🎙️Transcript: How Top Salespeople Overcome Obscurity
Sales Hacker + #FlipMyFunnel Revenue Summit
"How Top Salespeople Overcome Obscurity"
San Francisco, CA
March 8, 2017
Ralph Barsi:
How's everybody doing? I was listening backstage. It was great content, but it's so quiet out here.
It's like latter half of Day Two, lunch is over. It's really nice outside. Is everybody okay? Yeah?
So, round of applause if you lead a sales or a sales development team. Okay, not bad.
How about, round of applause if you're an individual contributor. So, either an SDR or a rep. Alright.
And other? Marketing? Ops? Anybody else? Okay, not bad. Not bad. Cool.
Okay, so I'm not feeling a hundred percent today. There's a cold going around. It has found me. We don't have a lot of time.
I think we've got maybe 15, 20 minutes and we have a serious problem in sales and in sales development that just doesn't seem to go away.
So, I'm going to try to leave you with a few nuggets of value. If I can leave you with just one lesson or one nugget of value, and you're on your way and you can immediately apply what you learn here, then I've done my job.
I'm thrilled to be here.
So, obscurity, I think, is one of five barriers that sales reps and sales development reps continue to hit. And as a result, nobody's hitting quota.
Everybody's frustrated. Everyone in the organization, from the top down, is trying to figure out, "How are we going to get noticed? How are we going to get our SDRs to start penetrating those key logos that we're trying to convert?"
So, I think the fundamental problem is nobody knows who you are in the marketplace as a sales development rep, especially starting out in your career, more often than not.
Secondly, there's a lack of focus. We are hit with a deluge of information and insights on a minute-by-minute basis. Half of you are on your phone right now, so that just speaks to it.
Number three, there's a tremendous lack of inactivity going on. Everybody says they're going to go do something, and says they're going to execute, and then they just don't do it.
So, there's just a lack of activity.
Number four, they do all their due diligence. They actually do measure twice and cut once and they read about the accounts that they want to penetrate.
They read about the key contacts that they want to have conversations with. They finally get that call point to pick up the phone and they just fumble all over the words. There's no conversation flow whatsoever.
And when you are trying to penetrate, say, an enterprise size account, and you finally get a CEO or CIO or someone from the C-suite on the phone, and you blow that call, you and your company risk not getting back into that customer or into that prospect for a good year to two years because your sales development rep or your sales rep blew it.
And then the last barrier is to just continue improving. So, I think everybody in this room can tick the box that you're not failing at that because you're all here.
You're all at Revenue Summit, and that's leaps and bounds ahead of half the marketplace who are on Facebook right now at their desk because it's the workday's almost over. So, my hat's off to you guys.
Okay, a little bit about me just to provide some background and context. I oversee the Global Sales Development organization at ServiceNow. We're based right here in Santa Clara.
My team is comprised of 130 people, a hundred of which are sales development reps and 30 of which are leaders. They reside in seven offices worldwide. So, there's a lot of moving parts as you can imagine.
There's little mini infrastructures to each office. There's languages and we're on a very quick trajectory as a company.
So, we have a lot of people parachuting in from different companies, bringing their philosophies and bringing their best practices into our organization, and we've got to shuck and jive a lot in order to move the whole thing forward.
And in a lot of respects, it feels like we're building the airplane as we fly it.
The first half of my career - I've been in sales 23 years now - first half of my career was spent as an individual contributor, where I carried a bag, I carried a quota, I managed a territory, I closed deals, got commission checks, et cetera.
And the latter half of my career has really been focused on building and leading sales development organizations.
In particular, I built and led the sales development organization at InsideView based here in San Francisco. I then moved on to do the same thing for a company called Achievers, a Toronto-based company, but had a San Francisco office.
And the work that our sales development organization did influenced an acquisition from Blackhawk Network.
So, when Blackhawk Network acquired Achievers, I got a phone call from ServiceNow to come do what I was doing over at ServiceNow and help scale their team while their organization has been experiencing tremendous growth.
So, here's how you can reach me. I even put my Gmail address up there. So if you think this 15 minutes together doesn't add value and you want to tell me about it, go ahead and shoot me an email and we'll fix it.
I have a blog, ralphbarsi.com. We talk about avoiding obscurity. That's one way to do it, is to buy your own URL with your name on it.
You don't have to do anything to it, but you should have it. So if somebody does figure out who you are and they look you up, give them some there there to look at and to learn from.
I'd love it if you'd subscribe to my blog. I've been a writer, speaker, and teacher of sales and sales development for many years and I've got a bevy of content that I'd be happy to share with you for free.
You'll get a personalized email from me if you subscribe because I have...eight subscribers...so would love to have nine, that'd be awesome.
Alright, let's move forward here. Yeah, this is what happens.
We have sales development reps out there who hope they're having a great week this week. They just hope people are reading their emails and listening to their voicemails and they just hope they hit quota this quarter and hope it's a good year.
Well, I encourage those types of people to replace the word hope with expect because when you do that, you find a physiological shift happens in your body when you start to expect things to happen to you.
So try it out. Try it out today. Instead of hoping the rest of this conference goes well, expect it to go well because you can influence it one way or the other how your experience goes from this point on.
Okay, there's still a lot of hours left in this day and we can knock a lot of shit out in that amount of time.
Alright, so this is what it requires: it requires shifting your mindset to start attracting your prospects and attracting your audience and your marketplace versus pursuing it.
One of the biggest problems that a lot of us have in sales and even in marketing is we love to talk about us.
We love to write emails that talk about us and our offering and some of the people we've helped go from X to Y in a given timeframe, and really, honestly, nobody cares.
They don't care. It's like finishing a round of golf and you just played 18 holes and you're at the 19th hole and you're having a drink with your buddies and you tell 'em how well you hit that putt on Hole 8.
They don't give a shit. They don't care. They just want to talk about their golf game. Same applies with sales and sales development. Please do the due diligence and as I mentioned, measure twice and cut once.
When you are researching the newsworthy insights of these companies that we all hear about every day, there's plenty of information channels and vehicles to get us information on the people in the companies that we're trying to do business with.
Lead with that, okay? So adjust your mindset and a lot of people want to finish it all. Now I've got SDRs to this day knocking on my door.
They've been in the company for six months and they're ready to be account executives. They want to go to the field, they want to carry a bag.
They've banged out their phone calls and they're just done now and they've decided that the tenure of an SDR should be six months, not two years, and my objective is to drive a revenue pipeline for my organization and a people pipeline for my organization.
So I encourage them to adjust their mindset and go from A to B, not A to Z. What's critical for sales development reps, who, for the most part, are starting out their career in sales, they're discerning whether or not they even want to be in sales.
Maybe a year goes by and they decide they want take a different path, but in that first year to 18 to 24 months, what they need to be focused on is mastering the craft of sales and sales development and leaders out there have to be doing the same thing.
Understanding and providing an environment for them where they can go from A to B and not A to Z. Get in touch with your purpose.
Remind yourself why you're even getting up in the morning and why you're going in working for the company you work for or starting the company that you are starting.
Because if you lose touch with your purpose and you're not sharing what your purpose is or what your objective is or what outcome you're after, when you're having a rough day, or a rough week, or a rough quarter, no one's going to be able to help you because you've been so close to the vest and haven't shared with people what's lighting your fire every day.
So get in touch with the purpose of what it is that you're doing, the outcome that you are after so that you can go get it and decide in your mind first that you're going to start to build your brand in the marketplace.
You're going to start to get known by adding value to every situation you run into. If I run into one of you after this talk and I catch you in the hall, I will look at you as if I've got taffy stuck between my eyes and your eyes because my focus is on you, it's not on me.
I want to hear what your story is. I want to hear if you've got a little narrative. I want to see if I can help in any way. I'll help connect dots, broker introductions, connect you to people if I can because this is not my job.
This is a vocation for me, and I encourage all of you to find what it is for you that's going to become your vocation. Don't just go to work to go bang phones and try to get your number of meetings and try to build pipeline and try to close deals.
Go to work to become something in the process. And for the leaders in the room, please open up the door and open up the path for your people to become something in the process.
Your job is to remove obstacles from their path so that they can shine with the unique strengths and gifts that you don't have that they do. Okay?
So it really starts up here so you can cast out this nice bat signal and start attracting the opportunity to you.
A lot of sales leaders and sales development leaders ask me, man, I've got to recruit all the time. I'm having a hard time building a team of A players. It's because you've not decided to build a team of A players.
You're certainly not putting the signal out there. We all know that people leave organizations because they're leaving their leaders, not the organization.
Well, it's the same reason a lot of people go to the organization in the first place. It's because of the leader. They want to work for that person.
So if you own a team and you have headcount and you're struggling with recruiting, please ask yourself a few questions about what bat signal you're casting out in the marketplace.
Do people even know who you are? If they look you up, do they know about your track record? Are they hearing from people who have worked for you in the past and are they hearing accolades and goodness about how you've helped them develop their careers?
Those are the questions you need to be asking yourself instead of wondering why no one's walking in the door to crush it for you.
Alright, so that's tip one. Tip two, revamp your social profiles. I was listening to Koka Sexton today and Jill Rowley, and I continue to hear social selling being touted, and I just don't think a lot of people are buying into it yet.
It's last time I checked it was 2017. I mean, sorry. It's here guys. You have got to have a presence online. You have to be adding value online, especially in the B2B SaaS technology world.
If you have not jumped on that train, you're already years and years behind and have a lot of work to do. So please begin by revamping and reshaping your social media profiles.
Nobody wants to do business with a silhouette, so get a nice professional headshot as your profile pic and start sharing it across all the different real estate that is social media so that people recognize you.
Because what you want to do if you're young in your career is you want to get to a point where you no longer have to introduce yourself.
You want to get to a point where you no longer have to submit a resume, where your phone rings because they've seen your track record of work.
Because, if you're a good writer, we need to see your writing. If you're a good speaker, I want to see you on this stage, not me.
I want to hear what you have to share and you will cast a signal that will be very loud and will resonate with a lot of people in the marketplace and your phone will start ringing again.
We're attracting, we are not pursuing. Does anybody not know who Casey Neistat is? Go ahead and raise your hand. There's a few.
Look up Casey Neistat on YouTube. Dude's got a pretty sick brand because what he has done is he has carved out a year and a half of his life as an amateur filmmaker making killer video blogs on YouTube, and as a result, has started companies because of the groundswell.
He's gotten of attention and just did a commercial during the Oscars two weeks ago to encourage people to do the things that they can't.
The things that you're told you can't do, do that because maybe none of us can do it and only you can.
So let's see it. Check out Casey.
This deck was designed specifically to forward it to all of you and for you to download because there are hyperlinks behind everything.
The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand was written by Neil Patel. Take the "Building a Personal Brand" lecture course from Udemy because it was done by Gary Vaynerchuk. He actually took the time to do an online course on how to sell and how to brand yourself by way of social media.
What you say on Instagram is going to be different from what you say on Twitter. Instead of saying "Happy Birthday to THIS gal!" No one knows who this gal is. Tell us a little story underneath the picture.
Maybe include some hashtags, something that's going to help us find you, and you'll start to reshape your brand on the different social media platforms.
Join groups: Sales Hacker, AAISP. There's a bazillion groups out there.
What you want to do first is just listen to the conversations that are happening. Then connect with people in those groups. And then engage.
Don't come blasting in, parachuting in with answers to everybody's questions, when people don't know who you are. Take your time. Then finally, create content that makes people do something.
You'll download an article of mine when you click "Do something," where I'll actually tell you how to broker an introduction and I'll say, write this, say this, connect here, do this.
That's what people want. If you're a content creator, they want to do something with that content. A lot of people will take notes today and then they'll just stack that notebook in their home office and they won't do anything with the notes.
"Yeah, I was at Revenue Summit last year. Great, great conference. It was cool." But the A players will take notes and actually write action items in those notes and will do something with the notes and the things that they're learning today and apply them.
That's what do something means. Cultivate your network, and you do that by just understanding and comprehending the power of networks.
Learn about Reed's Law and Metcalfe's Law, which is essentially, "as your network scales, it scales exponentially."
So, Metcalfe's Law, for example, talks about when you have two phones, you have two connections. When you have five phones, you've got 10 connections. When you have 12 phones, you have 66 connections.
The same applies to people, the types of people that you're connecting with and adding value to their lives. When you get introductions brokered by them, you're opening up your network tenfold.
So just be aware of how networks work.
The Ultimate Guide to Meeting People at Events was written by Selena Soo, S-O-O, and it's a great strategy for pre, during, and post-event execution so that when you are at Revenue Summit next year or another conference, there's a whole strategy that you have as to who you're going to meet, what you're going to say, how you're going to do it, what value you're going to add while you're at that event, and how everybody's going to win in the end.
So this guide talks meticulously about how to do that. Focus on your current followers, not your future ones.
Maybe it means going to If This Then That as an application and setting up what's called a recipe to be alerted.
Every time you get a new Twitter follower or LinkedIn follower, it automatically pumps it into a spreadsheet on Google Sheets.
You then slice and dice that spreadsheet. You look at all the bios that people write in their Twitter profile, for example, and you just start drawing circles around the pockets of people that you want to get to know a little bit better, and you start feeding content to those mini audiences within your audience.
That's how you focus on your current audience and not worry about so much about, I've got 10,000 followers, I need 10,090 by the end. Who gives a shit?
Just take care of the people who are in your network today and everybody will win as a result.
And then finally, ask for and broker introductions and Never Eat Alone. Great book by Keith Ferrazzi that I highly recommend you check out.
Please learn how to write.
It breaks my heart. It really does. We talk about all the different approaches that you can consider when you're writing to people.
Like, you could do 10% personal, 80% company-wide or general, and then 10% personal. Again, that's something that you should actually do.
People nod their heads like, "yeah, that's a great concept," but then they won't do it. Have a question mark in your email because that evokes a response.
Think about lobbing a preemptive email to someone before you call him. "Hey Lars, it's Ralph at ServiceNow. I'm going to call you between 10 and 10:30 Pacific tomorrow morning."
"The number that's going to come through will be a 669 area code. If you're there and that number comes through, pick it up. It's me. If you pick it up, I'll be on the phone with you maybe six minutes."
"I'm going to ask you about 10 questions about this area, this area, and this area, because what I'm just trying to do is connect dots for you so you know that if we have a good conversation, I can connect you to these three people and we can help you find lift in your revenue pipeline or in your revenue, and that's it."
And that gives Lars a way out to say, "Hell no, leave me alone, don't call me" versus me just cold calling him with just a little bit of information.
And as I said at the beginning of our talk, blowing it, and now Lars isn't going to talk to me for a good 18 months because I just didn't go about it, right?
I wasn't personal. So please learn how to read and write and speak. So download or order the book Writing That Works from Joel Raphaelson and Ken Roman.
Download The Ultimate Guide to Social Skills by Ramit Sethi. He does work here in San Francisco as well as New York.
Go meta. Create content on content on content. I'm a mentor at GrowthX Academy here in San Francisco, and I went and visited them two weeks ago and we recorded my talk to this new cohort of students and I talked for 70 minutes.
And because we recorded it audio only, I got an MP4 file of that recording.
So, I sent it to Rev.com, and for $1 a minute, they transcribed all 70 minutes of my talk to the cohort.
So I will grab the finest nuggets and excerpts from that talk and I'll create an article out of it, and I'll pull 20 tweets out of that article alone.
That's what I mean by going meta and using content on content on content. This is how you start to get noticed in the marketplace, so that your phone rings and you're not the one calling people.
Finally, model your favorite writers and speakers. We all have them, so just do what they do with your own style to it, okay?
Look what happens as a result. People start to write back to you.
Be concise, be valuable, be actionable, and be mindful and cognizant of the person you are trying to get in touch with or connect with, and almost detach yourself from your body and from your mind and from your ego, or else all we're going to keep hearing about is you and I want to talk about me.
It's pretty simple, fundamental human psychology stuff. Look at people with taffy connected between their eye and your eye. And when you look at 'em and you're talking to 'em, treat them as if this is their last day on the planet.
But this is it because that's how you know you're going to be connected with someone and really fully listening to them wholeheartedly.
It's as if this is it after today, okay? So give them the benefit of the doubt. Put a 10 on their forehead, let them work it back to a two. You don't have to do that.
A lot of us make the mistake of stamping 2s and 3s on people's forehead, and we don't even know the person. I'm guilty as well.
So give people the benefit of the doubt and speak with your heart. Be mindful and cognizant.
You've been very generous with your 15 minutes of time. It's been an honor to speak with you today, and it's been great to be part of Revenue Summit this year. Have a great day.