Episode Transcript
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You were listening to be tob revenue
acceleration, a podcast dedicated helping software executive
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stay on the cutting edge of sales
and marketing in their industry. Let's get
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into the show. Hi, welcome
to be to be a revenue acceleration.
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My name is looking with it,
and I'm yet today with Jamie Shanks,
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see you at sells for life.
How are you today, Jimmy? Fantastic.
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Thank you for having me. Well, it's a pleasure having you.
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The topic for the day's a pisidies
outset up your business for the social world.
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But before we go into the the
details of the conversation, Jamie,
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we always ask a very simple question
at the outside, which is, can
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you please introduce yourself, as well
as the company you represent, sells for
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life? Fantastic. So my name's
Jimmie shanks. I'm the CEO of sales
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for life, and sales for life
is a professional services firm that focuses on
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skills, enablement and training. So
our expertise is consulting and training sales leaders
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and sales professionals on a very specific
topic called social selling. But ultimately our
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real responsibility is pipeline creation, powered
by modern digital selling, our social selling.
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Okay, that sounds it definitely isn't
yet. We are a lot about
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and lots of people are investing in
social media, but it's in it is
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also a bit of wall that people
are still trying to understorm's in training to
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experiment. So I ma Charlotte,
of holiday audience will benefit from the conversation
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today. On the side of running
your company, also the youth of two
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best setting books on them as well, which are tied towards social setting,
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mastery and spear selling. Those book
by the great impact on Ridaos with one
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of your books writing extremely number one
and Amazon your release. So cost of
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all congratulation for that, because that's
that's a bit of an achievement. But
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going on to my question, I
was the recognition for Your Best Practices shuting
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this book being persived by Your readils. Well, I think that a specifically
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spear selling, which is the new
book that I wrote and was published in
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January two thousand and nineteen. It
was crafted because the world of social selling,
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people were confused. How do I
use modern digital selling or social selling
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in an account based world? The
reality is the whole world can't be all
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of our customers, how do I
focus in on a certain country or a
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vertical or a set named of accounts? And so it's based on our curriculum.
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Are Training. Curriculum is called social
selling mastery and the goal was to
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teach sellers how, specifically, if
you're going to select. The most important
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tip was how to select accounts based
on competitive advantages rather than competitive disadvantages,
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and ultimately that's powered by relationships.
That that makes sense. And in some
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of the processes that you are using, on the way you go about,
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the social platform you are using,
the medium that you are using, would
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you say it is mainly based on
the type of persona that you are trying
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to target or more on the solution
and product that you are trying to sell?
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A great question. So the most
important piece to modern digital prospecting is
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actually to develop a process autonomous of
any solution. So you think through,
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what do I want to accomplish?
What type of accounts, what I want
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to find? How would I want
to engage them? You draw out those
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ideas without a social media platform,
thought through an advance. Then you identify
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a platform that best communicates with your
audience. So you're calling me from Europe,
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if I lived in Germany, as
an example, I may use Zin
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as a tool to execute the very
sales play that I designed. If I
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live in Dubai, I may use
WHATSAPP as a tool. The reality is
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the tool only is an accelerant and
a mechanism to achieve communication, communication medium,
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or to achieve your research that you
want to conduct. It is not
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social selling in itself. Okay,
and I guess, as I mentioned in
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the introduction, we and I like
the Theato of your book, social selling
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mastery, because it seems that it's
it's raise something is a knot that you
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need to know how to perform and, as I was saying, lots of
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people are doing lots of trials and
that's what we feel from all clients.
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What would you say the key kpis
that you should measure, because there is
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audience, lots of people who are
speaking about likes at the beginning of facebook.
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If you've got, if you can
engage your audience on Facebook, of
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Ry. But what would you say
of the key KPI is that audience,
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if they're pushing social setting, should
look at in order to make sure that
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not only that using the right channel, but also they've got the right content
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on that channel. I think that
I I think we're people get mistaken as
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they spend too much time thinking around
the Kpis that are available within a social
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media platform, such as content sharing, likes, comment shares, and in
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fact we should be thinking of sales
objectives that we're trying to achieve. So,
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as an example, if your goal
is to have one net new discovery
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call every week, more than you're
having right now, that's a sales objective
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and thus yet the KPI that we
measure against is our ability to increase meetings
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and conversation. So, for those
listening on the call that might be marketers
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or might be enablement leaders or even
sales leaders, do not focus on the
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ability to measure what's in front of
your face inside a social media plas think
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about what achieves a sales objective for
yourself and then execute and ability to measure
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that very those very activities that highly
influence sales objectives. So glad we are.
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You saying that as a response to
my question. It's it's refreshing because
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sometimes I want to say it's frustrating, but it's it. You can have
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a frustration when it seems that social
media or social selling campaign, should I
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say, actually measured on the rich
and the rich is great, but it's
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a little bit like if you are
doing an, I guess, an emailing
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campaign. You could send an email
to a million people, but if nobody
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respond to you, that's great.
You've emailed in a million people, but
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if you've gotten a response, was
the point. It's probably better to sell
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an email to one person and get
them to respond to it rather than reaching
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a million and not having the right
message for them, not only from a
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self perspective but potentially from a brain
perspective, because it probably means that your
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message is stronger. More the Lord. As I said, I'm glad you
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gave that on so because it's it
should be all about conversion and cells.
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So that's great. Moving on to
your YouTube channel. So we took a
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good look at a sells for life
and if we came across a lot of
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videos while you're sharing insight and tapes
through web nails and and speaking about your
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experience. You have thousands of subscriber
and great feedback on your videos. What
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would you say? I'll the teeth
that you would give to people. Company.
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We would like to Creid our own
online presence and get into the sociorts
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sitting atmosphere. Great Question. Ultimately, whatever business you're in, you're creating
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subject matter, expertise and intellectual property. The companies want to hear best practices,
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pitfalls challenges. The ability for you
to document these, whether they're in
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video format or they're in a written
blog, or you're hosting a Webinar or
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you're hosting a podcast like we're on
right now, is creating a schedule to
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be able to dispense that knowledge out
into the marketplace, and the simplest way
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to do this is to start with
a blog. That's where a lot of
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companies usually start, and the best
way to start that we called the insights
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committee, and this is where key
sellers within an organization will actually talk into
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a video camera about pitfalls and challenges
and Best Practices they're hearing in the market.
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They're basically going to tell customer stories
and then you record that message and
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you hand it to somebody to do
speech to text and now all the sudden
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you take all that intellectual property from
the sellers minds, you put it into
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written form and you get it out
into the market and companies love reading it
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because it's, you know, the
voice of the customer sellers, of sharing
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it, because it comes from them. A stuff. Simplest way you can
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get started it's just take all of
the ideas that are in your head and
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actually record them, because most companies
live in a vacuum. They don't actually
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learn as much as they should on
a topic, and that's your job,
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is to teach them. Absolutely yea, so great tips, actuation things we
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should have play it well self.
So my next question would be more about
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my theory of questions is more around
the evolution of social media. Okay,
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so, for example, social media, long time ago when for as an
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individual, for myself, was my
space, and then you moved on to
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facebook, and now facebook is not
coold anymore. So people keep keep on
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moving and I think instagram is is
kind of the new platform in a way,
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and in the middle you've got things
like twitter, snapchat and everything.
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So the way people are communicating seems
to be evolving. We used to post
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about ourself and put some comments and
comments on those other people, and now
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it's all about putting a picture and
liking the pictures and changing the media.
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So you've been doing what you've been
doing for seven years now and I would
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say that a lot has changed into
thousand and twelve. So how do you
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see yourself and your company progressing with
social media and keep on screaving through that
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medium in getting your word out?
Yeah, and there's two plays. is
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where we it's interesting as social media
evolves, what hasn't been solidified is strategy
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and leadership around it. So those
are those are the two places that my
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company is doubling and tripling down on
helping. The reality is as well,
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there's hundreds of things you could do
on social media platforms. We're not distilling
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it. I think that the world
of social selling training hadn't done a great
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job of properly distilling it down to
executable sales place that not only a seller
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could could execute. Goes from strategy
to execution, but more importantly, how
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frontline sales managers could coach towards it
and turn it into coachable moments. So,
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in fact, the platforms keep moving
and people adjust what platforms they're on.
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Where we're focused is let's actually develop
a universal road map of what the
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strategy should be. Remember, we
talked about sales place. It's a process,
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not at not a platform. So
what we're trying to do is define
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the exact processes that, no matter
what happens on any particular social media platform,
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you could just adjust the platform of
choice to use around the process and
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then you could also teach a coach, a frontline sales manager, a second
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line sales manager, to actually look
for what we would call green flags and
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red flags. People are doing the
right activities, people are not doing the
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right activities. So that's how we're
addressing it. Is I think. Let
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the world keep moving in the way
it is. But yeah, hearn the
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is in the coachable moments now.
Okay, I like the response as well
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on that one because I think it's
it's an interesting way to look into it
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and and you are right, you
can't stop the evolution of the platform.
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So those, the scachable moments,
are quite an interesting concept as well.
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If we look at it now,
not from the company with trying to get
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on the social setting strategy and trying
to get out the message for social social
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selling, but if we look at
it from the end use of perspective.
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What I see myself from prospecting and
I would say using social media as an
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nonshore Pronoun, as a sales person. I would use, for example,
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Linkedin to send message to people.
Okay, but I want to reach out
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to I would say that Linkedin was
probably one of the best tool five years,
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six years ago in term of reaching
out to people, and the response
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rate was pretty good. And now
I see the response rates going lower and
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I'm using the same message. I
would like to believe that I'm still sending
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the rights information, I'm sending pertinence
till out information to the people I'm trying
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to reach out to. But my
question is, from your perspective, how
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do you see the end user consume, mean social media? How do you
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see them? Do you see them
changing? Do you see them getting fed
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up about the specific, but foremost
specific quail being engaged with? I definitely
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see that more and more sellers are
leveraging tools like linkedin to communicate with customers
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instead of using their email platform button. Are the ones that are being very
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successful are actually rethinking their messaging completely, and where they're rethinking their messaging is,
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instead of using the written word,
by typing a message to a prospect,
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what they're doing is making videos and
they're using free and available video tools
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that allow them to not only humanize
themselves, the seller, but also synthesize
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all kinds of best practices. In
short, three thousand two hundred and sixty
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two videos, and they could teach
customers things they don't already know. They
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could show new ideas, because eighty
five percent of people are visual learners.
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It just makes sense. And so
the ones that are really successful are still
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using tools like Linkedin, which are
getting busier and busier. You know,
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there's almost like five or six hundred
million users on it right now. But
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they're using the power of video to
be unique, to be bold and different
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in front of the customer. So
basically using this seb medium, but changing
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the actual content, but changing the
actual content, and video, as we
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all know as consumers, is becoming
more and more important in society for communication.
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So they're just using what naturally the
customer is consuming anyways, which is
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videos. I've got to be honest
with you. Actually gave some companies a
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meeting not so long ago after receiving
a video, and I saw that it
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was a very smart way and it
was different, and also you get a
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feel closer to the person because you
actually see them, yes, and that's
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definitely something that is valuable and I
did fall in the trap. So I
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got such a trapped he was a
very well built message and a nice person
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delivering that message and that gay seemed
to be very pasionate about what he was
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doing and he was able to explain
to me, while looking at me kind
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of India ice through my computer,
with a lot of passion, that we
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should engage and I felt that he
was the right thing to say yes to
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him. And I think we've got
a cold tomorrow or something like that,
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so it's definitely walking now. You
mentioned that there is some free platform.
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Can you just mentioned the name of
this platform? So so, so maybe
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audience can have a look at them. Yeah, the tool that I like
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to use is by a company called
videyard and the tool is called go video.
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It's a chrome extension, a google
chrome extension. You get downloaded and
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use it on your computer right now. Wonderful. Why I should definitely take
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a look at that. SOS like
something that we should try against. Lots
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of good tips and an insight in
the conversation today, Jimmy, one thing
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that we also do at the later
state of the conversation, which we are
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getting into now, is to ask
you what is the best way for audience
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to get in touch with you?
Some of the people listening to the podcast
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may want to have a quick code
with you to discuss the social were setting
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00:15:46.620 --> 00:15:52.409
strategy. They may want to get
more information or potentially use your services.
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00:15:52.649 --> 00:15:54.769
So what is the best way for
them to get into trees? You,
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00:15:54.809 --> 00:15:58.490
Jamie, always your team. The
best way to get ahold of me is
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00:15:58.570 --> 00:16:03.970
actually through Linkedin. They can message
me on linkedin anytime, or you could
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email me at Jamie at sales for
lifecom and I am happy to help your
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00:16:07.879 --> 00:16:11.559
audience. It was twelve you on
the show today, Jimmy. Thank you
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00:16:11.600 --> 00:16:18.590
so much for having me. operatics
has redefined the meaning of revenue generation for
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00:16:18.710 --> 00:16:25.029
technology companies worldwide. While the traditional
concepts of building and managing inside sales teams
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00:16:25.070 --> 00:16:29.870
inhouse has existed for many years,
companies are struggling with a lack of focus,
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00:16:30.149 --> 00:16:36.659
agility and scale required in today's fast
and complex world of enterprise technology sales.
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00:16:36.700 --> 00:16:42.820
See How operatics can help your company
accelerate pipeline at operatics dotnet. You've
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00:16:42.860 --> 00:16:48.090
been listening to be tob revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an
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00:16:48.129 --> 00:16:52.169
episode, subscribe to the show in
your favorite podcast player. Thank you so
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00:16:52.289 --> 00:16:53.129
much for listening. Until next time,
