Got A big part of building a franchise to be successful is you need to
really understand your customers and the type of customers that you're going to engage with.
You're listening to the Audible Ready podcast, the show that helps you and
your teams sell more Faster. Will feature sales leaders sharing their best insights on
how to create a sales engine that helps you fuel repeatable revenue growth. Presented
by the team at Force Management, a leader in B to B sales effectiveness.
Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast.
I'm Racial Club Miller, and today we're going to talk about filling your
pipeline, prospecting, getting the right mindset around driving your own pipeline, and
today joining me for this conversation is Force Management is Calledmore. Hi. Paul,
Hey, Rachel, how are you good? Good? Thank you for
joining me for this conversation. I brought Paul on for this chat because I
see his work every day and he is very good at driving pipeline and prospecting,
and he could share some great best practices that have worked for him and
other people that follow our force Management methodology over the years. So Paul,
let's get into it. I mentioned at the top about having the right mindset,
and you need the right mindset for prospecting. A lot of it comes
down to accountability, being accountable for driving your own number, and we use
a concept called the franchise mindset having that mindset. As a salesperson, I'd
love to start by just hearing what that mindset means to you in the role
that you do every day. Yeah, I'd love to, So thanks for
having me on. Enjoy these podcasters for the record. In regards to the
franchise model, when it comes to building a franchise, in most cases you're
given a patch, a location, et cetera to build it right. When
you join a franchise of a company, you don't necessarily get to pick where
it's going to be, but you get a general idea. And I think
in the world of sales, depending on what your role is that you're getting
hired for, you tend to give in a territory, maybe you're giving a
list of accounts, et cetera, and usually they're not the best. When
you join a company, a lot of the will say that tier one or
the top A level accounts tend to be with the top sellers, which makes
a lot of sense. So in order to get there, you need to
earn it. So a lot of times we talk about, you know,
one of the first things when building a franchise is to have a plan,
right. John Kaplan would always say, have a plan to make a plan,
and so part of building a business plan is to target the right buyers,
right, who are the actual decision makers, who are the actual influencers
out there, and people that can ultimately help you build your franchise. When
you talk about the role of a seller, it's all around building pipeline,
qualifying the pipeline, and then closing the deals. So as you do this,
you kind of really need a plan on how you're going to attack the
market. I'm reminded of a podcast actually, it was on Revenue Builders with
Kelly Conry. I go ahead and link it in the show notes as well
as that a Plan to make the plan podcast we have that you just mentioned
from John Kaplan, but he tells a story of how his first sales job,
he was given Arkansas as a territory and he was like living in Texas
and they were like, go sell Arkansas, and he knew it was like
not the best, right, but kind of you have to work with what
you have and having this right mindset. The business plan to your comment is
how you can make the most out of what you've been given. Yeah,
and I don't know what he was selling an Arkansas, but I can't imagine
it was a lot of anything, right, So it's I get the concept
of that. You know, a lot of times when sellers walk into jobs
and territories, they tend to look at what were the activities that people were
doing prior to they got there, right, And you always hear this story
back in the day where a seller would walk in and the most successful ones
would see a bunch of Manila folders on a desk with a bunch of contacts
and stuff, and instead of going through each of those basically doing with the
person who you replaced was doing, they tend to throw it away and start
early again and start over right. And I think a big part of building
a franchise to be successful is you need to really understand your customers and the
type of customers that you're going to engage with. And a lot of the
conversations that we get Rachel at Forest Management come back to the essential questions right,
the four essential questions that we have in the back of our business card,
with the first one being what problems do you solve for your customers?
And what I love about that question is I can ask you know, many
sales leaders, sales reps on an airplane, on the golf course, anywhere
you run into them and they say they're in sales. If I ask them
a simple question of what type of problems do you solve? They tend to
tell me what their product does right, And we need to get out of
that mindset. But what are the problems that people are having today? How
do you specifically solve those problems? That's what you're going to get when you
on board within your new hire, and you're going to learn about all the
great products and services. But then we need to understand how are we different
than the competition, including doing nothing right? And so when we look at
our list of accounts that we're targeting, well, there's probably four or five
other companies that are targeting the same accounts. So how do we truly understand
our differentiation and pull all that together? And then, as a new seller,
you don't really have a lot of proof points, right, You don't
have your own, you do need to borrow. So when you do meet
the ecosystem and you start to talk to some of your peers on your team,
it's always good to find out you know what's working and give us some
examples of some success stories in your territory. Learning those stories as proof points,
it's easy to memorize the measurable results, but understanding the story behind the
proof point, particularly if you're a news seller, can really help you get
a grasp on the answers to these essential questions. What were the problems,
how did we solve them? How do we win that deal that was because
we were differentiated? How are we differentiated? And how we delivered it?
That can really be an asset for you as you enable yourself to find more
customers like that for your pipeline. Absolutely, and then ultimately it's drive the
right activity right And you know, I think when it comes to prospecting and
people targeting new accounts, a lot of times you hear the term single threaded
where they're going in with one point of contact or you know, I used
to always say at PTC when people were prospecting, is when you're looking at
a company, if you truly understand their business and the problems that they're having.
There's not one person they can tell you. Now, so how do
you expand the reach within the account and meet with other people? Yeah,
so all of those things going into having the right mindset, whether that's that
franchise mindset or whatever you want to call it. But you own your terbriatory
or your list of accounts. You accountable for the results there. And the
more you understand the customers, as Paul said, through the answers to those
four essential questions, what problems you solve, how do you solve them,
how do you do it differently or better than the competition, and the proof
behind that, the more successful you will be at hitting the bullseye at that
target. When you're prospecting and that mindset too, you're just looking for those
triggers. I know at Force Management, like one point in time when people
bring us in is when there's a merger and acquisition and they really need help
driving consistency. So when I'm like on LinkedIn and I see there's a company
about another company there's a merger and acquisition, I'm like, oh, trigger,
somebody check this one out. Because you just have that mindset of what
you can do for your customer base. So we talked about ownership, and
you're likely, no matter what your sales role, God willing, you're getting
some leads that are coming to you. If the rest of the company is
doing their job, you're likely getting some leads. But you really can't rely
on one source. And that's that accountability. And I know that you kind
of pass the wide net, so to speak. You know, one of
my boss's PTC. Tim Cabans, used to always say on your business card,
at the end of the day, your title is sales and you're measured
for what you do. And so you know you can rely on people and
you can wait for the qualified leads that come your way. But the reality
is, you know, at the end of the month, end of the
quarter, it is your forecast that you'll be held accountable for. Right and
as a new hire, a big part of it is building out activities.
And so when you do work with marketing, and I work really well with
marketing, I think in my point of view, it's great. But also
where are some other sources of knowledge or connections can you tap into? And
you know, you see, like you mentioned LinkedIn, there's a lot out
there with board members, right, What board members are on accounts that you
may or may have come across. What about companies that have similar customers?
Right? So if you think about the products that you sell in your customers,
you know, maybe there's some other people out there that have customers or
themselves that are similar or you have prior relationship as you expand your market over
time, you know. The reality is when you think about the connections in
LinkedIn, when somebody has five hundred plus connections, my experience is I may
call them up and say, hey, do you know X, Y,
Z and sew and sell? The answer is now, right, So you
got to figure out what are ways to get around And the term that I
use is when you're meeting new people and you're trying to establish that is you
need to earn the trust. And part of that is when you communicate with
people, even if it starts with the LinkedIn connection and introduction, it's not
an inside out approach but an outside in. How can I help you,
regardless of the outcome I'm trying to achieve it, How can I help you
be successful in your role? So, as you mentioned, companies are doing
things are promoting stuff on LinkedIn. How do you provide some type of knowledge
and support to help them be more successful in the role. Yeah, give
them offer them some value. Yeah. And part of it is, you
know when you think about white papers, right. I remember back in the
day, I got a manager send me a document and said, hey,
take a look at this. I knew he didn't look at it. Here's
just forty off emails, and so I didn't look at it since then.
You know, when I think about a white paper, you read it and
then you provide summary, You summarize it three or four bullets. Why is
this valuable to you or to your role or to your company. The same
thing with webinars, right, and a podcast is provide a quote that's in
there that's particularly relevant, but also be specific on what minute in the webinar
does this conversation come up, so it's more relevant and they get to jump
right to it, right. And I think that's all around just trying to
build a normal cadence of helping people and things will come and return it usually
does. Yeah, And making it easy for them to see why this piece
of content is relevant to me, making it easy for yourself as a seller,
to use the content or the marketing assets that are available to you,
but going down one extra step to make sure that it's received well by who
every year reaching out to is one way we can differentiates as salespeople. You've
mentioned a lot of good tactics after we have the right mindset things that we
can do to help drive pipeline and prospecting. I'm curious for your tips for
those of the people listening out there of how you work it into your daily
rhythm as a seller, because there's a thousand things you have to do each
day, including recording a podcast with me. But how do you get a
rhythm behind it so you don't like do it one week and then stop for
the next eight Like, what's your rhythm behind it? Yeah, and it's
pipeline building. It's a twenty four to seven role, right, You're always
looking and you're always looking out there. Jack Napli, my boss at PTC
for like seven years. One of the comments that we always talk about building
pipeline is like shaving. You can't shave seven day or seven times on Sunday
because you're going to be too busy the rest of the week to shave.
It's something that you need to do every day and do it all the time,
and so and part of it is it's like working out. The hardest
part is getting started right. And so when it comes to prospecting, one
of the things that I do is I have thirty minutes in my calendar every
single morning where I am targeting new opportunities, new buyers, looking at accounts
to see what has happened in their business, looking at press releases, and
it's uninterrupted time and it's all tied to getting this done. And one of
the biggest mistakes that I've seen people make Rachel is once they get a big
pipeline, they start closing some deals, they stop doing that and then go
back to the gym. It's always hard to start all over again. And
so it's something that you just need to make it part of your normal rep
operating rhythm on a regular basis. Yeah, and sales ebbs and flows right,
and when you're in the down when things are slow, you're going to
be glad that you had a rhythm around that pipeline a hundred percent. So
having the right mindset some great tips there to work it into the daily rhythm.
Using content as a way to add value you blocking your calendar for thirty
minutes a day. Those are some great tips. Paul leave us with some
final thoughts for the listeners out there on prospecting and really owning it as a
salesperson. So one of the things that we talk about is the concept and
command of the message is believing what you do matters. You know, and
no matter what you're selling a technology or whatever it is, but you have
the ability to change people's lives, change you know, the way managers manage
their business, and then ultimately change the valuation of customers that you're targeting.
Right, and when you think about what you do matters, it motivates me
to find new targets and have discovery calls and conversations about what they do and
what are they struggling with and how we can help. One of the rules
that I've done was always is that one more right. Making one more call
is elementaries that sounds it's the reality. And I have multiple proof points over
the year where I've made one more call and I could get one more deal
coming out of it. I go into it with a smile, I enjoy
it and it's worked out really well. Right, Well, I know that
the listeners will appreciate your perspective on this topic today, Paul, awesome,
Well, thank you, yes and thank you hey. On Paul's spirit of
one More, how about listening to one more podcast. I'm linking us several
in the show notes on this topic, so be sure to check them out
and thank you for listening to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. At Force Management,
we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Our proven methodologies deliver
programs that build company alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams the
ability to execute the growth strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is
our experience. The proof is in our results. Let's get started. Visit
us at forcemanagement dot com. You've been listening to the Audible Ready podcast.
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until next time. Six