HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR PROSPECTING AND NETWORKING IN B2B SALES

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. So you a big fan of trade shows? Have they always worked for you?

I had a good ride there, I think, earlier in my career where I, I did a lot of trade shows. It ends up kind of being a dog and pony show where you're sort of playing business versus doing business. Sometimes you're going out late with customers or with coworkers And then next thing you know, you're there for 3 or 4 days in Vegas or wherever it is. And then you get back and you feel like crap for the next 2 or 3 days. So it messes up the following week and it's kind of like this vicious cycle. But it's funny looking back on that because at the time I probably thought it was fun and it was effective as far as getting new customers. But looking at it now, I think you need to be pretty strategic with some of the shows you go to. And a lot of it, Probably is not a good use of money for companies or for the salespeople, depending on what it is. But it sounds good. It's like you're, you're busy, you're in front of customers, you're showing them the product, getting them to come to your booth. But there's a lot of, I think, downsides as well with the whole trade show game.

Yeah.

And I don't know how much of it's driven by sales or marketing. And I think the pandemic kind of reset everybody. Because typical B2B companies, the trade show budget is usually about a third of the marketing budget. It's a lot.

It is.

You know, and certainly in the sales tech space, you know, that kind of— I know the best right now, you know, the big shows, the amount of money they spend for the results they get. I mean, you could, you could Basically send airline tickets for everyone to go to Hawaii for a week cheaper. Let's say you had 100 prospects you wanted to meet. You could give them tickets to Maui for a week, them and their wives, cheaper than you could buying a booth at one of these places with the hope that they walk by. So And I never would do the booth even though the company would pay for it. I'd always do like a hotel room, a happy hour or a dinner, take the money and put it to that. Something that's much more high-touch, concentrated time with people that I know would be there. The idea of sitting in a booth for 8 hours a day, you know, just brought me back to selling shoes, what I did in high school. It was like standing up all day long. Walking back and forth with shoes, you know, mostly to women who wanted to try on shoes, not buy shoes. And let's face it, Trisha, 80, 90% of the people come by don't recognize you or your booth or anything, and they just want the Chatsky. So I was never a big fan of trade— I mean, I wasn't in a market where trade shows had much effectiveness. From a booth standpoint. From a social standpoint, you could probably get more done in one day having a dinner or a happy hour, or just tell people, meet me at this bar. I got the company credit card. Let's destroy it.

Very good.

And then it's fun. At least you have a night out. But, you know, these booths at like Dreamforce or something, And I tell marketing people, but they don't care because it's not visible. You could be on the podcast and hit more people than it'll be in the keynote. And they're opting in to hear you. They're not walking in and out playing with their phone. They're opting in. And they go, and it's what, 1/100th the cost of the booth and zero effort. You know, which really should appeal to marketing people. But no, they want for their career to be able to be seen at Dreamforce with a big booth that no one comes by or cares about anything but the coffee cups. You know, how many people really buy business-to-business stuff the way it's set up as retail? That's what a trade show is, retail, right? It's like Your little store is 8 feet wide. Come by and see a demo. And it's like, who has time to see a demo while they're standing there, right? Oh, here's this screen. Now here's this screen.

No, I agree. You touched on a few points there, but it's, it's a B2B sales process. So you can't, you're not gonna sell it in a couple of days anyway. Now you could potentially get some people interested if you do Prep leading up to it, but I mean the amount of money people are spending—I mean at least $25K, probably well over the six figures for some of the stuff like Dreamforce as well—and I think with the marketing side, it's it's probably just stuff over the years where maybe they're trying to push their career and they think that that visibility at that show—it's just it's just kind of like the marketing playbook that's been around for decades, even though people know it doesn't really drive any revenue. But then they still have these boardroom meetings and it. They still spend a lot of money on it. And it's kind of mind-boggling because to your point, your podcast for sure has that type of exposure. I know for me, doing personal branding on LinkedIn and what have you, I've invested a lot of time myself, but it's like these companies, if they would maybe focus on other avenues, like, hey, let's have our reps build a personal brand strategically, or let's do podcasts with, with stuff like what you're talking about. I mean, the amount of reach you can get with doing things to that effect, or 10, 100x what you could with a trade show. I'm not saying don't do the trade shows. I still think there's some that are probably strategic and you can do that, but you can be scrappy too. You don't have to have a massive booth. You can just get a badge and you can walk around and go to the events you want to go to and plan meetings leading up to it and kind of build up know, like, and trust leading, leading up to the event. So there's a lot of ways you can utilize it without spending 6 figures and you can kind of delegate that money to other stuff that's going to drive revenue because you, I don't know about you, but anytime I've ever gotten a lead from a trade show where it's generated from marketing or something and they send it to my Salesforce or whatever CRM it was, I mean, maybe 1 out of 180 actually even responded or something. I don't know. I can't remember even having a conversation with somebody from one of those and I spent time trying to reach out to them and have no idea what they were even looking at. So I think you just, whoever's there, they feel obligated to like, oh, we got to get leads and got to send it out for the CRM, but they're always just BS leads and it's just a kind of dog and pony boondoggle with the leads from the shows too.

Yeah, because typically marketing is there and they know by the end of the last day they got to fill up that jar with business cards or scanning badges. So they will scan anyone. And this is where the mismatch between marketing and sales, because that's not a lead. That's a contact. And if you want the contact, you can easily go onto social because someone is posting the attendees typically on Twitter. And I used to do this all the time. Instead of going to the trade show, I'd get the attendees list. You could buy it from somebody, but somebody would buy it and then post it on social. Somewhere, and you could just download it. And so why now? Is that any different than the people who got their badge scanned? Same thing, right? Except for the other person came closer to your booth than those people. No, sales is responsible for processing these as leads. And then they get into the win rate problem and you're like, oh God, it's like cause a problem, complain about the problem, blame the problem on someone else. This is the waterfall methodology of big companies. And I don't have anything against trade shows. It's just what is the best use of your time? You know, 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn, you can connect to what, 5 people a day, 25 a week, 100 a month. That's 1,200 a year. If you connect to relevant people, that's 1,200 people who now know who you are. Up to you to do something with it. You can't do that in a trade show. You know, trade— being in person is fantastic, but you got to be in person with the appropriate people. So to do a trade show right, you'd have to put a week or two in finding out who's going, what time they have free, kind of sync up for coffee, drinks, dinner, whatever. But that's work. You know, if you had even a reasonable following on LinkedIn, letting them know you're at the trade show, put a calendar link. If you have 15 minutes, would love to sit down with you. I think too many people view a digital event different than a physical event. And if you look at LinkedIn as a 24/7, 365 trade show, then it might make more sense to some salespeople who are used to doing trade shows. But you can do it from your bed playing with your phone as opposed to, you know, climbing on a plane Staying at a crummy hotel, you know, getting in, getting your badge and looking like a dog walking around with a collar for 2 or 3 days, listening to a bunch of product pitches about things you don't understand, and then eating a bunch of Danish, gaining 5 pounds, and not feeling very good.

You're staying out late, getting up early, sitting at the booth all day. But I mean, and if you can use social or LinkedIn prior to the trade shows and do it the right way, that's where it can be really powerful because you kind of got both going for you. But you're right. I mean, LinkedIn is a 24/7, 365 days a year trade show. And I think there's a few reasons why people maybe don't utilize it as much. If you work for a bigger company, I think You are scared to put yourself out there because you think there could be repercussions because of— they're thinking you're looking for a job or whatever may have you. So it really depends on— sometimes I think a lot of salespeople want to do personal branding and start doing that, but then they're scared because of their company. So then they never do it. Second is I think they're worried about being perfect and they try to perfect everything they do. And you don't have to be some crazy influencer. You can Even just share relevant content, reshare other people's stuff that you think your customers would care about. So there's a lot of ways around that, but I think people overthink it and they're worried about what people are going to think if they don't have a perfect post or picture. So then they spend 2 hours on trying to do something and like, well, I can't, there's no way I can do this because I'm spending so much time. And then I think the other thing too is, is just, you have to be consistent, right? If you're going to do something on on LinkedIn or try to build up your personal brand, it's not going to happen right away. So you have to have some type of consistency there. And people might do it for a couple of weeks and then they just stop. But if you, if you get over some of those things and you really focus on it, it can be really powerful. And you're kind of building up that know, like, and trust all the time, kind of having your money work for you versus just working for your money. So you can still do all the in-person stuff. You can do some trade shows, but then you have this kind of engine going on behind you. And, and I, at one point I decided to, to really focus on it and it's, and it's definitely paid off, but it didn't happen overnight. It, and it's still a lot of work at, at times, but you don't have to be some crazy, you don't have to be like Brian Burns and posting a lot of videos every day. You can do, you know, once a week or you don't even have to post stuff. You can use other ways to kind of build up your brand. But I think if you want to be different and you want to stand out, You need to be looking at LinkedIn or whatever relevant channel for you because the days of just meeting in person and all that type of stuff are obviously way behind us. So I think people wanna research, they wanna kind of know you before they talk to you type thing.

Yeah. And that's it. You don't have to be a content creator, you know, because you can just put a text post about what you're doing, what you notice, something you messed up on. Something that worked for you that you didn't think would work. And I think too many people put too much thought into it and too much judgment of others. But you're in sales, you know, if— and believe me, I get enough trolls and it doesn't feel good, you know, because people don't want to support you sometimes. So people— there's a lot of jerks out there. And they want to see how they can up their status by reducing you. It's like, who cares? Go away, right? I think you got to look at what is most effective and what fits your particular style best, because, you know, how many trade shows are there? You know, some industries there's one a month, or But that's a lot of work. And ask yourself, you know, how many deals do you get out of a trade? Some industries have one big show a year and they get, you know, 3 quarters of their business from it. Great, go knock yourself out. But most, it's a gamble. We don't know. And when I talk to founders in the sales tech space and they're going to one of the big shows, They go, what do you think? They go, have you already spent the money? They say yes. I go, oh, good idea. They haven't spent the money. Stupid. And they go, why?

And I go, well, how much are you going to spend?

You got to fly everybody there. You got to put them up. You got to feed them. You got to give them transportation. Then you have to pay for the booth. And the number that they say that attends there is probably 3 times the number of people who are really there. You know, and I'm like, really? And, and they always, why aren't you going? Because I can get 10 times as much done in my office. I can, you know, but my business isn't a high-touch, in-person business. But are the real key people going to be at that trade show, or do they send somebody? Most executives send somebody. It's a treat for their admin. Go to this trade show, collect everything, you know, because they look at it, oh, it's a 3-day vacation. And that they're going, and that's your lead. The same admin that won't let you talk to them is now your inbound lead that you have to process.

You're right. It's, it's, it's really about Every industry is going to be a little bit different. And if, and if it is really effective, then it could be worth whatever that dollar amount is. But I think if you're in, if you're especially those founders that maybe they have investment money, maybe they don't, or if you're a commissioned salesperson, you start thinking about these things a lot differently because you don't have time to waste versus somebody that's on a salary, maybe marketing, and they can get away with a 4-day trip and not having to worry about stuff. So if you're more commission focused from the sales side and you kind of been, been around this before, you're probably not going to want to go to those things as much and you're going to like send the new sales rep so they can go experience it and you're just going to do your thing at home where it's effective. So you have to kind of like everything in sales, you have to prioritize it and maybe there is one or two a year that, that are worth it. But I think in general that money could be used a lot more effectively for, for other things with, with the sales team for sure. And I mean, I think on the social side, what have you seen for you? I mean, I know you built a lot of stuff up on LinkedIn before it was as popular, but have you kind of seen that, that snowball effect over the years from, from what you've been doing and talking with other reps out there?

Yeah. Yeah. Because I was at a security company and my manager saw me on LinkedIn and he had his friend ask me if I was looking for a job.

And I go, what they always think.

Yeah, because they're still thinking 15 years ago. But what I was doing is back when LinkedIn Groups was a thing— today it's kind of, it doesn't really work— but I created a CISO, Chief Information Security Officer, group, a blank one. Then I did one for my particular territory. And all of a sudden, all these CISOs were joining. And I was posting content that I referenced and took from other people, gave them credit. They loved me promoting it. And all of a sudden, a couple thousand CISOs were in my group. And all of a sudden, people were like, how are you getting those meetings? Oh, you know, cold calling, spamming, just like you. No, I was talking with people who wanted to learn about what other CISOs were doing, even though CISOs weren't necessarily my primary target. But then I created one for software architects in web services. It was a hot topic at the time, like AI is today. And all of a sudden I'm getting inbound. Not leads, just contacts, but the right contacts. And we have something to talk about. Now, is that more effective than going to every security trade show in the country? Yes. And it took 5 minutes. And my SE, it's going to take a lot of time to manage that. Yeah, about 5 minutes a week. Everyone was poo-pooing it. Stupid, doesn't work. You're just gonna get a bunch of people looking for jobs. And it's like, yeah, some people joined to look for jobs, but I got to control who joined the group. So when you, when you get all the outsourcers and the SEO people and the, all the other noise, just don't let 'em in. Now, can you do something like that today? Of course you can. Much faster, much easier. Because everybody wants to learn. And if you notice my content, I never pitch what I do. It's 100% give. And if you keep that way, and this is something that salespeople don't understand, it's like everything is transactional, isn't it? No, not everything is transactional. Remember where it says all about relationships? Is a relationship transactional?

Nope.

And, you know, and everybody said, well, that's marketing's job. Well, how good is marketing doing their job? Oh, you're right. It was most of the companies, they had people in marketing. I had no idea what they did. I know what they didn't do. They didn't get us any leads. So, you, we can either rely on, you know, cold prospecting, Your referral network, or you gotta be creative. I chose being creative.

For sure. And I, it also depends, I think, what type of company you're working for. If it's more of a startup where people don't know the name as much, I mean, that's, this is where it can be even more effective because if you don't have that name, you don't have a ton of existing business, it's gonna be brutally competitive most likely. to try to go out there and find new opportunities. So if you're not doing this and trying to stand out and be a little bit different, I mean, it's going to be tough just trying to pound the phones or whatever method they're telling you to. So it's a great way, especially for those earlier revenue companies that don't have massive market share, because it's just brutally competitive out there. It keeps getting more and more competitive. And if you're not focused on something like this, trying to build up know, like, and trust, it's going to be really tough. And then there's a right way to do it. too, is people think, oh, well, if I'm gonna be self-promoting, if I do a personal brand, and to some extent you have to be open and vulnerable about things because I think people want to see that real authenticity, but it's not pitching stuff. You know, then the mistake people make is they go on there and like, well, I posted 5 or 6 times and I never got any traction. No one was— the only people liking it were my internal employees. It's because it was some pitch about your product or your features and benefits. That's not what people I'm gonna hear about, and that's why probably marketing sometimes will say it's not effective. Social's not as effective because they're, they're doing it the wrong way and they're, they're spending $20,000 on some product, cool looking video for 3, 3 minutes that the only people liking it are people at the company, not actually potential customers. So there's also that mistake and you have to have the giving mentality. It's like that jab, jab, jab, jab, but you just keep jabbing. There's maybe never really a right hook because people don't want to get sold. They do want to hear stories. They want to hear, uh, different ways people are figuring stuff out. Uh, what are other folks doing that are going up against the same thing? So I mean, they want to learn, they want to see new technology, they want to see cool things that are disrupting the market, but they don't want to get sold on social. And I think that's where it's gotten probably a little bit out of hand at times because it's There's a lot of people pitching on social too, which makes it tough to probably stand out as well.

Yeah, because if you look through your feed, what have I seen the last 2 weeks? It's like 80% job changes, you know, 2% schmaltzy videos about some animal rescue. I don't know what this has to do with LinkedIn or business or anything. Inspirational quotes. Okay, that's close to business. And people telling them, everyone telling them how great they are. And it's like, okay, what's in it for me? And I go, that's why I try to do humor, because talking straight with salespeople, everyone's got emotions about it. But if you can make them laugh, if you can show them how ridiculous the alternative is and why it's not working. You get a lot of people opened up to it, thinking about it. That's what I'm looking for. And what does marketing do? Marketing was raised and focused on advertisement, right? It's an ad. Your world would be better with us. Click here. That's what they do. And if you can't communicate your product like that, What choice do you have? Most of the stuff I've sold required a minimum of a 20-minute conversation before they even understood what it was and why they needed it.

It was—

they were startups, and startups create something that the market is anticipating that they'll need. You know, if you have a big brand, people know what it is. But what they think it is and what you're selling there might be 2 totally different things, you know, because what's IBM? Everyone thinks mainframe, but IBM, 3,000 products, you know. So if you're selling something that has nothing to do with big banks and this little thing over here, you've got to now take them from, oh, it's not a mainframe, it's this thing over here. Can you do that in an email and also entice them to why they need it and what problem it solves? Doubtful.

Doubtful. That's a lot.

And how it's different, you know, that this is where B2B marketing just broke about 10 years ago because webinars were burnt out and ads can't communicate complex things. So what do they do? They give up on communicating it and just try and capture contacts so that they can check the box and go back to sleep for another quarter. Look, we got all these leads. You didn't close them. No, those are people who wanted the Apple Watch, not us. So if you're selling Apple Watches, you're a great marketer. As long as it's free. And this is what— and then all of a sudden, reps, they think that's a lead and they're not closing, they're not interested. And their prospecting is all, you know, put a bunch of messages into a cadence box and ship it out to the world, hoping it comes back attached with revenue. And if it doesn't work, you're not doing it enough. You gotta do it on more channels. That's what the geniuses came up with. Remember that? That was about 5 years ago. You gotta do multichannel. You're not bugging them enough on multiple channels. The problem is they haven't heard from you.

Is it 16 touches now? Is that where we're at? Is that, is that, is that the number? 16? Yeah, 1,600. Oh, it's so true. It's, uh, that, that classic stuff on social, but it, yeah, those are all doing it the wrong way and it's gone off the rails from that standpoint. But if you do the know, like, and trust way and are kind of patient and you have that giving mentality, it can be really effective compared to whatever you're spending on these, these trade show budgets. So I think the leadership probably needs to have that mentality that way the reps feel open to doing it. But if you can, you know, you don't have to wait for that too. You can do it on your own as a rep as well and really invest in the personal brand and LinkedIn's been And it's been a great one for me for sure as well.

And to become great at sales, the best way is to model somebody who already has become good at sales and to hear other people who have become great at sales and the journey that they're going through, the false beliefs, The misnomers, the mindset issues, all of this stuff that gets in our way between where we are and the income that we want. Let's face it, we're in sales because we're money motivated. We're competitive. We want to be better every day than we were yesterday. And how do we do that? Just really, you know, read a book, listen to a podcast. That's good. Good start. I like it. But then you have to take action. And then you want both tactical and strategic ideas. You want mindset. You want strategy. You want to understand how companies buy. You want really deep content and examples, case studies, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes. That's what I'm here for. I'm here for you to learn from my mistakes.

And boy, do I got a lot of them.

So go to b2brevenue.com, sign up for the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting fills up your pipeline, gets rid of that problem of, oh, I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough meetings. It gets those conversations started with the people you want to talk to. Now, it's not about a pitch. It's about a conversation. Now, everybody thinks of conversations when you're talking or you're online at the same time or you're on the phone or Zoom at the same time. That's not a conversation. A conversation is when the client is talking about what they care about, what they're interested in. And that is what we call qualification, where we can sense where are they and how do we build up that curiosity into interest into urgency. To get a deal. And these are skills that we need. They're lifelong skills that we need in sales. And then how do we get a deal closed? Yes, anyone can take an order. But what if they don't know how to get it done? You got a new account where you're trying to get a big change done internally. What are the issues? If you're not planning that through, odds are it's not going to get done no matter how much your champion wants it. So Winning the Complex Sale solves that problem for you. Why waste all your time on these false positives or these no decisions? Because they don't pay very well. They pay 0.0. What you want to do is pay a lot. So sign up today. Invest in yourself. You're the asset in sales. Quit waiting for somebody else To approve it or train you. See if you can get it expensed. That should be your first sales obstacle. Your first sales challenge is how do you get your company to pay for it? Just go down, tell your manager you want to do this. I put a little example email in the show notes right below here. Just swipe up and take a look at that. And if they won't, you got to ask yourself, why won't you? Why won't you? Oh, it takes time. Well, you work all day. You're working wrong all day. Why not improve that? There's the time right there. Oh, the money, Brian. It's money. Well, you make more money if you become better in sales. And Start the Conversation pays for itself the first week because you're going to get at least 2 meetings just learning from the very basics of it. Closing the Complex Sale will pay for itself 100 times over. Students in it tell me it's the best money they ever spent because they now have control over their deals. And it doesn't end. Some give up. Some give up after they win their first deal and they think they've got enough. No, come back. Come back. Keep going. You can get even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Yeah, excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse— you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, 50, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income.

Really?

Yeah. The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000. 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.