Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Welcome to season four of the Innovation Junkies podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning, prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, and this is Jeff Amerine here with my partner Don Corleone.
Jeff Standridge:
Man, I’ll tell you what, Jeff Amerine, you’re going to have to carry some of the conversation today because apparently, I’ve been screaming too much.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, too many ballgames, huh?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, something. I don’t know what the deal is. Actually, I do know what happened. I have two grand babies that are in daycare, and I kept them last Friday, and I think they brought everything home from the daycare to me.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, the Petri dish followed ’em home. Yeah.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, let’s talk about sales today. You want to do that?
Jeff Amerine:
That’s awesome.
Jeff Standridge:
Great.
Jeff Amerine:
Let’s do it.
Jeff Standridge:
We’ve got Ian, I sound like a squeaky teenager. We’ve got Ian Selbie with us today. He’s a coach, he’s a sales mentor, a sales trainer. He’s a podcaster himself. I had the privilege of being on his podcast not too long ago. Ian, tell us about yourself.
Ian Selbie:
Thanks, Jeff, and a pleasure, both Jeffs, for having me on your podcast, the Innovation Junkies. It’s awesome. I recall having a great conversation with you a couple of weeks back, Jeff, and your episode’s dropping real soon. Yeah, I’ve been in sales my whole life. I truly have 84 to 94. I was with Apple, had a great run with Apple in 1990. Some of our listeners may not have been born yet, but that’s all right. In 1990, I was their top salesperson in the world, had the privilege of meeting Steve Jobs, had my picture taken with him, and in 1994, after a 10-year run, I decided instead of renting my resume to the highest bidder, I wanted to start my own business. And my passion is helping people in companies reach their potential. So I started a business doing that. And Jeff, I got to tell you, 29 years later, I know it sounds a very long time.
I still love what I do. I’ve trained over 17,000 people in eight countries around the world, written six books and like yourself, podcasts. I started podcasting as a hobby when covid hit because my pipeline evaporated Like many of ours, there was no travel, nothing going on, so I needed a hobby. So I thought, why don’t I try this podcast thing? Sounds like fun. So I don’t know, the first 10, 12 episodes were just me talking about some of the content in my books and my methodology and process, and then I started thinking these poor guests must be getting so sick of my voice by now, I better start having some guests on the show. Great guests like you, Jeff. So that’s just a little bit about my background and what brought you and I together.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. Very good. Why don’t you start by just telling us one of the two or three big ideas that you share with your listeners and with your clients about sales?
Ian Selbie:
Well, sales, I’ve got two two-day program that I explain, but I can net it down to a few statements. It is the what, maybe not the how to, but the what. So I think there’s four really important things. Any sales professional in a B2B selling environment needs to do. Number one, they need to be confident. They absolutely need to be confident and not arrogant, not overconfident, but confident. So manage confidence. Number two, they’ve got to be organized. And some salespeople are more attuned to this than others, but we need to be organized in a degree that we’ve got some systems to keep us on track so that we bring some kind of method to our madness. It’s got some kind of, if you didn’t know you were playing football and someone said, here’s a ball, you might run in the wrong direction. So having a process is really important.
Number three, you’ve got to be persistent because selling can be hard if you get a lot of no’s before you get your next Yes. So you’ve got to have that tenacity, that fire in the belly to keep you going that you should prod yourself with and not need your manager to be whipping you daily. Right. So persistence. And then the fourth thing I would say is follow through and follow up. It is one thing to, if a customer, you make a commitment to a client or prospect, and if you fail to meet the deadline on that small commitment, what does it say to the client or the prospect? Can’t trust ’em with the small stuff, never trust ’em with the big stuff. So yeah, I think confidence, organized, persistent and follow up, follow through are really important. I’d say another framework, there would be four things call high.
So call on decision makers first instead of show up and throw up and try and sell something. Second item on that list would be find the pain, find the business pain, and then thirdly, bring your gain. Try and solve some of the problems with your solutions, with your products or your services. You’re not going to be able to solve all the pain with that, but you could extend greater value with other kinds of elements to solve their business pain. It could be advice, introduction to someone else. And the fourth thing is do it again and again to come back to the follow up. Follow through. It takes $700 a time, money, and effort to get a new customer. It only takes $100 a time, money, and effort to get repeat business from an existing customer. So when you got ’em, never lose ’em. Treat ’em like loyalty, treat ’em like gold.
Jeff Amerine:
Let me ask a follow up with some of that, Ian, if I could. Those are two fantastic frameworks. Sometimes when we’re working with entrepreneurial organizations, they might have a highly complex solution that might require a consultative sale. Talk about the differences between selling well-understood products or services and complex solution selling where a consultative approach might be required.
Ian Selbie:
It’s so important. I mean, the idea of call high, find pain, bring gain due to gain, which is almost like a wrap is really applied to complex selling. It’s enterprise selling. That’s the framework. If you don’t understand their business pain, you’re just throwing product at the wall, even if it’s expensive product at the wall. So you need to solve the problem. It’s got to fit together. So there’s a lot of companies, they teach their salespeople, product knowledge, pk, and I say pk, fine, that’s your ante. That’s not going to win you a deal. That may keep you at the table, but it’s the ck, the customer knowledge that wins you, the customer and keeps you the customer. So in a complex selling environment, there’s typically three to five decision makers. It’s not one and done. And so they’re all going to see the world a little differently. I know they’re trying to buy the same service, the same product, but they’re trying to get different values from it. It’s a bit like a Rubik’s cube. You got to make sure the red gets the red, the blue gets the blue and the et cetera. So the company has business pain, but all of them have their own individual pain tied to the solution as well. So again, comes back to a deep understanding of the customer’s business pain on what the decision makers want as a result of your solution.
Jeff Amerine:
Really good.
Jeff Standridge:
So where do you think, or in your experience, where do most salespeople tend to get off track in selling into these enterprise clients?
Ian Selbie:
It is fun. I’ve written a thought leadership paper on this called, and I’m happy to give it to any of your listeners if they want it as a gift for listening to your podcast, Jeff. It’s called The seven Deadly Sins in Selling. So the seven biggest mistakes that salespeople make, and if you could stop doing those, you’ll already be better. So stop doing things and start doing things. If you’re going to stop doing these seven, you’re going to be miles ahead. Number one, it’s failure to call on the decision maker first calling too low. So calling on influencers who actually don’t have the autonomy to say yes, all they can say is no. Not ignoring them, but anchoring yourself at the decision making level, and then you’re okay to come back and talk to anyone else. Got that connection up to the decision making oftentimes called the C-suite. Number two is not understanding the business pain. It’s just going in with your product. I call it show up, throw up and hope somebody buys something. So that’s pushing. It’s not pulling. So consultative selling is about getting on the other side of the desk, looking and investigating almost like a business doctor, what is the business issues? What are they you diagnosed before you prescribe? So let’s find out what’s really going on in the organization.
Jeff Standridge:
One. Yeah, I know you’re familiar with Brian Tracy, the huge sales guy. He used to say every salesperson should see themselves as a doctor of problem-solving.
Ian Selbie:
That’s it. I totally agree with Brian. Absolutely. I totally agree with him and many of his books for sure. I mean, I won’t go through all seven because it’s long, but another one that’s interesting is thinking that the CRM will save you that, oh, we invested a whole bunch of money, time, and effort standing up A CRM and the salespeople hate it. It’s like micromanagement. It’s like boiling the ocean in software. So no, it’s about having the right process and then adapting tools that will support the process and help make it consistent. That’s a common mistake.
Jeff Standridge:
I’m glad you brought up CRM. So lemme just throw this out here, and you tell me whether or not it’s your experience as well. And I’m going to switch and say Salesforce automation, right? CRM tools versus Salesforce automation, and we call it Salesforce automation. And we tell our salespeople that it’s to make their lives easier, but it’s not designed to make the life of the salesperson easier. It’s designed to give critical metrics to the sales leadership so they can track the activity of the salesperson.
Ian Selbie:
Absolutely correct. And so I would say CRM can also stand for something else other than customer relationship management. It can also stand for cash runaway monster because you can spend so much money on a CRM and what do you do? You turn your salespeople into data slaves. They’re tied to the keyboard typing instead of in front customers where you want them, where the action actually is helping create revenue, build relationships for your company long term. And so somewhere along the way, we made a bad turn with CRMs. I believe in sales automation like you, Jeff, there’s lots of different tools out there that can help a salesperson. LinkedIn’s a great one as an example, having a good slide presentation that talks about the value and how you solve other client’s business pain. That’s a great sales tool. But if you want me to be glued to my desk typing in every breath I take with a prospect or a customer, don’t give me a big quote of that because you’re just making the table unfair. We have to keep notes, we have to keep track of things, activity pipelines results for sure. But that should take minutes a day and not hours a day
Jeff Standridge:
For sure.
Jeff Amerine:
It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon. That’s a good analog. If you talk to any doctors, they’ll say, yeah, we went through this whole meaningful use electronic medical records, supposed to make everything great and it’s been the bane of their existence. It’s actually taken time away that would otherwise be patient-facing. It’s kind of the same thing in the sales arena. How much is enough, I think is the big question.
Ian Selbie:
You’re still right, Jeff. You’re bang on. And if a doctor’s doing paperwork or filling in call reports on every visit, every client patient they had, what are they not doing? They’re not billing new clients. The same in sales, the very same in sales.
Jeff Standridge:
So how do you coach salespeople and sales leaders to do the right job of being organized, but to not fall into the trap of creating busy work?
Ian Selbie:
Well, there’s three metrics, and if you don’t measure it, you’ll never manage it from a leadership perspective. That’s an old, but it’s a very true and relevant concept. So I look at three things when I’m in organizations, training them, coaching them, helping them grow their business. Three things I look at, number one is activity. So that’s the first thing. You don’t build a pipeline without activity. So one of the things I do, I just did one this morning as a matter of fact, something called Pipeline Wednesday. So what is that? Every second Wednesday for three hours, I get the whole sales team to do an outreach campaign and book meetings with new prospects. They book a meeting, they send me a little text, I put it on the scoreboard, send it back to them. Do you think salespeople are a little bit competitive?
Jeff Standridge:
Much so. Very much so.
Ian Selbie:
The salespeople see the scorecard, the scoreboard, and go, I’m losing. Oh, I got to catch that guy. I got to catch that gal. And so it gamifies prospecting. So this morning, as a matter of fact, we put I think 27 new prospects into the pipeline, and one gentleman by the name of Chris, I’m not sure if Chris will be listening to this, but well done. Chris, you won this morning and you’ve got nine meetings on your own.
Yeah, I mean that gamifies prospecting, which is activity. Now I’m not saying that’s the only time they prospect, but that builds teen muscle, right? So no one wants to lose. Everyone wants to win, and everyone gets ready for pipeline Wednesday. So we gamify prospecting by doing that. So that’s one thing that certainly helps on the activity side, the pipeline, everything in the world of selling lives in the pipeline. I’ve got an investment in a software company called Sales Look that tracks pipeline, not CRM, it’s pipeline Management. You enter a deal in seven seconds, you move it in one second, happy to drop a link for a video demo on that if you’re interested. But pipeline reviews and follow up coaching. If I’m a manager sales leader, I want to be doing at least monthly reviews with all of my sales reps. one-on-one, examining their pipeline and what has changed, added and moved. And because pipelines don’t lie and they have shape. I’ve been coaching pipelines for over 20 years, Jeff, I can just look at a glance of pipeline and it’ll tell me what’s going on or maybe what’s not going on, and I can provide the relevant coaching to it. The third thing is activity, or sorry, revenue so if someone’s behind on their target, how do we fix that? It goes back to activity. You got to double down on the activity to rebuild the pipeline to make it up. It is all chained and linked together
Jeff Standridge:
For sure.
Jeff Amerine:
I guess revenue is realize revenue, actual bookings, close contracts are the outcomes you’re looking for. One of the things that we’ve found before in lots of different uses of pipeline visibility for that matter, project management, is things can be very binary. Sometimes people will move stuff through a process and it’s like, oh, it’s 25% chance of closing, 50%, 75%. It might sit at a 90% chance of closing forever. In which case it really wasn’t that far in the process. What advice do you have about how to think about the difference between where something is in the pipeline and how to account for it?
Ian Selbie:
Absolutely. It’s about having business rules on the stages. Happy to share mine with you, but let’s go back to the numbers. I know companies that do this, forecasting 10%, 30%, 60, 90. Let me ask the listeners, have you ever won 60% of the deal? No. No. You win or lose. And the one that wins is the better at qualifying. So the stages in my pipeline start with interested. So what does that mean? The definition of interested that the client’s interested, and by virtue of them giving you time to sit down and talk to you to examine their needs, their business pain, what you might be able to do to help ’em. So it’s that first date in the sales process. You move the deal to the next stage called discovered. So that’s when the salesperson has gained enough information and understanding and believes there’s a real deal worthy of pursuit. So they’ve got the budget, they’ve got the need, they’re going to spend it somewhere. Why not on me? Then we move the deal to qualified and qualified is I’m not always accused of being way over the top when it comes to qualified, and I’d rather win by three touchdowns than a last second field goal. So there’s seven things that qualified means and my white paper that if you follow the link that Jeff’s going to post the seven, you’ll get a better understanding of what qualified means. A couple of ’em are you’ve met the decision makers, their business pain, you presented your proposal in person and you’re on the short list. There’s more to it, but that’s four of the seven.
Sometimes we go from qualified to closed, which is great. We get to celebrate. We won, not because we’re good at closing, because we’re thorough at qualifying, but sometimes there’s that other zone called select it, we’re going to go with you, Jeff, but yes, Jeff. But however, it could be the person making the final decision or the approver might not be there. They need to put their name on the contract or whatever that needs to be. That’s not to time to start calculating commission because now your competitor probably knows they’re losing but haven’t lost yet. So they’re going to do all they can to claw their way back into the game. So those are the definitions. So when I’m coaching someone on their pipeline and they say they’ve got, oh, they got this beautiful deal and qualified, well, I ask ’em seven questions and if we only get five answers, we move it back to discovered. Now you know what you’re missing. Go get that information. I’ve never lost a deal in my life. I had too much information. I’ve lost many because I didn’t have enough of the right information. And that’s what being really diligent at qualifyings about.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. So let’s talk about hiring salespeople. What do you look for when you’re interviewing someone and let’s set their resume aside. I’m talking nose to nose, toes to toes. When you’re interviewing somebody, what are the things that you’re looking for that give you confidence that you’re about to hire a good sales talent?
Ian Selbie:
That’s a great question. And oftentimes I’m brought in to a new engagement to conduct an assessment, a sales assessment. So I interview their management team, the leadership team, all their salespeople. I have something called a sales talent scorecard, which I develop in a collaborative fashion with each of my clients, which starts, basically it’s a spreadsheet. So what are the 10 criteria that make for a very successful salesperson with that company? Some of the things are cut and paste from client to client for sure, but each business has some of their own uniquenesses. So it could be product knowledge, it could be they have a book of clients within that industry. So that gets, and then we actually score the salespeople. Five’s excellent down to one is terrible, and then that gives us a read on the existing sales team. Quite often change happens after that process. Some people aren’t met to be in that company or in that role. And then we hire new ones and we make sure we increase the team scorecard average going forward. I look for, I don’t care if someone’s got an MBA, I think that’s great. That tells me they finished what they start. I look for experience. So tell me about a couple of customers that you’ve won and how you won them. That’s an interview question I love to ask.
I like to find out who their network is. How many contacts on LinkedIn do you have? How often do you post? Are you active? Do you have a following? So when you show up as a consultant of sales person, do people listen to you or do they just think you’re flogging them some product? So I am trying to inspect their approach, their history a little bit that way. Of course, everyone, I was a reference this morning for an ex salesperson of mine. It is great when someone gives you a resume and you’re getting closer to making them an offer. We’ve all been there. Can I check two or three of your references? Sure. Who are they going to give you? They’re going to send you the fan club, right? So you’re going to get all the, so that’s another good use of LinkedIn. Who do I know that knows them that he or she hasn’t given me?
I call that blind reference checking because that’s where you get more of the truth, right? Not the fan club, just, I’m not saying that’ll make my decision, but it might put it more into balance in terms of what I think of. So I use the sales talent scorecard often when I’m interviewing and it’s getting a read. So I ask, there’s a couple of real good questions. I’ve got some psychology questions that I love asking. One of them is, and this I learned long time ago, I said, do you have any children? Yes, yes, I do. I’ve got son, daughter, blah, blah. Okay, great. If you could give your children one skill, one quality to be good and successful at life, what would it be? So I hear a word, right, and I write it down, say interesting. So later in the Ner interview, I’ll ask them the question of if your prior employer could describe you in three words, what words would they use? So if the words the prior employer used to describe are a few of them, don’t mash with what they want to give their child because the psychology is the one quality we want to give our children is actually the one quality we’re most fond of in ourselves. That’s the psychology on that. So if they’re trying to tell me what I want to hear and actually later it doesn’t sync up and it’s a complete miss.
I got a red flag waving at that point.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, Ian, it’s been great talking with you. We’re going to make sure that we get the link after the show. We’ll get the link to your seven deadly sins in our show notes. But why don’t you tell our listeners where they can best connect with you?
Ian Selbie:
Thanks, Jeff, both Jeffs for having me on. It’s been my pleasure. Great chatting with two professionals and being on your amazing Innovation Junkies podcast. Thank you. I’ll send you the thought leadership paper for sure. A little PDF, I don’t know, 10, 15 pages, something like that. People can get ahold of me a couple of ways. My email is ian@ianselbie.com, so IAN at I-A-N-S-E-L-B-I-E.com. You can find my website@salesmentoru.com. So that’s sales Mentor, the letter U, all one word .com. Or you could hook up with me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I think there’s a few Ian Selbies on there. One’s an Australian painter, that’s not me, so I’m the other one. So, I accept all friend requests on LinkedIn, and I’m very active. Jeff, you and our episode of Confessions of a Sales Pro. We’ll be dropping on LinkedIn as well in a couple of weeks.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. And y’all can also check out Confessions of a Sales Pro. Got some great episodes on there, and we encourage you to do that. Jeff A, anything else?
Jeff Amerine:
No, Ian, thanks for coming on. It was a great conversation. All businesses rise and fall with their ability to do sales well, and we can’t learn too much about it. Really appreciate your time today.
Ian Selbie:
Thank you both, gentlemen. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you, listeners, for listening.
Jeff Standridge:
Thanks, Ian. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thanks for joining. See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.