[E127] Digital Sales Mastery with Jamie Shanks – Part 2 of 4

Jason: Welcome back to another guest episode and part two of my conversation with Jamie Shanks. This is the sales experience podcast. My name is Jason Cutter. If you didn’t catch it, make to sure to check out yesterday show which was part one and you can go to cutterconsultinggroup.com/podcast and find the show notes, transcription, Jamie’s links. All of his information are on there and here we are. I’m going to continue the conversation that we had in part two of four. Here you go.

Jamie: I’ll tell you something that one of our customers have been doing. Imagine taking digital sales and social selling data, which is essentially relationship mapping. It’s relationship mapping and engaging in a bolt in different way. At the same time, you’ve got artificial intelligence, machine learning that is, if you know how to kind of parse through your own data, your content consumption story of all of your marketing insights inside those stories are buying intent, so what this customer had recognized is that if they could parse through all of their data records to understand what does ideal look like, who actually cares? They discovered that in their inbound flow there were a type of hand raisers that would have these commonalities. They would do these certain things, they would watch certain amounts of content at certain frequencies and there was a certain amount of people in the buying committee that our magic number was number three.

Jamie: So if three people in the company at key stakeholders were consuming content, that was a super green flag for buying intent. Now when you match that with digital sales, digital sales is the ability for me to reverse engineer your social network to determine who you’re connected to or be able to look at that key account and determine are there any stakeholders that work in that account that actually came from one of our best customers in the last year. Take those two data points together and it allowed them to determine which accounts, account selection do I focus my time on. And this is where most sellers fall down. They just start calling through the phone book A through Z or they, they make an account list and they call based on the size of revenue or number of employees. I, none of, which is a competitive advantage. So this customer combined this information, they tripled conversion of their inbound deals or inbound marketing qualified leads to convert the sales qualified leads in 90 days because they were just telling the right stories to the right people at the right time that people actually cared. That was it. And it’s actually not that hard when you think about it conceptually it’s just about putting the two data points together.

Jason: Yeah. And I think that’s what’s amazing because on one side it’s very creepy, right? Where you go onto a website and already knows who you are or it’s tracking you. You know? I know some people who have had the experience where they’re talking about buying something. Next thing you know there’s ads online about the thing they were just talking about. Yeah. Like not even like what you searched on, but like literally we were talking about luggage and then here’s the luggage and then Amazon is telling me about luggage. And so there’s the creepy side of it, which is funny because people just still accept it. And then there’s, when you’re a consumer or a buyer, and especially if you’re within an organization, when you contact a company, you really actually want them to know enough about you to be able to sell you intelligently.

Jason: And there’s almost this expectation that everyone should have a certain level of knowledge and that you know, because you as a buyer are going to have an equally, you know, large amount of information about whoever you’re contacting because you’ve done your research, right? That’s the difference between back in the day where you’d walk onto a car lot and you have no idea what the price is, what you could get it for and what the options that, you know, the salesperson, the car dealership, whoever it is, had all of the power cause they had all of the information. Whereas now you know, all the buyers are informed and then they’re expecting the company to then be informed at a certain level to you seeing that.

Jamie: Well and, and so that’s the concept of Caveat Venditor, let the seller beware that the buyer is arming themselves with information to make informed decisions. Whether you like it or not. And you know, I’ve been doing this now for seven years. You know, I was, I pioneered this topic called social selling, and I’ll be honest, every year since 2012 when we kind of started on this snowball effect of social selling, I’d wake up every year and I’d say, Oh God, this is the year everyone’s going to figure this thing out. Charlatan. This is just going to be like part and parcel the way everybody sells. I’m not even going to have a service to provide people. And then the next year would go on. And actually I’ve started to realize much like Franklin Covey probably recognized with, the seven habits were written a zillion years ago. But guess what? Those habits will stay valuable thousand years from now. And so I started to reframe the mindset of my own value in my own IP. And then we started to realize, guess what? Tools will change, but enduring frameworks won’t. And if you can just keep evolving the play within the framework, it’ll always help. Right? 

Jason: So, yeah, when I think there’s the, there’s several things in there I want to unpack. One is that what you’re saying is so true and I see this and I know that it has stopped me before in creating, which is there’s nothing new in the world, right? Yes. There’s innovations, there’s inventions. You know, there’s some technology. Like AI is a new invention and innovation, but the concepts and the framework and the ideas and, and the structures and the formula for how to do things or be successful, like that’s all the same. Especially if we’re talking and narrow it down to just sales and or relationships. Like literally it’s the same like you’re saying like every once in a while I stumble across a reference from a book from a hundred years ago and then you read that and you go, Holy crap. That’s like literally you could just replace the dates, the fact that they’re talking about, you know, the train and steam power, but now it’s, you know, this and so, but the concepts, like you’re saying, the concepts are literally the same. Like thinking grow rich. Whenever that was written as literally the concepts are the same and the fundamental, and what’s interesting is that there’s nothing new. And what’s crazy to me, and I know you see this all the time, is how many, especially sales organizations still don’t do anything different than what they’ve always done right there is there for what they could be doing and changing into and doing that works. But they just do what they’ve always done, whether it is the best or not. 

Jamie: And have you ever heard of the Africa concept? So the Africa concept is, so you have an entire group of people that never acquired landlines because they went from no phone, an entire generation of telecommunications pass them. And now through wealth creation, they’ve now moved into mobile phones. So they skipped that whole generation. And I’m watching this unfortunately unfold and we’re going into the 2020s and I’m watching this unfold specifically. If I were to even call out a nation, it’s the nation I live in Canada. This is a nation that is so poorly invested in skill development and sales performance that when I meet the average sales organization in Canada, they’re in the like they’re barely in landlines and they’re going to have to hyper accelerate cause they’re going to go… Cause we’re in like iPhone 12 now, right now.

Jason: Now let me ask you this though. Total side note, do you think it’s, they’re just having challenges because everyone in Canada’s just so nice? 

Jamie: No, I think, I think the honest answer is most sales innovation globally is still being driven out of the United States and the American buying culture is spend now. You know, it’s like build the parachute on the way down spend now we’ll innovate and figure it out along the journey. But at least we’re trying to innovate. The Canadian organizations, and this is a generality, the Canadian organizations sit on sidelines, sit on the sidelines. But what they don’t realize is, especially in this social ecosystem, social and digital, this has been around for seven years. That’s it. And in that seven years it went from tips, tricks, and tactics on LinkedIn. To now people are incorporating AI and ML. And this is not just in Canada. I mean we’re in, cause we do 50% of our customers are, were in global organizations. You go into Europe, you go into Latin America, you go into Australasia. It’s unbelievable how fast people are falling behind only because the world is actually moving of that fast clip now. Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. And I could totally see that. I mean that makes sense. And, and really it’s the technology. It’s the availability of information. It’s the fact that anybody at any moment can literally grab their phone. Everyone who has it and like you’re saying, like an Africa concept and situation, but they skipped over landlines. They’re going to, phones, phones are cheaper. There’s a much, much more lower price point for that than there ever was. You know, at the lower end, not, we’re not talking to the iPhone 12 iPhone 11 iPhone, you know, high end, you know, it’s a, you know, the really big ticket for figure prices. But at any moment anyone can grab their phone search for something and knowledge is no longer important or scarce. Anyone can find anything. And as a seller you have to A) be prepared for that. Like you’re saying, or the buyer is now going to be coming at you completely armed and you’ve got to assume that you can no longer be the snake oil salesman, Google, rip them off and get one over on them and then move into the next town before anyone realizes it. Right? So got to understand they’re prepared. And then you’ve got an almost, and this is what’s crazy and you know, it’s an interesting concept to me is you almost have to go backwards. Many, many generations of sales knowledge and information and go back to relational selling and using those tactics instead of the salesy tactics that no one likes. Because now it’s an even plane.

Jamie: I fully agree and I’m actually been hearing that rumble and whisper at conferences and people talking about, it’s amazing how there used to be a saying that was very popular. It’s not what you know is who you know. And I remember that in high school. Why didn’t you didn’t go to the right school? And then that kind of passed. And I’m 41 so 20 years go by and people are like, nah, that, that world is dead. You know what? That world is not dead relationship selling and who you know. But for the first time ever, it’s the ability to map relationships at a global scale for free in any company in the world that didn’t exist. And so this is a concept called social proximity. And the concept is pretty simple. I’m going to put the right sales rep in front of the right customer because of relationships, the decision maker and that seller went to the same university or the decision maker and that seller run the Chicago marathon. And so they have a, it’s called the sphere of influence. They’ve got this connectivity between each other. So what is all that is emerging again, that relationships are at the core of selling and people buy from people. 

Jason: So we talked about this early on. you’re doing all this focus with your business. And again, this isn’t just a, a Jamie promo highlight podcast episode. Uh, however, I think this is all amazing and definitely want to get to the end. All of your links will be in there. You got, anybody wants to talk to you about it, please reach out to you. But more of just information and kind of awareness in the explanation of what is and then where it is going. And for me, almost a cautionary tale because we are both consultant type figures in different realms, but a cautionary tale of what companies need to be watching out for it as we enter into the next decade and where, what they need to be looking at, what’s available and then how you do it. So you’ve now generated this person who’s got the right intent, you know a lot about them, account-based or not serve it up to your sales rep, whether it’s an inbound or it’s an outbound, you know, go after this person. What are you seeing different in the conversations that need to be had by the salesperson versus maybe what’s traditionally done?

Jamie: Yeah. So the first, next step, let’s assume you have a sales motion that is a, you have an inside seller or what BDR and SDR that are creating a lead to pass to an account executive. So at that service level agreement handoff, a couple of things are number one, the seller passing the lead is arming the account executive with more information than before. So a lot of them are actually doing some of that planning exercise. Again, what are competitive threats? What are insights that they’ve consumed? What are some of the relationships being mapped during that handoff? The other big piece is the account executive can also do that requalification. It’s really vital that if you are working a key account or you’re just working any account that you’re taking a moment to map what we call asymmetrical competitive advantages versus asymmetrical competitive disadvantages. Relationships are the one thing that a competitor can’t take from you, but it is the one thing that they can have on top of you inside an account free and available information that your team should be doing on every single opportunity.

Jamie: Is there a previous employee from your competitor that now works as a key stakeholder in the account you’re trying to target? Whether you think they’re part of the buying committee or not, those poison pills can crush a deal. Number two, are there people that work inside that ecosystem that have skills, certifications or projects launched with your competitor? Again, many times that information is on LinkedIn. Have you mapped those and then have you mapped the, assuming you’ve connected with all the key stakeholders in that organization, have you mapped their social network again for competitive intelligence? The reason I say this, I can, I can actually give you a use case customer of ours. We were doing a team-based workshop and each team was assigned an account and they were mapping it and they were doing account planning, account engagement, and then how they were going to, can I activate it towards the end of winning it, it’s the discovery of those poison pills.

Jamie: They had a deal that they’d been working for eight months, massive deal, which a multimillion dollar deal only to discover during their team-based workshop. The publicly available data was that the account that they were targeting was being almost bombarded and assaulted by their competitors and their competitors had a far more greater traction relationship wise than they had and they couldn’t figure out why the deal had stalled and stalled and stalled. Relationships are at the core of decision making and so this is a simple play that an account executive should be doing to better prepare the insights they’re going to share. And then to kind of further that thought, now we’re getting into account engagement 

Jason: And that’s it for part two of this four part series with Jamie. Again, you can check out the website, you can reach me if you have any questions you want to talk about this. You can also find his notes, his information. If you go to salesforlife.com and that’s it for now, make sure to come back tomorrow for episode part three of the four part series. As always, keep in mind everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.