On this episode of "Mastering Modern Selling", we delve into the integration of traditional and innovative selling strategies in the current sales landscape.
5 Key Points Discussed:
The episode wraps up with actionable insights for sales professionals aiming to blend traditional selling skills with modern social media engagement techniques.
Donald Kelly's experiences and strategies offer valuable lessons on differentiating oneself and succeeding in today's competitive sales environment.
On this episode of "Mastering Modern Selling", we delve into the integration of traditional and innovative selling strategies in the current sales landscape.
5 Key Points Discussed:
The episode wraps up with actionable insights for sales professionals aiming to blend traditional selling skills with modern social media engagement techniques.
Donald Kelly's experiences and strategies offer valuable lessons on differentiating oneself and succeeding in today's competitive sales environment.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling Relationships Social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fist Bump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller Carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of Leet Smart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive in to business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape. This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fist Bump.
Speaker 2:Through episode 73 of Mastering Modern Selling.
Speaker 2:I'm Brandon. I get to be one of the hosts. Carson is here, as usual. We have Donald Kelly with us as our guest, and you may notice that we're shy. One host, tom Burton, is on the ski slopes in Mammoth enjoying a little bit of time with his wife, so we miss you, tom. He might be pulling us up on the left. He might be in the comments, he knows. So yeah. So welcome everybody.
Speaker 2:Hey, just a reminder the show's sponsored by Fist Bump and if you're a sales executive or a leader that believe you should be more active on LinkedIn but you're not sure what to do, our concierge services might be a good fit for you. We'd love to chat with you about it. But today we're gonna have a great conversation because our guest is Donald C Kelly. He's a renowned sales expert. Carson, I know you've read a lot of his books. I've read one of your books, donald, sorry, I haven't gotten them all. I know you've got your new books sell it like a mango that I have not read. But Donald's gonna bring a whole bunch from his history on prospecting, overcoming fears, closing deals and, very specifically in the show we're gonna talk about how do we practically integrate traditional selling with social selling techniques? I know from our audience that you all like the practical, the tips, the strategies, the how-to's, so we're gonna make sure that we get into that. So, donald, welcome to mastering modern selling. We appreciate you being here.
Speaker 3:Brandon, I appreciate you having me. Carson, thanks for the invite. I had this on my calendar for several months and I was just waiting for this egg to hatch to get an opportunity to be here. So I wrote home and told my mom I finally made it.
Speaker 2:So and you know what we know. It's not totally true, but we'll take it.
Speaker 4:Now, you know, what I love about Donald is that he just exudes charisma, and one of the things where I wanna start actually today is just with his background, and we've had a few chats over the years. I've been on his show, he's been on mine and we're just talking about even sell it like a mango, his sales philosophy and how he kind of got started. I think it's a great place to start. So, donald, why don't you walk us through the history according to Donald?
Speaker 2:Donald, can I interrupt real quick Without Tom here? Welcome to the audience. We love your comments. We get you involved in the show. If you comment you have a question for Donald. Yeah, you wanna add to what we're talking about? We'd love to have you, if you're listening now, throwing the comments who you are, where you're from. We'd appreciate that and we'll get you on the show. So sorry to interrupt you, donald.
Speaker 3:It's all you. It is all you. No, sorry at all. So go back a little bit History according to Donald. So here's my revisionist history here now.
Speaker 3:So I started as a kid there was a mango tree in our front yard. We grew up in Jamaica and my cousins had me go pick mango at the top of the tree and we were getting some pretty good mangoes and it was like everybody was there was a demand for it, People liked it. So, fast forward, we was around the holiday time and Jamaica being what it is, we had mangoes all the time, I stipulate. So there was this. Our neighbor had this T-end, a little shop, we call it shop, and they had like it was basically like convenience store, but they had this motorcycle, Carson Brandon, and it was on this, this ninja on the motorcycle, and it was just like so cool and I was like I want that.
Speaker 3:So, as someone growing up in Jamaica and being in a third world country, everyone around me was selling. So what do you think I did? I was like, well, people want mangoes. Let me try to sell mangoes. I remember going downtown in Spanish town and you see people with mangoes and all kinds of fruits. I'm like if these people can do it. I could sell a mango too, right? So I started, I picked these mangoes, I put them out on the it was a Saturday morning. I put them on this let my aunt. She had a flower stand where all of the pots and the flowers and stuff was on. It took all those things off and I put cardboard and I put the mangoes down and I was getting ready to sell them to make some money and I absolutely sold nothing and it was depressing If I was a kid didn't get a chance to get my Ninja bike.
Speaker 3:But here's the thing, though fast forward as I came into professional selling later on, because I still had the same idea, the same belief, this notion and as growing up as a kid in Jamaica I didn't know that was sales, I saw it as being a business man, an entrepreneur. So as a kid in the US, when I moved here and I was nine, I was the one selling candy to your kids in middle school, right, I was the one also in high school creating little jobs over spring break and doing spring cleaning and doing lawn care services or whatnot. I just this hustling mentality I grew up with, is what I lived with. So when I went to college, my buddies was like one of my friends was like you should consider sales. So I never, ever, ever married the idea of sales. I just thought of it as being a business man, right, being an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:So I went into formal selling. I started selling dish network over the phone, fell in love with that. It was tough, but I fell in love with it. Had a great manager, learned a lot from him, got introduced to the Little Red Book of Selling by Gittimer. Then, after that, I went into a timeshare. We started doing the phone calls and we were the inside sales, getting people for timeshare presentations, and from that went into IT training classes, selling MCSE, net plus Cisco, ethical hacker or sort of ethical hacker courses and all these things Then graduated, went into the medical field and then finally landed in software.
Speaker 3:Now, when I did all of this, one of the cool things that I found, though, is that the go back to Donald selling mango as like a seven year old in Jamaica. The same challenges that I saw was the same challenges when I was selling complex software. Because here's the thing no matter who you are, no matter where you are, you have competitors, and those competitors are gonna have features pretty much almost similar to what you have or almost the same value. Maybe they'll give her take a little bit. But let's not fool ourself.
Speaker 3:When you come towards the mangoes the mangoes I was selling, it wasn't like the mangoes were any different. They weren't coming from Indonesia. This mango, what are the same ones that were coming from Jamaica? Probably the same species. It's probably from the same tree, for goodness sake. But it was just that I didn't know how to sell that product.
Speaker 3:So oftentimes it's not the product, it's not the service, it's the seller. So sell it like a mango. That's where the idea came from, and in my book and also the way that I sell is that same belief. No matter what product you offer, no matter what the service is, it's not necessarily about the product and the service, it's about what you do as a seller that helps you stand out. And Jamaica, those were the people like singing, or maybe they had like a little chance, or the way that they positioned their stand, or the mangoes that they peeled, their mangoes. They did things that were different according to the needs of the buyer. And so there's a new seller's guide to closing more deals. And that's my story, the history according to Donald. So I didn't lie there. I didn't make any money selling mangoes that day.
Speaker 2:But you learned a valuable lesson.
Speaker 3:Oh my goodness, it was tremendously valuable. It helped to shape everything else that I had. So, no matter what you're selling everybody, sell it like a mango. Be creative, stand out from the pack and be different.
Speaker 2:What I like about that, too, is it reminds me as we transition into social selling because we wanna talk about how we were blending traditional selling with social selling is we hear a lot that like content has to educate, but it also has to entertain. And that's kind of what I heard you say in there. Some people danced and sung while they had their mangoes or did different things in order to promote it. So what does it mean to blend traditional selling with social selling?
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is a very good question. I feel like the traditional selling, and we'll go back to some definitions. You all have done this already, but just for kicks and giggles here to folks who are out there, like Butch I Butch in Atlanta ATL. Like traditional selling, you're talking about making the phone calls, you're doing the emails, you're probably even going in person to do some of your meetings and so forth. That's a traditional idea. The social selling concept is where we embody more tools and tech like this or linked in, where we take an opportunity to, from a social perspective, to build relationship with others and to help articulate our value.
Speaker 3:Now, when it comes back down to this idea of creativity and standing out and being different, it's absolutely critical, I think, right now. The benefit that we have in this era is that we have so much at our fingertips, like we have a computer here in our hands. The challenge, though, is that everyone has the capability to put out information, and oftentimes, information becomes even more noise or amplified noise, which makes it even more difficult to stand out from you know what's good or what's not good. So, when it comes to words being creative, what I've found is that, yes, there are a lot of people on LinkedIn like a platform like LinkedIn and a lot of people are doing outreach on LinkedIn. Yes, the noise. The challenge is there are not a lot of people doing unique or creative outreaches on LinkedIn. They're not quote unquote dancing. They're not, quote, unquote, you know, peeling the mangoes. They're not doing things in a timely, effective manner. And I know Carson shares a lot of great insights and built a great book of business from, you know, using social strategies, and he's, you know, obviously the king of this, I would say.
Speaker 3:But there's a power in this idea of making sure we stand out differently from the pack and we can go some more to give some more tactical details, but I just wanted to kind of help bridge that gap what traditional is and what social is, and then why that creativity is so important, and then the the. The impetus behind that again is that we just need there are a lot of noise and we need to find a unique way to grab people's attention In our business. We call it edutaining, and then not I can't coin that word myself, but the edutaining concept is this, simply this that we got to educate as much as we entertain, and this is a little discovery that I made, so I'm really pumped about this, so you hear me out on this here. I was about at the end of last year. I was doing a podcast, and we're just doing, we're jiving, and this is a basic concept, but I realized a disconnect that many of us have, right, and the disconnect is that, when you ask a buyer, only 3% of a any market is really ready at this point to purchase a product or a solution. Right? Great question, debbie. Only 3% of a market is ready at any given time to purchase a solution. So, if we go traditional approach and I'm just going to make some cold calls I'm going to hope that today, I can hit that 3%, or sliver of that 3%, and get some of those people interested. There are more people that are not willing to buy from you, and there's some people that may be ready, like 30%, 30% or whatnot.
Speaker 3:When you do ask buyers, though, are you open to learning more? More people are willing to learn, and here's what I found at Inbound Hubspot CEO on stage said that 44% from some of the latest data that they've been collecting. 44% of executives said that they've discovered new product and solutions from social 44% of executives. Now, keep this in mind. Buyers are open to learning. They're willing to discover and look for opportunities to learn, because all of them, no matter who they are, they have challenges, whether the challenge is prominent or they live with that problem and go along with it. Everyone has problems or challenges. They may not be ready to buy, but they'll be more than willing to learn. So here's what I found, though, in this vein Most people sales people want to sell, buyers want to learn. That's the clash. But buyers, if they want to learn, sales people should teach, and that's where you find magic.
Speaker 3:Thus edutaining, and I discovered this 10 years ago with a podcast. I started my podcast 10 years ago, and I was just sharing what was working in full circle that. Jeff Regitmer was my first guest on my podcast. He was the first sales book that I read and got access to, and the cool thing about all of this, though, was that I just started edutaining, sharing what was working for me, sharing ideas and tips, and I was able to break through the noise and we got opportunities. But I know Debbie asked a question around this. I'm not telling everyone that they need to go create content and be a podcaster or whatnot. However, the buyers do have challenges. They want to learn. Can we offer insights on that, and I have some tactical ways that we can talk about that here, but I've been rapping for a minute there. I'll take a sip of water and I'm sure you have some question between there.
Speaker 4:No, this is amazing and I want to call out a couple of things because you know. First off, I've been aware of you for several years. You know because your show is actually highlighted as one of the great podcasts, and I love the fact that Gettimer was your first guest. He was actually one of the first shows that I was ever on. You know, just such a gracious person as far as you know, just wanting to further the sales community, and that's what I've always seen from you. You have always been very genuine and authentic. You talk a lot about and showcase your family and how important they are to you, but you're all about spotlighting other people. There's no braggadociousness or that. You ask good, provocative questions and you start a dialogue. You said a couple of things, too, that I really wanted to double down on.
Speaker 4:We all have competitors, right, they have strengths. Pat Tenney was on a couple of weeks ago and in his book, the Bonus Round, he talks about the importance of doing a SWOT analysis on your competition. You're never, ever going to beat your competitors based on their strengths. You can't go to toe with their strengths. It's pointless. But where you can win. I'm sorry I lost my voice. I'm just drinking with a Super Bowl this weekend. Where you can win is understanding the opportunities and threats that exist around your competition and showing up as a person, earning the relationship and educating on their timetable. Earning that relationship and focusing on that piece. That's what I think is so, so important.
Speaker 4:One of the things that you said that I think was really critical is the differentiating factors standing out. I'll give you an example. I work in an organization where we have a very, very robust partner ecosystem. They do 95% of our implementation and deployment work. A lot of them could be very similar to one another. They're all competing in that space. What I always like to say is partners come down to people. It's all about the person that I want to work with, where I make a connection and there's that give-get and I know that I can put the ball in their hands and trust them to run with it. That's what I think, the things that you've laid out here today for our audience. I want to make sure they really understand the importance of the people element.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that give-to-get is just so amazing. I cannot bottle all of that down to the excitement I have when I hear you say this Bob Berg, good friend of mine as well, he's up down here in South Florida but the go-giver mentality can I give more to people? I can tell you I've had situations, carson, where I poured into people, listened to podcasts and then four years later I think it was like four years one lady. She came back and she's like I'm ready now. I'm ready to purchase something. She invested in us and then she came back and got something else. Then now there's a bigger opportunity with her whole organization that we're looking at.
Speaker 3:You can't calculate that kind of stuff that easy. Some people just want to get the quick win. When it comes to platforms like LinkedIn, I know we get tactical on this. It's like how can I give? The biggest thing that I tell sellers is that no matter.
Speaker 3:I always go back to the top of funnel questions. When I meet with a prospect, they're probably intrinsically questions that they have about my services or concerns or worries they might have about investing in a service. Not necessarily like how much does it cost, but it's like do I really need something like this. Those are questions that make great social content where you give to other people, where you give away information. We have that information, give that information and then magic starts to happen as a byproduct, where people come back to you. One lady today shared a screenshot to me where she took my pod and she shared it with her boss. Now she also shared my course with her regional, who shared it with the director above her. I gave her some content in one of my episodes and now she takes this information and she's given more to me in the long run. It's just amazing.
Speaker 3:Go back to this again. We love the short-term game. We want to get quick results. This is where traditional come back in brand new to your question. You need to implement this traditional and the long-term approach when you garden or when you plant things. There are certain fruits, there are vegetables that you probably get right away. Take a little bit. You're going to start seeing some sprouts with that strawberry bush, so to speak, sooner than later. But if you have something, something's going to take a while to develop. It's going to take a minute. You need to farm and cultivate that. I feel that many of us, when it comes to words, content, like being on platforms like LinkedIn. It's imperative that we are farming and preparing because in three, four months those things start to turn into opportunities.
Speaker 2:Let me pop this up real quick. I'm sorry I'm moving into that facilitator role. I want to jump in, but let's see Peter's question on here. Donna, just real quick so we're answering it. And not forget, use your podcast call so that they can find it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Sales Evangelist. You can go search it on. Just go to Google the Sales Evangelist and absolutely promise you that you'll find us website, spotify or a bunch of lists that we're on.
Speaker 4:There's been some great guests in the annals of Donald's show. I've been able to dive into many, many of them and just touch on a litany of topics Going in. Donna, a little bit more on the tactical side that you alluded to. You've been prominent on social for a long, long time. You've been doing the podcast and you talked about the reason, the catalyst for that. Talk to us about some things that maybe you've been willing to try, that you've tried out, that maybe didn't pan out the way you thought they would as far as a sales engagement perspective, or even maybe something that surprised you, Maybe something that you thought you wouldn't do or that wouldn't work, that did work. I'd love to hear some of your greatest learnings along your sales journey.
Speaker 3:Posting the first part there. I think it answers everything that you just shared. Posting content is the first one. Let me go back and I'll explain the story behind this. Many of us, as sales professionals, as people on LinkedIn, when we first started on LinkedIn, many of us know that LinkedIn classifying Carson, you're the Microsoft, you're the mothership now for LinkedIn it was a professional network and it still is. It's a professional network and that P word just messed it up when I moved by that. It messed it up in our heads. Give us the head trash.
Speaker 3:I work with the content team at LinkedIn and we have a creator, a guy that we come together every once in a while. One of my meetings with him he said do you know why? The thing that many people have a hang up with is professional network. I feel like on Insta, I can post a picture of my coffee or I don't drink coffee, but most people post a picture of the coffee or whatever. They post a picture of the dog, post a picture of the family. When it comes to LinkedIn, it's like oh, this is professional and I can't post stuff here Because of that.
Speaker 3:Most people don't the stats right now. At the time when I met with them, it was just 3% of LinkedIn users that were posting. It was 2% and they're just hitting a 3% threshold. That number is probably around 5% now of the 1 billion users. Probably about 5% of those people are actually posting content on the platform, on LinkedIn. Here's what we recognize now.
Speaker 3:Because of that, people have that fear, people have the trepidation. I don't want to look silly in front of my boss, in front of my colleagues, in front of people in my network, my clients Go back to your question. The thing that I discovered that was and that sounds so dumb and so basic is posting is that I do have something to share. People do want to hear what I have to share. The other side, the fear about that, is that I've posted in the past and it didn't get any traction, didn't get anywhere. What I found was that I was posting self-loathing things, things or selfish things. I was posting here about my services check out our company, come get a demo, come learn about our software. That wasn't working. But when I post content, answer questions and what's relevant to people, magic start to happen.
Speaker 3:I discovered this other formula and I put this together is called Connect, share, engage. Go on tactical here Connect, share, engage. Connect meaning if you look at the profile and I like having people do an audit you can do this right now. But just go up to your LinkedIn network, click on the little people buttons there the icon. If you click on that and then you go to your type in, you'll see a filter come up. Click on all filters and then type in your ICP title. If mine is a VP of sales, go search now in the first degree connection how many VP's of sales I have of the 18,000 people that are following me. If it's like 1%, that's kind of silly because that's telling me the people that will buy from me I am not connecting to here. I am trying to wonder why I'm not getting business or opportunities from LinkedIn because the people that are there are not people that can purchase. It's the same thing with mangoes. Again, go back. If I'm selling mangoes to people who are allergic to mangoes, that's kind of not going to work. I need to sell mangoes to people who want mangoes and capable of mangoes.
Speaker 3:The first thing is connect. I encourage people to connect with their ICP and to do that on a daily basis. Linkedin made some changes now so you can't really do a lot of the personalized. Unless you have the paid versions, you can do five personalized messages, connection requests per month. However, you can still connect with individuals. Connect with people a week. I mean 10, 20 individuals. That's magic starts to happen. You connect with 10 people a week over the course of four weeks. In a month, that's 40 individual. Half of them connect with you. That's 20 more VPs of sales that actually connect with me in my network. Magic.
Speaker 3:The second component is share. This is where I went back to my trepidation, my fear I wasn't sharing content because I felt like I was stupid or I felt that it won't look good or people won't like it. Then I would share stuff and it didn't go anywhere. But I was realizing I need to share things that people want. Who are my ICPs, what questions, what burning challenges that they were facing or challenge difficulties. Sometimes I post things about hiring and I don't even do anything with hiring because my ICPs have challenges around finding people. So therefore, I want to give them a value or insights that I discovered that can help them out. And then the third part is engage, and this is where most people don't do this, where they will post something and then run away like it's a you know firework, like you need to engage with folks. When somebody comments or like, go back into that and see who those individuals are that comment or like on it and then send them a connection request.
Speaker 3:I would say something like Brandon, saw that you engage on my post about hiring. Maybe I can't remember where you are, brandon, but might say something like Atlanta. Atlanta might say Atlanta is here we go. I'll do a perfect one. I'll say Brandon, thanks so much for engaging my post about hiring. Ps, I see that you're an ATL. Would you recommend that I go to varsity permission to connect here on LinkedIn? Now, that's going to be engaging. Let's focus on you. You engage on my post and I'm it's all personalized If you'll feel guilty not commenting back or at least engaging back with me, and then you're going to tell me varsity is not that great. So the point is is like we make this such an awesome opportunity and we make it such a great communication strategy and it doesn't have to be complicated, but you connect with the right people, you share relevant content and you engage. If you do those three things, magic happens time and time again.
Speaker 2:We just stopped the show right there, can we? I'm going to drop. I dropped, it's all done, I love the stuff you know.
Speaker 4:That's one of the biggest things that I think getting over our own hurdle, your experience matters, even if you're literally just starting out and it's you know things that you're grappling with with a new job. Like everybody, people will resonate with whatever you have to say. Just be willing to say it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. You know, I, like the we talked about this on the show too that mindset shift and, donald, I think you hit it. That professional network, that P word, scared the crap out of us, right? Everything was, it had to be professional. It had to be professional. But if we think about our professional career, I was on, I was on the phone with a VP of sales and struggling, you know, trying to figure out what to do with LinkedIn, and I said, well, let me, let me ask you a question in your career, your 30 plus year career, what has been your biggest asset?
Speaker 2:And he thought about it for a little bit and then he and he kind of lit up and he goes relationships. You know, I've been really great at relationships and and he starts talking to me, I got clients now that when I fly to see them, they don't even let me stay at a hotel, I stay with them. And he got all excited and I said you know, I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile over here and I don't see anything about relationships. And you just had this aha moment. It's like when we change that mindset to be like in our professional sales career. We focused on relationships, we focused on meeting people, learning about them, building that rapport.
Speaker 2:Why are we keeping it out of LinkedIn? Why don't we share Like it's? I get it, it's. It's different. If we're face to face, I can, you know, ask questions and like, oh Donald, you're from Florida, tell me about it, how long did you live there? And all that. And it posting is a little bit different. I know I see Chris Dunn on here with his comment. You know Chris has started to create posts about his morning walk with his dog and takes pictures of him and his dog or the view he sees, and then he talks about what he was thinking about. You know, yesterday I had a call with a, with a customer who was struggling with this and on my my walk this morning I was thinking about and he starts sharing what they're going through and then when he sends connection requests, now he gets things like love to connect with you. I feel like I already know you. I'm love to jump on a call. I feel like I already know you. There's a lot of power in this, this tool called LinkedIn, if we use it that way.
Speaker 4:I would also have to reckon that the 95% of folks that aren't posting there's probably a good chunk of them that still view it as just a resume and they also write it like a resume in that they make quick bullet points about just what their job entails. If that, they may just list their employer. And my challenge to you if you're looking to leverage LinkedIn as more of a tool to create relationships or to create and nurture a personal brand and showcase your rich experiences or your tentpole wins or the things that you would bring to an employer, that makes a hiring manager look at that and say, wow, I got to have this person. If you're looking to do that, that's where the things that Donald has articulated today you want to start really getting intentional about. How can I go out and I loved how you said that, donald. I think that's really eye opening.
Speaker 4:If you got to your network and you look at, you know the people I'm selling to. Am I actually connected to and connecting with them? Am I starting a dialogue with those people? Am I sharing things that would actually be valuable to them? Or am I just talking about how great I am or how great my solution is?
Speaker 4:Because that is not going to resonate and it's not a drastic overhaul necessarily to your LinkedIn process.
Speaker 4:A lot of times it's small tweaks, it's just a change in tone or messaging.
Speaker 4:I had somebody tell me years ago look at LinkedIn like a way to just ask provocative questions and try to start a dialogue, and when you do that and when you take that approach, it gets people to engage with you and then when you eventually get a meeting with them, you feel like you know each other.
Speaker 4:You know I've had so many people and even job opportunities that have come about because of content that's gone out on social and I'm grateful that I got over my limiting beliefs and fears and imposter syndrome and started doing those things. But now I look back and I've had a lot of great learnings, like the value of a podcast, the value of engaging with different people on LinkedIn and creating relationships. That's been really incredible For our audience. Today, donald, that is maybe starting to take those first steps or they're thinking about what their strategy should be like now and in the future, especially now that we have AI and automation and all these things and a lot of noise still. How would you recommend to our audience to stand apart from the noise, and get started today in a really meaningful way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is so powerful. There is there man. There's so many different ways. How much time do we have?
Speaker 4:And it looks like Chris and Jennifer are going to connect.
Speaker 2:I know I love this show.
Speaker 4:I love it so.
Speaker 2:So Chris said, is his. You know my story about him was true and he said I just thought everyone loved dogs. And then here's here's Jennifer, I'm going to connect so I can see the pictures of your dog. Look, this is like you know. You were mentioning about the power of social, and not just social, but podcasts and live shows and this whole modern digital platform. And I know the term dark social gets used. Some people don't know it real well. It sounds more like the dark web and a little scary, but it means that these digital tools get us connected to people that we wouldn't normally easily get connected to. And who knows what's going to happen with Jennifer and Chris now meeting and knowing each other. But a digital platform like LinkedIn, with the live show, a special guest, and all of a sudden you're getting connected to people that you wouldn't normally be connected with, and I love this platform.
Speaker 3:It's so good, so good. And you see, go back to that question that you mentioned that you just asked Carson around that you know what should they do? How should we go about doing it? A lot of it is just showing up and showing you care about other people and what I? It's a really hard strategy to wrap your mind around when you're a sales rep and you have a quota and somebody is telling you you need to go and get business or land appointments. So what I recommend that you do.
Speaker 3:When it comes towards LinkedIn, again, go back what I. If somebody is just getting started, the easiest thing you need to build your network. Now, how do you find people to build your network If you have navigator and LinkedIn does sponsor my podcast? So I just have to be transparent here. But even if they didn't, I've always been a pal of LinkedIn and love it. But you navigator really does help. The way I use navigator is I go and find people who are new to their positions and people who are posting on a platform, and those are the people that I send connection requests to. So those VPs of sales one, they're probably having an interest in finding out how they can improve pipeline development. And two, they're active on the platform posting things and what I'm in this. I did a masterclass last week and I shared this concept.
Speaker 3:Go back to trigger treating days. For all of us who've done trigger treating, you go knock on any. Everyone knows a neighborhood in their community, in their city. That was the neighborhood for me, being in South Florida, it was Wellington. Wellington. People are rich out there so they had like full size candy bars. You know some of those homes and they would leave candy bars on the doorstep and you get a. You know, you follow the honor code. Take one, you know candy bar, or they'll give you a candy bar or just have the really good candy. So I would not go to places where I'm not going to go and get the good candy. The other thing that I want to do, that I did when I went to those neighborhoods, is that I didn't go to homes with the lights off. It was kind of silly to go to a house with a light off because they're not going to have candy. And I have two hours, for goodness sakes, to trigger treat. I'm going to maximize go to the houses with the lights on in Wellington, more than likely I'm going to get the big candy bars. So here's what I mean by this. Now, when it comes to LinkedIn, I use navigator to help me to find the houses that have the lights on people that are on LinkedIn, to people who are active on LinkedIn or posting content on LinkedIn. So those are the houses that I'm going to and, yes, they have interests, potentially because they are trying, they're new to their sales role.
Speaker 3:If you don't have navigator, one of the tools you can do to get started is go look at an industry post. So let's say, for instance, if I love using HubSpot as well, so I'm going to tell HubSpot HubSpot is a big marketing juggernaut. If I'm doing anything in a marketing space, say that I have like a marketing software that integrates into HubSpot. Go to where the people are drinking water, the watering hole. So go to HubSpot, look at the post that HubSpot has and look at the people that are engaging on the post. More than likely, those are the people that are in Wellington with the lights on. The people who are commented on those posts are more than likely, the people who are in Wellington with big candy bars because they're actually commenting on a post of an industry leader that you guys are all a part of. And if those people, how are your ideal customer profile, send them a personalized connection request, show them that you care, comment about the thing that they commented on, and that is a huge way that you can grab somebody's attention.
Speaker 3:It's the human side. Like I don't post content on LinkedIn. I'm being straight up here. I'm not just all vain, but I just I don't post content on LinkedIn and don't want people to comment. I get the dopamine and to get excited when somebody comments or like it or share it. So if somebody comments and says hey Donald, I read your comment on HubSpot posts about, you know, sales blew my mind. Permission to connect here on LinkedIn. You best believe I'm going to send that connection request because that makes me feel good. So if you're starting off, that's all you can do. That's what I would recommend you do. Find people with lights on in Wellington and go to those homes and tell them you know, share something, because they're all posting content or engaging. Share something that you saw around, what they post or engage. People appreciate that you're starting to network, you're starting to expand. And it's the same thing with the dog, like you know Jennifer here and you know we're talking about, like she's curious about those dogs, and now there's a great way to start leveraging a conversation. It's so very simple. It's like and again go back to what you shared with this Brandon like, I have clients from Australia, from Japan.
Speaker 3:I remember that guy that was working with China. He worked in Japan. He was Japan first, where he found me, and then he was doing this tour and he needed help with coaching because he was doing going around pitching a solution and he found my podcast and trusted me to be able to coach him. Then I have clients in Bogota Bogota, colombia that I'm working with. I have clients in Poland. That's all came because of the medium of, like LinkedIn, where I was able to network with people. So there's a power in this ecosystem that's there that bridges gap, because if I just try to find those people in my local chamber, god bless me I would never, ever have found them, never find people who connected to them. But that's the magic that happened. So I wrapped there for a little bit. That's good.
Speaker 4:No, with all this candy. If you got me Jones in for an afternoon sugar rush it has resonated with everybody.
Speaker 2:We got that on there and then we got another one on the analogy. I mean, you're hitting it. No, you said something earlier about sales reps with their quotas and not taking the time to do it. We hear a lot of hey, social selling is great, but it takes too long, we don't have time for it, and so it gets kicked to the back burner. How do you answer that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm going to tell you. Go back to what, especially what Chris said over here. Chris done, yes, it's simple and it's not easy, and that's what I'm going to tell you. It's not like I try to budget at least two hours a day for some kind of prospecting. If I can't get anything in, I'll do like 30 minutes of something and it's usually that's going to be LinkedIn.
Speaker 3:So what I tell people is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's kind of like me saying that walking takes so long, carson and Brandon, walking is so annoying. I will never, ever walk from here to you know, walk from work to home. That's, I would never do that and probably I won't do that. We'll never need to do that. So but it's like the idea is like, well, I have a car, so I don't need to walk anymore. That's so dumb. Like, of course I'm going to need to walk from the house to the, to the car, I'm going to need to walk around the neighborhood, I'm going to need to walk in the mall. So it's like saying, well, I don't, I can't do social selling. It's like, don't do one or the other, do all of them I'm not abandoning.
Speaker 3:In traditional selling. I make cold calls. They're more likely warm nowadays, but I make calls. I do send emails. My emails are way more effective and I'll give you my playbook. So for go back to what Chris Dunn was asking here, you know not easy. I'm giving you my playbook. This is what I do and this is what we work. We start off with a focus list. Again, I'm going to houses with the lights on and that are active in Wellington, right? So I build that list on sales navigator. I then use Apolloio and that allows for me to get their email address and get more enrich my data. Once I have that focus list and that's enriched, I don't email people until I get a connection on LinkedIn and I have engagement.
Speaker 3:Once I have that engagement, my first email to those individual is something is something to the nature. Time back to that post. So if I was Jennifer and Chris Dunn here on here, my first email to Chris will be like you're the dog, need more dog pictures. Dot, dot, dot. So we make that connection. So I might say something to the nature. After a week or two and I find a relevant topic, a relevant issue that he has, I might say love what you're doing. I'm sorry. The pictures of your dogs have been so awesome. My family is actually thinking about getting a golden doodle right now. I may need to pick your brain about being a dog dad In the meantime.
Speaker 3:I noticed as well that you are leading a team of sellers and they're not necessarily all active on LinkedIn like you are. Is that purposeful? But more than likely, chris is going to respond to my email because we have built an engagement on LinkedIn. We started a conversation there. My first email ties back to our subject line, ties back to that and initiates it. So the point is with all of this is that I utilize both of them. I'm walking and I'm driving. I'm not doing one or the other. One does take a lot more time to drive walk from my house to the office, but I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to do it in an appropriate way. When am I going to use social media? When am I going to use LinkedIn? Well, it's our email. What am I going to use? The phone and when am I going to use texting? And when do you do those in an appropriate manner? Magic starts to happen. Thoughts here. I love that.
Speaker 4:Donald, and you know what I think is interesting. So you hit on a couple of really interesting elements that you're employing a lot of strategies. So I always like to say I would never discriminate against a way to create or nurture a relationship so social and we've used this term social selling for so long. But really social selling is just selling, it's leveraging social to sell. We're still picking up the phone, still earning that texting relationship with a customer executive. But something that really resonated with me, that you touched on, that I want to drill in on a little bit more, is that there are a lot of us that carry a quota and we get pulled in a lot of different directions.
Speaker 4:We may or may not have a sales leader that is thinking about social in effective ways or even really knows how to leverage it effectively.
Speaker 4:You run into this quite frequently and if I've got a manager who's hitting me on metrics and quota and this and that and isn't training me to effectively utilize all the tools at my disposal to go out and find my target audience, including leveraging social. How can we approach that? And I'd love to hear that even from two sides. You work a lot with sales leaders and also with sellers. How can sales leaders do a better job of establishing the culture? And if you're a seller today and you're not getting that level of nurturing, what should you do?
Speaker 3:I think some of the sales leaders don't know and I'm being straight up, I'm not just trying to advertise my business or any of that, but just think about it. If we're, who are the sales leaders nowadays and if they're pushing the way that they've sold before? Let me back up here. I have never climbed a T-tons. I lived out in Idaho, I went to school out there. But if I was to go and climb the T-tons, do you really think that I'm going to take a fellow Floridian to go climb the T-tons with me? It doesn't make any sense at all and we don't know what, the back trails to take, we don't know the altitude, the preparation, stuff like that. I'm going to find a local who's out there hanging out in Idaho, who is a burly person that loves the outdoors eating their granola. We're like, bro, I need to get to the top of the T-tons. Can you guide me to that? Of course I'll guide you. So it's the same concept when we find these managers who are just saying, yeah, the T-tons are dumb, don't even go there, it doesn't work, it's not going to be nice. They've never been there, they've never used it the landfills in Florida and it was ran out of breath, so they don't understand that landscape at all. So therefore, we got to find that source, like being on podcasts like this or going to find tools, or finding individuals and people. Salespeople, I feel, are some of the most giving individuals. I would go find some of those people on LinkedIn and follow them and see what they're doing. If I find people in my industry, they're doing it well and go and follow those individuals Again. Go back to the watering holes, so to speak, and all of us know some of the leading organizations in our space. Look at their salespeople and follow them, see what they're doing when the ones are active on social. Second thing you can obviously go and invest with programs like what we have or partnership or whatnot, but I don't think you need to do that particular thing as of yet. You just find people that are doing it well and pick their brain. There's magic that comes from that. So that's the first thing. As a seller, you've got to find it.
Speaker 3:Now I'll tell you this story for me too. When I was first starting off in my sales career, I had one of those managers who never knew how to climb the T-tons and I would go to her to get information and I found myself getting frustrated. It was when I realized I needed to not knock in her. I needed to get experience from people that climb the T-tons if I want to get to the top of the T-tons, as well as take the things that she has given me that helped me out to be effective at local networking events and so forth, and when, as I married those two, I started to see that my skill set starts to improve upon that.
Speaker 3:The leaders, what I would tell you is that we need to look at it holistically. We're in a different era, we're in a modern selling arena at this point and go back to the show and the impetus behind everything that's here. We can't approach it one singular way anymore if we're going to be effective. Email open rates have decreased by 50% since the pandemic and email output has increased 50% since the pandemic this was about two years ago. Stat now from LinkedIn and reply rates have decreased by 30% because more and more people are just being turned off by the noise. So we can't use that same approach. We have to use something a little bit different.
Speaker 3:So, the leadership what I would tell you is that don't abandon the process, don't abandon walking. However, is there a more effective way for us to walk, and when should we be walking and be willing to look and to seek out what's working in the modern ecosystem and help my sellers with that? The last thing you want is the pendulum to go in one direction for a seller to say I'm not making phone calls anymore. They said that email is dead. That's not what we're saying. You don't want to go to the other side and say, well, this is how I did it when I was selling back 10 years ago. That can't be the only thing. You've got to find that nice, balance, medium, and the only way you can get past that is to educate yourself, whether you're the leader or whether you're the individual, and find the guides. That's been there.
Speaker 4:I don't like it Listen to you all day. And it reminded me too, because we did this event a few years back, when you came to St Louis and you had all these cards that had all these statistics and I was like send me these stats. I love them and I used them in coaching my team. So that was a great call out. All right, butch, hold on to your seat because here comes the movie reference.
Speaker 4:You said something important, donald, that you said a lot of important things. I feel like I keep saying that, over and over, salespeople share. We live in this incredible community where we may even be competing with each other, but for love of the game, like we share best practices and things that help us all sharpen our acts, like I have no qualms about sharing things. In fact, I interviewed an executive and a big competitor the other day and it was just amazing just to kind of share stories and ideas and, frankly, I think competition makes us all better. Today's Valentine's Day, ladies and gentlemen, and every Valentine's Day, my wife and I watch the same movie, the Kevin Costner baseball flick.
Speaker 4:For love of the game, it's our film and so I challenge you all for love of the game, for love of the sales game, share your experiences, share your stories and go out and seek out those people that are doing great things, like I think. Sometimes on social you look and you see somebody winning or you see somebody's success, or you see somebody posting about something and you're like you keep you think in yourself like man, I wish I could do that or I wish I was doing this event. You can and you can go out and talk to these folks. I love that.
Speaker 4:Donald was on, had Gettimer as his first guest on his podcast. What gave me a lot of hope when I published my first book was reaching out to people like Jeb Blunt and Jeffrey Gettimer, who didn't know me from anybody and had me on their shows, and that gave me some momentum and some confidence and I look back and that was very meaningful for me at that time. So do what you do, master your craft and, for love of the game, share and go, seek out others that can make you better.
Speaker 2:Carson, can I, can I throw the move? I got two things I was thinking about. Number one is when, donald, you were talking to remind me, when Mike Weinberg was on our show with us on your birthday, carson, and we talked about the charlatans around LinkedIn. I think a lot of the sales leaders got burned 10 years ago, 15 years ago, in a lot of the lead gen. This is a silver bullet, it's just going to work. And they bought into it early and they got stung and so they're sitting there now like, hey, we tried LinkedIn, it didn't work. And LinkedIn it's a new era, and especially in a post-COVID world, and the strategies that Donald's talking about is using it like a human being, not using it like an automation machine. And it reminds me of the movie Carson, because Donald brought it up my own private Idaho, you guys remember the movie.
Speaker 4:Two friends.
Speaker 2:One guy was going to seek his mom, who he never met in Idaho from Oregon, and he brought his buddy to go along with him because he was scared of the journey. He wanted someone that was going to help him and he was kind of his encouragement, his support as they went along with it. So find people, find Donald, find Fist bump, find somebody that can help you on that journey because it's worth it. But it's not necessarily easy, like in my own private Idaho. He was scared, was his mom going to want to see him and all that stuff. He was going to see Anna Reeves, river Phoenix old movie. But bring someone along with you. Find somebody that can help lead you and give you that confidence Wow.
Speaker 3:I love that. I love it. You see, the cool thing about that component, too, is find somebody you could bring along or to help out. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, you know 10% more than somebody and you can offer that to them. And I want to go back to what Carson was saying with this thought too, I had.
Speaker 3:Salespeople are the best people I learned this when I was going through my Sandler days the best people to get the help from, because they empathize. Right. I get a cold call and every once in a while I'll take the cold call and if I can give a tip, I'll give a tip and if there's something to benefit, I can benefit from it. If there's a way I can collaborate, I can collaborate with that company. And one of the things that I got was this large company I want to get into and I reached out to one of the sellers and I got intel from the seller and that helps me now, as I'm getting ready to talk, to reach out to somebody the executive. So that person the seller couldn't pay for our services. Maybe they could, but it's not who I'm going after, but the networking, the fact that I had the relationship enough to be able to ask that question and they're willing to share that insight. It gave me relevancy with my value proposition as I position myself to this large company, and that's where the power of that network comes from. And just be willing to give and be willing to ask for help is another one of the biggest things that I've learned.
Speaker 3:If you're going to progress I don't remember the exact quote and if somebody knows it's serious but if you're, in order to progress, you have to start off by being honest with yourself. If I ran track in high school and, being a Jamaican, we love running in the mon Jamaican and fast, you know so. But if I want to improve, if I want to improve my 200 meter, I need to be honest with you. Carson, my coach of where I am right now, I need to run and show you yes, I'm running at a 25 seconds, and then you will say, donald, great. But if I lie to you and tell you, yeah, I'm running at a 22, there's an, and then I come to game day and I can't run to that 19. You know I'm not getting down to 19. It's not going to work.
Speaker 3:I'm going to make sure I'm being honest. So for all of us, be honest, I need help. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't need to help with this, carson, can you give me some guidance? Brandon, can you give me some tips on this? Jennifer, do you have any thoughts on this? I see what you're sharing. I'm wanting to learn and that just helps. So much Um and people willing to help you if you ask.
Speaker 2:So, donald, you kind of had your own little version of cool runnings going there then, because you were from Jamaica, florida, and you went to Boise State.
Speaker 3:I want to be while you're Idaho, that's right.
Speaker 2:I knew, I knew I saw it on there, but now it's like the boys in state. You had to be why you, Idaho, you had to go live in the snow. All the boys are be why you, Idaho is in uh.
Speaker 3:It's Rexburg so the names sounds freaking. Cold Rexburg sounds like a.
Speaker 2:They're over there by it's over by Idaho Falls, right, Exactly so you're talking about like North, uh, southeastern Idaho?
Speaker 3:Um that's, that's like cold men's country up there. Man, you're not to four hours from Canada.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm going to. I'll Trump you a little bit. I lived in Cortal Lane for oh my goodness, you're right. There's Northwestern Idaho, and we were. We were 99 miles from the Canadian border. Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 3:Love Idaho, though, so yeah we did, um to be creative, one of something. We created a holiday. It's actually coming. It should be. I think it's in January. Now we in the college, with my roommates, um, so being Floridian, and we had some, a few of us from Florida and um being a Jamaican we created we call it Jamaica day and we watched cool run ins and we made a bobsled, went up to the sand dunes, that's awesome, that's stellar.
Speaker 2:Well, we had three movie references today.
Speaker 4:Can you get ourselves?
Speaker 2:I was impressed. I hopefully, hopefully, uh butch was impressed with that waiting for the movie references.
Speaker 4:And Donald is the master of storytelling and uh analogies. I, I love the way my favorite had to be the uh trick or treating going where the lights are. And it's so true because I, I look back and I think about who I'm engaging with most on LinkedIn and it is all about the people that are already posting that you know that they're active and they're ready to dive into a dialogue, into a conversation uh, people that are of the title that I ultimately want to be engaging with. And then, furthermore, those who are, you know, maybe relatively new in role or might have mutual connections. Like it all comes down to probability and odds, and you shared some of the statistics earlier about the reduction in, you know, the rates of email opening.
Speaker 4:But you better believe that if I write a really good quality email and I send it to the right number of people and I'm consistent with execution, there could be some results there. And if I apply that same mentality to some of the other ways that I'm doing outreach, like making a call, um, you know, leveraging LinkedIn, et cetera, those things will engage. And that's why, even embracing mediums like this, doing podcasts, I've interviewed prospects on shows and it's turned into a relationship that later beget a deal. You know, thinking about the relationship as opposed to the deal, those are the types of things that can make all the difference in the world, because you never know and I think that's the way to control when the strawberry bush is going to bloom.
Speaker 3:No, you can't, oh my goodness. And you see the other part. Um, I hope this doesn't sound um too vain, but people like winners. Yes, people like people like to deal with winners. So if I'm going on a platform like LinkedIn, do you think I'm going to go to somebody with that, without a banner and don't have a picture Like that doesn't look that good. I want to go to somebody that has stuff that looks good, like I can connect with um, that I can learn from that, I can, you know, find, you know I can potentially help. And here's the other part too. Here's a caveat. I know we need to wrap up here coming up soon, but here's the caveat that I give you.
Speaker 4:I don't want to, I don't want to.
Speaker 3:Keep going. Here's my, here's my, here's my last little punch that I want to give you. Many of us are. Many of us have connections on LinkedIn that we are not connected to. One more time for folks in the back Many of us have connections on LinkedIn but we're not connected to.
Speaker 3:So here's a simple strategy that I recommend, and I want to go back to my analogies. Right, imagine yourself going to a conference, whatever conference in your industry. You know it's great. I'm going to consider podcast movement a keynote there last year but I go into that room and you have 500 chairs set up like 500 chairs in that room and you see, you see all these heads going all the way back and you're like man, 500 people and I'm on stage and they're there to connect. They like me, like that's pretty darn dope For many of us. We have those people and it's as if we don't walk. We don't talk to them at all. We walk outside the room and we go find other people and try to connect with those people when we're like, bro, I am right here with you, like, talk to me, talk and share me some of your stuff.
Speaker 3:So what I tell people is like there's several things that you can do One. Look at birthdays. This is money, carson. I'm telling you this is a money thing. It's a money thing. And if people don't apply this one, this one works time and time again. When people have birthdays or work anniversaries or new jobs that are in your network, prime time, I'll give you some. These are everything I'm telling you. I've applied so I can tell you the truth. Scout honor. I'm an Eagle Scout, right, so I can't lie now. So everything there was truth. So here's the thing that I would tell you when people have birthdays, instead of me sending like the dumb thing on, you know, happy birthday, like I'm what I do and I strive to do this. I'm not perfect at it, but imagine taking like five of those people in that audience that you have and just send them a birthday wish.
Speaker 3:I might say something with the audio feature on LinkedIn to the nature Brandon, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday there, brandon. I know my voice doesn't sound great Amen, it's so good, it's great. Connected with you and Carson several months ago. Just want to wish you a happy birthday. Hope you're having a great day in Atlanta. You and the family talk soon. Like that's totally different. Dude is going to reply, Brandon is going to reply back to me, but I'm nurturing him more than anything. I am staying. Let him know that I don't want you to get stale. I want this relationship. It means something to me.
Speaker 3:Carson gets a promotion to a new job. Everyone's going to do the post. Carson is going to change his LinkedIn and it's going to have the new job and everyone's going to say congrats, congrats. 90% of the people are going to say the dumb congrats, default, because they don't want to sound stupid. They're going to go by quickly, they're trying to do something simple. So I would say oh, my goodness, carson, congratulations on this awesome promotion, well deserved. And then I take it to the personal message. I would say Carson, saw that you just got promoted, man, way to go. Congratulations on that.
Speaker 3:Global VP of sales for Microsoft. What is your first order of business? And you know what Carson is going to say. Carson is going to tell me his playbook Donald, my first order of business is hiring. My first order of business is getting my team ramped up. My first order of business is to have my team do more social selling. And then, since we're already connected, I'll be like Carson, here's a tip, if you'd like it, that can help you with that that we use with one of our other clients. Better yet, if you're open to it, would love to jump on a call and share some tips with you and see if it can help you guys right now.
Speaker 3:Of course, donald, I'm willing to do that, but I'm using my network right now, people that have birthdays, have anniversaries and that work celebration one, the promotions, if you tell, if I promise you every last one of you, if you were to do what is your first, congratulations. Be personal, be caring, don't just do this to be tried. Be very personal and give a sincere message and then ask them what is your first order of business? They're going to tell you whether it's something you can help them with or something that you know that could, somebody that you know you know that could benefit from them. And then I'm going to go back to Peter, who was on here, and I'll say, hey, you should check out Peter, because Peter is a recruitment king, and then I might connect you with Peter. But I just gave you a resource and I'm using and helping my network. Come on, man Carson, you're going to feel indebted to me at some point. I'm not saying just to get you indebted, but in fact it's just that you're going to never forget that experience.
Speaker 4:You'll never forget the way that Donald made you feel when you had a birthday and you got promoted because his way stood out from the crowd. Come on, man, come on. I would love to hear whatever cold call you're going to do next. You're like all fired up. I'm going to go do it right now. Let's go. Here's to it.
Speaker 2:Carson. Here's our problem we got to figure out somebody to kick out of our top three shows ever, because right into that.
Speaker 3:Can I do one more to solidify my we're not going anywhere.
Speaker 3:So I got to go pick up my kid from school. It's Valentine's Day. He got chocolate. He'll be good.
Speaker 3:So here's the thing Go back to that network again. So if you're nurturing your network five people a day, just five people, see if anyone has birthdays or promotion. But go back to your ICPs. And if you have been nurtured, if you've been giving value like I look at it like a bank I've been deposited into the bank of you know, of Brandon for years with my podcast content. I got over my fear and I shared content and he's found it valuable and he's been connected with me for several months.
Speaker 3:So then what I tell, what I might, what I'll do to Brandon is I'll reach out and I'll say just this line this is the only time I pitch on LinkedIn. If I see that Brandon has something relevant that could benefit, I could benefit, I can help him out and we could find some mutual benefit there. I would say Brandon, permission to ask a question. I know I did one the other day to this guy and he's like you just did, but it's a permission to ask a question. And then you're going to say, of course, donald, shoot what's up. And then that's the only time I pitch I'll say Brandon, I noticed XYZ, the value.
Speaker 3:I noticed that you guys mentioned that you're trying to improve and increase social selling and that your team has not. You know you're trying to improve, increase your teams. You know your BDR is output as well. I have an idea that I think could work for you that we've used with others. It's our XYZ program. Are you open to learning more about that? I've deposited in your bank account for so long. You've seen my stuff and you are one of my connection not a brand new person, a first degree connection and you have a relevant problem and I have a relevant solution. You're more than likely going to say Donald, I'm open to talking to you at least, and I can tell you time and time again permission to ask a question, permission to ask a question.
Speaker 3:You try that now with five people. You see magic. There's a lady in my masterclass last week. She said I never get responses from people, never. So she went and she used that strategy. You reach out to six people and out of the six people, two of them within the first two hours after the master class responded to her and she started conversation and you know developing stuff from there. Obviously, I need to follow up to see how much more, how many more came from that. But you know that's a startling difference from somebody who never gets any response. But all it is is just very simple.
Speaker 4:Be the positive, and then ask. Probability and odds. You got to get more at that and if you can just get in the room, then you know what to do when you get in that room. But don't put the cart before the horse. Don't focus on the deal, don't focus on the sales process yet Focus on getting the meeting, getting the conversation, creating a relationship. Man, I love it. And I think we just beat Larry Levine for the longest episode ever.
Speaker 3:From the heart, larry, from the heart.
Speaker 4:We love you, Larry.
Speaker 2:We love you. Oh, the AI did good too. Did you see that? Do that again, Donald. Yeah, I did it.
Speaker 3:When I'm back, and this is if you do this on Zoom or some of these other platforms. Now, there it is oh yeah, look at this one, the thumbs up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thumbs up is good when you get the fireworks. Yeah, like one thumbs up.
Speaker 3:It's like I got you on a couple screens here, but then there's another one that I did. I don't know what it was. I just did a wave and then all of a sudden fireworks popped up. But I can't remember all of them.
Speaker 2:But yeah, well, donald, before we go, I'm sure a lot of people are going to want to follow you and reach out to you. Where can people go to connect with you and follow you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the easiest way to do so, you can go to the sales evangelistcom. We do have a free download at the bottom and in that it's five strategies, some of them I've shared today, that can help you make LinkedIn prospecting easier. If you would like to connect with me personally not just follow me, please connect personally Just go ahead and do so on LinkedIn. So a big shout out to Jennifer and to Deborah and to Peter just did that, so connected with them. And actually even here while we're here, peter has a book on recruiting, so we were talking about that there in the chat while going back and forth and we may have him come on the show. Brandon, you need to come on my show too, because you have stuff that can benefit our community.
Speaker 2:So I really love it. Thank you, donald Carson.
Speaker 3:whenever you come back. You know you've been on here twice already, so you got to open to our policy.
Speaker 4:Let me know when I love these connections that are happening as a result of the show. Donald, I mean you never disappoint. I love your energy and just who you are. Man, keep, keep posting those fresh cut Friday pics, man. They make me smile every stinking time. Your kid is so cute all four and a half years.
Speaker 3:And thank you and I want to show that's the last, last, last, last piece of the program. So the other part to that, too, is that people want to know you and Carson just hear that people want to know you. People do business with those in no like and trust. So if you go to my LinkedIn profile, you can check this right now. I had another aha and let's see what happens with it, but I did a instead of sending people to my website. That post is like who is this guy? And then I don't pitch my service. I just said I'm more than a sales guy and this is who I am because I want you to know me. Like people, I'm more than a title. You're more than a title. Carson has a family. Brandon, you have a family. Peter has a dog. For goodness sake, Like that's. You know more and has a family. But there's more to us than just our title and when you do that, it makes a difference.
Speaker 3:Not all my posts are around that, but I was apprehensive about posting because I'm like this is not Instagram. Should I post that? There? It was in the pandemic. So we started doing this and I'm like screw that. So I post a picture of me and Caleb and every. If I don't post every couple of weeks, people are just kind of like, hey, what's up with their posts? I haven't seen any of your posts lately. What's up with the fresh cut Friday? But it's a tradition that we started and it so happened that I started sharing pictures of it and we're chroniclizing that so that we can have that for generations Go to the barbershop together and get our haircut, so anyway.
Speaker 4:I love it and it stands out and I see it, I smile every time I think of you.
Speaker 4:I remember it. It reminds me of this episode of the office and it's like Michael Scott was a. He's a disaster, he's a joke. But there was one episode that really stood out for me and it was the one where he was going toe to toe, head to head, with Dwight on sales, and the reason that he was successful was because he knew everything about his clients on a personal level. He would have cards that literally had everything about them, their spouse, their kids, what mattered to them. And as funny as that show is overall, that episode stuck with me because if you know your, your prospects and your customers as people, and they know you as a person, there's a trust, there's a transparency. That's what makes deals happen.
Speaker 2:Come on, man you know the very beginning of the show. Before Carson, you came on as and it was a different name I had a CMO. Come on, it was one of the very first episodes and this is mid 2020. And the topic was is LinkedIn becoming personal? And we started talking then because I was a believer in personal posts in LinkedIn before that, because for me, business was never business, it was always personal and therefore it was business. And that's when I saw that trend starting to happen. And she came on and was like the CMO in me was like what the heck is going on? But the human in me was like this makes sense. Why haven't we been doing this sooner? And she shared how she had started dropping some personal what we call personal posts, but it was giving insights into her life and her person or character, and she's like my engagement has never been higher.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Because we, you know human beings still have hearts and they feel, and we do business with people who we know we like, we trust. What a great platform to do that. And I, chris's dog walks have has been showing that and displaying that as well. Donald, longest show ever, one of our best shows ever, if not the best. Thank you so much and we're really grateful to have you and we're going to definitely have to have you come back and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 4:Agreed. Thanks for all you do for the sales community.
Speaker 3:We love you Love you guys too, man, thanks for having me, of course.
Speaker 2:Sorry, absolutely.
Speaker 4:And thank you to the audience for being so engaged as always. Until next time, happy, modern selling.
Speaker 1:Bye, everybody, thank you for joining us today on Mastering Modern Selling. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe for more insights, connect with us on social media and leave a review to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fist Bump and our concierge service at GetFistBumpscom. Mastering modern revenue creation will help you to learn more about Fist Bump and its new creation. With Fist Bump, where relationships, social and AI meet in the fire-centric age.