Tom Lavery is the CEO and founder of Jiminny.com, a platform that helps sales teams grow.
In this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Tom shares the step-by-step process to get better at B2B sales by learning from the individuals on your team that are already crushing it.
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Transcript
Will Barron:
Coming up on today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast.
Tom:
Most people in the sales workforce are millennials now, and how they behave and act is very different. So I think historically it’s very much like I’ve got to deliver my own number, and like I’m going to be enclosed and I’m going to do my own thing and not share. I think a lot of companies that I see every day are much more open and collaborative now.
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 to click Subscribe. And with that, let’s meet today’s guest.
Tom:
Hi, I’m Tom. I’m the CEO and founder of Jiminny. You can find us at jiminny.com, that’s Jiminny with two N’s, or you can find us on LinkedIn.
Will Barron:
This episode of the show with Tom, we’re diving into how you can learn from your peers, how you can learn from individuals internally within your organisation. If someone is really crushing it, how you can have some of that magic rub off on you. So let’s jump right into the conversation.
Sales Within Organisations is Changing from a Competing Environment to a Learning and Collaborative Environment · [01:01]
Will Barron:
We’re in sales, right? Are we competing with our sales team? Are we trying to be top of the leaderboard? Are we trying to smash everyone internally, or are these individuals a good resource to learn from and should we be working together to, I guess the rising tide raises all boats kind of metaphor. Is that what we should be looking at?
“Most people in the sales workforce are millennials now and how they behave and act is very different. So I think historically it’s very much like I’ve got to deliver my own number, and like I’m going to be enclosed and I’m going to do my own thing and not share. But I think a lot of companies that I see every day are much more open and collaborative now, and there’s a real thirst to learn.” – Tom Lavery · [01:20]
Tom:
Yeah. I think things have changed, so most people in the sales workforce and millennials now and how they behave and act is very different. So I think historically it’s very much like I’ve got to deliver my own number, and like I’m going to be enclosed and I’m going to do my own thing and not share. But I think a lot of companies that I see every day are much more open and collaborative now, and there’s a real thirst to learn. If someone’s crushing it, then why don’t I want to understand what they’re doing and take some of that information? So I think that in a lot of SaaS and tech companies, that’s changing very quickly. I don’t know about the rest of the B2B space because I think that’s what I’m exposed to a lot, but yeah, for me, I think there’s definitely a shift happening. I think that’s the type of salesperson that exists today that wants to learn that way.
How to Emulate and Learn from the High-Achieving Salespeople · [02:10]
Will Barron:
Good. It would’ve been an, an awkward and short conversation if that wasn’t the answer, Tom. So with that, mate, how do we know who we should be listening to, trying to get information from? And we’ll come on to how we do that and how we ask good questions internally in a second, but how do we know who we should be aspiring to take on some of the traits of, perhaps? Is it just the person who’s smashing the target, or are there other traits of an individual that we should be looking out for of essentially, this is the person that we want to get under the wing of if we’re perhaps new to sales or in the middle of the pack?
Tom:
Yeah, I think these are really interesting questions. So I think when you’ve got it sometimes, the best person you might get advice from or might coach you in the best way when you’re talking about everyone doing peer-to-peer coaching, is not necessarily the best salesperson. Because you see that time and time again. But I think there’s obviously things you want to look at. Everyone has their own sales process and every business is so different. So I think you want to start by narrowing it down to one part of the sales process and kind of learning in that way. So I’ll then give a really simple example, but if it’s discovery and you really want to improve on that, then you want to find out who’s the best at discovery in that business and hone in on. Because everyone is better and has different strengths in each part of the sales process, so I think you start by understanding which part of the sales process you want to be better at and then honing in on that person who does that part of the sales process really well in your company.
Practical Ways to Check Gaps in Your Sales Process and Start Improving Yourself · [03:30]
Will Barron:
How do we know what part of the sales process we should be better at? And I mean that as in a super basic question in that clearly, if we get better the discovery or even just the qualification or even just the pure prospecting, it might raise our funnel. But if we suck at the closing end of it, it makes no difference, right? Is there a best bang for buck place to start improving ourselves if we’re kind of neutral across the board?
Tom:
I think you’ll know very quickly in sales, if you’re not good at one part of it, right? Because it would be glaringly obvious in your results, whether you’re doing an SDR role or an AE role in terms of that. But I think for me, the hardest part is creating the opportunity. Whether you are turning a conversation on a cold call into a meeting, or you’ve got a demo or a pitch and you’re actually turning that into an opportunity, they’re the parts that generally are the hardest to do because you’re building that early part of the relationship. So nine times out of ten, you’re going to want to become excellent at that first, otherwise you can’t do the upper bits anyway. Because you know you’re not going to be having enough price negotiation calls or proposal meetings if you can’t do that first bit really well. So if I talked to myself 10 years ago, I’d say always focus on that bit first, because then the rest will come over time. You know?
Tracking Sales Processes is the First Step Towards Getting Better at Sales · [04:48]
Will Barron:
The reason I ask this is, and this is something I struggled with in medical device sales in that the last company I worked for didn’t have a CRM. So I didn’t really have numbers on prospecting. I wasn’t making so many calls a day. That seems to be a super easy thing to track, especially if you’re SDR, BDR, an individual like that. You know whether you suck or not, because someone else is doing more calls than you and closing more business, and you are doing less calls and closing less business. So there statistics we can look at. But just to keep the conversation a bit broader here, is the answer to the problem that we should be tracking things? Is that something that should be the baseline for all selling?
Tom:
Yeah, I think with most businesses should be surprised how far they get before they start tracking stuff like you say. I’ve seen companies at 10 million plus in revenue and they’re not doing what you would think are some of the basics, and they’re maybe not doing them because they’ve just survived and grown without doing it. So unless the pain is there to do it, you don’t end up doing it as early as you might think. But no, I think, sorry, I forgot what that was. [crosstalk 00:05:57]
Will Barron:
Is the baseline for all of this to do tracking? And just for context, the last company I worked for turned over billions in revenue and it was privately held. It wasn’t like a public organisation, which may change some of this, that they want more accountability and things like that. So on one side it was a blessing, because every Friday I went to my local hospital, just chilled, had a cup of tea and won a lot of business off them through relationships as opposed to cold calling or anything like that. But for a general rule, do we need to be tracking things to be able to even then compare, to be able to get coaching? What I’m trying to get at is, is that the starting point for all of this?
Tom:
Yeah. I think there’s some basics there, absolutely. In any sort of thing, you’ve got to know what types of calls you’re doing in your sales process. Then just very basic, how am I converting at each stage? Because if you don’t have an idea of that, even personally yourself, one, you’re not accountable to anything and everyone needs a target. But you want to be able to understand, if I need to convert this many meetings into opportunities, what is that percentage? And am I making that percentage incrementally better? So yeah, I’d say without a doubt, if you are in a business and you’re not doing that, that’s something that you’d want to be able to see or push your managers to see, to help you understand where you can improve. For sure.
Why The Buddy System is so Effective in Sales · [07:15]
Will Barron:
Good. The reason I drilled down on that is because clearly it’s very easy for us to skive, avoid all this stuff. And as long as we hit the sales target, we’re fine, right? Perhaps we shy away from accountability when it can actually help us over the long run. So with that, Tom, perhaps we’ve got a number of calls, number of conversions into meetings, and that’s the thing we want to improve. And Samantha, who sits opposite us, crushes it on the phone and she’s doing something, but we’re not sure what she’s doing. How do we go about starting to uncover this with her? Rather than sneakily listening into her phone calls and standing behind her desk when she’s on the phone, and we can talk about tools that can help with this in a second. But how do we even perhaps approach Samantha and just say, “Nothing weird here, but I want to sit next to you and learn from you”?
Tom:
Yeah. I think it depends on the organisation. I think some things that I’ve implemented historically or seen work well amongst teams, whether it’s happened organically or the manager instigates it, it’s like the buddy up. To have a partner that you work with, you might spend more time with them. You might do double up on sales calls, whether you’re listening or actually doing them together. Or you might not be doing an inside sales, you might be doing a face-to-face. You might go out on meetings together. And that kind of buddy system can work really well, especially in smaller teams as they’re growing. And then you can mix it up and get exposure to different people’s skill sets and the way that people approach things differently. So that’s one thing that I would encourage, and that can organically happen for sure. [crosstalk 00:08:42]
How to Learn from High-achieving Salespeople when Most of Them Thrive on Experience and Instincts · [09:03]
Will Barron:
Good. And that’s been my experience in different roles I’ve had. I’ve always had a more senior rep, and then somehow I was the senior rep helping trainees at the last organisation I worked for. And there was a little team around us, and I feel sales is moving more towards that with, we have a logistics person, we have a product specialist. And I was, without any training whatsoever, trying to manage them all and keep everyone on track. So that’s probably a conversation for another time, Tom.
Will Barron:
But with that, we’re getting under someone’s wing, we’re chatting to Samantha. She’s cool, she’s happy to help us out, but it is my experience that most of the top salespeople don’t really know what they’re doing which works well. It’s not like they have X, Y, Z process. It’s not like they can say, “Well, I do these four things on a phone call. I don’t talk about price until three and a half minutes into the call. I consciously handle these two objections up front.” It’s all kind of repetition, and it’s all going from their guts, and they do well on the back of that. Clearly we want to reverse-engineer some of this out with them, so how would we go about doing that?
“When you start your sales career, you’ve got to create your own way and your own methodology. You take the best bits of other people that you learn from over time.” – Tom · [09:46]
Tom:
Yeah, I think first of all, when you start your sales career, you’ve got to create your own way and your own methodology. You take the best bits of other people that you learn from over time. So I think there’s no cookie cutter, “Oh, I’m just going to copy this way.” And that’s why there’s no silver bullet to B2B sales. Everyone’s been trying to solve the same problem for a long time.
Tom:
But I think in all honesty, you’ve got to have your own way and you’ve got to be creative in that. I think that the modern sales person sells really well when they flip-flop between product and solution selling, because you have to talk about both things and you have to have it in context. So how you learn to do that, whether you are high energy, high octane on the call and that’s what works for you, or whether you’re a really good listener and you really understand the needs and you dig deep on questions. Because not everyone, you can do some of it and the balance, but some people will just be passionate and energetic and that will get them really far. And other people will just be much more attentive and caring in that conversation. And it doesn’t mean that either’s right or wrong, it just means that that’s their style and they take different elements of people that they work with and mould that over time.
Will Barron:
It’s good that you brought this up, because I’ll mention what we’re doing with the Sales School, but I don’t want to dwell on it because I want a solution that everyone can use, hopefully on the back of this. But one thing that we are doing is personality testing, which then links to a bunch of sales traits. The whole point of it is it gives you content on what you are naturally good at, what you probably suck at, some workshops within the sales school that hopefully fill in some of the gaps on this. So if you are introverted, it will share content on how to kind of train your assertiveness and things like that. So that you can not necessarily bounce yourself out, but you know what you’re good at and what you suck at.
Tom Explains Why Sales Success is Built on Insights and Discovery · [12:05]
Will Barron:
For me, my personality type is the debater, which is great for the podcast. I always take the opposite point of view. I will always be the devil advocate. The downside of that is, especially with a customer, I will perhaps not take into account the thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And I will argue with someone when I know I’m right, because logic is the only thing that matters. So the personality testing is useful, and there’s online Myers-Briggs testing, which you can give you some insights on this. But it seems like the perfect coach, the perfect person’s helpers would be a similar personality type. Am I overthinking, go of this? Do we need to go into that kind of detail when we’re trying to learn from someone, or do we just need someone to sit us down and say, “Make more calls, stop doing stupid stuff,” and that’s enough to hit targets?
Tom:
No, I don’t think it’s, it’s overthinking it at all. I’m going back like 10 years ago now when we grew our last business and we did something very similar to the Myers-Briggs. It’s called like Insights, and you would train people. It very much simplifies it into a waggon wheel of colour. Are you yellow, which is high energy? Are you red, which is very direct? Blue is detailed. So even in the recruitment process and bringing people into your team, two or three interviews, a face-to-face, a coffee, you don’t really know someone yet. So you’ve got to get as much insight and gain as much as you can.
“Not everyone has that self-awareness. So being able to hold a mirror up to a salesperson, and show them what they’re good at and what they’re not good at or how they need to improve is probably one of the most valuable things you can do.” – Tom · [13:00]
Tom:
So understanding that person, not everyone has that self-awareness. So being able to hold a mirror up to a salesperson, and show them what they’re good at and what they’re not good at or how they need to improve is probably one of the most valuable things you can do in those early days. So yeah, I’m all for people understanding, like my Insight work would always say I could be a bull in a China shop about stuff. And they’d see those things with me, because he’s driven and pushes, don’t get in his way because he’s busy. Little things like that. You learn your own behaviours, and you can sort of deal with those bad behaviour as well as improving in the other areas.
How to Develop Self-awareness and Self-insight · [13:38]
Will Barron:
Is there any testing you’ve done in the past, clearly as leadership or what you’re doing now, that I can put in the show notes to kind of balance off that I’m talking about own product. Is there anything that you’d recommend on that front for developing that kind of self-insight?
Tom:
Yeah. I mean, I think the company is called that, Insights. You can look them up. Basically, someone within the organisation can become a qualified Insights trainer, then you can run them internally yourself. But they’re really simple, really effective ways. Once you run, them they cost like 50 quid to run one at a time. But yeah, we use them all from recruitment to onboarding, through to coaching in the sales process. And then we’d actually take it into the sales pitch, and then we would talk about the prospective client and the opportunity as their insight and their profile. So I would be yellow and red and I’d be very high energy, very direct. And I might be selling to someone in HR who’s very blue and green yeah, who’s very detailed and caring. Now, they’re two different things that are going to meet, right?
Tom:
It doesn’t mean that someone in HR, because they’re caring, doesn’t get excited by someone with high energy. But it’s just about what listening to them. There’s going to be points where if you just steamroll them with your personality, you’re going to fail. You’re going to crash. And I’m not trying to get too deep of it, but there is an element of understanding yourself and then understanding what your prospect’s personality is like. And it’s like when you go up the food chain as well, and it’s like, all right, I’m going to bring in another stakeholder and we want to sell to them.
Tom:
I know it sounds obvious. Be like, “Okay, so what are they like?” Just ask your prospect. Do they want to see a video, or do they like the detail? Do they want something written down in a doc? Because if we’re going to take this up the food chain and sell that product to them, how do we make it relevant to their world and their personality? I think it all stems from that, really. You’re thinking about people all the time because selling is talking to people, right? So there’s no better way to do it.
Emotional Intelligence in Sales: Why the Medium is Almost as Important as the Message · [15:30]
Will Barron:
It makes total sense. And this is something I’ve been pondering on for a long time, and I’ve had people on the show to talk about emotional intelligence. And it never really resonated with me. This was some really interesting research, and hopefully we’ve done some half decent episodes on it, but it was a little bit washy-washy. But then once we started talking about personality tests, I started looking into it myself and I love this way you described it of, it put a mirror in front of me and said, “Oh, this is what you do great. This is what you really suck at.”
Will Barron:
And especially as our team grows now, and I’m now selling the Sales School to the C-suite, and we’re probably interacting with similar people behind the scenes. It’s changed the whole game for me of, again, some people call it emotional intelligence. And I like the way you described it of just going, what does this person want? My job is to serve them, right? My job is to add value to them or be a consultant, all these cliche things. But it’s like the medium is almost as important as the message on a lot of these occasions.
“When you’re interacting with someone, especially today when there’s so many different things you can do, does recording a three minute video to that CFO change the whole course of the opportunity, rather than spending four hours yourself writing a document that they’re never going to read? But have you even asked that question? You can spend your own time being effective.” – Tom · [16:35]
Tom:
Yeah, exactly. When you’re interacting with someone, especially today when there’s so many different things you can do, does recording a three minute video to that CFO change the whole course of the opportunity, rather than spending four hours yourself writing a document that they’re never going to read? But have you even ask that question? You can spend your own time being effective, but I think as you mature and you learn as an artist, as a salesperson, as a person, you start to know your gaps and then you can spend less time on the things you’re not good at and more time on the things you’re good at, because you understand how good you are at that part of the sales process or how you operate.
Peer-to-peer Coaching at Jiminny · [17:15]
Will Barron:
Cool. Well, let’s pull it back to peer-to-peer coaching for a second. So I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, in that there’s some kind of metric that we can compare ourselves to, compare and contrast and see that we clearly suck at this. Samantha is killing it at X, Y, Z, we’re rubbish at this side. So we’ve identified perhaps a person within the team, just to make things simpler, that can potentially help us. We know that they want to help us. We’ve engaged with them, Samantha’s awesome, she wants to give us a kind of helping hand. We’re new to the company, she’s been here 27 years. She knows the products and all that inside out, so she can give us a bunch of insights that perhaps it would be more difficult to get if she didn’t know the industry and all that kind of stuff as specifically as she does.
Will Barron:
We’ve sat on a rock for two weeks and not talked and done a water fast, or we’ve done a personality test, and we know ourselves inside out so perhaps we can add this layer to it as well. What do we need to get from Samantha? Or what questions do we need to ask her, or how do we need to engage with an individual to learn from them? Because a lot of salespeople might be great salespeople, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a great teacher, right?
Tom:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a certain level of cohesion you need as a team, right? So you all want to operate, you want to talk, you want to communicate the best you can. But there’s technologies out there now where you don’t need to bother. Like, say there’s a business, and there’s SMB and there’s mid-market and there’s enterprise. And one day you want to learn to be an enterprise salesman. You might not be in the same room, you might not be in the same office, you might not even be in the same geo. But you could maybe listen to their recordings and stuff like that, so you don’t have to actually-
Will Barron:
Share with us, and promote the product as much as you want, but share what what Jiminny does on that front, and how it documents things so that we perhaps don’t need to just ask Samantha all these questions. We can perhaps go back at what’s worked in the past and dive into that side of things.
Tom:
Yeah, exactly. So what we do is we’re a communications platform that lets you record, transcribe and analyse every call. So whether it’s from our dialer, if you’re making it from your mobile or from a video conference. And then when you’ve got all that data as a business, you can then decide how you want to structure it, what you want to do with it. Whether you’re a small organisation selling your product for the very first time and pivoting and learning how to take it to market, or you’re a hundred-man sales team and you’re trying to do X, Y, Z. So I think having that data and insight helps you to then onboard and ramp, and that that’s a critical part anyway, when you’re first coming into that business.
“I think onboarding is always seen as a two-week thing, and you see tools out there. It’s not, it’s a three-month thing. I’ve never met a salesperson in B2B that ramps up in like two weeks, so why is onboarding two weeks?” – Tom · [19:54]
Tom:
Because I think onboarding is always seen as a two-week thing, and you see tools out there. It’s not, it’s a three-month thing. I’ve never met a salesperson in B2B that ramps up in like two weeks, so why is onboarding two weeks? Everyone’s onboarding plan is like two weeks long, but they don’t start delivering in two weeks. So I understand it’s time and effort, but it’s got to be consistent with kind of making sure that in that first three to six months, depending on the organisation, that you’re constantly learning your craft in that new business. Because it’s like a new language, right? It’s like I speak English, now I’m going to speak Spanish, I’m going to go sell this product.
The Insights we Should be Looking Out for When Trying to Learn from the Best Salespeople · [20:30]
Will Barron:
So if we narrow this down to phone calls, and we’ll wrap up with this, Tom. What insights specifically from phone calls should we be looking out for? There seems like a couple of obvious ones of amount of time that we’re speaking versus the amount of time that they’re speaking, perhaps length of call. I don’t know, you could probably make up a million of them and only four of them will be actually relevant for high performers versus everyone else. But if we have to narrow it down to a phone call, perhaps not necessarily a cold call, but a somewhat of a warm call where we’re trying to book a meeting or something like that, what insights should we be looking out for in Samantha’s calls that we can perhaps then start to replicate ourselves?
“There’s no shortcut to knowledge. So you’ve got to put time and energy in. Someone doesn’t get amazing at taking free kicks in soccer by not taking like 50 a day after training every day when they’re growing up as a kid.” – Tom · [21:47]
Tom:
Yeah. I think that you just talked about some of the basics, right? Understanding the length of the call, the talk time, the talk time analysis, how you structure the call, how does it start? What’s the middle, what’s the end? Because you’ve got to structure a successful call, whether it’s a two minute cold call or a 50 minute demo, it’s got to have structure to it. And then how you pivot during the call is just a skill that you kind of have over time. I think the thing is every B2B call is very subjective. So you’ve done it before, call number three to call number five to call number eight that you do out of ten can take a very different journey. And there’s no shortcut to knowledge, right? So you’ve got to put time and energy in. Someone doesn’t get amazing at taking free kicks in soccer by not taking like 50 a day after training every day when they’re growing up as a kid.
Tom:
And it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to get good at sales.” Well, you’ve got to practise. It’s the same thing. It’s time, it’s effort and it’s energy. And I would sound like a bit of a wishy-washy answer, but it’s not. It’s just if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to work hard at it, and I think comes back to that. How easy do you make it for your team to become better at what they do? Is there an opportunity for them to do that as extensively as they want? And yeah, I think that it comes back to that really well.
Trends to Look Out for when Learning from the Top Salespeople · [22:40]
Will Barron:
First off, I’m disappointed you used the word soccer and not football. Forget the US audience. They know what’s up, they know who invented the sports. But with that, I guess final thing, we’ll wrap up with this. I don’t know if you track all this on the back end, or if you’re kind of running data on it. I know know Jiminny isn’t 20 years old kind of thing, to have mound of data to perhaps look on this. But considering it is subjective, that’s the word you used, Tom. Considering it is subjective, are there any trends in B2B sales of you should talk less than the person that you are calling upon? Is there any trends like this which we can kind of have top of mind, that will leave the audience with one or two practical things to leave the conversation with?
Tom:
Yeah, absolutely. We see from like discovery and qualification calls that it should at least be an equal amount of conversation time. I mean, that’s such a basic, if you are talking more than your prospect on a discovery call, then you’re probably not going to get very far at that point. So that’s one thing that’s really important at that stage. And I think when you’re structuring a call, especially like we see a lot, because we work with a lot of inside sales teams and teams that are selling over the phone. And I’ve done both when I was on enterprise, and inside sales is far harder than enterprise sales. Because you get to do the golden handshake and like you were saying. So I think a lot of the time people see it as enterprise is the big job, but actually selling inside and selling over video is a lot harder, because you’ve got to build relationships in different ways.
Tom:
But I think in the inside sales space, there’s an optimal amount of time that you can engage someone and you can hold the conversation. And to go back to Insights again, it depends on the product because no one size fits all. But you’ve got to learn in your business who you’re selling to, what are your products like, how complex it is and then work out the optimal time that you can talk to them about it without losing them. And there’s that thing that works. So those are the things for me when you’re doing that discovery, is the talk time, and then how you structure that presentation and take it further forward, is through the length of time that you’re actually having that and how you put it through.
Tom’s Advise to His Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [25:10]
Will Barron:
Perfect. And you can use Jiminny to do this, there is other platforms to do this. Clearly we have other people on the show who of touched on a couple of these subjects before, but you could also just sit there, see what time you started the call, see what time you finished and just document whether the call sucked or not. You could probably, if you’re hacky and you’ve got no budget or you want prove some of this and then sell your boss on software to help the team collaborate and all that kind of stuff, there’s probably an element of N-equals-one self experimentation of all this as well. Love it. Tom, with that, mate, I’ve got one final question to ask everyone that comes on the show just to wrap up. And 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 to help him become better at selling?
Tom:
I think when I was young, I was very just focused on me and what I was doing in my organisation and my world. And I think, I don’t want to sound too cheesy, but things like this. So opening your mind to what’s out there, listening to other people, looking at other industries. There’s so many meetups and events and groups. There’s one in London right now, like Sales Confidence and things like that, it’s all based around SaaS. There’s so many things you can do that you couldn’t do 10, 15 years to go to broaden your mind and to learn from other people, and I think that’s the biggest thing you can do. If you just say, “All right, once a week I’m going to spend some time to read this, listen to that, do that.” Like you said, you’ll become better.
Will Barron:
Love it. Well, I’ll link to Jiminny, everything else that we talked about in the show to this episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Tom, thank you for your time and your insights and for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.
Tom:
Cheers, Will. Thanks a lot. Bye.
