Live Better Sell Better June Highlights

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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 Sell Better podcast.

You can't be afraid to fail. You have to accept you're going to fail and you're going to learn massive lessons from. I actually, in the book, I have an old prospecting email and I put it in there on purpose. It is awful. It's too long, there's too many words, it's awful. And then I put the iteration of it, like the six years later version of it that actually has a call to action and it has an attachment, it has the right things in it. So I think I would challenge everybody. Go back to what you've done, right, and see if you can tweak it. Can you make it shorter? Can you make it poppier? Can you add something more relevant? The date is different now than it might have been five years ago. Can you make it different? So you have to keep trying things and you have to be open to failing because the magic is in the fail. It really, really is. So you have to try that. I would never send that prospecting email that's in my book today, ever. And if somebody, well, people send me those types of things all the time, I cringe. But don't just throw it away, go back to it. How can you cut it, slice it and just make it a little bit more effective?

Be you, be fully you.

So look at this.

I d. I work out. I have, I have a one hour block in the middle of the day to go work out. And then I get a message from Jess, my bdr. She says, I saw them going for Pilates. I'm like, you do you, my friend, you do you live your life in the middle of team calls, they're asking, the company is like, start DJ for us and so you can have fun. It's okay. I'll say this work life balance, I think is dead. I think it's about work life integration. My boss follows me on Instagram. My entire company follows me on Instagram. They know my life. I'm comfortable being me.

Get really comfortable dumping all of your problems on the table and letting your operators help you figure out how to attack them. If you come to me with these one offs, I may not be able to pick up on the themes, and I may not be able to support you. You give me all 15 of your problems at once, I'll show you that three of them are actually the same thing and can be solved overnight. And these other 12 could be hit in this order, right? Like, come to me as a partner to help sort through the madness and give you answers that you didn't even know were possible.

When you feel like you've pushed as hard as you can with output, think about input. Like, what are you reading? What are you listening to? Like, how are you getting new ideas so you're not just, like, banging your head against a brick wall again and again and again? Like, how are you feeling excited? Because when you are prospecting, let's say on LinkedIn, for example, like, if I were to have written posts and I was in the mindset of, like, oh, I have to publish this content on LinkedIn, and I was publishing it with no energy, you never would have contacted me to be on this podcast. But because when I was publishing on LinkedIn, like, my energy, I was excited, I wanted to share. I was really enjoying what I was doing. It attracts people who are interested, and that's the same when you're prospecting. So I think, you know, how are you getting input? Whether that's, you know, asking your manager for another call, whether that's asking a teammate to get their eyes on a new script or some emails that you're writing asking for input, reading something new, listening to something new, seeking out new perspectives and new information, it does recharge you and it's making you better at the same time. So that's something really actionable that I think sales reps could do more of to get just some new, fresh energy in the day.

One of the things that we used to do, our client Success team, when we would do a renewal, we'd always, after the renewal sign, is ask them why. And like, it's. It sounds crazy. Like, hey, you've got a hundred different priorities. You've got a hundred different technologies here. You decided to renew with us. There's other options. Like, why? And I think I know the answer, but tell us. And like, they're like, oh, because it's easy. And like, okay, cool. Well, what's. There's a second question that we used to ask a lot and the answers would shock you is, hey, what's one unexpected benefit you've gotten from working with us? Like, one thing that when you signed up for us, you thought X and then Y happened. And, like, I equate that to the tennis ball analogy, meaning, like in junior high, I remember being in class and like, we're sitting at these round tables, teacher comes out and gives us a couple of tennis balls and is like, hey, I want all of you to brainstorm around, come up with as many uses for a tennis ball as you could possibly come up with. And we'd come up with like 30 of them, right? It's like, hang it in your garage, make sure you don't pull in too far, put it on the bottom of a walk, or make a coin purse out of it. Like, there's a hundred of them. I think there's a huge opportunity within organizations to think beyond. Like, tennis balls are sold in sporting goods stores, but most of their uses are for other things. When you think about your solutions, get those answers from your customers, especially when they just renewed, right? You know, and ask them, like, why did you renew with us? And like, what's the benefit that you got beyond us? And if you've got a great relationship, like, what does it mean to you to like to work with us? But then ask that last question about like, hey, what's the impact of what you sell on your customers?

I'm not a, you know, second week, throw somebody on the phone. That's not my approach or preference. But you have to hit it hard at the beginning. That's where you can take advantage of your mentors, of your buddies. That's where you can do a lot of, like, group online at the same time, cohort writing workshops. But I'm, I'm with you. And you know, one other thing too that we've been playing with is, you know, and it'll depend for every single company what your channels are and where you, where you work that way. But one thing I've seen too is like, as you've. So first, you know, you've covered your basics, your fundamentals. They know what sales is, they know what your tech is, they know what your business does. You move on to the practice. A lot of role playing, a lot of recording themselves and you listening and coaching. A lot of buddy sessions, a lot of them listening to other calls. And then once you start to move into like actually practicing, one thing that we've been playing with too is starting in while you're continuing to practice the like, high adrenaline things like cold calls, those are scary for so many people. But while you're still practicing that, going ahead and getting your actual real world experience in on the slower response, things where you can, you know, I send an email, I get A response. I can't. I have time then to ask for help on it and to work on it then. And so like starting to build in your slower response, probably like lower adrenaline, fewer oh shit moment channels and then like kind of amp it up from there, you know, that lets people just get comfortable with what they're doing.

People have call reluctance because they're out of practice. Right. Like it's one thing to role play with your manager. So first of all, let's say you don't have a conversation technology like Aurum doing the actual role plays and kd, I know you're big on this, I know you've always been big on, on getting the batting cages going right, the, the role plays and I can't emphasize that enough, but you know, actual reps, actual chances to, to be on the shooting range, so to speak, at the driving range. And so when you have something like Aurum, what we teach our customers and what we teach internally is when you book a meeting or when you get someone on the phone, the best thing and you have that conversation, the next best thing you can do is get right back to the next one. Because conversations bring more conversations, meetings bring more meetings. The most common thing we see is a rep gets in a great qualification call or booked meeting or an objection and they're like, oh yeah, I'm good, that was awesome. Like I go take a laugh, they go get some coffee, they come back and they've already cooled off by the time they come back. The biggest thing you can do, if I can give you one piece of advice, when you book that meeting, get right back into that session and get to that next one. And success brings more success. That's, that's kind of low hanging fruit, I think would, would help a lot.

Of folks out there.

Yeah. So this is something that we actually figured out on our own, like in our own team. Before we were building Lavender, we were building this communication psychology marketing product that was inspired by the science and we applied some of that within Lavender to help write better sales emails. But one of the things we looked at was how do we take someone's personality score? And there's a lot of research around that around how to predict your personality off of online data, which is what we were looking at when we were building that product. And we knew we had to get the personality science into this framework for how decisions are made to have them actually convert and buying. So we built some models to predict the decision making based on the personality science. So there are some things that you can track back. So people who are going to score really high in openness are going to be more likely to score higher in their vision quadrant. People who are very low on agreeableness, but they're really high in extroversion, meaning that they're going to be putting out energy to get things done. Regardless of what people say, they're just going to break through any sort of barriers. They're going to likely be very action oriented. And then people who are very high on agreeableness, for example, they're going to probably be more people oriented and fall more in that people quadrant because they don't want to have a lot of conflict, they want to get along with everyone around them. And then people who are very high on their conscientiousness, they really want to get all their tasks done. They're very detail oriented and in some cases maybe lower on extraversion, they tend to dive really deep into those details and thus be more data driven. So you don't have to understand all the personality science. And it definitely goes way deeper than this. But the simplest way to think about it is these four quadrants, Action, Vision, People and Data, and then figure out which one are they going to skew in towards towards. And we kind of gave them characters. If you were action oriented, you were the mover, and if you were vision oriented, you were the motivator. And if you were people oriented, you were the collaborator. And if you were data oriented, you were the thinker. So it's. You kind of can think of this Persona like what is a thinker going to like? What's the thing you're going to respond to, what's the mover going to respond to? They're going to move forward. So I think if you kind of distill the complicated personality science into these four characters, it's much easier to think about. And there's other, other frameworks out there, like 16 personalities and they're thinking of 16 different characters. And that's a lot. So I think it's just easier to look back at the four and figure out where are they most likely to fall out of these four and then just move forward in your process.