Say what sales with James Buckley

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? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Live Better Sell Better Podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA KD and oh boy, oh boy, is this going to be good today? This is going to be good because I've got my man James. Say what Sales Buckley on the show today and why I'm so pumped for this is one I've been a part of watching his journey over the last four or five years from rep to manager to brand builder to director across multiple industries. But also what makes him so unique is he is a sales trainer and coach who still sells. He's in the trenches. He's still testing and tweaking and trying and optimizing and succeeding and failing in the moment. Which is rare for a lot of sales trainers cause oftentimes they have removed themselves from the game. And so right now, James heads up business development at JB Sales Training. May have heard of my dude John Barrows out there. Shout out John Barrows. Right? But James is the fire behind the pipeline for one of the best sales coaching training programs out there. So we are going to talk career trajectory, we're going to talk pivoting, and we're going to talk about outreach messaging, because things have been changing. So buckle in, y'.

All.

This is going to be fun. James, my man. Welcome to the show, man.

Thank you for having me live. Better Sell Better has been one that's on my radar, as you know, for a long time. I listened to a couple episodes right before this just to get that fire going in me for this, and I'm pleasantly surprised to be on this show. When I got the outreach, I was like, oh, shit, I made it.

Let's go, baby. But what. What are you doing? Looking up stuff to get the fire. You are the fire, man. This is why you are here. This is what we're going to dive into.

Yeah, but look, just listening to those two episodes gets me a feel for your flow, the energy that you provide. And I tell sales reps all the time, before you get into calls, before you send messages, know who you're about to talk to. What kind of person is this? We're going to talk about that later, but.

Well, we're not going to talk about it later, we're going to talk about it now because I hope you all just heard what he just said. Right. He is researching his prospect, AKA me, the host, before coming on a podcast, and this should let you know how his brain works. Let's dive into what you're seeing. Right? I kind of said it in the intro where, you know you're in it. So not only do you teach it, not only do you help people with it, but you're doing it right. So what are some of the things that you've noticed change over the past, you know, 12 to 24 months when it comes to sales and outreach and really standing out?

Yeah, we're selling in a world where our buyers, our prospects, our connections, notice how those are all different people, Right? Our people are hypersensitive. So it's important that we show them that we know them. It's important that we don't practice practices that are 2015 and prior. There was a time when we looked at personalization quite differently. If somebody used your name, you thought, they wrote this for me. If somebody put your title in there, you were like, there's no way this was automated. Right? Then in 2018, everybody figured out what merge fields were. We were like, oh, snap. All these messages that I've been getting are just robots sending me messages that are pre written. And then we started looking at personalization differently. And now Fast forward to 2021 in a post Covid environment. If we read a message and we believe that there is even 50% chance that it might have been automated, our brains default to it was automated. And then it gets a checkbox and then we scroll up to the top of our inbox and we hit the trash can and what's left is the stuff we actually want to read. Everybody starts their day this way, everybody comes back from lunch this way. If you don't, you're an alien that reads every single thing that comes into your inbox. And if you're somebody that's labeled as an influencer, I don't care for that label. But if you're somebody that's labeled as an influencer, your inbox gets destroyed every day and you scan and you're looking for two things, shit that is clearly automated that I don't even have to open to know it, and stuff from people I don't know about, things I don't want. And that's the stuff you checkbox and hit the trash can for.

So but with that, right? And I talk about this with my own teams. So in a world where 80, 90% of these emails are being automated, how do you stand out? How do you make sure that someone does look at yours and without opening it, know that it's not automated or even if it isn't automated, automated, how do you stand out in that? Right, because when I'm scanning my inbox and there's 100 messages in there, I'm barely giving any of it the time of day, right? So how do you stand out with all that going on?

My opinion has always been that you have to look at your emails as only one channel of the touch points that you're going to deliver over the course of the span of time, whatever that span of time might look like. So for me, my very first touch, let's say I find a cold prospect and I'm like, oh shit, they sell to B2B SaaS. Like I could prospect them and get them interested in a conversation with me. My go to method is going to be I'm going to send an email to the person that I think is the decision maker and I'm going to personalize the top of it and the subject line. It's going to have their name in it, it's going to have like two or three words after it that grab their attention, maybe even they're a little bit relevant about their specific position, but it's going to be a short subject line. With their name in it because that's going to stop them from hitting the checkbox when they scan.

Right?

Then I'm going to personalize the first part of that message so that when they see it in the preview, it screams, I wrote this for you. The rest of my email, the other 75 to 85% of my email can be a templated piece of content. That's okay. You can quote, and I hate this phrase because it's got such a, like, tainted view, but personalize that scale.

I knew. I knew that's what you're going to say.

It was coming. You can do it, but it takes time. And that's the part that sales reps don't want to put into it, is the time. I don't think that every account requires this level of personalization. I think there are tiers to that. We talk about that in our training. But. And you know it's true, right? You can't spend a lot of time on your C level accounts. Those are like, you know, you're trying new things, trying to get those people interested. And if it works, you move it to the tier twos. And if it works, you move it to the tier ones. And that's how you have a process for what works for your verticals and the people you sell to. But we've got to be able to show people we are not robots. We have to be able to show them up front that we're people. And we do this outside of the inbox. The inbox is only one part of the equation. My next touch, right after I send the email is the LinkedIn connection request, right? So first I call, I leave the message, then I fire off the email referencing the message. Hey, I just left you a voicemail. Reaching out because. And I tell them, and you know, that's the next touch. And then the LinkedIn connection request, 1, 2, 3, back to back in like 10 minutes. This is like me saying, hey, man, I really want to talk to you. And they're choosing which channel they want to engage with. Chuck, it's usually not the phone. I'm fine with that. It's okay. You're probably not going to call me back. It's fine. But you will send me a DM that says, I got your message and I'm okay with that.

That's true. So now if you think about that, right? So I'm going to take one step back. So I love to give people tactics, right? So you talk about that first line and making sure that it's personalized. Get me to open or to make sure I know it's not automated. Could you give them an example? Say you were writing me an email. What would you make that first sentence sound like or have in it to make me want to open that email?

Yeah. So my subject line for you would be your name Kevin or kd, because I know you go by kd. So I would say KD and then dash and then I would say Finseth's Fire Framework. And then in quotes, I'd probably do fff just to get it, like, catchy, right?

Yes.

And then my opener. My opener line would be kd. Great episode with Christina Finseth. I absolutely adore her. We talk all the time. She's a good friend of mine and I'm very fortunate to call her a friend. Let's connect. I feel like you and I could probably be good friends, too. I'll talk to you soon. That's it. Small, short. Then I'm going straight to LinkedIn. KD just shot you a quick email. Really looking forward to connecting. Here's my quick sell. If you want to give me a call. If not, totally fine. No pressure. That's it, right? Or I'm sending you a blank connection request. We have data that shows that many, many people accept blank connection requests just as often, if not more so than they connect with people that personalize those messages. If they connect on a blank connection request, I'm going to wait a day, maybe two, and then I'm sending them a personalized video again outside the inbox. The inbox is only one touch point. I might in a couple days, if I went 1, 2, 3 rounds with you and you didn't choose one of those channels to get back to me on, I might go find you on Instagram and I might follow you on Instagram. That's passive. I might not say anything to you, but I'm going to pass on a passively follow you on Instagram. I might even like your last post. Rightful comment.

So what? I hope y' all are catching here. I want he said it a few times, right? Just to get out of the inbox. Right? Not being one place. Right. I've talked about this before. Jeb Blount said it in his book. You need to have an and mentality, not an or mentality. People are like, should I call or email or social or video? Or it's like, no, it's an ant. You have to be everywhere. But here's why. This is what's really important. It's not to spam. Everywhere. It's to build awareness and familiarity of your name. Because that when people are aware of you and they feel like they've heard of you before, when they recognize the name. Right. I joke about this with my own team all the time. I said, what's the number one driver to get an email open and be like, oh, subject line. I'm like, nope. They're like, first sentence, nope. And does it have a link? Does it have a text? Like, nope, it's who sent it. If your mom sent you an email, it doesn't matter what the subject line was. It doesn't matter what the first sentence was. You recognize the name and so you open it. Now, I want to go a different direction here real quick though. Right. So you know you sell to sales leaders, right, who are active on LinkedIn, maybe more so than other industries. So say I'm going after engineers or finance or hr. Right. So I've got their email inbox. How would you approach them in different avenues? Right. So I got my phone. Cool. And I hope you all caught that. By the way, he's still calling, even though he said he knows, like, still calling. So don't bypass that. Salespeople. But then how do you know for some of these other industries where maybe they're not as active on LinkedIn, how do you still try to build that kind of everywhere mentality to build that awareness?

Yeah. So when, when you're selling to technical people, it's important that you realize that you have to be looking for what type of person this is. And sometimes this is found on LinkedIn on their profile, but they're not active. But they created a profile. It's there. So look at a couple things. One, do they have a profile picture? What does it look like? Does it look like this? This person is not going to be excited to hear from you. It doesn't matter what you're about to say. They're going to be straight to business. What can I do for you? How can you help me? Is this a waste of my time? Straightforward, direct people, or do they look like me? I will talk to anybody, man. I will talk to anybody and get to the value and help somebody. Because that is my number one reason why I do what I do. That's my why. I like helping people. But if you're not going to talk to me, I can't help you. And I don't want to talk to people that don't want to talk to me. That's a sales caveat that a lot of salespeople don't understand. Quit chasing people that don't want to talk to you and find the people that do want to talk to you. That has to be step one. Look at their about page. What's their love language? Do they talk in forms of data and numbers and percentages? You should probably talk to them like this. This is how they think. Or what's their job description? Is it copied and pasted from the website? It's probably not very useful. But if they wrote it and they're telling you what they care about, adjust your approach to match with those things. Talk to them about the stuff they care about. These are simple things you can do. And it doesn't necessarily happen on LinkedIn. Sometimes you can find their profiles on their websites and you'll see our staff, and then you'll see this IT director down there that has no LinkedIn presence, but it'll have. Like, this man came from Cisco and spent 20 years in the engineering department. You can reach out to him and say, 20 years at Cisco is epic. I would love to hear what that journey was like. By the way, the reason I'm reaching out to you is. And you can tell him why you want to talk to him. And then you could say, I'm really looking forward to hearing more about Cisco, take him back, stuff he's accomplished in the past. Everybody likes to talk about that stuff, right? And then you can relate all that stuff to the stuff you're doing. Well, let me tell you why I wanted to connect with you. I want to get the story before we get to that. I want to get the story. Tell me about your 20 years at Cisco. You started here and you ended up here. I read your bio on the website. Fantastic. I got to hear more about this, this journey. How did you end up leaving Cisco, first of all? And they're like, talking, right? And it's not about you, and it's not necessarily about their company. It's about them personally. It's about their journey. Everybody likes to share that stuff, especially engineers that don't get asked about it very much.

So how would you recommend teams implement this? Right. Cause I'm sure there's many sdr, AE manager, VP out there listening, going, yeah, that's great, James, but, like, I don't need my SDRs asking them why they left Cisco. We need to book the meeting and book the meeting now. Right?

Yeah.

What would you say to that side of the track? Right? Because I see both sides here. There's definitely like the, hey, get the conversation going. And there's other people going, well, why would they talk to me about why they left Cisco if you're not willing to talk to me about like the prop. So let's expand this a little bit more.

Sure. So I would push back on those people and say to them, if they're like, we need, we need results. Right. What you have to ask them is, do you think results come without conversation, without rapport, without relationships? So here it is, this is it. And it's plain and simple. It's actually a lot easier than people think. Plain text emails to these people work really well. Plain text, stop sending them shit they did not ask for, they're not going to open it. In most cases they have security measures against them being able to click on these things. A lot of times we send this stuff to IT professionals, technical professionals, and they already know they have big red flags in their brain that are set up from 10 and 15 years of experience. They've clicked on those things in the past and gotten a virus and gotten their wrist slapped by their security officers. They know what that's like and it sucks to be that person. So they're not going to open your shit. I assure you of that. If they're a technical person, plain text emails go a long way. Send these people quick, small bite sized pieces of information that are just in plain text and ask them questions about them. The stuff they care about. The stuff that your most successful customers tell you are little nuggets that you can drop along the way. And remember, it's not just about email. Call them. You want them to talk to you, call them. They will immediately talk to you if you get them on the phone and they remember you from the emails that you've been sending. Yep. You know, I've been getting your emails and I haven't responded to you. And let me tell you why this is not a priority for me. Fantastic. That is a great example of getting a conversation started. Just because they're saying no to you now does not mean never talk to me again. And too many sales reps equate those two things. Hey, well, this has been great. I appreciate you responding to this, giving me a call back, answering the call when I called. Let's do this in a couple of months. I'm going to reach out, we're going to have another conversation about things that I've learned about your company in that window of time and then go head first, especially if It's a Tier 1 Enterprise account. Dive into that company, learn all you can, come back to that person. Thirty, 60 days later, tell them what you've learned and show them that you did something that matters to them and you'll earn that time. Everybody thinks opportunities are created, but they're not. They're earned 100% of the time.

It's so funny. So I, you know, every once in a while I try to take a step back and think about where, what I see in the trends and where things are going. Okay, what am I going to do about this? Right, so phone connection rates, are they going up or are they going down?

I think they're going down and it's because of all the attrition.

So connection rates going down, Email response rates, are they going up or they going down?

They're going down.

They're definitely, they're going down. Social touch response rates going up or going down?

I think they're going up.

So it depends on the industry. I think overall they're going down in terms of response rates, but we can chat on that. So, but what I'm saying is like, all these things are going down, going, okay, so then those are the macro trends. That's not something that's going to reverse at a macro level. It's not like something's going to change tomorrow that increases those things. So I go, okay, so what does that mean? And one of the things that I wrote down was prospecting will take longer. You have to slow down your expectations of how long it takes to get in touch with somebody. Because the thing we were joking about at the very beginning of this, right, this idea of personalization at scale, what kills me when people talk about that is nothing's wrong with the idea of personalization. It's this idea of scale. Email wasn't supposed to scale for salespeople. That was not. That's literally what these outreach sales off these tools, they didn't, they didn't even bring in automation until like two years ago. They weren't supposed to be automated. You were supposed to personalize every email. And we've gotten away from that. And I think what you're talking about I resonate with because it's the idea of slowing down. It's like, yeah, we all want to book the meeting today, but that's forcing us to do things the wrong way. And then we don't get the result. Right now we're scaling suck. We're doing a lot of things at scale that suck.

I'm going to tell you like this, though, those leaders out there that are like, I don't want you talking about your past at Cisco, I'll say this. What you're saying to your reps in that moment is you should only be talking to people that want to buy from you. And how will you know if they want to buy from you? If you don't earn the right to give them that value, offer them that value, you have to earn that right through building rapport, learning people's pasts, relating what you do now to the things that they care about. All of that comes over time and relationships. It doesn't come in a 15 minute cold call. It's such a juxtaposition between frontline reps and leadership's expectations. Oftentimes you find leadership's expectations to be like, we need to work on bringing our sales cycle down. But then at the same time they expect that premise, that mentality to apply to large organizations, mid level market organizations. That is an unrealistic expectation. If you want shorter sales cycle, target smaller companies to work with because they have 1, 2, 3 decision makers. Mid level market and enterprise organizations take time. They move like dinosaurs. It takes a long time. There's a lot of stakeholders involved. Your team selling in that moment versus something that's a little bit more transactional. And if that's an uncomfortable position for you to be in, split the teams up and make them feel different about their sales culture on this side of the fence versus the sales culture on this side of the fence. Tell your sales reps hurry up and sell because they're never going to have the passion for getting to know their clients and your retention in churn will skyrocket even though you're closing business. And that sucks.

No, it's this idea, like I joke with my team too. I was like, I'd rather have a six month yes than a three month no.

John says it all the time. It's not the worst thing to lose a deal. It's the worst thing to take a long time to lose a deal.

Right? Like do what you need to do to close the deal the right way. Way. Right. And if that takes longer for some or shorter for others, then so be it. Right? And it's this is there's a lot of trends that I think are going to change things because also part of it that oftentimes reps don't understand and managers don't understand and then directors don't understand is oftentimes some of this directive comes from the board and the investors. They wrote that hundred million dollar check and they're saying you need to grow by 35% quarter over quarter, go get it? And you're like, oh, Jesus. Right? So now you said a word that I want to harp on before we take a little pivot here. You said passion. You said passion, right? This passionate sales rep, which I think anyone that's ever met you or spoken with you understands, like the passion you bring to sales, but also just your passion for people, for living, man, for living. And so the question I'm asking here might be heavy or not or controversial. It's like, can you develop passion in people, or are they either passionate or they're not? Do you think people can develop this level of passion that you carry yourself with?

This is a huge high note for me. I believe that you can ignite people's passions, but I believe that they're going to choose what that passion is about, and we can't figure that out. They have to decide that for themselves. I am extremely passionate about sales because I do something that allows me to help other people. So what's my true passion? It's helping other people. Sales happens to be the vehicle that allows me to accomplish that particular passion every day of my life. And therefore, I will never walk away from it, because it's how I get the opportunity to express this immense passion I have for sales success, success in general. So what you're really asking is, is the people hacking part, part of igniting this passion? And it absolutely is. You could take the best salesperson in the world and give them a product that they don't believe in, and they're going to suck at selling it because they're not passionate about it. Right? They don't care about it. This happens over time. When reps spend too long at companies, you see a rep that's six years in. Sure, they might be a top performer month over month, year after year, getting all kinds of awards, but when you're like, hey, how's work? They're like, it's cool, it's fine. It's great. That sucks. We understand this. You're a top performer. You're excelling at everything that you do. You're always winning in the game, and you're like, whatever, I'm going to Fiji next year again. Like, it's fine, it's cool. Find that thing that you're passionate about, and you're going to find something you want to do every day, and the money won't matter anymore. And once that happens, the money comes quite naturally. Everybody talks about the money. Nobody forgets. Nobody. Nobody remembers about the person and the passion that the money comes from. Everyone leaves that part out and that's crazy to me. I got very lucky in my path. My journey was a really different and crazy journey. And I try to share it with sales reps all the time so that they can understand you're limiting yourself. If you're following a traditional path, follow the path that leads you to the things you want to do.

So. Oh man. So now I got so many questions around this, but this passion that you have for life and what you do, right? So I lead large teams, right? So my team, almost 100 plus people, at its peak was 150 some people. And you can see it, you can see the ones with passion and they have it. And my God, do they accelerate and they thrive and they do so well. But they're not the majority, right? They're the minority. And so this passion for sales, did you always have a passion for sales or you were a passionate person that got into sales? Do you get kind of what I'm poking at here a little bit. It's like, where does this passion for sales come from then? And can you develop it?

Makes total sense. My passion originally was for success, whatever that might look like. I wrote my college thesis on non traditional student success and I got obsessed with how people define success. Some people define it as monetary, other people define it as family, other people define it as stability or comfort. And my, my awakening was what avenues are out there that people can achieve success through? And I found all these different avenues. And it happened that after college I saw a Facebook post about business development positions available at a SaaS company. And I had done door to door residential sales and door to door B2B sales in the past. And I was really good at it. So I was like, all right, cool, I'll try SaaS. Why not? It's been a while since I've been in technology. I had only been in tech for a little while and it was in the XP days. I don't know if you remember those days. Oh, yes, Windows XP was the back in the day. So that was my experience with technology up to that point at the University of Miami. And I was very young, making terrible decisions in life. And I think my obsession with success and then the introduction of business development and those two obsessions kind of coming, those two things coming together like, okay, I'm going to do this. And now I have this whole new view on success and what it means to me. So my goal, my success goal when I first started in SaaS in 2015 was I'd really like to be Able to take my wife and kids to dinner without having to check my bank account first to make sure it's okay. That was my goal and I passed that goal. After my first year, I never had to look back to make sure I could take my kids to dinner, right? And once I passed that goal, I always remembered that goal. That goal still lives in my rearview mirror as I move forward. I remember that moment, making that goal. That's what success was to me in that moment. Now success looks totally different as we grow. The definition moves, the goal post moves. That's intentional, that's by design. That's what is supposed to happen when you accomplish a goal, you set a new one and you run full speed for it, right? So my obsession with sales came from my obsession with what success looked like for me personally. And I would encourage everyone, whether you're new in sales or whether you're a veteran in sales and business every day. When your feet hit the floor, ask yourself what a successful day looks like to you. If you can't define it and it's kind of blurry, before you just go execute on shit, try to zero in on that for a minute. Even if you have to stand there and drink your coffee and not do something for a minute. I know everybody likes to flip through their social feeds in the morning. That's our dopamine hit, right? But like take a second, finish your first cup of coffee and think about what a day looks like for you.

Today.

My day looks like this many meetings scheduled, this many closed one opportunities that I have available and how many pushups, squats and sit ups can I do throughout my day. That's basically my day for the last three months.

I love it, I love it. And oh man, this is going to get good here too because like now, one counterpoint I'll give you right there at the end is I do this with my own teams myself. My family is making sure that on a daily basis, success is behavioral, not outcome based. So am I doing what will lead to success? Because so often, and you've been in this game so you get it, we tie success just to the end result. So we'll do all the right things that day, but not book a meeting and beat ourselves up for it or say it was a shitty day as opposed to going, I did what a successful person would have done today. And I think that's something that especially a lot of early salespeople need to learn is you can do the right things in a day and still not get the results that day. But if you do the right things every day for a week, every day for two weeks, every day for a month, you start getting the daily wins. It's when we punish ourselves. We do the right things today, we don't get the end results, we punish ourselves and we don't do it tomorrow because it didn't work yesterday. Right. And then we start that, that pattern there. So now you. Oh, man, this is going to get good. So you said non traditional success. So how did you phrase it?

Yeah, so my thesis, my college thesis was on the success and development of.

Non traditional students, non traditional students and non traditional success in different paths. So talk to us a little bit about this, right? Like, you've really carved your own path in your career. You know, like four or five years ago, I doubt you woke up and we're like, you know what I want to become? I want to become James say what? Sales Buckley. And I want to be the director of business development for like. But you've, you've carved this path really like on, you know, not on your own, but on your own. Right. Like you've created this. So like, and it's very non traditional. Yeah, talk us through that a little bit because your career path is very interesting and your development as a, as an individual, as a brand and as a leader has been very fun to watch. Walk me through kind of the ups and downs of that.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is probably one of my favorite stories to tell publicly. I love this one. I learned about the power of brand when I worked for a very popular pest control company that has a very recognizable logo. Maybe you've heard of Orkin Pest Control, right? Orkin, man. Well, that was me, man. Like, I had the hard hat, I had the mustache, I had the white shirt, I had the yellow, the red diamond, I had the truck, I had the equipment, and I was door to door residential. Well, let me just tell you might not know to look at me, but I'm 270 pounds, big ass me at, you know, Aunt Dorothy's house is coming to knock on the door and her husband is at work. She weighs 90 pounds, sopping wet. She's not opening the door so I can do a free pest inspection. So I started knocking on doors and leaving my card behind. But then every afternoon I would drive over to like, local grocery stores, gas stations, Dollar Generals, and I would sit in this Orkin truck and I would eat my lunch and people would approach me and ask me questions. And I found this to be a common trend. And I always used to like, for the first couple of weeks, I was like, damn, I just want to eat lunch. Can people just leave me alone? And then I realized what I was doing. I was getting frustrated at leads that are coming my way. Like, what are you doing, James? So I quit knocking on doors, and I just moved around from grocery store to grocery store in different communities all across East Tennessee. And I sat there, drank some water, had some coffee. Question here, question there. Here's my card. My phones start ringing. Can you come by? Can I schedule a meeting? Business development. Brand awareness. This is the name. Fast forward to 2015. I started SaaS. I remember the first post that went viral. It was a joke. It was a joke template that I shared. And I was like, I don't know why we can't just be honest with our prospects and write templates that say, this, dear prospects, we can do this dance for like, 10 more months, or you can get 10 minutes with me this week and we can figure out if we should have a conversation. What do you say?

Nice. Nice.

So I woke up the next I posted this on LinkedIn. It was like one of my first posts on LinkedIn. And I woke up the next morning and I came to work and I logged into LinkedIn and I had 219,000 views on that post. Keep in mind, at the time, I had like 150 followers. I was like, brand new 2015 to LinkedIn, right? I immediately was hooked on, like, okay, I look in my DMs, there's all this inbound. Great post, great template. I've booked four meetings with that this month. This week. Like, you're like, whoa. Like, this is crazy. I was. I had to put a comment in there, and I was like, I was only kidding. It was supposed to be a joke. You guys don't send this to people. But people were scheduling meetings with it. I just remember feeling great because everybody was like, this is so useful. That made me feel good that I helped a bunch of people write something that was impactful for their pipeline. Good or bad, it was impactful. So I got hooked on this concept of creating content so that I didn't have to chase these conversations as much. I'll just talk to people that reach out to me, that engage with me, that want to connect with me. And that was where. And I was like, well, if I'm going to keep doing this, I guess I should probably, like, introduce myself and do a quick video. So I did a video. Hi, my name is James. I've been a sales rep for a year. Let Me tell you some stuff I've learned. Give a couple of tips, turn it off, Thousands of views later, I'm like, man, this. There's something here, right? So then I'm like, I guess I have to give this thing a name. Well, when I was a kid, say what was, like, the most popular thing, everybody was saying it, right? And one of the most common questions that I was getting when I started creating this content was, what do I say when? What do I say when they say this? What do I say if this? What do I say if that happens? So I was like, this makes total sense. Say what? Sales. It kind of rolls off the tongue. The alliteration is nice, right? So then I had a friend, my friend Kenneth Herring, Mr. I Hate Mondays. And he was working with me at the time, and he had done, Mr. I love Fridays, not as popular. Mr. I hate Mondays took off like crazy. And every time at the end of his show, his quips, he would say, hashtag, Mr. I Hate Mondays, I'll see you next week. And then he would bail. So I was like, what am I going to say that that matters to me and that is relevant to my target audience? And I said, I got it. Like, it hit me right away. I was like, hashtag, say what? Sales. If you're a salesperson, we're the same person. And I say this everywhere. Kd, when I tell you, people yell it from the mountaintops when they see me in public. You're like, man, I really hit a high note with that one. And that's how say what Sales was born. And then from that point on, it was about consistency, and now I can't control it. It's like its own thing. It does whatever it wants to do. And I'm just along for the ride, man, doing the thing. I love it.

See, that's something that you have absolutely one upped me on is I don't have a catchphrase yet. I need to get a catchphrase if people can yell at me from, you know, the side of the street or the mountaintop, so I don't have to work on this a little bit. So, okay, so then now. So the game has changed a little bit, though, right? So, like, LinkedIn now is very crowded. Everyone's trying to be a thought leader, influencer, build a brand, have a brand, be a brand. All those things. If you were starting over again, right? Because there's people listening right now, like, yes, like, I want to do that, too. Like, I want to have an impact. I want to help people. How would you recommend someone start now? Because it is a little bit different, it is louder, it is noisier right now. What would that process look like today?

Yeah, my. I think my best advice to somebody that was starting in this space right now and wanting to start building a brand is to tell your story instead of immediately asserting yourself as an expert in a field. Where are you coming from? What did you learn from those experiences? When I first started giving out sales tips, I felt really awkward about it because I was only in sales SaaS, sales for a year. But then I started drawing on past experiences, talking about residential sales, B2B, door to door sales in person sales, sales events, things that I had been through in my past that I had to overcome so that I could achieve success, the education I went and got as a non traditional student and so on and so forth. Once I started sharing this stuff, I earned the right to start talking about things that were working for me because I had, I had that test it out and see mentality we are. I have always been a practitioner before anything else. Like I'll never tell somebody to do something I haven't tried and seen success with, but I will tell somebody to try something if it makes sense for them and then tell them. Let me know what the results are because I think that's a really good idea and I'd love to hear back. Yes, it sounds like it makes perfect sense. So if you try it, let me know.

Logically, this could work. Go for it.

You tested, you got to do it yourself, right? So I always had that mentality of like we got to do the job, we have to do it all the time and then we have to tell people about it. When you're new, you don't have that experience in that field just yet. So what you got to do is you got to start talking about what you want to know and the people that you would potentially sell to, they want to help you so they'll jump onto those posts. Hey, welcome to the industry. Reach out anytime I can be helpful for you. Hey, great post. I remember when I started and that was a really tough thing for me to grab onto. You can DM these people and send them connection requests and say you look like someone I can learn from. I'd love to chat sometime because innately and I default to positivity so you'll forgive me for not being a pessimist. I default to the fact that we want to help each other innately. It's 2000 years of human instinct to help each other get up and be better humans. We are born with that. I believe most of us, maybe not everybody, most of us, right. Statistical outliers always exist. But for the most part, people are good in nature, in my opinion. And because that's true, when you put something out there that says, I'm new, help me. People that want to help you will help you. These are not prospects. Let me be really clear. These are people you can learn from. So that when you're talking to prospects, you know what the fuck you're talking about.

Yeah. And I think it's funny you nailed it there, because I'm big into sociology and, like, our history as human beings and how we got to where we are now. And one of those things is we actually are all born to help each other. We unlearn it as we grow up. Kids help each other all the time. All the time.

You can watch it happen in classrooms.

Zero hesitation, untaught. They will help each other. We unlearn it, right? Because we get punished or we get ridiculed or we get exiled or anything like that. And it's just such a shame to watch and see. And so, and I hope y' all caught what he's talking about, too, is just because you're not an expert in a space, because that's why a lot of people. I can't build a brand for my prospects because I'm not a cio, I'm not a senior Java engineer. That's exactly. So write things that they know about and they could help teach you. Right?

That's the point.

You're not trying to teach them. Let them teach you by asking engaging questions and putting yourself out there, being vulnerable a little bit, and then build that network and that brand. And so I think that's just such a key point. Now, I got an anonymous caller that dialed in here real quick and sent me a message to ask you this. This question here, and it's about video prospecting. And they'd like to know, you know, why you don't use more video prospecting in your cold, outbound emails. And the caller described himself as sorghum dingrum. You know, so just curious for Sorghum here, what are your thoughts on video prospecting in email?

Well, sorghum, I think that video prospecting in email is quite useful. In fact, I've been a Vidyard user since its inception. I think I was probably one of the earlier adopters. And I can tell you that because my personality is so large. Sorghum Mingram is. It's that Communication that comes through when you leverage video in a prospecting email. Now, Sorghum and I, I think, I know. I think I. I think Sorghum believes that you should not send a video in your first touch. I actually disagree with Sorghum Ingram and, and I think that if you have context, a video in your first touch is actually quite effective. And I have data to prove that for Sorghum.

So you heard it here first. Sorghum video in the first email can work. I actually use a lot with context. I mean, we do a lot of video in our first email and we've tested both ways as well. And I think to your point, context is king there.

I'll tell you a statistic, and I want to give this statistic out for everyone out there. On one Thursday, I sent 90 cold videos to 90 Cold Prospects. Each one was less than, than a minute long. I did not tell them my name or who I was with. I simply allowed my energy to flow and asked them if we could do a quick meet and greet. And in 12 hours, I had six meetings scheduled. And four of them were enterprise. If you do the math. And there are 22 working days in a month and you only ever send 90 videos a day and only ever schedule six meetings a day. That's like 80 meetings in a month. And I don't know what your quota is for meetings scheduled, but I promise it's not 80 in a month.

That so we could do a whole nother hour on video. Because one, I agree. Two, they have a longer tail, right? And you can reuse them. Right. I've tested this with some reps completely changing their activity expectations to be video like 50 videos a day. Not a cold call, nothing at 50, get 50 hours every single day for two weeks. I promise you, you start having people come back to you and you have people that engage and you have people to go through it. All right, so we've already been going for 45 minutes now, and I knew this was gonna be a tough one to keep in any way within the timeframe. So I got two last questions for you, my man. This has been great. So the first one is actually a little bit of a recap, right? I call it the big three, right? Because people remember the beginning, they tend to remember the end. If there were three main points that you wanted people to remember from our conversation today, what would those three main points be?

Yeah, turn your give a shit dial to the maximum and start caring about what you're saying to people. That's the first one. The second one is carve your own path, man. Don't go the traditional route because you feel like you're supposed to. This job will take you places you never thought about being if you allow it to. Don't fight what's natural for you. And the third one is if you're not passionate about what you're doing, do what you're passionate about or take some actions that help figure out what you're passionate about so you can do that more. And don't do things that you're not passionate about, especially in a sales role. It shows it's ugly and your prospects run away from you like a sleazy car salesman.

It's so true. It's so true. And let's wrap on this man, right? So the name of this podcast is Live Better, Sell better. So this weird idea, right, that if we lived better, if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more joy or energy, passion, fulfillment in life, that the sales also would improve. What would your live better advice be? For someone who said they're passionate about living and passionate about life, what would that party in live better advice be?

Yeah. Focus on filtering everything in your life from negative to positive. If there is negativity of any kind coming from any direction, do not feel compelled to breathe life into it. We can choose to interact with things that are positive and things that are negative in nature just at a blanket statement. I choose positive all the time and it's done immense positive things for my life. And because of that, I bring this passion for life and my job and how I spend my time and who I meet into every situation. And that has taken me farther than any education could have ever taken me. Though I would not have had the opportunity without the education.

Oh yes, my man. This is exactly what I was hoping and thinking it would be. James, where can people get more of you? Where can they follow you? Where can they get content? Where can they get more in depth content from you? Like, where can they get a little bit more say what sales in their life?

So first of all, hashtag say what sales is all over the place. Google hashtag say what sales and you will find hundreds of thousands of pieces of content out there with me in it. But more so join me and become a member@join jbsales.com 365 bucks a dollar a day. Develop your skill set. Invest in yourself. It's no one's job to make you a successful salesperson. That responsibility lies with you.

I love it. I love it. My man. Thank you. So much for your energy, your insight, your passion. Everything today. No, I love you. No, I respect you. Your journey has been amazing to watch, and I can't wait to see where you take it. My man.

Mad love, brother. Thanks for having me on.

Let it.