January 11, 2025 | Read online
Helping elevate the people and profession of Sales by sharing authentic conversations, practical tips, expert advice, relevant tech and real-world lessons from my experience selling every day. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
I need you to take 2 minutes and answer 3 very simple questions that will help me give you better and more relevant content this year”
Happy New Year!
Sorry, according to Larry Davidson I shouldn’t be saying that after the 7th.
Regardless, it’s a whole new year and we have to get after it so let’s get going.
TACTICAL TIPS: KNOW YOUR EQUATION
SALES RESOURCES: LOOK ALIKE CLIENTS
SALES FROM THE STREETS: EMPATHY WINS
TACTICAL TIPS:
Know Your Sales Equation
It’s that time of year again when we have to start all over again in Sales.
New year, new quota and it’s usually lower than last year.
Just kidding, it’s always higher.
We barely get a chance to breathe at the end of the year before we have to get after it again to start the year strong.
It’s no wonder most sales reps can’t answer the question - what’s your sales equation?
What are the activities that you need to be doing consistently to exceed your quota?
How many deals, proposals, meetings, and prospecting activities do we need to do every month?
The first module of my Filling the Funnel program is called “Know Your Equation".
I’ll be sharing the training video with everyone on this newsletter for free when we launch the new Membership platform in February, but I think it’s important to do this equation sooner than later, so I wanted to give you the worksheet here.
(This is a master file, so you can make your own copy; you don’t need to ‘request access’ from me).
There are two tabs at the bottom of the sheet; one is for full cycle sales (AE), and the other is for the SDR role focused on getting meetings.
All you have to do is fill in the cells highlighted in yellow, and it will give you a breakdown of what activities you should be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis to hit your quota.
Feel free to email me directly if you have any questions.
SALES RESOURCES:
Look Alike Clients
I think 2025 should be the year of Quality over Quantity.
Let AI play the volume game. It’s better at it than we are anyway.
We need to double down on the give-a-shit factor and tailor our messaging and approaches to the clients we can add the most value to
That’s why we need to reevaluate and dig into the details of our Ideal Customer Profile to find the clients who are most likely to need and get value from our solutions.
We need to go way deeper than just industry, revenues, employee count and number of locations.
The more detailed we get, the more targeted and relevant we can be with our approach, which should lead to much higher conversion rates and much better customers.
Here’s how I suggest approaching this:
-
Identify your top 10 existing customers who are:
- Doing well in this economy and
- Getting a lot of value from your solution
- Get your GTM+ team (Sales, Marketing, CS, Finance) together in a room or on a Zoom call
-
Dissect each client to find all the characteristics that make them a good customer, including:
- Their tech stack
- Stage of business (series A, B, C, etc)
- Size of department you sell into
- Who do they sell to (their ICP)
- Etc etc
- Once you dissect all 10 clients, identify the common characteristics they share
-
Then create a “Saved Search” in LinkedIn Sales Navigator with as many of those characteristics as you can
- Added bonus on this one - add the 10 customers to the “past company” filter so you get alerted any time someone from one of these 10 clients moves to a new company that fits your ICP
Now that you have this list of your best customers, you can use this new tool I came across to find look-a-like clients to prospect to: https://revfx.ai/lookalike-accounts
(It’s free and they are not a sponsor)
Enjoy!
SALES FROM THE STREETS:
Empathy Wins
Never in the history of human conflicts has the phrase "calm down" ever calmed things down.
I just had to cancel a flight and hotel room for a charity event I was going to with my wife this Friday in Atlanta due to the weather.
We were staying at the W Hotel, and I'm a lifetime Platinum Elite member of Marriott (which the W is part of).
As I was clicking the cancel button online, I noticed they had a 3-day cancellation policy, but I didn't notice it until it was too late.
So I called Marriott to see if they could help me out. I knew the policy, so I knew I was asking for a favor from whoever would pick up the phone.
First, I was shocked that they didn't know who I was when I called in.
I'm not saying that in the douchey "do you know who I am" context, I'm saying that from a technical standpoint.
My phone number is connected to my Marriott number, which should show my status, no?
It's 2025....
Needless to say, after I gave her my name Platinum number and explained the situation, her first response was:
"Well, that's why we put the policy on the website so you know what the policy is."
That didn't exactly sit well with me, but I remained completely even-keeled and explained that I knew what the policy was, based on my 20 years of loyalty to Marriott, I was hoping they could help me address the issue and get the refund.
Then she said the magic words...
"Excuse me sir, please calm down...."
Now, for anyone who knows me, you know I can get pretty passionate about things, and when I get pissed, it's pretty obvious. I'm also extremely self-aware of my actions.
There have been plenty of times in my life where a "calm down" was warranted. This was not one of them.
The old me probably would have pulled out the "Boston John" approach and lit off on her but I've matured over the years.
So, I took this as an opportunity to take a second and put myself in her shoes.
The weather around the country has been crazy recently, which has probably led to a lot of cancellations and, therefore, a lot of pissed-off travellers calling in to complain.
She had probably been dealing with more than a few irate customers who actually did need to calm down.
Also, it wasn't her fault the system didn't flag who I was and what my status was.
Needless to say, I paused and asked her if she had been dealing with difficult customers today and she said yes.
I then told her I wasn't trying to be difficult and didn't want to add to her frustration, I was just looking for a favor and if she couldn't help me I understood.
From there we both "calmed down" and tried to address this issue at hand.
Moral of the story:
1) NEVER tell someone to calm down
2) Try to have some empathy for customer service people these days
PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: Insightly by Unbounce
I'm so excited to announce my new partnership with Insightly by Unbounce. For those who don't know, Insightly is a CRM that makes your life way easier, super customizable, and extremely cost-efficient. I saw the tech and partnered with them the next day.
And honestly, I'm so sick of overpaying for CRMs.
A CRM shouldn’t feel like just another chore. Insightly is built to make your life easier, and here's one way it does just that:
Insightly just dropped a brand new AI-powered email Summaries feature that allows you to get bite-sized summaries from even your most complex sales conversations baked into Insightly CRM automatically.
Phase one of this feature will allow you to easily convert lengthy emails from leads and contacts in your CRM into digestible summaries. See the feature in action here.
Insightly is hooking up our readers with free onboarding when they sign up ($1500 value).
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ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME
- The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day! 3000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?
- The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)
- The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.
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