Tech-Powered Sales

Justin Michael, Tony Hughes

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400226535
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión de la información

Conventional ways of selling are becoming outdated. Learn what it takes to go from the traditional sales mindset to a tech-enabled sales superhero.

In tough markets and with more people working remotely, creating a quality sales pipeline in traditional ways is more challenging than ever. As sales technologies continue to evolve and advance, developing technical quotient (TQ) is an essential element of sales success.

Record-setting sales expert Justin Michael and bestselling sales leadership author Tony Hughes combine to provide practical guidance on how professional sellers can maximize results with an effective sales tech-stack to increase sales effectiveness for outstanding results.

In Tech-Powered Sales, Michael and Hughes share helpful advice that:?

• Reveal the techniques that enable you to break through with difficult to reach buyers
• Teach you how sales technologies can be employed for maximum benefit by raising your TQ
• Enable you to make the jump from being a beginner to a superuser within your sales team
• Show you how to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution to leverage technology rather than be at risk of being replaced by it

Tech-Powered Sales delivers evidence-based strategies salespeople can use to create more opportunities than ever before. If you want to learn how to maximize your abilities to develop new business, this is the book for you!

PART I

SALESBORG THEORY

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

—Alan Kay, former chief scientist at Atari

You’ve picked up a book that if used correctly will give you real superpowers as a salesperson. No book like this has ever been written in the field of professional selling. You are about to go behind the veil to see how sales pipeline creation can be done at scale by an individual blending the human with the machine. There are some great books on prospecting for today’s world, like COMBO Prospecting by Tony Hughes, Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, and Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler, but none of those books fully explain how to drive strategies at scale—leveraging the full power of technology for the seller.

Read those books and apply what they teach using what you also learn here, and you will be number one in your company, even your industry. Remington Rawlings did, even with all the odds stacked against him, becoming a global top ten power user of Outreach. Working as a young rep trying to learn the tech sales world, while also going to school full-time, he had an unfortunate accident that caused major neck problems. Because he had to work faster and better than all his peers to keep up in school and work, he considered whether there were new ways to find a path to achieving quota. He read and studied, tested, practiced, collaborated, and came up with a system of territory planning that allowed a full connection of his sales tech stack.

After learning every button on every platform, he crafted tons of email content to avoid spam filters, maximize technology use, and connect with his target market in meaningful ways. Doing this hyper-personalization at scale led to 150 percent quota attainment repeatedly, outperforming his peers—and eventually coaching them. Having built $2.5 million in the pipeline in only three quarters with companies including PayPal, Symantec, UPS, Progressive, Gulfstream Aerospace, Smuckers, Bayer, KPMG, and Colgate, he was determined to help others find this same type of success. He contextualized it all for scaling automation and sequencing strategies across other SDR teams. Remi is living proof that the techniques in this book work. You, yes you, young Padawan, can do this too.

Execution is where most things fail. It’s not the knowledge that will change your life, it’s the doing that makes all the difference. In this book you will see how to operate at a whole new level, leveraging the age of machine automation. In doing so, you’ll be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.¹

As a seller, we’re often hired to literally create a miracle with revenue, and now, with what you will discover in these pages, you can. It will allow you to fuse with the modern sales stack in an unprecedented fashion—you’ll become the orchestrator of your techno-magical performance.

Technology is best at dealing with huge amounts of data, sifting for signals amidst the noise by pattern matching or identifying trigger events, automating repetitive processes or tasks, doing “what-if” analyses, making recommendations, and even rudimentary personalization at scale. In essence, machines can think and do where there are definable parameters with which to work.

Humans, on the other hand, have genuine empathy and can transfer belief and build trust with a real human connection through relevant storytelling. This can create a sense of belonging or community. People are also imaginative, creative, and equipped to deal with ambiguity and hidden agendas in navigating politics and complexity to provide vision and insights. Humans are best equipped to help others feel and decide to drive change, then build a business case for it and secure supporting consensus. Humans can speak to both head and heart with both logic and emotion.

The transference of belief and the creation of emotional resonance in a desire to change is the foundation of sales engagement. Machines think and do. Humans feel and engage. A cyborg-like fusion of both sides is needed for sales success today and into the future for productivity and effectiveness.

Yet we need to do this in ways that are authentic and ethical. Taking a page out of J. K. Rowling, to access the deep insights contained herein, repeat this aloud: “I solemnly swear that I’m up to real good.”

Before you go on, you should know this book will challenge you. It is supposed to be hard. It will take you to the very brink of your capacities. You will feel overwhelmed, and you’ll wonder where all of this information is taking you. Growth is never comfortable. That’s part of the process of evolving—part of the process of becoming a fully cybernetic being.

But if at any time you feel like you’re being driven to be a robot, just remember—you’re human, and just using the tools available to you to be more productive. That’s what has occurred from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution and all of the iterations since. We harnessed the power of gravity and water to mill grains, then the steam engine to replace horses, through to mechanical automation and into the information age, and now the fourth Industrial Revolution is being driven by big data, distributed cloud computing and storage, social platforms, mobile everything, sensors within the internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence.

There’s almost a humanitarian aspect to our mission to free up the human operator from the yoke of the current technology bottleneck, a cage imprisoning the worker to low-value repetitive microtasks, riddled by context switching and ever-increasing KPIs. We see it like Upton Sinclair exposing factory conditions in The Jungle in 1905.

Granted, outbound sellers work remotely or in comfy, air-conditioned offices with great coffee and snacks; so there’s nothing inhumane about those conditions. But philosophically the system is still inherently so wasteful that over 70 percent of what the human is doing can be automated. About 80 percent of SDRs fall into this job.² It’s rejection dense, repetitive, and still requires manual configuration. Go buy a top sequencer and load a data list into it and feel your head explode. The process can take hours if you do custom variables and personalization—and this is for the forward-thinking companies that even have the stack.

If you are an operations person, try to make sure everything is syncing perfectly all the time. Have your sales engagement tool matching your marketing automation processes, and make sure that your revenue strategy reflects throughout your whole funnel. It’s superhuman for this to be the case, almost unattainable. Yet this is where sales or revenue operations professionals will become orchestrators of the bots, making the tech stack truly sing.

The sales rep of the future? They will be the glue between the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) and CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Isn’t that an API in human form? Internally and externally? Exactly our point! They will be as technical as they are strategic. As much a trusted advisor as a quant analyzing data. The human behind the self-driving Uber, the builder of the business case (ROI). Closest to the code. Sharpest point of the spear. They talk the language of leaders, which is outcomes, numbers, and managing risk—yet they can dive into the relevant detail to silence any critic or justify support. They enable sales and marketing to become one; sales enablement and customer experience to be synergistic; sales evangelism to become sales engineering.

These super-sellers embrace “Smarketing,” mapping the entire customer journey across inbound and outbound touchpoints, harnessing the power of intelligent platforms and automation to inject truly human engagement at exactly the right times. (Smarketing is a trademarked term coined by Peter Strohkorb, an amalgam of sales and marketing.) According to SiriusDecisions, B2B businesses that align their revenue engine grow twelve to fifteen times faster than their peers and are 34 percent more profitable.³ Companies that create a revenue operations team drive unified alignment of their sales, marketing, partner, and customer success teams. Adopting a revenue operations strategy helps unify people, data, and processes across their Go-to-Market (GTM) teams.

What should you be reading or studying to be ready for the rest of your work life? Great at math? Computer science (CS), Mandarin, Node. js, and Python? Great with people, persuasion, and negotiation? How about linguistics, neuroscience, politics, game theory, applied statistics? Right now you should certainly invest more time with your sales engineers to become more technical. Demo your product. Build out your chops in R, Tableau, SQL, JS, and Python. Learn how to properly use your company’s CRM and become masterful with spreadsheets. Dust off your entire tech stack. Join GitHub. We’re serious; the future will not be televised.

Wesley “Meep” Pennock helps us imagine a prototype of custom software and middleware human sales functions. Part of what we did for early-stage startups was to architect new workflows, sales tooling, and platform features to augment, enhance, and automate disparate systems. It’s approachable, even if it feels surreal wiring $100,000 for a small dev team in Kyiv to recode an idea in three months in Python that had taken a year with an army to build in Seattle in PHP . . . and it works!

TQ will be your limitless pill if you have your own house in order with genuine high value in your product/market fit along with a value narrative that creates engagement! By adding TQ, you will become an unbeatable one-human sales engine, a cybernetic salesperson, if you will.

CHAPTER ONE

From Human to Superhuman

Ethical Imperative Amidst New Realities

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

—Ben Parker

Some sales leaders perused an early draft of this book and told us to rip it up. Like John Connor at Skynet, “There’s just far too much evil these ideas unleash if your goal is to weaponize the top of the funnel.” Cries of illegal, unethical, and amoral remind us of the early fears of radio, the internet, television, and the horseless carriage. That’s why we have chosen to bring old-school values and new-school techniques together to the final version here.

Read the preface and our creed again. Intent is everything, not just for us as practitioners seeking to help others but for you as a modern, effective seller acting with integrity. We should all embrace positive values and ethical conduct as we seek to break through to help new clients. To quote Jill Rowley, “We live in the age of the empowered buyer.” And to echo Dr. Tony Alessandra’s Platinum Rule—always “do unto the prospect what you perceive they would want to be done.”¹

It is important here to emphasize the use of automated systems that are GDPR, CCPA, CASL, and CAN-SPAM compliant, built on privacy by design principles and architecture. Data must be sourced with integrity, and with opt-out and Do Not Contact (DNC) easily facilitated. We advocate that you place a link to unsubscribe in every sequenced message. Everything we’re suggesting in this book should be ethical and legal in your country, state, and municipality—so please educate yourself. The leading sequencer companies and data providers have gone to great lengths to enable their technologies to operate ethically and securely. As a professional, you must be committed to operating with integrity and intelligence. Send less personalized sequences that are more effective, and split-test more often to smaller batches. Respect the potential customers you are seeking to help by being human in engagement and making it count with brevity and relevance.

Unbridled technology automation in the hands of amateurs is dangerous. We must use technology intelligently and ethically. This book is not about the “bots running wild” but instead is about running with bots, flying with bots, and even deep diving with them. We are in the age of empathy in light of recent world events so please put yourself in the prospect’s shoes at every turn. Remember there’s a human on the other end fighting their own unique battles in a world that seems to have gone crazy, and you’ll be able to keep your white wizard hat firmly in place while performing your techno-magic.

As you read this, you may justifiably feel that this is all about the seller, and you may think, Isn’t professional selling all about the buyer? Yes it is, but before you can do all the noble initiatives such as setting a vision for a brighter future, exploring and cocreating the business case for change, navigating politics, gathering consensus for support within their teams, and launching a lifelong partnership that provides value . . . you need to find a way to earn their attention. Make no mistake, unless you can find a way to positively break through into the world of the buyer, and do it at scale, you will fail—your skills going to waste.

The trends in the 2020s are conspiring against everyone in sales by reducing attention spans, increasing resistance to change, and hardening the status quo. Decreasing deal sizes, larger quotas or targets, increasing competition, too many choices, slipping close date...