Join us for this week's episode featuring Drew Ellis, VP of Mid-market Sales at SAP, who brings valuable insights into modernizing B2B sales strategies. Our discussion is aimed at sales professionals eager to excel in the digital era, offering guidance for those engaging with both large enterprises and the dynamic mid-market. We will explore how to leverage LinkedIn not just for outreach but as a platform for establishing your personal brand and demonstrating thought leadership in the realm of social selling.
We address the misconception that artificial intelligence (AI) threatens sales roles, presenting instead how AI can enhance your sales approach. Discover how AI can refine your industry knowledge and provide you with advanced strategies to gain a competitive edge. We'll discuss the role of AI in improving team collaboration and enhancing sales presentations, highlighting AI's role as a supportive tool that amplifies the human element crucial in closing deals.
The episode also focuses on the importance of authentic customer interactions, sharing personal stories and strategies that underscore the value of face-to-face engagements in today's digital world. Learn about the significance of customer-centric events for building relationships and expanding networks. Furthermore, we'll examine how leading sales professionals incorporate AI to boost their teams' effectiveness without compromising their organizational culture. This episode promises to inspire you to adopt AI and innovative sales methods while reaffirming the enduring importance of personal connections in winning customers' loyalty.
Join us for this week's episode featuring Drew Ellis, VP of Mid-market Sales at SAP, who brings valuable insights into modernizing B2B sales strategies. Our discussion is aimed at sales professionals eager to excel in the digital era, offering guidance for those engaging with both large enterprises and the dynamic mid-market. We will explore how to leverage LinkedIn not just for outreach but as a platform for establishing your personal brand and demonstrating thought leadership in the realm of social selling.
We address the misconception that artificial intelligence (AI) threatens sales roles, presenting instead how AI can enhance your sales approach. Discover how AI can refine your industry knowledge and provide you with advanced strategies to gain a competitive edge. We'll discuss the role of AI in improving team collaboration and enhancing sales presentations, highlighting AI's role as a supportive tool that amplifies the human element crucial in closing deals.
The episode also focuses on the importance of authentic customer interactions, sharing personal stories and strategies that underscore the value of face-to-face engagements in today's digital world. Learn about the significance of customer-centric events for building relationships and expanding networks. Furthermore, we'll examine how leading sales professionals incorporate AI to boost their teams' effectiveness without compromising their organizational culture. This episode promises to inspire you to adopt AI and innovative sales methods while reaffirming the enduring importance of personal connections in winning customers' loyalty.
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 lead 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 number 72, mastering Modern Selling. This is two weeks in a row. I've got this nailed no more of the Social Selling 2.0 stuff.
Speaker 3:You're a pro. We can't change your name again anytime soon, Tom.
Speaker 2:No, it takes me a few weeks just to do that pivot. I'm not really good at those pivots. So, hey, drew, welcome. Thank you, great to have you here today.
Speaker 4:Thank you, I'm excited.
Speaker 3:It's been a long time in the making. Drew, good to have you on. I was messaging with Brandon this week and we're talking about getting to know Drew. I remember the first time I heard Drew on a couple episodes of Mike Weinberg's show. As many of our listeners know, mike did my birthday episode this past year, so we're a big fan of Mike. Drew was just not only to be invited back for a Mike episode, but just dropping wisdom left and right. My favorite takeaway was being thick as thieves with our customer executives, so you're in for a treat today. Audience.
Speaker 2:Drew, the pressure is on Carson's putting the pressure on you already.
Speaker 4:You guys are too kind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so well hey, it works in technology, so I know we can take pressure.
Speaker 2:There you go. So, hey, a couple of things before we get started. If you're online listening, definitely, hey, butch, jump in, let us know where you're from. Also, if you're listening to the podcast, you know, brandon, I don't know that we give enough love to the podcast listeners. We have a lot more podcast listeners coming in every week and we really appreciate it. And, if you like it, please leave a review and a rating. It's appreciated. And, hey, we can get into number one in mastering modern selling Carson. So I don't know, mike might create other problems.
Speaker 3:He's taking it in our way, that's right, I don't know yet.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I haven't looked. And we also want to thank Fist Bumps. Brandon, why don't you tell a little bit there? Fist Bumps has been a really great sponsor. They're helping to pay for some of this stuff that we're doing here in the production and the podcast. So tell us a little bit about Fist Bump.
Speaker 5:Fist Bump. Yeah, so Fist Bump is basically hey, ceos and sales leaders who believe that they should be using LinkedIn better but simply don't have time or, honestly, a lot of them they're not really sure what to do. We have a concierge program that's done for you and done with you. There's certain things we just can't do, but we come alongside and help them with that every step of the way. So we've got a guest coming up on our show who is a CEO who started using LinkedIn and now he says 50% or more of their new opportunities are all generated from his LinkedIn activity. So lots of value there for organizations who use it well.
Speaker 2:Are you saying that LinkedIn stuff works?
Speaker 5:You know, I think it does. Hey, I just got a message in the private chat that my heater's loud man I'm freezing today, but I'll turn it off.
Speaker 2:All right. So thanks, brandon. So Drew, again welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and then we're gonna get into some pretty I think interesting topics today.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks for having me today. I'm excited. So, as Carson mentioned, I'm in technology sales. I work for SAP, a large organization just like Carson with Microsoft. Been there for about 12 years, went through pretty much every kind of individual contributor role you could have and then took my first step into leadership about almost three years ago now and I've been leading a team in our mid-market business for North America, which has been pretty fulfilling and pretty exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's start. I know we had some topics we wanted to cover, but we have a lot of people listening to this show that are on the small to medium-sized business area and obviously you have enterprise people. What would you say is you know what's the difference that you see kind of working in a large enterprise-type company but selling to the mid-market? Let's start with that, because I think that's a good place to kind of lead in.
Speaker 4:That's a great question. So I spent my entire career in the enterprise business calling on our largest accounts and then, when I had this opportunity to come to the mid-market, I was apprehensive because I didn't know if my skill set would translate, because it is different, and what I have found is that my own fear, and maybe a little bit of my own ego, actually was the hindrance, more so than the client themselves, because at the end of the day, it's still people, it's still problems, there's still complexity that they're trying to solve and we still have a solution that kind of fits their needs, or at least I hope fits their needs. So once I got over my own mental shift of not knowing and being a little bit afraid of having it be something new, I realized you know what it's people. Let's just go have a conversation. Let's just go be real. Let's understand what their problems are.
Speaker 4:Let's not forget what got us to this point in our career. Right, making sure it's about them, not about me, and everything else kind of fell into place. There are some nuances in industry, right? So, like larger accounts, the deal cycle may take longer, so you may have a lot more time that you're spending with an account and it may be a little bit longer of a process, might be more people involved in that process also, so you may need to know more of the folks that work there and the decision tree and all of that stuff. But at the end of the day it's like I said it's still people, it's still problems, they're still complexity in their organization that they're looking to take out and solve and that's what we have to go do.
Speaker 2:So what I'm hearing you say is the fundamentals are still the same.
Speaker 4:The fundamentals are definitely still the same. That's correct.
Speaker 2:Fundamentals are the same. So, brandon Carson, jump in. What are some? I know we had a lot of topics. What do you think is the best way to kind of take us down here?
Speaker 3:We're gonna take an overarching comment and it's the way that Drew was able to connect with Mike, and I think it kind of exemplifies a couple of things. One Drew is here today because of an awareness, because of a show that he did with Mike, or a couple shows he did with Mike and Drew, and I started talking. I introduced Drew to Tom and Brandon and here we are, and what I think is fascinating is the story of how they got connected. Drew, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it goes back to your original statement, how you started the show. Are you getting value out of LinkedIn? So when the short version of the story is when I was looking to move into leadership a few years ago, I was looking for leadership books like anyone else. You go to Amazon, you go to Google, you type in. I typed in leadership sales new I'm new to it and his book the new sales simplified pulled up. And then there was sales management simplified that pulled up. I bought sales management simplified and I started reading that book first before I even bought the other one.
Speaker 4:And from there I just kind of sent him a LinkedIn message and I was like, hey, man, this content helped me earn what I felt. It helped me earn, kind of, my first sales role and here's what I did and here's how I used it. I wasn't expecting to hear back, let alone. He pinged me back almost right away. He must have been online and was like, hey, let's get on the phone and talk about this. I'm like all right, let's do it. And that just kind of snowballed into kind of like this conversation, talking shop, having fun, realizing we had a lot of things in common and realizing that there was still a lot that I could learn kind of from him and his audience and what he does. So that's how we met just a cold LinkedIn email.
Speaker 4:You and I love it, I got that.
Speaker 3:I think it's incredible. Nobody's unattainable If you got something you wanna reach out, reach out. The worst thing that happens is that you still have no relationship. The best thing is it turns into something magical.
Speaker 5:And let's keep taking that. So we talked on the show before about the term dark social, and I hate the term because it brings up concepts of dark web. But really what it means is this social platform that we have, whether it's our post, it's comments, it's shows. Sending you send a message to Mike after buying his book. He reached back out and then, drew, you got invited to be on Mike's show and then through Mike's show is where Carson met you and saw you and started engaging with you and now you're on our show.
Speaker 5:All of that is adding to your they call it a personal brand. That adds to your reputation. It gets you in front of more people and then, who knows, today somebody might be listening that needs your SAP services and reaches out and that's where opportunities come about. And I know that's a little bit of a soft approach. For a lot of sales leaders it's like, oh, there's a little bit of luck and all that. But hey, the more active we are in this platform it is the most important business platform of the 21st century so the more active we are on it, maybe the luckier we get.
Speaker 4:You know what's funny about that is and I'm probably gonna get laughed at for saying this, but I'll come clean I don't have a Facebook account, I don't have an Instagram account, I'm not on TikTok.
Speaker 4:The only social media I have is LinkedIn. And prior to reaching out to Mike Weinberg, I never really posted or did anything. And so, reading the book and just taking that shot, the only time I had used LinkedIn is kind of going back to Carson's episode, like when you were talking about landing the step and all that I would use LinkedIn to ping my clients, people that I wanted to meet inside first dates. So you might be working with a client but you may not know everybody in there. So I would go to LinkedIn, do a search, try to ping the customers that I wanted to get interactions with. It was only after kind of meeting Mike and learning about you guys and Carson and everything, that I actually started to use it more as a social aspect for my personal self and just to broaden my network and that kind of thing. And I still don't have Facebook, still don't have Instagram. This is it. I have LinkedIn, that's it.
Speaker 3:You're not missing anything, drew, yeah you don't need anything, you don't need anything else.
Speaker 3:And you know what's funny, what I love about what Drew just kind of said, is, as you think about it, look, I mentor sellers all the time. Every seller benefits from a brand. It's a way to have your reputation speak for itself before you meet someone. And what's powerful, too, is everyone's experience matters, no matter where you are in the journey. If you're starting out, you're having experiences that will benefit others. Talk about them, ask questions about them, be provocative. If you're an old, grizzly sales vet like me, you've got experiences, you can tell stories and you can help people that are on the path. And I love all the comments about luck. There's a reason that the color of money is sitting back here. It's the greatest sales movie of all time. The line for some players. Luck itself is an art.
Speaker 5:And the other thing with that is it's this platform again posting, commenting, being on shows it creates familiarity. The more people see you, the more they're hearing you. When we do send the reach out whether it's a message in LinkedIn, it's an email, it's a call that barrier to them saying no or ghosting or ignoring drops down dramatically and we hear people all the time. I get text messages from people, some of our FistBone clients. They'll screenshot and they'll send me. It's like hey, we sent this message. And they're like, yeah, let's meet. I feel like I already know you because of your LinkedIn content. Carson, you get that when you're traveling, right, people come up and no, they say they know.
Speaker 3:Brandon Lee. They don't say they know me they say you work with Brandon Lee and your point is still valid because you're a known entity because, of that I so well said.
Speaker 3:I think you have this ability with social to create a positive reputation and just a presence as a thought leader A leader like Drew, who is obviously well respected in this trade and draft talking about stories of how they are helping customers and organizations do more. Those types of things resonate. And if I have the opportunity to work with somebody that I see as a prolific thought leader on social versus somebody that I don't know anything of, guess which decision seems less risky?
Speaker 5:Yeah, that familiarity right. It just breaks down those barriers. Yeah, I was. I spoke to a sales leader a few weeks ago and in our conversation I asked the question over the years and he's our age, he's been 25, 30 years sales sales leadership I said over the years, what has been your greatest strength in selling? And he thought for a moment and he said probably relationships. He was like I've got clients now that when I travel to go visit them, they don't let me stay in a hotel. I actually stay with them and throughout the years it's always been the relationships. And I didn't want to be rude but I said I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile over here and I don't see any of that. I don't see the activity, I don't see the engagement. I don't see. I see you very professional, but your resume doesn't scream to me that you want to be in relationship and you serve people. And there's that disconnect with some of the ways that people have used LinkedIn or looked at it as a resume.
Speaker 3:I had a question too, drew. You mentioned spending a lot of time in different roles as an IC and then making the forehand a leadership. I had a leadership career before joining my current organization, but I spent several years as an IC and I'm glad I did, because I feel like and you and I have talked about this in the past I feel like you have that credibility, but also you know what it's like to walk in their shoes, and so it's as you create and nurture a culture and you're at the pulse of what matters to your team. It goes a really, really long way. I would love to hear from you Just with your journey as an IC and now as a leader, staying at the pulse of customers but also rapidly changing technology. What does modern selling mean to you? What have you tried and what has worked well for you in becoming thick as thieves and earning the right to be a trusted advisor?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's a really great question and really timely with where we are in our industry right now, because everyone is looking for a hack. Give me a hack for this, Give me a hack for that and it's like I laugh every time. The hack was getting a customer list with a phone number that worked in the past. Let me get a phone number that connects to people before I have to figure out how many I have to dial to reach someone. There's no easy button. The easy button is doing the job, and doing the job takes the same skill set today as it did 50 years ago, as it will 50 years from now, and that is picking up the phone, connecting with the customer, understanding what their problems are and providing a solution to those problems. I think today's world has some tools that make it so much easier for us to bring the value for the customer.
Speaker 4:I know you're going to bring this up, so I'll bring it up anyway as artificial intelligence Everybody wants to talk about. It Is AI. Is it going to put the salesperson out of business? I argue no. It should make the salesperson a lot more value driven, quicker in the cycle. As an example, when we look at these tools that we have and we work for big companies Carson we have all the tools we could possibly want at our disposal. I have everything and we work for SAP. We've got everything. So what do we use? When we use artificial intelligence, we use it to get smarter on our customer faster.
Speaker 4:What I love about it is because I'm so fresh in being an individual contributor into leadership. If I'm going to talk about our solution, I use artificial intelligence to help me position our solution in their language. If they're in a business that I don't know very much about that industry let's say they're in manufacturing or healthcare or whatever it is I say help me describe this offering in their language, using their analogies and their nomenclature. Now I can walk in and I can relate it to them in their terms. That builds immediate credibility to me, because I've done two things there. One, I've come to their level using their terms and their industry. And number two, I've walked in for payer to bring value to them that's going to solve a problem that they're interested in, not just me pushing something to them. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:It does. We don't have an excuse anymore to show up and not speak their language and I think with all these great tools the bar is raised. The responsibility is greater on sellers. You can't just show up and verbal vomit everything that you think is great about your product or solution, that you read off of a marketing slide. You've got to actually dig in, do the work, earn the relationship.
Speaker 2:Hey, I have a quick question follow up on that. Drew, I think what you just said was really compelling about AI. Let me make sure if I got this right. So let's say you're going to go talk to a manufacturing company. You're not an expert in manufacturing, certainly not, maybe an expert in what they do or what they manufacture. You're using AI or chat, gpt or something to basically build that narrative with the right terminology, the right vernacular, the right everything. Maybe learn a bit about manufacturing that you didn't know. And now you walk in, maybe not positioned as an expert, but way more. Your position is a bit of an expert anyway, along the way, and not just somebody who is a salesperson. Is that really what I hear you saying?
Speaker 4:That's exactly it. So the specific example I can use is I wanted to understand how to position our tool set with what my team sells, in the language of a camping and hunting and fishing company specifically. So then it said hey, your product A is like the tense, your product B is like the fishing pole, your product C is like this right. And it went right through it and it told the story. I was like, okay, so now if I'm going to walk in, I'm going to tell a story about how our offerings help our customer. I am talking about how a tent is going to help someone's experience, how the fishing pole is going to help them grab the fish. And now they're relating it to their industry and they're saying I get that. I understand what this technology piece does for me because I understand what we sell does for our customers.
Speaker 5:Wow, that is really really powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to bring up Josh's question here while we're on the AI subject. He asked has AI changed the way in which you also prepared to combat objectives as well? Are you using it in that way at all as well, or handling objections or even negotiating?
Speaker 4:Absolutely so. One of the ways we use AI with our team is like so now we're going to walk into that customer, we're going to have the analogy through their language. Now, before I do that, I'm going to go find out who are their top three or five competitors and what's important to them. So when I understand what the competition is doing and the AI can help me go through their financials, it can help me do the background, it can help me find the latest press releases. So I'm not spending hours gathering data, I'm spending hours perfecting the message because I have all the data in front of me.
Speaker 4:So when we walk in, we've got a great analogy in their terminology, but we also have knowledge of the industry, their competition and what they're solving in those worlds. So we can talk somewhat intelligently about obstacles other people have overcome, which goes back to any objection they may want to throw at us. We can say well, you know, these three companies are also suffering from the same problem and guess what? Two of those are our customers and we've helped them do this, this and this. So we're just much more informed walking in, because the customer doesn't care what we sell, they don't care what it's called, they don't care what it does, they care what it provides for them in the outcome.
Speaker 2:So are you coaching Sorry, just real quick, brandon are you coaching your team to use the same sort of tools and is the team working together on these things? Or how do you see adoption within a team, especially some people that can be a little afraid of this?
Speaker 4:Half of them I'm coaching, the other half are coaching me, right? Certain people will grab onto it and they'll be like look at what we're doing, especially the people that have come right out of training, because it's been 12 years since I've been in training, so I don't know all the new processes and tools that we might have inside of our company who come right out of training. I'm like present to the team, what you just learned. Teach the old dog some new tricks, because there's going to be a lot of stuff that we didn't know about. And they're like well, here's how we're attacking with video. Here's how. I'm like okay, hold on, we're making videos for the customers. I can tell you I'm not doing that. Show me how. Right. So it's a two-way street. Some of the older folks like myself. We're learning from the younger folks who've really grabbed onto these things and really run forward with it.
Speaker 5:I want to come back to what you said. Using AI to help you tell a story using their language and using that example I think is brilliant. They're selling tents and poles and camping equipment and you ask AI to give you the foundation of the framework to tell your product story and their terminology. I mean, that would take forever for a salesperson to do on their own and not be able to do it for each and every customer but be able to plug that into AI and have it spit out. We should be more prepared and better in our conversations than we ever been before. Absolutely. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. That got me really excited.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it. Well, I was just going to say real quick, it's really great for your first interaction with that customer too, because you build that bridge much quicker. In your first interaction then say maybe someone you've got a relationship with for two or three years.
Speaker 5:It reminds me when Anthony in Arena was on the show, remember he was talking about the difference of two or three people go in and do a presentation the next day. You say, well, what was the difference? And Anthony's like well, one guy was tall and blonde and the other guy was wearing a blue shirt. Right, that was the difference. And what you're saying there will make you so remembered and just rise to the top in those conversations.
Speaker 2:I wanted to hit Bob's comment here and get your take on this too. He says, by overtaking the top of the funnel, ai will remove the training grounds. Where new sellers learn to sell is SDR and BDRs. Do you believe that to be true? Is that it kind of removes that tripped traditional? Well, I have to learn or kind of cut my teeth in this area so then I can go be an AE because I don't have that experience. Or do you think you can bring in people faster?
Speaker 4:You know, this topic, I think, is a much bigger discussion, because what I have found every company wants to hire someone that has three to five years experience because they want somebody that's already trained and can hit the ground running. Well, that might have been okay to do 20 years ago, when there were all kinds of companies with these really great training programs that people would go through. Because you know the companies, we always target company A because they got a three month program. You flash forward to today's day and age. There's not many companies that invest in that first line training, especially for SDRs, bdrs. They want people to come in because they want them to already be trained and hit the ground.
Speaker 4:So I'm not a big believer in thinking that it can replace training. I think there's always a need for training, there's always a need for mentorship, there's always a need to help somebody get where they need to go because you've been there already. But I do think it can help speed up the collection of data that it takes to be smart about a topic or smart about a customer, and so I think that part of it will shorten the cycle. But the reps on the field, the number of repetitions you're going to go through. Nothing is going to shorten that cycle. You need to actually, now that you've got this wonderful story, you need to go talk about it and see if it works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that makes sense right. So you still have to go through the training. You have to understand the products you're selling, your market, your ideal customer profile, all of those things don't go away. But you can now accelerate that and accelerate the time to value for a salesperson much faster by using the things that are there Bingo.
Speaker 3:Drew, I want to dive in on something you mentioned and I want to drill down on it a little bit more. Just from your purview, what are the best sellers doing today that sets them apart? You alluded to some things. I love that you shine a light on the best practices of your team and that you talk about how they're training you and they're bringing to you and to other members of the team their best practices. I think some of the best things that we can do as leaders is to empower and enable our team to shine and to impact the work of others. In an ideal world, we find the unique superpowers and strengths of everybody on the team and we can assimilate those into our arsenal. You mentioned video and some other things. What are you seeing the best do right now that makes them stand out?
Speaker 4:The very best are, first and foremost, on site with the customer. I bring that distinction up because we have a lot of folks in the industry in any sales industry that maybe have three to five years of sales experience. If you have three to five years of sales experience, most of that experience was through COVID. Most of it was in a virtual setting. It wasn't on site with customers. You maybe don't have that experience. You maybe didn't have that ability to do that. The very best sellers are on site because we're a field team and customers need to be having that interaction From there.
Speaker 4:It's digging in to find out what the customer's problems are, but then also a relentless ability to perfect their craft. I'm going to continue to learn. I love it when reps on my team are like I don't have access to a demo system Time out. Why do you need a demo system? Well, because I'm going to go show a customer how to do it. If you're a one man or one woman wrecking crew that can go do this and want to take their career further and further by doing more themselves, that just builds the trust bucket. I don't have to hand you off to somebody else. I'm doing more myself. I care about being really great. If you care about being elite, you're going to continue learning. I think that's it. I think if you're on site and you care about being great and you care about the customer's problems, I don't think you need to overcomplicate. That's the formula for being really great at this job.
Speaker 3:I love that. In my mind I have a propensity model. When you're able to be on site and in front of folks, that is the highest propensity to take things forward. I was at a summit event last week. I had 22 executive meetings, had a dinner that I was able to arrange just by messaging all the attendees. That had over 30 executives in the room and just building community. We talk about that on the show all the time.
Speaker 3:Sometimes the value that I bring to people isn't because I'm the smartest guy in the room. It's quite the contrary. I can put people together in meaningful ways. I can bring resources to them when you're in person. If you're a seller, if you leave a meeting and you don't have three to five follow-up opportunities that you keep the momentum going on, right then and there, shame on you. I landed on Friday from the plane, went straight to my desk, cleared off 11 follow-up notes, two customers tying in every single resource that I wanted to be part of. The next step that's the key thing. That is the propensity model. Next, look, I don't discriminate against any way to get in front of a meeting customer.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of mutual conversations that sometimes happen that are a prelude to getting in-person interaction. You want to be intentional about setting those up. I've talked a lot on this show about how I've leveraged LinkedIn to create these relationships that didn't exist. Then we've turned them into executive briefings that happen on site. Your goal is to sit down and break bread. There's a lot of different ways that you can do that by finding email addresses, using the Zoom Info tools of the world, going out on LinkedIn all of the stuff that we talk about on this show. I could not agree more with Drew. There was a comment in the chat too, from John. Have you found cold calling is still important? Drew, you sound like you are not phone averse. How are you and your team using the phone today?
Speaker 4:We absolutely still use the phone. I think you can do as much inbound with marketing and all that as you want, but nothing replaces the outbound touch. I think what you have to remember is it's hard. You are going to call 20 people and you're going to get 19 nos. That doesn't mean you're a failure, it just means the job is hard. I think people just again, they want the hack, they want the easy thing to do. It's not easy to hear 19 nos in a row. That's why I'm a big believer in the team culture, because one person might have heard 19 nos and they're down on the dumps. The other person might have had that day where they got three yeses out of five calls and they're riding high and that vibe is good. You bring the team back together, you talk about it and everybody's pumping each other up. I don't know. I just am a big believer in you have to do the work if you want to see the results there's no way to circumvent that.
Speaker 5:It brings us back to Mike Weinberg's episode with us. We are talking about the charlatans on LinkedIn that had all these magic bullets there's silver bullets that we're going to get you five calls every day just by turning on this automation. I laugh at those.
Speaker 4:I laugh at those so hard. There's 108,000 people at SAP, 108,000. You don't think someone's tried that Seriously.
Speaker 5:It comes back to what you said. Sales is hard, whether it's the cold call motion, it's your LinkedIn motions, it takes time. What you said. I'm thinking of people that say, well, I posted and nothing happened. How often, well, I did. Three of them, it's going to happen. Honestly, right now I don't know what happened Over the last week and a half. My posts have just sucked. I've had such little engagement and all the stuff in their ads. There is that tendency to go man, this sucks, but you got to remember it's hard. You got to keep getting up and keep going back and the yeses will come.
Speaker 3:Well, it's about mastering the craft too. Brandon, I can tell, as an observer of your content and your posts, the influence that what you're learning has had on what you put out there the types of posts, the types of graphics, what you talk about, how you share stories and you engage and tag people. I think that goes back to Drew's point too voraciously learning and soaking up podcast content. I was really arrogant in my 20s and I just thought, oh, I don't need a mentor, I don't need to read books or podcasts about sales, I'm just naturally good at it and it's clearly working. What's funny is I was working in these boiler room call centers.
Speaker 3:The reality is I look back and was I really selling anything? In? Compare and contrast that to now in enterprise selling and really working with executives at very prominent organizations on very meaningful, dramatic change. If you want to be in sales for the long haul which there are a lot of pros to doing it, the benefits, the relationships, the money if you want to be in it for the long haul, you've got to work toward honing and mastering your craft and there's so many great ways to do it. Seek the greats, go out and find people. I mean part of what I love about this show is we can go out and find people like Drew who can come on and talk about the things that they've done, but the fundamentals and the work are common themes. They've always got to be there.
Speaker 4:They are. I mean, there's an epidemic of order takers out there right now. There's just like we just want the easy button to hack so that the leads and the deals flow to me, because that's so much easier and if you're in it to be an order taker, you might win one year and have a flu. But if you want repeated success it's a professional job you have to treat it like any other professional job and you need to go out and you need to solve some problems.
Speaker 2:So to have a quick question, my mind's been going when you were talking about some of the things there, and even going back to some of our AI conversation. You mentioned the importance of being on site or face to face, and I assumed you also probably go to shows or conferences and things like that as well with the team.
Speaker 4:We do at times when it calls for it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So are you finding, I guess, if you look back, a lot of people looked at going to a show or even an on-site meeting as a way to open a door. But are you seeing that you're better served by setting the stage, building the relationship, doing a lot of the things in the digital world, so that when you have that on-site meeting and Carson I mean, it's a near take on this from your experience last week had you already built a lot of the relationship so that the value of that face to face was exponentially higher than if you just met them for the very first time and didn't have any interaction with them prior?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I think, if you're going, so we'll put a lot of our own shows on, and those shows that we put on, what we try to do is we try to make it about the customer's network.
Speaker 4:So not only are you going to come learn a few things from us about what we're doing in your industry, but the more important thing is you're going to leave having meeting or met you know five or 10 or 15 clients that are either non-competing businesses to yours that you can actually have some legit relationships with and talk openly about it, or maybe similar to businesses to yours and you might learn a few things of what they've done to solve it. So I think, when you have those shows, if it's about the customer and their experience, I think it's really great to do. If it's just a show and tell, where we're going to stand up and do a bunch of presentations, I think you're maybe you'll get some people to attend, but it's just a big marketing call. Maybe not so much, but I do love those one to many shows where the customers walk away going. Hey, you know what? The people I met in this show I'm going to stay in contact with coming out and they communicate and they work on problems together. That part is pretty cool.
Speaker 3:Events are what you make of them. You know, like Drew was saying, you know what's interesting. So, tom, you asked about like, did we have a lot of these relationships going in? Probably not with some of these folks that were C-level and VP level to the point that we should. I've had a lot of times in tech. You know I've been with this team for a few months. You know you become beholden to certain titles within organizations, like IT director or system administrator or procurement, and we need and value those relationships. But a lot of times for meaningful transformational change, you also need CEO, cfo, chief data officer, chief strategy officer, and a lot of those folks were at these events, but my team nor I had ever really met some of them. You know. I really told them. You know, and I've talked on this show about making the transition into this role how we put a newsletter process in place.
Speaker 3:We put a webinar series to passively educate all of these folks on all of the announcements that we were making, so that we could kind of demystify those. And what was fascinating is I used all of the contact information from folks that were showing up. I messaged all of them in advance. I told my team this is the biggest play we're going to do in January, or probably this entire quarter, because you will be in person with these folks and we have, you know, a thousand customers are going to be at this event, so get in front of as many people as possible. Invite me to as much of this as possible, drop everything. I skipped all of these internal sessions which I really wanted to see, and I will watch those recordings, but FaceTime with customers is sacred and so getting that time in front of them was so important. I didn't know them, but they knew of me because they knew I was the face of these webinars that they were doing. They knew that I was sending them these newsletters, so I built a familiarity and what I love about it too. Sometimes sellers are afraid to send a lot of marketing materials or to continue to pelt customers with information because they think it'll be a turn off. I had so many customers come up to me and say thank you. These started out of nowhere, like in October, and we just started getting these and they've been so helpful and informative.
Speaker 3:Customers are purchasing as a result of these things and the intent is to just guide and navigate and make sure that they know the resources that are there. You can't possibly touch a thousand customers in a month, but you can with the right resources and using video, using newsletters, webinars, things like that. So we knew of each other. They know who I was. There was some familiarity. We broke bread, you know, at a lot of them like I mess. Be smart about what you do with these shows.
Speaker 3:I emailed every one of them. I gave them my cell phone number and said, hey, we're trying to concoct a dinner night one and get as many of you together as possible so you can meet, we can network, et cetera. Most of them texted me. I texted them the directions to the restaurant. Now I've got all their cell phone numbers and they have mine. Ton of value in that. So you know you're all looking for hacks. That's the hack. Find ways to follow better relationships with your customers so that you don't fall into the epidemic of order takers. Drew, you're great at the little bombs man. I love that I'm not in a epidemic of order takers.
Speaker 5:Dude Carson is on fire today. Keep going.
Speaker 2:And Carson did they. You know, I'm sure, because you know Brandon Lee, that helped as well, right?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, it always does, it always does.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I love being the first one.
Speaker 3:I've saw your webinar once.
Speaker 2:But that, brandon, oh my gosh, and you know what.
Speaker 3:So I do another show with Hilka Fawber and I know you guys know Hilka. He was at this. He was in Seattle at the same time, met him in person for the very first time and we've been collaborating on stuff for four years. So remember in person, time is sacred. Always try to seek that as the end result.
Speaker 5:And I think bringing that back around to that, it all starts with familiarity. And what we have now, that the four of us didn't have at the beginning of our careers, is this stuff in front of us. We have. We have LinkedIn that we can share, like Carson's talking about. You're sharing what you're, what you're observing, what you're thinking, what's going on in the industry, and people are watching. And a lot of times we quit because we say, oh, nobody's paying attention.
Speaker 5:But then you hear the stories of people would say like James Gilman shared this story with us. He started using LinkedIn and he was using it more and more little discouraged. And then he went to his high school reunion and he's like I was like a rock star there. People kept coming up to me going, dude, you're killing it on LinkedIn. It's like none of them had ever liked anything, none of them had ever commented on anything, and I know that's a little bit on the personal side, but they're watching. So this, this platform we have, so we talk about modern selling. Familiarity is important, that face to face is important. But how do we hack that? Do the work? You leverage LinkedIn, leverage the webinars, leverage the newsletters going out. It takes discipline, it takes work, but when you do it as we were talking about earlier, then when you make that call, they answer it and go hey, how are you doing? Because they know you.
Speaker 2:So let's let's switch over a little bit. You know, drew, you you transitioned right from an individual contributor to sales leadership. I think it's on your LinkedIn profile, when you first go in there, it says fundamentals and bearish gimmicks. Talk to us a little bit about that, what you mean by that. And let's talk a little bit about I know you're big into culture and kind of what you consider to be, from a management perspective, the culture and the environment that you're trying to create.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so fundamentals and bearish gimmicks for me. I don't remember how that came about, but we were having a conversation like this and it's always about, especially on LinkedIn, like you'll get pings from everybody about the latest whatever. And I just like to say that and remind myself because something is flashy, something's exciting. I'm a salesperson at heart so I secretly, I love to be sold. Right, most sales people do love to be sold. We have a respect for it. We appreciate it.
Speaker 4:I have to remind myself, and I use it as a mantra, that, like you know what, at the end of the day, none of this matters except for the tried and true fundamentals and you know the social selling of what it used to mean in the past, the charlatans that you talk about and all that stuff. And I know that Mike and Carson and everybody beats their fists on the table going they're not. They're not here anymore. But the people who exercise the discipline and the fundamentals to use it the right way are still here and we will still be here tomorrow and in the future.
Speaker 4:And there there is something to be said that if you've got great discipline and great fundamentals and you're in sales and you know how to generate revenue. You have a little bit of power in your role and in your future and you can determine kind of your path and if it's not with your existing company, there's another company that will pick you up, because there's one thing that they want, it's the skill set you have. So if you're coming in, I tell my team all the time like you're the pro athlete, like you're the talent, you are the talent, you're the ones generating the revenue. You know you can kind of pick and choose where you want to go and what you do. You know I want you to stay with me. We're built a culture but at the end of the day you're the talent. You're going to take that where you think that you can go. You know be the most successful person there is.
Speaker 2:So how does that translate into the culture that you I think the words you use is action, discipline and accountability. How have you found, as a sales leader, to build that culture and how do you see that your sales team is responding? Obviously, you're trying to build that talent, but you don't want them to run off. So how do you build that great culture?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it starts with practicing what you preach. I think the team sees me be disciplined with my time. They see me being disciplined with the actions. They see me trying to bring value to them, and so they know that it's not just a talking head up there spewing whatever the company's message is. We're going to go solve the company's goals and objectives because that's our job. But we're going to do that in our flavor, with the way that we want to do it and the way that we feel is what's going to build our culture to the most successful path forward. Because we kind of like winners beget winners. You want to be on a team that wins. You want to be surrounded by people that win. It's contagious, that environment.
Speaker 4:We were talking about the Lions before this. That's a great example of when you've got years and years and years of losing. You kind of get beat down and you forget why you're even doing the job to begin with. But if you can bring someone in that kind of makes people believe in themselves, makes people enjoy what they're doing, makes people really want to win, then you start to see some of that success and you celebrate it All of a sudden. Wait a minute. We are a team of winners. We are a team that can go get this done. This is a fun place to be. Yeah, we've got to do all this corporate stuff, but that's part of the job. Let's go have fun while we're doing it. So that's what I try to bring just that sense of being real about it and making sure that the team understands I'm here to remove obstacles to the best of my ability. But let's go win, because there's nothing more fun than winning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's interesting. Right Going back, I was just thinking about our Mike Weinberg episode again. He was saying that sales leadership is kind of something that's kind of gone by the wayside. It's not something that people have been practicing and when they do, it's more RevOps than it is sales leadership. But what I hear you saying again is that you're putting that emphasis on the sales leadership and then the forecasting and all that RevOps aspect of it will come out of that as a by product of the good sales leadership.
Speaker 4:That stuff gets remarkably easier if you're doing the things that you need to be do before that. So there's always going to be forecast calls, there's always going to be RevOps, there's always going to be those types of tasks that you have to do because reality is this information has to get disseminated across all the people that need it. It's got to go up. We have to understand where we're going. We have to lead the business. It's easier to do a forecast call if you've spent the four days before out in the field doing your job. I know what's happening with this customer because I was just with them. If you're not with them and you can quickly decide or you can quickly understand who's giving you a line of crap and who's actually done the job, they get exposed pretty quickly. I would say on my team everyone has a lot of pride in being great and they have a lot of pride in doing the job well and we don't really have those problems If you get to a forecast call and the information goes quickly and RevOps are what they are.
Speaker 2:Hey quick, I want to hit Josh's question too here. I think it's an interesting one. Are you using AI and your leadership and growth planning, or even the plans that you put together from a leadership perspective?
Speaker 4:I haven't used it yet in that capacity because I'm trying to figure out the right ways to leverage it. There's simple things that are coming within our organization that I think are going to make life a lot easier just around forecasting and emails and all that kind of stuff. Right now, my primary use of AI is to try to make the reps life easier and to try to bring more value quicker to the scenario. I haven't really done it internally yet.
Speaker 3:Okay, I am a little bit, and there's a litany of ways, just because we're starting to see more and more AI being infused into some of the tools that we use every day, like your instant messaging system might have teams, your CRM system might have dynamics, having AI plugged into these things where you can very quickly draw or infer trends or things of that stature, or you can interact with the bot to very quickly pull revenue totals and things of that stature and help with territory plans for 2024.
Speaker 3:As an example, where I'm using it the most, though, is honestly helping me with my team meeting agendas To be able to comb my team chat. I've got multiple team chats one with the executive leadership team, one with our executive leadership team, one with our extended 40 plus folks that touch our market, and then one with just my direct reports. I can comb those in seconds flat and say what would be a suggested agenda for our next team meeting or our next all hands, and using that as a theme or parameters or guardrails or suggestions as far as what to talk about, based on what the chatter is, or even going into a one-on-one and being able to go back through the last segment of emails and messages between myself and this person. Every time it reminds me of something that I need to bring up during those conversations. I think we'll see it more and more integrated into our leadership and growth plan.
Speaker 4:I agree with you and I think it's a little different for Carson and I than maybe some of the other folks that might be listening out there, because Microsoft and ChatGPT pretty well infused their massive multi-billion dollar investment. Sap's got their own AI that we're delivering. It's coming standard within what we do day to day. There's probably a lot more there than what I even realized, because it's just there and I just use the tools, versus me going out and going to ChatGPT or Bar or any of those things and saying give me that agenda. I'm definitely going to pick that up from what you're talking about, carson, and try it, because there's value there for sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, drew, you said something else really important too, that I think kind of answers Joshua's question is as you're thinking about a growth plan, when you think about a certain subset of customers, like a subvertical or a vertical within the vertical, or being able to speak their language, there's so many things that AI can arm you with as far as trends in the industry or even some of the old tried and true things. I subscribe to a bunch of industry trade magazines. I subscribe like I get a daily digest of news and I can direct that even into AI to say is there something that's actionable that I should jump on today? It might force one thing to the top.
Speaker 3:Drew, you were talking about the diligence and the discipline around scheduling. Ai can make us work smarter. We're never going to stop working hard. I hate the old phrase work smarter, not harder. We're going to work hard, but AI is going to help us work smarter so that our actions have more impact. I think that's where we will continue to look at how can I use AI to compliment my work so that I am literally doing after the best possible next action and as disciplined as possible.
Speaker 4:Any of the business processes where you're trying to gather something so you can make a decision. I try to leverage AI in that area because the quicker I can gather what I need to gather means the more time I can spend on making a thoughtful decision. I haven't leveraged AI to try to make any of those decisions for me yet, although I might start to try to see what it provides back, but it's been always around reducing the amount of time to gather the data, to gather the information, whether, like you said, industry trends or internal data. That'll help me spend more time on making that decision.
Speaker 3:I want to touch on Bob's question too, or comment. Too many senior leaders try to control culture. Culture is built from the bottom up. What the top does is set the guardrails. Leadership sets the tone for the culture.
Speaker 3:The best thing that leadership can do is to get close to the customer and to the field and really understand in that sphere what matters most when I started working with this organization a few months back. It's not about coming in and making sudden big, sweeping changes because I can. It's about spending time in the field, listening to customers, what matters to them, what's worked, what doesn't work. Talk to my team, understand what works, what doesn't work. What does this person want to be known for. How can I help this person maximize their paycheck or their career trajectory? These things that I wish I had known more of as an individual contributor. That's the kind of culture that I try to nurture. That's the thing. To Bob's point we don't create the culture, but we absolutely can set the tone for a creation and a nurturing of culture. Drew, what are your thoughts on Bob's comment?
Speaker 4:I would have to agree with what you said. I think the team will run as fast as you do and they will rise to the occasion. I think if you're out leading from the front, I think that good things happen. You don't need to micromanage, you don't need to do any of that stuff. You need to empower, step back and let the team go do their job. Like you said, set the guardrails and remove obstacles.
Speaker 2:As we wrap up here, I want to hit John's question. I have a comment and I want to get your guys' take on it as well. He says well, AI replaced salespeople or even outbound sales, appointment setting. I got this question. I was in a meeting last couple of days. I got a similar question.
Speaker 2:My personal viewpoint is, of course and we've touched on this already we will never replace salespeople. The role is so valuable, the relationship, everything we talked about. But I do believe and we've touched on this is that, whether you call it a digital twin or whatever you want to call it, as salespeople, as sales managers, we will have this guardian angel digital twin capability to be able to help us with all the things we've talked about today, and then a thousand times more, and help us. I hate to use the word automate, but to some degree, automate some of the tasks that take time and streamline what we're doing. My answer to that would be absolutely no, but AI is going to make salespeople a lot better, a lot more effective, not only as a salespeople, but to the customer. The customer is going to have a much better experience with the salesperson because of the knowledge and the things that we talked about. What's your guys take on that? Do you think that's accurate or is there a different world ahead of us?
Speaker 4:I think that AI will help make the art of sales, or the science of sales, more efficient. That could mean we may need fewer, but that doesn't mean we're going to need zero. I think there will always be a person in there that's going to interact with the customer, so long as that person has to make a major purchasing decision and they have to answer to someone else. It's pretty hard to go to a board of directors and say I just spent $10 million on ABC because the software told me to do it. I don't know if we're there yet.
Speaker 4:We might get to that point, but I don't think we're there yet for quite some time. I think AI helps us become more efficient, but I also think AI helps everyone in the organization become capable of sales. There's a lot of people in the organization Everyone's got a job in their company to make it work but everyone also is part of sales. Everything we do helps drive a sale in the company. I think AI can help bring down the fear that I maybe am not prepared to have that conversation and really help people understand that you know what what I do.
Speaker 4:While it might be revenue enabling, it's still part of revenue generation. I think AI will help with that. You might have customer service folks who maybe now are empowered to do more than they were before because they have data in front of them and they're not afraid to have that conversation. You might have other folks in the organization be able to pick up the phone and call the sales team, have an intelligent conversation because the AI helped them speak our language, so now they know what to ask us. I just think it makes everyone participate in the active sales and it makes us more efficient at it.
Speaker 2:I completely agree, that's good.
Speaker 5:I got a page full of notes.
Speaker 2:That was awesome, Drew. This is one to listen to a couple of times.
Speaker 5:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, Drew. Really some great insights and I think everybody appreciated some of the practical advice and tips that you provided today.
Speaker 5:You know what today was missing? Drew was awesome, but you know what was missing, Carson? Where's our movie reference? Sum us up, man.
Speaker 3:I thought I made a brief one at the beginning. I'll have to go back and check the tape, but I mean, if anything I think about assimilation, assimilating different things into our arsenal it reminds me of Star Trek and the board. We're always going out and trying to pick up these new sales pieces, acumen, experiences, resources and making them part of ourselves so that we can be as effective as possible.
Speaker 2:That's what I kept in mind, well done.
Speaker 4:Well done. I think I heard color of money reference in the beginning, that's true.
Speaker 5:That's true. That's true If we're keeping score we'll die.
Speaker 4:I was listening. That's an easy one.
Speaker 5:Yeah, color of money and money ball. They're just kind of give-me's now. Yeah, we bring those up a lot. Hand back to the future giving Brandon's cameo. There we go, Drew. This was excellent. Thank you so much. Carson's going to end us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Carson. Hey, I expect you to wave to us on Sunday. I'm going to be looking for you.
Speaker 3:I will not be anywhere near T-swift, I'm just letting you know. But I will be in Vegas at the Super Bowl. Go 49ers.
Speaker 2:OK, I don't know if I can second that or not.
Speaker 3:You're a California guy, tom, why not? I'm a Southern.
Speaker 2:California guy.
Speaker 5:Southern California, you can't cheer for them.
Speaker 2:You don't like the Rams yeah that's hard to run.
Speaker 3:They dumped us. That's why, see, we can't keep football teams here in St Louis. I've lost the Cardinals and the Rams in my lifetime, so I've got family that used to live in the Bay Area. That's why I've always been a Niners fan. My wife's going to be decked out in Chiefs gear, so we'll be a house divided on Sunday, so wish me luck.
Speaker 2:All right well, we'll look for you, all right well? Thanks again, carson. Wrap us up here.
Speaker 3:Until next time. Thank you everyone for joining Drew. Amazing stuff today. We've got to have you back, my friend and happy modern 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.