaway you would like somebody to leave with from our conversation what's a one major piece of advice i love how you summarized your authenticity and the helpful i would say that big piece of being able to show up authentically is being able to do that even outside the camera and doing that with your colleagues doing that with your friends doing that to yourself to recognize that there are a lot of quirks to your personality you might be labeled weird in some circles you might not have all the right answers but the more you learn to accept that version of yourself the way it is then you feel what's safer to do that online as well i would say that the exercise of showing up as you are is it has to be a muscle that you you take steps on your really real life as well love ali what's the best way to get a hold of you i know we'll definitely put linkedin on there yeah linkedin and i it's definitely myself and i make jokes in the comments with you you can engage and then i also have notion page a notion page where i documented all my process with more details around how we exactly we do the measurement and how i approach really difficult topics like politics this hazel or linkedin and some other difficult ones so i can leave that as a resource as well i love it we're gonna put that in a show notes i'm gonna go check it out to see if i can borrow some of your ideas so elena thank you so much for coming on a show today really appreciate it thank you for having me man i'm telling you ali elena came and she dropped some good value to us today and i'm super grateful for her if you haven't done so already go ahead and subscribe to the podcast but more importantly go check out the link she shared you can find that at chili piper dot com slash ts s e you can get access to that notion that the notion page where you can get all of the details again chili piper dot com slash t s e to get access to all of that goodies in that pdf in that notion i'm saying pdf but in the her playbook because i ice was paying attention to it and looking at it going deeper in it there's so many things apart as far as how you can make the account more effective and how you can do this with other parts of the the sales process and how you can share relevant content that people gonna wanna hear i highly recommend you check it out as always i want you to build a stronger pipeline i want you to be able to influence more deals i want you to be able to get deals to the pipeline faster most importantly i want you to raise your level of thinking and go out and do big things see on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our a podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly network pod sales podcast network
26 Minutes listen 9/26/25
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Should salespeople become influencers? I’m a firm believer in this, and my guest, Michael Manzur, Founder & CEO of Flood Me Social, is back to discuss the importance of thought leadership and influencer marketing. He shares how building genuine influence and community online is the modern path t... Should salespeople become influencers? I’m a firm believer in this, and my guest, Michael Manzur, Founder & CEO of Flood Me Social, is back to discuss the importance of thought leadership and influencer marketing. He shares how building genuine influence and community online is the modern path to driving real results.From Audience to Community· You can’t just focus on your ideal audience as an influencer—you have to build a community. · Michael explains how sales professionals can use social media platforms like LinkedIn to create meaningful conversations, provide value, and position themselves as trusted thought leaders.· In today’s world of AI, influencer salespeople must do more than simply attract an audience—they need to create engagement that fosters stronger connections, leading to more opportunities and qualified leads.Common Mistakes Companies Make with Influencer Campaigns· Michael points out how many organizations jump into influencer campaigns without first aligning their business objectives with their social media and influencer marketing efforts. This often leads to confusion about goals and results.· Companies frequently delegate influencer marketing to already overloaded social media managers, causing burnout and a lack of focus on what’s truly driving results.· There’s often a disconnect among stakeholders, where campaigns are judged solely on surface-level metrics like impressions or comments, instead of tracking whether those efforts actually lead to sales or real business outcomes.The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing· AI is beginning to disrupt influencer marketing by allowing brands to experiment with AI-generated creators, sometimes achieving results at a fraction of the traditional cost.· Despite technological changes, Michael noted that “the best practices don’t change”—AI influencers still need effective calls to action and strong community engagement to move the needle in sales.Steps for Sales Leaders and Executives· Start by understanding best practices in influencer marketing and ensure every campaign is tied back to clearly defined business objectives and sales targets.· Participate actively in the right communities, not just by broadcasting messages but by engaging—commenting on posts, sharing insights, and building thought leadership, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn.· When running influencer campaigns, carefully select the right creators, create detailed creative briefs, outline clear calls to action, and constantly monitor for results that matter—such as actual leads or conversions, not just likes or impressions."The best way you can access influencer marketing and sales is just by sharing your thoughts in the community that you participate in." - Michael Manzur.Resources· Take a few minutes to check out the Goldman Sachs creator economy article and see for yourself how this massive shift is reshaping marketing and sales. Let this be your motivation to explore influencer campaigns, engage your communities, and make sure you’re not left behind.· Revisit episode 644 of the podcast with Michael and learn more about what he had to say about getting social on social media. · Reach out to Michael on LinkedIn for insights and consulting in faith-based, wellness, or broader B2B influencer marketing
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator i believe that sales should be influencers and i'm gonna tell you why check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm your host donald c cal the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today on this episode i have my good friend michael missouri he runs an influencer agency and the other day i had a cro and cmo on a podcast and she worked at cal and i did a little bit of talked about this in the episode but listen the one of the things that she mentioned to me in a a conversation was like how much influencer marketing is so critical right now a lot of these big organizations so having a conversation with michael who runs an agency i wanna see how does that work with sales what can we do to be able to influence deals and i feel very strongly that sales should be influencers not influencer in a sense out there know doing a latest tiktok dance but influencing the deals or opportunities and you're gonna see why in this episode if this is your first time listening to our show our show is designed to do two things one help you to build pipe and two help you to be able to accelerate deals to the pipeline a little bit faster as we go into the episode michael you get a chance to connect with i mean see his passion he and i have been friends for for a long time now and he has ran some pretty successful campaigns working with companies like car mac's and is generating leads and business back to their organization he's gonna break down what that formula looks like why influencer marketing is working right now and how you and your team could take advantage of it check it out michael welcome back to the show man hey thanks for having me grateful to be back excited to share and kind of participate in insights together so well i always love your the value bring to the table and this conversation it's dovetail tales from an episode i did the other day i don't know if you guys remember i i think i may have mentioned this on the episode but i did an episode what jessica gill martin and she was the former cro at cal and the content we spoke about on that episode was getting into the c suite she works with a lot with c so i was asking her what some of the conversations going around mike and she said right now the conversation is around how can we stay relevant with ai in so much going on i'm like what else is going on at a table she's like you know from a marketing standpoint it's very tough to get success from the old school channels like just you know email campaign or we're just gonna do some kind of blast or and this may be blast one for my podcast but even cold call it's not as effective as it once were but it still works social ads and so forth and i said well let's take everything away what's one thing that you could do to really see success from marketing and sales standpoint if there's one thing i take everything else away what's the one thing you want and you know what she said michael she said influencer marketing so this is why we have you on a show today and i know you have some stats on this and it again sales leaders sales rep you're listening to this call i'm not telling you that you need to be a influencer but no i am because i talked about that on a different episode you influence people and we have a blog post coming out about that but your job though i'm not saying you need to go out and go do a tiktok campaign and get all this stuff ways how you can create take advantage of influencers and i wanna get ahead of that conversation so i brought michael on today because i want for him to speak to us on how does influencer campaign actually generate leads because all of a salespeople people on this call that's what we want does that make sense michael one hundred percent one hundred percent and i believe being sales oriented and not just sales oriented of real results you know you can have a hundred calls a day you can be prospecting you can do these things first of all let me back backtrack thank you again you know this is wonderful i i love the sales community i love the purpose driven you know people in the sales evangelist and just a quick step for you so you go to go you just type in on google goldman sachs creator economy you run it to this article as published twenty three this is mind blowing go ahead mike yeah absolutely so and just a headline i just read the headline creator economy can approach half a trillion dollars twenty twenty seven this is goldman sachs so create economy could approach half a trillion dollar by twenty twenty seven wonderful article released several years ago just two years ago and think about everything that's happened with ai and several other things just two years ago right so i think the practical aspects start off you know with a good strategy is just like any campaign you have to have a fixed business objective and then have social media goal tied to your business objective i agree with you you know it could be that thing talk campaign right then what is the dance you know and do not yeah exactly something bigger so i do believe that you know is value but vanity metrics we call them in social media marketing so likes comments shares different things like that they have their place brand lift all these other things the reason why i put those in quotations is because does it lead to sales does it move the needle if i am a cro if i am a territory manager if i'm trying to get my product and get it sold and build value for my team etcetera how can i do this thought leadership so we're right now in a very very unique and actually beautiful time and the main thing right now that i'm telling guys whether it's sales whether it's anything with a enable man whether it's a new rap or a seasoned leader get all social media share your thoughts online and here's a key there's a very big difference between an audience and a community and yeah i guess it's like a a hair we could split some people use them interchangeably please go for yeah audiences you're really talking at the people you're standing on the podium and you're talking at them you're not talking with them you're not engaging in the things they wanna talk about as a community and we know those of us who use like for linkedin for sales or any any type of engagement or or calendar appointments etcetera with a community you're participating you're commenting on their post you're commenting on the different things well how does commenting on a post help me generate leads or how does commenting try it try it it's the best way because once you're known organic has excuse me linkedin has this unique thing where it has organic reach and so you're thousand two thousand ten thousand connections can see what you commented on yeah they can see what you're engaging with you participate as part of that community and now you were not just an influencer but a thought leader you're somebody who has consequence and value you're a key opinion leader in that sales process so you know i think it's wonderful if i talk about this all day so truth lies and work is brought to you by the hub podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you any answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing i think that you just like to have a more conversation on it because here's one of the arguments that i have i had people say and some of the well meaning organizations that i work with as an influencer you then moved away from the title influencer and it became this like thing this taboo like we don't want to be seen as an influencer the influencer title but you go back to the concept of influence as a salesperson and this is what our blog is about for my other company to podcast podcast our newsletter but i am influence in that deal i do want to influence michael i do want michael my the chief marketing officer who's following me to see the content that i shared that you'd like just just shared it as a thought leader to say dang it donald stuff makes sense and i'm influencing the sales process but i'm not shaking my bomb bomb with some new tiktok you know music there's a different type of influencer in that thing but i hundred percent but there is a place for influencers like the people who are shaking their bam bombs but maybe that's not your brand but there is a place for influencers my company we're hypothetically thinking about this michael what's the first step that i shoot do as a sales leader or as an executive listening to this podcast what should i be doing if i'm gonna experiment with hiring influencers to help us with our brand to do a campaign great question i'm excited to answer so the very first thing would be to understand the best practices what works what doesn't what is important for people to know of top tier so when i'm evaluating the results they got me is this something that in house is valuable to my company maybe it is like you said shaking and bob maybe that's important for us in that order we're trying to expand awareness or we're trying but for us in sale does it lead to sales does it lead to moving the needle does it lead to you know q four q one of next year of us having the success we want hitting those financial targets moving the bottom line not just top line so the very first thing would be understanding that the so you know understanding key business objectives the second thing moving down is what is the life cycle of an influencer marketing campaign so it moves in several stages and i'll break those down just very briefly as a snapshot the first is sourcing so you have sourcing you source the influencers you're a company in house and you say you know what we're gonna invest in influencers you source the influencers where do you find them there's databases there's various different ways but sourcing is the first one you find that influencer then you send what's called the creative a brief in creative brief you kinda outline elements of the proposed campaign hey we're doing back the school right coming up on q four here q four is a busiest season by far and influencer marketing you have all the holidays you have cyber monday black friday you know like end of the year it's crazy and every influencer marketing agency company people like us just have a plug and play solution that we sell to companies is it's very busy so that creative brief then outlines the elements in that campaign okay here's two deliverables you're gonna do two thirty second videos that you're gonna highlight the product you're gonna say lincoln bio we're gonna do an affiliate or maybe it's u g you're buying the assets you know you're just you're not even running a campaign you're they're selling you the videos there's various different types but in that creative brief you would outline the type of campaign and then the duration of the campaign the exclusivity the usage rights various different components that's around the time you see the contracts etcetera creative brief then execution of the campaign campaign goes live so step three the campaign goes live there's monitoring there could be live analysis depending on the complexity of your value chain and like your sales enable cycle you'd be able to look at that and see okay we're live now here's execution and then afterwards well we're talking about and what's most important for us as sales driven in sales oriented the results if we got x percentage of growth or this many impressions or this many which is the state of the market right now and which is why it's in flux with ai and a lot of things like that influencer marketing is the his because it's like did you get us real results well we got you a thousand comments how many of those led to sales what's the purchase intent what's the like did it reach our buyer persona are we getting leads from this so i think being understanding those results and being results oriented in terms of how can we have successful campaigns let's say you hit every metric that you wanted how can we duplicate this how can we trip or influence and that's where the influencer title comes in is we're able to then say okay let me backtrack and where can i go and then have a replica of these you know replicate what i just performed and that's the fit and final step is the center of the final step is essentially looking at that and saying how do we duplicate how do we learn from those campaign experiences is the learnings or takeaways from the results of that campaign understanding those things donald what it does is it helps us in sales at cmo that even ceo you know i only work with the c suite those of us in influencer marketing because we directly move the needle those of us who are focused on sales we directly move the needle so a cro or revenue officer is looking at me and going this is amazing like this is amazing many of you have heard i don't wanna drop me but many of you have heard influencers on tiktok let's say and they go into a store and then when they're known that they're there let's say it's food review or some kind of something they leave business when they're going out the door they leave business and they're leaving opportunity why they tapped into those communities and that's why i tell you audience community very important hair split so what are some of the mistakes that companies make when they say they talk about in the board meetings that we're gonna do influencer a campaign what are some of the biggest mistakes that organization make and then i wanna come back to another one about some of the results you've seen before absolutely so when i do a kickoff strategy meeting and we're onboarding certain parts of these clients i see everything i see the social media manager running the influencer marketing efforts they're burned out they're putting out fires they're trying to evaluate results while doing community management the primary thing we wanna do is the first part is are your business disruptive aligned with your social media efforts and in this case performance marketing and influencer marketing efforts let's say for example our goal is to increase sales by twenty percent in a six week period or in a six month period well how do our cost to action with our creators connect to our business objective you know how are we making sure that the lincoln bio is leading to real results not just bounces from our shopping cart you know and with us in terms of thought leadership if you're gonna be a key opinion leader a subject matter expert it doesn't have to be you're the sales guy you know it could be i'm tied into this community i serve this community i bring value to what i'm doing and you know it works so to your point i think the heart of this question is essentially understanding what works what i've seen is people too busy they're busy putting out fires to know what works and what's the most important timelines are extending people are not really understanding the value up top you have stakeholder buy in there's confusion well the last campaign you ended didn't do so well and it only got s x y z impressions or comments and we wanted sales so then there's a retraining of the team you know so there's so many things that happen what we do is we bring best practice solution we get in there after doing that audit and that you know kickoff strategy meeting we're able to then say okay how do we set up the system in house for you where you understand what works and then afterwards that triggers we do a set up and then a subscription till we set up their influencer marketing efforts and then do a subscription that provides market intelligence up to the minute you know insights and influencer marketing because it's changing so much you reference ai i mean it's nuts there's ai creators making six figures you know that are owned the code is owned by people and other things like that but it's an exciting time but so many people feel left behind the best way you can access you know influencer marketing and sales and other things like that it's just by sharing your thoughts in the community which you participate participated so are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high value customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash ts s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e when let's get started what has been the you've done a lot of these different campaigns can you you don't have to give names but can you share one of the best resulting campaigns that you saw yeah so i a creator just recently i don't wanna share the name but i just shared so says car max so we worked with car max this was about three weeks ago and you'd be surprised how much in house people and these bigger companies whether it's car max we did a deal with dove several weeks ago and what happens is a lot of times even in house the machine is just going right it's car max whether it's stuff whether it's all these other coming but machine is just going and it's like we never really stopped and many of you salespeople can relate to that we never really stopped to consider why are we doing what we're doing like is this moving us closer towards the yearly goals or our quarterly goals so i think helping them from an outside fresh perspective fresh eyes being able to stop and see that is this going to help us with our ceo initiative for this year or our five year goal or our and us in sales like is this gonna help us move the needle with our quota etcetera so what i did and this is particularly for car we set them up with a creator we were able to have them participate in that market intelligence an insights point of view and they were able to pivot so we got them with a creator the results were given there were great results but they said you know what we can duplicate this with ai i agreed i mean i thought it was wonderful i'm excited to connect them with creators but if they can do it with ai at a fraction of the cost i mean you know go forward it and i think a lot of bigger companies are starting to experiment you know as you reference with ai and with other different things but the best practices don't change the yeah ability to get results doesn't change because that ai creator will still have to do cost to action they'll still have to pose and you know promote products or do whatever it is to move the needle value wise in terms of sales so once you understand that what works and why is it important you know it changes everything and again the best way to find that out is by being in these communities because the value proposition that i propose and jobs to be done is clayton and chris soon has talked about may not fill the jobs to be done that is you know the community i'm engaged in but as a salesperson you would know you would know the prospects pain points you would know the rebuttal you would know you know the things that combat that and help enhance the value in the eyes of the prospect i think it starts there just participating in the communities were part of and being engaged actively online part on linkedin what would you say is a final result of the campaign with them was it leads that they got or was it just they mean they had some success right the car max or dell yeah yeah it's conversions so their conversion goal we well those of you who don't know this will be helpful from a marketing guy perspective so there's a a funnel right it's a funnel so it starts at awareness and then it kinda goes down that's the top of funnel this is a marketing funnel and then it goes all the way down to convergence and in conversions they can vary sales maybe it's foot traffic maybe it's you know learn more click here buy now whatever it is in terms of a call to action button online or in person etcetera so theirs was to learn more and to have phone calls we're were able to think it was three hundred and eighty two percent which their yeah yeah influencer are marketing the returns are amazing i mean once you know what you're doing once you've seen just like in sales once you know okay i got this prospect because i said something that really filled their pain point or i'm able to it's the same thing in marketing and understanding that funnel is once you're able to understand what moves a needle and what the best practices are and what like can be duplicated and replicated regardless of industry because you understand the best practices is once you understand that i mean the results are stu and right now i've worked with operation underground railroad i've worked with the golden state warriors i've worked with we've worked with quite a few people that i've seen results across the board and it's very exciting to understand so if you take nothing else from what i say today and you're listening to this or maybe you watch this later on youtube the primary thing i want all of us to focus on is participate on linkedin in the conversations maybe you set a strategy gary va vaynerchuk and etcetera brothers call it the dollar and eighty set strategy where every comment is ten cents and you do x y z comments per day and you know so participate in those things because now that you're trusted they come to you you have inbound sales you have inbound influence and capacity to influence the prospect so it's a wonderful thing and it's happening right now and i would hate for us listening to then you know two years from now we're like i could've done that i guess ai right yeah now ai is doing it you know so well with that being said michael folks listen to this and they're like you know donald i'm curious i wanna check this out what's the best way for them to get a hold of you linkedin linkedin it's wonderful i have conversations people all the time on linkedin very active on there i'm gonna start producing series and content on there to talk about a lot of this because many spaces are changing i'm in the faith based space and christian wellness health and wellness brands that's what our primary focus is and we do consulting as i mentioned for the other brands and people but i'll give you just a snapshot so linkedin is the best place to find me last year i was at a conference called the influencer marketing show in new york city obviously new york city big city off people from all over the world it's a destination location and we're there we're having a good time you would be surprised how many sales people were there doing exactly what we're doing right now yeah just trying to learn trying to participate trying to be part of the conversation how does this apply to what i'm doing right now yeah and how cannot i better learn as a a a sales enable mint you know whether it's maybe it's a direct revenue a cro and or even you know bd r new new developed you know reps and and business development i think the important part is understanding our knowledge gaps and filling those and i would love to be a part of that process so reach out to me michael alejandro man on linkedin and yeah i would love to help michael thank you so much for coming on a show today man we truly appreciate it absolutely thanks for having me that was michael missouri if you haven't connect with to michael you'd go ahead and connect with them tell him that you heard him here on these sales of evangelist podcast i am truly grateful to have him and i'm truly grateful to have you and for you being here if you haven't done so already i encourage you to subscribe to our podcast and we'll notify you every time connect with michael on linkedin tell him that you heard about him here of a show and you know as always i really want you to build pipeline and i think you should i know and feel very strongly you should be an influence influencing the deals not necessarily again being tiktok and mastering cap cut you just need to be able to influence and you can do so very easily based on the things michael share and if your team wanna do an influence campaign go ahead and try get your marketing and sales team together your revenue team and see how you can apply with influencers that out there to help him move a deal forward as always i want you to thrive i want you to succeed i want you to be able to close more deals most importantly i want you to raise a level of thinking and go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales of evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly network pod sales podcast network
27 Minutes listen 9/22/25
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I’m so excited about this episode. I have a good friend and co-host of our new podcast joining me. We’re here to introduce Sales 101: The B2B Classroom.It’s a podcast for sales professors on how you can help guide the next generation of sellers in our industry. Students and those already in the indu... I’m so excited about this episode. I have a good friend and co-host of our new podcast joining me. We’re here to introduce Sales 101: The B2B Classroom.It’s a podcast for sales professors on how you can help guide the next generation of sellers in our industry. Students and those already in the industry can still listen in — we share plenty of tips that can help you as well.Growth of College Sales Programs· BJ and I have taught sales at Brigham Young University for years. We’re starting to notice the growth of college sales programs compared to 20 years ago. BJ shares that there’s been a 50% increase in sales programs.· What’s so great about this is that students are able to gain sales skills before entering the field. It’s also an untapped recruiting source for modern B2B organizations.Hands-On Training in Academia· College sales programs allow students to gain real-life skills using frameworks like Challenger, SPIN,and MEDDIC, as well as industry tools (Salesforce, HubSpot).· They get time to role-play, use simulations, and gain practical hands-on experience.· For example, I shared a story about how students at BYU won sponsorship deals for their local theater.Integration of AI in Sales Education· I play a clip from Professor Barry on how he’s using AI tools to enhance role play, research, and call analysis while teaching his students.· This shows how college sales programs can help students learn to use AI-powered techniques for outreach, efficiency, and analytics.Why Listen to Sales 101: The B2B Classroom· Besides hearing our handsome voices, you’ll learn directly from sales college professionals and industry leaders about what’s working and what’s not. You’ll also hear firsthand from students about their real experiences in the field.· This podcast bridges thegap between academic sales programs and real-world B2B selling. · We spotlight the latest trends in sales education, share best practices from top university programs, and reveal how savvy companies are tapping into this talent pool to build their sales teams of the future.“We have one goal and that is to get our students jobs. We understand in order to get our students jobs, that theory doesn’t cut it alone.” - Dr. BJ Allen."They're not only getting the book smart. They're getting learning from industry leaders, from guest lecturers, and they're getting practice." - Donald Kelly. ResourcesSales 101: The B2B Classroom PodcastSponsorship Offers1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.3. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator with the advent analytical ai and generated ai ava i i mean it it's changing universities world you know across the board it's certainly changing the work we're doing in business school but because like business school such a like a practical human centered education i would say like it hasn't really disrupted us as much because we're not having students write papers like jenny a can't sell something for you but what's been really cool is is just to integrate that stuff to really just say i would say efficiently operationalize some of the things that you can't do so in that berry clip ray talking about how using ai to aid in your research and then you think about how you're going to personalize that research for your prospects hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist podcast i'm a host donald c kelly the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today and on this episode it's a different type of episode because i have one of my good buddies and my c host for our new podcast you probably heard me talk a little bit about it's sales one zero one the b sales classroom and we have doctor bj allen in the his doctor bj allen welcome to the show donald what an honor to be on the sales evangelist podcast the most famous sales podcast out there in the world that i've been telling people about forever and now here had to be on it finally i didn't tell him to say that it was just you know it's just a truth i'm a begging in donald the have thinking he's been lame visa you're not good enough but now accidentally now i finally arrived he's he's arrived no listen if this is your first time listen to this podcast and you agree with everything that bj j says please so subscribe and tell someone else about the show and the show is designed two things one to be able to help sales professionals build pipeline and two to help them be able to accelerate deals with our pipeline and now sales leaders and sales reps who are listening to the show we have a unique thing bj and i have this other podcast that we are launching and i think you should check it out sales one zero one we have a link down in show notes but it's all around the next generation of sellers i've done adjunct professor at b university bj oversees the sales program at bringing me on university and he's developed done a lot of sales competitions and work with hundreds couple thousand and thousands of students i'm gonna say that maybe the numbers aren't right but you know it's a pod gonna but it's like myself feeling actually trillions alright we're gonna get callback on that one though but the point though is he's he's helped so many salespeople people and one of the things that we saw cast is that there's a lot that we can still do to help prepare sales professionals for you as your recruiting sellers or so it can be more effective and as i'm teaching sales teams i'm seeing things that college students if they're coming into the game should be prepared with so be and this podcast we interview college professors and industry experts to help college professors who are teaching the next generation of sellers and we are learning some amazing things that they're doing in preparing a next generation so we wanna take a few minutes in this episode and to tell you about some of the things that we are gathering from some of the guests that we've interviewed and some of the interesting things some of the best colleges and the country are doing that are developing sales program the first one vi i did not know so many universities are taking advantage of professional selling or incorporating it talk to me about that about your experience being in the industry but in in education space but also what are some of the things that surprised you when it comes to when you first started go into competition and just discovering how these programs are designed so what's is so interesting about this world donald is that you know twenty years ago like the sales didn't really exist at universities outside of a handful of schools and i did a presentation a couple years ago at like a a university teaching conference and i talked about the kind of just the explosion of sales programs and when you look at all the sales programs in the united states about fifty percent of those started within the last like twenty years wow faith you out just think about that explosion like it's just crazy and so a lot of sales executives are just starting to kinda learn about it and this happens all the time here in utah where i'm at with brie university is we'll get you know call or an email from a major sales organization here and they'll say hey i didn't know that that by you had one and and i don't blame in for not knowing because very new but this type of thing happens all the time and so if you're a listener you're a sales executive you're a sales leader you probably have like an amazing pipeline in your backyard that you probably don't know about yeah because the is brand new and what also makes these sales programs so unique is it's not just they're an awesome on pipeline for talent but that they're teaching sales skills at a rigorous university level so you are getting students or recently graduated students who come in knowing the sales process they know how to process spec they know discovery calls they're trained and challenger and spin and medic and they know how to use crm software hubspot salesforce like they're so well equipped now of course they don't have like the degree of the hard knocks that come from the streets but a lot of them do have internships and themselves and like they're just they're right and they're ready for you to train them and going to all these sales competitions you know mean donald we have a couple sales tells textbooks that are used in over a hundred universities like we live in this world every day and if there's one thing i'm learning it's that universities are doing a fabulous job of training sell students to just hit the ground running when they get their first job after graduation truth lies and work is brought to you by the podcast podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in impart wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and be a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to state so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing you know the cool thing i like about this too bj from a lot of the professors that we've interviewed it's they're giving them a lot of real world experiences there is a one that we we did a prep call with and she he talked about how think it was him as a guy but he talked about knows of this was lady she talked about how her students worked with a local theater company and this theater company was looking for the they're looking for more like the graduate program students and she said i don't have the graduate program but we have a sales department that we just started for our undergrad and they she took them and he's like okay well let's seven and do some research so they did research and it came back with listen theater company you're trying to generate revenue you should do sponsorship and then they pitched this company on them doing the cold outreach and booking like sponsorship and they literally did it and then they helped it wasn't like crazy money but you have a small semester like with fourteen weeks but they helped them to gain a thousand dollars in sponsorship money but it was a more thousand more dollars than what they had but it validated to that organization that we can do this and they already had a right picking of salespeople people that know how to do it alright and and that's why what i love about it is that if you're doing accounting they have to go for an internship to be able to do that to get accounting skills if you're doing marketing they have to go do some marketing project for a company to be able to do so these in these classes they're getting a real world experience which i think goes back to validate your point they're way more equipped and i would venture to say than any other salespeople people that they might pick up because they're not only getting the book smarts they're getting learning from industry leaders from guest lectures and they're getting practice am i off on that i think you're spot on donald i mean i i and i love that kinda trifecta that you pointed out they're getting the education but sometimes many times like sometime well i'll just say sometimes like university education gets a bad rap because i think you're just learning theory like you're just you know a marketing theory or you know the theory of how things work but like business schools in in universities wide like there are a lot more hands on practical than sometimes we think and we have one goal and that is to get our students jobs understand than nor to get our students jobs that theory doesn't cut it alone and so we wanna teach them how to think we wanna give them theory but every class period is about hands on learning yeah role plays every day we have a simulation that students use they do discovery calls they do phone prospecting and when i talk to sales executives and i tell them these things are like wait what your students learn how to do email prospecting like they learn like nitty gritty stuff i say yeah like we we teach them how to do linkedin prospecting what to say how to connect how to do research status questions we give them phone scripts they practice phone scripts they practice some video emails i mean like this isn't just oh like let's learn you know spin selling techniques this is hey like let's learn how to do the things you're going to do on your very first day of the job and it makes a huge difference and and it's so fun to have students come back and say like your class was interesting and it was applicable but i didn't really appreciate it intel i got my first job yeah and you know the other people in my cohort were like i don't really know what to say you know i don't know how to personalize this phone script the company gave me and everyone's like yeah i went to my notes from your class and like then i had a script that was awesome and so there's a just a ton of value in that i think kind of what you're alluding to donald there's a clip i wanna play when it comes to role play one of the episodes that we did recently where one of the professor talked about how he incorporated role play and then also specifically ai with his students how do i convince them that they don't need it well i design assignments where i load ai with data or i allow obviously ai to do its thing and go grab data to answer questions of students in a bot to student role play the students to seller the chat is the bot and they're the buyer and the student must ask the appropriate questions of the bot to get enough data to put together a presentation i take half my students and that's their scenario i then have a placebo i have a another set of students they get to use both a human interaction and a bot and then the third set of students work with a designated buyer either me or a few of my guests who come to class and the students set up appointments and they spend fifteen minutes with a buyer and they learn all that they can from the buyer by asking questions if the student doesn't ask the specifically proper question of the bot they don't get that right information to put together the optimal proposal in group three where it's just a human being they get more information because the human being actually works as a partner with them and actually can tend to lend information that is not even at because the trust is built there and they feel a sense of partnership and collaboration with the seller now the third group gets both the bot and the human being they actually have the optimal proposals and i can prove to them who worked with the bot who worked with the student and then who had both and we rank the grades of the proposals and the combination generally always win so i do that once then i let him switch then the scenario two which is a different cell scenario they play a different role and then i do it a third time and in each and every case the student they got the combination does better than when they were solo with the bot or solo with the human and so i convince them that if you use chat as a tool you'll be best i also to show them that working with the human being typically a second best and then the bot while sometimes it gonna be a win it comes in third place so i have to be careful though that that's the result i have to be careful also not to pre engineer the results or the students will think i'm manipulating bj what i love about the concept of barry going on he's definitely a role play guy but also the ai concept because that's one that brings up over and over and over again is how we can utilize ai and i think that's a good transition so he's role playing with the students but he's also incorporating ai what are some of the things that you are seeing in the college space when it comes to ai and to help salespeople people yeah so i mean you know with the advent analytical ai and generate ai ava i mean it it's changing universities world you know across the board you know it's certainly changing the work we're doing in business school but because like business school is such a like a practical human centered education i would say like it hasn't really disrupted us as much because we're not having students write papers like gen a can't sell something for you but what's been really cool is is just to integrate that stuff to really just i i would say efficiently operationalize some of the things that you can't do so in that berry clip ray talking about how using ai to aid in your research and then you think about how you're going to personalize that research for your prospects so like in air our sales class that's what we do so first i have them research somebody and i think okay how can you personalize your outreach based on the the research you did and then i showed them some kind of chat gp prompts that they've could use to get very similar information but then now that they save time because chad did that now they really have a chance to even more personalize their outreach and think about the different value that they offer with their product and how they can use their reach research to encounter that so that's just kind of one example but then we could go into the even you know a lot more advanced stuff with how we teach students to use ai to increase their efficiency during the call right some of gong really cool ai features that help salespeople people analyze their discovery calls i mean there's a lot of really cool stuff these students are using and these companies these sales executives they love it because the students come in they know so much about technology and they're helping some of the old school sellers to learn how to use ai to become more efficient are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin hills now listen up linkedin sales navigator is a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash t s e is linkedin dot com slash t s e for sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e and let's get started speaking about gong one of your students in your class austin i think it was austin knows was joseph joseph yeah joseph he told me in our couldn't you know con converse with him in preparation for one of the episodes for sales one zero one he said that the way that he he loved the class learned a lot but a thing that took him to the next level was one you guys had a sales society that he had to take part in or he took part in after school which got him connected to a local entrepreneur and he was able a startup up and then he was able to work get a job instantly because of his sales experience and then two the fact that he was taking the principles from that and also the online things you taught him in class and he was able to land a job with gong and i was like this is dope he was probably so much further ahead than the average b sdr or bd r gong because of all the knowledge that he had so kudos man the stuff that you're sharing the clubs that you guys have it works and i think that's another place where people missed the ball especially executives at major companies i mean bj told you it's like it's like a right for the picking bj wrap up here i want you to talk about if you can drop some of the names of the sponsors that you have for your sales program at b young and how they are getting right talent from you guys you hinted on a little bit early but i want you to give us a little bit more in depth on that and how this could be a lucrative opportunity from any other recruiters and sales leaders looking for top talent yeah so we know we have companies who said that they would never recruit at the college level right they would say oh we need you know even our entry levels they need three to five years experience and such and such and then and then i'm like just come right just come meet our students just come interact them see them in the sales competitions and it'll change your mind and that's exactly what happens right so we have what we call like at by we have our we what we call our core mentor companies other companies they're kinda our other universities they may be sponsors of their sales programs i mean but we're talking like big tech companies q bill aws microsoft pay calm we have give it adobe as well no not yet okay not yet adobe you're listening to this sponsor yeah we have medical cells alta medical specialists we have boston scientific which is like kind of the cadillac of thing these small companies you talk about bj beijing yeah you know and these are again these are you know some of these are companies that thought like nah like i'll never recruit the universe level it just doesn't make sense for because we have thousands of applicants for every opening like why would i need to come here and recruit and build organic relationships with students but then when they come here and they see they changed their minds because it's a win win for everyone so you know i would say like if you're a sales executive or you're at in hr you're in recruiting like it's a huge missed opportunity because as dawn talked about they have skills they've learned a lot of things they understand technology and ai but they don't come with a lot of pre conceived and like a lot of pre this is how things are supposed to be done they're very teachable they're very hardworking and they're just excited i mean there's nothing more no more energetic than a new caution who just graduated who's like bright eyed and bushy tail ready start their sales career right like things are like the prime people that you want at your company i absolutely love this listen we would love for you to check out the podcast that we're are launching as you know i love sales and we've been running ts and running sales organization here for a while we feel that this is a next territory that we wanna be able to help professors so that they can in turn produce top talent for you all so if you wanna check out that podcast it's sales one zero one to b b sales classroom you could find a link down below and it's going live on all the platforms where you can gain get podcasts bj give us a last little reason why i should come and listen to sales one zero one with us it answer's is really easy donald there donald is the leader in the cells knowledgeable everything so you should listen to him i'm also i'm not as good looking as donald my voice isn't is nice but i'm also there so that's a secondary reason to come and then a third reason because we have a lot of top professors top sales universities that are just spitting out knowledge all over the place on our podcasts the episodes are sure i think you'll find it really really interesting so you should check it out come on to sales one zero one we have a link down below we appreciate you and we'd love to have you come subscribe as always we want you to thrive we want you to succeed we want you to close more deals in accelerate deals to the pipeline a little bit faster but most importantly we want you to raise a level of thinking and go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of angela sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yeah pod sales podcast network
25 Minutes listen 9/19/25
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Planners, tablets, Google Calendar — you’d think with all these tools, you’d be able to stay on track with the tasks that bring in money. So why do silly distractions keep pulling your focus? Check out my strategy that will cut the noise and help you focus on what matters most.Every Monday Problem· ... Planners, tablets, Google Calendar — you’d think with all these tools, you’d be able to stay on track with the tasks that bring in money. So why do silly distractions keep pulling your focus? Check out my strategy that will cut the noise and help you focus on what matters most.Every Monday Problem· You wake up feeling unbothered—until you remember everything you need to get done.· Suddenly, the pressure builds on your shoulders, and your mind may even jump to the worst-case scenario: freezing in the moment and not getting anything done.How to Shut the Noise· As a sales professional and business owner, I know how overwhelming it feels once you start thinking about all the tasks on your plate.· The best way I’ve found to avoid getting stressed is to start with the most critical tasks first. Tackling the hardest items right away gets them out of the way and sets you up for the best results throughout the day. Remember Kevin O’Leary’s 80/20 quote!· In this episode, I share my personal strategy for choosing which critical tasks to focus on and how to prioritize them so you can stay in control of your day.“You can have time in your day to breathe. Take a walk in the park, go to the gym, and focus on your physical health. You can’t do the work if you aren’t healthy.” – Donald KellyResources· If you like more guidance with improving your sales skills, join my Sales Mastermind Class.· Thinking about starting a podcast yourself? Learn more about Blue Mango Studios. Sponsorship Offers1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.3. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast,
this episode is brought to you in part by the following ts sponsors cutting your sales cycling in half sounds pretty much impossible right but that is exactly what sandler training did would help hubspot they used breeze hubspot ai tool to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch and a result they're pretty incredible click through rates jumped twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled you heard me quadrupled and people spend three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow this episode is brought to you in part by blue mango studios imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source not only attracting your ideal customer but entertaining them and getting qualified leads to find out more go to blue mango studios dot com if you're struggling to close deals you need to try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial all on the house go to linkedin dot com slash t s e again linkedin dot com for sixty day free trial of linkedin sales navigator we got planners we got tablets we got phones we have so many things to keep us on track the challenge that we find though is that we're still not getting the stuff done and we still have the stress how do you make sure as a sales rep that you're focusing on the most critical thing and not the six thousand looming things i'm gonna give you an idea today and hopefully this can help you out check it out hey hey hey everyone welcome to another great episode of the sales of evangelist pod cast i'm your host donald c kelly the sales of evangelist and i'm so excited for another great episode i'm so excited to be here with you today on this episode i will tell you about a strategy and an idea that hopefully can help you free you up alleviate some of the stress that we all face and to help you to make a little bit more money to process if this is your first time listening to our podcast go ahead and subscribe because i wanna make sure we notify you every time we drop a new piece of content if you've been here you've been listening and you love it you think it's dope thank you i appreciate that it means a lot to me and today's episode is gonna be one of those ones that i've come with the experience of doing my on my own and i feel that it can help you in the process with whatever you're doing but here's the stress that i find as a sales rep like there are six million different tasks that you can do like today was monday morning right and i wake up and i get to you know get to the point where i start working before i've been started i start thinking about the different task and things that i have to do it and i'm like holy moly there are ton of things that i must get done today and if i don't get those things and then i start thinking when do i need to get them done by and i start getting freaked out about they probably won't hit that deadline and then what am i gonna do to be able to get the you know the clients or get with the right prospects or just there's just it just gets overwhelming and you can hear it in my voice how stressful that can be what i found to be the best thing that's helped me not only as an individual contributor but in my role as the executive and founder of this business and also our podcast production company is to put the most critical task down and let me explain mister wonderful kevin ole o'leary you've far heard about him on a shark tank he had quoted something that steve jobs does and that also mister my goodness elon musk does man i'm getting the brain fog there but here's the piece that that he talked about they focus on the basically those twenty percent of task that's gonna give the eighty percent of the results in their day the signal to noise ratio to be successful for steve jobs was eighty twenty eighty signal twenty noise he was right and the only other person that i've seen that has a higher ratio than that is elon musk he has no noise he does not deal with noise look what he's achieved and if you could go back in history you're gonna find out that the geniuses of their time were close to hundred percent signal truth lies and work is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals join husband and wife team allen lia elliott as they dispel myths in part wisdom and answer all your questions about finding keeping and motivating great people people who listen as podcast loves the unique blend of theory and practice which helps business owners and leaders simplify consumer psychology plus if you enjoy learning what makes people tick then this show is perfect for you i listened to the latest episode about small talk and being a sales guy this was one that i was kinda keen to listen to but it gives some great insights that i didn't think about when it comes to small talk in a sales process you should check it out yourself and see if you should continue your small talks or not i'm not gonna give you the answer listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast since twenty thirteen we launched this podcast the goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and i feel that we've successfully done so as a natural product listeners like you would reach out and ask could i coach them could i train their team could i come and speak in an sk o could i consult for them and that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to state so in twenty nineteen one of our clients saw what we did and ask could we do that for them we experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing i would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source but also educational and a lead generation if you're interested go to blue mango studios dot com again blue mango studios dot com and our team could show you exactly what we did it's amazing from your perspective as a sales rep though you have tons of things that you feel that you have to get done i wanna give you a way that you can most focus on the things that are absolutely the most critical what i do i take an old school piece of paper you can use your tablet you can use your phone i use my sales planner as well and i'll write down those critical tasks or all of those tasks and then what i do is i identify which ones i must do or which one others can do and what i mean by that maybe if you're a team leader or you're an individual contributor is it something that you have to do or something that marketing can do is this something that you have to do or something else that rev ops can take care of so identify who has to do those tasks now if you come to that you may be your list of twenty drop down to a list of eighteen let's just keep it there you have a a list of eighteen tasks now if those eighteen tasks which one of them are most needed most critical now like they have to get done now so there you have to do it and they must get done right now that mission critical well you identify those tasks and you will quickly realize is probably about five to six of them on that sheet of paper that must get done now the other ones can get pushed out now promise this would all make sense what you then look at is can you organize them in priority of you know which will again just different priorities there's five of them so which one do i need to focus on today and now your day isn't focus focused on doing thirty things or twenty things it's focused on doing the five most critical things the other ones you just put them out as far as when they need to get done because again these are tasks that you have to do but they don't necessarily need to be all done today can you put them for tomorrow so you identify maybe another four or five for tomorrow and then the next day and the next day this simple task simple thing helps tremendously the cherry on top is that you actually put those things on your calendar at a set specific time so let's say for instance one of mine i'll give you one for today we have to work on the launch for one of our clients for our podcast production company and our teams doing that but there's part that i have to do so i have it written down for a task for today but then specifically on the calendar i have that put in at a set time so that will go out at four o'clock pm eastern time then i have another one that's at four thirty those two tasks now are there your critical task and i can get them done what i found oftentimes is that when i don't do them like that when i don't set the specific time for those particular tasks they just loom because the accountability isn't in there they need to get done but they're just loom and it makes it even that much more stressful thinking that i am not doing as much i'm not getting things done and the other cool part about physically writing down i can cross it off and there's some kind of dopamine there's something about it when you can check off a task that you actually got it done but with these ones when you if the other piece is that the time frame about the timeline the the time required to do it if i set the limit and say i only have twenty minutes i only have thirty minutes and it's on to calendar for thirty minutes and i set the alarm it's fascinating how those things get done you wanna give yourself some breathing room so those five things i mean put them five back to back i may put a break in between here and there but they have scattered throughout the day and i have some time to take a little breather so i'm not truly know crazy stressed and then i can get the task done force myself in a time period cross it off and it just feels good that you wanna attack the next one the same thing applies when it comes to prospecting you might put some on your calendar to say i'm gonna do thirty or forty minutes right now you probably need to go to hour of prospecting so you put an hour of time right now and you do that hour take a little break then you have another hour that you do later on but you're specifically putting those times on your calendar you're making accountability behind it and then you're checking off and at the end of the day you can say off the six things i had on my calendar i got five of the sixteen done so i don't know what that exact number is but let's say that's like a ninety percent your regulations that's amazing you got ninety percent of your critical things done for today the one extra one let's see if we can move it to a top priority for tomorrow or move it somewhere else but now you don't have the stress of worrying about all these things everything is accounted for because all critical task this week are set out on your calendar at a specific time and the ones that you don't need to do is given it to somebody else with clear instructions on what needs to get done so you don't have to worry about that are you struggling to close deals b to b selling is tougher than ever before and that's why i will tell you about linkedin sales navigator listen up linkedin sales navigators a sales intelligent platform that helps sales professional effectively prospect and engage high valued customers drive higher revenue and increase sales performance sales navigator helps target the right buyers surface key signals such as job changes or which account you should prioritize and shows you hidden an ally so you can find those buyers that are most likely convert fueled by linkedin one billion members platform yes one billion sales navigator gives you the most up to date first party data enabling you to unlock conversations with the people that matter right now you can try linkedin sales navigator get a sixty day free trial at linkedin dot com slash ts s e that is linkedin dot com slash ts s e for a sixty day free trial try it for yourself linkedin dot com slash t s e and let's get started and then you can have time in your day breathe so you can take that walker on the office park or if you're home like you go out side to walk or whatnot put your time in there for the gym and so forth because if your physical health deteriorate you can't do the work that you're to be a top performing seller that's where your mind component comes in and your mental health and all of those well be and it comes into the picture i notice this may sound like you know it's it's elementary the problem though is that you and i both know it but how often do we do it and that's where i find that sellers will in no matter what the skill is maybe it's prospecting maybe it's emailing maybe it's the linkedin messages we know what to do but we don't do what we know we're supposed to do oftentimes that's where accountability comes in that's where the reminder comes in and so forth this is actually one of the easier parts being a part of the mastermind like with some entrepreneurs has been the biggest thing that's helped me to hit revenue with our company because i know i was accountable to that group a similar thing happened in our sales mastermind every semester we do the same tactics with salespeople we have them coming into mastermind we have them put a goal maybe again quarter million dollars in revenue in three months that they need to generate and build in net new business fine that's what their goal is how do we attack that we break it down into the micro goals of what they should be doing on a day to day basis to accomplish that and sometimes they put things that they don't need to do and sometimes they don't put all the things that you need to do but we want them to list everything out and you start putting them on the calendar and it's amazing what starts happening after a few weeks of doing this results come because your one clearly focus on what you need to do two you have them set three you have a time limit four you have accountability and that's what has been a a a huge component for me so this episode is a shorter one but i hope that you get the idea i don't wanna elon it too much than more than what is needed when you find yourself overwhelmed with six thousand million things to do apply this little simple calendar idea this tool and you'll see how it makes a big difference and if you are feeling stuck you feel like you're not getting the breakthrough you feel like you're i don't know you're spinning your wheels you can overwhelm every monday morning or every morning and you're not it just feels like you're you do a lot of stuff but you're never ever moving forward your prime candidate for a mastermind if you feel like you have your quota and you're doing over and over the task over and over it but you never seem to be hitting your quota you're a prime person for our mastermind if you feel like you don't know what you need to do to be able to get to your numbers you don't know what activities you should be doing you don't know how to overcome a certain objection you don't know how to utilize linkedin effectively and do some prospecting you wanna pick in the brain of some of the other sellers that are doing at top sellers you need to check out our my mastermind you can find the details by going to the sales evangelist dot com slash mastermind would love to have you join us listen i want you to thrive i want you to succeed i want you to raise a level of thinking but most importantly i want you to go out and do big things see you on the next one the sales evangelist podcast is created by the sales of evangelist sales training organization it is produced by ts studios our podcast production manager is nancy paul our audio engineer is j ob our video engineer is das ko guest management is done by jill vid and christy vi our a content writer is carl lisa gal our graphic designers y sa and i'm your host and executive producer donald c kelly yeah pod sales podcast network
16 Minutes listen 9/15/25

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