B2B Sales Mentors

20 Stories from 20 Top 1% Sales Professionals

Scott Ingram

• Publisher: Top 1% Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780990605973
• eBook ISBN: 9780990605966
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Are you looking to take your sales results to the next level? Get inspired and learn directly from some of today's top sales professionals.

Worried you're not on the right path to consistent sales success? Have your commissions plateaued? Do you struggle to influence decision-makers in your field? Twenty-year B2B sales veteran and Sales Success Stories podcast host Scott Ingram is a true self-starter who walks the talk. Now he's curated these extraordinary lessons to give you the competitive edge you deserve.

B2B Sales Mentors - 20 Stories from 20 Top 1% Sales Professionals is a curated collection of timeless lessons from practicing experts. Shared in an informal style with clear action items at the end of each chapter, these wise words will make a huge difference in your work and industry. Whether you sell to large enterprise accounts or to SMB companies, this book will inspire you to skyrocket your earnings!

In B2B Sales Mentors, you'll discover:
* Mindset and goal setting techniques of elite performers
*Creative prospecting techniques that consistently open doors at the c-level
*How to land your dream sales job, and other ways to grow your income
*The sales processes used to close mega deals in the real world
*Concise bulleted takeaways from each powerful example to lead you to your next win
*Practical processes to help you improve yours results and much, much more!

B2B Sales Mentors - 20 Stories from 20 Top 1% Sales Professionals is the handpicked resource you need to keep you focused on high-performance results. If you like advice from battle-hardened experts, industry secrets to deliver the dollars, and bite-size steps to develop your own winning strategy, then you'll love Scott Ingram's definitive guide.

Buy B2B Sales Mentors to rise to the next level today!

Let Me Know if Anything Changes

By DeJuan Brown

DeJuan Brown cut his teeth in sales at Intuit and currently serves a team as a Regional Sales Manager at Bloomberg BNA. DeJuan was featured in Episode 6 (top1.fm/6). He and his wife are the parents of six kids and DeJuan also contributed two other stories to Volume 1 of Sales Success Stories: Why is Why Better Than What and The Janitor Know More Than You

Losing a sale can be devastating, no matter the size of the deal.

I mean the time, effort, and energy we expend to get to the finish line is real.

To get all the way there and not get the deal across impacts so many areas of our lives.

I believe there is a specific type of fatigue that stems from hearing ‘thanks for all your time, but we’ve decided to go another route.’

Several years into my career, my final responses to this rebuff were almost always identical.

I’d often ask the normal, “What made you decide to go that route?” and then finally I’d muster up the strength to utter the dreaded 8-word cliché:

“No problem, let me know if anything changes.”

In 5+ years, amazingly, nothing ever changed! At least, not enough changed to prompt a prospect to call me back.

Honestly, I never thought twice about whether my statement would ever even garner a future response.

I was on auto-response when the deal was lost, and being that disconnected from the prospect at the end probably meant that I was disconnected from the beginning.

It wasn’t until I started hearing talk about concepts like servant-leadership, service first and customer-centrism that I had an epiphany of some sort.

Well, it was not the kind of epiphany that leads to wholesale change. However, I had enough interest to try some short-term experimentation with these concepts.

The first thing I tried ended up being a game-changer, and I can point to at least three consistent results which persist to this day.

Instead of the dismissive and uncaring “let me know if anything changes,” I shifted my focus to what I term the “continuity of service.”

I would make helping my prospect my primary goal in my sales meetings. I know many of you are thinking, “DUH!!! What other goals would you have?”

If I’m honest, I had a ton of goals in my meetings during that time. However, at least 90% were singular and self-serving. I wanted the prospect to know all the things my solution could do for them, how long we’d taken to develop these unique features, what other clients were saying about our solution, etc.

Even my discovery process was about “me” and “us”; it was rarely about “them.”

‘Continuity of service’ implied that service had a starting point, but no end. This was the thought that changed the tide.

Listen, I wish I could tell you that I immediately went from 0-100, and I tripled my sales THAT year. It definitely didn’t happen that way, so here’s the deal.

What changed was my mindset, and therefore my language. Mentally, I went into meetings with the question, “What does service look like for this prospect?”

This question alone meant that I had to ask different questions, listen more completely (complete listening is something I’ll address later), and develop a creativity that, up until this point, I’d lacked.

Losing a deal took on an entirely different meaning to me, as I began to think of the loss as yet another opportunity – not a lost opportunity, but an opportunity. My prospect-facing statement of ‘let me know if anything changes,’ morphed into the internal question. “How can I bring value to this prospect from this point until they either become a client or a source of clients in the future?”

“I’d love it if you’d use me as a resource.”

Exchanging one dismissive statement for a veiled call to action, I began to get traction.

Initially, I was deathly afraid that telling folks to use me as a resource would result in a time suck with no real returns attached.

What if every prospect tried to use me for free information, free access to software, or something of the sort? How could I manage requests coming in from every angle while still trying to do my job?

Years later, I’ve not had such an occurrence and I’ve seen great results to boot.

Specificity has been key, however. I found that saying, “I’d love it if you’d use me as a resource” alone would leave the prospect without guidance on what that even means.

Once I started unpacking that for them, people would actually take me up on it, see the value in my service and solution, and several times they would boomerang to become clients.

Here’s a real and practical example:

After several meetings and a couple of demos, I met with the VP of Tax at a large corporation. I was hoping to get the contract signed that day. All the I’s had been dotted and T’s crossed, at least in my estimation.

Upon my arrival, we exchange pleasantries and everything was going smoothly. In the midst of this, I state that based on our prior meetings, it seemed natural that we move forward unless there were other questions that had come up.

He looked at me and started, “Well…..” Immediately I thought “Houston, we have a problem.”

The VP began to explain to me his rationale for continuing with their current solution for another year. I let him know the reasons for my disagreement, reiterated to him the value that we’d uncovered during our times together, and ended with the unpacking I referred to earlier.

“I’d love it if you’d use me as a resource. Your team told me that comparative content between the 37 states you do business in is near-impossible to collect efficiently. Based on that, I want to serve you all. I’ll send this to the team also, but please let me know when a project requires such a comparative. I’m more than happy to create that chart in real time and send it to you all.

I know that you also periodically deliver time-specific reports to the CFO around developments in the foreign countries you all have interests in. Let me help you there as well. Prior to your next CFO roundtable, let me know the date range you’re presenting on, and which jurisdictions you’re presenting in. I’ll help supplem...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Mindset of a Champion
• I’m 6’4” and Devilishly Handsome
• Best Practices vs.ONLY Practices
• Set Your Goals at 2x to 3x Your Quota and Build a Daily Routine to Over Achieve
• Creative Prospecting
• Differentiating Yourself From the Average Sales Development Rep (SDR)
• Discovery Is Not Just One Step in the Process
• The Year I Doubled my Income
• Let Me Know if Anything Changes
• You Can Have Everything
• My greatest win at Microsoft
• Taking on a New Challenge
• Hold On – You’re on an UNSTOPPABLE Rollercoaster
• The Real Value Add in Sales
• How I Beat Out 300 Candidates For My Dream Sales Job
• If You Want To Be Successful in Sales, Live With Your In-laws
• I’m a Hustler, Baby
• Team Selling
• Top Three Lessons That Landed My First Big Deal
• Next Steps