Jack Kosakowski is your “no fluff” resource for all things social selling. He’s not some random author who is riding the wave, Jack is a true practitioner and is still in the trenches with #SalesNation selling.
In this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Jack explains the high-level social selling strategy we should be implementing into our daily sales practices to get ahead of the competition and really start crushing it.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- JackKosakowski.com
- CreationAgency.com
- Jack on LinkedIn
- @JackKosakowski
- Sprout Social: Social Media Management Solutions
Transcript
Will Barron:
Coming up on today’s episode of the salesman podcast.
Jack Kosakowski:
So, what happens is a lot of sales reps, they’ll go, “Okay, Jack, we want to get started.” So they’ll start sharing content. And what they do is they share content that’s old, it’s boring, it’s corporate, and it’s just not going to work. So what I tell sales reps is like, “Let’s start with fun.”
Will Barron:
Hello, Sales Nation. I’m Will Barron, host of The Salesman Podcast. The world’s most listened to B2B sales show. If you haven’t already, make sure you click subscribe and with that, let’s meet today’s guest.
Jack Kosakowski:
Jack Kosakowski here. I’m the CEO of the Creation Agency, US division, also a co-founder of skillslab.io, and we essentially help turn digital into dollars for all types of different sizes of companies.
Will Barron:
In this episode with Jack, we’re diving into the high level strategy behind having success through social selling, not just do this LinkedIn post or jump on Twitter or anything as basic as that. We’re diving into the high level strategy of what you should be doing over the next six months to make sure that you crush your sales targets 12 months from now. And with that, let’s jump right into the show.
Social Selling and Why You Should Care · [01:03]
Will Barron:
What, on a high level, is social selling, therefore? What’s the point of it? We can dive into why we need LinkedIn, why we need to create content in a second, but is there an overarching strategy? Is there something to be aiming towards with social, regardless of what platforms we’re spending time on?
“What we need to do is we need to create sales conversations, and the channels that we used to do that on are evolving and to be fair, we have to find people that want to buy from us, and we have to let them know who we are and get that conversation started six months before they’re ready to buy. And the old traditional ways just don’t allow you to do that anymore.” – Jack Kosakowski · [02:00]
Jack Kosakowski:
Yeah, I mean it evolves every time we talk, right? I feel like what I would’ve said three years ago, two years ago, whatever it is, but I think it’s really just coming down to the digital economy. I mean, at this point, the economy is digital and that used to be e-commerce, but that’s shifting and now e-commerce is all digital, but really B2B, right? I mean, what we need to do is we need to create sales conversations, and the channels that we used to do that on are evolving and to be fair, we have to find people that want to buy from us, and we have to let them know who we are and get that conversation started six months before they’re ready to buy. And the old traditional ways just don’t allow you to do that anymore.
The First Steps Towards Social Selling in B2B Sales · [02:10]
Will Barron:
So, is that a summary of the strategy then of, we need to be planning six months ahead of ourselves? I’m talking about enterprise large value B2B deals here, as opposed to anything that could be closed on the phone or on a one-call close or anything cheesy and cliche like that. Is it six months in advance and then what are the steps? Is it visible and then it’s know that I can trust and then relationships? Are there milestones that we should be aiming for if we’re trying to close a big account? And obviously, I guess the end milestone is closing the deal.
Jack Kosakowski:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, how do you get people to know who you are, right? How do you get visible? How do you get valuable to the point where they say, okay, this person, I could see some type of connection through the connection that we have online, that they could help me personally and professionally? And then the third one is, how do you get connected offline? I mean, we talk about the online connection, but it’s a slow … I say it’s like a slow drip of building the connection online to the point where you can get offline and you can personalise your conversation and you can kind of start off about a quarter through the prospecting sales process versus just being another salesperson, begging somebody for business. You actually kind of use a strategy around targeted accounts, targeted connections to get the right people offline over time.
How to Create and Maintain Visibility Online · [03:35]
Will Barron:
And is there a tick box for each of these, specifically the visible one? Because it’s one thing for me to spam you, Jack, with 15 emails begging you to come on the show. I’m visible, but I look like a complete idiot. Is there a kind of end point or a start point of what visible should be and when we’ve had success at it?
Jack Kosakowski:
Well, I think visible is just putting yourself out there. I mean, that’s where most sales people just fail tremendously, right? I mean, they’re not even … Let’s say they are on LinkedIn, right? They’re optimised, whatever. All that stuff is great, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not actually starting to share the right content, you’re not engaging with the right people, you’re not doing an omnichannel approach versus like, hey, I’m just going to be on LinkedIn. Well, that’s great, but like, where are you … Why aren’t you running some Facebook ads? Why aren’t you running some Instagram ads targeting your LinkedIn connections, right? Doing kind of an omnichannel approach. I mean, this stuff is evolving. I mean, there’s … It used to be like, I used to say one to one.
“If you’re just on the phone and you’re hoping that you’re going to get one out of a hundred dials to connect, that’s great. You might get that one person in a meeting, but how are you going to be able to be on the phone and use digital to get in front of thousands of people while you’re sleeping.” – Jack Kosakowski · [04:42]
Jack Kosakowski:
Well, now I look at this as like, if you’re in sales today, how are you scaling your visibility? Because if you’re just on the phone and you’re hoping that you’re going to get one out of a hundred dials to connect, that’s great. You might get that one person on a meeting, but how are you going to be able to be on the phone and using digital to get in front of thousands of people while you’re sleeping, right? I mean, you can … There’s so many different ways now that you can keep yourself out there, keep yourself visible to the point where somebody goes, oh, I see this guy everywhere I go. I freaking open up my … I’m playing a game on my mobile app. I heard this the other day. They’re like, “Gosh, every time I play a game on my mobile app, Jack, I see one of your videos pop up.”
Jack Kosakowski:
Perfect. That’s exactly what I’m looking for, right? Because this is a way that sales start to happen because now they go, “Okay, dang. I see this guy everywhere. Now, I’m going to listen to him. Oh, wow. I didn’t know that we could do that with our business. Great.” Are they going to have a sales conversation with me at that point? Probably not, but now all of a sudden, I’m on LinkedIn and I write a piece about seven ways to do something and they’re like, “Oh gosh, just watched this guy’s video a week ago, now I’m going to read this article.” Now, all of a sudden, they engage with me and what happens is I engage back, see, oh, hey, this person’s … I’ve seen them a couple times, I’m going to pick up the phone and I’m going to ask them for their feedback about the video or the blog content that they engaged with and I’m just going to start some dialogue. I’m not going to sell them, but I want to get their feedback. I want to hear where they’re at, their heads at and just start to build a relationship a little bit.
Jack Kosakowski:
So, that’s an over time strategy using an omnichannel approach. And that’s what I think the best sales people … You’re seeing it with authors, consultants, essentially what all of them are doing is that exact strategy, but you’re going to start to see it, in my opinion, and you are seeing it with B2B sales people and it’s coming. That time is coming.
Will Barron:
There’s a weird phenomenon, and you, I’m sure, will have experienced this because of the size of audience you’ve got as well, Jack. And not that I’m putting you and I on a pedestal here whatsoever, but it’ll give context to where I’m going with this of at sales conferences, I get recognised all the time. I always get people who listen to the show, Sales Nation, come over, and it’s always the first person who comes over and I encourage people to come and say, hello, obviously. It’s always a bit weird because they know me. They know that I train in jujitsu, that I’m after this car, that I’ve just done this interview with Grant Cardone in Salesman Magazine, they’re doing all these things that I’ve got this fish on my desk, which people are still unsure about the branding behind, which will come in the not too distant future, but I’m storytelling all these stories purposefully and people know all of them.
Will Barron:
So they come over, shake my hand, and it’s weird for me. Again, the first, second, third person, if there’s a bunch of them that will come and say hello during an event like that, because I don’t know anything about them. And I go, “Oh, this is the whole point, right?” [inaudible 00:07:23] This is all the luck and chance and experimentation that I’ve achieved all this as opposed to any hard science, but that constant contact, the podcast coming out three times a week, the magazine hopefully getting delivered to people’s doors and just being, not even read, just laid about in people’s houses, on the coffee table for months on end before they bin it or get rid of it or file it away, whatever they do with it, the videos and the adverts that we do for the sales school where people are getting genuinely bombarded every single day across Facebook, Instagram. I’ve done a little bit of experimentation with Twitter as well, so people are getting the word omnipresent.
Familiarity and Why you Need Constant and Consistent Online Visibility in B2B Sales · [08:07]
Will Barron:
They’re getting surrounded by the content, me, and they’re getting a little bit of kind of directly sold to as well, which is perhaps a different context in a B2B sale versus the sales school is B2C but is it as simple as that then with regards to my tale of me getting recognised and people build trust with me by just visibly seeing my face so many times during the weeks and months before a sales event, is it as simple as that? Is there something going on with our brains? Is there some kind of psychological element of this of when you see someone’s face, you become familiar and you automatically build trust with them? Is that all we need? Not all, but is that a huge point of this that we just need constant visibility over time and that does a lot of the hard work for us?
Jack Kosakowski:
I think it comes down to the branding play. They say that online, if you’re going to buy something, somebody needs to see it five to seven times before they buy something. I think the same comes into a sales conversation. So at B2B, what most people are buying is you’re buying their time, right? So how do you get in front of somebody five to seven times so that when you do pick up the phone, right, you cold call them per se or you cold email them and you actually have something … You actually have some brand awareness from a personal perspective, right? So what you’re saying is you go to an event and somebody goes, “Oh my gosh, I know you, Will.” And you’re like, “Well, I don’t know you,” that’s what we want, right?
“At the end of the day, our goal is to get a sales conversation. And unfortunately, with all the noise and with limited time from our buyers, they have limited time, they can’t just spend it with you just to hear about another product, you have to be able to get that visibility, get that value, get that connection, and then be able to have some credibility so that when you do get on the phone, they actually listen to you.” – Jack Kosakowski · [10:14]
Jack Kosakowski:
Wouldn’t it be amazing as a salesperson to be able to make some one minute videos about trends that are going on in the industry, make some one minute videos at a conference and interview Will as a sales rep and say, “Hey, Will, I’ve been following your podcast,” and then go share that video on LinkedIn and then put it on Facebook, maybe run an ad to your target accounts, right? So that all these target accounts that keep hanging up the phone on you, don’t answer, don’t respond to your emails, well, let’s put them in a value flow system where we get visible, valuable using the content with minimal time, and I hate to say this, but people think you have to do this at scale. It’s really not that hard. We have phones. We can make quick videos. We can do things. We can do quick targeting, take some quick courses on Facebook ads, but at the end of the day, our goal is to get a sales conversation.
Jack Kosakowski:
And unfortunately, with all the noise and with limited time from our buyers, they have limited time, they can’t just spend it with you just to hear about another product, you have to be able to get that visibility, get that value, get that connection, and then be able to have some credibility so that when you do get on the phone, they actually listen to you and go, “Well, this person knows what they’re talking about. Shoot, I’ve already learned about three or four things from them before,” right? “I’ve already learned from Will. I’ve been listening to Will for three months. Of course, he’s going to have my ear when he wants to tell me about something that can help me build my business. He’s got the credibility with me.”
The Perfect Balance Between Keeping Up with Industry Trends and Creating Content Specifically for Your Buyers · [10:55]
Will Barron:
So, how does this align then with messaging and what I mean by this is I want to separate, if we can, kind of sales and marketing and marketing [inaudible 00:11:04], and perhaps the branding and we do some of the messaging and the education on a personal level, if that is the split. We can dive into that in a second, Jack, but again, for context, brand that me and you both work with, I won’t name who they are, because I know a lot of them listen to the show. I built my kind of awareness within that brand by very simply super … Not smart or anything like that, I just went into the Facebook ad programme or ad application. I put that brand in, they’ve got a decent sized audience, and I put kind of people employed in this company and I just sent them over and over and over an image that just showed the sales and podcast logo and then the message was “The world’s most listened to sales show,” something along those lines.
Will Barron:
When I then started cold calling into the account, not really cold, but warm calling or getting a referral to the right person to speak to and then cold calling them, everyone knew that this messaging that had been spammed to them for about a month beforehand, I think it cost me $60 to do that, wherever that was, that $5, $10 a day over kind of say seven or eight weeks, that’s all it cost me. And people knew my message on the size of the audience, which is what I was trying to win their attention with on the back of that. So, for salespeople, should they be trying to teach individuals or their potential customers industry trends or should they have their own message of I do X, Y, Z, I could help you, one, two, three? The answer might be both, but should we have a message and then should we be prioritising getting our message and branding in front of people? Or is it more teaching and building kind of a relationship with them?
Jack Kosakowski:
So I think, yeah, you have to have a mix of that, right? So, let’s give you an example. Let’s say that you are a sales rep, B2B sales rep, and you have your LinkedIn profile. Well, on your LinkedIn profile, you could make a video that says … And maybe work with your marketing team and say, “Hey, I’m Jack, here’s what we do.” I don’t know if anybody knows who Gaetano is, but Gaetano DiNardi, he was the VP of marketing at Sales Hacker, and he just went to Nextiva, and if you watch what Nextiva’s doing, these sales reps who are selling VoIP services, like their videographer team has gone and doing these high end videos for them and interviewing them and just asking them questions and putting these together, and these guys are putting it on their LinkedIn profiles as the video attached to their profile, right?
Jack Kosakowski:
So, in my opinion, what your goal is, is to drive somebody to your profile, and at the end of the day, you have to have that type of, here’s who I am, here’s how I could help you type of content, but you should be using other content to drive them there because I feel like if you’re making those videos and you’re putting those up, you’re going to sound like you’re just a salesperson trying to sell everybody.
Will Barron:
Yeah.
“Speaking in a language of expertise is when your buyer gets better personally and professionally every time they run through a piece of content that you’ve shared on your feed.” – Jack Kosakowski · [14:17]
Jack Kosakowski:
You’ll automatically lose people, but I think you got to think about the rebuttals that you hear from your buyers. You’ve got to think about the problems that they’re having on a daily basis that maybe your solution can fix, or maybe your solution compliments something that another product that they probably have that your solution could compliment that, right? So, thinking about speaking in a language of what I like to call is expertise is that your buyer gets better personally, professionally, every time that they run through a piece of content that you’ve shared on your feed, and that is whether that’s you or a high end third party source, right?
Jack Kosakowski:
So, if you’ve got a Gartner, you’ve got Forrester and they come out with a new reporter of like the top technologies, top trends, I mean, those are really credible sources. That’s what a CEO decision maker wants to read, and if you’re the one delivering that, that makes you associate as the expert, but the other thing is creating your own content and using your customer’s pain points, and you take one minute, two minutes, and you actually just talk about how to fix those pain points without even selling and making those one minute videos. Things like that, I mean, you got to get pretty creative, but you have to start putting yourself out there to get visible. That’s the number one step that I guarantee every salesperson that’s going to listen to this goes, “Well, social selling, I mean, I’m trying it.” No, you’re not because I could guarantee if I went to your profile right now, you’re not even putting out the content that you need to put out in order to get conversations started, which is to get visible and to get valuable.
Why You Need to Be Creative with Your Content Strategy · [16:04]
Will Barron:
It seems like what you’re describing here is what YouTube was, and still is a little bit two or three years ago. There were people building incredibly large audiences by just almost commenting on what other people were doing in the space, and it seems like that is a potential framework of content, which is pretty easy to put out. All you got to do is have your thumb on the pulse or whoever the saying is, on the industry that you work in the vertical, and then you just rebuttal or comment and somewhat perhaps put it through somewhat of a neutral filter. Hell, if you’ve got a crazy personality, don’t put it through a neutral filter. You’ll find half your customers will love you and half your non-customers will hate you, but perhaps … Let me ask you that then, Jack, how much of this does need to be neutral and corporate and B2B professional and how much of it should be genuinely engaging and polarising?
Jack Kosakowski:
I mean, you have to have polarising. So like, here’s the thing, so what happens is a lot of sales reps, they’ll go, “Okay, Jack, we want to get started.” So, they’ll start sharing content, and what they do is they share content that’s old, it’s boring, it’s corporate, and it’s just not going to work. So what I tell sales reps is like, let’s start with fun. So, the first thing I tell sales reps is if you go to my profile, go look at all the videos I share. I just shared a Nike commercial where a kid with cerebral palsy is given a … It’s the most like awesome video, and they go through and it’s a four-minute video. So, I went to YouTube. I downloaded that, right? You could do it really, really easily. I downloaded that video and I embedded that into my LinkedIn profile, put a great message on there, and then I put the link obviously in the comments too to give credibility back to the video.
Jack Kosakowski:
But what happened was I got a lot of people that … I think it at around 250,000 views right now, right? And 117 comments. Now here’s the deal, that has nothing to do with what my services are, but what it does is it’s me sharing something that I think is super moving. It’s amazing. I actually use it as a marketing example because I said, this is how good content … Nike’s the king of stories, right? Storytelling, so it does kind of align, but I’m using other people’s content that, like you said, is polarising, it’s emotional, so that I can get people, what I like to call kind of the visible part, right? I’m getting visible because if I were to just have shared something that was what everybody else is sharing, I wouldn’t get 250,000 views, and people go, “Well, who cares about views?” And I go, “You’re right. I don’t care about views.” I really don’t. I have videos that have millions of views on LinkedIn. You know what I care about is I care about that I’ve connected with somebody on an emotional level, I’ve started conversation or not started conversation, but I’ve started to get their attention with a common theme, which is some content that I love.
Jack Kosakowski:
Next step though is what a lot of people don’t realise is LinkedIn gives you free retargeting. So all those people that just viewed, the next time when I share my webinar, I share my blog posts, I’ve got now people where I’m getting visible, which is a piece of content that has nothing to do with what I do. Second step is valuable because now, after I share that video, a few days later, I’m going to share a piece of content that I’ve made that will be relevant to a lot of those people that’s actionable and helping them do something. So now I’ve got blog posts and I’m retargeting those people for the video. So I can valuable.
Jack Kosakowski:
Then the next step is to get some engagement, post another strategic post about, “Hey Gartner says that in the next five years, buyers are changing the way they buy, and here’s the statistics,” right? Then I get a comment from a CEO. Then I’m commenting back. I mean, you’ve got to be really, really creative with your content strategy, but it’s really, actually not that hard because you see videos on Facebook that you like that are moving. You see videos on LinkedIn, but what’s happening is people are not actually sharing that content. They’re consumers. They’re not actually sharing it. The excitement and the magic where sales conversations start to happen over time is when you start to share that content and actually connect the content with the conversation.
The Benefits of Engaging with the People that Engage with Your Content · [20:02]
Will Barron:
So it’s funny, I saw that video, the lad who was trying to run an under two-hour half marathon, I think, something like that. I saw it two or three days before I ran a half marathon, about four or five weeks ago, and that was so motivating for me. I saw it on Facebook. Unfortunately, I did not see it on your profile, otherwise I would’ve given it a like, Jack, but yeah, like that really gripped me. I was too dumb to re-share it before you did, but on that front mate, two things here, one, is there a strategy for engagement? So, I scribbled this down earlier on in the conversation of when you used to engage back, and this is an I’m quite poor at doing. I’ll post content that gets 20, 30, 50 comments, and then I’ll go back through the first three or four of them, and I don’t do it strategically, and then I forget where I am, and then I post another piece of content by this point. And then there’s still people commenting, and then I turn off notifications to LinkedIn because you just get spammed every time I turn it on of people … All this stuff going on.
Will Barron:
Obviously, that’s a good problem to have but is there a strategy to, you’ve kind of alluded to it a little bit here, but to get conversations going, to get comments, is there a strategy for that? And then is there a strategy to manage them if we do have a couple of home runs and we’re getting a hundred odd comments on a post?
Jack Kosakowski:
Yeah. I mean so I get … I can’t tell you how many people comment on my posts, but I comment pretty much to every single person that leaves an actual good comment, right? I mean, if you look at any of my feeds, I can comment with everybody. I’ve got Sprout Social. I use that because it allows me to kind of use … It’s like an email for social posts, right? So, there’s different tools out there, HubSpot or Hootsuite, but in the beginning, you’re not going to get that many likes and comments like we do, right? So, you should be able to manage it pretty easily, but in my opinion, you respond to everybody to a certain extent, unless they’re a troll. And you just look for those people that are consistently engaging on your content or commenting back, and you use that as personalization to either send them a LinkedIn message if they’re the right person, you pick up the phone, you reference the post, you reference …
“Most salespeople want to sell on the first call. They want to sell on the first post. They want to sell on the first comment. You’ve got to get away from that.” – Jack Kosakowski · [22:08]
Jack Kosakowski:
What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get an online conversation started so that you can get offline and personalised by some type of form that you just don’t have, because most of you are calling cold and you’ve got no common connection. The goal is that if we get common connection and we get, what I like to call is, actual conversation online, that is the easiest part to get somebody offline. Because we in sales now have something that we can personalise and try to connect with somebody. Now, I think the thing is you’ve got to realise that most salespeople want to sell on the first call. They want to sell on the first post. They want to sell on the first comment. You got to get away from that, right?
Jack Kosakowski:
You’ve got to be able to be strategic in how do you connect with people and how do you personalise your message to get offline? And when you do get offline, how do you use that first call smart, have the right motive? I mean, that’s just sales 101. I mean, but most salespeople struggle with that because they’ve got their heads so far up their ass trying to sell all the time.
Storytelling and Social Selling in B2B Sales · [23:00]
Will Barron:
And it’s conditioning, right? I’ll stick up for the audience here a little bit, Jack, if they kind of go, “Well, we need to close deals.” We’re all conditioned from a young age that salespeople in films always be closing and used car salespeople and they’re just hounding the phones, which worked perhaps 20, 30 years ago, I have no idea, I wasn’t born if it worked then, but I assume it worked then otherwise people wouldn’t do it. So we’re conditioned from this. We’re conditioned by sales management, sales leaders who perhaps are still living in the dark ages. So with all that said, something you intrigued me here with the kind of Nike example, should we trying to story tell through posts like this about us personally, to build a relationship with individuals or is this a … Because you could quite easily do facts where, Gartner said X, Y, Z. That’s not a very engaging post, but if we putting our own spin on it of, I learned yada yada at this and then this company, and then this, then Gartner said, this, this and this, that’s clearly more engaging and there’s a human element to it that makes us want to reach out and comment on it.
Will Barron:
So should we be storytelling? And how do we, without doing seven hours of podcast about storytelling, is there a kind of framework to a story that we should be including in these social posts?
“When I see something on Facebook, I literally take a screenshot of anything that stops me in my tracks because I’m like, “okay, well that got me to stop, what could I do to stop my buyers?” – Jack Kosakowski · [23:52]
Jack Kosakowski:
Well, I think it comes down to one thing and one thing only is what content … You have to think backwards when you’re in sales. What content stops you from scrolling, right? I always say that. When I see something in Facebook, I literally take a screenshot of like anything that stops me in my tracks because I’m like, okay, well that got me to stop, stopped me, what could I get to stop my buyers? I think you’ve got to have an overall arching strategy. I mean, if you look at people that do LinkedIn the best, they share a really interesting video of something that connects with you on a personal and professional level, whether that’s … I share a lot of Jay Shetty’s stuff. I love Jay Shetty’s wisdom videos, Prince Ea, like these guys, like they tell stories better than anybody, and the thing is like, I can connect their story to sales, right?
Jack Kosakowski:
I’m like, okay, listen to this about empathy and how this guy … How Einstein used empathy to create X, Y, and Z. How can you do that in sales? So I think you really got to think about the content strategy and what moves you and then post three times a day, right on LinkedIn, three to five times a day, a video. Then you’ve got to maybe write some text, right? Some text to try to start conversation is here’s three things I struggled with when I first started in this industry and here’s three ways I found to be able to get over that. How would you get over that? Right? Ask a question, start some conversation.
Jack Kosakowski:
Then you got to share some third party stuff. like you said, Forrester. Well, the thing is a Forrester post is not going to get a lot of engagement, but what it’s going to do is it’s going to get engagement from the right people, because the people that care about that stuff are your target buyers. So how do you filter out if you got a hundred thousand views on a video, how do you filter out, through time, the real, real good people that are paying attention to you? Well, share a piece of content that’s super strategic that only a CEO in your industry or a VP in your industry, whatever, like or comment on because they’re the only ones that care about what’s happening in the top right quadrant, right? So, strategically, you want to think about what content.
Jack Kosakowski:
Every audience kind of moves a little bit differently. Some of your posts, you’re trying to get the visibility part, some of the posts, it’s kind of like a funnel. Some you’re trying to get the value part and some of that content you’re trying to use for a connection. Now the Forrester report could be the connection part with the VP. You’re like, hey, I’ve shared this. hey, they commented. They put in a little bit of their own sauce on it. I responded back. I’m going to send them a connection request and say, “Hey, saw that you commented on the Forrester report, would love to show you guys what we’re doing. We were one of those in the top right quadrant and I would love to get your feedback on what we’re doing and see if we could connect offline, maybe there’s some business value here.”
Jack Kosakowski:
But there’s your personalization. You’ve just now … They’ve seen a video of you. And the funny thing is you might get on that call and they go, “Gosh, oh, by the way, that video you shared the other day of that runner from Nike,” which this happens to me all the time, right? “Gosh, that was so great.” I’m like, okay, so we spent the first 20 minutes talking about a video that I didn’t even know that they actually watched, and we actually connected offline because of the Forrester report. So I’ve just went from an awkward conversation, which is what a first call for most sales people is, is I went from an awkward conversation for somebody that doesn’t know me to somebody that does know me, has connected with a few pieces of my content, and now I feel like I already know them 20 minutes in. I don’t even have to sell them and they go, “Okay, yeah. By the way, what do you guys do?”
Will Barron:
Yup. They’re proactively asking you at that point, right?
“If your life sucks right now in sales, you’ve got to fix something. If you are in the 80% of people that’s dialling for dollars all day and you’re not seeing any dollars, you’re getting low meetings, you’re struggling or you’re a top sales rep and you want more, then here’s the secret sauce. The secret sauce is to get more visible, get more valuable and get more connected. Because the more people think you’re valuable and the more people you’re connected to, that’s the secret sauce of sales.” – Jack Kosakowski · [27:24]
Jack Kosakowski:
Yeah. And I mean, now, I don’t want to say any of this is easy. Like this is not … Like we’re not having a silver bullet conversation, but what I am telling you is that if your life sucks right now in sales, you’ve got to fix something, right? If you are in the 80% of people that’s dialling for dollars all day and you’re not seeing any dollars, you’re getting low meetings, you’re struggling or you’re a top sales rep and you want more, then here’s the secret sauce, right? The secret sauce is get more visible, get more valuable and get more connected. Because the more people that think you’re valuable and the more people you’re connected to, that’s the secret sauce of sales, right? The best sales people work on referrals and they work through their current customer base. How do you grow that? And how do you connect those? This is the way to do that over time.
The Long-term Content Strategy for B2B Salespeople · [28:30]
Will Barron:
So Jack, it seems like this is a medium term kind of plan here. As in, if I’m in medical device sales, my target was always yearly around Christmas time. And so, well, the end of November, I think the target was kind of the deadline for when smashing it was, so we can have a three to six month lead time and then we can crush it at the end of the year and bring all this together. Is there a long … I don’t want to talk about the short term elements of this because then we’re talking about hacks and probably ways to not do it properly, but is there a long term plan for all of this?
Will Barron:
If, for example, I’m in medical devices, I’m selling endoscopy devices. I love selling these camera systems. The technology’s super fascinating. It’s always changed every year. There’s more technology rather than rod lenses in endoscopes, it’s a chip at the end of the camera … It’s a camera chip at the end of the scope and all these incredible things are going on and it’s a fast paced move and there’s robots doing it now as opposed to just surgeons in rooms.
Will Barron:
If I know damn well I’m going to stay within this industry for the next 10 years, what is a 10-year content plan? What does that look like? Bearing in mind that we perhaps don’t want to be a salesperson in 10 years, we want to be, for what it’s worth, an industry thought leader or something along whatever bullshit title we want to give it, how do we use content to go from closing deals, smashing targets to becoming known across a whole industry?
Jack Kosakowski:
Well, that’s no brainer, right? I mean I always say that there’s two types of sales people, right? There’s short term, which 80% of people in sales are short term. They’ll never make it. And then there’s long term. If you’re a 20% in the long term, what’s your goal? If you’re 27 years old, you’re 30 years old and you’re really good at selling, that’s great, but I’ll tell you right now, I’m 36 years old and I’m running the company now, but I’m still heavily involved in the sales part. I don’t want to carry a bag when I’m 45 and I’ve got kids that I’ve got to go to their soccer game, right? Like I don’t want a VP manager breathing down my neck going, “Jack, are you going to hit quota this month?” Right? “Are you going to hit quota this quarter?”
“You have to think about the long term, what do you want to be? Do you want to be begging for business the rest of your life? Do you want to have somebody breathing down your throat, do you want to be accountable to a number or do you want to build something over time where people actually come to you and they pay you a lot of money to tell them what to do? And that’s the difference.” – Jack Kosakowski · [30:07]
Jack Kosakowski:
So, you think about the long term is what do you want to be? Do you want to be begging for business the rest of your life? And do you want to have somebody breathing down your throat, do you want to be accountable to a number or do you want to think about how you can get … You can build something over time where people actually come to you and they pay you a lot of money to tell them what to do? And that’s the difference. What’s the long term strategy?
Jack Kosakowski
The long term strategy is that you become either the expert consultant, you become the expert director, you become an expert VP, all those different things, whether it’s internal or external, they come down to one thing and one thing only is who knows that you’re the expert? How many people know that you’re the expert? And the more people that know and the better the people they know, the dollars attached to that just gets bigger, right?
“If you’re a long term sales person, especially in the same industry, get moving because at the end of the day, in 10 years, when you scale your connections, you scale your visibility, you scale your value, you scale that over a 10-year period, that’s where you become the one that everybody wants to do business with.” – Jack Kosakowski · [31:03]
Jack Kosakowski:
So, are you short term or are you long term? If you’re a long term sales person, especially in the same industry, get moving because at the end of the day in 10 years, when you scale your connections, you scale your visibility, you scale your value, you scale that over a 10-year period, that’s where you become the one that everybody wants to do business with.
How Much of Building a Personal Brand Comes Down to Perception and Credibility? · [31:30]
Will Barron:
So, two things on this. One, I’ll ask you separately because to stop any kind of confounding myths between the two of them, but one, how much of this comes down to just perception of skill, perception of audience size, perception of [inaudible 00:31:42]. I’ll use the example of this magazine. I put most of this magazine together myself. I mean there’s 2,500 people on the waitlist to get a copy, and they’ve kind of paid the shipping and the printing fees already. We’re getting that many printed. It’s going to go out to the people in the sales school, all this kind stuff. Twenty years ago, clearly it makes … You required a team to build a magazine like this. Now with me and two freelancers, we put it all together within the course of the past six weeks or so.
Will Barron:
So, the perception of this is that it’s far higher quality and it’s far more production value than the actual reality of it. It was actually pretty simple and a fun project to put together. So how much of all this, especially in the long term of it, is perception and your dollar hour hourly rate is based on perception, versus the cold hard truth that you are the number one guru in the space?
Jack Kosakowski:
I mean, I don’t know. You have to ask that for yourself, right? I mean, I know that there’s very few people in this world that I would pay big money to go see, or to hear, or to learn from, or to pay for their course or to pay for that. So, I mean, I always tell people, take a step back and think about who you spend your money with when it comes to learning or if you’re a CEO, who do you spend your money with when it comes to mentoring or business advice? There’s so many CEOs. I don’t think a lot of people realise is how many CEOs, especially at bigger companies, like they get to a point where they’re like, we’re stuck, right? We’ve got either cultural issues, we’ve got sales revenue issues. We’re trying to … We’re stuck in some capacity. We’re going to go out and hire somebody for $25,000 for the next three months to just get on the phone with us, to come into our office a couple times and tell us how to fix something. That’s who I want to be, right?
Will Barron:
Of course, yeah.
“Do your research. People that you follow don’t necessarily mean that they’re credible because they have a big audience.” – Jack Kosakowski · [33:32]
Jack Kosakowski:
That’s who I want to be but how do we know that those people are credible? Do your research. People that you follow don’t necessarily mean that they’re credible because they have a big audience or this or that. I mean that comes down to being smart and really actually looking into the people that you’re consuming their content. I think people have to be really careful about this new economy that we have with personal branding and stuff. You do have to do your research. You have to figure out, okay, what have these people done? What companies have they built? What have they been a part of?
“Credibility sometimes doesn’t mean that somebody’s done what they actually teach. The best coaches in the NFL were never the best players, just plain and simple. But there’s educators and there’s people that are really good at educating about something.” – Jack Kosakowski · [34:05]
Jack Kosakowski:
That stuff’s important, but at the same time, it comes down to one thing and one thing only. Credibility sometimes doesn’t mean that somebody’s done what they actually teach. The best coaches in the NFL were never the best players, just plain and simple, but there’s educators and there’s people that are really good at educating about something and teaching and training that actually probably haven’t done it themselves. Now. I’m not a big fan of those people, but at the end of the day, if you learn from them and they can help you scale your business or they can help you personally and professionally, then they’re credible, right? You’re the one that decides that.
Will Barron:
I appreciate that. That was a very balanced opinion because I don’t think we’ve got to the point in, as you described, the digital economy where there’s no review or there might be, I don’t know. I don’t think there is. There’s certainly no review site for salespeople. I think LinkedIn eventually will do this with a referral system or a way of kind of, again, well, I worked with this individual and I give them five stars out five for their cadence and their support and everything else after the fact of the sale or whatever it is. I mean, that’s going for salespeople, but for when we get to the next level of being a consultant or a speaker or whatever it is, I mean, well, I face it every day with people kind of bullshitting them or trying to bullshit themselves onto the show and it was difficult at first. Now, it’s almost a gut feeling that you know when something’s not quite right.
Jack’s Process for Measuring a Person’s Online Credibility · [35:30]
Will Barron:
And then one of the things I look at and this drags us back to the kind of middle of the show, I’m going to wrap up with this, Jack, of engagements. One of the things I look at and tells me if someone’s an expert or not typically is not how big their audience is on Facebook, because you can buy 1000 likes even like legitimately or 100,000 likes pretty legitimately, pretty fast and pretty cheaply. It’s how many people are commenting on those posts, how many people are actually asking interesting questions and then the quality of the people that are asking the questions. If they’re all 14 year olds who are trying to kind of suss how they can quit school and start some kind of job from home or some nonsense like that, clearly that person is targeting a specific audience that doesn’t align with me.
Will Barron:
If I go on Jack’s profile and there’s a bunch of CEOs of companies that I deal with, because I know you kind of work with a lot of companies I do as well in the sales space, sales enablement space, I see these individuals, VPs of marketing, VPs of sales commenting, I go, oh, Jack’s obviously onto something here. So, if we had to measure some of this because we’ve got an asshole sales manager, who’s saying, “Well, you can’t just … I want you to just piss and get on the phone because I can report that up the food chain,” is engagement of posts and then you’d be able to say, “Well, 25 CEOs from our space have commented on my content this week alone,” is that a reasonable kind of metric to measure or is there a better metric to measure if it’s going to take six months before kind of conversations get going into the business side of things?
Jack Kosakowski:
No, I don’t think, not for a salesperson because a salesperson is only dealing with a , limited amount of accounts, right? So, if you’re looking for a credible source from a marketing perspective or like a credible source from a sales perspective and like you’re going to go buy somebody’s training or you’re going to go hire a coach, I mean, engagement might play into that, but what I would is like I look at recommendations. So like if I go to somebody’s LinkedIn profile, it’s usually a tall tales’ sign that they’re either behind the times because they have no recommendations or they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, then I’m probably not going to deal with somebody that’s … Maybe unless it’s like something different at a company where they’re trying to scale and this person’s just a behind the scenes expert, because there’s a lot of those, right? Don’t get me wrong, just because you don’t have social presence doesn’t mean you’re not an expert.
Jack Kosakowski:
There’s a lot of experts that are not on social because they’re so busy being an expert, right? But I’m saying if you’re looking at it from a straight social standpoint is look at the recommendations, like what are the quality of the people that are giving them your recommendations? Like I have recommendations from top executives at Salesforce, top executives from Slack, all these different companies, like these are credible companies and I feel that I’ve worked with some credible people, but at the end of the day, it depends on your industry. If you’re in financial, I mean, if I was going to somebody’s LinkedIn profile, I’d want to see that they’ve got other financial firms of credible titles and so forth that are leaving them recommendations.
Jack Kosakowski:
That’s why I think recommendations are actually really, really the most underrated thing on LinkedIn where people don’t take them as serious as they are. I can’t tell you how many people that have said, “Hey, you won this deal, Jack, because you weren’t the one that gave us a list of names in an email and said, hey, go use these as a reference. You said, go to my LinkedIn profile and there’s about 33 people on there that are CEOs at top companies or VPs and you can reach out, every one of them has given me permission to tell you that you could reach out to them,” and they go, “Okay.” And nine out of 10 times, they never actually reach out to anybody, right? So, start to use that digital reputation and start to use that when you’re looking out for people as well.
Will Barron:
It’s a currency, isn’t it? Because if someone is being reached out to all the time, they’ve probably given you a little bit of cash [inaudible 00:39:13] and then you’ve spent it at that point because an executive at Salesforce doesn’t want to be pestered every day giving you referrals. One or two, great, they want to kind of pass on the goodwill, but perhaps a way to think about it as a currency and one thing on this, and I’m going to call out the audience to give some referrals if you enjoy The Salesman Podcast audience and same with Jack, if you appreciate his kind of commentary and content on this, go to Jack’s profile as well.
Where and How to Get Sales Recommendations · [39:50]
Will Barron:
I’ll link to both of them in the show notes of this podcast over at salesschool.org … Jesus Christ, I’ve got salesschool.org so drilled into my head at the moment. Over at salesman.org. I’ve literally just been doing a tonne of work on it. So it’s kind of top of mind, but without spamming my own audience with adverts mid-show. Do you ask these individuals, we’ll wrap up with this, Jack, do you ask these individuals for recommendations or do you find that they just naturally occur?
“I see people that get recommendations from their coworkers and I’m like, “Give me a freaking break. Use it for what it is. Go to your best customers with the best titles, get recommendations from people that actually matter and that you actually aren’t just begging them for something that you don’t deserve.” If you’ve got no recommendations, that should be a red flag for you that you need to really work hard on building the right customer base.” – Jack Kosakowski · [40:10]
Jack Kosakowski:
So, I’m really selective of who I want a recommendation from. I see people that put recommendations just from their coworkers and stuff, like give me a freaking break, right? Use it for what it is. Go to your best customers with the best titles and get recommendations from people that actually matter and that you actually aren’t just begging them for something that you don’t deserve.
Will Barron:
Yep.
Jack Kosakowski:
If you’ve got no recommendations, that should be a red flag for you that I need to really work hard on building the right customer base. Maybe if you go, well, shoot, the people we’re doing business with that I’ve been selling to, I don’t want to put them on there. Perfect. Then use that as a way to say, okay, I need to go close this business because I want to have the strongest recommendations and let me tell you, if you use it correctly, it works. A lot of salespeople, A, don’t even talk about it, they do have it. I’ve noticed that. But for most people, executives especially, they don’t just recommend anybody. You can ask for recommendations all day long and they’re not going to put their name on you if you don’t deserve it. So don’t waste your time. And I get this with people that I don’t even know on social, like ask for a recommendation. Give me a freaking break, right? I’m just like laughing.
Will Barron:
Yeah.
Jack Kosakowski:
But write down all the credible people that you’ve done business with and what I say is, if you can reciprocate first for me, I’ll go write them a recommendation. If it’s a customer on mine, like, a couple CEOs that I work with, I love them to death and they’re doing amazing work. Now, I went with no intentions of them writing it back. Maybe in the back of my mind, I said, well, hopefully they would write one for me someday, but I went and I just put my heart and soul into making them look good, and I didn’t ask them for one. And all of a sudden, a couple weeks later, I get these great recommendations. So I think you’ve got to think about maybe giving that recommendation first is usually the best strategy.
Jack Kosakowski:
And then the second strategy is I usually pick up the phone and call somebody. I’m not going to send it online to say, … I say, “Hey, you know what? I would love to get your word on my work. Like it would mean a lot to me.” And I personalise that on a phone call because I do take those recommendations pretty seriously, and I think everybody should and be smart about how you ask for those because you could look like an idiot if you’re begging for those.
Jack’s Advise to His Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [42:37]
Will Barron:
Love it. I love it. We’ve never covered recommendations on LinkedIn on the show before, so I appreciate that, Jack. And I’ve got one final question that I’ve asked you about 47 times now on the show and I’m going to ask you it again, that is, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what would be the one piece of advice you’d give him that has nothing to do with social selling that would help him become better at sales?
Jack Kosakowski:
If I had to do it right now, if I had to go back and one thing, I think I would really focus more on learning. In the beginning of my sales career, I was so worried about becoming a good salesperson and becoming good at selling that I think I got in my own way of actually doing what I think helps salespeople become the best salespeople, which is learning the industry and learning about the buyer better than everybody else. I spent way too much time trying to be good at sales and way less time just trying to be good at the industry and to know enough and have enough education that the selling part would come naturally through the information.
Will Barron:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That makes total sense.
Jack Kosakowski:
[inaudible 00:43:30]
Will Barron:
Yeah, love it. And that’s the whole premise of everything I’m doing with the sales school moving forward and The Salesman Podcast of if you are a great business person, you’ve got a slight bit of entrepreneurial flare, you can see problems and you can solve problems, you’re the thing that someone’s buying. There’s the product and the solution on the far side of it, which needs to be sold. There needs to be a process for it. There needs to be reporting, needs to be all this stuff going on, but if someone likes you and there’s you and a competitor and they’re probably somewhat similar, you can bullshit the features one way or the other, if they buy into you and the fact that you are going to help them, you’re going to support them, you’ve won the deal, right? Is it any more complex than that?
“For most salespeople, it’s not that they don’t know how to ask the right questions, it’s not that they don’t know how to sell, it’s the fact that they don’t know the information or the industry or the buyer well enough to have a conversation that drives them to take action. And what I mean by that is that there’s so many tools out there that I could buy. The difference between what I buy and don’t buy is not the tool. It’s the information that the sales rep gives to me around the tool that makes me have a vision to say, “oh, I have to have this.”” – Jack Kosakowski · [44:20]
Jack Kosakowski:
So, I disagree with that. I think likability is a huge factor in the sale, but what I do believe is that I believe that when you get … And I can tell this from personal experience and from being on lots of sales calls with clients, the number one thing is information. Most salespeople don’t … It’s not that they don’t know how to ask you the right questions, it’s not that they don’t know how to sell, it’s the fact that they don’t know the information or the industry or the buyer well enough to have a conversation that drives them to take action. And what I mean by that is that I can … There’s so many tools out there that I could buy. The difference between what I buy and don’t buy is not the tool. It’s the information that the sales rep gives to me around the tool that makes me have a vision to say, oh, I have to have this. And they have to know your business and they have to know your industry so well that they don’t sound like a salesperson and they don’t sell … It doesn’t sound like a tool. It sounds like a vision.
Jack Kosakowski:
Most of sales people don’t understand the information well enough to give you a vision and why is that? It’s because they’re not educated enough. They’re not at that level of wisdom when it comes to your industry that will get a CEO or a VP that lives in this stuff and hears sales pitches all day long. You have to be the purveyor of information. You have to be able to paint a picture and give a vision for what this is going to do for the company, and if you don’t know the information, you don’t have the wisdom, you can’t do that. It’s absolutely impossible to do that.
Jack Kosakowski:
And that’s why really good salespeople, when I get on a call, I go, oh, this person’s really good, right? Because they’re not talking about the product. They’re not talking about themselves, they’re not selling, they’re painting a picture, they’re painting a vision and I’m getting excited. And when I start to get excited, that’s when I know that I’ve got a good salesperson because salespeople that can paint that vision, they can spark something inside of you as a buyer that you’re like, Ugh, guess I want it like, okay, let’s move forward.
Parting Thoughts · [46:30]
Will Barron:
Well, that’s the episode for next time of what makes up vision, whether it’s probably all of the above of the ability to tell stories, the ability to copyright effectively, the ability to have kind of empathetic conversations, the ability to know your industry, that’s the conversation we’ll have next time around. I’ll make a note of it now before we wrap up, Jack. But with that, mate, tell us a little bit about skillslab.io. Tell us a little bit about Creation Agency and then is … I don’t know if you want to share it just yet. You’ve got ebook coming out. We’ll promote it on the show kind of later on, but do you want to mention that as well?
Jack Kosakowski:
Sure, yeah. So, Creation Agency is actually the agency behind everything that we do. So we run marketing as a service for our clients, but what skillslab.io is, is kind of like … Jason Sibley and I started it, who’s the co-founder of Creation Agency and we just wanted to start to give back to people and actually give actionable ways to do stuff, and we wanted to do it for free. We’ve invested a lot of time and money into it and what we want is we just want people … We want sales and marketing people to start to get innovative ways to do old things, and that’s what we do. So you can go on there. It’s free content, free eBooks, guides, free webinars. We have one webinar a week, which is, I like to call them more like online trainings with really, really intelligent people that are doing really, really cool things. They’re usually CEOs in different industries talking about tools, trends, things like that.
Jack Kosakowski:
So check it out. It’s awesome, in my opinion, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll tell you right now, if you’re struggling on LinkedIn or you’re trying to get some new, innovative ways to do something, I’m a huge fan of the modelling strategy with Tony Robbins. So if you want to learn how to do something, rather than take their course, why not just watch what they’re doing, right? Now, not to say don’t take courses, but if you want to get started right away, you want to learn something, model. Watch what I do. I’m very effective with LinkedIn. This has become my passion and if you have questions, reach out to me. I’d love to be able to help. I’m here to help anybody try to figure this thing out.
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well, I’ll link to all that in the show notes to this episode over at salesman.org, kind of everything else we talked about in the show, because we’ve covered a lot of ground with this one, Jack. And with that mate, I want to thank you for your time, your expertise as always, and for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.
Jack Kosakowski:
Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me.
