HOW SALES HAS CHANGED AND WHY YOU NEED TO CHANGE WITH IT

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show. If you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, the Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice. Before it's showtime. Here we go. Notice any changes in sales recently? Last 5, 10 years since you started?

Seems it's gotten harder for some reason.

Why?

I don't know. It's a great question. I'm sure we can go deep into that, but I mean, obviously I feel much better about my ability, my skills, how I can get things done. However, I think the outside conditions, some of the way things have changed with how people approach sales has made it harder for everybody, whether you're good at sales or not. So I think especially the last 4 or 5 years, really seen that because of, you know, whatever happened around the COVID timeframe, but it seems to be getting harder. That's my perspective. And you have to keep treating it as a craft and trying to get better because it's getting harder and harder. So if you don't do that, you're going to get left behind from what I've seen.

And I think it's a lot like, um, war, meaning when one side comes up with a weapon, what does the other side do? They come up with, uh, an anti-weapon. Come up with aircraft, then you come up with radar and Anti-aircraft. You come up with hacking and then firewalls and security. And I think in sales we're running into that because, you know, I'm old enough to remember when email came around and they never had like easily described email addresses at first. It was like J713. So it was hard to guess emails and there were no data companies. You would buy a phone book. And I thought to myself, just imagine if you could have everyone's email address, how great that would be. Or even phone number, direct number. So remember, you have to go through a receptionist or a directory. And I think that's what we're running into today. Everybody's has access to infinite amount of information for free or nearly free. They stuff it into a product. And if you've seen what's going on in email today, it's the craziness gone absurd because Google's getting good at identifying junk. So now you have to find products that warm up the domain. And I don't know about you, but my spam folder— some good stuff, a lot of good stuff falls into my spam folder. So this is what's been happening. Somebody comes up with a piece of sales tech, they have success, and people go berserk with it.

Now, the email was a little bit before my time, but I was I was around, I just wasn't doing sales emails back then. But I think, you know, at some point you can tell me, I mean, you could probably get 70, 80% open rates on certain things when email first started thriving and it was great. And then it got ruined by marketers, salespeople, and it just keeps getting worse and worse over time. But it, you know, everything at some point makes a ton of sense. Like what you were talking about, I'm sure emails used to be really, really effective and there was a lot of great things with that, but then It's changed substantially, but then people don't change with it. They just do more, do more emails or do more cadences that have 18 touches instead of 12, whatever it is. So email is a great example. I feel like it's, I don't want to say dead, but it's just, I don't think anybody's really looking at their email. And you can imagine your buyers who work at a big company, probably they have a high title. They have 150 internal emails, let alone the spam stuff from people like us trying to get in front of them. So email, It's really tough, but then also keeps progressing to to other areas too. I mean, whether that be cold calling and how that changed. Maybe quite frankly, cold calling's making a little comeback because it's you know more refreshing. I don't know for sure. And then you know LinkedIn. You talk about the the pitch slaps on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn's great. I know you use it very effectively, and it's been a huge part of your success. And and same with me. I really have have. dive deep into LinkedIn, but there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. And then now it's like the second you connect with Brian, like, oh, Brian seems like a nice guy, and then you immediately pitch me whatever it is. I'm like, okay, well, that, that ruined it, right?

Right. And I think the issue there is it's just bad selling, not bad technology. You know, there was a little bit of a discussion about the cadence tools and how they've created a, a generation of lazy salespeople. Well, we always do the same thing. We copy the unicorn because for 15 years it was predictable revenue, but nobody thought to themselves, how hard is it really to sell Salesforce in 2003? It's as much as— as close to taking an order as there is. You're competing against Excel, some internal cobbled-together thing, or some other thing that they host that nobody uses. Every company I worked at had a CRM. We never used it though. You know, when my company got bought by IBM, they had a CRM. No one used it. We tried to use it. It was Siebold, uh, Post-it with this HTML thing stuck on it. And it was like to go from cell to cell took a while, right? It was not instantaneous. And my manager goes, we're doing a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet was just the forecast. It wasn't every little stupid voicemail you left and email you sent. And even when we had cold calling and email, when it did work, we didn't do it the way people are doing it today, right? The way people are doing it today is like they're selling magazine subscriptions or newspapers or long-distance service. I don't know if you remember that. It was probably the '90s before that stopped. The phone would ring from dinnertime for 3 hours straight. Sprint, MCI, AT&T, Mike's Long Distance Service. And it didn't work because, uh, first we had caller ID, so we had technology, anti-technology. And today you pick up your phone, it says spam call. Oh, I gotta pick that up. Or they have some other thing that, you know, makes it look like it's local to trick you. And you let it go to voicemail. I mean, everybody screens their calls, right? But when you see a friend call, someone's helping you. And this, this puts the whammy on sale. What do you mean? You speak of witchcraft, Brian. When do I get to talk about me and what I want? And that's all they do. Look through your inbox. Doesn't work on you, but every sales leader goes, got to work on someone. The key is it only works on dumb people. So now you've got a pipeline full of dumb people, and then they're wondering why it doesn't close.

So I'm a millennial. I can't necessarily speak for the other generation after me, Gen Z or whatever it is, but I guess to their defense, they've maybe been taught some of the wrong tactics. So they've been taught, they've been taught the cadence tools and all that type of stuff and pressing the easy button and it's just like boom. And if you are at a unicorn type company that is crushing it, has an amazing product and a ton of inbound, some of that works obviously a little bit easier because people are, people are coming to you, but that's the exception, maybe the 0.1%, if, if that, and everybody else is not in that case. Even, even big companies sometimes struggle with this, to have a good brand. They still can't use these tools and they're like, why is this not working? So I, you gotta have a lot of perspective of, okay, where are you working? What have you done in the past? And I think That's where I'm at. So I understand it, but I think most salespeople are just going, you know, job to job and they don't get it and they're just doing more of this and then it just keeps getting worse and worse. So I don't fully blame the sales reps because they have probably been taught this and they don't know anything better necessarily. But eventually, if you're doing stuff and it's not working, I mean, it's like the definition of insanity, right? You're just banging your head against the wall. So at some point you have to put Push back to the your your manager or the leaders, and if you're not closing deals, they're going to fire you anyway. So you got to figure out a better way to do it. You would you would think, and then you know now there's a lot of noise too with AI tools and insights, all these different things that keep popping up. I mean, that's flooding a lot of what I see on on LinkedIn and other areas, and and again there's. Technology is always going to be there. It's always going to get better. You have to embrace it to some capacity. It's going to help salespeople make the profession. It should, in theory, makes the profession better, but they get abused, right? When something starts working, then everybody starts doing it. And then there's another pop-up and now there's 100 companies doing the same thing and it, and it ruins whatever that thing may have been. And then the last thing is that just the buyers have so much information, right? So they don't have to talk to salespeople most of the time. They can find everything out.

ChatGPT, Google.

Website, LinkedIn, and that plus all these tools that are bombarding people just makes it really, really hard to get stuff done.

Yeah. And that point is critical because that's the point that everyone's been making for 20 years. There's so much information out there, but why would they look? There has to be active pain to look. I mean, do you purposely look on the internet for obscure things that you don't know you need, don't know are available. How do you find out about them?

Google, ChatGPT, uh, website.

Yeah, it pops up, or you're searching for something else, or some friend tells you, or you hear about it. And the mistake that people are making, they think that you're going to find that person before they find you. Okay. Do tow truck companies, um, you know, swarm the highways trying to find people who are broken down?

Nope.

Why not?

It's such a chance that it's going to happen. It's just a complete waste of time. I would imagine they— maybe somebody tried it at some point and they're like, this is a complete waste of time.

Your car breaks down, what do you do? Do you wait for a tow truck?

I'm calling them ASAP.

Are you gonna look for an ad? Are you waiting for a salesperson to call you?

First thing that pops up on Google for me. That's what, that's what I'm gonna do.

That's active pain, right? They don't swarm the highways and byways looking for people who are broken down because the odds are so low, nor do they cold call a bunch of people. Hey, you need a tow truck today?

No.

Why are you calling? What makes you think I need a tow truck? Well, it's my job to sell tow truck service. That's active pain. The other one, when you meant about insanity— insanity is doing the same thing over and over without getting a different result. In sales, it's beyond insanity. You're not getting the results, so you do more, and then you buy a tool to do 100 times more. Then you hire more reps to do even more. We switched from quality about 15 years ago to 100% quantity today. Everything's numbers. Everybody posts, ah, this is the strategy I built to build my pipeline to $9 million. I go, I can build a pipeline of $9 million in 10 seconds. Open the CRM and type in $9 million. That's just as good as your pipeline. Pipeline is just a pacifier today. See, we went from hiring experienced salespeople and somebody, some accountant said, well, wait a second, we can hire people right out of college for 1/3 the amount. And somebody said genius. And it was probably a unicorn. And then the people from that unicorn went to monkey.com who just got seed funding and says, we gotta hire more people. And 1 out of 10 companies worked. And then those people went to 10 companies. Or they look at the people at monkey.com. And they go, that's working, so I gotta copy that. Monkey see, monkey do, right? Yeah. And you ever notice all these experts on LinkedIn, they all work at unicorn companies? None of them are like these tiny little, no, nobody ever heard of companies. Why is that? What are the odds of that, that it just happens to be that all the experts work at unicorns? And none of the experts don't work at unicorns. Nobody figures that out either. And everyone's talking about the number of things I do a day. So it's activity-based, not skill-based, not focused. And why is that? It's the dashboard. If a manager doesn't know how to sell, they can look at their dashboard. And I've, I've heard people on other podcasts go, it's pure math. Number of prospects turn into number of proposals that turn into number of closes. Well, it can be that if that's the way you want to view it. And they say, oh, it's just a ratio. If that's true, then what do you do? You put as much on the top as possible because the ratio tells you it's going to come through the bottom. And you do that, and after 3 quarters, it doesn't come through the bottom. What do you do next? Hire another marketing person, another CRO, and start all over again. Well, they didn't. Their cadence was only 16 steps. Or they didn't hire enough of these types of people. I think we've lost our way in sales for a lot of people. And some of the people on LinkedIn that are good, isn't it all personality? If they're good on the phone, they're gregarious, they're, they're the life of the party. They could start a conversation with anybody. But can you teach that? Is that easily transferable?

No, it takes time to, to learn all that. That's unique. And it, it almost sounds more like a, a system problem. I always think of when I was doing stuff in healthcare, I would get frustrated at the system of healthcare and how dysfunctional it may be at times. But I realized, okay, I probably can't change That. So what, what can I focus on? So it makes me think of the same type of thing. I mean, maybe, hopefully not, but if we've lost our way so much with all the stuff you were mentioning, it's somewhat of a system thing at this point, depending on what industry you're in and all that. Uh, tech and SaaS is probably way heavier with all this compared to anything else. So if you know that as a salesperson, it's almost, that's the problem though. If you don't have the experience, you're going to be getting told all this stuff and you're just going to do it. And then you're going to be like, what the hell's going on? And then it creates this. terrible cycle and then you hop around to different companies. And if you can find, like, if you have, are really good at finding unicorns at the right time, I mean, good luck with that. Give me a call. Yeah, please let me know that if you can just bounce to unicorn to unicorn, because that sounds amazing. But the chances of winding up at a place like that are very small, I would imagine. And you have to really know people to get in there early to benefit from it the most. So usually when you find out about it, it's Maybe too late, and you're already coming in after like the wave has already risen. So there's a lot of things in there, but I mean ultimately this is what salespeople should be thinking about: How do I actually get better at my craft? How do I learn how to sell? Make it more about them, not me. Be more proactive. All those transactional tactics. You talk about the LinkedIn stuff. There's a lot of gimmicky type stuff, and. Getting away from that and trying to be more of that, the partnership. So that's what they should be doing. But it's how do they have the clarity to realize that's the direction they should go? I think people are definitely waking up. It's just, you know, are they scared to do against what their managers are saying? Are they? But again, if you're not performing, if you're not producing, you're gonna get blamed regardless. So you might as well do something to try to get outside the box, be different, because everybody's doing what you're talking about. And unless if you're at that unicorn situation, it's, it's not going to work very well. So I feel like you have to be different, you have to change it up, you have to, you know, do something out outside of the norm. Otherwise you'll just get left behind, like I said earlier.

Yeah. And if you're good at picking unicorns, get into venture capital because that's what they do. And if you're good at it, they'd love to have you, and they're not good at it. It's like 1 out of 100 of their portfolio turns into a unicorn, and that's what they're betting on. All the rest is kind of like sell for scrap just to try and save face, not even get money. Most of those acquisitions that you see, there's really no money that changes hands. The VCs are just trying to save face. It makes it look like a success even though it's a failure. So if you're good at finding a unicorn, get into VC. You'll make a lot more money and they'll appreciate you more. Because guess what? As soon as they get that $50 million round, guess what they do? Take you to club? No, they hire 100 people. And they tend to hire a sales manager who's used to treating everybody like a robot because they don't have to treat them like a human being because they're making so much money. It's so easy. And you probably don't learn how to sell.

If you hire 100 people, I'm sure they have the spreadsheets that tell you, oh, it's gonna be $1 million in revenue per salesperson, right? Isn't that, isn't that how it usually works out?

Yeah, I mean, look what happened, you know, after the— well, during the pandemic, you know, everyone panicked. Then every— all of a sudden the market was flush with cash, right? Interest rates were cut to nothing. You know, the government flooded the market with cheap money. VCs could just give it away like candy. So everybody hired, overhired, which gives you the Because when you're hired, you're assuming there's demand for your need, for your services. Not in sales. You create the demand for your services, which becomes your responsibility, not theirs. And if you fail, what do they do? They promote you? No, they fire you because it has to be your fault. It can't be theirs. And I think a major thing that's changed is everyone thinks that Gen Z and millennials like to make up their own mind. They, they search on their own and they, they don't want to talk to salespeople. They don't want to be sold or connect with other people. I've heard that my whole life about every generation. Everyone thinks they know everything. They've got a handle on the market. They don't have any problems. We all have problems. We all want to talk with somebody who does something for us, not to us. And I think that's what people have missed. Also, the sales process that I see today are about fast, not effective. It doesn't matter how fast you lose the deal, you've already lost it. It matters how well you do, how well you get a deal. And salespeople want to move 100 miles an hour and clients want to move 10 miles an hour. What kind of friction could that cause?

Not good, that's for sure. A lot of deals get lost.

And they're like, give me some time. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing at all. And we don't see it as the reps need to help the client go through the process.

And, and it's because of all the stuff we're talking about. The buying process has gotten more complicated. So there's more people involved. It takes longer. People don't want to stick their neck out there. That just makes it even worse with everything we're talking about. And then you have a rep, they're trying to go fast and numbers game, whatever it is, and skip steps, go straight to the demo, whatever the case. And that just makes it tougher because the buyers, if they are going to make a decision, a substantial decision, they're sticking their neck out there. They want to feel good about it. It's their reputation, all these different things. So you, they, they want to put, put everybody into the commodity trap. And then all this stuff we're saying just makes it worse because you're acting like a commodity as a salesperson and you're just, being more transactional. So it just adds fuel to the fire. So ultimately, they're only going to buy stuff that they really need right now, that, that's urgent. And that's usually not what we're selling, unfortunately. So yeah, but it's— you just gotta— it's almost like you have to take a step back. And it's like the offensive coordinators from the press box, they see the field and they're looking at everything. And they see all this stuff materializing. That's sort of what we're talking about. But unfortunately, I think the reps and the managers are just on the field and just next play, like getting after it type thing. And it's how do you take a step back? But eventually, when something bad happens, usually that makes people change. They get let go. They don't hit quota 2 years in a row, whatever it is. They're not making money. I mean, eventually, you have to look yourself in the mirror and be like, man, some of this just doesn't make sense. I need to change it up. But usually that's what it takes. People don't do it proactively, unfortunately.

Yeah. And plus the market is flooded with new products.

I mean, it's brutal, brutal.

The cost of starting, let's say SaaS, because everybody knows what it is, everybody uses it. To start a SaaS company has gone from, used to have to, you know, buy hardware. Then you had to buy a database. Then you had to buy a piece of middleware. Then you had to buy a user interface. That's all free today. You don't have to buy hardware. You get on AWS, you start it up. And now with AI, for every one SaaS company, there's going to be 10 AI companies that does something like it. Or connects to it. So it's only going to get worse. And if you have a founder who doesn't understand sales, guess what they're going to do? Just model the company they want to become. But you're not that. It's like a Little League kid going up to the Yankees and going, where do you want me to start?

Right?

It's like Over there. So I think you have to start thinking like the client. What do they want from someone they work with? Not from a sales rep. Everyone has to put that persona on because they don't know how to sell, right? If you ever did a dance video, you dance like you know how to dance. I don't know how to dance. A lot of people don't know how to sell, so they act like what they think a salesperson acts like, which is the opposite of authenticity, right? You're, you're playing a character, you're acting.

You put your sales voice on, right? It's a whole different persona.

You start talking in acronyms and digital transformation and You know, time to market. What all this bullshit that has no meaning because it's been used so often, and the client has to map that to what they want to accomplish. Why not talk in their language about what they care about? Is that a foreign concept? Am I am I out in left field on this?

No, it makes perfect sense to me. I think it's just everybody gets so caught up in the instant results society, and then you think this way and it sounds great, and then you're, oh, that's harder. I have to do something different. I have to plan. I have to think like the customer. And then you're just like, I'm just gonna go press some buttons and send some emails out. And I feel like I sent out 100 emails today. That's great. I accomplished a lot. So I think in theory everyone knows this. They just go back to the bad habits and the easy thing to do, and then they keep getting the same results and it keeps making it harder for everybody else. So hopefully more people will wake up, but it's definitely the only way to do it.

Even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse—you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, fifty, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and lost income. Really? Yeah. The difference between where you are today. Let's say you're making one fifty. Decent. Decent income, but you know there's other people in your industry making $300K, $400K, $500K. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you there with those leads trying to close those deals. And do you have the game? Few people do. Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth. Accept it. Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't. So sign up today. We'll see you next time.