Accelerate! With Andy Paul

Kimberlee Slavik, author of five books, including Visnostic Sales and Marketing: The Power of VISualization DiagNOSTIC Statements™, A Neuroscientific Approach to Communicating, Training, Selling, Marketing, and Leading, joins me on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast. SUMMARY Kimberlee Slavik has published five successful sales books in 2019 and is working on three more. Readers’ reactions to her first book led to the others in a series. She also wrote a leadership book from her sales experience. Kimberlee recommends upgrading sales management standards and suggests requiring licensing for sales management; there should be consequences for bad behavior in the sales industry. Kimberlee was motivated to write Visnostics to provide plans for the execution of the sales theories she had learned along the way in sales. She tells how to flip the story to appeal to customers. Generation Zs have a three-second attention span so you have to get their attention with your first words. You never know what your

Ian Altman, co-author of Same Side Selling: How Integrity and Collaboration Drive Extraordinary Results For Sellers and Buyers, 2nd Edition, joins me again on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast. SUMMARY Ian introduces the second edition of Same Side Selling. Ian advises subject matter experts and trusted advisors who serve their clients’ needs with integrity. Ian emphasizes to aim for the results your clients have in mind and build trust with them. Andy and Ian explore how offering discounts diminishes your integrity. Ian shares a story about home renovations. Ian reveals his decision quadrant for asking questions about the client’s problem to solve, the importance of solving it, the desired result, and who else is impacted by it. Ask the right questions about what a successful result looks like to your client. Andy and Ian agree that companies should hire salespersons that serve their clients with value. Clients will buy proposed solutions that help them to be successful. Ian tells a car dealers

Chad Sanderson, Managing Partner at ValueSelling Associates, Inc., joins me on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Chad defines the sales singularity as the combination of tech tools and human connections to use the best features of both in the sales process. Technology needs to amplify the human element, not replace it. Automated templated emails tend to devalue human relationships. You can turn that email into a message relevant to a human being by adding two sentences crafted by a person for a person. Chad uses Amazon Prime as an example of a customized, low-friction B2C user experience. Now, on the complex B2B side, buyers are looking for a frictionless experience. You can ask a question to uncover a solution. You can take 15 minutes to research a role in an industry to come up with a relevant targeting question or statement. SDRs qualify a contact for the next call. Chad notes that this requires showing respect for the contact’s role and understanding how your business might help them. Chad recommends tha

Mercy Bell, Analyst at Dogpatch Advisors, joins me on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS As a young woman of color, Mercy was unusual in B2B tech sales. She sees an echo chamber in sales and on LinkedIn of white men of a certain age and experience. After college, Mercy was the second hire at a startup. At age 23, she had a $3.7 million year in enterprise sales. In her family, she was the first to graduate high school, first to graduate college, and first to get a desk job. Mercy worked at the fundraising call center for Stanford in the Great Recession. Her territory was Stanford graduates on Wall Street, many of whom had lost their jobs. After four years, she was prepared for sales. Mercy talks about the “in-the-moment” creative decision tree Dogpatch Advisors reps follow to position their software for their customers. Mercy’s first memory as a child with her mother was people asking her, “Where are your parents?” She felt she was constantly giving people an “explanation of self.” That “why me” type of exercis

Stu Heinecke, author of How to Get a Meeting with Anyone and Get the Meeting!, joins me again on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Russ Klein, CEO of the American Marketing Association, calls Stu Heinecke the Father of Contact Marketing. Stu admits to naming it. Stu is also a Wall Street Journal cartoonist. Cartoons offer a point of agreement. Stu used cartoons in direct mail campaigns for Rolling Stone and Bon Appétit and set records for responses. He wanted to penetrate the rest of the publishing industry. He put together what he called a ‘contact campaign.’ He sent a cartoon to two dozen VPs of big publishers. He needed a 100-percent response rate. All the contacts responded and became clients. Stu started a multi-million dollar business from an investment of about $100.00. Contact marketing means reaching out to a relatively small group of top influencers. Stu sometimes uses ‘big boards’ that cost him $250.00 each to reach a contact worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. Get the Meeting! is a

Sean Sheppard, Sales Influencer and the Founder and CEO of GrowthX, joins me again on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS GrowthX is a Silicon Valley venture capital partnership with an accelerator focused on sales and an academy that trains people in sales, marketing, design thinking, and data science and aims at developing markets. Sean describes the ‘lasting-mover advantage’ for companies that own the customer use case. Sean reminds his clients to go slow so they can go fast later. Look first for the customer profile of ‘Mr. Right Now.’ The first into a market is not the last in the market. Apple was not the first GUI; Google was not the first search engine. Sean gives examples. The first company to the market can rarely sustain its position. Sean teaches three keys to build a lasting-mover advantage. The first is to own the use case by earning it through value. The use case is changing at a faster rate than ever. Andy Grove wrote that only the paranoid survive and that we constantly have to be staying out

Bill Bice, CEO of Boomtime, joins me on this episode of the Sales Enablement Podcast. KEY TAKEAWAYS Boomtime brings scale and efficiency to marketing. They combine technology and expertise to provide marketing as a service. Aggregating data opens up insights into your buyers, whatever size your company may be. Bill has founded several companies whose success correlates directly to the effectiveness of their go-to-market strategies. Bill started Boomtime to improve his companies’ marketing results. Bill first asks a CEO from where their last couple of clients came. If they were referrals, that company is a prospect for Boomtime’s word-of-mouth marketing service. Bill follows a structured interview process with new clients to understand their business. Boomtime provides a content-driven approach to marketing and positions the CEO and their business as thought leaders. Boomtime helps you to do three things better: 1) capture the leads and referrals that are already coming in, 2) follow up on those leads, a

Steve Farber, author of Love is Just Damn Good Business: Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do, joins me on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS People who are great at what they do love their company, team, and customers. Steve explains the impact of translating love into action in your work. Do soft skills make you nervous? Can love be quantified? Steve talks about the net promoter score and employee engagement as examples of love metrics. If you can’t measure something, is it still worthwhile to do? What is the measure of a relationship? If you’re not hitting your numbers, that is a measure of failed relationships. The highest-performing salespeople have great relationships. Selling is all about relationships. Steve shares a case study of a top salesperson who asked herself if her customers loved her. She went on a campaign to gain their love by serving them in a way that showed her love for them. Listen in for her results! How do you develop love? Steve discusses relationships in tr

Oren Klaff, Managing Director of Intersection Capital and bestselling author of Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal and Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idea is Their Idea, joins me on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Buyers have become increasingly empowered in the years since Oren wrote Pitch Anything. Now, buyers receive your proposal and then can search everywhere online to find the lowest price. Buying options reduce conversion rates and take the margin out of selling. That’s why Oren wrote Flip the Script. When the buyer chases you, you close sales deals. Andy and Oren discuss maximizers and satisfiers. Anyone who asks you for a proposal plans to ask you for a discount when they compare proposals. Oren finds from his consulting that when buyers are motivated and decide to work with you, that decision is resilient throughout negotiations and distance. But when buyers have many objections, you don’t close deals. Objections come from two reas

Chris Spurvey, Business Growth Facilitator and CEO at Chris Spurvey Sales Consulting Inc., joins me on this episode. KEY TAKEAWAYS Chris shares his negative first exposure to sales. He doesn’t respect “pushy” salespeople. At university, Chris and partners started a business. When they sold it, he moved on to become a marketer, not a salesperson. After 10 years, he read a Robert Kiyosaki book and identified himself as an entrepreneur. That led him into sales. Chris’s first sales position was Manager of Business Development for an IT professional services company. Chris remembered the salesman that had sold his family a $3,000 vacuum cleaner; he thought that was how he was supposed to sell. He studied Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy; internalizing their methods didn’t work for Chris. After months of miserable, determined, and unsuccessful efforts, Chris realized he needed a way of selling that was in line with his personality. The more he experimented, the more he found things that worked for him. Chris help

Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, joins me on this episode.

Bill Eckstrom, Founder and President of EcSell Institute and Sarah Wirth, VP of Client Services, who are the co-authors of The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth, join me on this episode.

Shawn Finder, CEO at Autoklose, joins me again on this episode.

Bill Wilson, Co-Founder & CEO at Sales Right Co., joins me on this episode.

John Crowley, the best-selling author of Knuckle Dragging Sales: A Primitive Process To Make More Money, joins me on this episode.

Jens Hentschel, Founder and Managing Director of the Fivis Partnership, joins me on this episode.

Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic, joins me on this episode.

Dennis Brown, LinkedIn sales consultant and author of The Ultimate Guide to Generating Inbound Leads with LinkedIn, joins me on this episode.

Ben Salzman and Kyle Williams, Principals at Dogpatch Advisors, join me on this episode.

Wayne Cerullo, Chief Prospect Officer at B2P Partners, joins me on this episode.