Leading Growth: How to modernize your sales team

12/13/22 • 36 min

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

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.

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

Highlights:

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.

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.

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

Previous Episode

If your sales process is all in the CEOs head, you can’t scale!

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

Next Episode

Use this simple rule to win more deals

Years of trust can evaporate in a matter of moments if you forget this simple rule. Dmitri Leichik learned the hard way that customers are not buying your product, they are buying your commitment to their success. The moment they perceive a transactional motive, you’ve lost.

Utilizing a founder led sales model, Twistellar has grown globally and still relies on Dmitri’s long term relationship strategy that in many cases takes years to mature from conversation to trust to a project.

If you sell B2B, you have to assume that a potential customer already has a trusted supplier. They may say no to you on a Monday and yes on a Friday because something changed in that relationship.

Timing and luck are everything and that’s why you have to be tireless in maintaining relationships over long periods of time.

Highlights

3:24 You need to clearly understand how people interact, how people communicate, how your sales people actually work every day to make their customers happy. Only then can you automate the process.

5:14 A professional consultant must focus on the customer’s business processes, not the solution features. Sometimes our role is to convince the customer not to spend money on a solution because the business is not ready.

8:27 In sales, the first step needs to be defining “What difference can you bring to the table?”

9:49 To be successful, three factors need to come together at the same time: You need luck to be in the right place at the right time, you need to be very active to be in as many places as possible, you have to be working hard to make every customer successful.

11:49 I still do most of the selling myself since I am the best person to match business needs to technical solutions. I am a technical advisor and am never trying to sell a specific solution.

13:47 In B2B, a potential customer already has a supplier to solve their problems. You have to get to them at the exact moment where they have some reason to consider a new partner.

14:45 We work 12-14 hours a day so that we can always be available to give friendly advice. That’s how we ‘sell’.

18:48 To win business, you have to demonstrate that you bear the responsibility for the project’s success.

20:49 It can take years to build a relationship before the first project. On the other hand, one wrong action can spoil that relationship in one day.

23:01 You must consider all of the people in an organization who benefit from your work. They are part of your word of mouth referral network especially when they move to a new company.

26:50 The sales process ends when the work is done and the customer is happy.

28:10 Mistakes can be made and it's critically important to take responsibility for them. We recently underestimated a project by 400 hours and we accepted the loss.

About Our Guest

Dmitri Leichik is CEO and co-founder of Twistellar, #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark. Dmitri brings more than a 20-year background of being a co-owner and CEO of a group of trading and production companies, providing hands-on management experience.

For now, Dmitri is a business expert who's responsible for corporate strategy, finances, business development, customer relations, and general operational efficiency in Twistellar. He managed to gather a team of 100+ motivated professionals in just 5 years.

Dmitri is a master of business & service processes automation and optimization. He ensures that the customer is always the key figure at Twistellar.

Connect with Dmitri

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About Guest Company

Twistellar is a #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark, working with customers in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The company pro