Sales Enablement PRO: Book Club Sales Enablement PRO

Olivia Grieman: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Grieman. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

Sales is a career where mindset really can make all the difference. From understanding customer behaviors to developing a sound process to crafting an effective strategy and to closing with confidence, success in sales is very much rooted in psychology. I’m so excited to have Alison Edgar, MBE, here to tell us a little bit more about this concept that she details in her book Secrets of Successful Sales. So with that, Allison, I’d love to pass it to you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background.

Alison Edgar: Hi Olivia. Thank you so much for having me. I am Allison Edgar, MBE. Now, I’ll probably explain that before the book. In the UK, twice a year the then queen, now to be king, chooses a thousand people to be honored for specific things, and you can get them for charity, for sport, education, for pretty much anything. Mine is for being a member of the British Empire for Entrepreneurship and Business. In the US it gets confused a little bit because people think it’s an MBA, but it’s not. It’s an MBE.

I am also the author of two books. The first one is called Secrets of Successful Sales, which we will be talking about today because it’s obviously about sales enablement. The other book is called SMASH IT!: The Art of Getting What YOU Want. I think it is interesting when people ask which order you should read the book in. I think actually Smash It is the prequel. It should have been written in the order of Secrets of Successful Sales, but yes, I’ve written two books.

I think fundamentally, one of the things that I think will resonate with the audience is I actually love sales. I think that sales does evolve and there’s obviously new technology and there are things that can help us, but fundamentally, people buy people and they buy people like them. Hopefully, some of those things will come out today and just different ways that people can stay focused to improve their sales results.

OG: Fantastic. Thank you for being here. Also, thank you for explaining what MBE means. I did not know that, and what an honor to be recognized for all of your amazing work. I do want to dig into the Secrets of Successful Sales book that you mentioned. What I really loved about the book is that it brings together psychology and sales to walk through a methodology to help others really achieve success in sales. I’d love to hear, from your perspective, what are some of the key principles from psychology that really do have a massive impact on success when applied to a sales strategy.

AE: I pretty much think a lot of it is always the psychology behind it because you can have the best processes in the world, but if you’re not building strong relationships with different types of people, you’re alienating some of your customers and that affects your performance. I think that’s where when we look at what I use DISC, which is based on Carol Young’s psychology, and it’s based on colors. I think any of the psychology profiling tools, they get a bad reputation. Oh, you’re pigeonholing people. Oh, you’re putting them in boxes. You’re not. It’s really about self-awareness and adoption. It’s not about pigeonholing. Oh, task-focused introverts shouldn’t be in sales or introverts shouldn’t be in sales. It’s not, because actually some of those attributes are the best things, but I think it’s really building those strong relationships, and that does come from psychology.

The other huge thing comes from your mindset and how you stay focused and stay positive, and how you become resilient. Ultimately sales are wrapped in rejection, and this is quite controversial, I don’t think that everybody has got the in

Olivia Greiman: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Greiman. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

In sales, it’s easy to get so focused on the end goal of one deal that you ignore the details and then lead to an aftermath of the sale that is crucial to long-term success. Setting a solid foundation and maintaining a strong relationship after the sale can be just as important as closing the deal. In her upcoming book, Sales Essentials, Rana Salman details a start-to-finish guide to lead you to sales success. I’m so excited to have her here to tell us a little bit more about her book today, so with that, Rana, I’d love to hear a little bit more about yourself and your background.

Rana Salman: Thank you for having me and really thank you Sales Enablement PRO for all that you do for our community. My name is Rana Salman. I am the CEO of Salman Consulting. I’ve been in sales and sales enablement for a long time, and before it had the fancy name, which I know some of your listeners, Olivia, would relate to.

I work with hyper-growth to large organizations to help strategically elevate the performance of their sales team through strategic content and through training and coaching. I’m a seller at heart. I’ve been selling for a long time, and I still actively sell to this day. Olivia, some of your listeners, I may have called on them, and in fact, I’m hoping that they got me later on in my career rather than earlier because as many of you know early on in our careers we’re a little bumpy in sales.

OG: I’m so excited to have you here and to hear more about your upcoming book Sales Essentials. Tell us a little bit about what the book’s about.

RS: I’m excited to share it with you. Sales Essential is created with the salesperson at heart. I created that book with the sales rep in mind and wanted to create it as a guide for them. Wherever they are in their deal, they can get to that place where they need that information and that can enable them to exit that action effectively.

For example, Olivia, in the book, the bulk of the book is called Applied Essentials, and it’s divided into three areas: before the sale, during the sale, and after the sale. A very simple way to categorize how we navigate our sales process and what I wanted to do is in each of these categories, there are specific chapters that are aligned to these categories, and they’re written in a way that is very simple to understand and navigate, so that way there are no gimmicks, there’s no jargons. It’s easy to understand.

For example, if I am a sales rep and I am getting ready to do my discovery call, what I wanted the rep to do is to go to that chapter and to look at these nuggets of information, to look at these best practices, to remind themselves of that, go get the tools about discovery, and then to put it away and go do that call. The idea here is that if you are selling and if you’ve sold for a living, you know that time is invaluable. It’s finite, and time is money. When I was creating the book, I wanted to keep that in mind and provide them with what they need when they need it.

Also, another thing that I wanted to make sure of is that we provide the sales enablement leaders with case studies and provide sales leaders with the sales tools that they need to coach their reps as well, for the sales reps to have the tools that they need. It’s about 300 pages that are divided and created in a way as a guide and as a reference.

Before I forget Olivia, I want to give a big shout-out to my publishers, McGraw Hill, who have helped me bring this to life. They are one of the top three publishers in the world, and I really learned a lot from them. They took my book to the next level and I wanted to make sure I say thank you.

OG: I cannot wait to

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

In any career, there’s a big difference between being good at your job and being one of the best. In sales, this difference can have profound effects on the success of the company and your own career trajectory, but especially for demographics that are more underrepresented in the sales profession, such as women, bridging the gap to go from good to great can seem daunting. That’s why I’m so excited to have Cynthia Barnes, author of Reach the Top 1% here to tell us some of her advice to become a top-performing salesperson and how enablement can help. With that, Cynthia, I’d love for you to just tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, your background, and your book.

Cynthia Barnes: Thank you. As you stated, I am Cynthia Barnes, a sales trailblazer and founder of the National Association of Women’s Sales Professionals and Inclusive Selling. As a keynote speaker and advisor, I help sales professionals understand, respect, and cater to the diverse needs, preferences, and backgrounds of potential customers foster stronger connections, and promote a more equitable and inclusive business environment.

You might have seen me as the first black woman to keynote a national sales conference, a LinkedIn Top Voice, or featured in the Salesforce Plus series beyond the quota. I’m here to reshape your perspective on sales, inclusivity, and success with my unique blend of humor, wisdom, and charisma.

OF: I love it. Well, we are so honored to have you here with us and so excited to dive in and just talk a little bit more about your book, because I loved it. One piece that really stood out to me was you wrote that sales are simply the best career on the planet, especially for women because it lets you call the shots. That resonated with me. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about this perspective. Why is sales such an empowering career path for women?

CB: You hit the nail right on the head, Olivia, and it is the best career for women because we get to say how much money we make based upon the amount of effort put in. Rarely do you find a career that allows you to say, I want to make X amount of dollars, and if I’m willing to make the sacrifice and put in the hard work, then I’m able to do it.

Another thing that we want to think about with sales for women, there are so many women out there who are part of a sandwich generation. On one side you have kids going to college, and on the other side, you’ve got aging parents. Imagine if you had $250,000 in the bank throughout your sales career that you’ve been able to sock away. You could get to help your kids graduate from college with no debt, and you get to choose whether or not your parents go into a home or they stay home with you.

I don’t know any woman who is of childbearing age who doesn’t want to dictate herself when she goes back to work from maternity leave, rather than her job saying, well, you get eight weeks and you need to come back. Having that money provides you with options, and options mean freedom.

OF: I love that financial freedom aspect. Sales is a primarily male-dominated industry, and so I’m curious to also hear your advice for women to keep moving up the corporate ladder and overcome some of the barriers we often face, not just in the corporate world, but sales in particular, what are some of those challenges that you see women come up against and what is your advice for how they can overcome some of those challenges?

CB: It is that we kick our own ass quite simply. We kick our own butt. I don’t know if I can cuss or not, but we kick our own butt. What I mean by that is, sure, there’s the imposter syndrome. Sure, there’s the inner critic,

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement Pro podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

In the post-pandemic business landscape with volatile economies, meeting customer expectations is increasingly complex and difficult for businesses to get right. This means that it’s more important than ever for business leaders to collaborate and operate with a growth mindset across the entire customer journey to achieve sustainable success. In her book Marketing For Dummies, Jeanette McMurtry talks about the critical role that marketing strategy plays in ensuring long-term success and how marketing, sales, and enablement can partner together to move businesses forward.

I’m so excited to have Jeanette here to tell us a little bit more about her book. With that, Jeanette, I’d love for you to introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your back.

Jeanette McMurtry: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here and I’m quite honored for the invitation. A little bit about me, I’ve been a marketing consultant and a staff CMO on and off for many years, and I’ve really focused on helping brands create what I call psychological relevance. For years, I was able to travel the world and talk about the power of personalization. What I mean by personalization is seeing your name in the graphics, the copy of the direct mail letter is all about you, it’s not about some generic event. It’s all about your transactions and history with the given brand.

Well, at some point, that became a commodity. I clearly decided I need to find a way to take personalization to a higher level so I started studying psychology to learn how to take personalization to the level of the human psyche and I really pondered and studied the psychology of choice. Why do we do what we do and why do we not do what we don’t do? Why do we choose one brand over another? It was the most fascinating thing I ever could have done for my career and for my approach to marketing, which has been very successful, by adding those elements. I studied Young, Freud, and Kahneman, all the psychologists from back then to the current day to really learn about what makes us think the way we think and then behave and purchase the way we do.

I started applying these concepts to marketing campaigns for brands across different industries and I saw the results of the campaigns with psychological relevance beat those that did not have psychological relevance by 500 to 600% for revenue generated and response. That’s unheard of, so as a result, I have developed what I call psychology-based marketing, and I am very fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to write books about this whole new concept in my discoveries along the way of how to apply psychology and how to create brands around psychological relevance.

OF: That is fantastic and I’m so glad that you brought that up. Your approach is backed by psychology and backed by science. That’s something that really stood out to me even just from the introduction. In your book, you said that marketing is part science, part art, and part technology. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. You mentioned the psychological aspect, but can you share a little bit more about the role that each of those parts plays in marketing, especially in the modern business world?

JM: We’ll start with science. Science covers a lot of different things. It covers not just psychology, which I’ve just mentioned, but the psychology of science is really critical if you want to tap into consumer behavior and you really want to make a difference in building relationships and relevance for your brand. It’s also about the data. If you don’t have good data about your customers, about your market, about their behavior, about thei

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

If you’ve ever worked in B2C industries, you’ve likely heard some variation of the mantra that the customer is always right, and really the core meaning behind this phrase is that the needs of the customer should be the top priority for the employee. Really setting that expectation that the customer is at the center of the business model. In today’s economic landscape, these expectations continue to trickle even more so into the B2B world. Having this customer-centric mentality is a place where sales enablement can really play a crucial role in helping revenue teams understand the importance of customer-centricity to drive loyalty.

I’m so excited to have Jim Tincher, the author of Do B2B Better, here to tell us a little bit more about this concept that he outlines in his book. Jim, I’d love it if you could just take a second to introduce yourself, your background, and a little bit about your book to our audience.

Jim Tincher: Thanks, I’ve always been a customer-focused kind of guy. My first job out of college, I remember that first summer going to my boss and saying, Hey, I’m visiting my girlfriend, my now wife, in Connecticut. I asked my boss if I could visit a customer while I’m there. He gave me this look like, why would you wanna do that? In fact, he asked me, why don’t you just go on vacation? I thought that’s what people did. Just go and visit customers, find out what they want, how they use your products, and how you can serve them better.

I have since learned that’s not what most people do, but that’s what I want to do from the very beginning. Since then, I’ve been with lead customer trade programs at Best Buy, and UnitedHealth Group, and nine years ago I started the company Heart of the Customer, where we really help, especially B2B and B2C firms understand more about their customers and how to create an outcome where customers want to spend more, stay longer, and interact in ways less expensive to serve clearly from your group. Spending more is probably the one area of most concern, but all three are important.

About three years ago now, my team and I were sitting around and we noticed something that nearly every company we work with says. They’re customer focused, but some are much more customer-focused than others, and some organizations are able to really build everything they do around the customer, but most can. Everybody has customers as a top priority on the wall or some variation of that, but in some organizations, they actually make decisions around understanding what customers want and need, whereas most don’t, they operate internally, and we wanted to understand what separated those two types of customers.

We ended up identifying what we call change makers versus hopefuls. The hopefuls might be doing good work and they hope it helps their customers to want to buy more, stay longer, and interact in ways less expensive to serve. The changemakers could prove it. They could show they were growing through the customer experience. We did over 200 hours of interviews, surveyed hundreds more to get to the bottom of what it is that great companies are doing, and that’s all in the book, the four actions of a change maker. It’s called Do B2B Better and it’s the four actions that change-makers take to ensure that they really are solving customer needs.

OF: That’s fantastic. Thanks so much for that background and context too. That’s so helpful to hear about how the book came to fruition. Something that I love that you talked about in your book is really how customer loyalty is the key to a thriving business. I think that is so critical, especially today with the economic climate that we’r

Olivia Fuller: Hi and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs.

Sales can be a tough job and it’s not one that everyone is naturally inclined to do. With uncertain economic conditions like we’re experiencing today, this job can be even more difficult. The Snowball System is designed to help people sell effectively in a way that they’re comfortable with without feeling like a sleazy salesperson. I’m so excited to have the author of “The Snowball System”, Mo Bunnell, here to tell us a little bit more about this concept and his book. With that, Mo, I’d love it if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and your book.

Mo Bunnell: Yes, let me say this out of the gate. All of you listeners and watchers out there, I am so much a fan of sales enablement professionals and Olivia and her team at Sales Enablement PRO have great resources on the website, certifications, classes, courses, assets, and resources. It’s better than I’ve ever seen anywhere, so when Olivia reached out and thought we should do this podcast, I was excited because the work you do matters, and the things that we’re doing to evolve the profession are important. So, Olivia, I just had to say that out of the gate then I can talk about me.

OF: I love that. Thank you so much.

MB: It’s such an emerging profession and it’s going to continue to grow in importance over time, so you’re all in the right place. A little bit about me, I think a lot of times entrepreneurs start a business without trying to start business. I’ve been at it for about 20 years, and my moment of starting Bunnell Idea Group was a moment of complete panic, almost an anxiety attack. I had gone from a deep technical expert. I had taken all the exams to become an actuary, which if you don’t know what an actuary is, are long-term financial forecaster. We make the accountants look like party animals. I had taken all these years to pass these exams to be an actuary and in one weekend I turned into a salesperson. Now, we didn’t call it that, I was at a high-end professional consulting firm, so we called it a managing consultant.

The fact is in one weekend I went from being rewarded on service delivery, billable hours, client satisfaction, and things like that to retention and growth activities. The moment of panic occurred when I went to my new boss that Monday morning with all of the new floors, business card titles, and all that stuff and I asked him for the manual on business development, sales retention, and growth. I wasn’t expecting him to respond by laughing at me, but he did and it was probably a chuckle, but I heard it like the villain in Scooby Doo. It was not a good thing. That was the beginning. I thought I would get a playbook, but I didn’t get a playbook and I had to build the playbook I can tell you much more about the story if you want, but after years later it turned into an experience, a training class, and now we’ve trained 30,000 people at over 500 organizations all around the globe.

OF: I love that. I have a friend who’s becoming an actuary right now and I have a lot of respect for that journey. It is definitely a tough one. As you mentioned, sales is a very tough job and it’s not one that everyone can be naturally inclined to do, especially with the turbulent economy that we’re all experiencing right now, it can be even harder. You talked about how The Snowball System is really designed to help people sell effectively, but the part that I loved is that it’s in a way that they’re comfortable with. I’d love it if you could tell us just a little bit more about that approach and how it can really help sellers be more comfortable, and confident, and ultimately how that translates into