Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
105. Control What You Can Control (no excuses) with Ryan Reisert
Salespeople can control limited things in their role, and if they focus on these, they'll find success.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go Repeat guest back. And you know what? I think he's got the highest listened to podcast in the history of me having guests on, so I'm excited to see if we can blow out of the ballpark with this episode. Ryan Reisig, how are you?
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:I love breaking records, so let's see what we can do Well people love the math of sales because they said, oh geez, I need to do my math of sales and you did a great job talking about it last time you were on.
Speaker 2:Oh, fantastic. Well, that's fundamental right.
Speaker 1:Fundamental, and we're talking about another fundamental today, right?
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Control we can control. And stop using excuses, right? I'd love to get right into the topic. Where do you want?
Speaker 1:to start, do you think people realize what they actually can control?
Speaker 2:I think that most reps overcomplicate the job to be done. So if we take it to first principles, as a salesperson our job is to be talking with prospects in market period. That is the job to be done. If we're not in a scheduled interaction with a prospect in our market, our job is to be going and having unscheduled interactions with prospects in our market.
Speaker 2:The North Star I've always explained when I'm helping organizations stand up an outbound motion is we want a system and a process that when our reps are not in scheduled interactions meaning they go to their calendar, they load up a Zoom link and they're waiting for a prospect to join.
Speaker 2:If that person joins or doesn't join they should know what's their next best action. Their next best action should be going to a list of people that are in their territory and their contacts that they want to be talking to in their territory. They should be able to load that list up real quick, hit a button and be in their next conversation. So an ideal day is I have my scheduled interactions, we complete that interaction and then I go to my list and I go have more conversations and this whole concept of no-shows and things like that go away as well, because what a godsend if I have this system and process set up and someone doesn't show. Well, I can go and have three, four, five, six, maybe eight unscheduled interactions in the same amount of time, instead of just sitting there complaining that no one showed up to my meeting.
Speaker 1:That sure doesn't sound very complicated to me.
Speaker 2:It doesn't. But people overcomplicate this right. They're over-indexing on data, tools, intent, data. What's the shortcut to trying to talk to this perfect, ideal customer, which we all know doesn't exist? When you're prospecting, right, there's only a certain percentage, going back to math of sales, of people who are buying now, and our job is to kind of categorize the market and get there.
Speaker 2:But our job is to talk to people and if I'm not talking to someone and I'm doing all this work, trying to find the best leads in the database, setting up a sequencer and clicking buttons all day long and not talking to people, my job isn't getting done and so, at the end of the day, getting back to overcomplicating things, there's too much complication on data and all these different tools. They have even to get a list into their system to start calling in the first place, and then an over-indexing on all these other automations and workflows that are not talking to people, right, email automation, linkedin automation, all this other stuff that is not going down to that first principle, which is, if I'm not in a conversation, I want to be in my next best conversation. That's pretty simple. I find that there's 15, 16 different tools people are using just to like warm up a lead, and that doesn't exist either. Like if you don't know who I am, like I need to introduce myself.
Speaker 1:I don't know that I've been warmed up recently by somebody else. I'm pretty good at warming myself up if I get a blanket or a jacket, but I don't know if other folks can do that for me.
Speaker 2:I don't know if other folks can do that for me. That's right. And email opens. Let's send emails to warm them up and then let's just call people. That opened. I mean, how many times? Shit, shit just today, because I'm running these campaigns now for people. I was following up with a guy that I spoke with two weeks ago. There was a strong level of interest and intrigue on what this company was doing. Send him the email of course everyone's waiting around, you know. Sent the lead off, like, hey, I have to just follow up with them. No follow-up. So I get back on the phone, call the guy and he's like, obviously in the intro he's like and I don't remember that, right, hey, I'm riding with factify, not? You know, we spoke two weeks ago. Uh, what have we talked about this? Uh, just a reminder.
Speaker 1:It was this.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was. And I was like, um, you know, can we get that, can we get that scheduled? Now he's like, well, you know I'm not going to get to my email anyway, let's just go ahead and schedule it, right? Not going to get to my email anyway. Started with a conversation, what's the next thing you do? You have another conversation.
Speaker 1:It's pretty straightforward got the meeting he's on the calendar for tomorrow I think it's hilarious that you're saying that people that talk to you don't remember it. Well right, how would someone who clicked on something remember clicking on something?
Speaker 2:they sit there and click on stuff all day long and, by the way, most of the technology that is firing off these opens are false positives anyway, oh, it's the cisco router that clicked on it, not the actual human Exactly.
Speaker 2:So you're seeing these reps that are afraid to just have the conversation and remember, rejection is going to happen. It's like baseball. Right, the world-class sellers are striking out seven, maybe eight times out of 10. The winners are getting an at-bat two or three times at the plate out of 10. The winners are getting an at-bat two or three times at the plate. Two if you get a bat two out of ten times, you're you're on the roster, right you're. If you're batting in the 200 percent range, you're on the roster. You get three, you're in the fucking hall of fame, but you're still striking out or not getting on base. Six to seven or seven to eight times out of ten, right, and, and they're afraid to go and fricking swing the bat.
Speaker 1:And that's the game that they're playing. That's the game they signed up to play, and they just need to recognize that.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean the the best, and I know you hate, I know you hate sports analogies for sales.
Speaker 1:but I hate them. I'm kidding, he's kidding everybody.
Speaker 2:I only use sports analogies for sales but baseball is the best analogy like you can, you can get and, and if you've ever played most people have played little league growing up it's like one of the first sports that your parents force you into. My son's seven and he's just starting to coach pitch himself and when he first started he he just hated it because you know it's it's failure more often than not, but he's finally. He's finally getting in contact and hitting the ball and starting to fall in love with the sport. And you know you just have to keep reminding him that this is one of the hardest sports you can play, because you're going to fail way more often than you're going to win. And there's not, there's not another you know part in your life where it's okay to fail this much.
Speaker 2:In most people's world, like it's okay to fail this much, it's actually a part of the game, um, and all you have to do is learn how to, to, to fail a little bit less than everyone else, just a little bit less than everyone else, and you're, you're going to be way above the, the, the average and um, you know, it's one of the things that I really struggled with growing up. In baseball in particular, I would get so damn frustrated because I'd strike out a lot but I was really fast and so I would bunt and things like that just to try to get contact on the ball. And eventually I gave up on baseball because I couldn't handle that rejection. It was so frustrating to me but for some reason when I got into sales it clicked and it's all the that, that background.
Speaker 2:I was like, oh, this is just a numbers game and um, that resistance, that resilience, the ability to, it's not even rejection, it's just, it's just in, it's just information from the market to help you categorize where you're at in terms of the, the buyer journey. Right, most people are not thinking about it or not. They don't think they're interested in Northern Irish right now. Right, that's six out of 10 times when I go and talk to people. But just knowing that allows me to click the button and go to the next call, next call, next call.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'd encourage everybody I just looked it up Go back to episode 36 of the sales management podcast. Check out Ryan's episode of the math of sales and start to understand what he's talking about. I love it. Man, do you still play softball?
Speaker 2:Not anymore. I did for a while in my 20s. I still play.
Speaker 1:I played two weeks ago. Here's what happened two weeks ago. I went 0 for 3 in the first game. We played two games a night. I went 0 for 3 in the first game. Last, at bat of the first game, I popped out to left field. There was a guy in third. If he would have scored, we would have tied. We could have won the game. I popped out I think I was about in seventh and we play. We have like 13 guys on our team. We actually have, I think, 30 people on the team, but everybody has kids and travel and whatever. So we keep a big roster.
Speaker 1:Next game comes up. I'm sitting there. I said I'm going to go up there, I'm going to bat 7th and I'm going to get hit. And I said, all right, what do I need to do to get a hit? Back to the fundamentals I need to wait on the ball, keep my eye on the ball, keep my head down, make sure my swing's flat, don't try to hit it too hard. Boom Got a single and there we go, because you got to believe. But no, 0 for 3 isn't the end of the world. Lots of people go 0 for 3. People go 0 for 3 every night, and if you have something happen to you that might not be the positive, best outcome, the best result that you could want, but it's still within the range of possibilities. You cannot be upset about it.
Speaker 2:No, and that's the thing that I get, and we'll do the Donald Trump weave on this discussion in a second, because we're getting a little bit off track. But this discussion in a second because we're getting a little bit off track. But we are making a point here. Going back to controls, the uncontrollables. But here's the thing the number of dials people have to make in order to be successful in sales hasn't changed since the 80s.
Speaker 2:A lot of the stuff that I publish online is all based on a book called Successful Telesales in the 80s, right, and this concept of completions. And in that book it says it doesn't matter if you made 50 dials or 100 dials. Think about that. That was 40 years ago. They were still talking about 50 and 100 dials. Right, wild to me. But it doesn't matter if you make 50 dials or 100 dials, nothing matters until you get to a completion, right?
Speaker 2:Completion is you reach your prospect. Going back to what we're talking about, right, our job is to have conversations, but the conversations need to get to a completion. You reach the prospect, not a gatekeeper, not someone else, the person you intended to call. They understood why you were calling, the intention of the call and you got to an outcome and you're categorizing that for a future follow-up. Now that could be a successful yes. Yes, let's follow up now and take a meeting.
Speaker 2:But it could be a no, it could be a not me, it could be a not now. Those are all valuable. The reason why most people really fail in sales, and especially using the phone to sell, is that when they make 50 dials today, on average they talk to maybe one or two people and on average those one or twos are no's. So they don't give up because it's hard to make 50 dials. They give up because they just got two no's in a row. They can't handle this idea that a no is getting me closer to a yes and, by the way, on average it's going to take probably 20 really good conversations to get to that one that's buying right now.
Speaker 1:So when you think about control what you can control, you can control your understanding of that. You can't control the no's, you can't control the yeses, but you can control your understanding of what that math looks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, get the emotions or subjectivity out of everything and become objective. So this is the first thing you can control, which is understanding your math of sales. Your math of sales is never going to lie. First thing you can control, which is understanding your math of sales. Your math of sales is never going to lie. And once you understand that, you're lethal.
Speaker 2:And if you go back to the episode or I can talk about it briefly right now, but math of sales is pretty straightforward how many activities does it take to get a conversation? How many conversations does it take to get a meeting? How many meetings does it take to get somebody to show to a meeting, how many meetings actually are accepted opportunities and how many of those wins. When you work that backwards, you literally can know exactly how many leads you need on a list at any given time, how many activities you need to do those lists, how many conversations you need to have, et cetera, et cetera. So by understanding the objectivity around that, the math behind that, you can control your success and get away from the emotions that drive some of the bad behaviors that we have in sales. So, number one understand your math and become objective with it. Number two is a control we can control, which is the leads that you're working.
Speaker 2:So the list is the strategy, and what most people do is they fail to put the work into continuously adding new prospects at the top of their funnel of accounts.
Speaker 2:First, right, these are companies that we want to sell to, and then the people within those organizations that ultimately we need to be speaking to. So, taking the time, it sucks, it's a lot of work, it's actually probably the shittiest job on the planet. But if you take the time to build a really good list of accounts that you really passionately, genuinely believe fit your criteria of someone you should sell to, and then the people within those organizations that ultimately you can use as a part of your sales process it doesn't need to be the decision makers. These could be champions, influencers, end users, et cetera. Get them on your list and constantly be adding to that list. That's something you could control building your list. You should not be relying on other people to get your lists, especially if you're an account executive and you're using SDRs. It's like oh, my SDR is not filled. At least build the goddamn list right. Put the time into building lists that the conversations that are happening, the meetings you're getting are the right people.
Speaker 1:Okay, so walk us through who could own this and who should own this. You mentioned two roles already, but I want to explore who could own it, who should own it and why.
Speaker 2:Well, at the end of the day, the person that is responsible for the revenue and their paycheck should own the list right. So if you're an account executive, if you're not owning your territory because someone else is doing that for you, you can at least own the part of who you're attacking within that list. You should own that. The person who should not own it is the SDR. If there's a junior seller in the organization picking the accounts and picking the contacts's a junior seller in the organization picking the accounts and picking the contacts that are ultimately going through the funnel, you're failing Lack of business acumen, lack of understanding of who your best customers are. They're just not the best people to be selecting who you should be doing business with. It makes sense. They're still just learning how to speak to people, let alone deciding who your future customer is. It makes no sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. I think that where people get hung up is they say, oh, internet research list building strategy. That seems like something we should delegate and delegate and delegate. And then all of a sudden it gets down there and you've got entry level people doing strategy, which is always a bad sign. Anytime somebody is doing strategy at a lower level in a company, you have a problem, regardless of what the department is Correct.
Speaker 2:And even if you delegate the work, the heavy lifting of getting the core, let's say, ice chunk, you're sculpting an ice chunk you could delegate some of that out, but at some point before it moves forward to activity, the work to be done, like the conversation's happening, uh, the most senior person responsible for the number should be owning the final, you know check validate and verify that's right.
Speaker 2:Like yes, this is a good account, yes, these are right contacts, and actually going through them one by one, not trying trying to automate that shit out Like, yes, this is the right account, yes, these are the right people, then move that forward in the process. So AEs absolutely should be in that mix and then, if nothing else, they should be moving up to sales leadership and I can't tell you how difficult that is to speak with CROs or sales leaders who won't touch that with a fucking 30 foot stick, um, because they think it's beneath them, but at the end of the day, like, that is their number, um. So if they're not controlling where the work to be done is happening in their territories, then they're failing as a, as a leader. Um, so that should should go to most you know, so you can control that, right, you should control your list and you should be controlling your constant feeding of that list, right? What's?
Speaker 1:next activity levels? Can I guess?
Speaker 2:Well, the next thing you should track is your activity levels. But not in the way most people think, right. So most people go out, build their list and then they just hammer it unintelligently, without like an understanding of are these activities actually producing results?
Speaker 1:can you please make a video of yourself hammering a list unintelligently? That would be a hilarious visual hammer a list unintelligently.
Speaker 2:It's like fucking trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole, right like that's what's happening is they go out and they put these activity metrics number one, not backed by your math of sales. So they're like, hey, do $50 a day. But if you ran the math, it's like $50 a day is gonna get you two conversations. Two conversations is gonna get you maybe a meeting a week and your math says you need a meeting a day. So that would mean 250 dials, not 50 dials. Okay, so you wanna control your activities, but control them intelligently, based on your list. And what happens here is that the number one KPI you should really focus on is daily completions. You can control this. How many completed conversations in my market am I having? It starts the leading indicator is activities, but the number that you should focus on is the completions, not the lower number behind that, which is meetings. Right, completions lead to meetings. A meeting is a completion, but total completions Activities drive completions. Completions are going to get you meetings. But when you know that number, then you can start to look at your list and what you're controlling and what channels you're leveraging to get those conversations and understanding how to actually operationalize your list in such a way channels you're leveraging to get those conversations and understanding how to actually operationalize your list in such a way where you're focusing your attention in the right channels that produce those completions. So what most people will do, they build their list. If they listened, most people won't do this but control your list building and then they'll just unintelligently hammer their list with a bunch of activities. But the reality is we waste 80 to 90% of our time doing activities in a channel that's not going to produce or actually after which is that completion? So you want to understand how many activities I should do in any particular channel before I understand if that channel is viable or not when we're using the phone.
Speaker 2:Here's the math If I take a list and I call it through one time, I have 100 leads. I call through that one time and five people pick up that five out of a hundred. That 5% that I've reached represents about 20% of the total people that will ever be reached on that list. Okay, so that's one time through. If I go three times through it's 60%, five times through it's 80%, 10 times through it's 95%, 20 times through it's 98%, so if, if you kind of following this. There's this like super law of diminishing returns. Right, there's only about 20 to 40% of a list If I have a hundred people that I can get on the phone if I call them enough times.
Speaker 2:So if I'm being intelligent, I control my control bus.
Speaker 2:I get my new leads in, I do my activities to those leads, but I'm not going to call them more than probably seven, eight times before I decide to use another channel.
Speaker 2:And if you read my book Outbound Sales no Fluff which you can find for free all over the internet chapter six buckets I give you a process of how to actually start to operationalize the list even more, where you can focus on knowing which ones are most likely to pick up first and which ones are not, where you can focus on knowing which ones are most likely to pick up first and which ones are not, et cetera.
Speaker 2:But I can control the activities I'm doing. But I also want to know that my number is daily completions, so I could control bringing in new leads, I could control activities that are going to result in completions. And those are the main things that I can control Making sure that I'm working my territory by finding as many people as possible that fit the criteria for who I could sell to and doing that consistently over time. And then I could control knowing how many of those people I need to reach every day I need to reach. And then I understand theory of constraint, what channels I should be using to maximize my efficiency to get people into conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I love it. I keep going. Sorry, I didn't interrupt you. Look how good this guy is, this guy's great. He just monologues for three. I always say don't monologue for three minutes unless you're Ryan. His monologues are just engaging, so please continue, sir.
Speaker 2:No, no. What are you going to say so that I want to no?
Speaker 1:no, Go, go, go, go go. I was going to ask you a clarifying question.
Speaker 2:Well, here's the thing, though I just I said 20 to 40% of your of a hundred are going to be reached on the phone if you call them enough times. Right, 20 to 40% and seven to eight attempts against that list would basically maximize my likelihood that I've reached most of the people that I'm going to reach on that list. The phone is still the most effective way to get the most amount of conversations started than any other channel. If you run the same math against email, for example and I'm not an email expert, so people can fact check me all they want, but I like to see what people post and most people are like, hey, a 30% or better open rate, which is still not a reach.
Speaker 2:It's like we just talked about this earlier opens are a goozy figazy. Whatever is a good benchmark. Talked about this earlier. Opens our faguzi fagazi. Whatever is is a good push mark. And then they're saying like a you know, 10 to 15 response rate. Okay, so I get 10 to 15 people to respond from my 100 um right, and I still think that that's pretty high, because the majority of those are what?
Speaker 1:that's unsubscribed. Yeah, and it's unsubsubscribe or out of office, even reply.
Speaker 2:Out of office, reply, some of these other things that are not actual responses. What I've seen from other people is that they expect to get out of 100 contacts on an email list, one to three meetings, which is really really, really good. I think that's probably a stretch for most people. That would be very, very good. But if I took 100 people that I know pick up the phone and I call through them again, I'm going to reach 20 to 40 of them and I'm going to book 14 to 25% of them into meetings. So it's going to be a three to five X lever on that. And the amount of time that it takes to make a dial versus crafting the email that's going to actually perform at those numbers I just told you is astronomically different, right? Yeah, like that's a hundred personalized emails with multiple touch points over a period of time versus just picking up the phone and calling and so again, phone is still king in this market if you know how to use it properly and you can control those things. But most people are going to err on the side of let's go do all this other automation. Let's just try to get more emails out by filling my list of people that are suspect at best, like I don't really know, but let's email them because it's easy. And again, look at the results. What we're seeing with production, right, the average SDR today is making 40 dials to 53 dials somewhere in that range, and they're talking to maybe one to four people somewhere in that range, which is high based on the dial-to-connect rates.
Speaker 2:But this is reported stats and their goal is to schedule. I think it was 14 meetings is to schedule, I think it was 14 meetings. But they're only performing at about 67% of that number. So they might get eight scheduled a month and then they have like a 55% show rate, so they maybe get one meeting held a week. That math is not mathing for most people and it's a function of one the activity. They're not doing enough activities in the first place to get their list into a position where they can be successful. But two is, they're not using the right channels. They're focusing their time, energy and effort on a bunch of automations, a bunch of other things that don't matter, and they take dialing. It's the last thing they want to do, when it should be the first thing you do, because, going back to what we're here to do is to talk to people, so why wouldn't we spend our time focusing on getting more conversations started than all these other things?
Speaker 1:Well, the bigger question is why would you hire somebody that doesn't want to do the job that you're hiring them?
Speaker 2:for I don't know, I don't know that's wild.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's weave on this just for one second. How would you interview somebody to confirm that they actually want to do that job?
Speaker 2:Whenever I hire people in my process because I know how to get listened to a position of people that just pick up the phone Like I have a list ready to go and one of the last things I'll do is have a Zoom just like this say all right, let's get on the phone, we're going to dial. I'll start. Here's the script, here's the list, dial and I call, show them how a conversation works. You ready to go? Pretty straightforward. Do they jump right in and want to get started or do they fidget around and are they afraid? Are they m&ms? Mom spaghetti? What palms are weak arms?
Speaker 1:what are your results? How many, what percentage of folks rise to the occasion, just crush it, and what percentage of folks will away and say maybe this isn't for me when you do that to majority of candidates, uh, they fall off right away.
Speaker 2:Right, I don't, I don't have the percentage here, but let's be honest. If you put somebody into that environment, they're not going to necessarily crush it and throw like. I'm not expecting much more than them to just do the job. Right, let's load it up and make the calls, um, but easily eight, eight, eight or nine out of 10 are falling off at that stage.
Speaker 1:And those ones that make it through that process. It sounds like they probably actually want to be there and you're not going to have to renegotiate what the job is every week.
Speaker 2:No, it's super straightforward Because, again, reps that I work with go through this process of me enabling them to just do that all day long. I'm going to give you a system and process so that, if you're not in a sales, scheduled scales interaction like we're having we're in a podcast, but you and I were in a sales meeting in a zoom sitting down If you're not here, you're going to have a curated list of people that we know, pick up the phone and all you have to do is dial, just like I showed. You'll have a conversation every three to five dials and you can have 20, 30, 40 of those a day if you don't have meetings. It's really straightforward.
Speaker 1:And one other thing I want to touch on before we move on. You mentioned most companies are doing 40 to 60 dials a day, with one to two conversations. If you were to do that, if I were to say, hey, Ryan, that's your job, how many hours would you want to do that activity?
Speaker 2:An ideal rep that's actually in a job for selling. They should be dialing at a minimum three hours a day and sometimes up to five hours a day depending on their availability on their calendar, unless you're backed with scheduled meetings, that's two. My recommended call blocks are an hour and a half. Log in. You have the system that's of people that pick up and in one hour to an hour and a half of calling the system itself should be able to produce between about 50 dials. This is one to one and a half hours, not eight hours, by the way, when they're saying a whole day's worth?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because the underlying question is what do these people do all day, which I think a lot of folks listening are asking themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what do you do all day? Well, they're building lists, they're setting up sequences, they're in bullshit meetings all day long instead of talking to customers. That's what they're doing. But in the North Star metric, for anyone that's in sales, you should have a list that produced like this In an hour and a half of time you should make up to 50 dials, talk to eight to 12 people, complete five to seven conversations and schedule one to two meetings for every hour to hour and a half. So if you have two to three of those a day, that's two to three meetings that you should schedule every day. Sorry, three to six that you should schedule every single day.
Speaker 2:If you're mass mathing and if it's not, then you can go back to Mathisales and know where your constraints are. You're either spending your time on lists that aren't operationalized to have a high enough connect rate to hit those numbers, so there's work to be done there or you're not saying the right things when you get somebody on the phone because your conversion rates are off, or you're somewhere in between, which is targeting the wrong people, saying the wrong things, doing the wrong activities. But at the end of the day, we have three levers list, message, rep. More often than not it's reps not doing enough of the work that they can control building a list, doing the activities, having the conversations. But the North Star metric if you're not there, it's really easy to get there right. 50 dials, eight to 12 conversations. Five to seven completions.
Speaker 1:One to two meetings for every 50 dials 8 to 12 conversations, 5 to 7 completions, 1 to 2 meetings for every 50 dials Sounds simple.
Speaker 2:That's the math, and you know 50 dials is easy to do if you're not connecting with enough people. It's hard to do when you're having lots of conversations. Right, you have to rip through them.
Speaker 1:Well, so that's another controllable. So we've talked about a lot of things. The quality of the conversation seems to be the last controllable, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can absolutely control what you're saying. A script is huge. So many times. I see this all the time. I'm starting to do some one-on-one coaching. I got a little group coach community that I launched last month too, and time and time and time again, reps come in. I literally give them the words that they should say at the top. It's like this just go learn it, Practice it, learn it. You're gonna get through way more completions if you just say this. Hand it off to them, have them do it.
Speaker 2:We jump on a call session together and the first thing they do, they've already changed the opener. Hey, why are you changing the opener? Why are you changing the opener? Well, I mean, I just didn't feel comfortable. It wasn't for me. I was like, okay, well, you're telling me that you're struggling to get through conversations and the first thing you did was change the opener. I personally don't believe openers through conversations and the first thing you did was change the opener. Like, like I, I personally don't believe openers matter that much. Like, as long as you have something that you're consistent and confident with. I know you've seen me literally run live the live cold calling competition where I, like, ran a different opener every time, you can do whatever you want.
Speaker 2:You can. But if you're, if you're not good and you're timid and you're trying to learn, just follow the message, right? Yes, so a script is going to take you so far in sales and, I believe, all the way through, right? You script your full call, you script your follow-up at least openers. You script your discoveries. Again, they don't need to be. There's a lot, lot of open dialogue, but you know where to take the conversation. These are, these are frameworks. They're not necessarily robotic. Say the exact same words, but you, you're basically phrasing the words, phrases and sentences should be 80 to 90 the same on every single conversation yes right you can control.
Speaker 1:It's like a movie. It's like a movie script and you're taking the scenes and you're scripting out the scenes, and the scenes may appear in a different order depending on the conversation goes, but when you get to a certain scene, yeah, what does the product do? What happens next? Who else have you worked with? Whatever it is? Then you've got a script for that scene yeah, the if.
Speaker 2:If they say this, you say this. If they say this, you say this. If they say this and they haven't said this, you clarify. Then you say this it's pretty controllable. And the more you spend on building lists and not doing the calling, this is actually one of the things that you can control, even if you're not doing those other things that they still don't control, which is script out what you're going to say in every scenario and when you come across a new scenario where you're not sure what to say, go get the information and script it out and practice it and so that the next time it comes around, you know what to say. And that gives you these marginal gains. And all this is about the aggregation of these marginal gains and it's huge. It's massive when you can be consistent with your message. You know what's working and what's not working, and if you phrase the messaging in the right way, you can also control what's going to be said next right With the right script.
Speaker 2:And this is a framework that I train, which is a modification of Towns and Wardlaw's old ebook, the Art of Cold Calling. He has this beautifully designed cold call message which, when I first came across it and when everyone else sees it these days they shit all over it. But the reality is it's so well scripted that you can actually control the narrative in such a way where there's only like four or five variables that pop up. And that's what makes it so successful, because you're not word vomiting and getting people to exit calls without information or open up dialogue before it makes sense to open up dialogue and you get trapped. Right. There's gates in the conversation with cold calling that you want to get through, that you get lost if you start ad hocing and doing bullshit. Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Okay, A couple of things here. One why do people hate that?
Speaker 2:I feel robotic. It's I, can't I, I. It's not me, it's not my approach, it's all these other things. These are, these are excuses for not wanting to be successful.
Speaker 1:Everybody feels robotic the first time they do something. If you do anything for the first time, it's, it's wild, yeah, practice a golf swing.
Speaker 2:You know you do pool now like your pool shots.
Speaker 1:Well, my pool shots. I want my pool shots to be robotic. I want there to be zero of me in those things. If I told my pool coach I want to do something different, he would just laugh at me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It's easy to go back on the sports side and put these analogies in place, but unless you were an athlete, some people don't. I think that's. The other problem is, we don't have enough athletes in sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we need more athletes in sales. They're underrepresented.
Speaker 2:But I'm just saying the people with an athletic background know this really well. And then they get into sales and they forget it. It's like, like, literally, that's what training is all about. In every single sport, you drill the fundamentals over and over and over and over again until they become seamless. Like you know, they're unconscious. You just, you just perform. Yeah, that's what you want to do in sales and that's what your script is all about. Like you're, you're practicing, you're practicing these fundamentals. Your tone, tone, your pace, your delivery is is important, but the words that you're saying, they're going to feel weird If you just read them from a piece of paper. You have to, you have to, like, practice them until sounds like you're in conversation.
Speaker 1:Exactly Well, and I run into that what you described, where people want to put their own words and change the things all the time, and one of the things that I have done in the past. Someone comes in and they say, okay, I want to do it this way. I say okay, why? They tell me so you can defend that. I said yeah. I said okay, Well, are you going to do it that way every time for the next week? They say yeah, I go okay, cool, Do it, Report back. And then they come back and almost always I would say always, yeah, I go okay, cool, Do it report back. And then they come back and almost always I would say always, yeah, In this case, always, well, this didn't work or that didn't work, so I had to change it.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. You said you were going to do it the same way for the whole week. Now you're changing and then, okay, well, I think if we do it this way, so you're gonna do it that way for the whole week. I'm never seen the changers actually commit to their change. They just want to throw a wrench in the process because it serves some human need, I guess.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's the controllable. That is super important. We can control our consistency with messaging. Again, let's go back to it, don't care what you say, as long as it's consistent, so that you can use data to measure what's working and what's not working, and we can control that. But reps feel like the objection that there is, the rejection, rather the rejection that they're feeling, which is just math not knowing understanding the math of markets, not understanding that there's going to be so many people that are ready to go, so many that are not really thinking about it. But, yeah, there's a level of interest. The majority of them are not interested right now. You're going to experience more of the people that are not interested right now and you start making changes and there's no consistency. Right, there's no consistency, so you can't measure, and now you're just stuck at square one. You're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks, and that's something that's fundamental that we can control yeah and and and it's.
Speaker 2:It's so big, um, but most reps just want to. They feel like they, they have a silver bullet. They're always looking for a silver bullet and they're constantly chasing this, this perfect way to deliver a result. And when it works the one time, they they're like well, it works, so it must work all the time. And if you use that same approach, it's only going to work a certain percentage of the time, but you're not measuring it, so you don't know. And if you're not consistently using it, what's the point?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the silver bullet. There is a silver bullet and it's to do everything that Ryan's describing.
Speaker 2:Be consistent. Make a list make a list, know what to say. Call the list, follow up. That's it. That's the process.
Speaker 1:That's pretty simple. And then, when you get into a sales cycle, pre-meeting prep, execute on your sales methodology, post-meeting debrief, do it again. Correct, it's wild. People don't prep for meetings. It blows my mind, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the most simple thing you can do is pull up their damn website. If you're in B2B sales, most of the people these days are likely on LinkedIn. Pull up their LinkedIn profile. Do a little background Between their website and their LinkedIn profile. In five minutes of time you're 90% ahead of your peers In your company's sales playbook.
Speaker 1:What are three discovery questions I want to ask them based on who I'm talking to. Who do I probably want to talk to next? How am I going to navigate that If they'll introduce me to them? How do I ask for that? If I ask for it and they say no, what do I say to get them to motivate other people internally to come back and talk to me? There's five or six little things.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing that drives me nuts is so many of these SaaS companies. They love buying other SaaS products. Oh, we're going to go buy all these different tools for our team because they ask and we've got to fulfill their needs. Well, there's all these mutual action plan next steps, digital sales room type tools, and I see these companies that own them say they use them but never actually pull them up during a meeting. Okay, new person comes into the meeting.
Speaker 1:What did we discuss with the last person? Can we summarize that before we just start going into talking about whatever we want to talk about, or as we're setting next steps, how do we set three or four or five next steps if we know we're later in the sales process and we need to go through legal or procurement or finance or whatever it is, and controlling all of that as well, because you can't control what the prospect does, but you can control what questions you ask the prospect to better understand their business and you can control what commitments you're asking from them. So the whole. We focused a lot on top of the funnel today, but I just want to swing through the ball a little bit and highlight that there are so many ways that we can focus on what can we control? And the fact that it's a human and humans are unpredictable is not an excuse, because there are so many things that set between us and that fact that make it not an excuse.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent and I know we have focused the majority of our time on top of funnel because most people just don't have any process at the top of the funnel, but it's the same thing you just talked about. If you have a sales process, you know some of these things right. It's all about stage definitions and exit criteria, right and you have a defined process that you're running. There's millions of different methodologies that you run, but you probably have one at your organization.
Speaker 1:And there's one that really works well. It's called triangle selling. If anybody wants more info on triangle selling, send me a note at freestuffatcoachcrmcom. Freestuffatcoachcrmcom. If those one guy or the other want you to pay half a million dollars to roll out MedPick, call me first, please, Jeez.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So stage definitions, exit criteria, to your point, you need information. Sales is about information and trust. Those are the two things we're after, and it's on both sides of the equation. Is the information that I'm being given, do I trust it? And is the information that I'm receiving can I trust it? That's it. I'm trying to get information and trust it as I move the ball down the field. That's pretty fundamental and if you don't have a way to gather the information that you need, you have to have the questions available to get the information. And obviously, as a seller, if you're providing bullshit information, you're putting yourself into a really bad position because you're not going to win deals. So if you don't know something, let them know, go get it, bring it back. That's all we're trying to do here.
Speaker 1:That's all we're trying to do. Sounds like rocket surgery to me. Like Elon lands this. How big was it? 20 stories high, yeah it was. Rocket booster caught it with chopsticks, and all we're talking about is just control three or four things and do what you said you were going to do.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yep, Putting things in context makes things interesting. Cool man. Well, great chat today. Ryan, how can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. You can look me up, find me there and if you want to chat, you can call me anytime. My number is 415-994-0110.
Speaker 1:Okay, and what do you want to plug? You want to plug your coaching groups.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, come on, he's humble, he's humble.
Speaker 1:Watch this. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:I just launched. If you're an individual rep and you're not getting enabled with some of these things, I do have a new group coaching community. It's not like a course or a book. There's like 27 sessions now that have been recorded so you can go through it a lot of content, but it's live group coaching. We have an hour long start of every day where we go through some topics open, Q&A, et cetera and then we do an hour of cold calling twice a week where we go through some topics open, Q&A, et cetera, and then we do an hour of cold calling twice a week. So if you want to upload the game there, I've got a little school community that I launched. And then if you're a company trying to build Outbound, I've got some programs for you as well to help make sure that your reps are actually doing some of these things at scale.
Speaker 1:That program sounds pretty immersive. I like it.
Speaker 2:It's good.
Speaker 1:How do you land on that that twice a week is needed? What was not happening? That?
Speaker 2:drove the need for that type of structure. Well, I actually launched it every single day, but the feedback from the group was, for some of them it seemed like it was a little bit too much, so we just dropped it down to twice a week. But if you're an organization with sellers on the phone, you're going back to one of the topics we're going to talk about. Your leadership should be having at least one of those call blocks an hour and a half every single day, 30 minutes to do some Q&A, et cetera. An hour of literally live cold calling. Just go round robin, pick up the phone, have a conversation coach on it, have a conversation coach on it.
Speaker 2:That should be fundamental to any organization. This isn't done through gong and once a week let's listen to some calls. No, it's real, live coaching and feedback. That's where people are going to catch all the things that you're trying to train on and coach on through real, live scenarios in real time, where you can, you know, digest the conversation, talk about what went well, talk about what could have been improved and get to the next one, and you'll see your team just go up into the right and they'll catch it now not two quarters from now, when they're trying to figure out why the goals were missed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Every single day. Right, You'll, you'll, you'll identify. Do they have issues with not getting enough leads in their list to even call in the first place? You'll identify what their fricking workflow is, Because what we do is we share our screen. Who's up next? They share their screen, they load up their system and you watch them work through their workflow. Hey, why are you doing that? Some of the biggest wins we've had as the community is growing is everyone's using different dialers and systems.
Speaker 2:It's like every single day. It's like why are you doing that? Like two less clicks here, you know it looks like your list is not in a good spot. You're skipping leads. Why are you skipping leads? Like little things like that. It's not even just the conversation piece. It's like, literally, how are you operationalizing your time and how you're using tools? You can create resources all day long, but you have to actually sit down with your reps and see how they're going through these things to help them get better, Because your vidyards and recordings and playbooks aren't enough. You have to actually be in the trenches with them to see how you can help them. And again, it's those aggregations and marginal gains that make a huge difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean that's how manufacturing facilities are running. It sounds like you're talking about the Toyota production system going back to the 30s. All right, well, thanks, ryan, really appreciate it. Thanks, everybody else. Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time.