2 Lessons I Learned from Master Sellers
Today, I want to share with you two of the top lessons I learned from two foremost experts in the field of sales - best-selling authors, speakers, and consultants Anthony Iannarino and Jake Dunlap.
Each sat down with me for an interview recently and shared their insights on what’s working right now.
Value-Based Selling with Anthony Iannarino
Anthony Iannarino is a top sales coach and international speaker. He is a 5X best-selling author and co-founder of the Outbound sales conference. In our interview, Anthony and I discussed why you don't need the best product or service in order to sell, the danger of continuing to follow outdated sales methodologies, and the most important focus for any company that wants to transform its sales force.
The statement Anthony made during our interview that most stood out to me was when I asked him about the impact on the customer when companies break sales into separate roles, such as Sales Development Reps (SDR), Account Executives (AE), Sales Engineers, and Account Managers. His response was clear: “You don't put a human being on a conveyor belt...” Here is his full statement taken from our discussion:
“This is all the Silicon Valley ethos that now permeates business in the United States, especially the companies that do what you just described. Two centuries ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor went to Ford and explained that he could get many, many more cars off of a line if everybody was responsible for just turning one thing. Then it's a conveyor belt. But that's a car; that’s not a human being. You don't put a human being on a conveyor belt and have people twist and turn things as they go down.
So the SDR (or BDR), who's mostly making cold calls, is going to get really good at getting a meeting. And then when they go to that meeting, they don't know how to have a meeting. They don't know how to create value in that first interaction. And it's because they hand it off to an AE, and the AE handles the conversation. The SDRs growth is getting tremendously stunted by people who are selfish and who don't think about anything other than, we need to get our revenue up so we can flip this thing and become rich and not have to do any work anymore, except maybe become a VC or something.
They're each being harmed. AEs who are being taught that they don't have to prospect are now having a bunch of people looking at them as a model going, ‘I can't wait till I don't have to prospect anymore.’ And then they're going to move to other companies, and those companies are going to say, ‘What are you doing sitting there?’
I do think that there are good reasons to have different roles. Customer Success Manager for instance, makes total sense, those kinds of things. But, the more you keep slicing it down, the more jarring it is for the customer.”
Watch my full interview with Anthony Iannarino on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/ngwCFizczqk
Modernizing Sales with Jake Dunlap
Jake Dunlap is a top voice on the future of sales. He's appeared in Forbes and the Huffington Post and was a guest on the GaryVee Audio Experience. Jake is the founder of Skaled Consulting and a former sales leader at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Chartbeat, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder. In our interview, Jake and I discussed how B2B buying has changed, a better approach for today's non-linear buyer journeys, and how to ready your organization for growth in 2023. The statement that stood out for me most during our time together was when he said: “Prior to the pandemic, people would never buy enterprise software remotely - you have to be face-to-face…Nope, they did.” Here is an excerpt from our discussion:
“All you really need to do is just look at your consumer buying behaviors. Today, if you're on Amazon and something's gonna take like three days to get there, or like a slightly inferior item, but pretty much the same is gonna get there tomorrow - how many of you have picked the latter? All of you, right? And what's happened is that we are now so used to convenience, very little friction, and not talking to people.
Prior to the pandemic, it was said that people would never buy enterprise software remotely - you have to be face-to-face…Nope, they did. So what's happened is there are a lot of these legacy behaviors in sales that were true when buyers didn't have as much access to information. So they couldn't research a company. They had to get it from a salesperson. And the consumer hadn't been trained to want a self-guided click-to-buy journey. But that's what happens now. Companies have to realize that people are coming in at various levels of intent. You know, intent to buy, education level - that just didn't exist years ago.
So, if your sales process is linear today...If it's like - we do a qualification call, then we do this, etc. - you're not understanding where people are in the intent process. Because BANT, MEDDIC, and a lot of these don't actually help you to understand that.”
See my full interview with Jake on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/3dbjHsai-Kg
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