In this episode, we explore the evolving landscape of B2B social selling, guided by the expertise of co-hosts Tom Burton, Carson Heady and Brandon Lee. We delve into a range of topics, from Microsoft's advanced sales techniques to strategies for thriving in the entrepreneurial arena. Our discussion is aimed at equipping you with contemporary, effective sales tactics and teaching you how to adeptly handle unforeseen challenges, such as guest rescheduling.
A significant focus of this episode is on transforming LinkedIn interactions into tangible business opportunities. We move beyond mere content posting to discuss how to effectively optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract potential clients. We also explore strategies for engaging with influencers through meaningful commentary and how to turn your feed into a dynamic platform for networking and discussion.
Further, we discuss the utilization of tools like Sales Navigator and chat GPT for enhancing thought leadership and relationship building. These techniques are presented as modern alternatives to traditional cold outreach methods, offering a more effective way to connect with prospects.
As the episode concludes, we provide a comprehensive guide for leading your buyer through their decision-making process. We discuss the importance of content in this context and reveal how AI is revolutionizing content creation, even for smaller teams with ambitious goals.
In this episode, we explore the evolving landscape of B2B social selling, guided by the expertise of co-hosts Tom Burton, Carson Heady and Brandon Lee. We delve into a range of topics, from Microsoft's advanced sales techniques to strategies for thriving in the entrepreneurial arena. Our discussion is aimed at equipping you with contemporary, effective sales tactics and teaching you how to adeptly handle unforeseen challenges, such as guest rescheduling.
A significant focus of this episode is on transforming LinkedIn interactions into tangible business opportunities. We move beyond mere content posting to discuss how to effectively optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract potential clients. We also explore strategies for engaging with influencers through meaningful commentary and how to turn your feed into a dynamic platform for networking and discussion.
Further, we discuss the utilization of tools like Sales Navigator and chat GPT for enhancing thought leadership and relationship building. These techniques are presented as modern alternatives to traditional cold outreach methods, offering a more effective way to connect with prospects.
As the episode concludes, we provide a comprehensive guide for leading your buyer through their decision-making process. We discuss the importance of content in this context and reveal how AI is revolutionizing content creation, even for smaller teams with ambitious goals.
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 7 and 8 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. Happy new year again.
Speaker 3:January 10th already.
Speaker 4:Resolutions are still going strong.
Speaker 3:Good, I'm telling you guys, we're going to blink and it'll be February 1st, and then we're going to blink again and it's going to be June.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's why it feels like we're ready, I'm getting ready for 4th of July already.
Speaker 2:It's a whirlwind. We've got our Christmas tree up.
Speaker 3:I was on a Zoom yesterday and somebody the Christmas Liz the Glennon from Tech Fluent. She saw our Christmas tree up and she said look, I'm not the person that puts it up the day after Thanksgiving. I put it up a week before Christmas, so it stays through the end of January. There you go, all right. The other thing is too.
Speaker 4:The reality is you should celebrate until after epiphany week. That gives me an excuse to keep mine up.
Speaker 2:Yes, for sure. When is epiphany week?
Speaker 4:Well, epiphany was this past weekend, but it's meeting here and there.
Speaker 2:You can do another week or two after that. It's fine, it's not a problem, all right Enough.
Speaker 3:I just put up my Christmas lights early already for this year.
Speaker 2:Well, that's because you know it's coming fast.
Speaker 3:All right, let's get to it. Yeah, welcome, if you're online listening.
Speaker 2:You may be wondering where our other guest is today, brandon Bernansen. We had a last minute reschedule so I don't think he's going to be with us today, but we're going to make this even bigger and better than maybe we were going to do before. I know.
Speaker 3:There you go. That's a call order.
Speaker 2:I have set the bar.
Speaker 4:James Buckley, see you out there. We're getting James booked for a future episode. Excited to have James on with us today. Good to see you.
Speaker 3:I saw him in the email. That's awesome. Thanks, James.
Speaker 2:I'm glad to see his Christmas lights came down, so anyway what we're going to do today.
Speaker 3:That's legit. That's like my mom. My mom is going to.
Speaker 4:You know, Christmas afternoon most likely, and everything's put away.
Speaker 2:Do you put something like this?
Speaker 3:Our house the 26th first thing in the morning, everything starts coming down. By noon Our house is deep Christmas night.
Speaker 2:Wow, we waited till last weekend, so I guess everybody has their tradition, got their thing.
Speaker 2:So what we're going to do today, carson, I think most people know you have a new role, or have a relatively new role at Microsoft and you, you know, basically had to start over when you, as it relates to building, using modern selling, how you were going to use social all of that You've said a number of times right, it wasn't like walking into a big company and everything was already being done for us already. And, brandon, you've kind of rebooted and restarted a new company, fist Bumps here in the last, you know, a couple months. So I thought it would be good for us, since we lost our other guests, to really talk about what you guys have been doing using modern selling, to kind of get something off the ground, and I don't think that's something we've talked a lot about. So I think there's going to be a much more maybe tactical episode than we've had in a while.
Speaker 2:But, carson, why don't we start with you? Tell us, you know, just quickly what is your new job and sort of what you came into, like what you know? Did you have anybody, or what were you starting with, or or whatever you know, kind of take us from the beginning.
Speaker 4:Yeah, look, I'm like the Liam Neeson of sales. I have a special set of tools. So you just put me into any situation and I figure it out, right?
Speaker 4:So you know it's amazing about your sales approach. You can look at your sales approach kind of like a snowball and over time it's going to become an avalanche because you pick up these, these pieces, and so that's why I think it's really important to know that in every sales role that you're ever in, you're going to look back on things that you learned and things that worked and didn't work in prior roles and you're going to parlay those things into present day. There's also going to be, obviously, the discovery of new playing field, new parameters, new people, and that's what I think this is what it's really all about. So I made a move. I've been coming up on 10 years here at this glorious company. The stock trajectory during my time here has been from 19 bucks a share to what we peaked at like 380 a few weeks ago. But I digress, I don't take full credit for that. I think the key element is really looking at.
Speaker 4:I've always been a community builder and I talk about that a lot on this show, because I think the key element is there are a lot of folks that invest with our organization, but it might be in one facet and there are multiple facets. There's also very creative ways that we can align and partner, especially around data. You know a lot of our organizations that we work with have very unique data and there are ways to partner with them to commercialize that. So, first off, there are things that are relevant from previous roles that I've done here but also at previous companies that I work with before Microsoft and so you start to really get a feel for what's the playing field look like. It's kind of like walking into a new baseball stadium. You know you're a baseball player, but you walk into a new stadium. You got to figure out the nooks and crannies, you got to understand the dimensions of the field. There's the money ball reference and you've got to get a feel for like what's the talk track, what's the play.
Speaker 1:It's a different set of customers.
Speaker 4:I now support many hundreds of the nonprofit organizations across the Americas. My prior team was in healthcare. I worked covering payers and providers, and then also med device in my time there, and you know the talk track is very different. While, though, 30% of my customers today are healthcare customers, and so what's interesting is I walked into a situation, a scenario, and what's fun is that the dollars that this team makes we're the only sales team in corporate, external and legal affairs. We're the only sales team in Microsoft philanthropies the dollars we make actually are funneled toward Microsoft's philanthropic efforts. So I get to do what I love and for the greater good of humanity and wildlife, and you know nature, etc. So that's very fulfilling. But to your question, when you walk into these situations, first you got to understand the team. Who are the players, what are their unique strengths and superpowers?
Speaker 4:I spend a lot of time just asking to be a fly on the wall, asking to be plugged in so I can listen and learn. I remember when I first started and Azure was just really coming into prominence, and I would literally just sit and ask the technical architects to let me be a fly on the wall so I could understand their talk track well enough so I could deliver it myself. I'm not super technically savvy, but what I am is a door opener and knowing how to go out and connect. Now, in my prior role I'd spent a lot of time going into all of our marketing tools and what's interesting, you know, I think a lot of times in organizations you think, hey, you work for a big company, you've got all this stuff at your fingertips. We don't always and it's not always that our systems talk to each other, so some of these leads might be disparate. I may go out and find a pocket of leads here that might have downloaded a white paper or attended a webinar a year ago or whatever may have you. They've opted into marketing and unfortunately, we're not doing anything proactively to reach out to those folks. Now, if I, as a seller, reach out to one or two or five or 10 of those people, I may go over the room. But, as we've talked about on this show the modern selling approach, what we want to do is make sure that we are capturing and mastering modern selling at that. We're capturing all of these customers and engaging them, inviting them to something. We do a lot of our own homegrown webinars where we're passively educating and we are seeing signals of who's attending what, and with several hundred customers, that's exceptionally helpful.
Speaker 4:My first observation was that we had a really high caliber, high quality team. My second observation was that we had a very healthy business, but the sky was the limit when it came to really strategically partnering with some of our top nonprofits. Furthermore, there was a lot of opportunity where it's impossible if I'm an AE and I've got 70, 80 customers, I can't talk to them all the time. It's like a stock portfolio You're going to invest. That's one of the things you can control where you're investing and what you're investing and you're obviously going to gravitate towards the folks that are going to make the most money for you. So there is a subset of customers we're not talking to regularly enough.
Speaker 4:I needed to know all the players, the talent that I could do the webinars with, the talent that I could construct webinars and newsletters with working closely with marketing, working closely with technical architects, but then also our partner ecosystem. You know, I know you guys know folks like Rob Fegan and others. They've introduced me into partners that specialize in the nonprofit space and I've onboarded them not only to calling on some of our customers that we're not able to engage with as often as we want to, but also doing webinars with them and looking at what works. I can't tell you, I can't stress enough how important it is to look at what's already working. I've said on this show many, many times and I'll say it until I'm blue in the face I am a student and I will study what works, replicate those things, find a way to shine a light, believe it or not.
Speaker 4:Nonprofits, much less customer executives anywhere. They don't want to always listen to sales guys like us talking about how great our solutions are. If they're able to hear it from a customer. Appear in the industry, appear in the market. That might be what prompts them to do something. I was sending our vice chair and president's book out to CISOs last year and that was actually working and getting them to help them understand our security portfolio far better than me or my team just calling on them and trying to get them to take a look at where we were on Gartner reports.
Speaker 4:I think the key element is how can I get a feel for what the playing field looks like? Who are the players, what are the resources, what message is going to resonate with customers and, furthermore, making sure that we elevate and up level the conversation. I found that a lot of us at a tech company, a lot of times you're beholden to IT and procurement conversations, but real transformation happens with line of business, finding ways that we can have a very targeted message about how we can uniquely partner that will resonate with the CEO, the CFO, things that will help enhance their mission, things that will help them to enhance what they can deliver to their constituents. Trying to think about all of those things. I'm 40, I guess four months in now. I think the key element is how are we doing?
Speaker 4:What's funny is I wrote off into the sunset in my last role after we run fiscal year July to June, my first quarter. I hit 120% of my number and had a really solid payout. We won a big dynamics deal. I actually outperformed that my first quarter and I can't take any credit for that. I'm putting a lot of these things in place with the team, listening to a lot of signals, getting to know the team, surveying the team on what works and what doesn't, and also spending a lot of time investing in their career. But I think the key element is the best is yet to come. We're putting these things in place that will help us more effectively scale, and we're creating better quality relationships with customer executives that are going to pay of the way to a bright future.
Speaker 2:So you came in to an existing team right In your situation. It wasn't like there was nobody there. Roughly how many people were there when you came in Last show?
Speaker 4:There's a few hundred folks that work in this organization. All up You're about 40 that touch my specific territory.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you were kind of coming in and looking to go how do we go from good to great, right From what? We were there and I wanted to. Brandon, I want to get yours because you're a little bit of a different dynamic, but I'm a Tara had a comment here saying this is so relevant. I'm going to be starting, or potentially starting, a new position. I'm going to be starting something new. If you have some questions that you would like us to answer about this, please put them in here. We'll make sure we cover them. But, Brandon, you're obviously didn't go into an organization with 40 people and already kind of starting on your way. You kind of started a little bit from scratch. What did you do, or what was what was, what were you doing and what did you realize you had to do as you kind of rebooted? Fist bumps.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, first of all, I'm jealous. Carson walked into an organization with a hundred people on this team and all that comes included with it. I walked into a meeting or a team with me and Daniel. Yeah, you know, I think I think, when it comes to go to market, we're in a really new place Now.
Speaker 3:I've been talking about social. I've been talking about LinkedIn, social selling, been paying really attention to it, especially for the last four years, so I already had this inkling that we're going to have a bent towards using leveraging LinkedIn. But even then it's. I don't just believe in cold calls and we actually don't use a whole lot of email outside of our monthly or a weekly newsletter, which is very thought leadership. But I had to come in, look at it and say what is the best way for us to really start getting ourselves in the conversations with our ideal customers so that we can learn and we can become an opportunity? And so really, we started looking at where and who within LinkedIn do we need to be and what do we need to be showing up with in order to start opening some of those doors. And then, once we got there, then we got into the tactics Right and I think I want to pause right there, because a lot of times we hear, oh, social is so passive, and if I stopped with what I just said, it would feel very passive.
Speaker 3:I believe, oh, that's great, you want to know who you go talk to, and all that. But for me, that's a modern way of going, like not just what conferences or trade shows do we go to? Where do we want to go put our booth? With LinkedIn, it's like thinking about that 365 days a year. Where do we want to own that space? Where do we want to raise our flag and be a part of that conversation? Who are the influencers in the space that we need to be building relationships with? And then, how do we go about showing up every day tactically that we can leverage all this LinkedIn based activities? That actually is outbound. It's actually prospecting. It's not. We're not just sitting around waiting and Carson and Tom, we've talked about this forever. It's not. Hey, we post a few times a week and then PO's magically start flying out of the sky in our LinkedIn inbox. No, it's about how we leverage these tools then to be more proactive, without bound. And where we landed and for Tara and anyone else, it's posting is great, commenting is better, because the more we comment we get in front of more people. So we've got James Buckley here hanging out with us.
Speaker 3:When JB posts stuff, he gets hundreds and thousands of people that engage with this content. So if we go and I do this with Jeff Winter, I do this with Jared McKee I get notified when they comment, when I'm sorry, when they publish, and I try to get in there pretty quickly and comment, because then all the hundreds and thousands of people that come behind me that read and go looking through the comments, I'm right there, I'm saying something relevant, hopefully I'm being a thought leader, hopefully I'm not saying stupid stuff, hopefully. But then all those other people see it. But then in this case, like JB and I can't wait for him to be on the show when he says thoughtful commentary matters is when Jeff Winter engages with my comments or Darren engages with my comments. There's given me more legitimacy. More people that follow him are seeing it.
Speaker 3:And then here's the key thing for me that I absolutely love. It's like my favorite new cold outreach quote, unquote cold outreach tactic. All these people are going to look at my profile like, oh, darren talked to this guy. Who is he? You know headlines are good and everything. They go they start looking at the profile.
Speaker 3:Some of them send connection requests, a lot of them don't. But I go in and look at who viewed my profile twice a day and I'm looking and the people that I wanna know. If I'm not connected, I'm sending them a connection request. Hey, you looked at my profile, I looked at yours. I think we should be connected and I'm top of mind because I do it every day and anyone that's looked at my profile who I'm already connected to and they are a potential customer or somebody that I could have a good conversation with. Now I'm sending them a message saying hey, you looked at my profile today, I was looking at yours. We don't know each other very well. Let's have a get to know each other. Call and right, there has been producing two, three, four zooms per day for me and it means I don't need to go do 100 cold calls that are gonna produce no returns.
Speaker 2:So, brandon, what I hear you saying is obviously you came in brand new, right, and you're like I gotta figure out what my patch is. Who are my people right? Who do I wanna be building community with, building network with? You did your homework and then you went out and again not passively, but with a process. I like what James said there. If there's no process, if it's passive, right, and basically, sorry, james, if something happened there, because all of a sudden it said he was blacklisted. I don't know what happened there. I apologize if something occurred there. Anyway, the now I've brought up Tara's comment again. Anyway, what I was saying, brandon, was, is that? So then you went in, oh, now we lost Brandon. I'm here. Okay, we're back again. My goodness, now I'm in the middle.
Speaker 4:Yeah, now you're in. The middle.
Speaker 2:So I have no idea what I was talking about throughout all of this. But anyway, brandon, you were saying is that you really had to go in and establish yourself and then start building the network, build through commenting, get yourself exposed and over and over and it starts to create a flywheel eventually across all the things that you were doing and you're seeing the fruits of that labor with three or four healthy conversations every day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and yesterday and so, by the way, I saw all the comments disappeared. I had a big red box in the corner and then my whole thing rebooted. So that's what I experienced. But yeah, and it comes down to things like I can't remember now, yesterday somebody looked at my profile. We had been connected. I sent a message and said hey, you know, you took a look at my profile. That's awesome, thank you. I looked at yours. We should let's do a get to know. You call, we've been connected for a while. We don't really know each other and responded immediately. Now, this is a CEO of a company that on LinkedIn it says between 500 and 1000 employees, so not tiny little like oh, I've got nothing better to do, ceo, right. He sent me a message back that said oh my gosh, I feel like we know each other. I've been following you for so long.
Speaker 4:I love that.
Speaker 3:Right, and I knew who he was before this, but we've never been on a call. I commented a few times on things, but that is the strategic way that we're going to market because, you know, seven years ago I started a company and we did the traditional, we did the call center, we did cold calls, we did cold emails and, honestly, we got our butts handed to us.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to bring up a couple. And then, carson, I want to go back over to you on this. I don't know what the hell happened here. All of a sudden, the comments just started disappearing out of here.
Speaker 4:They are so good that it just overloaded the system.
Speaker 2:I guess You've got.
Speaker 4:Dominic Testo out there. He's the master of the sales story. We got to get him on the show. So yeah, bob the master commenter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think his comment here about go to customer, which I think exactly is what you can sort of go to market, is exactly, brandon, what you described and I also like what Dominic says here. I always say I've never received a PO in my LinkedIn direct message, ever. I don't know if I have either. Carson, you ever had one in your direct message? Maybe that should be a 2024 goal.
Speaker 4:No, but I've gotten over a billion dollars of landed revenue that never would have happened without LinkedIn. And I'll tell you this like you know, everything that Brandon is articulating is so key, like you know, as an offshoot and as an extension. After you know how do I get started, you know, then you start to really think about how can I intentionally be a thought leader in this new space. Who are the people that I need to be connected with? And you know the beauty of some of the tools that we have now, like Sales Navigator, to be able to go out and I have over 400 customers. I can go out and ring the bell on every one of them. So if they are page mix opposed, their CEO makes a post, I can follow their. You know their top folks. I can also look at top folks in the industry.
Speaker 4:There's a lot of podcasts that are done in my sub vertical, in my industry. My VP is very prolific and does a lot of podcast appearances and so, thinking of intentionally about how I can be a thought leader in this space, I will very often take his appearances on these shows. I'll feed the transcript into chat GPT and I'll have it write me a synopsis that I can very easily put out as opposed promoting that show, but also with insightful keywords that are going to get folks to be attracted to that going out and joining groups that are very specific to that. Now we could wax ad nauseam, wax poetic ad nauseam, about the value of groups, and I think it's ebbed and flowed over the years. But if you're in groups in bulk and there are a lot of groups that are able to very quickly go through and share some of these posts to, you'll get some engagements, you'll get some hits. So that might be something that we unpack a little bit on another episode.
Speaker 4:But the other element would be to thinking intentionally about the relationships that you're going to need in order to be successful, and what that message should look like.
Speaker 4:Now, some of us work for companies where the plays are prepackaged it's hey, this is what we're trying to push, this is what we're marketing, this is what we're selling, this is the product, this is the solution. I'm a big believer. You know. I observed what works and what doesn't. When I see something that doesn't work or I hear a problem from leadership, I always try to go in and address that. And you know, I always heard early on like hey, we got to get into the other rooms of the house, we got to get these line of business relationships, and so that's where I started to look to LinkedIn to be able to get these folks at bulk. And so I've crafted a message. I will reach out to executives on LinkedIn all day, every day, and get meetings because I show up adding value. But the other element is how do you execute the play? And my thought process is go for the relationship first. It isn't about sending something that's hey, this very specific widget might be pertinent to you because of XYZ. I would rather go out and get the relationship first, find out about them, show up with some value, make a very strategic introduction that I think a lot of people aren't necessarily thinking about, because they're thinking about their key metrics and their widgets and how they get paid, which is fine, but it's a means to an end. If I go out and I have a very strategic relationship and I express what we as a company would be willing to invest in in order to earn their business, and we make strategic introductions, create community, get them connected with other nonprofit, in this case, leaders that are maybe mutual customers of ours or whatever the case may be, those are the types of game-changing things that make the situation ripe to do business with us Because, let's face it, they could do business with a lot of our competitors.
Speaker 4:They are, in some cases and that's true of everyone watching your competition they're going to be strong at certain things. They're going to be weak at certain things. You're going to be strong at certain things. You're going to be weak at certain things. Sometimes they will do business with you because you spend the time investing, you demystify what your company can bring in a way of unique value and you go out and pursue that. So use all the tools at your disposal to map out the playing field. Go diligently after the relationships that will matter.
Speaker 4:We created a program last year called Plays that Get you Paid, and it was geared toward every single way of executing a play, not just send an email once to invite them to a webinar. But how can I live and breathe this all year? If this is an important thing, like Microsoft security, how can I invite customer executives to be part of a community where we're sharing ideas and learning from each other, whether or not they buy? Those are the types of things that I've seen beget results and ringing the bell for these customer executives on LinkedIn, so that I can see every time they post and I can comment and engage. I've gotten CEO meetings that way that nobody else could get, and that's why there's so much value in what Brandon articulated.
Speaker 3:And I love in the comments sorry, tom, you got Raul saying the most important ingredient is create trust, and listening to the customer Like that's our older, our non-modern, if you will motion was active listening. Be a good listener, whether it was a networking event, in a meeting, wherever it was, listen, listen, listen. The digital version of that is commenting. They don't know that we listened to them, that we read their posts unless we comment and it gives us. It's even better than just listening because we actually get to join that conversation and I like what Juan Pablo wrote on there too about add value in each interaction maybe only 10% related to your product.
Speaker 2:Well and it's the way to a buyer's heart. And, brandon, the three or four Zoom meetings that you're doing every day now or today are based around what you've got off of social. I assume those are not product conversations, or you certainly don't start that way right. They're more of a conversation to first of all get to know, build the connection, build the relationship and even see if it makes sense to have a conversation or, as Carson just pointed out, maybe there's some other way you could help them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think you know Carson and I do things slightly different. We use the same tools and we use them even very similar ways, but slightly different because you know he's got a much larger team, he's got a much larger marketing department, he's got a name Microsoft. I don't have a name with a lot of people and so for me it's that conversation is number one. I'm selective about who I ask to do those meetings with. They are my ICP or they're what I call ICP related. There's somebody that even you know goes up to my ICP, to the people I ultimately want to talk to, or they're around them or they're an influencer in that space. So I'm very selective, first and foremost, about who I ask. Then I go into that meeting, similar to what Juan Pablo was saying. I go into it to meet them to. Carson says it all the time to serve them. I go and I ask a bunch of questions.
Speaker 3:You guys heard me talk about how to win friends and influence people is influence me in doing this pre-linked in. I did it in networking meetings Ask about them, learn about them, ask how you could serve them. You know, learn to go give her way, like, okay, who's your who if I was to give you a referral, can you give me specifics who that person is, so I know who to send your way Right? Shout out to Bob Berg with that.
Speaker 3:All of that I bring into the zooms and at some point they'll say like, well, brandon, what do you do? And I got a little five, six, second little thing I say because I don't want to talk about me very much in that meeting anyway Say, oh, this is what we do. And if they take it and run with it into tell me more, I'm in, that's great, I'll tell you more. And they go oh, you know what we were talking about. That I want to introduce you to. Great, I'll run with it. I'm not going to not sell when I'm invited to sell, but in that first meeting I'm not. I am intentionally not trying to sell, I'm seeking to serve, I'm seeking to learn, I'm seeking to build trust and I know if I pull out my product in my brochure, my trust goes all out the door and it's going to be really, really hard to get back in front of that person.
Speaker 4:That is an under you element. The no sell meeting yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's the thing is for me too is I like doing it and it's fun. I'm talking to more people and I'm actually getting more opportunities. I'm getting more referrals for opportunities all because I'm not selling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think I mean I'm selling by not selling and I, you know, I you kind of fill me in a lot on what you're, what's happening with these calls. I would say, at least every day. You're always telling me hey, I got introduced to so and so through this call, or this led to something else, or there's some, there was some very positive outcome or opportunity that was created, even if it wasn't a direct opportunity with the person that you were talking about. I mean, I think that's daily.
Speaker 4:You mean, you guys have conversations without me?
Speaker 2:Oh, shoot, sorry, I didn't mean to say anything about that.
Speaker 3:I was going to say we broke the throttle rules, but I don't know if I should say that on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Carson, let's unpack the plays to get you paid a bit more, like let's take it back and really, what's involved in that? How does it work, and is that something new you brought into the new organization, or is that something you were using before, that you brought over?
Speaker 4:Yeah, actually I called it something different in the New York and it was another solution that was born out of a problem In a previous role. Some of the feedback I get from my team a lot was hey, I mean, these guys had so many customers and they were competing for time with some of their specialists, so they'd have sales specialists for each of the different product areas and they would be aligned to maybe multiple account executives. You know some of the account executives. I mean they would need something moving on a smaller account. But if this specialist was aligned to this seller who had some small ops and they were aligned to this seller who had some big ops that were going to send them to president's club if they could sell it, where do you think they're going to spend their time? So the goal of this was called plays to get you paid, because I spent time diligently meeting with all the specialist teams to understand look, if I'm going to master and my team's going to master, getting you introduced into executives and team up conversations that fit into a certain category, what would they be? What is going to most get you paid? We had over 50 solution plays. Nobody's going to possibly master executing 50 solution plays right. But if I go to a specialist and say, look, if I'm going to master getting you conversations for three to five, because you know I love prospecting more than I love eating lunch, what would that look like? Because lunch is for wimps, gordon, gekko, and I think the key element was there. I asked every one of them to send me their comp structure, send me your comp plan so that I can study that and I can understand. Okay, if I'm going to knock this metric out of the park, that's going to make my specialist happy. So how can I earn more time and earn more attention from my specialist? So that's where it was really born.
Speaker 4:But when you execute a play, I found a lot of time. People would think about executing the play, as I'm going to send this OFTE email file to X number of customers out of my CRM and then I'm going to pat myself on the back because I executed the play. And, bob, you're not alone. I ate lunch today too, and I think the key thing here is you can't just run a play once. If you think that this is important to your year, you've got to live and breathe it all year, and we talk a lot on this show about what you can control. If I reach out to five 10 executives, I can't control whether or not they're going to respond. In fact, odds are they probably won't, because, while, yes, sometimes having the logo on my back opens doors, sometimes it keeps them shut, especially when I'm trying to reach out to a chief data officer or maybe a chief marketing officer who isn't thinking about me and tries to push me to IT.
Speaker 4:So I've got to get really creative, and so I think where I've really tried to gear this is how can I enhance my probability of getting the meeting? How can I sometimes passively educate so that, when the time is right, the customer will engage? Because we know we live in a buyer-centric world right now and the mastery of modern selling comes down to making sure that we're adding value all the time and that when the customer is ready, we're top of mind, so they're reaching out to us. So what I started doing is I would go into every single tool I possibly could to get leads of customers that had opted into marketing, and it would enhance what was in our CRM. I mean, I saw situations, tom, where I might have five 10 customers at one organization in my CRM, but I was able to go out to our marketing tools and find 100 more that we weren't even talking to and they had opted into marketing.
Speaker 4:So now, when I do my custom-made newsletter that I'm building with marketing, or I do my weekly webinar series that I created and brought here, now we're touching the masses. Before I walked into a situation where my account reps might have had 50, 100, 150 leads. Now each of them has 1,000 leads apiece in just three months of working on this, and we're doing webinars that get three, four, five, six, 700 people, that show up to all of them. And that's the thing. That's how you go from good to great. And so plays that get you paid was born out of a problem. We weren't getting enough attention or the attention and the love that we wanted from our specialist team, so we built a plan that was geared toward getting them paid, so they were immediately bought in. It was built around their input and it was executing what they agreed were their best plays to perfection throughout the year, not just one and done so, very data-driven approach.
Speaker 2:So what I'm hearing you say is that those plays are all based around content or maybe content's not the best word but relevant information, relevant solutions, relevant, the most relevant that would move the needle with your audience, and you worked with the sales specialist to find out what gets them turned on, basically. And then, rather than going and saying buy my stuff, you went at them with the things that are the most likely going to move the needle, through a combination of webinars, newsletters and so forth, because you know those will get the best results. Is that a fair?
Speaker 4:To a degree. So there's a number of ways that we execute it, and one of it is absolutely it's content, and I may go find some super smart technical architect within my organization and we do a webinar together and we passively educate the masses. That could be one step, but one of the other ones is very important, and I think Bob made this comment in the chat that I think is super, super poignant the key with adding value, as he says, is understanding what the customer values, not what we think they might value. Now let's go back to the snowball to have a lanchinology too. I've learned a lot over the years of what really resonates with the customer executives and when you think about what introduction that I might be able to make that would be a value to them, what peer in the industry might be a value to them that I could make an introduction of.
Speaker 4:I also, 30% of my customers today are in healthcare. Well, I spent the last four years of my time at this company working with healthcare clients, and so I know a lot of these electronic medical record companies. I know a lot of these med device companies. I know a lot of these provider companies. I also know our internal resources, our chief research officer, our chief medical officer, and God love them. I mean, my team wasn't inherently thinking about these introductions because they were living in this world. I came from outside of this world with this knowledge and these relationships, and so think about how you as a person can uniquely add value to your customer. And so there's a lot of value if I reach out to a customer executive that fits into healthcare in my current space and guess what? I can introduce them to a person that's of prominence in my organization that can help them with other introductions.
Speaker 4:Or to think about how, as an example, healthcare nonprofits are using artificial intelligence right now to enhance their operations or to free up time for their caregivers, all of those types of things.
Speaker 4:So I guess, at the end of the day, you've got to think about and that is a very valid way to ultimately execute the play because, as I believe, deals are a byproduct of relationships Go after the relationship. First, think about how do I uniquely add value for this customer and don't worry about what it's ultimately going to look like or boil down to have that no-sell meeting. Understand their unique heartburn and pain, and then think about what relationships could I create for this person that could add value. That is what is ultimately going to put you on a path to success. Then we invite them in to do an executive briefing of some sort, and then that's when we can start to brainstorm and strategize around all the things that are possible. We can hear directly from their executives what they're working on, what is their roadmap, what does their vision look like? What's working, what's not, what relationships would be a benefit to them?
Speaker 4:what might be some other business lines that they could open up. That would be revenue for them, that we could empower and enable them to do that. We could just be a catalyst for that. Because, again, my competition can do a lot of the things that I can do, but at the same time they don't have me, they don't have my resources, they don't have my relationships that I can bring to my customer. And so that's how you wanna think about, how you can also be that unique differentiator of value for your customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that makes it's way more multi-dimensional. Brandon, what's your take on that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, you know. So at a smaller business level, I've got it. I think, the exact same way. That's what's really cool about Carson Eye. I don't have the resources and I don't have the budget, so I do look at it slightly different. But one of the things that I created is the show Right, and it's prior to our three show. I had my other show. You guys came along and like, well, I can do it much better with these guys. So, but the show has been part of my strategy because, number one, now I could use Carson's voice, I could use Tom's voice and thoughts.
Speaker 3:I take the show, we turn them into shorts or little you know, 90 second to two or three minute clips and that gives me a piece of content that I can share with anybody. That is part of telling a story about what value we bring. So it brings it to them. I'm obviously, in a way, promoting who we are and what we do, but I'm doing it in this video format and it's not always my voice. Like we've got shorts from when Mike Weinberg was with us, when Anthony and Irina was with us, when Larry Levine was with us, you know, when Brent Tillman was with us. We have these shorts that I get to leverage their popularity, their expertise, their name put it into a short because they were on our show and they go share it with anyone. And that's been my lower budget version of, that's my lower budget version of being able to duplicate or replicate what Carson does. Carson, you're a bad man.
Speaker 4:You have a private chat and I had an inside joke. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:It was a good one.
Speaker 4:Obviously, I couldn't keep my game face. Oh, I agree with your acting background. I mean you'd be able to keep that straight face, but I, I, you know.
Speaker 3:I actually that was so good I didn't want to. It totally threw me, I mean we need to do another take.
Speaker 2:We need to do another take on this, brandon, so you can keep your first yeah, you've seen bloopers.
Speaker 3:I mean, let me, okay, I'm in. Yeah, I'm really digging on Juan Pablo today, adding all this stuff in here. This is awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no again, value is from their point of view. Sometimes and I think this ties into Carson both of what you're saying sometimes you need to educate, sometimes you need to nurture, sometimes you need to make an introduction. I like the aspect of the plays that bring you, I'm sorry, the plays that the plays that get you paid the plays that get you paid.
Speaker 2:I like the fact that it's. We talk a lot about being trusted advisors. Right, what you're talking about is putting basically putting some meat on the bone with that on. Well, what the hell does that really mean? Yeah, and let's think through it and not just go hey, I'm a trusted advisor, but let's really think through how we actually accomplish that.
Speaker 4:Because that's the thing, the whole impetus of plays that get you paid is I go to my specialist teams and it's I need you to arm me as the door opener with what are the conversations that are gonna ultimately max out your paycheck this year. And now I need to go out and create them and I part of that is mapping out. We have a relationship heat map that we go out and we say like is this a green light, like very lucrative, positive relationship? Is it yellow or it's developing? Is it red? Where it's a detractor relationship? And I'm a big believer. We've got 15 C level and BP level titles that are tied to all of our corporate plays that come out from marketing right Now. I'm a believer in I play the numbers game right. So for 15 executives, I feel like I need to reach out to 10x of that in order to be successful.
Speaker 4:I've talked on this show about how the biggest deal I've signed, I reached out to over 500 people in that one organization that we're director and above over the two years that I supported them. So it's playing that numbers game. Now the other piece to that is not just the relationship heat map, but how am I tracking how I'm executing some of these plays at those organizations. I'm not gonna bring up every single bit of every single play. Every single time I have a conversation with the new executive at that organization. So I talked to hundreds of people at that big deal, that nine figure deal that I signed right Hundreds of people. But I didn't bring up every solution in our bag of tricks every time I talked to them. I had a lot of no cell meetings, talked a lot about what resources we had. I listened to what fit in their purview and some of it is telling stories about. Oh wow, that sounds similar to what we did at this other organization where we helped them create an application where they could help schedule their nurses at sister organizations so that they could optimize scheduling. This one was over staff, this one was under staff. Now they were able to communicate and they knew where they needed to send staff. That resonates.
Speaker 4:Those are the types of things and that's where, to Juan Pablo's comment, that's where you figure out how do you educate? When do you educate? When do you nurture? When does it make sense to make an introduction to somebody? But a lot of those after that no cell meeting, a lot of those. I'm making an introduction to somebody, or we're setting up a next step where someone else is gonna be a part of the dialogue. I'm not the smart guy in the room. I am the orchestrator that facilitated the quarterback, and that's where we, as sellers, need to think about it. You don't wanna be the hero. You want your customer to be the hero. You want that resource that you bring in to be a hero and to win. And if all these other folks win and your customer wins, you will win by proxy, and that's what it's based on.
Speaker 3:You know A1. Pablo, while you're here, take a look at my post that I planned for tomorrow. It's going to resonate with you, you're going to like it and it's totally a different way that you're expecting. But I can't wait for you to see it.
Speaker 2:So, brandon, do you have any more thoughts as it relates to what you're doing, again, much in a much smaller situation and a much smaller piece here, on taking what Carson was just talking about with the plays and applying that to you. Know, I think we even call it the Yellowbrick Road, or I call it. The Yellowbrick Road is maybe a small piece of that. I like where you're going, carson, where it's a bit more multidimensional, Like my Yellowbrick Road concept is more linear. But I like where you're going, sort of multidimensional and taking it to another level, and I think we should do another show on this. I think this is where AI can really benefit us and our ability to do this more multidimensional play. But anyway, I went off base. Brandon, do you have anything that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think similar to that. I'll see you later, Carson. Is this something we said Remlins today?
Speaker 4:Technical issues today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you just want to put Brandon back in the middle.
Speaker 4:I wonder if, like we're glitching because somebody's got an issue with our new rebranded show, it's like that's possible, that's possible.
Speaker 2:We could have some gremlins or something out there.
Speaker 3:Gremlins- yes, we're getting our codes getting hacked and attacked, yeah, so now I kind of lost track. But yeah, I think, look, it doesn't matter if you have Carson's size and budget of Microsoft or you're startup and small. This concept of whether a Yellowbrook Road, this Omni Channel AI, has given us a lot of power and, using our trained models where we can take things like our show pod, our show transcript, and turn it into lots of different types of posts with very specific goals. With it, we could take transcripts and turn it into messages that we're sending to specific people. We're using, in our case, our digital studio to do video where our team is chatting with me and Daniel and Butch and other people on the team about what are they thinking and what are they doing, what are they learning, and turning these into short little thought leadership videos that not only when we post it we have copy around it, but then we also can turn the transcript from it into multiple written posts with images. And we're creating content, more content than I've ever created in my career, and I've got the smallest team I've ever led. Right now, at least from startup standpoint, we're a super small team.
Speaker 3:So I think that thinking about the buyer's journey really truly believing and I think this is a mistake that a lot of companies are making right now and that we give lip service to. The buyer journey has changed and buyers do things differently. And then, after we're done saying that and high-fiving and acting like we feel good about ourselves, then we go right back to our very linear focus actions and then wonder why we're not resonating with buyers and why they're not responding to the things that we're doing. Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways of just that. Everything Carson says. I think through and I go oh, we kind of do that this way and we kind of do that this way. It's just at a different scale.
Speaker 3:So, whether it's Tara going into a new role, I mean, like Chris Dunn, who's a friend of the show and friend of ours, he sent me a text I think it was yesterday of a screen capture of somebody that messaged him on LinkedIn and said oh my gosh, I feel like I know you, I've been seeing your posts and message went about his son and they were scheduling a call to get to know each other. Chris doesn't have a show Like, I love our show and we use a lot, but Chris doesn't have a show. He's just showing up, committed to publishing every day, committed to learning how to create better content that gets more engagement, committed to commenting on strategic people, especially influential people, people that influence his ICP. And he's just working it and he's learning and he's making advances, and that's what we need to keep doing, because this is changing so quickly and you wrench in AI. You know, if you're scared of AI, you better get over your fear and do it anyway. What is that? You could be scared, but do it anyway.
Speaker 4:I think, at the end of the day, you've got to look at all of the tools, methods and mechanisms by which you can serve everybody that is in your sphere. So, yes, I work in a large organization. Now what's funny is like the group that I'm in today is almost like a startup within this organization. We're outside of the commercial business, which is actually a lot more fun right now because we're building something building foundation. This team has had a few different iterations over the years, but we have a very dedicated mission. Juan Pablo said something in the comments that resonated with me about how some of the things that I was describing doing internally that he does externally with vendors.
Speaker 4:And I think that's an important point to call out. In your position, sometimes, and especially if you work for a bigger company, you may be in a situation where you can, in essence, create a sales army that's out there almost working on your behalf. You know we have a very robust Microsoft partner ecosystem, right, and I think some sellers unfortunately get very territorial with their market. So when a partner is reaching out to a customer, they get offended, they get upset. I say bring them all on. And the reason why is because if you're out there and if you're able to create, as a partner or vendor, a better relationship than I can, then my role may shift very dramatically. And now my role is how can I bet big on this partner winning?
Speaker 4:I've had situations in the past where I had a team that was very, very successful early on because we were managing to set up situations where we were in essence taking, where, if I got a lead and it wasn't something that was pertinent to our business, I was giving it to my competition, I was giving it to a partner that could handle that business.
Speaker 4:And you know what happened is then when those people got the leads that they couldn't handle but I could. It came my way. So sometimes, even just investing in a relationship that may or may not pan out I mean, I did it with no expectation of reciprocity. I was making these investments but they ended up coming back multiple fold, and so I think the key element is it doesn't always rely on you having the relationship or you having the best relationship. You can invest in these relationships and you can help other people win and ultimately it can come back your way. I can also tell you so many stories about times where I couldn't do business with an executive at the time and the organization they were in, but something changed within their leadership, or somebody went to another organization and now, all of a sudden, we could work together. That's why it's so important that you're always finding ways to invest in relationships.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and as we wrap up here, I want to touch on something you know our new title has buyer centric right and a buyer centric age and we talk a lot about the buyer likes to be anonymous, right. The buyer likes to do their own research. They don't want to talk to salespeople, so to speak. But everything we've talked about today removes as kind of a anonymous zone buster. It makes it easier for the prospect or the buyer to want to engage with us earlier, rather than wait and engage, you know, after they've done their own research. We're making it we're not forcing them to engage with us, we're making it easy for them to engage and they want to engage with us. And so there the anonymous zone starts your mic went off, Tom.
Speaker 3:The gremlins are back.
Speaker 2:How about now You're back? No, as I said, it kind of it causes the anonymous zone, where the buyer is in that anonymous area, to either evaporate completely or significantly reduce, which is what we all want. And because the anonymous zone is where we feel like we have the least control, we have the least visibility and, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 3:It's you know, carson Carson uses the term anything I can do to increase my probability of success, and that's, I think, what a strategic and consistent social activity or plan increases the probability of success. Success in what? Getting the call when you ask for it, getting the connection when you ask for it, that's what does that look like. Well, the Chris Dunn example I gave you a guy that said, oh gosh, I feel like I know you from your post. Hey, his posts dramatically increased the probability of that guy saying yes, and it accelerates it, in my opinion. Right, it accelerates it because when you ask and they already feel like they know you, they're like, yeah, let's get on a call. Why wouldn't I? I didn't. I saw your post about your kids and you and playing in the snow. I saw that you know I commented on it or whatever. Why wouldn't? They were already going down that path of the know, like and trust before we ever have a first conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely. So, as we wrap up, Brian, Brian, real quick.
Speaker 3:Brian, Galicia jumped in on a congrats.
Speaker 4:Brian is now a LinkedIn top voice as of this week.
Speaker 3:Brian, did you see him? I saw that today. Go, brian, it is one of our me. Brian was really grown up.
Speaker 4:He went from social selling for newbies guest to LinkedIn top boys.
Speaker 3:Top. Yeah, I mean Brian was in like the first 10 or 15.
Speaker 2:Yes, right, right.
Speaker 3:First five.
Speaker 2:I don't remember and I'm sorry, sorry, and I wanted to just hit Bob's last comment here before we go, which I thought was good. Why do we continue to sell by territory? Geography is no longer a barrier. Territories are a holdover from the old days. A lot of that is that old world seller centric mentality that's not buyer centric right Territories is not necessarily buyer centric at seller centric.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think, honestly, I think that's been blown up a bit. I mean, even in my world I still see it where, if there is a certain subset of customers that have a very similar synergy and they are being lumped in because they may just so happen to be in Canada, or they may just so happen to be in the Midwest, or whatever the case may be, we're seeing more of that. But I'm also seeing more sub verticalization, like we're lumping this specific group of customers together, regardless of geography, because of X, and so I think we are challenging that, because in a buyer centric model, we acknowledged that a few years ago in our healthcare team when we sub verticalized because we realized, hey, I mean, it was common for me as a seller to be calling on a payer in the morning, a provider in the afternoon and a med device company at night, and that doesn't make a ton of sense, it doesn't give us the ability to be a specialist and to really serve that group. So I do think we're learning.
Speaker 2:All right, well, another great show, I think our new.
Speaker 3:Hey, by the way, Bob is going to be a guest on my other show on Friday at 11am Eastern. Just to plug the other one for winning fist bump show. That's going to be a good conversation too, because Bob brings it.
Speaker 4:He does, I'm ready to you know what. So I will try to be there and be the be the Bob that comment. There's a lot of you there too, and maybe the two of us can make up for Bob.
Speaker 2:Maybe two of us together can maybe do and do from Bob, and I really want to. I appreciate there's been a lot of kind words and comments today just about this is on track and really loving the conversation. That's very helpful. We appreciate it and you know, let us know other things we're going to cover. We've got quite a few guests lined up. We have to get to make sure that they actually show up. We have guests that are that are lined up over the next few weeks and, as we talked about, we really are trying to shift from what we did last year to be more focused on modern selling. How do you master modern selling and you really get down to some tactical how you actually do that? So, thank you, appreciate the kind words.
Speaker 3:I think I'm excited to two. Tom. We have your partner, Kevin Brown, coming up. I think it's probably going to be in March, but I mean Kevin's journey is a great journey of that, I think is a great story to tell. I mean he went from putting dimes and pay phones and driving all over Southern California right To embracing LinkedIn. I get notifications all the time of this TikTok feed and everything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, now we got. We got quite a few of those types of people coming up and Good to see you, Manny. We go way back. So, thank you, thanks to everybody, have a great week and we'll see everybody next week, carson.
Speaker 4:Until next time, everyone, Happy modern selling. Thanks everyone.
Speaker 2:Good job, Good job. 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.