9/16/20 - Sales Assembly Study Break with Doug Landis
Doug Landis, a growth partner at Emergence Capital, argues sales success comes from daily incremental progress, not distant targets. He recommends picking one buyer role for a week, crafting a consistent message, and repeating it. Switching between personas wastes 18-20 minutes of prep time per change and kills conversion rates.
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All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another sales assembly study break. I'm Christina Brady, president of sales assembly. I am here with Doug. Doug, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Hey, everybody. Doug Landis. I am a growth partner at Emergence Capital and a forever member of the lifelong study of revenue driving. I guess I'm a forever member of the bag carrying community of sellers, if you will.
Forever seller.
I love that for sure.
As a forever seller, you have certainly experienced times of success in times of a lack of success. And so for you, if you're thinking you're a frontline revenue producer today, what do you think is either the key to success or one of the ways to achieve success?
Yeah, I mean, I don't. When I look at success, I don't look at it as, like a destination, as a, oh, when I get to my number, then I'll be happier. You know, when I get this deal closed, then I'll get, you know, that much closer to my number. We always set these really, really lofty goals for ourselves. And then all we do is we set ourselves up to be disappointed because maybe we didn't actually achieve that goal the way we had imagined. Maybe we got it because Bluebird came in and all that hard work that we had been doing all year, it didn't really pay off. But we still got to our number because we had this deal come in from kind of left field. And so I think it's an important reminder just to focus on getting 1% better every day.
Right.
Instead of these big lofty goals, you know what you need to do to actually get there. So work on getting a little bit better every day. Making one more cold call, sending one more email, testing out, reading one more article right before you go to bed, maybe not right before you go to sleep. Because, you know, if you were to set a goal for yourself, like, I want to get 50% better, I want to get 75% better, you're never going to get there. And it's too hard to actually measure that. And so to do that, like, so what does that mean, getting 1% better every time? Well, I mean, it's like, just be really thoughtful about what your, what the small little milestones that you want to set for yourself to get better. And focus on the getting better part. Focus on the learning. Focus on, you know, whether if you didn't get the outcome that you wanted, there was. Maybe you learned something about the process. Maybe you learned something about the way in which to engage with a particular Persona or Company or industry, maybe you learned something about just your own skill set and what you're really good at and what you're less comfortable with. So if you just constantly kind of remember to focus on getting 1% better every day, I think that is, you'll feel more fulfilled. And to me, feeling fulfilled is a core tenet to being successful.
Yeah. And I think chunking it down is important too, and not taking on too much at once. And so I love the idea of if you just focus on getting 1% better every day than where are you in a year, it suddenly looks very, very bright. And so diving in just one level deeper on that, do you recommend that people focus in multiple areas to improve a little bit or to chunk it down even further and say, for the next three months, I'm gonna work on my outbound cold calling selling strategy or I'm gonna focus on my tactics when I'm sending an email. Do you focus on one thing and getting better at it or multiple things, 1% at a time?
Focus on one thing. It's almost like when you're prospecting, trying to generate pipeline. It is bananas to me that people go, I'm just gonna go down the list and call people. And these are different buyer Personas from different industries and different companies. And guess what? The moment I have a conversation with you and then I call the next person who's totally different, different industry, different role, different reporting structure, everything I now have to shift. And that is so hard to do. Right. And so why not? You get up, you, you know, you reach out to, you know, it could be a VP of sales or a cio and they actually respond, reach out, spend the rest of the week, just do nothing but reaching out to that exact same Persona with a similar message and keep refining it, retooling it, and getting better. It's focus. We fundamentally believe, like focus drives conviction. And so the more focused you can be is actually will be in line, will help you to also be in line with that whole getting better at 1%.
That's a really good tip. Doing title and role driven specific outreach
on a weekly basis. Just hammer it, hammer it, hammer it home. Because here's the thing, context switching is really hard. If I'm talking to the CIO and we're talking about, you know, look, I just read a report from JP Morgan. There's. It was 180 CIOs that control $88 billion worth of spend. And it was interesting. And they listed all the areas of focus for them where they're going to actually invest in areas they're not likely going to invest. So if that's the case, cool. I want to dig into that report. I want to have a point of view, and then I want to use that point of view in every conversation that I'm going to have. So why would I switch from, like, I've done all this research and homework on, like, what CIOs care about right now to now all of a sudden I need to go switch over and talk to a sales leader or a chief customer officer about what their world is about. And what invariably ends up happening is we default to the worst question in the world, which is, what's keeping you up at night? Like, no, no, no. Have a point of view. And you can create a point of view by just focusing on one area, one Persona.
Well. And if anything, that focus saves you so much time. I remember years ago, I read a stat that in order to properly shift the way that you're speaking and who you're speaking to, it takes 18 to 20 minutes of prep at minimum. Which means one of two things are happening. Either you're reaching out to people who are different titles and roles, and you're not prepping properly, which means if they actually do answer the phone, you're going to have that deer in headlights look like hi and not know what you're talking about, which means you just burned your opportunity to close that deal. Or you're spending so much time in between phone calls that your ability to actually drop enough hooks to get a meeting to then lead to a demo is so diminished.
Yeah, totally, totally.
That's a really, really wonderful.
One of the hardest things in sales is time management, Right? And it's because you're context switching. I mean, I'd never heard that statistic, but it makes sense, right? All of a sudden, I've got to switch gears and have a 20 totally different conversation with a different person in a different industry. That's hard to do. Right. It's hard to have a really, really strong point of view and a sense of conviction across all of your buyer Personas across every industry. And so why not just break it down into little chunks?
Well, thank you so much. That's really, really helpful. And you certainly got me thinking about it, and that's definitely going to help a lot of people who are looking at how to segment their week. So, Doug, thank you so much once again, Christina Brady with Sales Assembly. I want to give a shout out to Vidyar, our sponsor, for sponsoring the content. Thank you so much. And we will see you again next week for another study break. Bye, everyone.
