Episode Description:
This episode features our special guest Brent Keltner. Brent is the President of Winalaytics and the author of the upcoming book “Revenue Acceleration Playbook”.
Brent and I discuss the power of an authentic customer journey and he explains how important it is to truly and ‘authentically’ understand you buyers problems before offering solutions. He also touches on the importance of understanding the long-term value of each client by stressing forward thinking of how your products and services not only help you buyer now, but in the future as well.
You can pre-order Bren’t book slated to be released in April of 2022:
You can visit Winalytics online here : https://winalytics.com/
The book has a website of its own here: authenticitywins.com
Action you can take right now:
- Envision the perfect sale, with the perfect pitch, the perfect response, and the perfect close. Jot down what this process looked like.
- Think of difficult sales that eventually closed and what tactic helped push it over the edge. Jot down this process.
- Have your top sales performers also jot down a short summary of the next few sales they make.
- This will start to give you an idea of what a playbook might look like. It’s certainly not a finished product my any means, but it will start getting you to think about the steps of success in the sales process, that ultimately leads to customer success.
Episode After-Thoughts
It’s not easy to summarize what success looks like in a sales process. Even people performing at the very bottom will have some successful closes, so what we are really looking for is the magic that differentiates the struggling sales person from the top-performing sales person.
The idea here is to capture the essence of those top performers and share the success of the CUSTOMER not the sales person. The playbook SHOULD NOT talk about counterpoints to sales objections, but instead should focus on HOW the sales person SOLVED a problem for a customer, and how that solution led to CUSTOMER SUCCESS.
Those stories can than be shared like testimonials by the rest of the sales team. In other words “Hey, we just had a client who also had a problem with X. By implementing our solution over the course of just two weeks the company was able to save X by doing X, Y and Z.”
It sometimes feels obvious or sounds silly, but companies that implement building these playbooks genuinely drive revenue and sales much faster than those who do not.
Episode 41 Transcript:
00:00:00 Justin
Can you actually drive revenue growth just by listening to your customer? You might be surprised today’s guest has made a successful business of creating authentic customer journeys. That and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
00:00:26 Justin
Justin Varuzzo here from marketingandservice.com podcast, the podcast designed to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships.
00:00:36 Justin
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00:00:42 Justin
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00:00:45 Justin
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00:00:47 Justin
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00:00:47 Justin
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00:00:49 Justin
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00:00:53 Justin
You can always shoot me an email.
00:00:58 Justin
Let me know what marketing challenges are you having with your business and what would you love to learn more about next?
00:01:05 Justin
Let me know and I will make an episode just for you.
00:01:09 Justin
On today’s show we have a very special guest.
00:01:11 Justin
Brent Keltner Brent is the president of win lyrics.
00:01:15 Justin
Brent believes that you can create an authentic buyer journey.
00:01:18 Justin
By leading with buyer goals and pay offs, window Linux can raise team performance with a dynamic skills development model to capture and socialize top plays for every single buyer interaction.
00:01:31 Justin
Winner Linux helps clients build their best go to market strategy within and across sales, marketing and customer success.
00:01:39 Justin
Brent is also the author of a new book now available for preorder.
00:01:43 Justin
The revenue acceleration playbook and the concept here is pretty simple.
00:01:49 Justin
Listen, listen to your customers.
00:01:51 Justin
We’ve talked about this a lot, so without any further ado, let’s bring Brent onto the show.
00:01:56 Justin
Brent Keltner.
00:01:57 Justin
Thank you for being on the show today.
00:01:59 Justin
I really appreciate it.
00:02:01 Brent
Hey Justin, thanks for having me.
00:02:03 Brent
I’m really looking forward to the conversation.
00:02:05 Justin
Yeah, absolutely.
00:02:05 Justin
So maybe you can give a really quick synopsis of your past business experience that that’s LED you to where you are today.
00:02:13 Brent
Yeah, so I started out life as an academic and then shifted to work with Kaplan.
00:02:18 Brent
Their higher education group leveraging the academic background had about a decade, 12 years of revenue, leadership holes and a series of companies focused on higher education selling into higher education colleges, universities.
00:02:32 Brent
For very quick growth.
00:02:33 Brent
Successes at the end of that I realized.
00:02:36 Brent
There was kind of a method.
00:02:37 Brent
To the madness which I had actually developed as a uh, so I had built a what we now call the authentic buyer journey, which is not leading your sales with a product moving selling process but leading it with always anchoring on what does.
00:02:39 Justin
00:02:54 Brent
How do you make your buyer more successful so?
00:02:56 Justin
Gotcha, so in this in this role in this role at Kaplan and dealing with higher education were you there, were you actually selling or were you building the sales team or both?
00:03:06 Brent
Yeah, so I I was doing both in most of those roles.
00:03:11 Brent
At Kaplan was selling had a team that I was managing at Eduventures I.
00:03:15 Justin
Right?
00:03:18 Brent
We’ve launched a number of benchmarking research programs at colleges universities.
00:03:23 Brent
I would usually sell the first dozen and then I bring my team in behind to go to.
00:03:27 Brent
100 OK and then at.
00:03:30 Brent
Calija link I was the CEO of a small company.
00:03:33 Brent
So I’ve always had a my own sales bogey in the revenue leadership roles that I’ve been in.
00:03:40 Brent
So till the last gap, academics 12 years as a revenue leader saw that I had a method to drive.
00:03:47 Brent
Revenue quicker started about seven years ago when to Linux as a go to market and revenue acceleration consultancy.
00:03:55 Justin
Awesome, So what?
00:03:56 Justin
What is your typical the businesses that you work with?
00:03:59 Justin
What is the typical profile of that business?
00:04:01 Justin
Are they small businesses, large businesses or the educational space?
00:04:02 Brent
Yeah, it’s there really two.
00:04:05 Brent
We started, like many consultants doing.
00:04:08 Brent
Fractional sales leadership.
00:04:11 Brent
Were right contract VPS sales contract siaro, so those were typically companies you know less than a million in revenue working our product market fit.
00:04:20 Brent
We did that for about five years and then got to the point where really all of our work is around building the revenue acceleration playbook.
00:04:28 Brent
Overall Playbooks and then helping teams implement it.
00:04:31 Brent
And so right now our sweet spot are.
00:04:33 Brent
Probably 2 to $10 million companies. On the one hand that are folks that they’re doing sales, marketing and customer success, but really need to formalize those teams and the and the playbooks and need to make a connected buyer journey.
00:04:47 Brent
And then we, you know, worked with. Call it 10 to $50 million companies. Usually that are targeting going.
00:04:53 Brent
Public and they need to optimize each of those teams. There are a number of players and it’s how do you capture the practices of the top 20%.
00:05:02 Brent
So you can drive revenue quicker and.
00:05:02 Justin
Yeah, I think we’ve.
00:05:04 Justin
I think I think anyone, anyone in sales and business has been in the position where they’ve been in on a team where it is always very clear there are usually a few very top performers.
00:05:16 Justin
Then you have, you know, kind of a baseline and then you have the weak performers.
00:05:20 Justin
But there’s always a stand out in a crowd of sales staff everywhere, everywhere, in anywhere.
00:05:24 Justin
So I love this idea of kind of.
00:05:26 Justin
Digging in and seeing what is that top 10% doing differently and it’s amazing because like I’m a big zig Ziglar fan and you know you’re going back now to the to the 70s and these were the discussions that were going on and now here we are today.
00:05:40 Justin
With 50 plus years later, having the same discussion and it’s it’s great that that you have this.
00:05:46 Justin
New book so because you kind of mentioned, I just want to re emphasize it.
00:05:51 Justin
You now have this window Linux company that you run and you are, or you’ve just written a book called The Revenue Acceleration Playbook.
00:05:59 Justin
It comes out in April of 2022, but people of course can preorder it today on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. And of course I will have links to the book in the show notes and on.
00:06:11 Justin
Be marketing and service.com website for this episode. So if you’re listening and you find this interesting, definitely go and check out this book because Brent thank you.
00:06:20 Justin
You sent me a copy of the book and I read it and I really, really loved what you talk about in this book, because what you talk about in the book?
00:06:29 Justin
Is pretty much the same thing that I talk about on this podcast on a regular basis, except with a really cool twist, and that’s what I want to jump into right now.
00:06:38 Justin
A lot of times in business, there’s always the perspectives right and everyone in an organization might have a different perspective that you know, the CEO’s perspective is going to be different than the CFO.
00:06:49 Justin
Which is going to be different than a CMO, which is going to be different than a sales staff which is going to be different than the customers perception of the transaction, right?
00:06:57 Justin
You kind of take this B to B approach and you are looking at it from the salesperson.
00:07:03 Justin
Active so maybe we can talk a little bit about the perspective and the style of the typical outbound sales call in a B2B environment.
00:07:13 Justin
Some of the challenges they have and some of the things that you suggest that will greatly improve that.
00:07:18 Brent
We talk a lot about building value place.
00:07:23 Brent
Any company you go.
00:07:24 Brent
To they have a product, battle card or Prada.
00:07:26 Brent
Like spec sheet like you talked about, what they often don’t have written down is why does your customer care?
00:07:33 Brent
How does that create value for your customer?
00:07:36 Brent
How does it help drive revenue?
00:07:37 Brent
Reduce costs change a user experience, make better use of staff or some physical asset and the reality is you only know what value your product.
00:07:47 Brent
Creates once your customer has told you.
00:07:50 Brent
Once you can write down a quote, a testimonial, a success story in your customers voice.
00:07:57 Brent
So we talk about builders.
00:07:58 Brent
Value plays, which is how would your customer describe value?
00:08:01 Brent
Was a quick snippet.
00:08:03 Brent
Where is a a success story et cetera.
00:08:07 Brent
And then if you have value plays, it solves the problem you talked about, which is often marketing, prospecting, sales, customer success.
00:08:17 Brent
They all have a slightly different perspective on the buyer and customer journey, but if you write down value plays.
00:08:21 Justin
Right?
00:08:23 Brent
When you write down customer stories that they can all use, it now gives them an integrated way to message the market and everybody is thinking about how do I handoff around buyer value?
00:08:36 Brent
No, not my perspective on where you are in the journey, right?
00:08:40 Brent
So it it flips it.
00:08:41 Brent
You’re not inside out, you’re outside in.
00:08:44 Justin
Yeah, and it’s fantastic because I always talk about that alignment between sales, service and marketing, because in so many typical organizations you’ve got those three people with different perspectives and they don’t have unified messaging.
00:08:57 Justin
I think all of us can think of a time where we were told something by a salesperson.
00:09:02 Justin
But then it just didn’t come to fruition.
00:09:04 Justin
The product didn’t do what we thought it was going to do, and then we call support and the support people say, yeah, I don’t.
00:09:09 Justin
I don’t know why that guy told you that he just he.
00:09:10 Justin
Just wanted to.
00:09:11 Justin
Close the sale that that that’s not going to work for you.
00:09:13 Justin
And now you’ve got this really sour perspective.
00:09:16 Justin
As a customer, you you have a very sour perspective of this.
00:09:20 Justin
Company that you’ve dealt with, so I’m a huge.
00:09:22 Justin
Fan of really focusing on that alignment between sales, marketing and service.
00:09:28 Brent
Yes, unrelated.
00:09:29 Brent
I mean we all have the experience of buying something from the sales guy or gal where they become your buddy.
00:09:35 Brent
You’re totally wired on your problem and can explain how they’re going to solve the problem, and then they hand it off to the implementation person who’s like, tell me what we’re focused on today.
00:09:46 Justin
Right, right?
00:09:48 Justin
Yeah, we we’ve all been there.
00:09:49 Brent
What problem are we solving?
00:09:49 Justin
And it’s it’s.
00:09:51 Brent
And it’s just like no don’t do it.
00:09:53 Brent
Hand it off.
00:09:54 Justin
Yeah, so one of the things you you discuss in the book you talk a little bit about the alignment mechanism.
00:10:00 Justin
To these systems to help have that alignment between those departments, can you delve into that a little bit?
00:10:07 Brent
Yeah, I mean there there are two things alignment mechanisms.
00:10:10 Brent
We think about the one is these value plays consistent value messaging, right?
00:10:15 Brent
So if you think about a company I was just on with an old client, Greg Carter at Tru Fit that has a retail personalization platform so they helped Macy’s or A6.
00:10:27 Brent
If you are a web shop or you can go to the website, you get recommendations on the right size and style.
00:10:33 Brent
So you buy the right products you convert more from the web.
00:10:36 Brent
Site you less return size related returns what they train their team to do, from prospecting to sales to success is start with the buyer problem, right?
00:10:46 Brent
Don’t get into the details of the weeds of all of the ways you can implement or this kind of thing you can do in these integrations.
00:10:53 Brent
You can run because if you focus first on the buyer problems.
00:10:56 Brent
Then you get into the details of the product, but it’s a lot.
00:10:58 Brent
Easier to.
00:10:59 Brent
Hand off right there.
00:11:01 Brent
Problem was returns.
00:11:03 Brent
Make sure Mr or Mrs.
00:11:05 Brent
Customer success.
00:11:06 Brent
This is about size related returns real quick, just we know what they success.
00:11:10 Brent
Says they have this improvement goal, so if you get your value messaging right, a lot easier to make one connection to another.
00:11:18 Brent
You don’t have to capture all the details of the implementation.
00:11:21 Brent
The second thing we always talk about is think about your incentives, right?
00:11:27 Brent
A lot of people have individual activity metrics.
00:11:30 Brent
Prospecting, how many meetings did you get sales?
00:11:33 Brent
How many deals you close?
00:11:34 Brent
Customer success.
00:11:35 Brent
What’s your renewal rate?
00:11:37 Brent
Well, what are your cross team metrics?
00:11:40 Brent
Because those are actually more important to the buyer journey, so sales success.
00:11:45 Brent
What’s the value of the account after 12 months after the close?
00:11:50 Brent
Can I incent sales to tee up a lot of discovery.
00:11:53 Brent
You might only land one, but do I have some incentive to have a higher 12 month lifetime value or on the prospecting side?
00:12:01 Brent
Great, we need more opportunities, more meetings.
00:12:04 Brent
Should I get measured on what percentage of those closed, what the value of those are?
00:12:10 Brent
When they close and so now prospecting is incentive to hand it off to sales.
00:12:16 Brent
Not just opportunities, but.
00:12:18 Brent
But good opportunity, so link up on your value messaging and in addition to your team level activity measures, create cross team measures that align those incentives between teams.
00:12:28 Justin
Yeah, that that alignment is so important and since you were talking about sales that another chapter in the book that I really enjoyed is you bring up the scenario where you have a sales team.
00:12:38 Justin
And let’s say they’re a pretty good team.
00:12:40 Justin
They’re they’re pretty well managed, they’re doing.
00:12:42 Justin
A pretty good job.
00:12:43 Justin
But they fall into a routine.
00:12:45 Justin
And they’re not constantly improving.
00:12:48 Justin
They’ve got this status quo and you gave some good tips about how you can work as a manager to overcome that status quo, to ensure that that sales staff is constantly improving.
00:12:59 Brent
Improving, yeah, I mean look, it’s it’s life is busy and it’s easy to get in in the you know, whatever mode you’re in, but our markets are ever changing new competitors, new buyers coming into the equation so we know the best sellers.
00:13:16 Brent
It’s about hyper personalization.
00:13:19 Brent
You’re speaking to each buyer in their role in the you know financial survey you’re selling into financial service.
00:13:25 Brent
That’s different than selling to a manufacturer that’s different than selling to a hospital.
00:13:30 Brent
Their language might be slightly different, so we have to be constant learners to personalize.
00:13:37 Brent
What we say is as a manager in a team, think about 3% of your time, one hour a week, just practicing it, getting better.
00:13:47 Brent
Practicing how you do discovery.
00:13:49 Brent
Practicing how you personalize your messaging and we encourage alternating team based practice so you have a biweekly team meeting where somebody bringing a maybe a call video that everybody reviewed to give feedback on the discovery or the closing or an email follow up.
00:14:08 Brent
Right, so team based practice where people are expected to, you know, kind of present and get feedback this to continue with the truefitt example, they develop something they called.
00:14:19 Brent
Uhm, tests and improve a test and improved process where sales team members would bring their deals and a lot of it was how well have you gotten.
00:14:27 Brent
To a business.
00:14:29 Brent
Initiative or that would motivate a purchase decision.
00:14:33 Brent
Have you mapped out what each buyer cares about?
00:14:35 Brent
Do you know what actions need to take next so team based learning?
00:14:39 Brent
And then individual learning.
00:14:41 Brent
With your manager, and if you commit to an hour a week, it’s amazing how quickly you can get better at your craft.
00:14:48 Justin
Yeah, I love that I.
00:14:49 Justin
I think you know, having been in sales my whole life I’m.
00:14:52 Justin
I’m sure there’s been times in my career where I’ve been guilty of getting into that routine where you know you’ve got a pitch or you’ve got a certain thing and yeah, it works some of the time.
00:15:00 Justin
Most of the time, whatever that may be, but you don’t really think about what’s. What can I do to to improve that 30%?
00:15:08 Justin
That’s not.
00:15:08 Justin
Closing that’s walking away so I I do love looking at that and and I I love that you put that in your book and there’s some great stuff in there in relation to growing like you just said as a cross team and really listening to the customer.
00:15:22 Justin
You know, I recently was dealing.
00:15:24 Justin
I got a sales call from a company and I saw some stuff about this.
00:15:29 Justin
Company I reached out to them.
00:15:30 Justin
They reached back out to me and the.
00:15:33 Justin
Phone call was a typical example of what you just laid out in the worst way they called and they said, listen, we have this solution to this problem that you might have and I said this is great.
00:15:45 Justin
I’m not going to say the name of the company, but they one of the features they offer is text based billing where you can you know, send texts to all your customers.
00:15:53 Justin
They can pay right from their phone and it will go into their, you know, into a payment processing account on their end and then they send you a notice that this has been paid and transferred.
00:16:02 Justin
To your bank.
00:16:03 Justin
And it sounded great.
00:16:04 Justin
Like you know, it’s very convenient.
00:16:05 Justin
It’s nice and convenient to pay a bill through a text.
00:16:08 Justin
The problem was I said well what’s the mechanism in which you know if you send out 10,000 bills in a month and now you get 4 or 5000 payments back into the system, how do you then import those into your accounting software and and the?
00:16:23 Justin
The answer was, well, you just you know you have someone punch in all those payments and I said, well, that’s not very efficient.
00:16:30 Justin
I mean, you know, I realize this is not a Fortune 500 Corporation in enterprise environment, but we’re not going to 4000.
00:16:36 Justin
And payments entered every single month with someone punching in numbers with with room for error and no way to audit it, and no mechanism to just validate that what you’ve actually called.
00:16:47 Justin
I mean, it was just really a wild thing and I brought this up and the guy said I wouldn’t worry about it.
00:16:51 Justin
I just signed up today. I’ll give you a better deal. I’ll take 20% off and it was exactly that. He just.
00:16:56 Justin
Wasn’t listening that this was such a critical aspect to me and I would have appreciated even if you said hey listen, you know I’m not sure with that.
00:17:02 Justin
Let me check with my tech team and I’ll get.
00:17:04 Justin
Back to you, but it was just pushing for this driving for this clothes and my guess is that maybe three out of 10 times this pitch works and he gets the clothes and that’s what he’s happy with.
00:17:14 Justin
But if he sat down like you said and actually reviewed this, a team member might say, hey, listen, you didn’t listen to this guy and you lost it and now I’ll never do business with them because it was such a horrendous experience.
00:17:25 Justin
This really Harkins back to what you were just talking about with building those sales teams and having that alignment.
00:17:30 Justin
It really is important.
00:17:32 Brent
Yeah, and I I guess that he he doesn’t close three and 10 that it’s it’s.
00:17:37 Brent
It’s hard, right?
00:17:38 Brent
I mean, product pitching and just pushing for the clothes.
00:17:41 Brent
It’s a lot easier than actually having to listen and recap and confirm where the buyer is seeing value, but I mean what your experience was.
00:17:51 Brent
He didn’t first solve.
00:17:53 Brent
Your problem you just try to close you and we know to sell well.
00:17:58 Brent
You have to 1st.
00:18:00 Brent
Uh, solve a problem for a buyer and then we can focus on the process to close.
00:18:06 Justin
So when we talk about that process of closing, so say let’s take a look at that sales call in that journey and you put yourself in the customer shoes.
00:18:14 Justin
Let’s assume you’re doing everything right.
00:18:16 Justin
You’re you’ve got this.
00:18:17 Justin
This common value proposition that’s aligned and you are doing everything right.
00:18:23 Justin
Now you’re getting closer to this point where you’re going to try to close.
00:18:26 Justin
This sale tell me about the final 10 minutes of the call.
00:18:29 Justin
What does that?
00:18:30 Brent
Look like we always say we ask every person on the sales team develop a talk track that said looks something like hey, Justin.
00:18:39 Brent
You know, I know, we’re coming to time.
00:18:41 Brent
We have about 10 minutes left.
00:18:43 Brent
I want to make sure we just hold time for me.
00:18:45 Brent
To hear from you.
00:18:46 Brent
Where are you seeing the most value in this conversation and what we might do about it next and and then?
00:18:51 Brent
I mean, what we encourage is that transition starts with a verbal recap.
00:18:55 Brent
This is what I’ve heard today.
00:18:56 Brent
The problem you’re working on is probably.
00:18:58 Brent
Most align to our capabilities how we could help that I hear that right.
00:19:03 Brent
Uh, do you see enough fit to you know that it would merit a next meeting with others.
00:19:09 Brent
And who would we bring in right?
00:19:12 Brent
So you start with a verbal recap and then you get into their.
00:19:15 Brent
You know the classic band who else?
00:19:17 Brent
You know?
00:19:17 Brent
How urgent is this problem?
00:19:19 Brent
How are things like this funded so that that’s what we encourage?
00:19:23 Justin
Yeah, and it’s a great I mean.
00:19:24 Justin
Obviously it’s a great idea.
00:19:25 Justin
It’s a good summary of the call.
00:19:27 Justin
Well, if you’re if you’re into NLP, you’ve got that customer saying yes, yes yes.
00:19:31 Justin
Yes yes down the line, right?
00:19:33 Justin
So it really is a it it’s.
00:19:35 Justin
It’s an interesting way to end the call and it makes so much sense because in real life that’s what you do.
00:19:40 Justin
Hey, you know if you’re talking to a buddy so we’re good, we’re going to meet tomorrow at 9:00 o’clock and get a beer or whatever it takes.
00:19:45 Justin
Maybe you know you kind of review it.
00:19:47 Justin
And you but sales people don’t do.
00:19:49 Justin
That so often they just don’t do that and they end up on a tangent and then the customer is not happy because they don’t even know what’s happening anymore.
00:19:57 Justin
So let’s talk a little bit about HubSpot.
00:20:00 Justin
I know you have a great case study example on that and I’ve mentioned HubSpot quite a few times on the podcast and I I don’t have any affiliation with HubSpot.
00:20:10 Justin
I do use it and I do have some issues with it that I I hope, and it looks like they’re trying to work out specifically with mobile ticketing.
00:20:19 Justin
It’s something that they don’t really support right now on iOS, which is which is frustrating if you’re on the road and you need to be closing service.
00:20:26 Justin
But I do really appreciate the powerful tools that they give away for free is really incredible. So what can you tell me about your HubSpot case study?
00:20:35 Brent
So we have a case study with Mark Roberts.
00:20:38 Brent
Who is the?
00:20:39 Brent
CRO there, from, you know zero to 100,000,000.
00:20:43 Brent
Now, a very successful venture investor, but he it was really about building the integrated buyer into customer journey that that we talked about and creating the incentives.
00:20:57 Brent
To do that, and so, one of the things that I think they did a really good job.
00:21:00 Brent
About is they built their whole go to market process thinking about the ideal buyer.
00:21:06 Brent
At the end they were less focused on what were the intermediate metrics on conversion opportunities, what, what buyer at at 12 months has the highest value for us, right?
00:21:17 Brent
The highest enterprise value, and then they worked back.
00:21:20 Brent
From there to what I had described before, they changed the incentives in her remarks, saying that his first SDR plan for the prospecting team was awful.
00:21:31 Brent
Because you know, if they if they E got good meetings, they were really happy and if they got bad meetings, they were really unhappy and there was no alignment.
00:21:41 Brent
So they changed the comp plan to a high percentage was what was the quality of the meetings that closed and that was a big fix for them to now point towards higher quality.
00:21:52 Brent
The other thing I remember him saying is he changed the comp structure.
00:21:56 Brent
He told his.
00:21:57 Brent
Team I will copy you 20% higher.
00:22:00 Brent
On any deal that closes between the day that the first deal closes and 12 months right so after the first close, anything that closes afterwards, you get 120% and he said, Mark, they seem said Mark, you’re crazy. We’re going to find 5 opportunities and only close one.
00:22:20 Brent
He said, go for it.
00:22:21 Justin
Right?
00:22:22 Brent
That’s exactly what I want you to do.
00:22:24 Brent
’cause I could care less when the enterprise value hits.
00:22:29 Brent
I want you to do really deep and broad discovery to find out all kinds of things we could solve for them after that for.
00:22:36 Brent
First use case, so they thought about a integrated revenue organization pointed at a deal buyer right from the outset and it was one of the keys to their growth.
00:22:48 Justin
Yeah, it’s fantastic because there’s so there’s so often the issue where businesses have a difficult time articulating that exact persona of their buyer.
00:22:59 Justin
And aside from the the scenario you just provided it, it’s a double whammy because you all.
00:23:04 Justin
So end up spending a lot of marketing dollars that you don’t need to spend because you’re you end up reaching you.
00:23:10 Justin
Spread this wider net because you’re unsure of who you really need, so you spread this wide net.
00:23:14 Justin
You spend a lot more money on ads and a lot more money on digital channels and you realize, hey, you know I could have just had a little bit better of a definition.
00:23:22 Justin
Narrowed this down to a really.
00:23:24 Justin
Specific target and probably could have gotten a lot more out of those dollars.
00:23:29 Justin
It’s something something I see all the time.
00:23:31 Justin
I’m sure you see it as well.
00:23:32 Brent
I wanted to go back just quick play to one earlier point in the conversation about this idea of the top performers and everybody else.
00:23:39 Brent
And give a plug both for our approach and the.
00:23:43 Brent
The the book.
00:23:44 Brent
Is there is a solution and it’s playbooks, right?
00:23:47 Brent
Is when you write down your place and you have your top performers write down.
00:23:52 Brent
What are your best plays for discovery?
00:23:54 Brent
What are your best buys of talking back to your buyer?
00:23:57 Brent
What are your best plays for closing a meeting?
00:23:59 Brent
What are your best players for connecting the first meeting to the second meeting?
00:24:03 Brent
How do you price as an investment when you write those down and you get your top performers to write them down, and then you practice it?
00:24:10 Brent
What now your middle 60 can absorb that?
00:24:13 Brent
And there is a another story in the book about Aptio Larry Blasko, who is there, Caro, you know from.
00:24:21 Brent
2003 to 2016. So from 3 million in revenue to going public. Very rare for somebody to do that.
00:24:30 Brent
What he did is at every increment of their growth, so they started with a medic sales methodology when they were selling to the first big accounts and then they adopted another methodology.
00:24:41 Brent
And then when they were acquired by Vista, Vista has their own value selling methodology and every.
00:24:45 Brent
Every time what he did is he forced his sales leadership team to go right back down, refresh an integrated set of Playbooks so everybody was on the same set of playbooks and they could practice in the same way together.
00:24:59 Brent
And every manager has a weekly session with their team.
00:25:03 Brent
The team doesn’t know who’s going to get called on.
00:25:06 Justin
00:25:06 Brent
Who’s going to have to practice those core skills so it’s just an awesome testimonial to shared playbooks and practice will drive phenomenal growth.
00:25:16 Brent
Both for any type of company.
00:25:18 Justin
That’s awesome, that’s very cool. I love that, and since you mentioned the word testimonials I-1.
00:25:24 Justin
But the other things you’ve mentioned is customer voice and avoiding that.
00:25:29 Justin
Trying to sell capabilities of product and really understand and and one of the things that you refer to a lot is testimonials.
00:25:37 Justin
How does that play into that sales process?
00:25:39 Brent
Yeah, yeah so.
00:25:40 Brent
What we we we encourage on these value plays is that a team should have.
00:25:46 Brent
If it’s around how we increase the efficiency of a process or how we I’ll give you an example.
00:25:51 Brent
We work with a couple of companies in the manufacturing sector that might work on maintenance and the instinct is I’m selling you a.
00:25:58 Brent
Valve or a pump.
00:26:00 Brent
Fine, I’m selling you a valve or a pump, but really, what I’m telling you is a valve or a pump that connect to a planned.
00:26:05 Brent
Maintenance solution so you have less downtime in your plan and so you have higher production and that saves you money right?
00:26:14 Brent
So what I want my to condition my sellers to do is.
00:26:18 Brent
Get the buyer to understand that higher business outcome and then explain how the product helped with that higher business outcome.
00:26:26 Brent
Share in their words.
00:26:27 Brent
Hey, how did solving for how to getting you the right pump help your plan maintenance problem?
00:26:33 Brent
How did building a solution around the right pump?
00:26:36 Brent
How did some analytics around the right pump?
00:26:38 Brent
Help with that plan maintenance.
00:26:40 Brent
How did that help you?
00:26:41 Brent
What was the before and after case in terms of no visibility to visibility, less time taken off to ask.
00:26:48 Brent
Yep, with this emergency outage, how did that help you?
00:26:52 Brent
So ask them what problem it solved for them and if you.
00:26:55 Brent
Write that down.
00:26:57 Brent
Use it in your selling.
00:26:59 Brent
You just have old stories.
00:27:01 Brent
Sell stories.
00:27:03 Brent
Sell better than product.
00:27:04 Brent
You just have a simple story about how you help the customer that will lead to higher engagement and higher velocity in your deals.
00:27:13 Justin
Yeah, it certainly sounds like something that would be great to slip into.
00:27:16 Justin
That playbook goes right along with it, right?
00:27:19 Justin
Share that with your other sales teams and say, hey, here’s a story.
00:27:21 Justin
Here’s a practical application and and customer success.
00:27:25 Brent
Yeah, and and.
00:27:26 Brent
So your part about connecting stories can be used in prospecting.
00:27:30 Brent
Call connects emails that as snippets they can be used in a sales call that can be used as a customer success tool.
00:27:38 Brent
You know, here’s what our other customers are thinking about.
00:27:40 Brent
Are you thinking about that?
00:27:42 Brent
So those stories really do connect to go to market journey.
00:27:45 Brent
As well a buyer journey as well.
00:27:47 Justin
Yeah, that is fantastic and you know the The thing is, we’ve we’ve probably discussed about 2% of the content that’s in the revenue acceleration playbook.
00:27:56 Justin
And I could go all day here.
00:27:58 Justin
We could talk about this you’ve already given so much amazing information out.
00:28:02 Justin
So again, I encourage people check this book out. The revenue acceleration playbook. It’s a new book coming out April 2020.
00:28:09 Justin
You can preorder it today on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your favorite bookstores.
00:28:14 Justin
This is something that you don’t want to.
00:28:16 Justin
Miss and now I have to start to wrap this up because we’re running out of time, but I wanted to ask you what is the biggest mistake that you have ever made?
00:28:27 Brent
Biggest mistake I’ve ever made I’ll.
00:28:30 Brent
Just stick with the business.
00:28:32 Brent
Side of things is I see the very first commercial endeavor I had out of academics was to start a language learning company with my brother who had a business in Asia, a textbook company selling English language and it was a big mistake because I was a very as an exceptionally strong.
00:28:51 Brent
Language learner, but I was not a passionate language teacher.
00:28:55 Brent
I didn’t really care about teaching others language, so I picked a business I wasn’t passionate about.
00:28:57 Justin
00:29:01 Brent
And if you’re not passionate about starting a business, you’re just stick to it over this.
00:29:06 Brent
It’s just not going to be there.
00:29:07 Brent
That was a big mistake.
00:29:09 Justin
Awesome, yeah, that that’s definitely something we we hear a lot and again I think everyone feels that at some point.
00:29:15 Justin
If you’re if you’re an employee, you’re working.
00:29:17 Justin
That passion is just utterly important and necessary to keep that drive going.
00:29:21 Justin
Day in and day out.
00:29:23 Justin
And of course, my last question.
00:29:25 Justin
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
00:29:28 Brent
Yeah, I think I think it’s the flipside of that my brother who is a psychiatrist, says in raising kids.
00:29:35 Brent
You know, focus less on talent and focus on passion.
00:29:39 Brent
Right is and because the talent will come if they’re passionate about something and you just kind of rinse and repeat.
00:29:46 Brent
And I think about myself in, you know, I love like I got a left brain right brain.
00:29:51 Brent
I love writing the copy and I love selling and the the the hunt, you know.
00:29:56 Brent
So I was kind of wired for go to market strategy.
00:29:59 Brent
Didn’t get there immediately.
00:30:00 Brent
But I love lead.
00:30:01 Brent
In teams and then I’ve loved being a consultant and I did it as an embedded way, but I’ve we’ve just always kind of up leveled right.
00:30:09 Brent
The new opportunity.
00:30:10 Speaker 1
Right?
00:30:10 Brent
Just keep going ’cause there’s a bigger and bigger problem to solve.
00:30:14 Justin
Awesome, so Brent.
00:30:16 Justin
Thank you so much for taking the time today and thank you for sharing these tidbits from your book, which of course is the revenue acceleration playbook.
00:30:25 Justin
Brent, you’ve been an amazing guest.
00:30:27 Justin
You’ve given amazing content.
00:30:28 Justin
If someone wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way they can reach out?
00:30:33 Brent
Yeah, they can reach out to me at b.keltner@windowlinux.com. One other thing I’d mention is we do have a book web.
00:30:40 Brent
Site authenticity wins.
00:30:43 Brent
Com and they can go there and they can actually download for free.
00:30:47 Brent
The forward and the first chapter of the book for free.
00:30:52 Justin
Great so I will put links to that into the show notes and of course on the website.
00:30:57 Justin
So if you are looking for that you can just go to the website and you will find it and along with the information on how to get in touch with Brent.
00:31:04 Justin
Because Brent is someone that you definitely want to have a discussion with.
00:31:09 Justin
If you’re in a sales process because you’ve really given some great information today, and I, I really, really do appreciate it.
00:31:15 Justin
And I think that anyone who partners with you is going to see that value right away.
00:31:19 Brent
I appreciate that Jess and really enjoyed the call today.
00:31:22 Brent
You’re you have awesome questions and in a good way of looking at a growth, so I appreciate the alignment.
00:31:28 Brent
The thought partnership.
00:31:29 Justin
Absolutely thank you so much and I wish you the best success on your journey.
00:31:34 Brent
Thank you Justin.
00:31:36 Justin
Isn’t that something?
00:31:38 Justin
Listen to your customer and drive revenue.
00:31:42 Justin
Now I know it’s not quite that simple, but the concept here is in a sales process.
00:31:47 Justin
It is critical that you listen to what your customer is asking for.
00:31:51 Justin
You have to deeply understand your customers problem to offer a solution.
00:31:57 Justin
If you’re offering something before you know what the problem is, you are not doing your job.
00:32:02 Justin
As a salesperson, imagine if you went to the doctor and they said, well, we’re going to give you this drug.
00:32:06 Justin
This drug and this drug to fix these problems and you say, well, I don’t have any of those problem.
00:32:10 Justin
My cholesterol is good.
00:32:11 Justin
I exercise everyday.
00:32:13 Justin
My weight is healthy and they said Oh well we don’t care about that.
00:32:15 Justin
Just take these three drugs because this is where we make.
00:32:18 Justin
Most money you would run from that doctor’s office, but yet in sales this happens every single day. So do yourself a favor. Pre-order Brent’s book revenue Acceleration playbook and think about how you can better understand the problems that your customers are having and intern.
00:32:38 Justin
You will drive revenue growth.
00:32:41 Justin
You will accelerate revenue and that’s the whole name of the game.
00:32:46 Justin
Thanks so much for listening.
00:32:47 Justin
I’m Justin Varuzzo. This is the marketing and service.com podcast. If you like this show, please take a moment to like or subscribe. If you want to ask me a question.
00:32:56 Justin
I’d be happy to answer it for you. Just shoot me an email.
00:33:00 Justin
It’s J U S T I N at marketingandservice.com. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll catch you on the next one.