HOW TO THINK LIKE A CLIENT IN THE PROSPECTING STAGE OF 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.

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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 do you get any of those InMails invites or InMail messages that just hit you with a pitch?

I don't know what you're talking about. I've never, never seen that happen before, but never, never, never got them actually. Unfortunately, it seems to happen a lot. I mean, I was trying to count up how many I typically get every month, but it's, it's kind of hard to even keep track. So I, I think I'm pretty sympathetic and empathetic to salespeople, but when I see stuff like that, I'm just shaking my head. It just seems that there's no effort put into that. It's automated. It might be a robot. I have no idea, but it's just nonstop. It's just pitch after pitch after pitch, whether it be Social, and it just seems that somewhere along the way, sales got a little lazier. Some of these bad selling practices just sort of started happening, and now it feels like you're flooded with it. And myself, which I know how hard it is to get things done in certain types of complex sales and how challenging it can be, it's just, you kind of just shake your head when you see stuff like that.

Yeah, because I, I don't know about your LinkedIn, but I'm not sure what I did. Because I've got a regular inbox and then the Navigator inbox. The Navigator inbox is 100% crap. The regular inbox is 75% crap. And when I say crap, I don't mean to demean salespeople. It's just, I know it's automated because I have a little trick on LinkedIn where I put my middle initial and a period.

Mm-hmm.

because LinkedIn doesn't let you have a middle name. So I know they scraped it because nobody would say Brian G., period. Hey, Brian G., period. No one would do that except for a robot. So you get these, and now what I've seen is people are just putting it in the connection request. They're not even waiting till they're connected because the pitch slap was Connect 10 seconds later, get the pitch. And you gotta ask yourself, why are people doing this?

It's, it's a great question. And yes, you're right. 100% of the Sales Navigator or the InMail is just complete garbage typically. So I don't even look at that half the time at all. But I think just the way sales is in society is we want that gimmick, we want that trick, we want that easy way to get a meeting or get a deal done. But that's just not the reality of the way the world works. I mean, if you work for a unicorn or a massive company that has market share, a lot of momentum, you can probably get away with some of the lazier things like pitch slap, potentially, probably not. But for most of us, 99.99% out there, you actually have to Do work and have a process and have some type of know, like, and trust that you build up. But I think people just want that instant gratification. They want to get some quick wins. They kind of spray and pray type thing and hope that something's going to hit, hit, and they're playing the numbers game. But I think because of what we're talking about with, with the pitch slap and everything, that, that just doesn't, doesn't work very well anymore. Or I, I'm a salesperson. I don't even want to look at it. And I'm like, immediately roll my eyes. So you can imagine what your potential customers are thinking when they see something like that.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people look at it the wrong way. They say, oh, don't beat up on salespeople. And it's like, it's one, it's narcissistic to think that I can just send what I do to the world and someone's going to come back. I need that. And the closest real-world analogy I've come up with is if you go to a concert or sporting event, You see the scalpers. Now there it works because people are there, they have a ticket, they don't care about the scalper. They don't have a ticket, they want to buy a ticket. It works. Okay, but is that selling? Is that what we're doing? Is that B2B selling? No.

No.

That's B2C and it's finding, okay, the people who want a ticket, You can't go and email them, schedule a meeting, meet them for coffee, right? That's ridiculous. They either need a ticket, want a ticket, or they don't. It's binary. This is how people view the world in B2B as well. They're either interested or not interested. And you have somebody who came up with 3 to 5% of your market is interested at this point.

Yeah.

Now, either you don't know math or you look at the world, they must want it because I do it. And I remember going to a startup thinking, well, the company hired me, there must be interest out there for this product. And then I, then I said, it's like, no, they didn't hire me for that. They hired me to go create the interest for it. You know, the, certainly the marketing didn't do that. And, and most of the time it requires a conversation to understand it. In the scalping situation, you know what it is. It's a ticket to the game. The only real question is how much and where are the seats and how many tickets. It's a transaction. It's very simple. Now, how many people on LinkedIn are selling something that simple?

Not many.

Not many. So then you got to ask, so why do they keep doing it? Is it the only thing they know? Their manager tells them to do it, or they just think it could work if I do it enough? And this is the scary part.

It is. It's probably a mix of all the stuff you just mentioned there. It's probably pressure from the company or the manager to have a certain amount of activity or KPIs, so then they feel Obligated to do that, even though probably whatever they put in the CRM is not accurate anyway with, with the amount of in-mails or things they're sending out. So I think there's certainly part of that. And then, and also, it's, it's challenging to prospect the way we're talking about, like to do it the right way. It's not as easy as just pressing a button. So I think because people don't, people don't want to do the work sometimes, they just want to kind of do the easy way out. They think if they just do the cadences or the pitch slaps, that it's a no numbers game and they can just be effective with that. So they feel, they probably feel like they're making progress by getting in front of 1,000 people a month or whatever their numbers are, but it's not, they're not really making progress. They're kind of going backwards if you really dive into it. So I, and some of it I don't think is intentional to your point, it's not trying to bash salespeople because I've made a million mistakes myself pitching too fast and what have you. I think it's just Probably what their company is telling them, what they grew up being told to do. And then they just keep kind of running on a hamster wheel type thing, thinking that that activity is going to get them somewhere. But I think people just want the easy way out. And then pressing a button or doing a mass pitch slap to 800 people is much easier than trying to focus on people that are likely to be interested, that you can kind of build up that know, like, and trust.

Yeah, and it just simply comes down to not understanding how to sell.

Yep.

And this is not unique. I'll give you an example from yesterday. I did a video that started off like, you know how to email, but you— do you know how to sell? And I, I love the reactions I get because I had a chief revenue officer reply Well, I sent 2 emails out. One told me it was the dumbest thing ever, and the second one scheduled a demo. And I go, I didn't reply. I just said to myself, he's lying. He hasn't sent an email in probably 15 years. He's doing that so his team will see, you know, it works sometimes. You never know. That, that's the piece. This is where sales goes off the rails. Since there's no real litmus test of anything working or not working, people come up with a little platitude. You never know. Oh, oh, you never know. So let's say you have a brain tumor. You never know if banging against the wall will fix it or not, or taking a lot of vitamin C will fix it. Well, See, at least in medicine, we have a little bit more controls because people go to school for 8 years and have a 4-year residency. So they know salespeople, uh, you know, you get out of college with a psychology degree, a good smile, and you can hold a conversation.

You're in sales.

Here, here, here's your PC, here's your cadence tool, and there's the world. Knock yourself out. And managers will say, well, they'll learn along the way. What will they learn? What will they learn?

Bad practices.

Yeah. And then, and then they become a manager. And let's say it works, that their sale is simple and there's demand and there's interest already, because not every sale is the same. All of a sudden, let's say it works 1% of the time and they close some business and they work their way up to a manager. That's when the danger happens, because now that at the management level, they think it works because it worked in this one case. And for the last 20 years, everyone's been following some SDR who was at Salesforce during the tornado. Anyone who could pick up a phone could sell at Salesforce in 2004. There was no other CRM that was on the internet versus on-prem at the time. So all of a sudden they could sell it because they didn't have to get IT involved. And all of a sudden, for the first time ever, the VP of sales could buy a product, force his reps to use it, and not involve IT. Guess which one they buy?

That is not a hard sale, right? Yeah.

And then he writes a book about it. Now everyone's gonna follow this stupid process. And unless you're Salesforce and it's 2004, your success is probably not gonna be as big by evidence of his company that's going nowhere. So then what do we do? Well, it's not working as well. We gotta automate it. So then the spam machine guns come around and all of a sudden you can do 10 times as many dumb things in the same amount of time. Let's do it. And now you gotta think, okay, back then we had a handful of companies doing it. Marginal success. Now everyone's doing it and it's automated and it's on social and it's on all these channels. The likelihood of it working goes down because everyone is doing it. You know, I blow up in 2018, 2019 because I was doing videos on LinkedIn, but then within a couple years everyone's doing it. And it, it still works, but it doesn't work like it did in 2018.

Mhm.

And everybody thinks all you have to do is a video and put it on LinkedIn. No, you have to put something in the video that people find entertaining and valuable. This is where we run into trouble in sales, is we're doing things because other people did them. But in a different context.

100%. You're making me want to go back to 2004 and that Salesforce day. Yeah, like I've always been chasing that unicorn sale, but it seems to be hard to find for sure. But exactly, I mean, you, and you have to be with all the flooding of inbound and the cadences that you see now, you just got to think from the buyer's perspective. I mean, they are just getting destroyed from every angle possible, LinkedIn, email, phone calls, whatever. And it's just, all the stuff we're talking about. So they can't, even if you do have a legitimate product that's really disruptive and innovative and cool, trendy technology, I mean, they can't tell the difference one way or the other, nor do they have time to look at it. So they're just going straight to the trash. So it's not really getting yourself out there. So it's like, how do you be different and stand out? I always think about that as how do you stand out from the sea of sameness from what everybody else is doing? Because you don't have a choice really, in my opinion, depending on what you're selling. I mean, you have to stand out. You have to do something different. You have to kind of be a peer, not a salesperson that's just nonstop pitching. But somewhere along the way, to your point, it just went off the rails. And one company had success with BDRs and SDRs. Nothing against those folks. I mean, they're right out of school. They go straight into the role. They're trying to learn sales and that's totally fine. But that SDR and BDR kind of just changed the trajectory a little bit. And then now it's just you're relying on that or the cadences. I also think technology and some of the companies that have came out is great. I mean, there's a lot of things I use for technology to help me and save time and not always be working for my money and kind of outsourcing things with AI. But it also kind of makes us lazier too, where we rely too much on technology or AI or whatever it may be. And then we fall into this trap. But if you're selling something complex that's worthwhile, that has a higher price point, that's disrupting the status quo. All that isn't gonna get you in front of that, that buyer you want to or progress the deal along most likely. Uh, there, there's some things that can maybe help with, but I think we rely too much on that technology or AI or ChatGPT, whatever's coming out these days.

And you gotta ask yourself, do you need a conversation or is a pitch enough? And I, I don't think— you pretty much know if a pitch is enough if you're not getting at least 10% reply rate. If you get more unsubscribes than you do, yeah, I'd like to talk to you about it. And let's face it, are they really want to talk to you about it, or are they just gonna see your URL and your email address and go look at it? That's what I would do. That's what I do, because I think in the last year, 2 I've replied to, and they didn't know what to do with me because that's how little or how infrequent people reply. Because I own a business, I'm in market for a lot of things.

Yeah.

You know, if somebody happens to hit me at the right time with the right thing, I'm open-minded. It's not like I just don't like any email. Or I don't read any of them. I read some of them, but I've learned to just go to their website and kind of see what it is and how it works and if it's a match. And frankly, I, if it is, I just go directly and buy it because the salespeople don't know anything about it. And they just, it's just a worthless step between me and what I want. So I think today, you know, not only is sales hard to learn, people are getting a start on the wrong page. Like another comment on that post was, person didn't disagree with me, but what do I do other than email and cold call? I go, well, first, it's not the channel. It's a skill. And it's a skill that No one really teaches because we'll, we'll see somebody, you know, all the, the SDRs and the AEs that are now starting their own training company. Well, do you ever notice they're not working at some no-name company?

No.

They're working for a company in the tornado. They're taking orders. They're not building a business. They're not starting a market. They're Processing orders and processing interest. And congratulations, you got to the right place at the right time. Go to a hard company, go to a startup, go to a company that has no customers, and then tell me how good you are. It's very different.

There's a huge difference. And I've worked for some really big companies that have a great brand. And it's easy to get overconfident sometimes when, because you have that, that momentum, that, that tornado you're talking about, and it can feel good and you do probably get overconfident with your sales skills. But if you switch industries or you go to a startup, I've had a few experiences between those and it's, it can be humbling because I realized, man, it's way different when you're trying to hunt for new business, when you're dealing with something complex like healthcare, when I was doing that. Or when you go to a startup that has momentum, or maybe that momentum already disappeared and there wasn't momentum anymore, and you're trying to kind of break into some new places and there's no existing business. So it is way different. I don't— and most people don't realize that until they take those risks or they make some moves somewhere else. But for sure, if I'm gonna want to learn from somebody or get, get some new training or Yep. So I—

what I would recommend is reps think like a client. What is the client thinking when you're contacting them? Do they understand the problem? Are they aware of the issues? Are they going to recognize your URL, your brand, your category? And if they do, great, start from there and build up. We're kind of assuming They have the problem that we solve and congratulations, you found me. No one cares. Or they think like, I, I, we gotta go find interest and if they're interested, great. If they're not, forget 'em. They're off the list. I think that's too little, too binary. And you gotta ask yourself, is it a numbers game? Really? Then what are the numbers? Or is that a platitude or a rationalization for why you're doing something all day long? And is it more of a focus game or is it an activity game? I, I've never been in a company that was a numbers game. Never. It was always a focus game. And the way to tell is how many deals a quarter do you close? Net new revenue, not upsell, not inbound, but net new deals. And if that is, let's say it's 10, just as a round number. So you have 12 weeks in a quarter, that's 1 a week. And but yet you're making 50 calls a day. Doesn't sound like a good use of time. And are all those 50 equally likely to be interested?

No way.

Then you got to say, well, why are the other ones less interested than others? There's got to be some correlation there. And this is something that comes up in the course quite a bit. Well, where do I start? I go, you got to be a detective. How do I do that? You got to think. That, that, that, that eliminates 90% of the salespeople because they think thinking is sending email. No, thinking is who you send the email to. And why is it even the right persona? Do they own the problem? Do they care about the problem? Are they feeling the problem? And are you using logic or are you using emotion? Because think about the number of logical things you should be doing now. It's probably 300, right?

Yep. Yep.

But you do 3. So using logic doesn't get you over the line because people say they think logically, but they don't. And very few people even think consciously. They're all talking about their feelings and yelling and backbiting and deflecting. And that's what mammals do. And we all think we're all these professionals. Like, have you ever been at a company? And if people bought logically, why are there 300 CRMs? Really?

Great point.

To keep track of contact information, right? It's not a complex problem to solve. That's why there's 300 of them. It's an easy problem to solve. So why are there? Because people have different feelings about different ones at different times. They get used to one and they don't want to switch. And that's usually what a lot of people run into. It's like, that thing's 10 times better than what I'm doing, but I know how to do this. And I don't feel like switching. Notice the word feel. Is that a logical reason or an emotional reason?

The emotion definitely comes in there. And I, the numbers game, I, I believe is just an easy excuse. So that manager, if the sales rep isn't performing or the SDR, whatever, it just goes straight to a numbers game because that's easy for the manager to say that And then the rep or SDR feels like they have to do the numbers game because that's the only thing they know how to do. But to your point, it's no one's actually taking a step back and thinking about who their customer profile is, who's most likely to buy. It takes some thought and effort on the front end and constantly tweaking that too. But most, I guess some of the personalities in sales aren't as maybe analytical, process-driven. Maybe it's just tougher for them to step back and, and really think like that. Uh, I know at first, well, I'm actually kind of more analytical and process-driven anyway and, and more introverted. So that probably helped me just to actually plan and think and prioritize the right way. But it, I probably do it too much sometimes, but it helps me kind of focus on the areas that I think are most likely to succeed or the, or the customer personas or profiles that I think are most likely to have this problem or want to buy. But it's not, You have to do some work on the front end and you constantly have to tweak that. You have to keep track of, okay, who's responding to what? Are they interested? Where's it going off the rails? And then keep updating that. But then we just, I think we just go back to that activity and just, if we do 200 of that, that's way better than focusing on 30 that are more likely to succeed. But it depends on the sale that you're doing. If it's very simple and transactional, that's different. But it, That helps me out a ton because I have a plan to action. I'm not wasting as much time because the way we're talking about, you can waste so much time. Even if you use automation or technology, you're still going to be wasting a ton of time. And those people that you're reaching out to are probably going to blacklist you from ever contacting them again. So you're kind of wasting time and it's counterintuitive. So, but it's, it's interesting why salespeople won't actually plan and prioritize because it's hard, I guess. It's just people want The easy way of everything.

Yeah, because when you see someone else being successful sending a pitch, you gotta say to yourself, why can't I be that successful? Logical, right? Except for you're not selling their product to your market.

That's why.

And isn't that kind of empathy, kind of a little bit of analytical critical thinking? And honestly, I hated wasting my time. And I would— every manager had like some KPI. I paid no attention to it whatsoever because it was a total waste of time. And they do it because that's easier than teaching you what does work if they know what works.

And that's doubtful too.

It's a challenge. Have they ever sold it? Most managers have never sold the product that they're leading with, that they come in at the end of the quarter to negotiate some pricing or some concession to get a big deal done. And they think that's selling. That's a little bit of selling. It's not the whole selling. And no one cares how hard someone else works. So it's real easy to say, do a bunch of stuff, hoping that something will come through the other end. And they sit around and their dashboard doesn't look pretty if there isn't a lot of things to look at. And when I see the idiots who say, oh, it's stuck at this stage because it's not transitioning through, it's like, you are clueless about selling. How will I know where the sticking points are in the deal? Talk to the people. Is that incomprehensible that you would talk to a rep instead of looking through this dashboard where they're hitting a key to make the color look the way you want it to look? They're not stupid. They're smart enough to get you off their back. So now we got a bunch of people playing business instead of doing business. And I bet you I could sit down with that manager. Tell me your ideal customer profile. It'll be SMB company between 50 and 100 employees at Series B. Okay, but why would they buy? Why is that better than a Series A company? They can't say. Well, oh, we did our analysis. And I'm like, congratulations. Then why isn't it working? It's a numbers game, Brian. It's not— you more you make, you more you make. It's like you got to be a fanatic. No, you got to be an idiot to do that. And it is kind of keep you busy. Everyone's busy, so something must come out of it. But we're not manufacturing, we're sales. Manufacturing does that— move the box from one end of the warehouse to the other. Make work. Sales is a skill, and it's a skill that's hard to learn. It's even harder to teach because how do you teach something that someone thinks they already know or that they don't believe because their subconscious is going, oh, my rascals are different. That won't work for in my country. Oh, because people don't live in your country. I love that one. Oh, you don't understand. We don't talk to each other here. I've heard that. I go, do you reproduce? Do you have parents? Did that happen spontaneously or did they talk? You're like, okay, some countries are more friendly than others.

I get it.

More social than others, but there are people there. How'd they get there? Why are they still there? How do they collaborate? You work at a company. Why do they need you? And people just, you gotta think through this and they'll do anything to not have to get out of their comfort zone. It's true.

And that's probably the key is it's, it is uncomfortable. It's different. And I, I think you have to stand out these days. If you're doing all the stuff we were talking about from, from today, then it's, it's gonna be really tough to, to break through and you're gonna build up a lot of bad habits, and those are going to be hard to break. So it's how do you kind of stand out, think differently? And it is a skill. It's hard to learn all this and get good at it. But if you start early, it's going to be much better than trying to fix it 10 or 20 years down the road.

Because the number one pushback and excuse is, I don't have time. I'm too busy doing what doesn't work to take a minute to do what does work. That's the logic.

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 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?

Um, just really, you know, read a book, uh, 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.