Use Empathy and Tact to Start Listening More - Tom Slocum - Revenue Today - Episode # 024

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

Talk less, listen more. Many, many times you'll see it on LinkedIn. I hear from SDRs, they talk a lot. AEs, they're talking a lot about feature benefits. They're vomiting on the prospect and my favorite term, pitch slapping, right? They're just coming in hot every single time asking for a meeting, you know, bombarding the prospects. And sales is the only game where winning could cause you to lose. You know, think about that for a minute, that that is the only game where winning can actually be a loss to you because you are trying to win over your prospect, make you appear insensitive to their values and incapable of meeting their needs because you're trying to win them over. If you're selling, you're doing it wrong. You already have the wrong person on the phone, right? So that's where that research, relevancy, and relatability come in. Because you're getting to the right person at the right time and saying the right things to build a conversation in your go-to-market. So when you're able to use empathy and TAK in your sales conversations and really start listening and diving deeper with them, you become a resource that gives great answers to their questions. You can actually talk with them. It's okay to say, I don't know, I don't have an answer for that. You remove the fear and doubt from those common objections because you're no longer trying to handle them. You're digging into them because you gotta remember, you guys, your frontline reps on that frontline are there to impact your entire revenue engine. So they need to be having these discussions, diving in deep with these prospects to understand why they have these objections. Can you share with me why you feel that way? Oh, well, this is why. Maybe they don't know what they don't know, right? So instead of figuring out how to handle or overcome those, embrace them. Learn from them, document that in your CRM and let your entire revenue engine know what's going on so your marketing team can give you stronger collateral. Your RevOps team can build more enablement tools to help you and guide your frontline reps to do what they do best, which is have conversations and generate the pipeline. And again, identify opportunities to build value through customer stories. Share with them the wins you've had up until this part with your client base. Right? What are your users saying? What are you helping them win in? And be specific, right? Share with them actually what's going on. You guys know from RevLeague, I share it all the time, we had a 140% increase month over month, and I can share 3 to 4 stories on what happened because people want to have an emotional experience with you. They don't want to be sold on features and benefits, right? There's other communities, there's other products that are very similar to one another But what's gonna make the difference is the emotional tie that you can build within your messaging and your frontline reps to build value through those customer stories and let them feel how invested you are in helping them be the hero in their journey. And by doing all of this, it allows you to build trust, credibility, and interest in your solution. So at the end of the day, your prospects ask you for the meeting. How awesome would that be that your reps can call and have dialogue and discussions with people That at the end of that, the light bulb clicks for them and they are pushing you to the end of the deal cycle. Hey Tom, how do I get started? You know, what are the pricing points for this? And they start envisioning themselves in asking you to learn more. That's when you know you've had a decent conversation, you've actually made an impact in your go-to-market strategy that people want to work with you. If you have to sell and force that relationship, you were doing it all wrong in your go-to-market. You're trying to put a square into a circle. Remove the friction, empower your reps to be help people, not salespeople. So that way then you have more longer-lasting customers, which reduces your churn. Again, that frontline rep can be with you through the entire cycle. They don't have to just book the meeting and go away. They can work with the AE and the marketing and the rest of the team and continue that cycle with that prospect. That's what I wanted to share with you today. That is most of the 3 things I wanted to hit on for you and just showing you that there are ways to win in your pipeline and going-to-market strategy when you look to help people and empower your reps to be more helpful in the sales process more than more forceful. The automated spam emails, the just cranking out the numbers, there is a fine balance between quality and quantity. And building lasting relationships within your, your community of customers. You know, community is big to me. It's become a real place in my heart, and companies can do that. They can build a market with their customer base that's all about them and empowering them in their customer base that they're telling their friends about you. They're going to market for you on your behalf and bringing in referrals because they share all the time about how great it is to work with you know, these companies. We see it on LinkedIn all the time. There are a lot of companies out there that we're not even customers of and we'll support till, you know, every day because we believe in the community that they've built and it's because their reps are going out to market to help solve problems, not go to force sales. So I'll leave us on some questions. So feel free to drop in the chat any questions you wanna dive into out of those 3 slides, what challenges you might be having in and how to find that balance. When you say research comment, is this just for selling or do you use to connect for future growth? Great question, Amir, and it could be for multiple avenues, right? So research those comments that they're making on other people's posts within your network could be used for selling purposes, but it also could be for future growth. You're learning from that circle of audience what their pains are, their challenges are, you're active listening to what's happening. to where you're then able to connect for future growth and maybe build a relationship down the road because you're watching where they're interacting. And that's when you get that right time, right? That's when you discover that this might be the right time to reach out to this person because you've seen them for a couple times now talk about this pain or this challenge. But there's a lot of ways you can use that comment research for your, you know, for different avenues within your go-to-market strategy. Marketing could be doing it. They could be looking at competitors' pages, right? Looking at competitors' audience and seeing where those pains are And then creating collateral and being like, hey, we're listening to our market, our ICP, our buyer personas. We're seeing these pains and now we're going to provide them the collateral, the messaging, and try to go to them because we care. We're hearing what they have to say. So there's a lot of use cases for that. Any other questions? Ah, how do you reduce selling administration and duplication of research approach so reps are spending more time in engagement with potential prospects? So, Jermaine, this is a really great thing, right? Because again, we wanna scale personalization, but it can be a bind because there's a lot of dealing with the note-taking, the research, and then trying to obviously engage with potential prospects. So, you know, what I try to do is I try to have my team block out admin hours to prep for the day ahead. So they'll go, you know, 8-hour shift, about 6 hours of actual prospecting hours with, you know, breaks and lunch, all that great stuff. I try to have them at the end of the day spend an hour in admin, which is them doing that 3x3 research on what they're gonna go attack the next day. So they're gonna build all that out. So tomorrow when they come in, they've got 6 hours to just go ahead and tab out those accounts and work those with their messaging and whatnot. So I'll try to do that, is block out admin hours to do 3x3 and go over that, you know, in a 60-minute hour. There's other ways to make fields within your system. I've outsourced for people to do those things for my team. I have done that as well, is let them fill in those notes, do some research for us, and then put those in there. But those would be 2 tips that I would try to do. Michelle, what is 3x3 research? Great question. That is a methodology. So reps and the go-to-market strategy will falter on prospecting paralysis. They think way too much about research. They might spend 30 minutes on an account before they even picked up the phone to just get a voicemail or send the email that they crafted so well that just went to spam or got undelivered. So 3x3 puts you in a place where you could practice a muscle of quick research, which is where you find 3 pieces of information on this prospect or buyer or account in under 3 minutes. So to practice that, right, you take out your phone. You do a 3-minute timer and you start going on this one prospect. Find 3 key things that are actually relevant, not random things, relevant things that actually align with your company's solution or pain that you are solving and then get out in 3 minutes. Then note-take that in your CRM so that way you have that information and then that way it's faster each time. So 3 minutes, 3 pieces of key information, some will do 3 by 5, They will extend it to a 5-minute, but I think it's pretty easy to practice the muscle and get out in 3 minutes. And after so long, you have that practice and you know exactly what to look for in your buyer personas.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in RevGenius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.