[E162] Optimizing Lead Generation with Nelson Bruton – Part 3 of 4

Jason: Welcome back to the sales experience podcast. My name again is Jason Cutter. So glad that you’re here. This is part three of my conversation with Nelson Bruton. Make sure to listen to parts one and two as this as one continuous recording that I broken up into daily mini series episodes. But we just continue the conversation. Keep on rolling about sales success. You know, the tools that you can use as a salesperson to really work smarter, not harder, and be effective in your sales role. So here you go. Part three. Enjoy. So don’t spike the ball on the one yard line. It’s also potential, like don’t spike the ball in the end zone until the game is over because it means nothing. Because in most sales cycles you still have to sell past the close, which means after it’s closed, after someone buys, there’s fulfillment, there’s account management, there’s relationship, there’s expectations and you can’t just celebrate and then move on and dump it and then, you know, take off your Jersey and your shoes and just assume like you’ve won the game when you know there’s still time on the clock.

Nelson: Absolutely. And so, yeah, I think that’s, um, those are some of my favorites and I have a lot of them here. We don’t need to go through all of them. I think, uh, being able to, you know, in sales, you know, you, if you’re in it for some time, define what success is for you cause you don’t want to be one of the people that’s never happy. Yeah, you get hungry, you want to stay hungry, but you also need to balance that hunger with you. Gotta be, you know, at some point, you know, always be grateful for what you have and what you have accomplished. You know, you can’t stay hungry and unhappy all the time in sales and it’s easy to do if you are one of those very motivated, hungry people. But just count your blessings at the same time. Stay hungry. Right.

Jason: The quote that I love the most is always grateful, never satisfied. So I’m always grateful for what I have. I’m never satisfied cause I know there’s more and I want more, but I don’t want more. For more sake. I just want more because I know I can give more and I can do more and there’s more out there in the world, but always grateful for what I have and being okay, you know, what does success mean? If success is giving to others and impacting others and then you know, you’re going to get rewarded for it, then it’s not about chasing more money or bigger money for money’s sake.

Nelson: Yup. Exactly.

Jason: Okay. So that’s cool. I really love that list and we’ll definitely put some interesting stuff in the show notes for this with maybe links to some of that, especially the Zig Ziglar stuff. And, uh, I think that mindset is important because if you have the mindset and some sales skills and the abilities and the curiosity and things that come with that, then you can literally apply that to any sales, career and, or life as well.

Nelson: No doubt. No doubt. So the other thing that I thought it would be good to talk about was the, uh, some of the sales tools that I’ve accumulated or that I use. To be more efficient and work smarter. Not harder, that old cliche, right? And in sales, if you’re not working smarter then you’re not going to make the money and have the fun that you could be having. And um, there’s some tools out there that are beneficial. LinkedIn obvious tool for anybody in sales, especially who are selling to businesses, just about everybody has a LinkedIn profile. So that’s a very powerful tool.

Jason: And with LinkedIn, the best thing to do is connect with and instantly send them your sales pitch. Right? Okay. Cut. Okay, cool. Cause I get those all the time.

Nelson: Yup. And now you wanna you wanna you want to make sure that uh, if you are reaching out, I highly recommend upgrading to sales navigator. Yeah. Bringing in LinkedIn and then you can search by your target prospects and then, um, make sure you’re adding value, share content, educate, don’t sell on LinkedIn. Right. If you educate the relationship, then that kind of ties nicely into the sale most in most cases,

Jason: Which goes back to the Zig Ziglar quote about helping other people get what they want. When you educate, when you give, when you connect, when you set somebody up with something that they’re looking for you, you’re helping them in some way, it will, they’ll see you as valuable and not just another salesperson.

Nelson: Another one that’s really cool that I use is called Covideo video, and you may have heard of the company called BombBomb and it worked. The co video, they do the same thing. What you can do is you can use a software to record a video similar to this and share your screen and walk people through a quick presentation and you can record it and then you can send it to them via email and in the email when you send them an email, there’ll be a box that shows the video with a three second gift that plays, so it’s an animated first three seconds of the video. So when they see it in their inbox, they see movement. Okay. I usually wave like this. So they see me waving to them in the first three seconds and then they click it and they can watch the video and basically hear me go over some key points of a presentation or observations or research that I’ve done on their company. Whatever you put in the video, they can watch it and then I get alerted when they watch it. Yeah, the co video is a really cool tool. BombBomb as a tool that does the same thing. So those are two resources that I think if you’re in sales you should definitely check out.

Jason: Um, and yeah, and there’s a bunch of other ones that I’ve never heard of. The three second gift, one because I know there’s like vid yard and other ones that I’ve used where you can do that in the thumbnail, that three second GIF animated well, make them realize it’s more than just a picture. I’ve also seen people who used that technique and then have like a little whiteboard and they’ll write the person’s name or their company name so they know. It’s like this isn’t just a video for everybody out there. And it’s generic. Like I’m talking to you, Mike, about your trucking company.

Nelson: No, I think I’m going to put on my Amazon wishlist. A little small whiteboard. Yeah,

Jason: There you go. Maybe I’ll, I’ll get that for you for Christmas.

Nelson: But then other bedrock sales is people love seeing their name.

Jason: Thank you. Recognition. That’s what a win. Friends and influence people like use people’s names. That’s what people always want to hear. It’s all about them. Love it.

Nelson: Alright, so, uh, that’s really very valuable too. It’s only 50 bucks a month, I think. At least co video is so it’s really affordable. Hunter.IO. There’s probably other tools out there like it. I know that I’m there. I used a couple of them, but a Hunter.IO has a little Chrome plugin. Whenever you go to a website, you click the little, uh, Hunter IO, I think it’s a Fox or some kind of animal. You click the icon in your browser navigation bar and it will show you all of the email addresses of the people that work at that company. The names and sometimes it’ll have their phone number and so it’s a free tool. That’s the best part about it. We get people’s numbers and names and email addresses way quicker to click that Hunter IO icon at the top if you already, anything like that?

Nelson: Okay. Yeah, so it’s an extremely valuable tool for me. Let’s see, a HubSpot email tracker. Obviously everybody is familiar with HubSpot from a CRM perspective. Well they offer their email tracker for free up to a hundred tracks and what you do, you integrate it with your Gmail or outlook. When you send an email to somebody, you check the box at the bottom of the your composition email that says, I’d like to track this email, and whenever somebody opens it, you’ll get in a little alert at the top of your screen that lets you know they opened their email,

Jason: which for anyone who is not familiar with HubSpot or CRMs like that, which have the marketing element to it, which are more of a marketing side than just a pure CRM. It is an awesome, powerful tool and also creepy where you can see if they open the email, if they clicked on it, how many times, just be careful because what you also don’t want to do is then follow up with a phone call and say, Hey, uh, I saw that you just opened my email. Do you want to talk about it? Don’t be that person. Don’t that, that’s creepy. And sales, that’s creepy. And relationships just told you that.

Nelson: Yeah, don’t do that now what you can do and what I do is, you know, you know, 10 and 15 minutes after they opened it, I’ll send them an article or some additional research via email or I’ll pick up the phone and call them with an additional question or what we call a valid business reason. And if they say, Oh, that’s interesting. I was just looking at your email. He said, Oh really?

Jason: Yeah. Don’t do it.

Nelson: Well, those are some, the, those are some of the tools that I use and uh, they helped me, uh, with my followup and everything and uh, it makes it fun.

Jason: That’s great. So with some of the questions that I like to ask some guests, we talked about the sales experience. What do you see, you know, we talked about mindset. What do you see the top reps doing that are in sales? Like either the work for you or in your past, like what are the top reps doing that make them successful?

Nelson: They’re focusing all the possible energy and time they can on being face to face or belly to belly. So face to face like this with potential customers or belly to belly and meetings with customers, all the other minutia, paperwork and everything else. They’re pushing it off to assistance, helpers, someone else to do all that other minutia. The more time you’re spending face to face with your potential customers, the more sales you’re going to close. So if you can take your time away from all the other stuff, then you’re going to be much better off.

Jason: And there’s of course a lot of salespeople who don’t have the ability to move stuff away, delegate, have an assistant. But I think even in those situations, it’s important to always keep in mind you’re not making money by sending emails and doing followup. Yes, you have to do your CRM, track your notes, you have to do all of those admin stuff. But you’re not making money doing that. A lot of sales reps spend more time on that than the interactions, cause they’re worried about rejection or whatever it might be. And so, but you’re not making money doing that. And if you have to do one thing every day, it’s making those calls or having those meetings, things that are going to move you towards the close. Everything else is secondary.

Nelson: You’re right. And you know, for the people that you know, you’ve got to start somewhere. I mean the goal is to get you, you make, you said the top reps. So the top reps figured out a way to have the assistance because they [inaudible] level. Right. So how do you start at the beginning of that to get towards that? I think it’s prioritization, right? Time prioritization, time management. Uh, that’s a whole another conversation of best practices in terms of time management. But yeah, making sure you’re managing your time wisely. Get off social media, pick a couple of times during the day to check emails. There’s all these tips and tricks on how to manage your time more effectively and that’s what you’ve got to start working on in order to get to the point to where, okay, now it makes sense for me to have an assistant or a virtual admin to help with some of this other stuff.

Jason: That’s it for part three of my conversation with Nelson Bruton. Make sure to go to my website where you can find the transcript, all of Nelson’s links, everything you want to know on him and take a lot of this information. I don’t mention this a lot, but it’s very important to listen to podcasts, encouragement, motivation, exciting ideas, but none of it matters unless you take action. Which Nelson and I do talk about during this podcast. You know, I think it was part two where you know, it’s all about taking action, failing fast, failing often moving forward. But none of this matters unless you’re taking action on it. When you’re hearing things in this podcast, any podcast, reading a book, just make sure you put that into practice. Use it, try it out, see what works for you. Take action on it. Don’t make this like those books that you buy, I call them shelf help books where you bought this book, it seemed like a great idea. You read through it, maybe even highlighted, made notes, put it on your shelf. It’s now a shelf help book instead of a self help book. It’s collecting dust and it was a great experience. You had a good time and literally did nothing with it. So make sure, no matter what, if you’re spending time listening to something, it’s motivating, helping you grab some gems, put it into action. And as always, keep in mind that everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.