Learning from others’ career experiences is arguably the best way to improve your sales game and sales podcasts or webinars are the most effortless way to go about doing just that. Just like you’d have a cup of coffee to kickstart your day, a sales podcast or webinar every morning is bound to fill you with a ton of ideas and outside perspectives — the best kept secret to having an ultra productive workday as a salesperson.
In our previous article, we listed some of the best sales podcasts that will help you learn from the successes, failures and mistakes of some of the biggest and baddest names in sales. And if your stubborn self still insists on not having the time to listen to them, then you’re at just the right place. Here are 5 super insightful takeaways and important lessons from some of my favorite sales podcasts!
The 5 Best Sales Podcasts Pre-Chewed For You
1. How to Sell Using Pain
On the 343rd episode of Victor Antonio’s podcast, Sales Influence – Why People Buy!, he teaches us about the all-important art of how to sell using pain.
Victor says that the best way to motivate and nudge people into buying your product is by provoking them into really thinking that they’re failing to change by highlighting what they’re missing out on — how they’re losing money, how they’re losing market share, how their costs are spiralling out of control. This will help make them uncomfortable about their current situation and enable you to nudge them into generating a greater need for your product.
Victor talks about Ernest Dichter, the famous American psychologist and marketing expert from the 1950s, who highlighted the need to make people constructively discontent in order to make them buy. Victor says that in today’s language, we can use the philosophy of loss aversion that states that people tend to run away faster from pain than towards gain.
This essentially means that the pain of staying the same (losing out by not buying your product) needs to appear to outweigh the pain of change. To do this, your job as a salesperson is to highlight what the buyer is missing out on by not making the change (buying your product).
For example, by pointing a buyer to something they’re not able to do or something their competitors are doing that they aren’t able to do will help them visualize that pain. This could include highlighting their low average deal sizes, shrinking market share, longer sales cycles or other such obstacles they currently face.
So before you get into your next presentation with a buyer, ask yourself where you go in on the pain.
2. The Real Reason Behind Why the CRM Was Invented
On the 907th episode of The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul, the legendary host (who we were lucky enough to have on one of our previous webinar) sits with one of the fathers of the CRM industry, Jon Ferrara, to talk about the state of sales today.
It’s fair to say that Jon knows CRMs like the back of his hand, having co-founded the revolutionary GoldMine CRM software that transformed how sales people accessed contacts and customer data in the 90s.
When asked about the future of CRMs, Jon says the biggest problem is that most people don’t really know what a CRM is or what it should be used for.
Here’s Jon’s definition of a CRM:
It is a database where you put things in and get things out based on the fulfillment of a specific purpose. Most people use a CRM database to manage the cycle of prospects and leads in order to turn them into customers. They then use sales-marketing automation in conjunction with the CRM to lead-qualify and pass on to sales reps who then engage with them.
However, the basic nature of the CRM was founded on the Rolodex before evolving into the traditional 4×6 index card methodology for recalling people and following up with them. This then evolved into a day timer before eventually transforming into the CRM of the 90s.
At its core, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, the centre of which is relationships — our contacts. Originally, the birth of CRMs was contact management, where Act! was designed to manage tasks and notes for personal contacts while GoldMine pioneered integrating contacts for teams, not just salespeople but everyone in the company, helping integrate email, contact, calendar and sales-marketing automation.
Jon adds that GoldMine pioneered Outlook and Salesforce before they existed, except GoldMine was created as a database where every contact lived, was managed and engaged with. When Outlook came about it became the place for interaction and engagement pushing GoldMine into becoming a platform for lead flow management, reporting and nurture automation.
GoldMine had trademarked automated processes which enabled you to take actions based on triggers for people and companies. This involved taking leads and putting them on a track to nurture accordingly. Jon says that Siebel and then Salesforce were possibly created because they didn’t want people using their own personal GoldMines and Act!s to manage contacts and wanted to command and control the database. This is what he says evolved into what we know today as enterprise CRMs.
Jon adds that most CRMs today are designed for management and reporting as opposed to engagement and contacts. As a result, CRMs aren’t really good at contact management and engagement. This is essentially why when you buy a CRM today, you also NEED to get a sales intelligence tool (like Slintel) for your contacts along with a sales engagement tool, where salespeople spend most of their time today.
3. The Importance of Your Signature Line
In this episode of The Bill Caskey Podcast: High Impact Sales Training for Sellers and Leaders, Bill runs us through one little thing that you might be missing out on that will help you scale your email leads.
As a salesperson, your signature line is something that is seen by a ton of people every year. This is a great place to get some action when doing your inbound considering that most signature lines are quite weak. They generally only contain your name, phone number, email and your position.
Adding these two things to the mix will help you land a lot more prospects via email.:
- The first one is adding your calendar to your signature line. There’s tons of tools out there that allow prospects to book an open slot in your calendar for a predetermined period. This will help nudge your prospect into booking a meeting with you.
- The second is to add a link to a value delivering resource about your product that you have produced. This can be anything from a blog or podcast to a whitepaper or webinar. Make sure your resource has a compelling title if you expect your prospects to click on it and ensure the resource itself has your call-to-action within it. Also, keep updating this resource or creating new ones to stay relevant so you can continue getting those clicks.
If for instance 1000 people read your emails every year, 100 might click on your resource and from it 10 might choose to click on your CTA.
4. How to Improve Your Sales Productivity According to Harvard’s Frank Cespedes
On the 350th episode of the Sales Game Changers podcast, the amazing Fred Diamond (who we also had the wonderful opportunity to bring on Rambling Sessions) talks to Harvard’s Senior Lecturer Frank Cespedes about the increasing need for financial literacy among sales leaders.
Frank says the pandemic revealed that many sales processes needed rethinking, one of the main ones being to ensure your reps spend more time selling. While the data Frank cites varies by industry and company, the aggregate amount of time the average salesperson spends in contact with customers and prospects – outreach, pitches/demos, either in person, on email, LinkedIn or other platforms accounts to 30% on average.
He further talks about the exponential impact most businesses can make if they upped their selling time to 35%, 40% or even 45%. Frank says that’s not only a very big productivity improvement, but for most businesses it would also help increase the Total Addressable Market or TAM of the business. This is because as you increase your selling time, segments that were uneconomic to reach now become much more accessible and this is a big deal.
Also, it is an omnichannel buying world that’s out there and the reality for most businesses is that they require a multi-channel approach to be able to grow their TAM with the extended selling time. However, that would come as a significant change for most sales teams as most salespeople are individual contributors. One of the reasons that a lot of people get into sales is because they like the autonomy of the sales function. But when you now have multiple channels as well as selling responsibilities, the individual contributor must also be well equipped to be able to do so. It’s one of the tougher transitions for most functions, but it becomes especially true in case of sales.
It’s therefore important for businesses to ensure that their sales reps can increase their selling time.
5. A Clever Way to Make Your Emails More Effective
John Barrows is the one of the best sales trainers in the world for a reason and his podcast Make It Happen Mondays is a must-listen for all you sales folks out there. Here a quick way from episode 195 that should help make your emails a whole lot more effective.
John says that email is great, but only if you are using it in tandem with other channels, namely phone calls. Having coached a ton of clients and reps, John adds that 70% of the meetings that they get are from the phone. Most of them say that they were only able to get in front of executives because they reached out to them on the phone.
John further adds that you should never bank on getting a conversion when sending an email. But if you do leave the prospect a voicemail telling them to look out for your email with a subject line then there’s a good chance that a conversion will take place. This is a clever workaround to the often unsuccessful act of leaving a voicemail telling prospects to call you back, which they tend to never do. So by prompting them to take an action, your chances of getting a response are much higher.
He further adds that relevance is the other key to making your emails a lot more effective. If you can give them something that’s extremely relatable like an article or a real life event and offer to have a conversation about it, then the perspective of the email completely changes.
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