Discover the power of building lasting customer relationships and leveraging the latest AI technology in our final episode of 2023. Carson Heady, Tom Burton, and Brandon Lee, share their celebratory reflection on the year's most impactful moments and set the stage for the trends that will define the future of sales. Get ready to transform your approach to CRM systems, understand the significance of personal branding, and learn why being a trusted advisor is more crucial than ever.
We also explore innovative strategies for nurturing customer success and fostering strong relationships in the competitive landscape. We uncover tactics for expanding your influence within client organizations and discuss how to navigate economic uncertainties while maintaining loyalty and trust. Our conversation also delves into the importance of thought leadership and impactful communication, offering actionable insights that will help you become an indispensable asset to your clients.
Wrap up the year with a deep dive into the evolving marriage of sales and marketing, with a special look at how to use LinkedIn effectively for business growth. We also examine how AI tools like ChatGPT are revolutionizing sales efficiency, allowing for deeper customer insights and strategic decision-making.
Discover the power of building lasting customer relationships and leveraging the latest AI technology in our final episode of 2023. Carson Heady, Tom Burton, and Brandon Lee, share their celebratory reflection on the year's most impactful moments and set the stage for the trends that will define the future of sales. Get ready to transform your approach to CRM systems, understand the significance of personal branding, and learn why being a trusted advisor is more crucial than ever.
We also explore innovative strategies for nurturing customer success and fostering strong relationships in the competitive landscape. We uncover tactics for expanding your influence within client organizations and discuss how to navigate economic uncertainties while maintaining loyalty and trust. Our conversation also delves into the importance of thought leadership and impactful communication, offering actionable insights that will help you become an indispensable asset to your clients.
Wrap up the year with a deep dive into the evolving marriage of sales and marketing, with a special look at how to use LinkedIn effectively for business growth. We also examine how AI tools like ChatGPT are revolutionizing sales efficiency, allowing for deeper customer insights and strategic decision-making.
Welcome to Social Selling 2.0 Live Show and Podcast, where each week, we explore the future of B2B sales. Social has changed the B2B and professional services landscape forever. Capturing and keeping buyer attention has never been more challenging. Our mission is to help you discover new strategies, new technologies, new go-to-market systems and stay up-to-date with what is working now in B2B sales. Your hosts are Carson Hedy, the number one social seller at Microsoft, tom Burton, a best-selling author and B2B sales specialist, and Brandon Lee, an entrepreneur with multiple seven and eight figure exits and a leading voice in LinkedIn social selling. Brandon and Tom also leads Social Selling 2.0 Solutions, which offers turnkey consulting, coaching and training to B2B sales leaders. Now let's start the show.
Speaker 2:Gentlemen, welcome to episode. You know what episode this is? 65. 65, well done.
Speaker 3:I read your brief, Tom.
Speaker 2:I know, I know, I am impressed, I am very impressed. It will be Episode 65, Social Selling 2.0, the last one of the year. So next week we're going to do a best of and we were just looking at some of the stats. Carson, do you want to tell who the best of is going to be next week?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. We're going to air the number one episode of the year, which was none other than Bren Tillman.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the most downloaded episode of the year. So congratulations and thank you, Bren. So we're doing a replay of that. I think she was pretty early this year too, like March or somewhere around there.
Speaker 4:So yeah, that was a really good week, was it that long ago?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 4:Oh man, that's crazy, I know.
Speaker 3:Let's do it. We're here with you guys. A great year of learning and we've had a very engaged audience, so very grateful for that. As we head into the holidays.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so if you're online listening, please jump in. Let us know that you're here. What we're going to go over today is kind of looking ahead. We kind of looked back last week and this week we're going to look ahead as what we see coming, or what we think is coming around sales, social and demand creation. No pressure, we just have to come up with some right answers on that for 2024. So the way we were going to do this is kind of around, robin, I think. Carson, maybe we'll start with you, get your thought. We'll kind of go around. Each of us get our thoughts and I'm sure there'll be other thoughts and comments along the way. But what is your as we get started? What is your take on 2024?
Speaker 3:Yeah, love the question and we'd love to hear thoughts from our audience too. Thanks so much for being on and being with us. Please feel free to post where you're joining us from, I think, as we head into the new year and I know we're talking about this also a little bit later in the show but I do have to say AI integration is going to be a big one. Ai is going to continue to play a very significant role, and I think we're going to break out and talk more about that a little bit later. But there's a lot of ways that it will just from really arming ourselves with knowledge and information to getting signals how we're going to react and respond ideally from a more informed probability matrix perspective. I think that's why it's so important. I think some of the other areas that I'm seeing where we're trending toward from a sales perspective is just the role of a CRM, really, how it can be leveraged and how it can be integrated into all of our other tools. Just speaking from my own vantage point, I've become very reliant on it from all of the signals that it picks up from different places, mostly from our marketing tools. I'm using it a lot right now to create and build campaigns, going out and doing some manual work to ensure that we're building lists and building community. We talk about that a lot on this show.
Speaker 3:And then I think the last element is it's kind of twofold.
Speaker 3:It is number one around the importance of the brand of the seller, the sales culture of the organization that they or we in this case work for, but also how we meaningfully create relationships to earn the right to be the trusted advisor.
Speaker 3:I think when I think about customers, existing customers are so, so important because if you've earned that right, competition is fierce right now. So we've got to do everything we can to drive that stake into the ground and prioritize existing customers. But when it comes to reaching out to new customers whether it's leveraging referrals, replicating a success model, finding very focused ways to do outreach, social selling, et cetera, but also scale approaches it's going to be all about the knowledge that we have and that ability to really sell the problem as opposed to selling a solution being the solution, as opposed to going in and just trying to diagnose blindly. If I'm hopefully I'm being very clear to say that there is going to be a big responsibility for sellers going into 2024. All the information is going to be at your fingertips. You need to go out and get it, you need to use it effectively and you also need to focus on the relationships.
Speaker 2:Wow, brandon, I think there's some background noise on your end possibly. I want to. There's a couple of things you said, carson, there that we should unpack a little bit. One is the fact that I agree with you 100% right the CRM is your friend. I think a lot of times people have looked at the CRM as oh crap, and I have a CRM company, so I know this firsthand is a lot of times people look at the CRM as a ball and chain. But I am seeing every day when you're using that data from the CRM and you're using it to drive a lot of the AI even, it really is your friend. And so you're not just entering data. Go ahead just entering data because my manager asked for it. I'm entering data because it's actually going to turn around and help me and do that. So I think that's a huge take for next year. I really do think the role of CRM is going to change.
Speaker 3:Tommy, you know something important there. I think it falls incumbent upon leadership to set the tone right, because it's all about how you embrace and express and articulate the value of the CRM. If it is just managers coming in and saying you got to make sure your pipeline's clean, you got to make sure your pipeline's full, but not really giving the lie behind it and how important it is Because right now I spend time every day with my teams looking at pipeline for current frame, future frame it is a lot more impactful and important to look at what is some of the aspirational pipeline for next year. That could be massive, that could be monumental, that sends everybody to president's club. Right, those are the types of things that we need to be thinking about as leaders and that is how you can use pipeline and CRM as a plan to be able to arm you with hey, these are the big deals that we need to go after and chase, that are going to send everybody to club. That's how these leaders have to set the tone.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I got a theory behind this too, I believe, with because some of the trends that I've been seeing and some of the conversations I've been having, and I think it's whether it's the CRM or it's doing the research or it's even using social as a communication channel I believe that everything's catching up to companies now that we've been talking about for years, I believe, over the COVID. There was a bunch of excuses as to why we weren't hitting numbers during COVID, because it was COVID right, and it was like you could excuse and go oh, the buyers are different, but it's because of COVID. And even moving up to COVID, buyers were changing it. I don't think it was hurting companies enough to cause them to really take some of these things serious. So CRM was necessary, but it wasn't being used the right way and it was OK because the sales numbers were still producing. The same thing, I think, was social.
Speaker 4:I've had a lot of conversations with people over the last four years, the last several months. The conversations have changed a lot. They've changed from well, this seems like it's a nice to have to. How can you help us right? I believe that the buyer behavior is changing so much more and companies are going to trade shows and events and spending money, but no one's there. Or they're spending money and they're getting there, but they're not getting people into the booth. Because buyer behavior has changed. We don't go to shows to go do research now. We do our research year around and when we go to the show, we go talk to the people we want to talk to and the companies that don't have a social presence. They don't have anything other than their email going out and their weight and their booth going. Hey, we're over here and people walking by the aisles. I mean, we know that, right, they don't want to look because they don't want to get sucked in. I just believe that all these things that are affecting their closes and their revenue acquisition and their qualified pipeline are finally hitting an oh shit moment and it's forcing them to go.
Speaker 4:Take a look at what additional can we get out of our CRM, what additional research can we be doing with social? How do we use content? And now with generative AI, I think a lot more people will be able to produce and share quality content. But I believe it's all because of that. I think it's just finally catching up to people that you can't just pedal harder doing the same things. Just at some point it was 100 calls, now it's 150. And it's just not possible for somebody to make 250 or 300 calls a day and they're starting to realize that we could do 500 calls a day. We're still not going to hit enough numbers to hit our clients. That's kind of my theory right now about it. What do you guys think?
Speaker 2:I think you're a lot like Bob and you're shy and you don't have any opinions. That's what I think.
Speaker 4:I think you and Bob need to think, Carson if you know it, when you were talking and you were saying great things and Tom and I started laughing, it's because we saw Bob's comment come up about being shy and having no idea. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Bob's on a roll again. We need to just get Bob in the show. That's what I think we need. We need an episode with Bob.
Speaker 2:So, Carson, related to what Brandon just said. You pointed out something about competition never being higher or very a lot of competition that's out there. I'm wondering if, as we look ahead, competition is not going to get less, Sales effectiveness is not going to, or the ability to do the you know what we just talked about from using the old school sales techniques is not going to be any more effective. So you think it's a you know, Carson, and based on what you just said, is it a combination of those things that you think are really going to drive what we're going to be doing in 2024?
Speaker 3:Yes, Look, the stakes are going to be really high, right, the competition is going to be fierce for even our most prized customers and I think that's why everybody's got to up their ante and we're going to turn the corner on this conversation here, I think soon, and talk a little bit about the role of AI in sales in 2024. But I mean, the technology, frankly, is going to play a part in every stage of the game, whether it's arming the buyer with Intel that they need in order to make decisions. They're going to quote, unquote need sellers even less likely in their process than ever before, meaning that the stakes are raised and you're going to get that one shining shot, or you're going to have that opportunity to. You know it's going to.
Speaker 3:I've seen the rise of the importance of customer success over the last several years. I've always been or predominantly historically been part of the account team. Right, I've led the account teams. But you know we work very closely with specialist teams and customer success teams and literally over the last five years, every year, the customer success team becomes more and more important because it's so critical that we're safeguarding that relationship. They were continuing to bring value.
Speaker 3:We don't just sell something and pat ourselves on the back and move on. And now it's going to become all the more incumbent and imperative that we do that, that we really double down on our existing clients, that we're looking for additional ways to cross sell, upsell and again continuing to prospect into those organizations. I challenge sellers because I find, by default, you know, we get comfortable and we rely on maybe one or two or five key contacts in most organizations and where I've really tried to make my mark and, frankly, the only reason that I've been successful is because I've tried to drive a lot more net, new, meaningful relationships within organizations, which helps you create that groundswell of influence. And that's where I really challenge sellers to look at the relationships they have. You have all of the relationships that you're going to need in order to be successful in 2024. And you have blind spots with any of these relationships. Those things are of critical importance.
Speaker 2:Brandon, you're having a hard time making me keep a straight face.
Speaker 3:We've got another special guest on today.
Speaker 4:That was Piper everybody.
Speaker 2:So, brandon, what's your take on what Carson is saying, especially more from the SMB perspective, the small, medium-sized business, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 4:I think, across the board, customer experience is everything now, and it's from the beginning to the ongoing. I think there's a lot of, as Carson's saying, competition is heavy, it's strong, it's fierce. Whatever the right adjectives we're going to use. We need to also be blocking out our competition by staying very closely connected and valuable to our customers.
Speaker 4:That shift of being thought leaders, especially from the C-suite, from leadership of being thought leaders not hey, here's our latest product, here's this, here's that, but be thought leaders, helping create conversation, helping them think about new things and staying that very strongly relevant to them that they don't even think about needing you, not because they can't buy the widget from somebody else, but because all the other peripheral that you provide and bring to the table, and whether it starts at the C-suite level, but then your customer success, people, your ops, people, whoever else it may be, the more that. And this is really where the value of social is, and I know that a lot of times with C-suite it's like oh, social, it's cute, it's not freaking cute, it's necessary. Your people need to be communicating at scale, other than buy my shit or buy my next thing. We've got to be communicating at scale so that our buyers, our customers need us and want to be connected to us, because they can buy the widgets anywhere. They can buy the services anywhere.
Speaker 3:Brandon, tell us a little bit oh calm a little.
Speaker 2:I really like the communication at scale, though Stop holding back Brandon. Yeah, I think Brandon's just coming out at the end of the year. He's figuring I've got to say my piece.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it sounds like a lot of things.
Speaker 4:You know, in a way it is and it's because I've played nice, I wanted to be like, oh, yeah, look, early in my career I've been told things like I had resting dick face. I told people like, oh, you're kind of arrogant when you have your opinion and stuff. I've gotten older, I'm like, oh, I want to be more understanding of other opinions and all that I totally do. I didn't think I was being arrogant, I just have a very strong opinion about what I know has worked, because I've sold three companies like a $2 million, an $18 million, a $6 million company that I built. These things were so important. The buyer experience was everything. We had a 94 to 95% renewal rate because we treated them the whole way through working on that renewal. We were sharing information with them.
Speaker 4:Now, granted, this is pre-Facebook, this is early early, well, even pre-linked in, but we were still focused on all those things. If you're so valuable to somebody beyond your product, they're not going anywhere because they need you, they want you, they look at you as a valuable resource. All of those things are still important today. We just activate it differently and it's even easier now. We had things with people making phone calls every certain amount of weeks with things like hey, we've been reading that this is going on in your industry. We wanted to make sure that we brought it to your attention, see if it was relevant to you, or whatever. Now you can just do that in social media every day.
Speaker 2:At scale to your point At scale Right.
Speaker 2:I want to transition this. I'm going to give you my opinion on, or one of my opinions on, next year, but I think it builds exactly on what both of you are saying. It's not that I didn't know this, but after our Matt Dixon episode a couple of weeks ago or a few weeks ago about the fear of messing up, I'm seeing this maybe even in the last six months more than ever is that decisions, or lack thereof, are not being made or are being made because of fear of messing up. Even where I have and, what's interesting, even when you have a really good relationship, it's not like they just ghost you. You have a good relationship and they're like you know what. I just don't feel comfortable doing this right now. I don't know. I know they'll come up with an excuse, but at least they're telling you the excuse, versus ghosting you. You've done a good job of building the relationship to at least get the communication back, but you're getting a lot of things that are excuses maybe, but at the end of the day, they're fear of messing up. I think that the reason that happens to all of us is what you brought up, carson there's a lot of attention and competition for attention. There's a lot of people trying to grab your attention. You have organizations and influencers within the organization that are also weighing in because they've been doing their own research and so forth.
Speaker 2:I do believe that one of the key things of next year is going to be and I don't mean to be saying that to sell on the defensive, in fact, it's just the opposite is how do you make sure that you addressed, early and often, this issue of fear of messing up versus fear of missing out? And, as Matt explains, or they talk about in the Joel DeFett book and as we went on on the show, the things that we tend to do to try and get somebody to convince, to get over that hurdle, is not the right things that you do when somebody is concerned about messing up. I don't just keep going. Yeah, but did you see the other 10 features that this does? I did. I give you my ROI, which is what we wanted to. We want to keep putting those there. I think the fear of missing out is really going to be a big factor.
Speaker 4:And it comes back to that buyer experience and being a value added resource or whatever however you want to say it a thought leader, valuable resource, a trusted advisor, if we're helping them think through problems from day one. As soon as you know and that's where social is such an important thing somebody can come across your, your profile and see posts where you're going. Hey, this is what customers in these industries are dealing with and this is something that they're struggling with. That this is what we've seen as working your immediately From a lens perspective. You're being seen as a resource, as a trusted advisor, and the more you can solidify yourself in that trusted advisor role and from that lens, the more likely they're going to follow and trust and have been.
Speaker 4:The reason I think there's so much messing up to is and you'll get me on my other soapbox we opened the floodgate for startups over the last decade and a lot of them sucked. They were good ideas but they were poorly executed or they sold these great value propositions because everyone went to the same school of how to write it, how to craft a marketing message, and then people bought it and they didn't get the results. It was a waste of money and they had mud on their face. And now we're coming into this post real big focus on SaaS and people are starting to say wait a minute, let's slow down a little bit, let's think through this, let's make good decisions. And that's why I believe for companies, it's even more important to establish that trusted advisor lens.
Speaker 3:Because if you do, then you will truly understand what is the risk, and I think, as we continue to see this shift toward buyer centricity, it's also the important to keep other buyers as a part of your strategy, and what I mean by that is a great way to de-risk is creating community. That can be a value add that you bring to bear. Sometimes it's more about the existing customer that I introduced to my prospect. They create a relationship, they form trust and they can see right there what has helped this peer in the industry be successful. Just happened to be our solution, but it wasn't about me selling it or bringing up the ROI. It was about them, helping them understand where they were in the journey and helping them understand how it will de-risk what they perceive the risk to be.
Speaker 2:I want to ask a question on that, two questions actually. Carson, do you actually connect and have the two people you know, the other customer, not just give them a testimonial, but actually have them start to engage and become buddies, if at all possible?
Speaker 3:100%. I found in many cases there have been times where you know a partner will have a better relationship with the customer than I do, and that's perfectly fine. What do I need to do to arm the partner with what they need from me, resource wise, to help them win? Furthermore, if I'm able to build community, a community of peers in an industry you know, I worked in several different industries in my career and if I'm able to connect them and they can have a commonality in their journey and obviously there's some synergies between those groups and this customer, this existing customer, is able to share the story of how they partnered with my team and found success, all the better because now they can actually the prospect, can see that from their lens and that starts to continue to de-risk the decision. I feel like the Matt Dixon episode and, frankly, even just reading Jolt Effect in my mind, like I felt like I unlocked some big mystery of the universe. It was like just suddenly you have this aha moment and you can see clearly and you understand.
Speaker 3:Like now, you look at every situation and you start to think, wow, it isn't that I need to sell more value, I just need to really understand the risk to the customer. When I go into every scenario now looking for the risk, what's at risk?
Speaker 2:Well and I think you brought up another, or maybe there's another point that you mentioned there right, the community with the other customer, but also if you're building relationships with other employees that are quote-unquote influencers in that organization a lot of times the decision makers or the executives if they're getting positive feedback from the other employees, then that's less risky as well. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, look, you're not a one man band out there or a one woman band. I think the key element is you've got to understand what is the next most important action that is within my locus of control that I can do. You know it's a domino effect.
Speaker 3:You just have to push down the domino doesn't mean I got to sell more, do more. Sometimes it's creating a scale sales army that's out there working on your behalf, going out and finding a great partner that has a great success story with a certain industry and then figuring out okay, what worked Now, how do I replicate that and how do I put that buyer as a focal point of what I'm doing? Shine the light on them. You know, some of the best things that we do in our organization is get case studies published with customers. You're not sharing what we did so well. We're sharing what a customer was able to do because of our platform or because of our technology. That's the real win. That's what's exceptionally powerful is when you can shine a light on a success story that a customer had because of you and then, ultimately, you can ideally replicate that by creating additional relationships with and for that winning customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. I want to hit a couple of these comments here. First of all, bob. Bob has an interesting take here. We're entering a period of retrenchment and I think there will be there until around mid November or early December, for obvious reasons for next year. If that's true, I think that's going to amplify and magnify even the fear of missing out, I'm sorry, the fear of messing up even even more. So, right, if there is some sort of pressure on that. I also want to you know, very simply stated right, when you're a trust this is Jasmine when you're a trusted advisor you don't have to sell. But I think there's even more to that. What you're just saying, carson, is just go be the trusted advisor and you will sell, right, right, it's like a corollary to that.
Speaker 4:But I and I also agree with Carson, and I guess all three of us are saying it Matt Dixon and Jolt Effect completely changed my life. This year.
Speaker 3:That's what I read this year.
Speaker 4:Yeah, with the hands down, and it's not just being a trusted advisor. To get to the opportunity, you've got to stay, be disciplined, to stay the trusted advisor through the whole thing. And, yes, you're going to lose some deals because they're just they're not going to get over that fear of messing up. But if you switch gears on them, you're never going to get them back to the table.
Speaker 3:And you know what's? What I find fascinating is even the level by which I still engage with past customers that aren't even technically in my sphere today. But what happens is maybe a year or two passes and now suddenly that relationship might become very, very relevant to what you do if you continue to nurture that relationship. So I still look for opportunities today to help put customers that I know from years past into positions to win, whether it's creating relationships that could be fruitful for them. And guess what I've seen happen? I've seen I've made moves in my organization and I've come back into a sphere where I can either help them or I can leverage that relationship to help someone else and I think there's a lot of power to that. It's a force multiplier by continuing to earn that right to be the trusted advisor and to continue to invest in those relationships, even when the value of that for you doesn't necessarily it's not completely apparent in that moment. It's amazing what goes around comes around.
Speaker 2:I mean you're just being the trusted advisor and you're being an advisor. Go ahead, brandon. I know, brandon, your did you say something cuz you got. You got stopped there for a minute. I guess he's went away.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you froze on me. I don't know if it was me or you, but Am I? Am I here?
Speaker 2:No, you're good.
Speaker 4:No good, and now I forgot what I was gonna say. Actually, I do remember. I think that this, this early stage of the internet, changed the way we sold, because we had this new tool and we started testing a bunch of things with automation, inbound marketing, mass email at scale. And Now we're getting, you know, 25 years into this, and we're starting to realize that nothing beats good old-fashioned relationships, and Now we're creating new ways to get back to being a, a servant seller, to being the trusted advisor, to having that ongoing relationship and, as we keep saying, when, when you focus on being the trusted advisor Above and beyond anything else, even closing the deal, you will close more deals.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but you just got to trust the process and I think prior to the internet, we didn't have very many other Options to try, and so the best sales people just that, that's what they did. I remember coming into my first company and as a sales guy and looking and saying who's who's the number one sales person. Since then, every single time, it's a, it's the one that has the largest network, knows the most people but, more importantly, the most people know them and they're a connector. They connect people. That's powerful and they ended up being you know what's?
Speaker 3:what's great about that to Brandon is that that trusted advisor. You don't always guide somebody to your product or your solution, you just guide them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's and your reputation precede you. For some reason, I think we have a little lag here. It's like, you know, when you're watching the news and they're like interviewing somebody in Europe or something, and there's this Lag between them.
Speaker 3:Anyway, well, hopefully it comes in might have slightly time traveled to, like you know, 10 seconds into the past, or something like that that that actually explained. I've seen him in the 50s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when he gets going right, 80, whatever miles an hour, whatever, yeah. So I want to hit on, I don't, I want to hit on Bob's comment here and get your guys take on this. And then I have another sort of prediction for next year. Bob's saying it even in during times of fear of missing out, there are still risk takers. However, they may not be in the same tam total addressable market. You are targeting up to this point, shifting your targeted tam a bit. Perhaps you know it's an interest. I'll take a first cut at that.
Speaker 2:I don't See phone fear of missing out to me. I'm seeing it with people that you would normally see as early adopters or risk takers, but they're still messing up or missing out. Messing up, do I keep saying missing out? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I keep seeing the foe move, fear of missing out. I, she shouldn't talk. I'll just let Brandon talk. Fear of messing up, even with people, that is, that are more early adopters and innovative and risk takers, and so it's an interesting thing is that early adopters and risk takers and foe move may not necessarily Correlate, because you could have foe move with an early adopter or foe move with somebody who's more Conservative or even a laggard in terms of how they they purchase. I don't know if you guys have seen anything like that, but I don't. I don't know if I've seen them as exactly the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know what's interesting about this. So when I think about this, I think about this from two lenses number one and speaking from like even just an enterprise or a commercial sales engine. I don't think a lot of sellers sometimes can see the big picture. They can't see the total addressable market. They can't see what opportunity could exist. They are Used to things from a certain dimension where they've worked with a certain subset of people that have maybe said no or that have had fear of messing up in the past, and they accept that no and they move on to address what is Probably the lower hanging fruit and the challenges.
Speaker 3:A lot of times we become order takers in those situations or we are kept in a box by a certain subset of customer stakeholders who aren't necessarily the power or the authority in that organization.
Speaker 3:So I think in order for sellers to see the true total addressable market, you've got to understand all the parameters in the playing field, you've got to understand the opportunity that's out there and you've got to be able to, as a seller yourself, make bold Asks and go out and do bold things, sometimes breaking glass, and it's not for everyone, it's not for the faint of heart. There's been a lot of times where I've gone out and I've created relationships that has upset other people in that organization. But at the end of the day, I'm willing to take that risk because what am I risking as a seller If I have no relationship with this organization or if the same old person keeps telling me, no, I mean, what am I really gambling by going here, here, here here, to try to create a relationship and find somebody who maybe has less fear of missing, messing up or a different type of Situation, more desire or willingness to take that risk?
Speaker 3:So I think that's a big part of it. Now to pop point, there are I do we shift our total addressable market? Maybe I think that also begets opportunity for for businesses to look at new potential product lines. Really stay at the pulse of what matters to your target prospects. I've definitely seen our organization completely shift our focus of. What types of conversations are we trying to have? How are we trying to collaborate and partner? Integrating as opposed and augmenting solutions as opposed to replacing and always being the right answer. So to Bob's point, I think the answer is yes, all around.
Speaker 2:Well, another interesting great point there, carson, is Maybe it does make sense to adjust your product and or even the offering or how your product is packaged a bit To be less risk or perceived risky right. Provide a broader set of service. Provide, brandon, maybe a concierge service, like you know, for the, for the whole. Again, do things that Eliminate those, for those perceived risks. I think that's a really, it's not just one thing you can do to reduce the perceived risk.
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, and I think when you do things like like that, like we've we've added concierge services and to fist bump Once it dawned on me and just shifted away from a SAS model To say, you know, let's, let's go do things for people and take that total stress off their plate. It also then forced us to start looking what our, what our total addressable market was and what was our. Was there a better, more refined ICP? And it does. It does shift and I like what you're saying to Tarr Carson, what you said, but you know, you're, you're so often I think sales people get in like I'm split, this is the person I need to meet, this is the person I need to meet, and they're just not responding, not responding well at that point, man, if you go around them or you go to the left or the right, or I mean I learned from you, carson, over the year, over the whatever, two years, whatever Go, flood all the people around them and get to know them and and create that trusted advisor status with five or six people that report to them or Go sideways to them or whatever, like there's all different ways to go do it, and now is the time that we've got to take those risks and start doing that.
Speaker 4:And yeah, it may. It may adjust your total addressable market. That one scares me a little bit more. When I saw Bob put that on like, oh man, that's a, that's an even bigger shift.
Speaker 3:And I'm a risk-taker, right, I'm an innovator and I was like, but yeah, I think what I biggest social selling when I ever had was a two-year journey and Seven sea levels changed in that time. But I had over 200 first-degree connections in that organization and the deal died on the table. But the reason that we were able to resuscitate it, even though it looked very different than when it started, was because of relationships and it was because we were so entrenched that when they were bringing in new people and new executives, we almost had to read them in because we knew more than some of the other folks that were around. That's exactly what you just described. Brandon is getting in there, swarming the influencers, getting entrenched in that organization so that you're such a valuable partner that Not going anywhere and whatever the deal looks like, at the end it's gonna be with you. That's all you can control.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think we on the other side of the table also can't be in fear of messing up Right by going and building those relationships, because I think sometimes people think, oh, I'm gonna go around them or they're gonna feel you know, and there's all this sort of fear of messing up the sales process when. So I think it goes both ways, right is and It'll be interesting to see. But if we can, the sellers, we don't have that fear. Does that help eliminate or reduce the fear on the other side of the table? I think it does, just for the reason we've talked about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, look, most sellers won't do the stuff that we talk about and that I've done on this. You know that I've talked about on this show. Most won't do it because it does take some time to kind of build a Platform to do it. It takes a lot of time to do what Brandon does Commenting meaningfully in people's comments every day. These things are time-consuming. And there is also this it's not always comfortable to go out and reach out to 20 executives because one told you to pound sand. But if you're willing to do it you can achieve anything.
Speaker 4:Yeah and I, you know I'll add to that and not not from a pluggy standpoint, but you know the way that I use LinkedIn and the way we strain our team to use LinkedIn is more networking than sales and sales. And I mean I'm two, three new calls a day and I get on the zoom and I meet people. And number one, I'm not in sales mode, right, I'm in networking mode. I want to, if I can serve them and help them and introduce them, like I had one yesterday. I got two people I'm going to introduce them to today and it may or may not turn into something for me, but I know that these two connections are going to do good for everybody. But when I get on the phone or I get on a zoom or a teams call with them and we start talking, when I talk about social, I've already proved to them the value of it because they're on a zoom call with me. You know what I mean. And so you're saying, carson, that a lot of sales people won't do this stuff because it's too hard or it's out of the norm. You know.
Speaker 4:It reminds me, tom you and I have talked about it the partner in a company I spoke to and he's, you know, probably my age-ish, a little bit older, maybe he's responsible for BizDev and the company. He's been in it for 28 years. I said what do you still like what you do? And he said no, I really don't. Because I liked it when I could make 20 cold calls and 10 to 12 people would return it and half of those would become a conversation and half of those would become an opportunity and half of those would become deals and we were serving people. And he's like now my emotions just aren't really working and we've got to get outside of that thought process and try new things. And yeah, they're a little bit harder but they're producing fruit. And so you got to take that risk and do that try. Give yourself an opportunity for an at-bat by getting outside of that comfort zone.
Speaker 2:Well, and I would correct me if I'm wrong, but the two or three calls you say you're doing today are almost entirely coming from social and these are not people you knew already or matter the trade show or filled out a form on your website or you cold emailed or whatever. It's all from the social perspective.
Speaker 3:Darren McKee made a post today on LinkedIn and I will almost quote it, but you should go check it out. He was on a great episode that we did earlier in the year and it was basically how he booked multiple meetings without even picking up a phone and it was literally from commenting and being proactive around signals that he was seeing around LinkedIn. You know somebody he was connected with somebody at the competition who commented on somebody's post and that he jumped into that post and engaged with that poster and got a meeting with that person. It's just the signals that we can get. The information that we can get right now.
Speaker 3:It's so powerful and I mean I've talked ad nauseam on this show about things that I've seen in my sales navigator feed that said there's a new executive here, there's a merger and our acquisition here, and I just immediately acted on that information and that led to a relationship and ultimately led to a deal. You know, look, I know we can't connect the dots forward. You can't look and see exactly where a relationship is going to go and it's hard sometimes to figure out which relationships to invest more in than others. But the key element is I can look back on a wealth of situations where I invested in a lot of relationships and, by and large, most of them, over the course of time, pan out.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah and in that I mean for everybody listening Darren style. His technique is I think it's a little different to mine, but pretty similar, and this is what I would love to share with everybody that you don't know Use the activities you can control, which is publishing and commenting, so that the right people, who you want to talk, to, see you and engage with you and what that normally looks like is twice a day, in the morning and in the afternoon I go in and look at who's viewed my profile, because the actions I can do my post in my comments get me in front of the right people and more of them and then they go peek at my profile Like, who is this clown Right? They go look at my profile and some of them will follow, some of them will connect and some of them will look and leave. But if I go look at who's followed me, who's viewed my profile, and then you look and you see the ones who are the right ICP for you or around that ICP, if they're not a connection, you say hey, you looked at my profile, thank you, is it okay if we connect? And the ones that you're already connected to, they looked at your profile. You sent it to him and say, hey, you looked at my profile, I looked at yours, find something that they're about that you can reference and say, you know, give them confidence that you actually looked and not just sent something out and say, hey, we should get on a networking call and get to know each other. Now, yeah, a lot of people ignore you and a lot of people say no, but we've dealt with that, with cold calls and everything else before.
Speaker 4:But what happens is like I got one this morning. I haven't responded to it yet because it was a little outside my time block, but look to my profile. I think he followed me. I can't remember the details. Send him a message. We connected, send it back and said, yeah, I've been, I've been watching your stuff. I'm really interested in the style of using social you guys use. I'd love to talk. Well, he looked at my profile but didn't ask for a meeting. But when I sent that, then he engaged me more and said let's talk. That is not hard, it's just intentional and anybody can do it. You just have to be intentional.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great tip. The profile one is a great tool, because I think people forget that Right, they didn't like my posts or didn't comment Gold, right, and yet that might be as much of a thing as anything else.
Speaker 4:Well, because you also go through the story like James Gilman told and I've shared it a couple times. You know, president of a company, he's one of our concierge clients. We're helping him. You know, up his his LinkedIn game and he went to his 20 year high school reunion and he pings me the next day. He's like oh my gosh, people who had never liked his post or commented on his post were coming up to him going Dude, you're crushing it on LinkedIn.
Speaker 4:I see it all the time. Call them lurkers, call them viewers, whatever term you want to use. Most people sit on the fringe and they watch. But what I find is, if they sit on the fringe and they watch and they go look at my profile to see who I am, when I take the initiative to reach out to them and say, hey, we should connect. Hey, do you want to get on a call, I get a lot more yeses because they're just, they're uncertain, they're looking, they're trying to figure out. But when I open the door and invite them to it, they're like yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2:So I want to hit. I want to get one more of Bob's comments, because he is, he's, he's. He's not shy as I thought he would be. He seems very shy and having opinions unlike what he's not a commenter of the year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but then I want to. I want to wrap up our show in the year with one final question, which I think is very appropriate for this year. But Bob's point here marketing is going to need the help of sales in 2024 to learn how to do one to one messaging more effectively, because their marketing's forte is one to many and he says then bring them into the fist, bump fold. But the idea here is that, as how does marketing help sales be more effective on their one to one piece, brandon, what do you think? Do you think that's legitimate?
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know, and I get marketing people get pissed off at me a lot and it's like look, but let's just be realistic. Marketing is conditioned like a bullhorn. They talk at people and that's what they've been good at. The problem is a lot of buyers these days they don't want to be talked at, they want to be talked with and that's what sales has traditionally done really well because they've had to focus on the relationship. So marketing can help sales. I mean again, this is why we built fist bump to do what it does.
Speaker 4:Marketing can definitely help sales, but they got to think we're changing that lens. We're not talking at people and we're not talking about our products and services. We're talking with our customers and we're talking about their challenges. We're talking about their goals. We're talking about things that they should be thinking about if they're not, and we're not offering them solutions. I mean, we can go back a decade plus and, whether you like his style or not, gary V has been saying this for a decade and it doesn't pertain to all companies. I get it, but give them everything, give them your secret sauce, tell them how to do things, because most of them are still going to come back to you and say will you do it for me?
Speaker 2:Or help me do it.
Speaker 4:Or help me do it. And that's the way that we become a trusted advisor in people's minds. Is you tell them how to do it, how to do it, how to do it, how to do it? Oh, would you like my help? And marketing is just not used to that motion. They're used to speaking at people and I think the marketers that are learning that, and then they're like one marketer who looms out well and has a sales force of 20 people. They can amplify their work 20X through the sales people by helping them. But if they're still siloed and oh, I'm doing this and here's my MQLs that sales doesn't care about because they've learned that the SAL is where everything goes to die, that's not efficient for the company.
Speaker 3:It comes down to being able to understand and acknowledge how the other party can be a resource.
Speaker 3:I'm really fortunate because I'm best buddies with marketing I always have been but I also know that I do things very different than other sellers.
Speaker 3:Marketing picked me to be the voice of the sales field, to meet with our CEO a month ago and can present to him, and so I've had a very great relationship with them because it's understanding of mutual goals and proactively seeking to make them winners, and we need each other. I think that's the key element and it's only going to get better with AI. I mean, I can write a lot of my own marketing copy for events that I do thanks to AI, but where I need marketing is they are a resource, they are access to resources, and if I create an event in a way that helps them win and they lean in in a way that helps me win or execute my sales plays or reach a very specific targeted audience, I can make very specific asks of them and they can go back and create things that are going to, in my hands, be even more valuable, and that's the key. That's where it turns into the match made in heaven.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that lens, that you have that filter, that you do Carson and everything, everything you talk about. What I always hear you say is help other people win. That's it.
Speaker 3:That's what it's all about. Whether it's your customer, it's your colleague, your partner, whatever it is, it's always about helping other people win. Sometimes it's helping my competition win. If I know I can't and I'm not the solution, austin leads my competitions way because I know that they'll reciprocate when the time is right. I think that's the key is, you know, be that, go giver.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, right, I love that reference.
Speaker 2:So final question for 2023. I think it's appropriate, given 2023. And I'll start with Carson. I'd like all of us to answer it. What we think, what do you think the most impactful one thing? What do you think AI will provide in 2024 that will most impact how we operate as sales?
Speaker 3:I'd have to go to the efficiency element, what it has given me and the way of time back in.
Speaker 3:You know people thought I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn before, but you know, being able to go back and, like you know, do a video or put together an event, and the fact that I can literally have a chat, gpt or a Microsoft co-pilot, go in and create a synopsis for these things in seconds flat just by feeding it Intel, that saves me 30 minutes, that I can go out and do more activities.
Speaker 3:The amount of Intel that it arms me with. You know I can find out key insights about customers and executives. The fact that I can use different tools, you know, like Humantic and Octopus, to go out and automate things. That's where it's really having an impact for me personally as a seller, but also just as a person. It's giving me so much time back to go out and do really more meaningful things knowing who to react and respond to, what intelligence to react and respond with, how to show up with value to my customers and my colleagues. You know, just nabbing Intel from here or there and funneling that to my team. It's just making me so much more effective because it's making me so much more efficient.
Speaker 2:Okay, efficiency. So Carson's efficiency, brandon, what do you think?
Speaker 4:Well, I think Carson tapped on this too. I mean, he led with efficiency, but he was also saying it elevates. It elevates his game, because I think AI can make us better. Ai can make us more consistent. One of the things that I heard Carson just say is that he could go into AI and say you know, help me create this.
Speaker 4:Well, whatever this is, a lot of times we didn't think of building those things before because we just went gosh, I can't do that. It would take too much time or I'd have to go to marketing and ask them to do this. I mean, like you know, creating. I mean, one of the things that we've been working on with our AI platform is the ability to allow salespeople to quickly create a competitive analysis with a with their competitor vendor, but targeted very specifically to the customer, and creating a report that gives them like here's, here's your compare and contrast.
Speaker 4:These are the talking points you should address that you're going to be stronger in. These are the talking points you should realize that you're going to be at a weakness in. Like before, people didn't necessarily go do that because it took too much time. We didn't have the time to go. Do it Now with a couple of buttons and a few things, you can get stuff like that and we can elevate the quality. And I think from a company perspective, from a C-suite perspective, it might mean that you have better, more equipped, elevated people and maybe you don't need as many. Or maybe, if you keep the same amount, they're actually just going to close many more deals because they're just better all around equipped to do their job.
Speaker 2:So you're saying elevate Carson's set efficiency. I'm going to bring a little bit of a different take on it, just on some of the things we're seeing. So a lot of the customers or prospects that we work with are manufacturers, distributors, people that sell large volumes of products, like literally maybe hundreds or thousands of SKUs, and they may do hundreds and thousands of quotes and orders a year. And what we're finding with AI is I'm going to use, if I can analyze that data, the amount of data that, the insights that we're getting back by analyzing that data and then asking the AI what to do. Okay, so basically, analyze the data, tell me what you're seeing and then tell me what I should do about it.
Speaker 2:And the answers that we're getting back are mind blowing, because a normal seller would never think about or never know to do because they couldn't analyze that quantity of data. And I really do believe that AI, while it will make things more efficient and it will elevate the game, like you said, one of the biggest things that it will do next year is help you analyze large amounts of data large amounts of something that you couldn't do on your own and provide guidance to what you should actually do about it that you wouldn't be able to do on your own, or any individual wouldn't do on your own. I think that's going to be a major shift and it's just and the AI, the intelligence of the AI, is just getting better and better all the time, so the results of that are going to get better and better.
Speaker 3:Bob had a good question. Is it keeping up with current events? You're running the AI's training date limitations. Try Bing Chat Enterprise.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or even ChatGPT now uses Bing right for real time data. That's on there, so you can. Yeah, and it continues to get more. And then the enterprise version. Are they selling the enterprise version again? I heard they were putting that on hold because there are too many people wanting it, or whatever.
Speaker 3:The flanks gates are open.
Speaker 2:So and then, yeah, as Bob says here he says I'm with Tom AI can find correlations that are buried deep in a data lake so you can create true leverage points with maximum effect. And this actually comes back full circle to what you were saying, carson, about the CRM. What we're seeing is that, if you have the right data in the CRM, the CRM acts as basically a little data, or maybe more than a little data lake for you that you can analyze, and the things that are coming back are quite remarkable that you wouldn't get out of a report or a dashboard or a traditional way of looking at those things. So I think, if the trends can be spotted.
Speaker 3:That's the real power. And then it goes back to the whole money ball effect being able to gravitate toward these signals that say this customer has a higher propensity to buy because they're doing this, this and this. And he is a dumb sales guy. I never would have seen that.
Speaker 2:The money ball reference. I think on not even go ahead, brian in even Carson, not not dumb guys.
Speaker 4:I know we joke around, we say we're done, but we wouldn't have taken, we wouldn't have had the time to go find that before, and now we can. I mean, I think that's the key right there. There's a lot of things that we know we could do and we should do, but we just don't have the time or the resources to do it. And with AI we will have time and resources because the engine can go do it like that.
Speaker 3:And if you use AI in a way that helps you find your buyer and create better, stronger relationships where you're adding value and earning that right to be the trusted advisor, that is how AI is going to be the difference maker and help you with.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, it's been a great year. Thank you, brandon and Carson, thank you everybody who has listened and downloaded and participated. We have some really good guests and I think Matt we haven't gotten him booked yet, but, speaking of Matt Dixon, he's offered to come back next year for kind of like a Q&A session on the Jolt Effect, so I think we're absolutely going to need to do that.
Speaker 4:And Tom, let's do you know holiday requests for everybody. If you like the show and if you're listening to it we assume you do Would you help us by making sure you subscribe on the podcast, share it with people that you think would find value in it? You know we're trying to jump up into a new category and get into that top 10%. It's not necessary, but it's something we want to do. It'd be kind of cool to say, hey, not only are we number one on Apple, but we've hit number one in some other platforms as well. So if we're adding value to you, that's our request. We'd really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it'd be great. All right, well, happy holidays. Merry Christmas to everybody. We'll be, as we said, best of with Brent Tillman next week. We'll be back the week after New Year's Carson.
Speaker 3:Until next year, happy social selling. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2:Hey, tom Burton here and I wanted to personally thank you for listening or watching today's episode of Social Selling 2.0. If you enjoyed or found value in today's show, please share with your friends and colleagues. Also, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast outlet. And please also subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our free online community at socialselling20.com. There you'll get free access to the latest social selling resources, training sessions, webinars and can collaborate with other social selling professionals. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.