Sales Talk for CEOs

From mastering conversations to commanding the stage, dive into the mind of communication expert Nancy Duarte.

Alice and Nancy’s conversation reveals that, in an era of fleeting attention, CEOs must craft compelling narratives.

For these leaders, understanding their audience isn't just a tip - it's a mandate. Nancy stresses the significance of empathy and preparation, urging CEOs to don the shoes of their audience.

Gone are the days of static presentations. The modern CEO story unfolds with dynamic gestures, vocal versatility, and perfectly-timed pauses, all backed by Vanessa Van Edwards’ groundbreaking research on TED Talks.

But, how do CEOs craft this captivating narrative? It starts with the big idea, gauges the audience's current state, and projects a vivid future. Visual aids. Essential. Practice. Non-negotiable.

As businesses evolve, CEOs mustn’t just communicate; they should inspire. Embracing storytelling, these corporate narrators don't just lead businesses, they sculpt industries.

Join Alice and Nancy as they decode the art of impactful communication and envision a future where CEOs aren’t just heard but remembered. Tune in to the Sales Talk for CEOs podcast and let your leadership voice be the difference!

Chapters

01:19 Need for CEOs to improve their communication and presentation skills

02:50 Importance of empathy in effective communication

04:41 Three key factors to consider: story, visualization, and delivery

10:42 Ongoing conversations for long-term success and reinvention

13:28 Staying updated on news and developments related to the audience

15:49 Using a triangle framework to outline the big idea and desired transformation

19:41 Recognizing qualitative signs of audience engagement and understanding

23:12 Challenges of gauging audience engagement in virtual presentations.

29:14 Considering alternative presentation formats, such as interviews.

31:08 The importance of practicing and getting comfortable with the material.

35:07 Have experts prepared to answer questions you can't.

40:48 Gestures, pausing, and purposeful movement enhance delivery.

44:55 Research on how to end a talk effectively

47:08 CEOs as thought leaders and gaining an unfair advantage

About Guest

Nancy Duarte: A Luminary in Communication and Storytelling

Nancy Duarte, the CEO of Duarte, is renowned for her expertise in the realm of communication and storytelling. With a career spanning decades, Nancy has firmly established herself as an American writer, speaker, and business leader Nancy Duarte - Wikipedia. Her profound knowledge is encapsulated in her books, one of which is titled "Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations" Slide:ology® |.

Beyond her literary contributions, Nancy is recognized as a communication expert who has offered her expertise to help brands articulate their stories compellingly Nancy Duarte Built A 30 Year Career In Silicon Valley On The Art Of Storytelling (forbes.com). Her achievements and insights have caught the attention of renowned publications such as Fortune, Time Magazine, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few Nancy Duarte — Faith Driven Entrepreneur.

Throughout her professional journey, Nancy has encountered various adversities, which she has transformed into learning experiences, further enriching her expertise and perspective Interview | Nancy Duarte, CEO | The Industry Leaders

In essence

Anthony Iannarino has some bad news for sales leaders who are depending on 20 year old sales models. They just don’t work anymore.

“Tell me about your problems and let me tell you about my solution” won’t even get you a second meeting.”

Alvin Toffler, who wrote The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. The hard part is unlearning.

Sales teams must be retrained to create value not sell benefits. Anthony calls this becoming a One Up. The core value creation is ‘'I know more about this decision than anything else.” Let me start a conversation with you about that.

Unlearning old sales habits is only the beginning. Anthony takes us through his three, non-negotiable, steps to hold salespeople accountable. Number one, a set amount of time per week prospecting. Number two, reporting on the actual conversations that are ongoing. As a sales leader, your job is to establish the criteria for what represents a quality conversation. And finally what is the next conversation that we should be having and our strategy to get there.

Listen to the entire episode to learn how to build your modern B2B sales strategy and team.

Highlights:

2:21 I'm not disrupting the industry. All I'm doing is documenting the strategies and tactics that work because the buyer has a different problem than they've ever had before. They're more confused, they're more uncertain. They have a difficult time getting consensus.

3:07 The most common problems that sales teams have: I don't have enough opportunities. Opportunities aren't moving fast enough through our pipeline for us to reach our goals. I don’t understand why salesperson A is doing well while salesperson B isn’t.

4:47 If you're training your team in a legacy approach where it's looks like solution selling and we start with let me tell you how great our company is and look at all these logos...

8:21 ...one client said to me, we did $10 million. Our goal next year is $12 million. And I said, that is probably the worst goal I've ever heard...

9:26 The part of the vision that I care about is what do you want your team to be?

10:03 The best salespeople create more value in a conversation than others.

10:52 There's a chapter in the book about alignment. It’s when the CEO has a vision that is tangible, proven, and clearly understood by customer success, marketing, and sales.

12:39 I would describe churn as the devil.

14:16 We can get the first meeting, but we can't convert it to a second meeting. What that means is you didn't create enough value.

14:54 Let me give you another lens, my lens is not filled with false assumptions. I'm showing you what reality looks like and what you need to do.

15:30 We transform your team to a modern approach that means they're going to be what I call One Up. And One Up means I know more than you and I have greater experience than you do about this decision, not about everything.

Helping them understand what's going on, what it means for them, and what they need to do. So that means you're going to have a different sales force on the other end that can create greater value.

17:13 So it's not about what you sell. It's about how you sell. And if you get the ‘how’ we sell right, then you have a better shot of reaching your full potential.

18:29 Alvin Toffler, in The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. So that's where we are right now. So the hard part is the unlearning.

19:09 the most important thing for you to work on is increasing the effectiveness of your salesperson in the conversation with their client.

20:39 That's where growth comes from. It's the conversations that we're having.

23:34 I have two chapters on accountability...It's a very, very different kind of accountability. And

Jake Dunlap takes us from founding Skaled Consulting to his first successful sales hire. And yes, it did take 10 years to get it right.

It’s great to be a founder led sales company but founder led services delivery is a problem. This was the first major hurdle that Jake encountered in his fledgling sales consulting business and a barrier to scaling.

It took years to structure a scalable services delivery model. The first big lesson, young, affordable, full-time staff didn’t have the requisite skills to replace Jake and properly service the accounts. It turns out, contract, part time senior team members could deliver.

As he grew globally, it was time to expand the sales team. His next big challenge was finding salespeople who could sell even 80% as well as he could. His hires kept failing until he realized it was because the sales process was in his head and needed to be on paper.

His second big a ha moment was realizing that selling a product is different from selling a service. Jake only recently cracked this problem and hired an experienced services salesperson.

The biggest takeaway that every B2B company needs to understand, customers want everything on their terms and this includes learning about your product. Sales teams can no longer be gatekeepers of the buyer's journey.

Highlights:

1:57 We are a revenue strategy, operations and enablement company and really what that means, we've got 40 plus people globally and what we do is we help organizations optimize the sales process.

3:13 If you've got a marketing organization that's compensated on one thing and a sales organization that's compensated and there's no overlap, you're not going to have marketing and sales alignment.

6:27 When I started my business, I started cold outreach from Crunchbase. I found people that just raised a seed series A, series B and started reaching out cold to CEOs. Hey, you know, chances are you're probably thinking about these challenges. I've faced them multiple times. Let me know if you need help. And sure enough, within the first 45 days, I had a few customers. I’ve just been figuring it out since then.

9:59 I thought everybody had to be full time because if they were contractors, they wouldn't care. And boy, was I wrong.

11:57 Over the years we hired a few different sales people and it never worked out. Obviously as a CEO, everything's my fault. I didn't really know the DNA of the person that I needed. Selling a service is much different than selling a product.

15:05 I can count on two hands how many founders I've seen that didn't have to figure out the Go-To-Market themselves before hiring the first salespeople.

17:18 It's your job to fix these problems no matter what department. You can't outsource fixing your problems.

20:36 And so another mistake that I made when I was scaling early is I kept hiring junior people and putting them in roles that they were not set up to be successful in.

22:03 Get it right and then get it off your plate.

23:27 Some of our first big deals were through partnerships where the other partner didn’t provide the services that we did.

26:21 Handing a job off to someone without the training or process is abdicating not delegating.

30:40 I didn't ever really define what made a good partner for us. I took probably hundreds of calls with people who were never going to be a fit.

35:46 ​​Revenue Operations is really a good synopsis of what we do. It's looking at the end-to-end customer journey and experience.

40:03 We live in a world of now on my terms. I want to consume information when I want to. The problem is B2B sales is in the Stone Age right now. We've created a process where the salesperson is a gatekeeper for information instead of giving it to consumers on their terms.

About Our Guest:

Jake Dunlap consistently designs repeatable, sustainabl

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only constant is change.” If you’ve been a CEO for any amount of time, you know how true this is. Your business will morph and change throughout the years, and it’s important that you, as CEO, embrace that. The way you run sales, the type of salespeople you need, and your role in the sales organization will shift as you reach higher levels of success. This podcast will give you deeper insight into the stages of business growth, so you understand where you are and where you are headed. 

My guest for this podcast is Orrin Broberg, CEO and co-founder of Modus, a sales enablement platform that helps salespeople be more successful by applying technology and working closer with marketing. Under Orrin’s leadership, the business has skyrocketed since it’s start in 2013. In our discussion, Orrin outlines the three stages of business growth that he has experienced in Modus, and shares tips that will help fellow CEOs in every stage of the game.

According to Orrin, the three stages of business growth are as follows:

Stage 1: You’re scrappy and entrepreneurial with a ‘let’s just get it done’ kind of attitude. As for sales, you do most of the work yourself.

Stage 2: ‘Let’s get some kind of management in here!’ becomes your mission. You start to grow your sales team and add people in layers into the organization. You may even start to get some investors.

Stage 3: The 3 p’s are in place: people, process, and product. Backed by a good board and investors, and with trusted sales, marketing and customer success managers in place, you are free to become a future-oriented, strategy-focused leader.

Having made it to Stage 3, Orrin takes a look back at the journey that got him there, sharing advice for each stage and the kind of things he wished he knew along the way. No matter which of the stages of business growth you are currently in, you are sure to gain new insight that will help you reach your next milestone.

Highlights

10:20 – Building relationships to land big customers

14:14 – The 3 stages of business growth

18:32 – Stage 1: The scrappy entrepreneur

23:43 – Stage 2: Learning to delegate

31:24 – Setting yourself up for success in Stage 3

35:52 – How to know you’ve made it to Stage 3

38:22 – What’s coming in the future

Quote

“What a well-functioning team on the inside does is it allows leadership to look outside to see where we’re going and the vision.”

Connect with Orrin Broberg in the links below:

Website: https://www.gomodus.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obroberg/

You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below:

Website: https://AliceHeiman.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/

How do you wind up being a business broker after a luxurious career in the high-end wine business?

Funny story.

After working in the corporate world around 2008 and 2009 Jessica Fialkovich and her husband saw her friend who had a luxurious wine business brokering really high-end wines around the world. They thought how fun it would be to taste wine and travel for a living so with the help of their friend started their own wine business.

Three years later, it turns out that tasting wine all day was exhausting and they decided to return to something more corporate.

They hired a business broker to help them sell the wine business and as they say, the rest is history.

Jessica and her husband now own Transworld Business Advisors, a thriving company offering M&A services and Exit Factor, helping small and midsize businesses to increase their valuation for an eventual sale.

They’ve grown tremendously over the 10 years and how did they do it? At first, networking, door-knocking, and becoming a valued resource in her local business community. More recently she’s authored a very useful book called, Getting the Most for Selling Your Business and she and her husband have acquired several businesses.

Jessica shares her secrets to making acquisitions. Successful acquisitions require patience, relationship-building, and a knack for spotting opportunities. As Transworld Business Advisors continues to grow, their commitment to community service and client relationships ensures a promising future.

Join us in exploring Jessica's remarkable journey and uncover the secrets to thriving through strategic acquisitions!

Chapters

02:25 Jessica's transition from the wine business to business brokerage

04:08 Decision to join a franchise model for business brokerage

08:18 Challenges of hiring salespeople and the importance of cultural fit

12:00 Growth of sellers and team expansion in recent years

14:17 Researching and selecting new markets for expansion

18:51 Writing a book as a lead generator

23:07 Reasons for growing through acquisition: people, market share, services

23:56 Importance of timing and readiness for acquisition deals

25:25 Acquiring "fixer upper" businesses for strategic growth

28:02 Learning and adapting to the acquired organization's operations

31:33 Jessica's company culture and growth

About Guest

As a business exit expert and speaker, Jessica Fialkovich helps small businesses owners with under $10 million in revenue who desire to build a legacy.

She provides insights and guidance around the overwhelming world of buying and selling a business, giving peace of mind throughout the decision-making process.

Jessica Fialkovich offers 10 years of thought leadership within small business M&A and has personally bought and sold multiple companies.

Social Links

You can learn more about and connect with Jessica Fialkovich in the links below.

https://jessicafialkovich.com/

https://www.tworld.com/locations/colorado/

https://exitfactor.com/

Connect with Jessica on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicafialkovich/

You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.

Connect with Alice on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/

Check out Alice’s website:

https://AliceHeiman.com