5 Takeaways From a Career-Changing Sales Book

In my decade in sales, going from an SGR to a global vice president, I've read a lot of sales books and I found that most are a complete waste of time. Most sales books are fluffy, hypothetical and take what should be five pages of content and stretch it into 300 pages of boredom. But there is one book that has genuinely impacted my sales career. So in this video I'm going to share what this unicorn of a book is, as well as the most critical takeaways you can use to start selling more immediately. The one book I recommend without hesitation is written by a practitioner. The author has an insane streak of hitting enterprise quotas. It's relevant to our modern selling environment, not outdated, will work in any B2B sales industry, and it's enjoyable to read. The book is Selling with by Nate Nasrallah and over the next few minutes I'm going to break down why this book might be the best sales book you'll ever read and what you can apply today to sell more. So let's start with key takeaway number one. The steps you take to sell your product are not the steps your prospects take to buy it. I'm going to say that again because you have to understand this. The steps you take to sell your product are not the steps your prospects take to buy it. And you're not even invited to most of it. If you have a three month sales process, you might meet with the customer six to 12 times over that period and probably exchange some emails. But most of the work to evaluate your solution is happening without you. It's happening in one on ones between your champion and their boss. It's happening in internal slack threads and email exchanges. It's happening in team meetings where people are debating the pros and cons of different solutions. While you're sitting by your laptop hoping to get an update, your buyers are having a complete internal buyer process go on without you involved. I'll give you an example of how devastating this can be for sellers. I was a part of an evaluation committee at MongoDB. We were looking at three vendors to solve a problem that we knew that we had. We had gone through a bunch of demonstrations, we scored all the vendors and then we scheduled a meeting to review all of our internal feedback to decide which vendor we'd move forward with. So we, we got to that big meeting to pick the vendor and all the the vendors knew it was happening. They were anxiously hoping that we would we would pick them. And while they were waiting for an update in our decision, our head of Revops shut the entire thing down. Even though she had barely been involved in the process, she was worried that our data wasn't in a good enough place where we were ready to even implement the solutions. So. So the entire project got canceled. And the scary thing for sellers here is that the vendors hadn't even talked to this executive. They'd never heard this concern from us. And because we didn't have any good pushback for that concern, they all lost the deal without even having a chance to handle the objection. Now, the way to solve this problem is simple. You got to stop thinking, what do I need to do to move the next step in the sales process? Because the buyers aren't following your process. They have their own. So instead you need to think, what does the buyer need to move to the next step in their buying process? And what might get in the way? Had those sellers figured out who was going to be involved in the decision meeting, they might have been able to say something like, look, sometimes the head of RevOps will have concerns about data quality. Here are the ways that we help with that. So if that comes up, here's how you can handle it, then we would have had a good way to sell internally against that concern. But they just assumed we were going to follow the next step of their sales process and pick a vendor. And that assumption cost them all the deal. The next takeaway is going to tie back to one of the most common mistakes I see in sales, which is thinking that you win deals by having strong logic. Which is a huge mistake. Because key takeaway number two is you communicate with both facts and feelings in the sales process. And feelings matter more because feelings are sticky. You've probably heard the phrase, people don't remember what you tell them, but they remember how you make them feel feel. And all feelings aren't equal. And this is another critical takeaway for you. The most important emotion to drive in sales is confidence. In fact, when buyers are confident, close rates are 2.6 times higher. Imagine closing 2.6 times more deals and more than doubling your earnings. Now, I'd hate for you to be stuck just imagining this awesome world of earning a lot more. So let's talk about how you can make it happen. It starts with intentionally planning the emotion you want your buyers to feel. You should literally be asking yourself, how do I want them to feel after this call, and what can I do to make that happen? For a first call, maybe it's, I want them to feel understood. So I'll make sure to show active listening. And I Obviously want them to feel confident that I know their business, so I'm going to share my research or I want them to feel excited about next steps. So I'm gonna come prepared with a great customer story. When you plan the emotion, it will lead to driving more emotion, which is going to make you more money. The other simple and very powerful tip for driving emotion is to surprise and delight in the first minute of your interactions. Like, I'm in, like, eight to 15 meetings per day, and every meeting usually starts with, where are you based? How's the weather? How are you? And I get so bored sometimes. I'm in internal meetings. I'll kick things off as being pretty goofy, a little bit nuts, just to break up my day and keep things a little bit fun so I don't stay so bored. Your goal should be doing something different at the start of the call based on what you know about your buyer. In Nate's book, he's talked about a few ways he's done this. He's led a debate about if a burrito is a sandwich. He's had music playing. He'll even have his zoom background set to something tied to his buyer's interests just to have something a bit more enjoyable and interesting to begin the conversation. The question you want to ask yourself is, how can I start this call to make them feel happier than how they felt at the start of every other call today? If you do this, you're one step closer to having tighter alignment with your buyers just because they enjoy working with you more than others. And that can turn into increased confidence. And remember, increased confidence, 2.6 times higher win rates. Now, the more your pitch sounds like it's theirs, the faster they're going to trust it, which builds back that confident emotion we're going after. When it. When it looks and it sounds like their company, their team, their brand, the way they'll look at you will change. Which brings us to takeaway number three. Takeaway number three is to match your buyer's language, format, and design as much as possible. And almost every company gets this wrong. Everything that the sales team sends, the marketing team sends to the customer is 100% branded for their own company. It's their logos, it's their quotas, it's their stories, it's their product. And remember, most of your sales process happens without you involved. What do you want your champion? Sharing stuff that looks like it came from a vendor or content that matches what the team is used to seeing. A killer quote from Nate's book drives this point Home customer said, if a company's brand is all over the materials they send me, the chances that I forward that to my team are next to none because it'll look like a massive billboard. But companies don't make large purchases because you emailed over a billboard version of a PDF. Companies make large purchases when they see how you fit with them and solve their problems. And this can be done so easily by asking a few stupid simple questions. You're gonna wanna write these down and actually use them in your deals. First, does your team have a standard structure or template for sharing new projects with everyone? If you get them to share this with you now, you can build a business case and proposal that looks like it was created internally, which is going to land so much better than your competitor's business case that looks like a giant billboard. Next question to write down during your last all hands or executive update, did you hear any phrases repeated? What do you think is going to land better? Your pitch with your language or your pitch where you use the same language your buyer is hearing from their executives? Third question to write down. Everyone tracks their work a bit differently. What metrics does your team live by now? Which business case is going to land better? The one that has irrelevant metrics or the one that shows how you impact the metrics that help your buyer earn a promotion? Now that we're talking about business cases, let's talk about the ideal presentation and takeaway number four. Every day I get a lot of emails with slide decks and most slide decks are 30 or more more slides. They're often internal, sometimes from vendors. The only ones that I open are the ones that I'm responsible for presenting at an all hands. I don't have time to dig through the rest. And so takeaway number four is deals are won with strong headlines, not a 50 page slide deck. Because execs don't communicate through slide decks, they communicate through headlines and bullet points. If your best argument for purchasing your solution is summarized in a long slide deck, your argument probably won't even be seen. So instead of a long presentation, you need a headline. So here is a deal winning headline pulled from Nate's book you can start using today. Another great thing for you to write down and start using team should recommended action by timeline. This will result in outcome while avoiding cost of problem. So for launchdarkly, very basically it could be engineering should implement guarded releases by May 30. This will result in a 40% increase in release velocity while avoiding risk of downtime. Now building this headline is Also an incredible way to check for the strength of your deals. If you don't have a specific recommended action, your buyer doesn't know how to even use your solution. If you can't have a defined timeline, then your buyer doesn't have any urgency. And there's no urgency, there's no deal. And if you don't have a cost of the problem, the buyer probably isn't even convinced they have to make a change at all. So you should be testing this for your deals. Go write out the headline using this script for your top five deals. If you can do it. Awesome. You have strong deals in your pipeline. Just use your format with your customer as a tidbit that they can share internally and it's even something you can put at the top of your business case or proposal. Now, if you can't write out this headline very well for your deals, you need to get better at discovery. The good news is I can help you here. Start by grabbing my free discovery blueprint in the description and you'll be on your way. Now, at some point, your buyer is going to walk into a room without you, and all they've got with them is what you've left behind. Which takes me to our final takeaway. Takeaway number five. While you can't be in every meeting that your buyer is in, your writing can be. Sellers who write well outsell their peers every time. But not many sellers are good writers. In fact, most sellers are pretty poor at writing. So I'm going to give you just a few of Nate's awesome writing tips. Tip number one is to use visual language. We often use super boring language in business, like high quality leads that perfectly fit the ideal customer profile. Instead, we should use visual language like fits better than your favorite pair of sweatpants. Tip number two is to shorten your sentences. In business, we are guilty of being so long winded. You can go from something that's super long like all in one automated workflow that eliminates manual searching and change it into now it takes one click. And finally, tip number three is give it some personality. Because sales, even B2B sales doesn't have to be boring. So business writing doesn't have to be boring. Be yourself and don't be stuffy and overly formal. Now you can use AI to quickly improve your writing with prompts. Okay. But I strongly recommend to still take the time to get good at writing. Because clear writing means clear thinking and and clear thinking will allow you to unlock AI with much more impact in the future. Now look, these takeaways I've given you today that I shamelessly have taken from Nate's book will help you sell more immediately. Also, you should go buy Nate's book. I don't make any money off of this, but my ultimate goal is to help hundreds of thousands of sellers sell more, and this book will help you along the way. Now, this next video will also help you sell more immediately, where I summarized more than $50 million of sales advice in just a few minutes. I highly recommend you give it a watch.