I’m looking to see, does this company help people like me? And when I’m thinking about like me, I mean, with problems like me. Where I would choose to spend more time with one supplier over another is if they did a better job articulating common problems that ultimately led to someone valuing their solution. Because that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for that moment where I’m like, you get me, and we haven’t even gotten on the phone yet. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Yes. Do you have gas? Not currently. Yeah. I’m not asking about that gas. I’m asking about giving a shit about your prospects, about your customers, about the sales process, about how you’re showing up in that whole methodology. It’s from a fascinating conversation we just had with Jen Allen Knuth, also known as DemandGen. Absolutely. I have a ton of gas then. And it was a great conversation about exactly that. But, really, what does it mean? It’s about creating a better experience for your buyers, how sellers engage, getting over the status quo, and all sorts of different things in between and strategies for really breaking through what a lot of sort of traditional sales training has created. Yeah. And and some of, you know, what Jen talks about is, of course, intuitive, but you still have to apply it every day. Right? And so she gives a lot of real examples on how to do it. She actually presented at our breakthrough executive experience a month ago. Every single exec in the room was hanging off of every word she said, and so I’m excited to bring it to the revenue maker’s audience. Yeah. And there was some really interesting things that you could just take out and both for sales and marketers to apply to a sales process or even to how you’re going to market. So let’s do it. Let’s do it. Alright. Jen, thanks so much for jumping on and joining us today. So we don’t always talk to like, tell us a little bit about yourself, but I think it’s important because you’ve got a really interesting background that’s led into kind of a fun and and different world that you’re in now. So could you just kinda give the history that is Demand Gen? So as a little girl no. Just kidding. I never wanted to be a salesperson. As A little girl, I started my sales career in two thousand four like many sellers not intending to go into sales, but I graduated college and I had to do something and this company sounded cool. So I started at this company, corporate executive board, and ended up staying essentially there for about eighteen years in my my entire frontline seller career. It was a company where we were selling research and best practice advice to see the whole executives at Fortune five hundred companies. And I stayed a frontline seller because sales was never easy to me. I found that every year, something changed about buying behavior. Every year, the stuff that worked last year stopped working this year. And then in two thousand eight, two thousand nine was when the original research behind the Challenger sale came out, and it totally changed my hopeful philosophy on selling. So I went on to sell that and then became the chief evangelist of Challenger before leaving for my first stop, obviously, in the tech world, which was twenty twenty two at Lavender and then left, about nine months later to found my company, Demand Gen, where I work with companies selling into mid market and enterprise teams to help them with their outbound motions. So how’s that for, like, eighteen years in a nutshell? That’s that was quick, and that was comprehensive Okay. Cool. At the same time. So I guess, like, we had our customer conference. We’ve mentioned this before. Now I guess it’s been a little over a month ago. And you spoke in our track session. We’re We’re gonna talk about that session because you had a a really interesting sort of methodology mindset about selling that really resonated with that group. And my favorite part of it, of course, is the main. Right? It’s called GAS. And what does that stand for, Adam? What does it stand for? Grateful. No. Give a shit. Yeah. I’m on just a tool of the audience. Simon has put me on quota. I can only say that so many times. A couple times. Adam can tend to grow off the rails. So yeah. The oh, just me. Just me. Just you. Tell us about the philosophy and I mean, it seems so like, yeah, we should all give a shit. But sellers specifically, what should they give a shit about? Yeah. So where this is born out of, I think, for as long as we can remember in sales, sales is a hard job. Like, my dad was a construction worker. I would say that is a totally different type of hard, but sales is hard. And so I think it’s really natural for us as human beings to look around and say, how do I make the job to be done easier? And so we look for these easy buttons where it’s like, outbound prospecting is hard. Can I have AI write it for me instead? Finding the right prospect is hard. Can I just blast a thousand and hope that I hit a bullet with one of them that’s the right prospect at the right time? And so I think largely what we end up falling into are these really bad patterns where we think about optimizing for our own effort instead of thinking about the effort that buyers have to go through in order to make a decision or buy anything at all regardless of the size, I would say, today. And so in many ways, when we are optimizing for self, we are doing things that are in direct disservice to the buyer. I think you ask any executive today what their inbox looks like and you see the same face. Like, you get an eye roll, you get all of these stories about all these thoughtless messages that have nothing to do with their business or nothing to do with them or it’s fake forced personalization. And that is all derived out of our own desire to make the job easier for us. And so I think in many ways, this idea of gas or give a shit is slipping that on its head and saying, at the end of the day, I’m the one asking for something. I’m asking for an executive’s time, which is their most precious resource. That should be hard. Right? And so the pursuit of doing the hard work is what makes us successful, not our ability to find shortcuts around, you know, the path to get there. Yeah. And we can talk about, you know, like, giving a shit really right from that initial Adam’s looking at me like I’ve said. I just I just wanna say you’ve said it three or four times already, so you’re already four x where I am. Just saying. Okay, Adam. Going back to giving shit. Okay. It can start right at the first sort of outreach. Right? Cold outbound. You know, at Sixth Sense, obviously, we talk a lot about warm outbound, but but just that initial sort of hook of engaging somebody. But I will say looking at research, looking at market trends, what we’re finding is it’s taking longer and longer for deals to progress. Conversion rates are down. ASPs, you know, in certain cases are down. And so that sort of like, the journey of the sales cycle is just getting harder and harder. More multithreading required, more people involved in just longer cycles. And so we’ve talked in the past about the dead zone where you’ve got a ton of ops at that top of funnel early stage, you know, and then it just kinda stops or it stalls. And so much of what the give a shit part talks about is really creating a sense of urgency, but also speaking to the needs of the buyer to drive urgency. And and you had an interesting stat that you shared at the breakthrough presentation about the status quo and the proportion of ops that are lost to the status quo. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah. So this came out during when I was at Challenger, and the stat they came out with is thirty eight percent of all b to b opportunities that are in our pipeline today will be lost to status quo. And here’s the interesting thing about status quo. And I look back on my deals, and I think my number was probably more like sixty to seventy percent before I figured this out. Status quo is not you have a bad solution or we don’t like what you offer. In many ways, the customers and prospects I work with who ended up making no decision at all were the ones that were saying, you’re right. You absolutely have a better solution than what we’re doing today. But change is hard and I don’t know that we need to prioritize this today. So why don’t you call me back in six months? And I, being a fool, would just update my forecast to six months from now, you know, put my reminder on my calendar and just be like, okay. How how about now? Is now better? What I didn’t realize was that was just in many ways a brush off because I think often and I can’t fault them for it. When you’re in a buying role, the last thing you wanna do is is get into a back and forth. If you’ve evaluated a solution and you’ve had a demo and you’ve done all these things, you know that sales rep is pretty much guaranteed going to try to objection handle you. As a buyer, I can’t fault you for just being like, let me tell you six months because maybe by then, you’re gone, I’m gone, something’s changed. Like, I just don’t even have to have this conversation because none of us really like to be convinced. And so when I started realizing how many deals I was losing as a result of that, the moment I had is I was trying to objection handle status quo, which is wait until the prospect says it and then try to come up with some reason why they should reconsider the decision that they made. Instead of saying, how do I preempt status quo all the way back at the beginning? Like, how do I when I write my outbound research, how do I give them a reason to reconsider the way they’ve always solved the problem instead of trying to objection handle it on the other side? So it really did completely change my appreciation for the front end of the sale. I love that preempt to the status quo conversation. There’s a very specific formula that that sales folks are being taught. There’s training about, like, we’re gonna go to market like this. You say this, they say that, they say this, they say that. So I know you’ve got kind of three of these very clever names for can you talk a little bit about, like, the ways we’ve been taught to go to market that are sort of contrary to what you’re trying to accomplish with preempting that whole conversation? Yes. So I think, you know, if you go back years and years ago, though, I would argue it’s still very prevalent today. Where we kind of started was this idea of my job as a salesperson is to prove that we are better. So I call this the we are best motion. And so largely that sounds like, okay, we have a value prop. We’re amazing at these things. Let me just yell it into the universe and hopefully find someone that cares. So, you know, our solution is going to help you increase network reliability. Great. I don’t think any competitor of yours is out there saying we’re gonna decrease your network reliability, but we’re really nice people to work with. Right? So the problem is a lot of times, we are focused on the right outcomes or value propositions, but because we’re leading with it to the buyer, it’s like everybody’s saying the same exact thing. I mean, I’ve always sold in the sales and marketing space. I don’t think there’s many companies out there being like, we’re gonna reduce your revenue. We’re all talking about the same outcomes. And so it’s not that that isn’t important. We have to show that we deliver positive outcomes. When I’m trying to earn an executive’s time, if I’m saying the same thing everybody else in my space is saying, it’s very unlikely I’m gonna be able to stand out above the noise. So that was kind of number one, the we’re best idea. The second one I call time suckers because this was born out of this idea that we’ve gotta shut up about ourselves. We’ve gotta become more customer focused, more customer centric. And so what does that mean? Well, now I show up to calls with my hands out, and I say thank you so much for the time. I’d love to understand your goals and priorities. And let’s just say I do that with a CMO. That CMO is immediately kicking themselves saying this should have been a call I punted down at the organization. I do not have the time or interest to educate some random sales rep who may or may not be able to help me on what is important to me so that they can come back to me three days later and say I’ve got the perfect solution for you. And so what is flawed about this motion is we are asking our buyers to do the heavy lifting. You tell me what matters to you. What’s particularly offensive is right now, we’ve never lived in an era where there is more publicly available information, not just about public companies, but around founder led companies. They’re on YouTube. They’re on interviews. They’re on podcasts like this. If we take the time and do go out and do some research to understand what’s important to them. So that’s number two. And then my third one, with all due, love, and respect, is what I call the ugly baby lotion where people I got this a lot when I founded my company because I have the world’s ugliest website right now. And you get people coming in saying, oh, gosh, other new founders like you really struggle to build an effective website. And it’s like, thank you so much for telling me how bad I am at my job. Yeah. And so the the problem I have with it is the phrase like you. Just because I have a certain title, like I am a CMO of a SaaS company, does not mean I share in common all the other challenges with all the other CMOs of SaaS companies. And so I think even though that is a motion to try to say, let me speak more directly to you, we are still speaking to them in aggregate when we have all of this information available to understand what might be uniquely hard for them if we took the time to look. Yeah. So those are the three that don’t work. What do you feel does work, Jen? Yeah. I am a big proponent, and I’ve always sold into enterprise and upper mid market. I’m a big proponent of saying every executive that I’m gonna sell into reports up to a CEO, a founder, a dean, you know, depending on who you sell to. And that person has set a set of objectives for that business. And so every functional leader underneath that ultimate leader is now gonna sit there and say, my job is to make sure it’s not my fault if we don’t hit those objectives. So I’m gonna start looking through all these potential risks and then I’m gonna start prioritizing those potential risks. I don’t know that they call it this, but essentially by this idea of cost of inaction. Meaning, if I let this risk fester, does it present a bigger or smaller risk than everything else on my list? Because no one executive is gonna have the budget, people, resources to address every risk. And so they’re making that decision in many ways on their own. They’re going out there. They’re learning, podcasts like this. They’re going to meetings. They’re phoning a friend. And then they shape their decision around what criteria and what risk they need to go out and attack. So in my opinion, we have to be obviously working on those accounts where they’ve decided they have a problem and our solution fits. It’s where we all wanna spend our time. We also have to be thinking about the fact that not everybody is going to do that cost of an action exercise and decide that what we do has made the cut. And so if we are just pelting these people saying, this is what we do and this is what we do, we’re gonna have a really hard time converting those people. And I’m gonna have a very hard time converting or hitting my target just on the back of people that are interested in what we offer. So what I advocate for is I call it kind of the problem prompter framework, where I’m starting with something I see here or observe about them. So I use this example. I’ll just use it again for sake of being tactical. When Vanta got their last round of funding a couple months ago, a lot of sellers probably reached out to Stevie, their CRO, and said, hey. Congrats on the funding. We’re the world’s leader of this. Like, do you have time next week to meet to talk about it? And I imagine she could probably filter her inbox very quickly by just seeing, like, congrats on the funding and assuming that’s cold emails. Instead, if you start with Christina, their CEO, spoke about x. In this case, she spoke about using that funding to continue the move up market. Now I’m hooking on an objective that is obviously important enough to make it into the funding announcement. Now I’ve gotta start seeding something about what might make that objective hard. So where I go in this email is to say, not sure if you’re seeing this, but on average, enterprise opportunities, on average, have about eleven point two stakeholders involved, much bigger stakeholder requirements than an SMB. And of those deals, about forty to sixty percent of those are lost to no decision. So not sure if your team is seeing that as being a barrier to getting in the door and closing those opportunities, but this company over here had some smart ways to get after it. Are you open to hearing what they did? Now in that example and then I’ll shut up. In that example, I’m not talking at all about my product. Instead, I am anticipating or hypothesizing a potential problem, and I’m talking about it with unsure tonality because I don’t work there. I have no idea if that’s happening. I have no idea if it’s hard. But I’m putting it out there to say, I will first introduce you to how another company has thought about it. And then if you bite on that message, I can assume there’s some level of interest in that problem. In many ways, it’s just about slowing down. Like, if you have a problem worth solving, they will want to hear about your solution. We don’t need to leave with it. So it’s almost like you’re it’s researched back just like you. Right? Because you’re basically you’re kinda doing the same thing, except you’re contextualizing it in a company that’s probably has characteristics that really are just like you, not just generic. Oh, you’re a CRO in a enterprise blah blah blah. Exactly. And it takes, what, three minutes to read that funding announcement so I can do that. And the very first thing they see in that email is a statement about something they’re doing. Like, one of the pitfalls I used to fall into is I would start my emails and be like, hi. My name is Jen, and I hope you’re well. And I was reading your annual report, and by that time, they’ve already deleted it. And so this is just getting to the point. Readers are selfish. Talk about them more than we talk about ourselves. Slow it down. Like, I found a lot of success with that. So you mentioned I’m just gonna go on a tangent here a little bit because we do specialize out in here around here. So you mentioned websites, and you also you’re talking about you’re engaging with your clients on outbound sales. But how could you take something like this where you do that level? Because you build a website and you’re like, oh, we have our page for financial services, and we’re all financial services firms like you have this problem. How would you create a broader on a website, whatever it is in messaging that’s not a one to one outbound that could use a similar tactic? Because I’m literally just gonna wait for you to tell me that. I don’t wanna take notes. I love this tangent. So what I think is always interesting is case studies have some of the best things in them, but it’s not the ending. It’s not the after. It’s the before. So whenever I start working with a company, I go to their case studies page and I look for how do their customers and prospects talk about the problem? What is that moment of realization they have when tolerating the problem was no longer enough? What are the things they tried before they tried implementing this? Like, that’s the type of thing I think even for myself as I’ve stepped into a buying role where I’m looking to see, does this company help people like me? And when I’m thinking about like me, I mean, with problems like me. And so I get less lit up by looking at a company solution because, again, I think on a website, it’s hard to make them sound fundamentally different. Where I would choose to spend more time with one supplier over another is if they did a better job articulating common problems that ultimately led to someone valuing their solution. Because that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for that moment where I’m like, you get me and we haven’t even gotten on the phone yet. Mhmm. So we talk about jobs to be done, but this is problems to be solved. Yeah. And, like, how does that go? Okay. I like it. That’s good shit. I come on. I earned that. I earned it. I’ve been waiting for at least ten minutes. I’ve earned that. You earned it. Alright. It makes sense. Right? Everything you say is very intuitive. It makes sense. It isn’t done very often. Right? Why do you think that every seller out there isn’t applying this approach? Right? Isn’t, like, taking the extra three minutes to read the funding announcement or the earnings call? My inbox tells you otherwise. You know? I think it goes back to what we talked about before. It’s this easy button mentality. In many ways, we have grown up in sales being told that it is a numbers game. In many ways, there are plenty of sellers I come across today who say deep in my gut, I know this is the wrong answer, but I’m being held to a standard of x number of emails to be sent a day, x number of dials to be sent a day. And in order to stay out of that target zone, I cannot do these things. And so in many ways, I know it’s so easy to blame the seller because the seller is the one delivering that experience. But my first question is always, what is the system and the environment we’ve set up for that seller? Because if it is about I’m at the bottom of the leaderboard on activity and I’m at risk of losing my job, of course, I’m gonna do the things that are asked of me. And so in many ways, I think this is like a much deeper, larger problem where we as an organization probably need to have a bit more of a a mindset of scarcity. New approach where I said, every week, you can only target twenty accounts. And if you do not convert any of those twenty accounts in terms of booking a meeting, you don’t get more. You only get more accounts if you convert of the small set that you have. And so what happened, he said, was people stopped with the thoughtless cadences. They stopped with the, like, mindless calling, and they got really strategic. And he’s like, once that behavior developed, then I knew I could trust them to carry that on because they saw the direct result of it. But I think so many of us are under pressure to just hit these astronomical numbers that it just feels far fetched to try something like that even though that’s essentially, I think, what most buyers would say they want. I don’t think anyone wants to be one of a thousand in someone’s cadence. I love that. One of the other things you also that you tipped on a little bit and sort of marketers were sort of responsible for this in some ways when we talk about, like and we actually our our researchers our team, Carrie Cunningham, science of b two b, put out some research recently that talked about and it was the second year of this about buyers, the first I think it’s eighty four percent of the time, the first vendor they engage with is the one they go in. Right? So it sort of opens up this dialogue of, like, you don’t wanna reach out and pound pound pound when someone’s in the early stage, but you want to enable them to learn, get the information they need, little friction as possible. And, of course, the magic of, hey. I’m gonna download a white paper, and then you get seventy five emails being like, you downloaded a white paper. You must wanna look at our demo. So we can blame us. We’re responsible. Although, not us, but there are only Not us. Not personally. We don’t do that shit. But, basically, I did it again. I’m sorry. I’m gonna stop. I really not sorry. So I think it’s the question to to you is buyers are hesitating to go through that because they know the the script. The repercussions. Yeah. So, like, what do you do for a seller who wants to try to get that that meeting or they’re trying to get into there? And you you can clearly identify somebody as a you can you call it a learner in your in your content. Like, what do you do? How do you fix that? I think first and foremost, this idea of hand raisers versus learners is something that sales and marketing should be aligned with. I I think when I used to sell, obviously, the Challenger methodology, which meant sales and marketing both had to buy into it, And there was such misalignment in terms of the most simple things, like, what do we consider a lead? Like, in many cases, marketing was, like, they gave us their email address. It is a lead. And then sellers would sit on the other side of that and be, like, there’s nothing about this dude at a o l dot com that is a lead. And so we’re in marketing, and I I can empathize with both sides. Marketing route here creating all this content, and then sales is letting it sit. Sales is saying, I’ve got a limited amount of time. I’ve gotta hit a quota. I can’t follow-up with all of these leads equally. And so what we ended up doing is saying, let’s classify them differently. A learner is someone who maybe attended a webinar, came by our booth, downloaded a white paper, but maybe that white paper was about, you know, the top ten discovery questions to ask. That does not mean that person wants to buy a sales methodology. It just means that they may have some latent pain around discovery. So if I treat that person the same way that I treat a hand raiser, which is someone raising their hand saying, I’d like to take a demo, then, of course, I’m going to alienate those people away that are learners because they’re gonna say there’s so much friction when I learn with you. I’m gonna go and learn somewhere else. And that is what I would imagine a marketer’s worst nightmare. Like, we are trying to capture attention, and now sales is making it harder for us to do that. And so in my mind, if I have a learner and we I I hosted this webinar series. We’d get a lot of people coming in. Instead of saying, I saw you attended our webinar. Are you free next week to talk more about it? What I would say is, here’s something I didn’t cover on the webinar. It’s the five questions Debbie uses to understand if she’s got the right champion. Not sure if your team is seeing deals getting lost to, you know, someone who’s not truly a champion, but if so, happy to share some other ideas that we’ve seen from some companies that have been effective at solving for it. Either way, appreciate you joining. Right? And then what I’m doing is I’m just positioning myself as someone who has got more to teach. And if you look at where buyers spend their time, like, this is Gartner research that came out a few years ago, eighty three percent of it is spent basically learning about the problem, about the potential options, and it’s not spent with us. So my job number one is how do I carve myself into that? And I don’t think I do that by trying to sell. I think I do that when I’m more effectively trying to teach them around things they’ve expressed an interest in. Yep. So, I mean, it’s clear. Right? Quality over quantity. Really curating the experience for the prospect to meet them where they are in the journey. Right? All really, really important tenets to making it work. We live in the world of AI. We live in the world of cadences and sequences. And and so how do you approach the benefits of tools like that with the need to just be so much more prescriptive and customized? Yeah. And and I don’t wanna act like a complete moron that, like, we can all just sit there and attack our entire level executives and my tier one, probably tier two companies like that, but I can’t reach my entire territory like that. And I think if you’ve sold for more than a year, you’ve had people that buy that you’re like, wow, I would have never put them in territory a or priority one. And so in my opinion, the way that I think about that is I write for one company first. So let’s say I wrote for Vanta. Then what I do is once I have a really strong message, I pull back and I say, what other companies would have a similar problem state to that? And how can I efficiently find that? So I’m by no means at all a whiz on AI or anything like that. But there’s so many tools now where you can say, find me companies that reference moving up market. Find me companies that reference enterprise motion. Find me companies that on their website, they have enterprise logos. You can use scraping tools. Then I I still have message relevance, and I think that’s the key. I have no issue with sequences or cadences when it’s a relevant message based on something we uncovered. But I think what it takes is writing the message first to an end of one and then pulling back and saying who else looks like that. So instead of prioritizing my territory by, like, who’s got the most employees or the biggest revenue size or the largest sales teams, I’m prioritizing my territory by propensity to have the problem. And that’s where I think you can still hit scale without losing relevance. Yeah. That’s I mean, there’s the the tools even the RDA, I was I just asked for a lookalike on something. And it’s now with now these sort of, like, the latest round of AI pulling in, like, live search and all that, like, that’s the the research thing is becoming, like, easier than it could ever possibly have been before. So that’s pretty that’s pretty amazing. And that’s always everybody’s excuse. Right? Like, I don’t have time to do the research. Well, you do now because it’s it’s really damn easy. Yeah. So we’re getting towards the end, and we have, and we may have to record parental advisory explicit lyrics at the beginning of this. Do they still put that on albums? I don’t even know. But I think they just don’t do. I have a fifteen year old son who likes to listen to music that has parental advisory. I don’t I can’t believe I put that out there, but sorry, Samantha. So we have a question that we ask all of our guests. So it is, what is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve ever been asked to do in your career? And the definition of ridiculous can be both good or bad. And we’ve gotten answers from smuggling swag across the border to sunsetting a hundred customers on a product in seventy two hours to working with NASA on an amazing program. So it is far reaching. You have not been prepped for this question. Yeah. Well, this is probably gonna get me in trouble, but the best answers always do. Right? Yes. When COVID hit, I had sold a really, really large deal that had a lot of live training included. And then, like, two weeks later after they signed, the prospect reached back out and said, hey. There’s obviously a worldwide pandemic. Like, this affects our plans to bring people together. Is there any way we can, like, rip up this contract, talk about options, whatever? So I took it back to our company and was told that I had to charge them a cancellation fee that was so astronomical and so wild. And I fought it. I fought it. I fought it, and I lost. And so I went back to the prospect, told them. And then what in Chanel, they got out of it. But it was not after we completely soured that relationship, which which is one I had taken years to build. They were my biggest client. So that was one of those things where I was like, oh, I coulda shoulda kept fighting and I just didn’t. But lesson learned, I think you gotta go through those lessons to know where you push harder on the organization versus where you see. It’s so funny because that’s a recurring theme in to the answers to these questions of you know what you really need to do, but pressure, whether it’s from seniors, whether it’s from, you know, externally just kind of you fight your gut. Yes. In the end, the gut’s always right. It’s It’s always right. It’s always it never fails you. That’s why the gut is there. So lesson learned on my part. I own my part in that mistake too, but that was by far I was thinking of, like, all of the ridiculous things I’ve actually done, but I think that is the most offensively ridiculous. Probably really uncomfortable for you to be like, so I wouldn’t. Yeah. They’re like, do you want us to fly people in during a pandemic? I was like, no. I personally don’t know. I think you should probably keep them at home. Awesome. Jen, you were wonderful. Thank you so much. Really great tips and immediately sort of applicable things for sellers, for marketers about just giving a shit a little bit more. And we already have Was the lyrics. Let’s just go go to the wall on it. Let’s just go. So, yeah. Thank you. This was fantastic. Thank you. And I have to say, I had never been to breakthrough before. Wow. Just wow. I will be back back every year as long as you’ll have me. That was an absolutely incredible conference. I’m not just saying because you invited me, and I’m here on this today. Like, was talking about it for weeks after. So kudos to y’all, and thanks for letting me part of the experience. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.
Sales teams face immense pressure to meet monthly quotas, which often lead them to resort to tactics that prioritize their convenience over the customer’s needs.
It’s time for sellers to step up and truly give a sh*t.
In this episode, Jen Allen-Knuth, Founder of DemandJen, talks about what it means to care about your prospects. Having been in sales for 18 years, Jen points out the common pitfalls for sellers such as relying on outdated scripts, generic outreach, and shallow research.
When sellers can demonstrate an understanding of their customer’s pain points, they earn trust that lasts beyond the first call.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How to preempt and overcome the status quo with proactive messaging
- The three outdated sales motions you should stop using
- Ways to build relevance and urgency in every buyer interaction
Jump into the conversation:
00:00 Customer-centric sales with Jen Allen-Knuth
06:40 Why most deals are lost to the status quo
09:48 Three outdated sales motions
13:28 The problem prompter framework
22:06 How to engage with “learners” vs. “hand raisers”
25:56 Leveraging AI for better outreach
The 6sense Team
6sense helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team.