[00:00:00] Lee Brumbaugh: There’s no silver bullet in sales, but on Sales Against The Odds. We’re here to give you the best shot at building a sales infrastructure that helps you scale. I’m your host, Lee Brumbaugh. Welcome to Sales Against the Odds. I’m your host, Lee Brumbaugh. Joining me today is our Chief Community Officer, Tom Gardner. Tom is an important role for Sales Xceleration, helping support our 220 plus advisors across the globe. Tom, thank you for joining me this morning. Pleasure to be here, Lee. Thank you very much. So it’s eight o’clock. It’s eight in the morning my time, which means it’s six in the morning your time on a Monday morning. So I’m putting you in the hot seat first thing in the morning. So thank you for joining us. Now, we talked about originally doing this over shots of bourbon or an alcohol beverage, but I don’t think that’s going to happen at six in the morning, so nope,
[00:00:55] Tom Gardner: I’m hitting my coffee here first thing out of the gate.
[00:00:58] Lee Brumbaugh: Alright, so we’ve got a special thing for everybody today. Tom has agreed to do. He will be on the hot seat. We’re going to go through five questions that will impact owners in the SMB marketplace because it’s six in the morning. Tom has espresso shots. So Tom, if you don’t get an A, you’ve got to, there you go with the sign. I like it if you don’t get the A, you’re doing a shot of espresso. So you’ve got five questions we’re going to time you at a minute or less. And again, focus on areas, tangible results of what we can do in the SMB space. Sound like a plan, Tom?
[00:01:29] Tom Gardner: Sounds like a plan. I hope I don’t have to do that shot of espresso, but let’s see how it goes.
[00:01:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Five of them. Alright,
[00:01:35] Tom Gardner: Five of ’em nonetheless.
[00:01:36] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. Biggest opportunity for SMB businesses. So SMB world to grow their top line revenue, what can they do to get real results?
[00:01:47] Tom Gardner: Great question Lee. And this is one that we hear quite often and really I can’t look anywhere else except for leveraging AI in the use of small mid-size businesses. Everything from lead generation, getting the right messages to the right prospects at the right timing, all the way through doing things on scale and leveraging AI for the use of scale and even into coaching and developing of your reps, making sure that the reps and your sales team is really equipped to have the right types of conversations at the right time with the right resources around them. So leveraging AI all the way through the use of SMB from a growth standpoint is a key critical step. And I think the companies that really do take advantage of the tools and the abundance of tools in the marketplace today are going to be the ones that rise to the top here. So I would answer that with use of ai.
[00:02:36] Lee Brumbaugh: Love it. Great answer. You’re not doing the first espresso, but you’re right. Embracing ai, we’ve seen it with all our advisors. Those that don’t are going to fall behind. And from an efficiency scale, it’s where we need to be. Alright, second question for you. Biggest mistake business owners make in SMB for that business owner? Today’s listening, he’s got a $5 million company. What’s the biggest mistake you see in the space?
[00:03:00] Tom Gardner: I would say looking at and really underestimating the value of a proven sales process, a repeatable sales process. Really seeing business owners that either have their sales team trying to follow in their steps if they were a founder led sales organization and selling like they do, or really just not having a defined process that their entire sales team is leveraging. And what happens in that case, Lee, is that you see sales teams doing their own thing their own way, at their own time and they lose a lot of the insights into the business. Example, what has to happen for an opportunity to move from stage to stage? What are the questions that need to be asked? What information needs to be gathered? And if the team is really in sync and selling in a very similar path, they are able to get insights into the business to see what’s the likelihood of this deal being closed, what’s the likelihood of it progressing to the next phase? What type of information needs to be conveyed at that next phase? And when people are not following a proven or repeatable sales process that’s defined and agreed to, they’re losing the insights into the business left. So hopefully my answer is the right one here for you to stay away from that expresso shot, but I think it’s the repeatable sales process.
[00:04:12] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, good answer. And again, it’s one thing to think you have it, but to know it’s documented, have other teams utilizing across organization, even with founder-led sales, bringing that CEO, that business owner back into helping close deals involved in the big deals at the end of the pipeline. I think it’s critically important. You talked a little bit about AI in your first answer, so I’m going to go back to this. What is your favorite AI tool and how do you use it from a sales perspective?
[00:04:38] Tom Gardner: From a sales perspective, ChatGPT. Chat I think is one of the most popular that’s out there today, but I leverage it each and every day. And that could be anything from crafting of the right messages and emails to market insights, content creation. I actually leverage chat GPT in preparing to use other AI tools and other technologies. What types of prompts or scripts should I have created to be able to make other tools even that much more efficient and effective as well? So chat is one of those that I use each and every day just because the nature, the broad application of where that chat function can actually operate for us to
[00:05:17] Lee Brumbaugh: Everywhere from finding competition, your messaging agree. My wife was we trying to, she’s redoing stuff out on the outside and she was like, can this furniture go in this spot? So she’s taking picture and my kids do know more about it than I do, but it is what you do to stay up and how you can use it for sales perspective, that’s absolutely critical. Alright, you’re doing good. You’re not drinking coffee, you’re going to question four, give me an example of a key learning you had from your sales career. Something that maybe is funny, stood out to you, anything that stands out that you’ve come across in your career.
[00:05:48] Tom Gardner: It’s funny the timing of this that we’re here drinking coffee at 6:00 AM my time. But one of my early career learnings was I had a sales meeting as an early sales rep and I scheduled that meeting into early to mid-afternoon. And so now I want you to think for a second, a darker conference room, big meal for lunch late afternoon. And here it’s one-on-one with this business owner and I’m doing a PowerPoint presentation and I feel like I’m just absolutely crushing it. Just I’m on mark with all of my message the whole bit. As I asked some questions of engagement back to my prospect, they really weren’t being answered very quickly or at all. And I had realized that, well I probably had put the prospect to sleep for a period of time there during a one-on-one meeting. So I think the key lesson that I learned is really schedule your meetings when you’re at your best schedule, where it’s applicable for you and your prospect to be at their best and to be very thoughtful and strategic with how and when you conducted meetings to make sure, did you carve load
[00:06:59] Lee Brumbaugh: Your, this is the episode of the office where Michael’s eating all the fettuccine Alfredo before you did the prospect is that’s what’s going on.
[00:07:06] Tom Gardner: Very much so. I had plenty of coffee, but I may or may not have put my prospect to sleep in a one-on-one meeting. So I learned the
[00:07:14] Lee Brumbaugh: Lesson about jogging his prospects before meetings. I got it. Alright on that one. Maybe you should take your expressor shot with that
[00:07:21] Tom Gardner: One. Oh, I think it’s much needed here. Okay. Okay. See if I can do this.
[00:07:26] Lee Brumbaugh: There you go. Out the sign and everything. Alright, now that you’re fully caffeinated, what is your last one? Number five question on the hot seat. What is the most important thing to do or not do when finding an all-star sales rep?
[00:07:38] Tom Gardner: So many times I see business owners that really just leverage industry experiences, almost their sole criteria for hiring and they’re missing opportunities with some tremendous candidates. And so one of the biggest mistakes is overplaying that industry experience card. So encouragement here is have a thorough, well-rounded sales hiring plan, meaning who’s going to be doing the interviews, what are we going to be looking for? What’s that ideal candidate profile look like? Leveraging assessments if you’re going to be leveraging assessments to get further insight into those candidates. But having a plan and a thorough plan and an interview plan to be able to make sure that you’re making good hiring decisions and really leveraging all of the men and women around to have various vantage points into that candidate. And if you do, you’ll have a really, really good rockstar candidate that’s going to be added to the team. But having a hiring plan,
[00:08:34] Lee Brumbaugh: Right? Love it. Yeah. Look, all the things we’ve talked about, if you still have wrong people in the wrong seats, it didn’t go anywhere. So absolutely having a detailed plan and there’s a much difference. We know salespeople can trick us, right? So there’s a big difference between interviewing the right way from a sales perspective of that hire versus just winging it. So good. Tom, you are off the hot this morning. Thank you for joining us.
[00:08:58] Tom Gardner: Let me throw it back to you, if I could Lee here for a second. So I’ve been on the hot seat, but you’ve been such a generous host, so I would love to be able to put you on the hot seat for just one question if we could. Sure. Go for it. You had asked me around some of my key learnings as an early sales rep. I’d love to turn that question back to you. So you’ve had a lot of experience in sales and sales leadership and being the visionary of Sales Xceleration and all the key learnings that you have around you. What is one that you look back at and throughout your career is one of those most critical key learnings that helped position you for success?
[00:09:31] Lee Brumbaugh: The one thing that stands out, and I go back to what we just talked about when you talk about all the processes and all the things that we do, if you hire the right person, so many times the business owner is wearing a lot of different hats. The team’s wearing a lot of hats and you start, you onboard that person, you spend three days with them, you regurgitate, you talk about your message and how you stand apart from your competition, and then you release them to the wilderness. And that’s really not how it should be. I was blessed enough to start my career with Johnson Johnson and their sales and management training program was amazing, but I had three weeks to practice and role play and message, and then I had mentors and managers working with me and riding with me. So in the SMB world, when you hire that first rep, you’ve got to invest in them.
[00:10:14] Lee Brumbaugh: You’ve got to invest time, resources, energy. You need to onboard them a detailed onboarding positioning so that they learn everything about your company, they can message it back to you, and then you got to stay involved. You’ve got those first deals that come across, you’re helping them with pipeline development, you’re helping them with closing deals that you can’t be that founder that just hires a sales team and removes yourself. Whether it’s having a fractional person that’s helped supporting you, whether it’s having a sales manager in place, you’ve got to develop people. And I think that’s the biggest thing that stands out to me as a teams that develop people the right way. Were the ones that were able to scale their businesses and successfully grow. So that stands out. Hope that’s what you’re looking for. I don’t have a shot of espresso, so if it’s not you’re host anyway.
[00:10:56] Tom Gardner: Well, you’re lucky you answered it very well because I would’ve not have made you do a shot of espresso either there. So well done. Thank you, Lee, I appreciate that.
[00:11:03] Lee Brumbaugh: Tom, thank you for joining us. This has been Sales Against The Odds. We’ve given you five tangible ways to go back and repeat into your business. Hopefully this is helpful. Next time join us where we will have another great business leader learning, sharing with us all the insights that they can to help you grow your business. Tom, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you, Lee. You’ve been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our website salesxceleration.com
