Steven is an in-demand sales consultant and author of Future Proof Selling. (a 2019 Top Sales finalist). He has his own podcast, also called Future proof selling where he discusses the very best and latest sales strategies in play today.
Here on the BOSS podcast, the tables are turned, he is the talent.
Steven shares what he thinks sellers should be doing to use social as part of the more complex sale and beyond the starting of prospecting conversations.
Some of the things Steve talks about is how, inside sales, now thanks to COVID, has a bigger piece to play in our sales organizations and how we could be using content more effectively to reengage our clients.
Some great tactic for you to use.
Steven Norman
https://www.linkedin.com/in/growth-coach/
Sales Assessment Tool
https://growthacumen.com.au/sales-assessment-tool-3/
Growth Acumen
https://growthacumen.com.au/
Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/
Mark McInnes - Sales Training
www.Markmc.co
www.Bonjoro.com
Coupon – BOSS20
Tactical Pipeline Growth
www.markmc.co/tpg
Catch all versions of me here.
https://linktr.ee/markmcinnes
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BOSS Podcast
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Best of Social Selling Ep18
Mark McInnes: [00:00:00] Welcome to the boss podcast. I'm very pleased this week. I have Steve Norman, the CEO and founder of growth acumen. as I guest, Steve, welcome to the boss podcast.
Steve Norman: [00:00:10] Great to be with you, Mark. Looking forward to it.
Mark McInnes: [00:00:13] Very pleased to have you here. And of course, for those of you who don't know, Steve Norman is a Sydney based, a B to B sales trainer works has the organization called a growth acumen. You might know him as the author of a great book called future-proof sales strategy. And that was the, there was a finalist in the 2019 top sales, sales book of the year.
Is that right? Steve?
Steve Norman: [00:00:39] correct. It was shortlisted there.
Mark McInnes: [00:00:41] Yep. And I'm expecting very good audio quality out of you. Should I say because you're also the host of a great podcast. Now I listened to a few podcasts and yours is one of them, which is of course a future proof selling podcast. So I was lucky enough to be a
Steve Norman: [00:00:55] for everyone. We've all got to pick up our game on the audio and video and lighting and everything. And this, you remote selling world.
Mark McInnes: [00:01:02] Yeah. That's exactly. It's exactly right. and this is a great way to produce content for salespeople as well. If you can create a podcast. say, people might say, Mark, why is Steven Mark collaborating? Because we're both B to B sales trainers and we compete against each other, but I'd be suggesting that, you've got a much more holistic view at sales process and sales organizations than what I do.
Would that be a fair comment to make.
Steve Norman: [00:01:25] Yes. Sure. Like I get involved in like sales transformation projects, and helping companies, look at their whole sales strategy. Look at where they're allocating resources, looking at their structure. of course prospecting and sales trainings, part of that. but I know that's like your specialty that you're very deep on, whereas yeah.
I tend to cover the whole sales process, including discovery, qualifying, building commitment, managing pipelines forecast, and all of those processes.
Mark McInnes: [00:01:55] And in fact, in your book, you've you talk about the seven steps of building out a great sales organization, don't you? So I think you start with the structure don't you, and then you talk about that. actually you should talk through the seven steps rather than me. It's your book.
Steve Norman: [00:02:10] Absolutely yeah, there's seven steps. And, I talked about implementing the right sales structure, which is about really understanding your market. Where are the key opportunities, focusing your resources towards the highest priority opportunities, and then also specializing, wherever practical.
Because I really believe in having specialized sales roles, but as far as practical, we know in Australia in a lot of our territory, we have to be Jack of all trades, but there can be opportunities to specialize. the second step, and I think the biggest step for me is recruiting the right talent. And, an observation I have is most sales leaders.
A recruiting by gut feel or recruiting through running our structured interviews and trying to size someone up. the data would suggest that it's a very poor predictor of success. So I've got a whole structure for effective, solid recruiting. then there's, the prospecting function is key. next is that middle of funnel process around your discovery, qualifying, bringing insight, all of that about a whole system.
For managing the middle of funnel effective way,
Mark McInnes: [00:03:22] I love that.
Steve Norman: [00:03:26] middle of funnel Douglas, understand what that stands for. The next step is about referrals, selling, and very few organizations actually have a proper structure for leveraging referrals. And we just know the leads we get from referrals have much better economics, much better close rates. and then leads, we get through our prospecting activity.
So a whole structure there. six step is about collaboration and stakeholder management, and it's been proven with all the data salespeople and sales leaders that build great stakeholder support in their organizations. Are far more successful than average. So it's that's a really key thing to look at.
And the last thing for sales leaders is to focus on continuous change and improvement. And, this year has taught us a lot of lessons about that. And we need to look at our sales organization as a living, breathing, changing organism. when I talk to sales leaders and let's say when I was a sales leader, manage large sales teams, for more than 20 years, And always working on three or four initiatives to improve that organization, to improve how we did prospecting to improve how we were converting to improve our margins, to improve our product mix.
that you've got to be always looking at changing and improving and, they, there's a good way doing that in a bad way. And we know. 70% of change initiatives, failing companies, because they go about it the wrong way. So there's a pretty solid structured process of how to make changes in the sales team stick.
Mark McInnes: [00:05:07] Yeah, that's a great statistic. Isn't it. 70% of change initiatives.
Steve Norman: [00:05:13] Yeah. And we all know, We all know where we are. We're called into a town hall meeting. With the MD or the CEO or the sales leader and they tell us, Oh yeah, we're going to target this market, or we're introducing this product. We want you to sell services as well as sell product now. And they roll it out.
And then six months later nothing's really changed.
Mark McInnes: [00:05:35] Yeah. As a sales leader, if you hear those numbers. So I'm a safety kind of guy, Steven I'm like a safe investor. And I think I came from a sales leader in 70% of initiatives file. If I can, if I conduct no initiatives whatsoever, I'll be considered to be more successful than most others.
Steve Norman: [00:05:55] Oh,
yeah, the thing is if we don't adapt and we don't change, we're going to die. Pretty good. Gonna die a slow death anyway,
Mark McInnes: [00:06:05] Will that be better than a fast day? so if I carry, bring in a social selling campaign to X, Y, Z organization,
Steve Norman: [00:06:11] Yeah.
Mark McInnes: [00:06:12] and I've got a 70% chance of failure, I could just continue on with what I've already got and die, a slow death, but maybe I'll be in a new robot.
Steve Norman: [00:06:20] Yeah, exactly. You could move on and destroy some other sales organization, but, what we'd see with a lot of folks moving around and just implementing the site. A system, the better approach I would suggest is learn how to make change, stick, and you know that there's three or four steps that you need to follow.
To get the right alignment with your team to do the right planning, give everyone input, celebrate early wins. make sure you stay involved as a leader to make those changes stick because when you implement something new, your sales team will run into obstacles. They'll run into obstacles with the CRM or some other system.
Another department won't be supporting the new initiative and the sales leader will need to go and block that or clear that blockage. there's a lot of things you need to do to, to make change, stick.
Mark McInnes: [00:07:14] Yeah. And look, this two minutes just highlights how different being a sales leader is to being a gun sales person. you don't need to handle any of these challenges when you're the best sales person in the organization, but the minute that you become a sales leader, you've got to think about all of this.
put your, Experience on the line to bring it, these initiatives, these change initiatives forward so that you continue to increase your revenue. it's tough. It's a tough gig. And a lot of us don't know where to start or what a sales leaders don't know where to start.
And that's what got us to you. And I talking and bring you on the podcast today is because you've developed a really cool tool. That's gonna help us find. Where we can start where we should stop. Is that right?
Steve Norman: [00:07:57] Yeah, absolutely. So we've put together a sales assessment for organizations to assess their sales function. So it's a really great tool for sales leaders to self assess their sales organization in seven key categories. And they roughly follow the seven categories that I just outlined from the book, how are we hiring?
How are we prospecting? How are we doing discovering qualification, et cetera. So it covers all those areas in a bit of depth survey only takes five or 10 minutes to complete and they'll get. They get a 12 page report that will highlight the areas they may vote. They may want to focus on because you can't fix everything at once.
You can't, during the whole sales process, in one go, you've got to prioritize, okay. For the next six months, we're going to implement a social selling program. all right. And you need to be focused and stick to that. And then following that, okay, we're going to close on improving our margins or you're getting better.
Better close rates. and then follow that through. so this would give you some guidance and you can just, you can check it out at my website, growth, acumen.com.edu. It's a free assessment. And, I think you're pretty useful at this time.
Mark McInnes: [00:09:16] yeah. Look, first of all, I've got to say Steve, it's a great tool. I've used it as that's why we've reached out. The presentation of it is really high quality. the report that you get back is very good, much better than what you would expect from most consulting businesses.
I would thought of our size so well done to that, and it's quick and easy to do if you're a sales leader, stop the podcast here, go to the website, do the three minutes or five minutes worth of survey. then come back on that confident you'll get some value out of it and then come back and listen to this.
great. super great tool. Okay. we wanted to talk a little bit today about what's happening in the marketplace and the opportunities that exist for salespeople and wrap that up in some social spaces yesterday.
Steve Norman: [00:09:58] Yeah, absolutely.
Mark McInnes: [00:10:00] W what are your, what's your mindset around the opportunities for sales people now?
And what I'm saying now is in COVID, whatever version of COVID we're in the net, depends whether you're in Victoria, Queensland, new South Wales or Florida, so a little bit different. Yeah. So what's your mindset around that?
Steve Norman: [00:10:17] Yeah, I see two massive changes going on, Mark, that we go through right now. And the biggest one is the shift and the shift to digital. And we'll dig into that in a minute. And that gets a lot of focus. The other big shift is that the market shrunk, and the market has become much tougher and. Sales organizations and sales people that are not professional that are not don't have the skills don't understand the processes properly.
really getting found out right now. So the boss just gotten much higher and I think there's, that requires us to really understand where we stand on our sales fundamentals. And I see a lot of sales teams that have been what I call speeding last three or four years. We've had a booth economy where yeah, if your sales skills weren't up to par, you might still have been successful and you might've been able to lead with a product leg led sales process and still had some success.
That's absolutely not going to work now. so hence. the focus I put on developing that sales tool is because I really think folks need to take stock of their fundamentals. So that's something really key. And then there's shift to remote digital. Yeah. This is a shift that's been happening anyway, like you, and I know the past decade, these trends, there've been happening, look at the growth of LinkedIn in the last 10 years.
Like it's been growing at 20 or 30% a year. through that whole time, people doing more and more interaction on LinkedIn. And this year, of course it's jumped tremendously. It's got a lot of attention, but it's probably accelerated, I don't know, three years or five years of change. That was gonna happen anyway.
It's just all happened in this year.
Mark McInnes: [00:12:15] Yeah. So LinkedIn have announced a 26% increase of activity in April.
Steve Norman: [00:12:21] Wow. that's amazing.
Mark McInnes: [00:12:23] It's like a 705, 706 million people on the platform. 368 million people use it once a month. And about 3.5 million people use it once a week, post, once, sorry, post once a week. and, but so the numbers have increased by about 10 or 15 million, which is not a lot, but the usage rate is increased by 26%.
Steve Norman: [00:12:46] it's incredible. And similar numbers for zoom. Like your zoom was growing like crazy. Anyway, so business interactions were shifting to video already. Now it's been accelerated like it's doubled or tripled or quadrupled. We, inside sales has been growing for a long time, Mark, right? The specialization, the shift from field to inside or having a bigger right.
There'll be inside. Of course, we're all, now we're all inside. and we just, no the economics of inside sales. When you get it ride, so much better than the field, you can do so many more meetings. You can do so much more preparation. You have all the tools at your fingertips when you're talking to the customer.
yeah, there's a lot to be said for being an effective insights or remote sales person.
Mark McInnes: [00:13:37] Yup. Yup, absolutely. And I don't think we're going back to that, face to face demonstrations, let me sit in your boardroom. And of course, some of those things will happen, but they'll just, won't be anywhere near as often as what they used to be.
Steve Norman: [00:13:49] Yes. so when we've had, when we have this much disruption, it's a massive opportunity, right? So you were, like field sales and sales in general may have become pretty refined, very competitive for a long time. and maybe hard to get ahead to hard, to get an edge. but now with all the disruption, if you can invest in your own development and you can become expert at LinkedIn, you can become an expert on managing zoom.
You can become expert on all these like remote selling skills. You've got a chance to really, vault yourself forward and, and be very competitive.
Mark McInnes: [00:14:34] So look, that sounds obvious in some respects, because we're in the middle of the snail. what are you, what do you think salespeople should be doing or maybe sales leaders? Cause I know you've got to focus on the leadership piece line piece.
Steve Norman: [00:14:45] I think we have to be very practical. And the practical thing is I do a lot of work in the tech space and this test space that a huge portion of the leads in that industry come from events. And they come from face to face meetings. so that's gone away and so I'm getting involved in a lot of projects.
Okay. How do we generate pipeline in this new situation? And, yep. When you ask salespeople or experienced field salespeople. Okay. What's the best way to make a phone call. A prospecting phone call. what's the best way to write a prospecting email. what should you do on what's the best world-class way to conduct yourself on LinkedIn?
And they usually don't have much clue about that. And it's not surprising that they're not skills that they've. Yeah, I've been working on for the past few years. so I think we do have to get back to sales fundamentals, and we need to be drilling and learning about how to do this stuff and execute this stuff in a world class way.
Mark McInnes: [00:15:58] I think what you're saying is we need to relook at our processes and adapt them for the new, and I know a lot of people don't like that sort of the new, but what I've noticed for example is, the rapport building component of an online conversation is about. 90 seconds.
Whereas if I was in a boardroom, that might well be five minutes. Is that the sort of thing that you think that, where we need to make adjustments see now in your sales process? Is it something like that?
Steve Norman: [00:16:29] Yeah. Like how do we build trust? How do we build credibility, towing that prospecting, right? How do we build credibility with new people? And yeah, if you could get a meeting with someone and get face to face, right? you can cross that bridge. but I think we need to be using social much more effectively to warm up prospects and warm up potential customers here.
And it's not just the activity we do. It's how we present ourselves. And it's, what's our value are salespeople really clear about their value, their unique value, and they need to find that, and you can't do this on a weak foundation.
Mark McInnes: [00:17:15] what would you advise salespeople do in that regard on social to create that foundation?
Steve Norman: [00:17:22] Yeah, I think most salespeople underestimate their value, but generally they know more about their industry or their subject. Then the average customer. Because they exposed to so many deals, so many customers, so many situations, so many problems. And I really want to see salespeople presenting themselves as expert on solving their customer's problems.
Right.
Mark McInnes: [00:17:51] But I will wear that. I'm hoping this is what you're going to say next, but where that junction is between their products and services meets their clients, right? They don't need to be an expert on every component of their customer's business. They just need to be an expert at where their SAS product or their tech product intersects with their clients.
Is that right?
Steve Norman: [00:18:09] Yeah, it's gotta be relevant. And it's got to eventually lead to opportunities for your product. And that's what you'll have expertise in. We should have expertise. Okay. Let's play with selling, a records management system for hospitals, right? yeah. What are the key challenges that hospitals have with managing their records, getting access to them, securing them, being able to share them with other hospitals or whatever, though, those types of challenges are, we should be expert on that and how.
Other hospitals have solved those problems. And our profile should say, I help hospitals access records faster or at a lower cost or something like that. And so that's the foundation that we start with and then we should be, posting on those topics or finding. Industry articles on those topics and putting out comments.
And then when we're approaching a potential customer, you were talking about those particular problems and issues with some credibility
Mark McInnes: [00:19:20] Okay.
Steve Norman: [00:19:21] and through that, the customer starting, through those different interactions, when they check your profile, when they get a message from you, when they see it, they see a post wrong and they're starting to put the jigsaw together.
And it's starting to build a picture of you and you're presenting yourself very differently than someone whose profile says, new South Wales sales manager for XYZ records management company. It's a very different thing, isn't it?
Mark McInnes: [00:19:49] strategic connector
Steve Norman: [00:19:52] Yeah. my quota for the last five years president's club, like customers don't want to hear that.
Mark McInnes: [00:19:58] Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's important that they build a network full of their target audience. like it's all well and good to be connected to a whole bunch of salespeople and sales let's call them influences, I think that's important, but you also need to have a good. Depth of network.
That's going to be relevant for your per perfect clients, right? Because people want to see you in the same circles as what they are. When I first started selling, my boss used to say, so I was in FMCG, fast moving consumer goods, work for national foods, which is now line Nathan. And I used to say, you've got to go and read, grocery magazines about.
What's happening in the grocery industry, because when you're communicating with the people at shell service stations or the people at Woolworth's, you need to know what's important to them. and so you had to learn to like that conversation, and that's just exactly the same on LinkedIn, and the only way you're going to do that is by adding those types of people and those topics into your network,
Steve Norman: [00:20:58] Yeah,
Mark McInnes: [00:20:59] of people miss it.
Steve Norman: [00:21:00] there's something interesting I learned about recently is that, the brain doesn't really distinguish between a real meeting and a virtual meeting or a virtual relationship. And you can actually build relationship. You can build trust. Like I know if my experience on LinkedIn, so I've been quite active for maybe three years now.
And I'm posting regularly. I've got content folks coming to me all the time that say they feel like they know me.
Mark McInnes: [00:21:33] Yep.
Steve Norman: [00:21:34] And I do nothing. Actually. I don't know them, but they know me and they know what they're getting into. When they engage with me already. and if we think about how we look at sports stars or pop stars, or, the passion, we feel about different things that we follow.
We haven't met those people. We don't know those, those people don't know us. but we can have a very, meaningful sort of emotional connection, to something that we haven't touched on or met.
Mark McInnes: [00:22:07] Yeah, so good points there around what sales people need to do. If you got, what about reactivating conversations with all the counts or, using social deep, more deeply into the, into a complex site, we've got any ideas or
Steve Norman: [00:22:23] Yeah, absolutely. Mark. And we know the trend in your larger complex deals is there's more people involved in decisions. And that number seems to be growing year after year. It's like an average of about eight, I think. And on the super large enterprise deals, it's about 17 folks on average. And you can imagine this year, Yeah.
What I've seen is that more people are getting involved this year, because they're really scrutinizing where they're spending money,
Mark McInnes: [00:22:51] exactly.
Steve Norman: [00:22:52] are getting pushed upstairs, even on, low value.
Mark McInnes: [00:22:55] Yeah, because nobody wants to take the risk. So the risk is shared, like I don't want to be that sales manager that implements something. That's got a 70% chance of failure. But if I can tie my CEO, CFO, COO, and HR department into that conversation, then I'm less likely to get the sack when it files.
Steve Norman: [00:23:11] Yeah. And so it's very important that we broaden our contact base within large accounts. And what better way to do it than using LinkedIn.
Mark McInnes: [00:23:27] Have you got any strategies around there?
Steve Norman: [00:23:29] Look, it depends on the situation, right? and something, something I've done, we should be posting stuff relevant to those folks. and you can, even if you're working on a huge deal, could be a multimillion dollar deal. Yeah, I've planted content specific for that customer, but you don't have to tell them it's just for them.
Mark McInnes: [00:23:54] That's wrong. That's
Steve Norman: [00:23:55] I don't know if you've done anything like that, but you could post something that goes out to everybody, but it's actually very relevant and it's got some messages you want that specific prospect to see,
Mark McInnes: [00:24:06] Hi.
Steve Norman: [00:24:07] right? So you can post that and then you can even forward it, say, Hey, I wrote this article or I posted this.
I thought it might be of interest to you. Put it right in front of them and they can be very effective or find something, search something on the web or search on LinkedIn for something very relevant to their specific situation and just serve it up right in front of them.
Mark McInnes: [00:24:29] Yeah, I think it's if you can post or find some content that's been written by an authority that reinforces your point of view. So if you've been having a conversation with business XYZ about why they should make a change and you can find somebody that's in a position of authority that talks about the benefits of making that change, that you could then repost that article. Okay, can generate a bunch of activity and then behind the scenes, I could send that to you and say, Hey, Steve, look, I know we spoke about this two weeks ago. here's an article that supports the conversation. I think we were having, I think it's really important for you to have a look. it's a three minute read.
Maybe the most important part is, the second and third paragraph, just to what you'd like to know, and if you've got a bunch of activity on that,
Steve Norman: [00:25:11] I liked that specificity that you give there and we need to make it easy. We need to make.
Mark McInnes: [00:25:20] and it's also about making it relevant, right? So increasing the level of value. So if I say to you, Steve, here's an article and a lot of reps do this, right? So they go, I've tagged you in an article and it's a 15 minute rate or a five minute Ray, I'm asking to you to invest five minutes of your time.
how can I make that more valuable? If I say Steve, here's an article that I think is important for you. The key points for you are paragraph, or page halfway through page two. And it's important for you because you've just increased the level of value in that piece of content that you provided to them.
Because we know, the people see value in something that's delivered in a timely manner is considered to be personalized. Okay. and I can say it as being valuable. So you need to make sure you wind up the level of value when you provide something and you need to wind up the value of personalization and the way of you to do that is by simply doing something like that.
This is why it's important to you. Here's the most important piece.
Steve Norman: [00:26:14] Absolutely. And we've got the opportunity to put that in front of lots of folks in that organization. I can even say, Hey, let's say you're making a decision. In your company, but I know there's three or four other folks involved, but maybe I can't get to them. Maybe, they don't want to meet with suppliers.
It's all being led by you, but I could approach them on LinkedIn and say, Hey, you were talking to Mark about this new solution. I thought I'd share with you something that might be of interest to you. You can just start covering your bases, a bit more.
Mark McInnes: [00:26:45] Yeah. And that's so easy to do. And a lot of people will think of, hang on. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, but as a, if you consider yourself to be an authority in your space, which is what you were talking about earlier on, but then you could say, look, Steve, I've been working with Mark on this, this project, typically what I see in organizations like yours is your role.
Whatever it is, head of RT likes to be across some of this information. So I thought that's why I'd share this with you.
Steve Norman: [00:27:12] Yeah. And you don't respectfully and professionally, you're not really, going right behind someone. it works.
Mark McInnes: [00:27:18] Really good advice. good thought process. You Steve. Love it. and anything else that you think we should be doing?
Steve Norman: [00:27:26] of course, reactivating old accounts. And, we know that context change all the time and, changing context can be a trigger, to make contact again. so that's a basic on LinkedIn, right? That we should be tracking our key accounts and changes there and just, just making contacts and, warming up on LinkedIn.
and you've got a warm opening, right? If you've done business before.
Mark McInnes: [00:27:52] Yeah, that's right. and chances are when people move into a new role, are they busy or are they quiet? they're probably the least busiest they're going to be. So in that first 60 days, they're getting everything worked out. They're thinking strategically, it's a good opportunity to say hi, we did some great work together in X, Y, Z.
Now that you're at ABC, just wanted to make sure I've got your details, Maybe there's an opportunity to chat in the future.
Steve Norman: [00:28:16] enlist for change, right? when someone's moved and, great excuse to, to talk to them. And I like your one about contacting people on their birthday as well. I know you do that.
Mark McInnes: [00:28:27] You'd be surprised how good the, like how many positive responses I
Steve Norman: [00:28:31] I started doing it. It's it's awesome.
Mark McInnes: [00:28:33] Yeah. Books really well. I might mess this up, but, so you know, the people moving from one role to another, right? So it actually provides three opportunities. So if you've been working with Bob at ABC and he moves to X, Y, Z, there's an opportunity for you to talk to Bob now that he's at X, Y, Z, but there's also an opportunity where.
Steve Norman: [00:28:53] Becca at his all company, With
Mark McInnes: [00:28:54] So the new person that's Margaret that's coming in at ABC, but you're already talking to Margaret and guess where the third opportunities where she just left.
Steve Norman: [00:29:05] Yeah, of course.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:09] Hi, Bob really pleased that you now are the XYZ ed. just wanted to say, appreciate the help that you know that we did at ABC, or it could be appreciate that we didn't get to do what we wanted to do with IVC. So an unsuccessful style, right?
Steve Norman: [00:29:21] Yup. Yup.
Mark McInnes: [00:29:23] one of the reconnect because you never know what's going to happen in there, teacher, blah, blah, blah.
Who were, who do you know who stepped in over at IBC? Yes. No, it doesn't really matter if he does, then you can give me introduction. You go back to Mary and go, Hey, Mary. we were working on this project. I've never heard anybody say, I've just been talking to Bob who was in this role beforehand.
You can start a conversation. Yes. There's a few opportunities. No, there's not. Where did you come from? Mary? I came from one, two, three. Oh, okay. Do you know what's going on over there, then you bring up one, two, three. Hi. I was just talking to Mary who's only recently left. There you go. Three opportunities from one
Steve Norman: [00:29:55] you got like a warm introduction
Mark McInnes: [00:29:58] all the way forward.
Steve Norman: [00:29:59] at least name and that just improves your hit rate exponentially. If you've got some sort of common connection there.
Mark McInnes: [00:30:08] it didn't use say five minutes ago, referrals of,
Steve Norman: [00:30:11] Absolutely.
Mark McInnes: [00:30:12] the white guy. Yeah. very good
Steve Norman: [00:30:15] We have to do, we have to explore every Avenue to warm up the approach.
Mark McInnes: [00:30:20] Yup. Yeah, I think, we just forget about those, right? So we get, sometimes we can blind of looking for the tried and tested, search on LinkedIn, where we're looking for VP of sales and an organization this large, in this location and forget about some of those other really easy opportunities for us.
Steve Norman: [00:30:36] But they quite close in, right? Yes. Correct. I agree.
Mark McInnes: [00:30:41] good stuff. What else should salespeople be doing to help themselves in this digital transformation? Pace?
Steve Norman: [00:30:47] I can summarize a few things, A
Mark McInnes: [00:30:49] Yeah, please.
Steve Norman: [00:30:50] for everyone. So what we talked about it already, right? Let's make sure we are shifting our profiles to presenting ourselves as authorities in our industry. And at least as folks that help their target customer solve a problem. we help HR managers, improve payroll.
We help hospitals reduce their records, administration costs or whatever that is. You get that really clear and be leading with that. And that's going to be the whole foundation. I think in this market, we really need to be prioritizing our targets. There is a lot of industries that are down and where possible we want to focus towards.
Some industries and some companies that may be doing better in your situation. And my studies have shown that there's about 60% of the market is business as usual, what we're doing well at the moment. So we all know what those sort of segments are. So it's not all doom and gloom. And then when we're targeting, let's make sure we very much customize their messaging and it's gotta be very specific and relevant to today.
And there's so many hooks. To develop specific messaging today with what's going on, everyone knows what's going on in different in these industries with the, the crisis that we've had, they're either struggling or they're booming and they're struggling with keeping up with demand and their supply chains are stretched and all that, so that we need to get really specific there.
I want salespeople to take action. Get the right balance of, okay. You have a thought, you've got your context. You're gonna, you're going to make contact you think of something to do. Take action pretty quickly. don't ponder too long ride. And I see too many sales where they in analysis paralysis or sitting behind too much being more passive sitting on the computer, get on the phone, make calls, or send that note on LinkedIn.
Yeah. Don't overthink it. Get it right. Use some of these basic techniques, but it, the action don't do the execution. that's really important. and this is the time that might, my last tip is really. This is the time to accelerate your personal development. And we've all got a time dividend.
we're not traveling. And I think that we really should be using salespeople should be spending on, can you find two hours a week? To invest in yourself and really sharpen up on these skills. making outbound calls, writing emails, using LinkedIn, using zoom, become world class in the, in those areas.
And now you'll be very competitive.
Mark McInnes: [00:33:35] Yeah. So I th I think, I think that's really a great takeaway, to finish up on, there's, so we talk it, Dean Mannix talks about 13% of salespeople are above average. So it's really easy to step into that. In into that high-performing space. As long as you, as long as you invest in yourself, it's actually not that hard to outperform as a salesperson.
If you treat it as a real job and a lifelong role and take it seriously.
Steve Norman: [00:34:05] a question I asked my, my sales class is when I'm doing training is how many of them think they're above average, right? And of course, about 90% think they are, but only half a day, a week, we all have that. That idea of overestimating, where we sit in the pecking order. And, but like you say, it doesn't take a lot.
Like I think if you spend one to two hours a week on your own development, you'll be miles ahead. You'll be in that sort of top five to 10%.
Mark McInnes: [00:34:37] Yep. And that's where the gravy is those 13% of overperformance get 91% of all bonuses.
Steve Norman: [00:34:44] I can believe it. It's very disproportionate putting yourself up for fantastic career security and, rather than most salespeople and we know we'll have insecurity.
Mark McInnes: [00:34:58] Sorry, Steve, it's hard for me to disagree with any of that. It's been lots and lots of good takeaways there all the way through. What's the one thing you want to leave all these lessons with. What's the one thing you need, they need to do.
Steve Norman: [00:35:11] Execute take action, commit to activity. And just by doing that, even if you don't learn technique and study technique, your technique will get better. So just do the activity and that's half the battle
Mark McInnes: [00:35:30] Yeah, absolutely. Steve Norman, thank you so much for coming on the boss podcast.
Steve Norman: [00:35:35] been a real pleasure. Mark greatly enjoyed it.
Mark McInnes: [00:35:38] Thank you. Okay, Steve. people want to get in contact with you. What's the best way for them to do that. Are you interested in connecting with people on LinkedIn or how give us some direction there.
Steve Norman: [00:35:50] Yeah, absolutely so easy to find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/growth coach. Or just look up Steven Norman in Sydney growth acumen, or go to my website growth acumen.com.edu. And there, you can see all the podcasts, all the content, and also the sales assessment that we spoke about earlier. So look forward to engaging with everyone out there.
Mark McInnes: [00:36:14] Yeah. And don't forget. Style's latest grab that sounds assessment tool. It's very much worthwhile your five minutes of your time. It's a great tool. Indeed. Steve. Thanks for coming onto the boss podcast. I really appreciate it.
Steve Norman: [00:36:25] Been a huge pleasure mate. Thank you.
Mark McInnes: [00:36:27] Thanks a lot.