Everybody right now is all, you know,
up in arms about SDRs and BDRs and how they only
want to be in the role for six months.
If your job was to push a button every day,
a hundred times and have no creativity around that,
how long would you want to be in that job?
I give myself like a week, at best.
We're turning these reps into robots.
In my early days, like I thought you just had to come up
with a kick-ass elevator pitch
and say it a million times until your ears bled.
20 years later, I can still reiterate my voicemail
that I left 399 times a week for five years.
Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks.
We do all sorts of IT support for small
to midsize companies in the Boston area,
and we take a really unique approach
to manage your IT infrastructure by combining
the best people in technology have to offer.
I'd love to talk to you about your IT support needs,
so if you could call me back at (617) 529-7271.
This John Barrows with Thrive Networks, (617) 529-7271.
I would leave that voicemail,
I'd be like, Mm, nailed it again.
Like pitch-tone, everything was perfect on that one, right?
And then all of a sudden I started looking at my numbers
and I was realizing I wasn't getting a damn call back.
The perfect pitch is worthless,
unless you can relate to people.
Shelly, talk to me about Salesoft.
What's going on with Allen?
I don't like being in structure.
Put structure on me, I try to break it.
But I like building structure.
That's what I encourage management to do.
is provide a structure that these kids can play in,
but then allow them the autonomy to try new things,
Because if they're not challenged,
they're going to get bored out of their mind,
and they're going to go find another job.
If you're not constantly trying new things,
you're a dinosaur, in my opinion.
it was a eight week sales training program,
which was my formal sales education.
They defined solution selling.
So back in the late '70's, early 80's,
they came up with solution selling.
So they had a whole academy.
I was trying to sell like everybody else was,
and it just wasn't working for me.
instead of going into the executive level,
like all the other reps were going,
I actually went to the ground floor and I developed
a lot of good relationships at the lower level
and I gained a lot of good insights.
And I almost got fired, because my boss,
he had thought, "Hey, you haven't sold anything
So what, you know, you haven't done anything,
I'm like, see, give me some time.
And I remember nine months in,
I went to all my clients with a book of their office,
their click-through rates,
everything and their whole workflow,
and how much they could save by going
Then, because I had earned their trust,
it was like cashing checks.
So I remember vividly walking into my old boss's office
and just dumping three huge contracts on his desk
and basically being like, "See."
I don't think sales should be the "Glengarry Glen Ross"
"Wolf of Wall Street" boiler room style,
where people don't care about what they do,
and they're just trying to make a commission check.
Those are the ones that give us a bad name.
The real sales professionals,
who have passion for what they do,
and have empathy for their client,
those are the ones that are A, going to survive,
and B, make a lot of money in the longer term here.
From a management standpoint,
what we should be instilling in these reps is,
do they believe that this product makes a difference?
Not for everybody, but for the right client.
'Cause when you believe that, it's a lot easier.
I'm not saying sales is easy,
sales is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
But when you believe in what you do,
Now you're going to get these reps really wanting
to try new things and figure out their style
And that's another important point here.
Usually your best reps are kind of the artists.
They're the ones who are just naturally gifted.
"Okay, teach everybody else how to do what you did."
And they look at you like, "What do you mean?
Like, I just do what I do."
Look, I'm in your face, I'm a jackass, whatever.
But there's other people, that if they tried my approach,
they would fail miserably.
So that doesn't mean that my approach is better than theirs,
it just means I've learned that my approach is good for me.
We all have to figure that out.
What I want is, I want the rep who can tell me exactly why
they didn't hit their number
and what they're going to do about it next quarter,
because they have a process and a structure
that they can then apply to everybody else.
Because it all starts with training.
Training your team to have a common language,
and then consistently training them to up-skill.
Get them to believe in what they're selling
by going and talking to customers and understanding stories,
not just giving them playbooks and things to memorize.
If you do those things, now there's belief,
and now there's that transfer of enthusiasm.
We need to structure our sales organizations
with the client in mind first,
'cause once we understand what good looks like
from a customer standpoint,
and how we can navigate through that,
and the sales will come, the scale will come.
I tell people all the time, I don't sell them anything.
I help you achieve your goals or solve your problems.
That's what sales is all about.
