Kevin Dorsey and guests cover revenue leakage, sales process discipline, and how to nail your ideal customer profile. They dig into hiring trade-offs, why simple offers work better, and how success stories keep teams motivated.
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Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute. And deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail. But you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet beat or miss on revenue? What up everybody? Welcome to a special episode of Live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're actually having a recap. Let's be honest, not everyone's got time to go through every 45 minute episode. So we're bringing the best of the best into this episode. Only here, Live Better Better Sell Better podcast.
This is something I should learn from, right? So this constant learning is also in the military. In the military, half your time you're going to courses, they're teaching you things, right? And they want you. They're not teaching you these big philosophy courses, they're teaching you, you know, how to better clean your rifle, how to, how to shoot at a very specific range, how do you use something very, very specific tool. And you're picking up a hundred of these things, putting them together and achieving your mission. And that's what sales is all about, right? You don't say, let me tell you about how to cold call, right? You're saying to somebody, let's talk about this part of what's your opening statement? What's the question you ask? Right, let's. I can spend eight hours talking to you about discovery. A discovery call, right? And that's just like in the military. This is it. You're on my team. This is how we do things. We don't do things the way you did them in your other company. I'm sorry, you have to learn my stuff. In the end of the day, you want to do things slightly differently and you produce results, that's fine. But you have to learn my way of doing things non negotiable. And I never had a problem with him and he was one of my Best performers after.
Right.
But you have to. You can't accept, you can't be flexible on that. Right. It has to be this my way or the highway. And I know I. I'm sure there are dozens of people listening to this who are going, wow, that Zach's a bastard. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Right.
But I'm responsible for revenue. Right. I need people to produce. If they don't produce, they're taking money from my kids, so I can't be flexible on them. Right.
The biggest mistake is not understanding your ICP well enough. So one of the most powerful things you can do, whether you're an SDR and ae, anybody who's prospecting, is take time, block time off to really study your icp, study the deals that have come inbound, study your customers and really break it down and figure out, you know, who are you having the best conversations with? What are their really, like, their pain points? That's the biggest thing that helped me, me as well, is just diving in, figuring out what exactly are the pain points, as opposed to just reaching out to any sort of account. And so getting really niche and narrowed down is one of the biggest things to kind of stand out in that sense.
Some of the things you must start off with, and I talk about this in my course, is honest self reflection. So get to know your personality type, get to know how introverted you are, how extroverted you are, what are your intrinsic motivators in your life and what are your values. It must tie back to that. So for myself, five years ago, when I jump started my leadership career straight after being an AE at SAP, I sat down, I was like, right, what is it that drives me? What is it that actually makes me tick? It's not just closing deals. I'm doing that. Something is missing. Something is, I'm not being fulfilled. So then I realized I am extremely driven to help others. And for me to share something that I learned and then to see someone else apply that and to see them improve, that is what is my biggest intrinsic motivator. So that's step one, be honest with yourself. A huge misconception I see, especially in sales AES who want to be managers, they think that, you know, that's, that's the ultimate goal, and then you'll earn the most, you'll be comfortable. And that's not the case. As a sales leader, you typically earn less than your top performer. So that cannot be a motivator. Yeah, as soon as I hear that, I'm like, okay, that's not really the right fit for leadership.
The reason why I like focusing on heuristics and priming is because heuristics are a mental shortcut that allow people to solve problems and make decisions efficiently. The human brain has so many things firing at all at once. And especially in the day and age we live right now, where essentially you have an entire computer in your pocket and you're in the information age, where you can find anything at any time to be distracted for any amount of time, whether it's a YouTube short video that's 25 seconds long or a two and a half hour lecture from a Harvard professor, you can literally find anything to disrupt your day at any point. And so making decisions has become significantly more challenging in our day and age, which is already a proven challenge for human beings because of the availability of so many options.
Right?
So what you want to do to simplify your sales process is a few things. Number one, make one offer, not multiple offers. This is contrary to popular belief where there's like, you can have the gold package or the silver package or the bronze package. Every offer that you make ends up allowing someone to have three potential responses. Now, the most common response in sales is maybe. Now, maybe doesn't just mean they say maybe. It's like, hey, kd, I like this. I just need to talk to my partner about it. Hey, kd, I need to move money around and we'll chat about this. Hey, kd, I really like this. I just need to think a little bit more about it. Anything that's not a yes or a no is a maybe. Most common response in sales is maybe. The most uncommon response in sales is no, not yes. Most people don't have the audacity to say no because they like Katie or they like Alex or they like the person they're speaking to. So instead they're like, it's a lot easier to say maybe, even though I know I want to say no. And then I'll just ghost them after the fact because that's simpler and easier.
It's also changes the dynamic, right? You're, you're now providing value. You're an expert on a topic you're exchanging. You're not a salesperson that's just out there trying to pitch, you know, your, your product to them. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of benefits to that type of an approach. It definitely takes a little bit more work upfront for those meetings. You have to come prepared. You're not Going to just show up and you know, walk them through a demo. You have to come prepare, do some research. But when you're chasing those seven figure deals, it's worth that type of effort. And that blends in then to the engaging messaging portion that we talked, that you mentioned when you're, and I talked about this a little bit earlier, but when you're reaching out, these executives are busy and I think this is kind of true of everybody. But you have to be short and concise in what you say. We're trying to write emails in 100 words or less, which is difficult to, you know, demonstrate what this workshop is going to be about and what the value is in it for them and at the same time be personal. When we're doing enterprise, every email that goes out is personalized to at minimum the company. And if we can find something relevant to the prospect, then we're going to write something relevant to the prospect. But if it just looks like a mass email that went out to all these different companies, it's an instant delay delete. And, and you may not even get past the spam filters because a lot of these large organizations have, you know, more advanced type of spam and email systems where it's even more difficult to inbox than you would on a small or mid sized business.
We all get tired. Like we're grinding. I get stuck almost every day. I get tired every day. I get unmotivated and uninspired because I'm exhausted every day of the week. But the way that you remember, you have to go all out no matter what, whatever it takes. Don't quit when you're tired, quit when you're done. The way that I do that is I'm like, look at all these people that have won this seven figure club, this six figure club. All of my employees that have bought their house, that have went on their dream vacation, that were finally able to take their kids to Disney World for the first time, that bought their dream Aston Martin. Blake NOLAN, you know, A.J. got her penthouse. She just got her penthouse in Brickell, Miami. And she's living the high life like for our employees and for our users. Like those success stories from our, our customers and then the success stories from our users and our employees and from our books and from our thought leadership. So we have like 10 different channels that we have. We save all of these success stories and we share it every single day of the week with every single employee because it just helps you realize like we are on a mission to change the world to help the world Connect opportunity to positively impact billions. We are serving at a greater level higher than ourselves.
