THE SECRET TO GETTING YOUR CLIENTS TO OPEN UP AND SHARE

You ever connect with somebody, a prospect, a friend? And why do we want to do that? Because we want to cut through all the, the BS, the, the fluff, the protocol, and we want to get to the core issue. And the more we do this, the more we realize that the other person may not know The real problem. May not know what they're really trying to do. They just want to accomplish something, but they don't know how. That's what selling is all about. Say, people want a product, but why do they want it? What's behind it? Are they willing to fight for it, or do they just want the prettiest and they check a box and lose interest? 10 minutes later. The problem versus product conversation is a core ingredient in every sale. It's not how someone sells. It's in every sale. A manager told me this week, he goes, yeah, but Brian, how about if my reps don't want to sell your way? And I'm like, well, it's not My way. It's what selling is. In every sales conversation— I'm not talking about a service conversation where somebody calls up and has questions and you answer the questions and they either buy or they don't buy. That's not really selling. That's servicing. That's being a call center clerk. Selling is about understanding what the other person's trying to accomplish, what their current world Is like and how you can improve it and how to keep the person focused on why they're doing it. Because this crazy thing happens is once they start looking for a product, that becomes in and of itself an objective to find a product. And by the time they find the product, what ends up happening a lot of times is they— someone asks, well, why are we doing this? And everyone looks around and goes— they either don't know or they have a platitude and they forget. Being able to keep the client focused on why they're doing this, what the real issues are, is critical. And all great salespeople do it. But how do you do it? You've got to practice. You break it down into tiny pieces. And that's what brevity is all about. Brevity pitch gives you that ability to play with the particular situation and get good at it. And there are people who think that this is all there is to selling, and that's wrong too, because there's a whole lot more to selling. Even if you get good at this, there's a million things to selling, as we find out at the end of every quarter. So if you want to become great at sales, You either practice or you lose. So go to brevitypitch.com right now and practice and win. Here we go.

Hey, Josh, thanks for joining us today. So where are you getting started? Give us a little background on yourself.

Yeah, so thanks for having me. So my name is Josh Atkins and I'm based in Louisville, Kentucky, and I look after the life sciences vertical at Qualtrics. Qualtrics is the leader in experience management. For those who are the uninitiated on what we do, we are, we help the biggest, most complex brands in the world listen, understand, and take action on employee feedback, customer feedback. For the sake of my team, it's patient feedback, it's physician feedback. We want to improve experiences for people and help people understand how to deliver better experiences.

That sounds easy.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not a problem at all.

It sounds— it must be like order taking all day. You can't keep up, right?

Yeah. Just hot credit cards. That's all we're getting all day long. It's just people just voting stuff. Hey, we got this Amex. We got budget. We got crazy budget. Let's do it. But that's it.

That sounds like a lot of technology where the outcome is really great. But is it hard to kind of articulate how you do that? I'm guessing no.

Yeah, I mean, I always start with the start, start at the end. Like, what is this gonna look like? Like, and then we'll work backwards from there. Like, what is your ultimate goal? And for me, and what I lean into with our team is that, you know, we're not selling widgets and I'd love to not sell technology, although it is a technology platform. We are selling this outcome of, hey, having a better experience as a patient with this pharmaceutical drug, with this medical device. This is important work because it can save lives. It can extend lives. It can help people who have some physical condition that is hindering their life to improve their life, right? It can help a physician who's, who has burnout, who's not seeing the value of their work, We can help them understand what the physicians, what the patients value about them. So for me, it's very much a mission. And if we start there, if we come from a place of selling from here as opposed to selling from here, a lot of times I think we're in a lot better shape.

I was going to mention you went straight for the emotion.

Yeah.

Did you learn that in your acting career or?

Yeah, it's Everything is a feel to me. Everything is emotion. And I think the more that we kind of lean into the emotional aspects of it, you know, I think in my career earlier, I had, I had a hot-blooded Irishman that lives inside me sometimes that comes out. You know what they're like. Yeah. Yeah. It's so, you know, you get caught up in things and you get a little bit overheated and that's emotional where your emotions take you in the wrong way. But I, for certainly, I think, I think my theater background helped me not only understand but be okay with being emotional, right? And opening up here and selling from here and creating a point of view from here, as opposed to just being robotic in what we're doing, right?

Right. Because we're emotional creatures.

We are. Yeah, we buy it. We buy emotionally. We love emotionally, hopefully in the best ways. We sell emotionally. Um, it's all, it's all the same motion. It's all the same, same feeling.

And, but that doesn't go very consistent with becoming a sales leader. You know what those rascals are like.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's, it's a wild, it's a wild thing. It does for me. It actually makes, it actually makes, it makes sense for me because my theater training is all about ensemble, right? It's all about listening. It's all about tossing the ball. It's about not necessarily moving barriers and boundaries, but overcoming them. It's about sharing and listening, right? And it is all emotional. It's a heightened state of emotion. The theater itself is a heightened state of realism.

Yes.

Right? Um, so you're seeing people on the stage and they're much bigger because they're playing to the back of the house.

Yes.

Same thing in sales leadership for me. It's understanding the different personalities that might be on my stage at any given time. I can't treat one of my reps one way and treat another rep the exact same way because they're 2 different people and they have 2 different selling styles. They have 2 different Authentic motions. So for me, and I'm a— I like bound— I like, I like, uh, like moving boundaries for people and removing barriers so people can do good work. Um, so for me, it feels right in the, right in the sweet spot of emotional selling and, and, and leadership.

Well, it's good to hear somebody come from a different performance background than just athletics. You know, that, that, yeah, that seems to be everywhere in sales and kind of beat to death. But, you know, I've had, you know, people from the debate team, musicians, and actors.

I love that.

Because sales is a performance.

Absolutely.

Requires those rehearsal, improvisation, reading the room, timing.

Listening.

Listening.

How about this? How about Okay with being rejected.

Yeah.

How about that?

And, and the coaching.

Absolutely right.

Because when you were an actor, you had a director.

Yes.

And probably some other people that told you what to do. And sometimes you probably didn't agree.

Absolutely. But it is a collaborative process. Right? It is. And to your earlier point, I too have had The locker room style of leadership, which the, the, the language of that trade is, is 4-letter words and very aggressive type of leadership. And, and, and that turns me off. I'm coming from the exact opposite school, which is, for lack of a better phrase, let me love on you. How can I love on you the most in order to make you feel like you're worthy and that you can do this and put you in the frame of mind? where you can sell as authentically as you can. People don't, people don't sell well when they're scared.

Right. Because we go into fight or flight.

That's right.

Survival mode. And have you ever seen anybody very creative when they're just trying to survive?

Yeah. And that's the thing, man. You have to feel free to take your shot, to shoot your shot. Right? And if it's crazy, I've had a— I've been lucky that I've had a lot of great sales leaders in my career who have leaned into every crazy idea that I may have had. And you have to when it comes to prospecting, when it comes to just continuing and evolving and selling between the big— selling between the big stages. A lot of things happen between a discovery call and a demo. There's a lot of selling that happens incrementally throughout a sales process, and you have to be a little bit risky. To to be successful in this business, I believe. And the only way you can feel comfortable being risky is if you know that some that the walls aren't going to come crashing down with you. Shoot your shot. If you think as long as it's a thoughtful shot, as long as you can articulate it, and the juice is worth the squeeze, and you aren't going to like torpedo your deal or hurt your personal brand. I love I love creativity.

And I'm sure you got pushback earlier in your career. You know, I looked at your career and there was one company that stuck out that has a reputation of just the opposite of this. And we don't have to name it. It doesn't matter.

Yeah. Yeah. They're everywhere. Yeah.

It's very authoritarian. Survive, kill or die.

One of these things does not belong, right? You're looking at my CV, right? Yeah. And It was a fit for a while, and then I got an opportunity to go do something else. Like, I try to pick up multiple things, multiple lessons from every stop that I had. And for the one that you're talking about in particular, one of the lessons I walked away with was, as a leader, that's not the way I lead.

Yeah.

It's not for me. And there are some people who are— and, you know, and the reality is, one of the people that I worked with very closely At that organization kind of led me into my next one. Right? You fit. You tend to find your people in those types of organizations. Right? And for me, it was anybody else who has a personality, who's excitable, who loves just being happy and positive and gregarious, and probably a little bit more smart, elegant, elocuent than they need to be. Those are my people, and I found a few there.

And is that what motivates you?

From a personality perspective, those type of things?

From a career, you know, that creativity, because I mean, sales has that, has the variety, has drama, has a lot of drama in it.

Well, you know what, really, you know, I was very coin-operated for a while.

Okay, here comes the truth.

If we're being like, here's the brutal truth, right? You know, I would say for the most part of my career, when I got into sales, and I realized, you know, I was a theater kid who stumbled into sales because I had someone push me there. But, um, and then I realized how much money you could make in sales. Um, uh, so I got more interested in that and I was like, oh, you can make a lot of money in sales. So I leaned in heavily there. It wasn't until probably my last 6 or 7 years when I started dealing with experiences that I started saying, there's, this is more of a mission thing for me. I love selling things and I love the art of selling things, but unless for me there has to be blood going to it. So what was, what inspired me before was making more money so that I could afford to have a wife and maybe some kids one day. It turned into, okay, I've got that. That's great. There's gotta be something else. And for me it was like, uh, how can I help people? With what we do? How can I serve people? What can our product do to make lives better? Yeah.

And customers sense that too, don't they?

100%. People still buy people. People, people know when you're legit. And that's why every single call that I'm on, we talk about, and every interview that I have with a potential account executive, I'm like, why do you want to do this? We're in life sciences. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to sell this? What's your why? Connect why you want to sell this to me personally for you. I can tell you about me. I have an 8-year-old autistic son, right? So when I think about experiences that we have had as a family, when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, to healthcare, My, my why is how can I make his experiences and my wife's experiences and my why and my experiences better as we're moving through this system in order to get the right medications to help our son?

Yeah.

Right. To make it less strenuous on my wife. Right. So what's your why? Like, what, what, what is, what, why do you want to sell this? You could sell anything in the world. People who come to me have been in sales for a long time. I get really good people who want to sell what we do. They could sell anything, but you gotta be, you gotta want it to want to sell this to me.

And well, tell me about the sale. Who on the customer side wants this?

Yeah.

Or is open to it?

You know, it's funny, you're, you're, you're begging and borrowing and stealing from different buying centers, really. I think this, this idea of a chief experience officer, Yeah. Is relatively new, you know, the last 4 or 5 years where systems are actually, where health systems are thinking about it. For us, it's, I feel it's a couple places. One could live under marketing. There's somebody who's a senior director of employee experience or customer experience that lives under the marketing brand if there isn't an experience department, which I'm surprised more and more people are getting experience departments. Also could live in operations because the act of putting feedback into the hands of the frontline is an operational motion. So you're gonna have to sell to that person anyway, eventually down the line. You gotta make, you gotta connect with that person. So typically I always, we always try to at least get some buy-in from operations.

And is that the hardest part is getting that first call? Or is it keeping the momentum going throughout the process?

Well, I think what's happening, you know, it's the biggest, the biggest challenge sometimes is just doing nothing, right? I think the hardest part, what we do is I think our message resonates when we're giving it in the right way. Our message will resonate with you. If you think about the best experiences you've ever had in your life with organizations, a lot of names pop up. You're probably going to talk about Delta. You may talk about Marriott. You're probably going to talk about Chick-fil-A. You're probably going to talk about a Home Depot or some of those things. The program is run by Qualtrics, right? Think about those best experiences. The Marriott program is run by Qualtrics. So some of those things where you're like, that message resonates in a consumer-driven world where people's expectations are changing. They are no longer accepting bad experiences. They want the same experience from you That they got on their last flight from Delta, point blank.

But your market is more high demand, low supply versus medium demand, high supply, right? There's a million hotels.

Yep. Yeah, but it's still, you have to listen. You have to listen or they will go somewhere else because consumers have choice. Patients have choice now. Right? In order for them to— in order for a patient to stay in your clinical trial, you have to listen to them. You have to understand what they're feeling, right? And if you don't, there's a good chance they're going to drop out and you're not going to get the outcome that you want, right? They're not going to feel supported.

And I got to imagine that the product is reasonably expensive. It's not a commodity. So you have to justify this through the organization that probably didn't budget for this or plan for Yeah.

And I think what you're getting, again, what's important and what we talk about is how do we tie to initiatives? Enterprise Selling 101, right? What are the big boulders that this company is trying to move this year? How do we tie into that and who owns that initiative, right? Let's go talk to that person whose job it is to manage all of this, manage the clinical trials for this new drug, right?

Yeah.

It has to be a success. Let's, let's go make that person successful because if he's successful, he's gonna drag us along for the ride.

And what was your sales journey like? What were some of the, the epiphanies you had along the way? Kind of what do you wish you learned, you know, 10, 15 years ago that you know today?

Man, so many. I think my journey was, I was a theater actor in Chicago. I was doing odd jobs in the afternoons and daytimes in order to kind of continue feeding myself while I went to— while I went to the theater at night, and I had a job during the day. I sold books at Barnes Noble. And I did tours for the Chicago Trolley Company and the double-deckers. If you ever go through the city, this is where Ferris Bueller's dad works right here to the left. I did that for a while, and then I got to the point where I was like, okay, I need a steady 9-to-5 job because I need health insurance. And I wanted to take it seriously. So I start— I got a job as a market research specialist where I was calling health systems saying, hey, are you still using that Meditech device? Are you still using Cerner as your EMR?

And I—

most people I noticed on the floor had no personality whatsoever. They were just asking questions and getting off the phone. I'm sitting there like just to, you know, talk to people. And one day I was walking to the restroom and I happened to walk by the VP of Sales office, a woman named Amy Bergau. And she said, hey, here for a second. I didn't know, I didn't think she knew who I was. She said, I hear you out there, you're funny. And I said, thanks. She said, do you wanna get into sales? And I said, sure, yeah, I could do that. No problem. Sounds great. Sounds super easy. And she said, and she's like, oh, cool. So she was responsible for the distribution. We were collecting the information and they were selling it back to the industry. A few weeks later, she said, you know, listen, I'm not gonna have budget for another salesperson for another year. What I did do Was set up an interview for you at a startup that one of my friends is is working on. So she effectively kicked me out the door, which I'll I'll I'll forever be grateful to her. Another through line in my career is the impact of women, sales leaders who are female, and that started it. I I got essentially what was a business development role at the startup. And, and then we're off to the races.

And were you a natural?

Or? I mean, I can talk to people.

I mean, I saw in you, right? You had the personality. Yeah.

You know, I, you know, but I think you kind of evolve as a salesperson, right? I think it's the same, same deal with theater, right? You, you go in, you look at, you know, a side for a play, right? And they say, we're looking for you know, give me a chubby-cheeked, gray-haired Irish guy, and you're like, I can do that. Um, but they don't tell you about the personality. So you're looking at it going, oh, is this a— is this a— it's really— it's a Matthew McConaughey type role? Is this— what is this, right? And so I think I was trying to put on the persona of a salesperson for a while.

Yeah.

Before I actually— before, before I— yeah, the character of a salesperson before I actually started leaning into the I bet this would be a lot better if I was just me. Because no one is me. That's, that's the trump— that's, that's, that's the card that I have.

Yeah, because then you can start thinking about what the client wants to hear instead of how you should appear.

That's right. That's right. I'm just the guy and leaning into vulnerability. You know, I think Um, I read, I, I, I've heard, I've listened to a few of your, uh, your podcasts and you've asked, you know, what's your superpower? Or what did, what did you wish you would've known then that you know now? And it's like the quicker in my career, I wish I would've gotten to just being vulnerable quicker. I'm okay being vulnerable, but having that kind of go into my, my sales career earlier.

Mm-hmm.

And not like trying to actively work against that, the more I embraced that, I think the better I got.

Yeah, because like in acting, when the scene's over, you're talking to the director and the other actors. That's when the truth comes, right?

Yeah, yeah. And no one cares. I think the other thing is on the other side of the table, they're just people who are trying to get through their day too. Right? They're, they're not interested in BS. They're interested in having real relationships with real people. And can they trust you? And if they can't trust you as a person, how the heck are they going to make the decision to put their personal brand on the line to bring in their chief marketing officer, their chief experience officer, the chief executive officer to meet with this person that they themselves don't believe is authentic?

And are they gonna open up if you're not opened up? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Yep.

Yeah.

You gotta show it. You gotta show it.

And how about the complex side of B2B sales, learning about how to get deals done within companies? Because when you go from like a simple sale where it's one-to-one, now it's, you know, one-to-many or many-to-many.

Yeah.

And the default is to do nothing or wait or do it someday.

Yeah.

How'd you learn that stuff?

Again, really good. I think a combination of really good sales leaders and trial by fire. Another, another great sales leader that I had is a guy named Matt Carroll in Chicago who, he helped me at that startup and he's been kind of a sales mentor for me, you know, my entire life is, you know, he was seasoned Executive. And so having conversations with him where he would talk about building champions and like, what is a champion, right? And let's, let's get, let's get it straight. This person is a coach. This person's not a champion, right? You know why I know? Because that person can't stroke a check or tell another person to stroke a check. That's a champion. You just have a coach or someone that likes you. Right? And so when you're talking about the enterprise and that selling motion, building of champions, the continual testing of champions is something that's so important. And again, doing your homework. Did you read that 10-K? Did you look at what this person's purpose, like you did with me? Did you look at their LinkedIn profile and find out who they are as a person and what they're interested in achieving? Right? People expect you to do a certain level if you're going to call yourself a sales professional, right?

And did you make that mistake of having that nice coach who was really—

Yeah. Oh, of course. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, you get happy ears, you're right. And you're like, oh yeah, Josh, you're great. I think you're awesome. You know, I love your product. This is great. You know? Yeah, absolutely. You can come, you know, take me out for a bourbon. Absolutely. Let's go grab dinner. Like all those things that are, that's the classic where you have to then go. Um, and this is another kind of piece of my success, you wanna call it. But one of my personal things is that I always in deals have 2 ecosystems. I have the deal team that I'm working with on a deal. So that would be, uh, you know, your, your solutions engineer, your sales engineer. You might have, you know, other people, you know, looking into like working with you actively in the deal. And then you're gonna have, for me, it's like I've got 3 or 4 people that I like the way that they look at deals who aren't even close to the deal at all. I don't want them close to the deal. Smart, smart. And I say, what do you think about this? This is what we're talking about. This is the deal. This is the pitch. This is the connective tissue. And usually those people will be able to say, oh dude, what are you doing? Like, you're, you're too close to this. You need to put the golf club down and walk away because you're gripping it too hard right now.

Yeah.

Um, so that's, that, that, that, that was helpful. That was something that I, I kind of learned the hard way early was that I was like, I'm, I'm meeting all these people internally. What I'm, what I'm pretty good at is networking internally at my companies. And so I started organically just having conversations and one day I said, hey man, listen, could you just take a look at what I'm working on? And that's how that started. And so I think that's how I kind of got over that initially.

Yeah.

It's called Solomon's paradox. It's like, because you're emotionally attached to it.

Oh, yeah.

There's a lot of things you don't want to see because it ruins the story.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then the other thing is, you know, I think sometimes it's being honest. in, in where you're, in where your deficits are and being okay with that.

You know? Yeah.

Another great leader I had, um, was a guy named Levi Sales, literally the best name in the history of business development, Levi Sales. Uh, and he said he used to run, the way he ran QBRs to me was perfect because it wasn't a, a colonoscopy. It was a, how can we help you? How can you help? How do we help you with your deal? Everybody open up their laptops. Josh's organizations that he's working with, who do we know? How can we be helpful to him? It was expected that you were doing your work, but those sessions were not about like, I'm going to beat you into the ground. They were, how can I help you? And that naturally led people to, again, be vulnerable. Josh, do you have a champion? Oh yeah, sure. No, I don't have a champion. I need a champion. Great. How can we help Josh?

That point alone is critical. One of the first startups I had, it was like we take the top 5 deals of the quarter and it was board members, management. Who do we know there? Anybody who's worked with any of these people before?

Yeah.

When a rep comes to you with a deal, what are you asking to be that sounding board?

Yeah, I love it. I love, you know, I don't like the term, the phrase deal inspection because I feel like I'm like, it's not there. It's just like, let's have a conversation. MEDIC helps me. Yeah, I think MEDIC as a framework helps me where we are in the deal. I am such a social seller. By nature, I am off the— I talk about coaching trees a lot in the same way that, like, same football-like thing. I have a lot of coaching trees. And one of— if yes, great. If no, guess what? We'll have some work to do. A lot of work, right? That's a champion question. Right? And that's a hard question to ask, but they'll appreciate it. Right? And I think the other thing again is the vulnerability. But then again, I think the champion selling motion, the continual testing is another thing that consistently I see from the best of the best. And humility. Right? A-players, they want to be coached. They want it. And they know that, and they know they don't know everything. And they're very, they're very upfront and honest with you about where and keenly aware of where they need help. Because they just want to move, they want to move the deal, man.

They want the deal.

How do I win? How do we win?

Great points, Josh. I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Yeah, you can go and find me at, let's see, it's linkedin.com. It's Atkins, Josh Atkins on LinkedIn. I'm learning how to play around with Twitter. Haven't really gotten into that game quite yet other than checking out news, but maybe I'll start getting more of an impact there. But that's where I am.

Today, people are facing 2 major issues with selling. One is starting conversation and getting meetings, and everyone thinks they can do this With spam, with email. And you know how well it's working. If it's working, stick with it. Go nuts. If cold calling is working, pound the phones. But what if they're not working? What if your market is different? People don't know what you're selling. They don't— maybe even don't know what the problem is, but they have it. And if they found out about you, it would be great. But it takes a conversation. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting is the course that enables you to build that talent so that you can start a conversation with anybody and build it into a business discussion. And if you don't think this is valuable, yeah, look at your pipeline. It's pretty valuable. The other key issue is winning. The complex sale. Everyone thinks that it's what? Give a demo, presentation, negotiate, close, right? How's that working? Did it get stuck in the approval process? Probably. More than half of all committed deals don't close. They're not closing because of bad luck. They're closing because they don't know how to buy.

They don't.

They don't. They won't tell you that. No one will tell you that. Your manager won't tell you that. But it's the truth. Unless they've bought your product before, how would they know how to buy it? Or if they haven't bought a lot of products before, how would they know? They think they know because they need it. You think they know because you need them to think they know.

But they don't.

Once I learned this, my sales skyrocketed because I no longer relied on someone else to get it done. I guided them through that process. That's what Winning the Complex Sale is all about. It's about taking your sale, breaking it down into manageable pieces, and executing. So go to b2brevenue.com right now, check out the courses, and sign up. We'll see you there.