Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert, author of the popular books “The Sales Magnet” and “Selling Against the Goal,” as well as the president of KLA Group.
KLA Group is a Sales Consulting and Training firm focused on helping clients get more customers in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- BOOK: The Sales Magnet: How to Get More Customers Without Cold Calling
- KLAGroup.com
- LinkedIn.com/in/KendraLee
- @KendraLeeKLA
Transcript
Kendra Lee:
And I actually started talking about using email in your prospecting and selling in 1999. And it has taken until 2015, 2016 to be as prevalent as it is today.
Will Barron:
Hello Sales Nation, I’m Will Barron host of the Salesman Podcast. And welcome to today’s episode. On today’s show we have Kendra Lee and we’re talking about the steps we need to put in place to become a sales prospecting magnet. Kendra herself is a prospect attraction expert. She’s the author of the popular book, The Sales Magnet, and you can find out more about her over at KLAgroup.com. You find out everything we talk about in the show notes over at salesman.red. If you enjoy this episode, it would mean a lot. If you can leave review, to find out how to do that, to go to salesman.red/review. And there’s a quick guide there, it takes about 30 seconds. And with all that said, let’s jump into today’s episode.
Will Barron:
Hey, Kendra, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast.
Kendra Lee:
Well thank you for having me today, Will, it’s a pleasure.
Is Email the Only Way to Prospect in 2016? · [01:10]
Will Barron:
You are more than welcome. And today I want to talk about this concept of becoming a sales magnet. I really like that phrase and the term that you’ve used to describe it here. And were I want to start with this is clearly a leading question, but is email the only way to… And realistically is email the only way to prospect in 2016, because it seems like that is all anyone talks about, that is all that anyone is willing to write books on and write software to support. Is it the only way we can go about it?
Kendra Lee:
I would say, well, it’s not the only way. I think the reason you see so many people using email is it’s an easy way to try and start a conversation. And for sales people, when they’re following up, it’s easier to say I sent you an email and then the next thing they say, which is a mistake is, did you get it? Because of course somebody’s going to say no. But I think it just makes it easier to start that conversation. And if somebody replies, it means they’re actually interested.
How to Prospect in 2016 and Why It’s Not That Hard · [02:27]
Will Barron:
Okay. So we can go super deep into this. In an instant, and I appreciate the answer. Should we be going for the easiest option with prospecting? Should it be a walk in the park or should it be a challenge for salespeople?
Kendra Lee:
If it’s a challenge, they’re not going to do it. So I’m not going to say, you have to pick the most difficult thing to prospect. I mean, it’s the whole reason people avoid cold calling. So can they start with email? I don’t have a problem with them starting with email. What I have a problem with is if they send an email and then they never do anything after that. Oh, they didn’t reply to my email. Well, guess what? I was just thinking it this morning when I was exercising, it’s like, oh my gosh, I haven’t gone back and seen who emailed me on Monday because Monday was a really busy day. And then I thought, oh, I was really busy last Thursday. And I didn’t look at my emails, then I wonder what’s in there.
Kendra Lee:
And if you don’t reply, if you don’t forward and try and follow up a few times, you’re taking personally something that’s not actually a reality. They may not have seen your email. They may have very well deleted it, but you can’t give up after the first try. So I think I’m okay with people starting with email, as long as they’re not on it and using it as the excuse not to do the other prospecting. There are so many other things they could do.
Will Email Prospecting Eventually Be Replaced By Something Else? · [04:01]
Will Barron:
Yeah. That’s what I want to come on to. I think that’s going to be the crux of the conversation. But just sticking with email for the moment to build to the other options because I think email is an easy option. I think people abuse it. I think people get lazy with it. And do you think email will eventually perhaps go the way of the cold call, where it becomes extremely difficult to get through the personal spam filters as opposed to software ones. Well, do you feel like it’s just going to become more and more difficult to the point of something else will to take over?
“A salesperson’s email is competing with every single one of the emails that come into a person’s inbox. So it’s already difficult to prospect via email. I don’t think it will go away any more than phone calling has gone away, but we have to have another strategy because when the calling and the email’s not working, we’ve got to have another way we can gain access. We have to have an arsenal of strategies to use in our prospecting.” – Kendra Lee · [04:39]
Kendra Lee:
It has already become very difficult because so many marketers are now doing the digital marketing and I’m sure you see it in your inbox every day. You downloaded something and then you get 25 emails that come after that trying to get you to buy the next thing. A salesperson’s email is competing with every single one of those emails that come in. So it’s already difficult. I don’t think it will go away anymore than phone calling has gone away, but we have to have other strategy because when the calling and the email’s not working, we’ve got to have another way we can gain access. We have to have an arsenal of strategies to use in our prospecting.
Will Barron:
For sure. And I heard people on the show recently who were talking essentially using the line of cold calling’s dead, but email is dead. And a lot of people quoting Gary Vaynerchuk who’s clearly doing an amazing job of his marketing at the moment. And one of his slogans being marketers ruin everything. I think that’s probably true, but I also think when you wrap social media into the conversation as well, I think there’s a probably, so I’m a millennial. This audience are many millennials and we’re all used to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and all these other ways of perhaps breaking through the noise that otherwise email succumbs to.
The Death of Email Prospecting is Inevitable, Or Is It? · [05:50]
Will Barron:
But I think the problem with all of them and people saying, well, Snapchat will be the email of the future is that email’s just so ingrained into corporate culture. And I’ll ask you, do you think email will ever be dislodged by another written communication platform such as Snapchat or whatever it is, for the foreseeable future the next few decades at least, do you think email will still be there as the backbone of all this?
Kendra Lee:
I will wouldn’t go so far as to say the next few decades. I don’t know that I can tell you what will occur. It’s funny because I looked back and I actually started talking about using email in your prospecting and selling in 1999. And it has taken until 2015, 2016 to be as prevalent as it is today and such a rock in prospecting. So I don’t necessarily know what’s going to be there in 20 years, which actually to me is exciting because who knows what the technology’s going to be.
Kendra Lee:
If I go to the comment about Snapchat, to me, it all depends on who your audience is. The people that we’re working with, they are selling all to business owners and executives. Business owners and executives to don’t have a whole heck of a lot of time to be sitting around looking at Snapchat, especially Snapchat, because it’s so instant. So, for right now, we are seeing LinkedIn as a potential place that you can go. You’re essentially sending an email in your in email through LinkedIn, but that can be a way to potentially reach people, which is an extension of email. But even that is being taken over by the marketers, because now you can invest in a programme that’s going to mine your LinkedIn database and prospect it doing essentially an email campaign in LinkedIn. So I don’t know how long that’s even going to last.
The Future of Prospecting · [08:43]
Will Barron:
Well, the benefit of that though, perhaps is that LinkedIn is just this, sorry, emails are ubiquitous service that much like the internet itself with multiple hosts and servers and everyone’s sending in packets of information from different places. Whereas clearly LinkedIn is a closed community and they can implement whatever they want to stop this spamming happening. Because clearly you can only go on so many profiles a day if you’re actually looking at them versus the botting activities, which will send out hundreds of emails and easily flagged up. So this is what I was going to ask you. It’s interesting you brought up LinkedIn, do you feel then that LinkedIn could, or something like LinkedIn could become the email of the future and this hub, especially with, for example, the backing of Microsoft in that most companies use Microsoft Word, Office, Excel, could all this just be baked into one mega application so that we perhaps don’t even need to open an email anymore because LinkedIn can provide all this messaging for us.
“If you think about it, what we are trying to do with our emails is to start a conversation. So you need a tool that will start the conversation. We used to do it through the phone. Now people try to do it through email. We can do it through LinkedIn. You can do it on Twitter. You can do it through your social media. As a salesperson, we’re going to have to reach out and get somebody to reply to us. So it still comes back to, we still have to prospect.” – Kendra Lee · [09:09]
Kendra Lee:
Well, if you think about it, what we are trying to do with our emails is to prospect, to start a conversation. So you need a tool that will start the conversation. We used to do it through phone. Now people try to do it through email. We can do it through LinkedIn. You can do it on Twitter. You can do it through your social media. So when you say, can it be baked in? I think it absolutely can. I just wrote a blog post last week about how I think the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft is going to change sales and marketing. I think it could it be very powerful to pull all of that data in, but what it is it’s giving you that big data in a more consumable way and still as a salesperson, we’re going to have to reach out and get somebody to reply to us. So it still comes back to, we still have to prospect. Now we just have better information. So perhaps we are more targeted in our approach.
Will Barron:
And let me ask you about one more paradox and I’m stretching my own brain here, Kendra. So, and I know we’ve jumped in heavy on these questions so far in the episode, but before we come back to the present, there’s clearly a trend for… So I’m 29, I’ve got a younger brother who’s 23 and a middle brother as well. Me and my middle brother are probably the same on this perspective, but the younger brother is more open to it. And that is that people are living their lives more and more openly than they ever have done before. They’re sharing, it’s not just tweeting that you’re going out for lunch. It’s now sharing the actual picture of your food, all that you’ve seen this beautiful waterfall and tagging the location and all this kind of stuff. So we’re living in all this more openly, but the ability to get in touch with those people is perhaps get more and more difficult in that you used to be.
Starting Conversations with Prospects is Hard and It Will Be Even Harder in The Future · [11:15]
Will Barron:
I wasn’t in this kind of generation of cold calling. I got into sales probably just a bit after this, where email was more important seemingly. So it seems that we are sharing our world with people easier and more frequently, but it’s getting more and more difficult to break through and have a start a conversation to use your words with those individuals. Is this a paradox that is going to continue? Are we just going to be live streaming absolutely everything in 10 years, but you are not having a conversation with anyone? How do you think that’s going to go, again from the sales perspective?
Kendra Lee:
Part of what you said, I look at as the marketing role and we work with both sides, marketing and sales, because we’re all about lead generation and how do you get more customers. And communicating with the world is about your company is the marketing side. Communicating with the world about yourself is more the sales side. The mistake that I see is that sales people actually don’t use the information that is out there to gain access. It’s really interesting because we train sales people how to prospect more effective and we train them the cold calling. We train them on email and we train them on social media. And even after training them on what they should do for their conversation, guess what they start talking about instantly, any idea?
Will Barron:
Themselves.
Kendra Lee:
Themselves or their products. They forget that, wait a minute, you just found out on LinkedIn that this person went to your same high school and you both live in different states today, or you just found out that you have a shared hobby. My hobby is skiing. I get people who are creative, who will approach me about skiing. When you do that, and I know this sounds old fashioned in some ways, but it still gets you through because people look at it and they’re more interested. Now you can do it from a business perspective as well and figure out what their business issues are drawing in some of that personal that we can get from all this great data that’s out on LinkedIn and Twitter and if you can connect with them on Facebook or you see them on Instagram, then using that is actually what will help you. It’s more like networking.
Social Media Prospecting · [13:55]
Will Barron:
Let’s come back into 2016 then. So if email is getting more difficult, if a direct connection on the phone is near impossible for the salesperson and this all changes and we talked about this on the show before of if you’ve got an online brand, if you’ve got all this kind of stuff, perhaps that makes it easier lubricate, I don’t why this came to my mind, but lubricates the conversation perhaps. What else can we do where there’s less noise? What other channels are that other than the obvious two of phone and email where we can not do the research, because I think most people can manage that, but make that initial outreach?
“What’s interesting is we’re using new tools to do things that are old style sales. So we’re creating our network to ask for a referral, but we’re doing it through Twitter and LinkedIn.” – Kendra Lee · [15:55]
Kendra Lee:
One that I’ve been talking a lot about lately is using social media to make that outreach. And I’m going to use Twitter as an example. You can identify who are the key people that you want or key companies that you want to gain access to and start conversations with whomever it is that’s managing their social media. And doing that, you can get introductions to the right people within an organisation because behind every Twitter feed, for example, and even every LinkedIn company page is a real person monitoring it. So as a salesperson, if you’ve identified the top 10, top 20 companies that you really want to gain access to and you find that they are active on LinkedIn and or Twitter, you start engaging. You’re building that relationship with whoever is behind the scene and you can ask for the introduction. So what’s interesting is we’re using new tools to do things that are old style sales. So we’re creating our network to ask for a referral, but we’re doing it through Twitter and LinkedIn.
Will Barron:
Love this. Let me interrupt you here because I want to stop on this point. No one has said this strategy on the show before, and I’ve got loads of things going from my mind as you’re going through it Kendra. So there’s two things that come to mind. The forefront of it though, one, the person on the over end of the social media channel, they are very likely being incentivized to communicate quickly, to have these conversations. Well, that’s their job essentially. So it’s not like your co-pestering a receptionist or anything like that who is the exact opposite. The person on the other end of the social media channel is there to have conversations whereas the receptionists probably there to stop you and be a gatekeeper. So, that is brilliant. And I appreciate that.
How to Communicate and Build Rapport with a Social Media Account Manager Without Being Too Salesy · [17:08]
Will Barron:
But how do you go about communicating with them without being the salesperson who’s trying to circumvent whatever’s in place to protect that executive and clearly I’m using all cliches and I’m playing devil’s advocate here. But to protect that CEO, C-suite from people cold calling them. Because the answer in most situations would be to add value, whatever that means in this circumstance. But how do you add value to someone on the other end of the social media channel so that they want to refer you?
Kendra Lee:
So part of it is understanding what that person on the other side is measured on. And again, this is something we all learn in sales. The person who is managing the social media is measured on engagement. So they want to show that they are having conversations and that they are reaching more and more people. So to appeal to them first, you are having conversations with them that help them expand their reach. And as you are doing that, you are sharing what are things that you’ve observed or things that you like that they have shared. And I’m not just saying, click like or the heart or any of that. You’re actually commenting on what they’re doing. In Twitter, you’re using their Twitter ID. You’re using hashtag that will get them exposure. But you are basically talking about that company from a positive light.
Kendra Lee:
You’re saying great things about them and not superficially. It has to be sincere. What have you noticed? What are your observations? What are the things that you like about them? When you do that, you now create the engagement and the reach that they’re looking for that gives them the positive metrics. And then you can say things like, it sounds like we should be working together. Perhaps, why don’t we have a conversation, let’s take this offline. Those are three ways that you can say, hey, let’s talk. And then you set up a call with the person and have a conversation that says, hey, here’s what I’m trying to do. Who’s the right person in your organisation for me to be working with.
Kendra Lee:
They’re not going to give you the CEO, especially if you’re going for an enterprise. But if you’re selling to small and medium business, which is who we target, they may actually give you an intro to the business owner because of what you’ve done. And guess what, when they give the introduction, they’re going to say, hey, Will has been talking us up all over Twitter. You need to talk to him because he’s really paying attention to what we’re doing. So if one of your own staff comes to you and says, this person is helping our company to get the message out, you need to talk to them. Are you going to say, no?
Should Salespeople Be Engaging and Prospecting Via Social Media? · [20:27]
Will Barron:
I love this. I’ve got two questions, one devil’s advocate question. And one that will come on to and will lead to the rest of the show, should sales people be doing this themselves? And what I mean by that is shouldn’t salespeople be selling and closing deals. Shouldn’t they believe in all this back and forth to marketers or some other person in the company?
“Every salesperson has a prospecting responsibility. And unless you are an account manager and you’re just expanding your reach, you have to be doing some prospecting. And then I’d even say, if you’re an account manager, you’re extending your reach within an existing company.” – Kendra Lee · [20:50]
Kendra Lee:
So from my perspective, every salesperson has a prospecting responsibility or role, whatever word we want to use. And unless you are an account manager and you’re just expanding your reach, you have to be doing some prospecting. And then I’d even say, if you’re an account manager, you’re extending your reach within an existing company. And this is a great way to do that because you’re showing love for the companies that you’re supporting. As I call this prospecting, it’s another form of prospecting. Should your marketing team be doing it? Maybe. When I started my sales career with IBM, they gave me the worst territory ever. I had nine different industries, none of which were considered important to IBM. So there was no marketing in any of my industries. So it left it up to me. If you’re going to make your quota, this is another way to gain access to those prospects. So I would absolutely say go do it.
Will Barron:
Good stuff.
Kendra Lee:
I would.
What is The Attraction Trifecta? · [22:30]
Will Barron:
I think you made the split there perfectly of… This reminds me of, if you are working for a tech startup, perhaps in that kind of industry, dealing with other tech startups, it could be, it’s not reasonable that the other person on the Twitter is the CEO of the company anyway. And especially if they’ve got funding already and you’ve done all that work on LinkedIn, that might be just an avenue where you’re not spamming them over email. You’re not ringing them up every day trying to get the call. It’s an opportunity to sell, add value and all the cliche stuff without putting any pressure on them until you make that final ask. And from this then, are there any other, and I don’t want to use the word advocates. Are there any other avenues to advocates that you can build through, Twitter seems the obvious one and I guess there’s going to be a person managing the LinkedIn page. Are there any other places we should be spending time to do this specific strategy?
Kendra Lee:
With social media you mean?
Will Barron:
So anywhere, anywhere. What other avenues are there that we can create advocates in a company who can then refer us?
Kendra Lee:
Besides social media.
Will Barron:
Include whatever you like. Social media, outside social media, open to interpretation purposely?
Kendra Lee:
In my I book The Sales Magnet, I talk about the attraction trifecta. Three different overall strategies you can use to gain access. The personal attraction strategy is what we’re doing with our calling and our emailing. The digital attraction strategy is the one that we’re doing in social media. The other one that is often overlooked is collaborative. And this is where you are collaborating with other people to gain access to an account. And when I look at collaboration, it can be anything from the traditional events that you do to actually having alliances with companies that are selling to the same companies that you are. And I think that’s another one that is often overlooked. What sales people tend to do is networking. I’m going to go join a leads group and we’re going to get together. And we’re going to see who are the new companies that are in town that we should be talking to.
Kendra Lee:
What I’m talking about is really finding those companies that you align well with and you work well with and then creating a relationship with those sales people. And I can give you an enterprise example. We have a client that has a big data analytics platform. It’s one of our few enterprise clients where we work directly with reps and not with their channel. They align with storage companies that sell the storage for the big data. And they align with the platform companies that have the platforms for the big data.
Kendra Lee:
Your organisations often have those relationships at a high level, but the reps to make it work need to figure out who are the reps in my territory and let’s get together and let’s plan. What’s our strategy? Who are the top five accounts we want to go after or 10 or depending on at enterprise level, we are really only dealing with about five at a time, but who are those top accounts? And now, how are we going to gain access? And then you get into, well, we’re going to do an event or we’re going to do an email campaign, or we’re going to do those bigger lead generation strategy tactics.
Will Barron:
This is something nice to do in the medical device days, at first or intentionally, and then constructively the end of the period that I was working at the endoscope company I used to work for. So I was selling the surgical endoscopes. There was of course then ancillary and single use products that would go alongside with them. And I kept bumping into the same people in theatres every few weeks. And I can’t remember off the top of head now what the strategic alliances and alignments were on the corporate level. There must have been them there, but the fact that I can’t remember them shows how little that they were pushed onto us as opportunities. And there was one girl in particular, [inaudible 00:26:35], so we’d end up going to the same theatres with the same surgeons, just to hang out kind of in the background as the surgeons were doing their things and we were there to support them.
Will Barron:
And it was only after about a month of doing this, and it was her that she that came up of it. But she said, well, let’s meet up every month and I’ll just tell you all the surgeons that I know that have spare money. And you can tell me all the surgeons that you know that has spare money. And it was such a simple exchange of information. And there was no, you should go and start selling Will’s products, or I should start going selling Amy’s products, nothing like that. It was just a quick heads up. But that led to loads of business that came in, especially at the end of the year or with the way the NHS works at the certain points in the quarter, whether they just needed to spend money before they lose it the next quarter.
Why Salespeople Need to Foster a Collaborative Sales Environment · [27:28]
Will Barron:
And so that was a massive benefit for me, but it was something that just happened naturally rather than something constructively. Is this something that can happen in every industry? Because it seems like on the surface, it should be something that we’re should be prioritising.
Kendra Lee:
It absolutely can, and I actually wrote about it in my first book Selling Against the Goal, because what you can do when you create that type of a relationship, you can actually assign that person a quota. Now you may or may not go and tell them, but you in your mind can say, I can expect that Sally is going to bring me 15 new leads every quarter, based on the conversations that we have. And all of a sudden now I don’t have to go find 15 new leads on my own. The trick is, it’s a one to one relationship with that salesperson. And a lot of salespeople don’t take the time to build that. And you can’t do it with very many people. I mean, you really have to identify who are the top people that you want that type of a relationship with because frequently did you meet with your rep?
Will Barron:
We sat down about once a month for every six weeks, but then we would, a lot of the time inadvertently, Bradford is a huge [inaudible 00:28:57] near us. They do world leading surgery there. It was one of my best customers. So we’d both be in there sucking up to the same surgeons and bumping into each other quite regularly. So purposefully every month, six weeks, but then unintentionally more often than that.
Kendra Lee:
Yes. And so if you imagine it, there are only so many other sales people that you want to spend your time with once a month.
Will Barron:
Definitely.
Kendra Lee:
Now I had another idea for you, if you want to hear it on a strategy.
Will Barron:
Of course. Yeah.
The Future of Prospecting is Video · [29:31]
Kendra Lee:
Because you had asked me, what do I think might be coming? I think an evolving opportunity may actually be video, but I don’t think that prospects are necessarily ready for it yet. But I think being able to send a video message could become very interesting. We are seeing text evolving, but prospect are not yet ready to receive a text from somebody that they don’t know it back. Used to be this way with email, that they didn’t want to receive an email unsolicited. So we may get to a point where you can text? I’m not sure. But video to me could be very interesting.
Will Barron:
You may not know this. I do the ad sales for the podcast, so I’m still a practitioner so to speak. So I’m still able to test everything that we talk about. And I’m not sat on some high horse having written a book 45 years ago and never sold since. And that’s really important to me. So I still do these ad sales and it wasn’t the last time round. It was the quarter before that I tested this idea of sending a quick video over. I think I sent free videos and then a bunch of emails as well. Every single video got a lengthy reply saying, thank you for taking the time. They were thanking me for my prospecting efforts. And they’re all sales enablement, sales tech companies, CRM. So they are perhaps the leading edge of things. Yeah.
Will Barron:
But sending a video of email clearly and it was a YouTube dark video so that, it would play on the phone browser, whatever it was. It wasn’t complicated for them even if they weren’t into the technology angle of things. But every single time I got a lengthy reply said thanking me for the time of taking to do the video. But the videos were scripted. Once I’d run for it a few times, just changing a few words and customising it slightly. In the grand scheme of things, they didn’t take much longer than writing a bespoke email. Clearly it takes longer than just spamming out nonsense emails over Gmail or LinkedIn or whatever it is. But I got really good responses from that. And then the rest of the emails were probably went the way of every other email that goes out, which is unsolicited of, I’ll follow up with that later on.
The One Thing That Would Stop Video Prospecting From Taking Over? · [32:20]
Will Barron:
And then a few months later I’ll get an email, but the things I noticed from it were that I got a thank you. And then the thank you came within minutes of the email being sent and opened. And so I appreciate your video side of things. What would video taking over? Because it seems everyone has a smartphone. It’s way easier to give a Snapchat kind of message of, hey, I’ll give you a call in 10 minutes. I’ll speak to you in a bit. Rather than hi, I’ll yada, yada. And then you’ve got a… The only problem I guess, is that you’d have to have earphones in, or it’s socially, it’s less acceptable to be watching a video and having some blur out the speakers at you than perhaps it being on a screen that you can read silently.
Kendra Lee:
I don’t even think it’s that aspect because I think somebody could go find a quiet space and listen to it. It’s more the stigma that people have to, oh my gosh, I’m going to make a video. Do I look good? Is my hair [inaudible 00:33:09]. There are a lot of people that are afraid to go on video. And perhaps as the video generation matures within business that will change. But first off, I think it’s the stigma of being seen on video and do I look right? The second is just the technology itself. I don’t know that a lot of sales people know how okay, I created it, it’s on my iPhone, now what do I do? How do I get it into my email? How do I send it? So I think knowing how to do it, the mechanics of it, that’s one.
“All the ways our prospects can hear our voice or see us could help get that faster response.” – Kendra Lee · [34:51]
Kendra Lee:
And then depending who your target market is, if you have a technology lagging target market, there could be the concern of, well, is this really safe to open? So those are the three things that come to my mind that hold video back. I think it’s interesting. I got an email, this was from a client. But I got an email from a client where their sales team was stuck with gatekeepers. And she said, what do we do? And I looked at it and I thought, oh man, to write her an email about this, it’s going to take, I’m not interested. So I went and actually recorded an audio and I recorded a five minute audio and said, do these five things. So send it off to them. And every salesperson on the team listened to it and they used it in their sales meeting. They wouldn’t have done that with an email. So I think any way that they can hear our voice or see us, could help get that faster response.
Kendra’s Advise to Her Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [35:07]
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well, we’re running out of time here. So I’m going to just ask the one final question to ask everyone that comes on the show before you tell us a little bit about your book and what we can find out more about you. And that is, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what be the one piece of advice you’d give her to help her become better at selling?
“The risk of failure really isn’t as great as it feels when you’re staring at it.” – Kendra Lee · [35:40]
Kendra Lee:
I would tell myself to be even bolder than I was and take even more risks because the risk of failure really isn’t as great as it feels when you’re staring at it.
Will Barron:
So let me throw that back at you very quickly. If you went back and told yourself that, so you took more risk and you’re bolder, do you think at this point in time, you’d still probably tell yourself to take even more risks?
Kendra Lee:
Yes.
Will Barron:
Could I agree?
Kendra Lee:
I think we don’t take enough risks. I think we play it safe.
Parting Thoughts · [36:47]
Will Barron:
I think risks are, and I love this question. I love this answer. I think risks are expanding in a certain sense in that you would go back. Well, I would tell myself to go back, take way more risks. Probably not even go to university to start into sales and business earlier age. And then I think once I’d done that, I’d be so much more open and my mindset would be so different that I would then still answer the question the same way. And I don’t know whether this wheel of risk would ever change. And of course you get to some point where you’re just jumping out of aeroplanes every day for money. And that might be not the most productive. You have a decent family life or survive past the age of 35. But with all that said, Kendra. I want you to tell us a little bit about the book, which we’ve alluded to and mentioned a couple times on the show and then where we can find out more about you as well.
Kendra Lee:
Thank you. So the book that I was talking about is The Sales Magnet, how to get more customers without cold calling. And it goes through the attraction trifecta and has 14 different attraction strategies that you can use. They apply whether you are a salesperson or you are in marketing, because it’s all about getting more customer. And I wrote it from a salesperson business owner perspective on what are the ways that you can get noticed. And it’s available on Amazon. Again, The Sales Magnet, you can go find it there. I also have a website for it, if to go read more about it and I’ve put what I call the Sales Magnet tool kit there with all sorts of resources that go with downloading or that go with prospecting. And to find out more for me, I would say, go to our website and do content us and reach out. I’m happy to answer questions anytime you reach out to me.
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well with that, Kendra, want to thank you for your time. And I want to thank you for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.
Kendra Lee:
Thank you for having me, Will. It was a great pleasure.
Will Barron:
And there we have it. Thank you, Kendra, for coming on the show. Thank you, Sales Nation for tuning in. And if you enjoy this episode, you’re going to enjoy yesterday’s episode with Joe. We’re talking about fear. We’re talking about how to overcome it, the impact that it has both on your business life and in your life in general. Make sure to check that one out if you haven’t already. And with all that said, I’ll speak with you on tomorrow’s show.
