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Better Sales Through Listening

Hi, this is Jeremy, COO at Learn to Scale.

I recently attended a sales training that, going into it, I was less than enthused about. Most people know the feeling - the person running the training is always overly charismatic for 8AM. Kind of like Dan.

There were two big points the training focused on that I thought would be good to share with you.

The best salespeople are consultative, not transactional

People tend to have their guard up whenever a salesperson reaches out to them because they are skeptical about the salesperson’s intentions. They keep waiting for the pitch to come.

The most effective salespeople build personal relationships first and demonstrate genuine interest in helping people uncover and address their business issues. If executed properly, a salesperson becomes a trusted advisor to provide a customer with quality advice, even if it doesn’t directly result in business for the salesperson.

Demonstrate the value your solution will provide by showing how it will uniquely solve the problems your customer is facing.

The best salespeople ask questions and listen, not talk

The ability to ask thoughtful and personal questions leaves potential customers feeling heard and cared about. In fact, a study of over 25,000 sales calls by Gong.io confirmed that the highest converting sales reps talk, on average, only 43% of the time.

Asking open-ended questions, such as, “what is the #1 task that you’ve been assigned this year that would most affect your company’s goals?” gets people thinking about a time-constrained and measurable outcome that, if solved, would provide both business and personal value. From there, it’s up to the salesperson to ask further questions to figure out how their solution can solve the customer’s problem.

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None of this is particularly flashy or complicated but it does get to the core of what makes people successful in sales.

Taking the time to understand and doing the research necessary to show you care about the customer and their problems will pay dividends in the long run and will position you much more effectively over your competitors.

If you'd like to learn more, check out Chad Sanderson's podcast The B2B Revenue Executive Experience. ​

-Jeremy

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A TL;DR from the CRO

When you spend a lot of time talking about "aligning" you fail to hear that the problem doesn't need alignment.

-Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer

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New Year's Resolution Achieved!

For those of you who remember in January, I co-opted this newsletter as my accountability check for my New Year's Resolution to hit 1M steps in 90 days.

I did it! Over the past three months, I managed to take that extra dog walk, or opt for a run rather than a Peloton ride, or grab a coffee from the further away coffeeshop because I knew on every other Friday I had to share with all of you my progress.

To wax poetic for a moment, neither the fitness nor achieving the goal was my motivation. It was a pragmatic choice to pick a fitness goal (because fitness is a good NYR, right?) and leveraging public accountability via this newsletter was a means to an end (that Obliger tendency at work).

What kept me lacing up, however, were books.

I used to love to read: as a kid my parents had to constantly tell me to stop reading at the dinner table. I would stay up late at night chewing through Gone with the Wind. I took so many writing courses in college that my Junior year girlfriend discovered that I had effectively completed an English minor.

As I became an adult, however, reading became subjugated as a leisure activity, which thanks to my American culture, fell behind "work" and "work" on the continuum of What's Important.

However, setting a New Year's Resolution meant I had time on my hands while walking. I tried podcasts and audiobooks, but it was too slow or too self-contained. I was then handed a copy of The Way of Kings by my sister-in-law (who is also on the Learn to Scale Advisory Board)...and I couldn't put it down.

I rediscovered my passion for reading.

Once I got hooked into Kaladin, Dalinar, and Shallan's adventures, I brought my Kindle on dog walks around the park and lost myself in the words. It was winter in Boston, so instead of taking off my gloves to turn the (virtual) page, I would boop the Kindle with my nose.

Yeah, I walked through a frozen park at night with a black dog reading and booping an e-reader. And that's how I hit my step goal.

My original reward for reaching my goal was to rebuild my computer with new fancy tech, but that seems like the wrong prize. Physical activity and reading being rewarded with building something to make me sedentary- not a match.

What should I do to treat myself for reaching my New Year's Resolution? Let me know what you think!

"You should treat yourself by..."

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Good at crushing goals but bad at self-recognition,

Dan from Learn to Scale​

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PS. And they said Jigglypuff was not an entertaining character.​