Ed Wallace and Ron discuss how Sales Forces need to be doing their jobs.

You know, I can't talk about myself in a thumbnail, Ron, but I'll try. Just kidding. Well, I'll take you back to my education. I'm a CPA, and I always like to say that I'm in recovery. Part of that. process was to go into sales. So I spent many years as VP of sales of a software company. And then in 2006, I decided to form my own company. And it was called the Relational Capital Group at the time. And we started helping sales teams build better business relationships. And over the last 15 years, we've worked with Dow Chemicals, several companies that are part of the AED, including the AED. I'm on the faculty of the AED. And it's really been great. And we've evolved just like sales teams need to evolve. We've evolved now to helping companies with virtual relationships because I think we're going to be in a hybrid state for a while. So that's what we've been up to.

You know, we're working in rectangles. I never thought I'd be working in a rectangle, Ron. And I'm delivering sales training. So it's certainly a different world. Yeah.

Well, let me first compliment you on the shift you've made. Because you're a front of the room guy, just like I'm a front of the room guy. I've been with you at sales conferences and I've watched you train and I've seen you adapt not only your style, but your business. And I think it's the same thing that business owners and sales teams need to really consider because the buyers are changing and they may not change back to what we thought was normal. The buying process is changing. And I think when we come out of this, you're still going to have some buyers, some customers, whatever we call them, who are saying, hey, I like seeing you in the box. So let's meet in the box for half an hour. And that's why there's never been a better time to. And the other thing that does is it creates a level playing field with your competitors.

Because you had the relationship, you're walking into the plant or the facility or the dealership, wherever you're walking into. And now all of a sudden that's been taken away. And now a simple Zoom invite can get your customer on with the competitor. So we need to work on our virtual muscles now more than ever.

Speak for yourself.

Ron, we're seeing the same exact thing. If we think about it, millennials are in the older millennials are in their early 40s. They are becoming the decision makers of our customers. And we've got to adapt to the way they want to buy. They're very comfortable working remotely. They're very comfortable working electronically, digitally, however you want to say it. So how do we adapt to that? And we're still going to have our customers who want to meet with us, who still have their sales meetings. who still want to get together and have lunch or golf or those kinds of things. I don't think that's going to go away, but I think that's going to be lessened. We have one customer and they saw this coming. Now they are in a different industry than the industry we're talking to now, your industry, the equipment, heavy equipment and everything. They're laboratory products. And the owner of this business had 18 salespeople. He immediately shifted everyone.

into their homes. And he actually set up backgrounds for them with the laboratory equipment and a little bit of a logo, not an oversell too much. So there's a standardization when someone's talking to his sales rep about his brand. Brilliant. Here's his results in 2020. Okay. He does 24 million a year, not a big company. He used to spend almost $2 million a year on travel expenses. In 2020, he spent $20,000. His top line stayed the same. So think about his bottom line. So not only are the buyers adapting, but are the business owners and the people that run sales teams are saying, wow, you know what? Do I really need to send somebody out in a car to do one meeting today in Wyoming when they can do five meetings at home? So that's what we're seeing, pretty much the same thing. And we're seeing more millennial buyers and that's the way they want to work. So, you know, the new term, I'm sure you heard is hybrid rep.

We've got to build hybrid muscles because we're going to have to pivot in both directions. We use the word shift earlier, pivot, whatever you want to use, whatever verb you like.

Well, about 92% of emails are not being opened. That's from HubSpot, which is a CRM. And I get so many every day. I know you must get a ton of emails every day. So email is not really the way to go right now. Even if 8% are getting open, your success rate is not very high. So what do we do? The first thing, we need to think about is the social presence of our company and the social presence of our sales reps underneath our brand. And the best way to think about that is, I'll give you a scenario. I'm doing a sales meeting in Las Vegas. There's 70, you know, more 45 and older sales reps. And I asked everybody to stand up. I said, hey, how many? I didn't ask. I said, if you have a LinkedIn page, please stand up. 70 people stood up. I said, if you have your picture on the LinkedIn page, keep standing. Seven people remain standing. I said, if you like the picture you have on the LinkedIn page, keep standing. One person kept standing.

This was in March of 2020. And think about where does the millennial buyer go? They go to the LinkedIn page. They go to the website of the company. They may go to the LinkedIn page of the company and they go. And then if this Ed Wallace guy is going to talk to me, I want to check Ed Wallace out. And here they see Ed Wallace without a picture. They see Ed Wallace with, you know, he's on LinkedIn because, you know, everybody is on LinkedIn. He has five connections. He doesn't post anything. He doesn't create any kind of industry knowledge. I think the biggest thing is. We don't, you know, you write a lot and you're an expert in so many things. So you're a thought leader. I'm almost a thought leader. Okay. I write a lot. It's easy for us. But think about it. For a sales rep, they're not really creating content. They've got to find some way to be perceived as an industry expert, as a business person.

And I love to share this one fellow's LinkedIn page. My sales guy, John White. If the audience would go out and look at John White at Achieve Next, check out what he does as a regular sales guy on LinkedIn. You'll see John creates his own 60-second videos talking about some aspect of sales development. Or he shares something that some other thought leader in sales posted. When people go out to his site, he's got a wonderful presence. Let me interrupt

I would just go to John White. When you go to LinkedIn, I don't know his exact address, right? But if you go to LinkedIn, search John White Achieve Next, he'll come right up. Okay,

Absolutely. And it's a relationship mindset, not a sales mindset on LinkedIn. We are not going to sell anything on LinkedIn in most cases, right? Unless we're selling LinkedIn and we work for LinkedIn, but it's not about selling. It's about social presence. It's about creating. I like to put it this way. I'd like to help create a generation of salespeople who are business people masquerading as salespeople. I don't know. I'll say that again. I'd like to help create a generation of salespeople who are business people because business people like to talk to business people. They just happen to be a sales rep. And I think it's the reverse. Business people look at sales reps as sales reps. And it's difficult. So it starts with a... a LinkedIn profile, and we also counsel our customers, you're not going to convert your LinkedIn overnight. Go out and get a good picture. Feel good about yourself. Put a picture out there that you like, okay?

Then make sure your education and your background, make sure they read well. Again, look at John's. I mean, you don't have to look anywhere else. Look at John White's. See what he does. Just copy it, right? Just copy what that guy does. In fact, you know what I do an awful lot, Ron, is I bring John onto my webinars. And I bring him to training programs. And he does a little half hour on LinkedIn. There are so many things in LinkedIn that even I don't know about. Let's say I'm holding a webinar. And John wants to make sure people know about the webinar. But he only wants special people to get an invitation from him. There's actually a button on LinkedIn. where you can click on, it's called the events and you can send a personalized invitation to Ron and Ed and Charlie. And it's literally a personalized invite. I'm sure you know about that.

But those are the kinds of things that, and again, it doesn't happen overnight. So get started, get a good picture. Now, the other thing is, what are you posting? Well, we can't expect salespeople to have the time. And again, I don't think a business owner wants to see his sales rep writing a blog. I don't know if that's going to rub the sales VP or the business owner the right way. But find something Ron Slee publishes. I mean, you are an industry guru, right? You've got so much stuff on your website. They could go to your website and grab a month's worth of stuff every single day. Now, no more than three posts a week. That's kind of a good rule of thumb, okay? But you don't have to create it. Just share it. Put some kind of comment on there. Now, when the millennial buyer looks for John White, oh, this guy seems like he's pretty engaged in this industry. He goes to AED events.

He posts information about, you know, equipment and parts and different sales things. Now he has a little different impression before he gets on the Zoom with John. Now we get on the Zoom, okay? So John was able to keep using John White. So how does John distinguish himself in that Zoom call? Well, a background that is, it doesn't have to be, you know, a power office, but a background that's authentic. I'm between my kitchen and my living, my family room right now because it's the best place in the house for Wi-Fi, quite frankly. And if I was in my office, it's darker. It looks a little more, you know, a little too dark. So that's why I came up here. But an authentic background, not just like the shadows and, you know, like your background's perfect, right? You see the sun coming through, you see the nice bookcase. So a decent background when you're going to do a Zoom meeting.

You know, you don't have to be dressed in a suit and tie, but a quarter zip or something, a golf shirt, if it's the right time of the year. It's a casual situation. And then start off with some really good questions. Once you do, there might be some element of rapport building. But here's my $100 question. I give this to you and your audience for free. I invented this question. I see you smiling, right? So how many times has a sales rep stereotyped himself by asking the buyer, so what's keeping you up at night? Like they really care. And the buyer's like, wait a minute, I met you five minutes ago. I'm going to tell you my deepest, darkest bad news about my business? Or where were your pain points in your business? And I kept, you know, I've trained 29,000 salespeople and counting, right? And I'm like, I got to change that question. So here's the new question. You tell me what you think.

So Ron, you know,2020 was a challenging year for business owners, for sales teams. As you look back at 2020, what do you think was your biggest accomplishment? What do you think of that question?

I'm going to come back to my question, but you made a point that I love to build off of to position it as to how it'll help their business. Did you know HubSpot again? They're my survey go-to right now, right? HubSpot published some data a few months ago that a buyer, and I'm just using buyer generically, okay? A buyer expects their vendor, their salesperson, to understand. 85% of buyers expect the salesperson to understand their business. And how whatever it is they have to sell them is going to help their business. About 13% of salespeople actually approach it that way. So the $100 question is over the last year, it was a challenging year for everyone. Tell me what you think your greatest accomplishment is. The first thing that does, Ron, is it gets people thinking positively. And then now they're sharing happy thoughts with this stranger versus, oh, how do I cover up how my business is struggling? So we get them in a positive state.

It's not a manipulation. It's an aspect of worthy intentions. We want to have a good conversation, right? So then let's say you say, oh, my gosh, you know, that's interesting. You know, we switched everything to online. And now you're going to tell me about learning without scars, right? And you're going to tell me how you changed everything online and how you have all these courses online now, how people are. glomming onto it, how you're doing these blogs, how you have your daughter involved in the process, which is even better. And now you're in this happy state. And then I ask another question. Well, tell me more. Now you tell me more. And I ask you another question. Well, why is that? And now you tell me more. And then I'll say, is there anything else? I call it ask, ask, ask, ask, tell. And then you get to some kind of connection to what you might do. But before you get to the connection, you ask one more question.

You ask them, what do you think might slow that momentum down in 2021? Yeah. Yeah. And then, so it's such a nice, easy flow. Now, if I'm on that conversation, I haven't really had one like that in a while with the sales rep. So hopefully some of those, that emotional, you know, stereotype is starting to meld away. It's not going to meld away, but remember, they probably checked you out on LinkedIn. You had a strong LinkedIn presence. You posted some things. You look pretty good. During the conversation, you didn't ask them, let's keep you up at night. You didn't talk about the picture of their family behind them. You went, you did some rapport at a business at a higher level, and then you got into why you were there. And then you were able to cite a value statement. Like, let's say you said, well, geez, you know, I've been working with this vendor for all these years. We're really comfortable. Why should we switch?

Here's your next $100 gift, right? A value statement is the most powerful thing a sales rep can have, yet they stumble over them all the time. And they'll start talking about how big their company is or how many clients they have or we're the first at this or the second at that. And ultimately, it's really a clear statement through the eyes of that buyer that creates a benefit. Three things. Clear statement, not sentences. A statement through the eyes of the buyer, meaning talk to them first. And a benefit goes up, down, or eliminates. A benefit has three verbs. It increases something, it decreases something, eliminates something. So here's our value statement in our sales training business. Let's pretend you're a VP of sales. Let's pretend I blew you away with my LinkedIn presence. I blew you away with my $100 question. And you love this guy. You want to do business with me, but you have this other vendor you really like.

And you say, you know, why should I work with you? Here's what we say. Well, Ron, we help you increase sales through a strategic focus on relationships. That's it. The only thing you heard was increased sales. Hopefully that's probably, that's what you're talking to me about. And then if we got that right, then your next statement should be, how do you do that?

You know you got their attention when they say, how do you guys do that?

And that's why we're building relationships and not selling stuff.

Precisely. It's a relationship building mindset, not a sales mindset.

And they won't have the sophisticated. They can, but. They're not going to have the sophistication that you've got, but they can look at number of likes, number of shares. There's things they can look at on their posts that tell them this really struck a nerve. And then, you know, the other thing that I was thinking of is, as you were saying that, what I'm talking about, it doesn't have to be virtual. It can be in person. It's the same. It's the same. Right. So the principles of relational capital, credibility, integrity, authenticity, worthy intent, you know, putting the other person first and seeing behavior that validates that. And the third one is relational GPS, understanding the goals, passions and struggles. I know, you know, all these concepts because you've posted all that stuff, right?

They all work the same. And then so now we're still in the meeting. You just extended the meeting time because this rep is amazing. You're amazed, right? What do you do next? Well, now you qualify. You qualify, Ron. And again, I'm going to give you another simple acronym that's called BANT, B-A-N-T. And one of our sales coaches, I give him full credit for this. His name is Mark Allen Roberts. There's another guy to look up, Mark Allen Roberts on LinkedIn. You want to see some great posting on sales stuff? Mark Allen Roberts. Mark's a good friend of mine, works with me all the time with customers. And Mark said, hey, you know, the qualification is banned. Budget, authority, need, and time. So here's, so when I'm asking you about budget, I don't come out and say, do you have any budget for this? You know, we're talking about a solution now.

You might want to ask that question, Rod, so, you know, how does a company normally budget for things like this? You know, is there some element in your budget for this? Or will we need to build a business case together? Oh, this guy's going to help me rationalize. That's the one on budget. The second one, authority. You don't want to ask Ron if he's the, yeah, Ron, I don't want to ask you if you're the decision maker. I know in your business you are, right? But you don't want to ask, are you the decision maker? Almost like you're going to walk right over this relationship you just spent time with. It might be something like, You know, I work with a lot of companies in your industry, and generally there's multiple people that are involved in the decision. You know, how does that work here? What's the decision-making process here? Now you're not insulting the person. The third one is need.

Have we clearly found, do we clearly understand their needs? And that's where I talk about the ask, ask, ask, tell, all that kind of stuff. And the last one is timeline. Yeah, well, you know what? You know, so when do you think a project like this might kick off? Oh, well,2023. Oh, see ya. Would you believe, though, that I know you believe it, but when we do pipeline analysis with our customers and we just ask them, we ask the reps to do BANT, that simple acronym, most of the time what they're forecasting, they don't even have two of the four checked off.

ahead.

Yeah. I just want to talk to somebody today and you're the first one that walked in.

And let your authenticity come through. You talked about listening before. We need empathic listening or active listening, they call it different things. It's listening to understand, not to talk next.

Yeah.

And you want to ask the questions with, with, I don't want to say the word finesse. You want to ask the questions less directly so that you don't offend the person. like bringing, you know, who else, you know, is there a committee that makes these decisions? Tell me about your decision-making process. It's easier to defer to process and it doesn't bring people into it as much. And they're going to tell you, oh, my boss and his boss and a couple of the plant managers are going to be involved. Okay. And you're going to be involved too. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're going to, you know, we do as this can be. Well, what do we, what's our next step to, you know, and then you ask. And one of the things that. we're finding is asking about the buying process today, Ron, is such a great question because everybody has a new buying processes. So, you know, during the pandemic, how have your buying processes changed? What is your buying process here?

And they just riff on and on and on about it.

I think we just did it.

Well, first thing, I would think about the the mindset and skills to build relationships and sell virtually. I would call it that. And the mindset starts with, I mentioned a couple of times, but I'm going to add to the list now, a relationship building mindset and not a sales mindset. The sales comes, you know, we like to have them buy. We don't want to have to sell. So we want to start with the relationship. I'll start a lot of conversations off with, hey, Ron, you know, Please don't feel there's no sales pitch there. I'm usually on with my sales guy or my sales team. So I'll say, look, hey, this is we're in the relationship business. We're not here to pitch you on anything. We're here to have a conversation, a long relationship. So no pressure. Nobody's going to say, when can we get started? So that usually disarms any defensive buyers. The second one is the sales rep has to understand they're the value proposition for the business.

They're a living and breathing value proposition. And the business has a brand and everything, but they're talking to Ed Wallace right now. And they're assessing Ed Wallace emotionally. They're saying he's got too much gel in his hair. They may not like his glasses. His quarter zip isn't straight. That's the first thing they're doing. They're emotionally assessing the person in front of them. So we've got to overcome that. And we overcome that with business-like questions. And we change the persona that they're thinking. OK, so that's the second thing. The third thing is, how do we how do we get to a point where they're looking at us that we're credible? Credibility comes from asking great questions until you're deemed believable, which is credibility. There's no way they can trust you. And if they don't trust you, they don't ask you to do stuff together. So think about behaviorally. So those are the three things, right? Think behaviorally.

Ron extended the meeting. The buyer shared more information with me. The buyer brought somebody else into our Zoom. They brought somebody else into that call somehow. Those are the things that you want to observe that say, hey, you know what? There's something going on here. And they make a commitment to another meeting. So a relationship mindset, you're the value proposition, which means you've got to be buttoned up on LinkedIn and everywhere else in the way you conduct the interaction. And the third one is becoming believable. Because until we're deemed believable, we really can't have much of a business relationship. How's that for a wrap up?

Mahalo. And people can look me up on LinkedIn. They can find out about my books and everything. Just Ed Wallace 007. on Achieve Next. If you put in Ed Wallace 007, believe it or not, that's my call number on LinkedIn. So great being with you, Ron. And we will definitely do more. Just let me know. And great to see you. And I'm glad you're doing so well through all the challenges we all have you and your wife and your family. Thank you so much for having me today.