THE NEW CATEGORY IN SALES AND HOW TO LEVERAGE IT TO MAKE MORE MONEY

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of the other podcasts I put out there. Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers. So, if you're looking for more of a daily Q&A, tips and tricks type of show, that's the show for you. Also, check out our friends over at brevitypitch.com. Brevity Pitch is an AI product that allows salespeople to practice their sales conversations without anybody eavesdropping on you or judging you. It just lets you warm up and then develop your skills. Because we can think it, we can plan it, uh, but until we open our mouth and practice it, it's a different thing. It's like watching somebody play golf. You gotta play golf to become good at golf. That's what brevitypitch.com does for you. Tell them Brian sent you.

Here we go. So any career changes, uh, recently that, uh, we may not be aware of?

Quite a bit of change the last few years, but it's been exciting times. But I actually just recently took a role with a tech AI startup called Brevity. I think you may have heard of them before, and it's been a great transition so far. Before that, I was doing the full-time entrepreneurial path, but a variety of reasons led me to Brevite and excited for the future. Yeah.

What's it like being back selling full-time or selling for someone else?

I guess there's definitely a lot of differences for sure. I mean, as we've talked in the past at points, I mean, entrepreneurship is probably the toughest Sales role out there, uh, when you, when you have your own business. So it's certainly maybe not a break from sales, but just a different way. I, I think with Brevite, at least the situation I'm in, it's a good blend of both because it is a startup. There's a lot of autonomy. There's a lot of fast-paced, dynamic environment, which I thrive in and I enjoy. And then you also get, get to sell full-time and you have resources behind you. You have technology, you have support. So it's, it's a blend of both worlds, which is a good fit for me because I tend to be pretty self-sufficient. I want to get stuff done and I want to adapt when I can without a ton of red tape and bureaucracy. I mean, the bigger the companies get, typically the more of that that comes into it, but we're still in a fun stage where you get a little bit of both sides.

Yeah. And is it mostly to sales leaders or enablement or customer success or?

So right now I'm mainly focused on trying to upsell and take care of existing accounts. So a lot of new business flowed in, which has been fantastic, but it's trying to help them grow, help them really solve the problems that they care about most and, you know, take it to the next level with how they're using the platform. So it's mainly, yes, definitely sales leadership. So VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, other business folks that might be involved. And then typically the sales managers are right in the middle of it. And then the end users are typically sales reps. It could be a front-end seller that's trying to close business. It could be someone that's more account management upselling or someone that's trying to get new meetings and cold calling more outbound. And That's the core part of it. And then certainly you have some secondary areas where sales ops and customer success are, are part of it involved, may use it in some capacity as well.

Yeah. And what kind of pushback do you get?

It's, it's interesting so far. I mean, I think everyone is excited for AI the last few years, which is great, but there's also an overload of AI out there right now. I think there's some AI fatigue because everyone's Companies are just supposed to go find out about AI and add it to the Rolodex. So I think it can be a little confusing in the marketplace. So I think some people are just looking for something cool to play with and maybe try some things out. And they're told that maybe they're required to do that. That could be a requirement based off what the company is directing. So that's usually one thing. I think people— They're resistant to change. So they, they push back on, will their team use something like this? How real is the AI? Those type of things. And then when you start getting into the outcome side of it, there's the short term and the long term, which is definitely understandable. So you have to adapt your language to what's realistic in the short term with, with a tool like this. And then what could you see over the long term? Because some people could have deal cycles that are 12 or 18 months. So you can't.

Yeah.

track stuff, certain things in a shorter period. So those, those are probably the things out of the gates. And then also the one that's probably your favorite is that salespeople, sales leaders tend to think that they know everything. And I've been guilty of this myself many times. So they've been doing it for a long time. They've probably had success. They don't always listen to other feedback out there. They're not always in that learning mentality and they, they get stuck in just, hey, this is how we've been doing it. I already know it. This is our process. And that's sort of where they come from. So you have to somehow not push back too much on that part, but get them to realize that, hey, sales is a performance profession, right? You have to be a student of the game. You have to keep getting better and you can never really get to that mountaintop. There's always something that can improve you and there's always people out there that are better than you. So if you have that mentality, then something like brevity, or a variety of other things can be really helpful.

Yeah, that's kind of what I've been shocked when I talk to sales leaders. You hear about, uh, can I get my team to use it? And it's like, you got your team to use a CRM, didn't you? I bet not one of them wanted to use that. And did the CRM make you any money?

You still don't want to use it.

You're like, imagine coaching any team, right? And they don't show up for practice. What have you learned about how people view sales?

It's in general, I think people do want to do the right thing. They know that coaching is a good thing. They know that they want to get their salespeople to improve. They realize sometimes that people are just busy doing a lot of stuff that isn't driving— Too busy to eat it all. Yeah. And I think they need help. That's probably one of the biggest things I've learned is that everyone's got so many priorities. They have so much going on. They have so many demands from their leadership and their days are just stacked with meetings and all that. And they need help. upskilling their team, getting their team better, but, you know, they don't know how to do that or they don't maybe trust certain vendors to do that. So it's like, you know, how do you bridge that gap? But there's a ton of fatigue, I think, on sales leaders. And I mean, if you're not hitting your numbers, a lot of times, depending on the company, within 12 or 18 months, it's not going to be a good situation for you or your team. So there's a lot of stress and burnout from that and people are just overwhelmed. So if they can find something that Saves them time, helps their team, is driving towards performance on the revenue side, getting more meetings, closing deals. It's a no-brainer, but it's still change and they still have all that other stuff going on. So how do you prioritize it at the top of the list? I mean, that's the hard part, but I don't know if you've been seeing that stress and burnout, but I definitely see that from sales leaders for sure.

Yeah, but I think it's focused all on the wrong things. Everyone thinks they can solve their sales problem with volume. More leads, more calls, more emails. The problem is, if you understand math, as volume goes up, quality goes down. So what do they do? Got to do more. Don't know how to do quality. And it's a quality game. And I think What I've seen and been really surprised at is people stop at the enablement level. You know, product knowledge, competitive knowledge, industry knowledge. It's all good. It's part of the game. But that doesn't get you the next meeting. That doesn't get you past a blocker. That doesn't close the deal. Maybe those skills Would be helpful.

No doubt. And, and that's another thing that comes up is it's so hard to write out or learn your entire sales process. There's so many things that go into it over that 6 or 12 month period. And although we know that we need to be writing it out, and there are some people that do that or map it out, that's great. It's still hard to wrap your head around that because it's just so much information, so much time, so much gap between everything. And then The way we've tried to do it at Brevity is those specific moments, like those micro moments, because you need to know the, the map, right? But then it's these 15 or 20 traps where things really go off the rails. And I sometimes when you mention some of those to a sales leader, it's like, oh, I know that. I know I, I'm, I shouldn't be single-threaded. Like my team knows that they've been doing this for a long time. Yeah, we do know that, but it's not just that, you know, it's, it's how you, executed because, okay, maybe that person isn't letting you meet other people, which is a red flag in itself that this probably isn't a legit deal. Or maybe you're not asking it the right way and they feel threatened by the way you're coming at them to get introduced to someone else. Maybe you should have already done that a long time ago and had your CEO get introduced to someone. I mean, there's a lot of different ways there. So I think people understand those. Sometimes they're like, oh, well, my team already knows how to do that. But I'm like, do they though? Like, let's really—

Of course.

Let's, let's go deep this a little bit more.

Again, how are they doing it though? When we analyze the calls, they may have asked a question, but they, at the end, they only talk to one person at the account. So yes, they know they should. Do they? And who do they do it with? And how do they do that? And are they, and why don't they? They don't because they don't feel comfortable, which is very different than knowing how. We all know how to speak, but we don't know how to speak in front of 10,000 people. It's different. And what do you think the future of sales performance is?

I mean, I think we're trying to build a new category in itself. I mean, you have all the ones you mentioned, you had CRMs, Heyday, you have enablement, you have all these different areas, but really it should be about the performance because sales is a performance profession. It's similar to comedians, athletes, all these different areas, no matter how good you get. You have to be practicing some of the boring stuff, some of the basic stuff, some more challenging things daily, weekly, so that you can perform when it matters in front of the customer. So I think this category is really the future because sales has gotten really hard, especially the last 5 years. And that numbers game that you were talking about, it's probably going to keep getting worse before it gets better. I keep, we keep talking about that, but it's just going to keep getting worse most likely. So, which makes it harder for everybody else too. So. If you're not focused on the performance side, you're just going to get passed up. Maybe you can get away with it at the unicorn companies, the bigger companies where you just hide between the shadows a little bit. But if you're really trying to do well and have a good career, as well as companies that want to take market share, or, you know, everything keeps getting more and more competitive, I think you have to focus on this as a leader as well as your team. You just won't survive very long, at least at a, at a high level, right? You know, some, some industries are different than others, but I think most are getting really competitive. AI is popping up left and right. There's competition popping up. So if you're not doing this, it's going to be really hard to do well. So we'll keep adding fuel to the fire, whether that be new products, the way we support customers with people like myself for customer success. And I think that's That's the future for sure. Yeah.

And why do you think people haven't been focused on performance? I mean, there's no focus on it, right? There's certifications, there's enablement. And, but you look at any sizable team and it's a very small number of reps that are generating most of the revenue. So it's not an activity or just an activity.

I'm not sure if there's one thing that triggered it specifically. I think it was probably the, the, uh, that repeatable playbook that came out with, you know, what Salesforce was doing back, back in the day when they were a unicorn. And then now everyone thought that the email, well, at some points, that's the thing. You got to, the context at some points, the emails were working better. Yeah, exactly. So everyone started doing that, whatever, in the 2000s, 2010s, whenever it was. And, and then everyone just started taking that unicorn playbook and doing it for every type of company that exists, which doesn't work very well if you're not a unicorn. You can get away with it if you have people coming to you and your product's amazing and all that. So I think that's where it went off the rails and maybe people lost sight of, because I mean, back People know that role plays are effective. I rarely do I have someone that says they don't think that role plays are effective to get their salespeople better. It's just, you know, doing it in person, taking time out of the day, all that is a pain in the butt and it's just not realistic. But at some point, I think people were focused more on performance and then the whole email cadences, the numbers game, and then all that started just taking off. And then it got just really cloudy. In between. And then it's, uh, there's just a lot of ego in sales and people make good money and they tend, tend to, they don't want to admit to certain things. So it sometimes maybe feel, uh, threatened with maybe the performance side of it, but that, that's the 2 things that pop in my head the most. I'm not sure what you've seen, but that's what I think maybe triggered it. And then just salespeople tend to have a lot of egos. So.

Yeah.

I think managers don't want to focus, don't want to admit it because they don't have control over it. That means the rep has leverage if they're good. And it's a rare manager that won't divide the territory to death and kind of handicap the rep out of the company. But a smart manager needs the revenue. Doesn't need even distribution. And it's rare that a sales manager even understands what selling is. You know, they might think it's product knowledge. They might think it's solely relationships, might think it's an innate characteristic. And they may not care as long as it works. And the idea that You know, role play, could that work? Well, what skill—

how do you learn any skill?

You do it, right? Someone shows you, then you do it. You get a little feedback, you do it again. Sound familiar?

Yep.

It's not a foreign concept.

That's what's called experience. That's why we hire sales reps with 5 years of experience.

They've been doing it over and over again. And the 10,000-hour rule, that's deliberate practice. That's not reactive hanging out taking orders. Deliberate practice.

So that's probably 15 years, right? And how can you get it fast?

Mm-hmm. Exactly. And I mean, there's a lot of painful mistakes you learn along the way over those 15 years. And something like Brevity, if you do focus on the traps, it can help accelerate that. And, and, and, you know, you're still going to make mistakes, but why not make them on an AI versus in real life when it can cost you commission or leave revenue on the table for your company? So it— I see it as Anything coaching or this type of stuff we're talking about, it accelerates your career and it saves you years of mistakes that maybe you would be making otherwise. So the more you can invest in stuff like this, the better. And I, I mean, one of the things that attracted me to the company originally was just how easy it was to use. I remember I was laying on my couch, I'd created a role play with the, the voice option, and I just sort of Weaned it as far as what I told the voice, but it was way harder than I thought it was going to be. And I was just laying on my couch. I didn't think it was going to be like that, that level of difficulty. So I was like, man, this really would help salespeople. So that was a big part of it for me is like, I know it will help sales teams and salespeople and it will help me personally. So, and I think that's got to be the future is focusing more on how well you're doing it versus just the numbers game, because people are just turning into robots and it's, it's mind-numbing activities too. It's not. helping salespeople get better. It's just making them— it's the opposite.

Well, if you set up your sales organization to be order takers and there's no orders to take, what do they do? They're going to try and find more people who just want to order. And that doesn't exist. And I think, now imagine a comedian who instead of practicing either in front of an audience or in front of a mirror, Because they spend a whole year on their hour. Imagine if they just told themselves, they wrote it down on paper, never spoke it out loud. How do you think it would come across the first time in front of an audience?

Not good. Not good.

And that's a monologue. We're in dialogues, and a lot of the drills are not About making knowledge. It's about building confidence in hard moments, moments where people would normally be a clerk and do what they're told and kill the deal just not to ruffle feathers. And it's our job to sometimes ruffle feathers. To do the right thing, not the immediate wrong thing, the easy thing. And where do you see it going?

Yeah, no doubt that the, the confidence side of it is huge for, for the mindset of salespeople, because you do have to push back a lot because you're in competitive situations, and most of the time where the customer wants to go is maybe not the right direction. So you have to push back a lot. And, uh, Where do I see it going? I mean, I, again, I think it's a new category in itself. I think, I think most companies eventually will want to have some type of role-playing in an AI function. So I, I think it's gonna be pretty consistent across any companies that are trying to do well. So I think it will be— I'd see that as a good thing, right? So there's, there's probably gonna be more competition. There's gonna be more people doing it, all that. But I think that just justifies the category. And then, you know, there's probably only a few companies that will do really well, and Brevite will be one of them. And it's, I think, because we're focused on the performance side of it. And we have also, you know, the practitioners. I think people like myself and others, we use it daily, weekly, and it makes us better. So I think that comes off. And when we're doing that, you know, there's— as far as new in the future, it's meeting people where they're at. So right now, a lot of stuff, they're doing it on their laptop or iPad. There's, I think, meeting people where they're at straight to their cell phone, um, because salespeople are running around with their head cut off. They're driving, they're traveling, and if you could just have it go straight to your phone, which is something we're working, uh, to launch right now, like, that's exciting because that's another pushback too that I didn't mention earlier is people don't want to get on their computer. They're running around or they're busy, you know, they're out in the field. So boom, just have it come straight to your phone. And you can do it right there. So I think the, the focus on the user will continue to get better and better, and we'll have more stuff like that, which is exciting. But yeah, I mean, it's a new category. There'll be new competition, I'm sure. I think, you know, the bigger players might do different things, but that just justifies that everyone should have something like this. And yeah, that's a, that's a cool thing.

Yeah. And I think You know, as a sales leader, to be able to take your sale and break it down into minute little pieces and be able to have your reps do the enablement stuff, product knowledge, but do micro moments instead of a half-hour call, but a 5-minute drill as a warm-up every day. Because I think reps want to talk. They want coaching, they want feedback.

How do you get it? Post-call, it's too much.

Review a 40-minute demo call, it's like, oh, you said ah too many times, or what, you talk too much. Oh, that, that's been around for 10 years now. I think people still talk too much, don't you?

Oh yeah.

Knowledge isn't the problem.

No, that's so true. I, you definitely need to clean up your, your filler words when you can, but that's exhausting. I mean, it's in theory, it's great. Hey, I want to do a postmortem on my team's calls. And then you look at all of a sudden it's Friday afternoon and you're like, can I really spend 5 hours reviewing all these rep calls? And you want to, you know, it's, it's a good thing to do, but it's just, that's so much time and effort and work. So why not have Something like Brevity do it for you, basically, in a lot of ways, and then focus on those moments, right? Because it's all about turning it into a habit. And if you can just spend, you know, 10 minutes a day or less, and it's going to get you ready for these tougher conversations with the, your prospects. I mean, it's a no-brainer because you don't want to mess up. You don't— sometimes you only get one chance with these situations. So why not practice it beforehand so that you don't mess it up in front of the customer? Because it's like sports, right? You do all this work to get to this big game or big meeting. And then you don't get another chance for a year, maybe never again. It's the same thing in sales.

Yeah, I mean, I always called it the law of 3. It's usually the 3rd time it comes across really well. Well, the first 2 times, if they're in front of the customer, not, not good. And I've done it right before a call just as a way to warm up, you know, to handle certain questions and stuff, or Be able to get back to the problem instead of the product. You know, because everyone says they— it's— they know they should, they know how, but they don't do it. And this has been proven account after account. And that's why we kind of abandoned the call analysis part of it, because 95% of the time it was these moments. And, you know, the uniqueness of those moments was really not very unique at all. Getting the next meeting, focusing on the problem, pushing back on a quote, single-threadedness. Doesn't matter what you're selling. You run into those things in B2B.

No doubt. And a lot of times people think, Their industry is unique and it has all these nuances and that, that can be the case sometimes. However, these traps, these micro moments are consistent across any B2B sales environment, complex and some of the transactional ones too, depending on the industry. So it's— there's a lot of research behind it and I've personally been, been victim of a lot of these traps over the years and also focus on trying to get better at them. So I think you just have to try to relate it as best you can. But that's a common thing too, is people think, oh, my industry is too technical, or we have— it's too complex. We have 12-month deal cycle. I'm like, that's actually better. That's perfect. That's a perfect fit for this because how do you keep momentum over 12 months? It's really hard. So it's these times, these moments where things are probably going off the rails and you're losing the deals. You just don't know it.

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, uh, 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's 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? 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.