Adopting a New Attitude to Drive Sales Success in the New Era

How are your sales doing? The pandemic changed so many behaviors. It changed our thoughts and it changed how we did business. Mix the almost pandemic world with the fact that 4 generations are driving our businesses. And this digitization that we see now of how we communicate has evolved at an unprecedented rate. Boy, you quickly realize that what you've done before will no longer work in this new era. And that is no more true than it is for sales. And that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to today's show! This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And I can't tell you how great it is to have you here with me for this episode. Because today, I have as a guest Sales Trainer Steve Knapp. And today, we will talk about how business leaders and their sales teams can recognize the shift that they can make to succeed in this changed world. So, stay with us and you'll get a few tips and takeaways about how to blend more modern approaches to sales with the traditional skills you already have. My one ask is that you please pinpoint somebody who you think could use this information and share the link to this episode with them. Knowledge is power but only if it's shared. I don't know about you. But when I hear the word sales, my mind automatically goes to thinking about, well, goes to thinking about something like this. Bill, I sell insurance. What a shock! Do you have life insurance?

Because if you do, you could always use a little more.

Am I right, or am I right, or am I right?

Right, right, right.

I remember being a victim of people like that, whether it was insurance salesmen or car salesmen. Kind of makes you kind of makes your skin itch, doesn't it? But this brings me to our Question of the Day. So, when you look at pre-COVID and post-COVID, or almost post-COVID, how has your approach to sales changed and evolved? I mean, they say the one thing about COVID is they said that this was the great accelerator. It's what would have happened anyway. But it would have just taken a little bit longer. So, have you evolved or are you still falling back into how you usually did things before COVID-19 hit? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. Why don't you share your thoughts and your questions in the comment box and let us know your thoughts. But please make sure that you hashtag when you share this episode. Hashtag it with #ExperienceLeadership. And that way, we can all track the conversation. I am really excited to be joined today with Steve Knapp. Steve is one of the UK's most celebrated and influential sales experts. His inspirational selling techniques are still the cornerstone of Shell International. He rose through the ranks to become responsible for the success of the company's sales teams right across the globe. His thinking on changing buying behaviors, the sales leadership challenge, and the direct impact on sales cultures have been in huge demand. He is the author of Modern Sales Leadership and Funnel Vision. Selling Made Easy. Steve provides sales training in an energetic, pragmatic, actionable, and outcome-focused lesson that sticks and delivers results. Steve, I am so glad to have you from across the pond. Welcome!

Hey, hey, hey!

Hi Marc!

Hi everybody! And yeah, wonderful, wonderful to be here. What a great little video clip you just showed.

Thank you. So, I think it sells the point pretty good. Hey, before we get into today's topic, Could you just tell us a little bit about how you serve your clients?

Yeah. So, thanks for asking that question. There is a big shift in how buyers buy. And that means that there has to be a shift in how we as sellers sell. Yet, we haven't necessarily approached that opportunity with the same enthusiasm we might about a new product design or a new piece of technology or a new piece of marketing. So my business, Plan Grow Do, I'm one of the co-founders. We help sales teams, sellers, entrepreneurs find confidence through process and structure to sell in a changed world by leveraging our sales methodology, our sales insights, and our enthusiasm for doing selling correctly.

Wonderful! So, you being the expert, I mean, obviously, we picked this topic today to talk about. Why do you think this idea of topic and this idea of sales and behavior and this sort of— why is this so timely today?

Yeah, and you touched on some of it, Marc, in your sort of intro into the space, because we do have 4 generations, right, working across the buying and selling environment. And that fundamentally changes so much. And it changes so much because It means that buyers are becoming— well, I'm not going to say they're becoming younger because that's not possible. They are looking younger to people like me, right? And I think what we're starting to see is more mid to senior levels of leadership in my image, somebody that's probably got a couple of generations in the B2B frontline, managing teams perhaps see the different generations through their children, but maybe not necessarily through their work colleagues and peers. And what they're starting to see is more and more leaders emerge that are younger. They're starting to see buyers becoming younger in their eyes. In fact, 60% of B2B buyers are millennials. Now, that's something to think about. And by not addressing the changes in the generations that we recognize consume content, make decisions differently, work differently, live differently, we still see businesses selling how they have always sold and not necessarily thinking about how their buyer, wants to buy or their team wants to be communicated with in that circumstance. And if we think— sorry, one last piece to that. If we think about 57% of every buying decision is made before you as a seller are invited to speak to the buyer, we have to embrace the acceleration that you spoke about in how our buyers want to be engaged with us. I'd like to dig a big situation.

Yeah, you just mentioned something that I think is a gold mine. Can you go back to that decision buying? So, the decision to buy your product or service happens before you have the conversation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if we think about how we might skip some of that very important customer behavior. So, you put a download on your website, somebody clicks on it, you call them up and you say, hey, you must have loved that content. Do you want to buy my sales training? Buy from me. You know, we all need a little bit more. We all need a little bit more. But actually, what's happening there is your buyer is really just flexing their preference to consume your content as part of their research. And so, the story I often tell is when I used to sell industrial lubricants, I used to walk around the streets of Sheffield, a very industrial city in the UK, and I'd have a pilot's briefcase full of every single brochure of every single product we sold. It was a big briefcase, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I'd stand outside the factory, and I knew that it did something with metal, but I didn't really know much about that factory. I didn't know what they made, who their customers were. I knew nothing about what their problems were at the real meaningful level. Vice versa, they knew nothing about me. They knew I represented a brand. They probably trusted the brand because of the marketing that went around these super brands. But what you basically had was 2 people meeting who knew nothing about each other. So the sales process began at a very early exploratory phase. Now, when I go to that same factory, Again, metaphorically speaking, the buyer, I know who they are, I know what problems they've got, I know how I can help them uniquely. I've provided them through my content multiple touchpoints that gives them insight through my personal content, which connects to me and not the brand. So the whole buying process happens so much earlier in phases that we call suspecting and prospecting. And it's a really fundamental part of a modern sales approach that we have to go relatively slow at the start of the sales process because we're providing content that is informing our buyer's buying journey.

That's brilliant. And that, you know, you've just— as you were talking about this, I was just imagining that that whole beginning of that relationship aspect of you making the appointment, going in, introducing yourself has just been erased now because the relationship is starting so much much quicker online and through everything that you've been saying. All the content you're putting out there, the research they're looking for. Maybe they're the ones who initiated the conversation because they're looking for an industrial lubricant. And maybe they found you. And it's like, oh, wait a second. I know we have this need and here's a guy who's got it. But here's also another person who's got it and somebody else who's got it. And so then, they're doing their research by building up that know, like, and trust factor online first.

100%.

Yeah.

A traditional skill would be jumping into that office and you'd see things like the golf pictures behind, you'd see the shields, you'd see the certificates. So you'd pick up on all those soft cues and you'd leverage your interpersonal skills. Now, in a social context in selling, you're having to share this side of you online. Because the buyer will make decisions based on both of those axes, right?

Sure.

How you come over to solve problems. But how you come over as a human being as well.

Makes perfect sense. So, I mean, as being the expert in this field, I mean, obviously, you've seen a need obviously because you wrote a book on how to make this change. What ineffective habits are you seeing out there?

Yeah, I think it stems, Marc, from knowledge. And what I'm seeing is what I call the leadership gap. I'm seeing people reverting back to behavior that worked before, wherever you are in the world, periods of lockdown.

Right.

So you talked about the great acceleration, that it was going to happen anyway. It was. The B2B sales environment was predicted to reduce jobs in the millions over 5 years because of automation, because of artificial intelligence, because of self-serving of buyers. And I guess what we were seeing with traditional businesses is they were kind of kicking the can down the road. They knew that this was coming, but they were almost in denial, and they weren't re-engineering their process to match how their buyer wants to buy. Now, during whatever your period of lockdown looked like, you become a little bit more savvy in this digital space. You learned that your black book, your awards dinner, your golf event wasn't happening, therefore you had to find an alternative, and that became digital methods to communicate. Now, what many companies didn't do during that time was think, well, if this is going to stay, and we know it is because our buyers have been trying to get rid of our sales interactions forever, right? They just don't want to see a salesperson. You know, in fact, 44% of millennial B2B customers do not want to see a salesperson. They think we're a cost because we don't add any value. So what we found is that these companies, instead of backing the horse that was going to remain, were kind of waiting to go back to how they were before. So what you have is this juxtaposition now of traditional businesses who are still trying to create these early engagement meetings, And buyers who have said, listen, man, haven't you guys woken up to the fact that we've been doing something different and we are now demanding, we're demanding that if you're going to sell to us, your old behaviors and habits have to change. So this is the ineffective place that we see in this leadership gap. Who is skilling the leaders to make this effective change? to help their sellers succeed in what is a changed world.

Yes. Yeah, it's so interesting that you say. As you were talking about that, I was using my experience of running a national association came to mind. And we had this huge big struggle over sponsorship. And it was really interesting because this was a very old association. It spanned back 100-something-odd years. But since the 1960s and 1970s, It was interesting because the sponsorship component happened out of loyalty. It's like, oh, we want to do business with your company and your company is supporting this association. So, if we give you some money for your association, you're going to like us better and we're going to do business over the next decade. And what's happened as we came around to 2017, 2016, I started reaching out to sponsors and they said, why exactly are you sponsoring us? And they go, well, it's because we've always done it. But what was interesting was that value proposition was much different in 2017 than it was in the '70s because people no longer found value in, oh yes, I know Joe who's part of your association. So, we're going to support your association because we want to do business with Joe. They wanted much more tangible returns on their investment. And to your point, time is the new commodity.

Yeah, and I think what people are looking for within this space, and your example sort of highlights that, people are now looking for insight over information. So the reason you— the way you cut through the cluttered landscape, and I feel for people in charities and fundraising, this kind of space, they all are very worthy, but actually it's the insight you provide that connects to the buyer on an emotional level. And the same for professional services, the same for commodities, the same for anything we procure. If the seller can connect to the buyer on an emotional level, you know, what are their fears? What are their frustrations? What do they want? You know, what are they hoping for? They're more likely to create momentum because they understand me as a unique person. They understand what is driving me. I mean, think about, think about your scrolling when you sit at home in the evening, you've got nothing better to do, there's something bad on the TV and you're, you're looking through your social feed. What makes you stop? It isn't, it isn't the super brand, it isn't the clever commercial. It's the emotional content and how somebody uses the narrative that connects to you. Isn't it frustrating when? And this is kind of the stuff that needs to be far more intentional in a sales process. So one of the behaviors we also see businesses falling in is they revert back to saying the brand will do it, the power of the company. will pull the asset, will pull the relationship in. They're not valuing the asset, and the asset is the human and the emotion the human can create with another human. And I think this is something that really needs to be focused in on, because the reason I will buy from you is because of how you made me feel, because you understood my problem.

Yes.

You understood how you could help me. And I think that for your space, how you help people and why they do it would be one of the drivers versus, we've always known you. We'll always do it. That's kind of gone.

And so, are you saying like as you migrate into your space, are you seeing any myths that kind of the uneducated are telling each other that just make you go, Oh my God, do we not all cringe with the 10x?

I'm going to 10x your business. I don't know if all you guys that are on LinkedIn, you must get these people sending you these connection requests that say, I've been really inspired by what you do and what you say. How would you like 50 guaranteed leads per month? And I sort of think, well, gosh, you don't even know who I am. You have absolutely no idea of my business. You've no idea what motivates me. Yet you're throwing out absolute garbage statements and expecting me to respond to it. So I think this is the space where I see something really, really still rather smelly about sort of unauthentic approaches in this sales space, Marc, and I think this is where we've just got to cut through this absolute nonsense, and we do that by uniquely knowing the customers we serve, the problems we solve, and how we help them solve them. 10x your business. I mean, guys, you can just go away.

Am I right? Am I right? Am I right, right, right, right, right, right?

And they're out there, right? Sales has a stigma.

It does.

And in many cases, it deserves that stigma because of how people behave. It's a profession that isn't qualified. It's a profession that isn't overly regulated. And therefore, what we see is business owners have moved into selling and they're picking up bad habits. that they perceive work because those are the people that shout the loudest.

Yeah, everybody's doing it.

Yeah.

Right? And it's interesting. I laugh at the LinkedIn stuff. We had one episode where we talked about this where it was the show up and throw up. You accept the LinkedIn request and then all of a sudden, they go into their sales pitch. And the diatribe is just Ridiculous. And I actually took time and actually responded with this long whole big thing about who I was. And I don't know if it changed anything. But I'd like to get into some— yeah, go on.

No, I was about to say, you just wouldn't walk into a restaurant and a bar and say, hi, I'm Steve. I'm going to 10x your business. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you do. But I'm going to 10x it.

And you wouldn't do it at a conference. You wouldn't do it in front of the coffee station at the conference. You wouldn't be doing that in a buffet line. We have to start thinking on a more human level as opposed to this idea of making quotas, I think, right? Yeah.

Well, the quota has been debated for a long time. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And I guess ultimately, I like it because it gives us a sense of direction. It gives us a sense of connectivity to the business results. It gives us something we can recognize and reflect that we've done a good job. It also shows us areas where we can improve if we put the right processes in place to review the pipeline strength and how the opportunities are moving along. But it also drives some bad behavior. And I think that comes down to leaders again. Do we have strong sales leaders that actually are as motivated by the right behavior as well as the right outcome? Because very rarely do you get a sustained right outcome with bad sales behavior.

Sure.

You might get a winner for a while. But you won't get a long-term high performer.

That's a great point. Hey, I'd like to delve into some best practices and we'll do that. Right after this.

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Welcome back! I am here with author and sales trainer Steve Knapp. Steve, as a solopreneur, I know perfectly well that I've been flailing when it comes down to sales. I've tried to learn as much as I can about sales. But for those who have never been trained in sales, what What do you think we should be on the lookout for?

Wow, and I guess this is where I'd probably just answer that first and say there is actually no silver bullet, and I think this is the space that we need to just hover on for a moment. Sales success is assured if If your process directly connects to how your buyer likes to buy, which connects directly back to you understanding the problem you solve. And therefore, sales is ultimately a process. And therefore, for me, anybody— the advice I give people as they come into a space of recognizing They don't want to fail, flail anymore. They want to really sort of harness and focus in, is master the process, or at least recognize the process. Recognize where you are in the process, because a process enables you to logically move through stage by stage and step by step. There is a real risk in sales that we rush We get seduced, we get excited, we actually— they're really interested, so we spend a lot of time putting a proposal together, we use the resources in the organization, and we end up putting it in our pipeline, telling our bosses we've got a good one here, and actually, when you go out and you have that conversation, the buyer is turning around and saying, listen, bucko, I'm right back at the top of your funnel. And you're declaring me as a sale. And I think there's a space here that if we understand that there's a process, we know where our buyer is and we know how to logically move them forward. So know a process, trust the process because you'll have it to fall back on. And the one that you see over the shoulder when I'm on the wider shot is— here it is. Is the sales funnel, and in that funnel, this is where I break the sales process down into 7 stages, and let me just give you one real takeaway. The red that you can't see at the very top says suspect, and a suspect is your universe of people that you've identified might want or need your product or service. These are the people that who you'll put yourself in the room for networking, or you'll connect with them on social media, or when you write your blog article, you're writing with them in mind. These are your suspects, the people that you're trying to bring into your population. What many sellers do, regretfully, is sell, try to sell to suspects. So a hashtag here is #dontselltosuspects. The reason for that is they've not done, you haven't established 3 very key fundamental things in my opinion. 1, they have declared they want or need your product or service. They have in some way said, yep, this looks like this could solve my problem. 2, they actually have a budget to do the work. Some people say, whoa, this is really early to be asking that question. I think it's a very sensible question to ask early. You know that this work comes with a budget, you know that there is a need for you to have this appropriated so we can use it to deliver on whatever the solution is, and then the third one, the critical one, you have the authority to spend that budget. Now, why is that important? Because there you can start to establish what the decision-making unit is. So when I have those 3 things in place, Marc, Then I count people as a prospect, and it's from that place that I start then tracking the next stages of my sales interactions. Without having that qualification at the front, I don't really have a conversation with you. It's going nowhere. In a buying sense, a suspect is probably just aware of who you are. They're not considering you. So, it's a very important distinction. Never sell to suspects.

At the same token, you were mentioning those 3 components. At the same situation, you can't go to your suspects and say, hey John, here's a survey. Number 1, number 2, number 3. This is all done. This is all done moving a person from suspect to prospect is done a lot more organically, isn't it?

Yeah, so I think what you end up having, Marc, is content for each step of your sales process almost, and what you know is that, you know, that white paper, that free download, that video, the podcast, where it fits in the sales process, and therefore, as an example, the green phase, the negotiate phase, which is way down just before we probably start to close the deal, This is where we'd probably, probably be sharing things like case studies of other people just like you that we've helped, so I can actually see the value tangibly through the things that you've done and how they can correlate back to my problem. There's no point really putting a case study at that suspect level. It's probably too valuable a content because it's something that really is displaying insight to somebody who is considering you, and you see in the wheel over my shoulder the red phase, the 4th phase of the customer buying journey. This ties very much up to providing content for your sales stages and your buyer's buying journey, and knowing where that fits is a really magic piece of pixie dust that can help you really engage with meaningful insight that takes that relationship to a deeper level, deliberately moving the sale forward through your content and your insights.

Wonderful! And it's interesting that you have that broken out because when I shopped around for CRMs, I bought a CRM where I have a lead module and then, I have a contact module. And the whole idea was when you first came into contact with somebody, you moved them into the lead. But there was nothing in my CRM that said, here is a suspect, right? Because obviously, we're going to treat all those different variations differently. We're going to treat a prospect differently than we will the suspect, just like we'll treat our contact differently than the suspect.

Yeah, very true. And if you think about B2B organizations and maybe some of your viewers have this. If you've got a marketing team, this is very much where you'd have these things called MQLs, a marketing qualified lead. So somebody has clicked a button, somebody has responded to an email, and marketing say, hey sales, there's a lead. Uh-uh, that's not a lead. That's a marketing qualified lead. That is a suspect saying something here I've engaged with.

Yeah.

Now, when it becomes an SQL, a sales qualified lead, in my language, my 3 filters are answered. Tick, tick, tick. Now, it's a lead.

Yes.

And that, for me, is where we can have some good conversation because actually, what I'm not saying is suspects are bad. Suspects are good. We like suspects. If what we're doing is filling our sales funnel with suspects who are our ideal client personas, they are more likely to engage with our content because we know who they are. They are therefore more likely when they're ready to buy in the consideration phase, engage with our content, and then as we go through our sales process, they've done 57% of their research at the top end. And when they phone me to say, Steve, come and talk to me about your sales training, it's mine to lose. And that's how modern sales is.

What a difference! What a difference when you think about what we talked about when you were doing this, the industrial lubricant. It's a completely different mindset. Now, just before our break, we talked a little bit about this idea of sales leadership. Like, I mean, obviously you have people who are doing sales. In some organizations, you have their boss who's under a lot of demand and a lot of challenges to make sure they have quotas and they're making revenues and so on. The sales leadership attributes, are they out of sync now with the behaviors they need in order to start servicing this new era of sales?

I think unintentionally perhaps. And that was very vague in answering your question, right? Unintentionally perhaps. So I should be in politics. There's a job opening over here in the UK.

Yes or no?

I think what we start to see in leadership and leadership attributes, there's this piece about the culture that you're building that I think starts to become the critical moment in this journey, because I think as a sales leader, if you're creating a culture that is inclusive, is listening, is collaborative, one that recognizes, one that measures, provides feedback, all of those things that we know make us feel good, and you're deliberately taking the steps to create that environment, then the work you do with customers will replicate the culture that you have internally. If your culture is one about outcomes and numbers and more miles equals more calls equals better results, That's the culture you've got, and I think unintentionally that culture still sits.

Am I right?

Hey, hey, hey! You're right, and I think it still sits in many traditional B2B organizations that haven't embraced the silent nature of building relationships. They believe by hitting the phones, making the noise. driving the miles equals results. In a modern sales environment, there is a part of that, but I like to get in my car when I know I've got a 57% chance— well, the buyer's made a 57% decision. So building a much more silent, slower, more deliberate approach. So I think that's where leadership really— the biggest gap is. We have Opposed cultures, one that is about nurturing and one that is about outcomes. And I think you can observe both of those in businesses and you can see it in human beings, right? And you say, oh, you're just a consequence of the leadership in your business. You're a consequence of what's going on here. And I think that for me is where I see the biggest gap in leadership right now. their investment in creating a culture because that's hard. That's hard or it's harder.

Yes. And I guess there is a clash as well. I mean, when marketing gives you those leads and then your department is responsible for following up on those leads and then you have a pool of 5 or 6 people that you have to make sure are being productive and so on. I can absolutely see that behavior of, here's the cause. I need the effect. I need the return. We need to see results. But then, to your point, if the leader can be more of that coach and mentor of being able to understand that for every marketing qualified lead, that there's only going to be a certain percentage of those that will make it into further down the funnel. and not push as hard? Am I onto something?

Yeah. And I think you are, you see. This links back into a quota is good or not, right? So, sales is a performance. You're measured by your performance, right? You're paid by hitting your quota. There's a bonus. It's a curious space, right? Why would you ever go into a place that Yet somebody tells you what you've got to do, and that you've got no choice over what number it is, yet you've got to go out and make it. And if you don't make it, you're not getting paid. Oh, it's a bizarre profession to want to get into. Well, I've spent 30 years there, so maybe I'm a bit bizarre. But I think it is a space that we need to be very cognizant of. At the moment, businesses are trying to recover some of the lost ground.

Sure.

And that lost ground is because of things that nobody control, right? So if we think about how many buyers that were in the seat over in the UK March 2020 when we went into our first lockdown, how many of those buyers have the same priorities in July 2022? Probably very different priorities, very different objectives, very different budgets. Maybe a layer of the organization has come out and now the senior person makes more of the decisions, so what was important to the buyer isn't important to the owner, so we're trying to force conversations and quota attainment with perhaps an environment that needs to be re-understood. Is that still important to you? And I think this again is an area where sales is still finding its own equilibrium again.

It's almost like we need a different metric than quotas to measure against though now.

Well, we've looked at this. And one of the things I was very proud of in my time at Shell is we brought in a scorecard that was equally balanced with behavior. So, we have results and we have behavior. And actually, your results are impacted by your behaviors. And it turned out that we got far more sales superstars. We actually could identify those sales stars that did it the right way, and the metrics were still there, but the coaches that coached the sellers were equally encouraged to be as encouraging about the behaviors as they was the number. And I think that's the place where I'm seeing more and more scorecards finding a balance about behavior and results. We still have to make the money, right? We've still got to deliver the money to the shareholder, to our own business, to our business owners. It's a space though where I think we come into this space of realistic targets. You're going to switch your sales teams off if by month 3 they don't think they're going to get there. So they have to be realistic. And that's sometimes where some of the challenges come. But maybe we have to work harder at the marketing space.

Yeah.

Which brings us probably a bit round to the, if we're pushing people to do things how they've always done things, there is no way they're going to make this gap on quota. They've got to think differently and reprogram their approaches to suspecting and prospecting. If my buyers are buying silently, 57% of the decision is made before you're invited, 44% of millennials don't want to see a seller, 59% of B2B buyers are millennials. If all of this is going on, yet we're still trying to drive sales through our funnel and not thinking about how we engage with people in a much more relevant way. There's only one way those companies are going to go, regretfully.

Yeah.

So, I think this is a big opportunity, big opportunity for businesses to reprogram their sales approach.

I really do think that this is fascinating. Steve, how can people get in touch with you if this is resonating with them and they know that they now need help? How can they get in touch with you?

Yeah, I mean, like all things, I'm on LinkedIn. So, please connect with me there and message me. Or my email is steve@plangrowdo.com. Get hold of me there. We can always have a conversation and see where things go.

Fantastic! Hey, I'd like to get into some cautionaries. And we'll get to that right after this.

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As you can tell, Steve and I are passionate about helping entrepreneurs and business managers just like you. If you belong to an industry association or an organization that you feel could use the service, could use what we have to offer, feel free to drop us a line or do a connection request. And our details are in the show notes. So, feel free to reach out. If you're just tuning in, I'm speaking with the author of Modern Sales Leadership and Funnel Vision, Selling Made Easy. Steve, tell us a little bit about your new book.

Oh, I'm Marc. Thanks for the opportunity. And yeah, look folks, it's not a massive book. It's here. It's also paper as well as digital. And Modern Sales Leadership is co-authored with my business partner Rob Taylor. And it's our offer to help the emerging Leader with the Roadmap to Successful Sales Leadership. It's a bunch of chapters that really starts to get into the nitty-gritty of how you, in your emerging leadership role in sales, could start to nurture the right environment to create sales heroes. And be the leader of a community to deliver sustained results for your business or the business you work for. So yeah, if it resonates with you, it's on amazon.com.

And so, just out of curiosity, is that funnel and the graph that you have in the book as well? Can people get the secret?

Yeah. So, one of the chapters is about the sales process and we Talk about this funnel and this process.

Lovely. I imagine that people get into this. They kind of understand that they have to change. However, sometimes people jump 2 feet in without realizing the end effect. Any cautionaries for the audience that they should be aware of?

Yeah, I guess I've mentioned there's no silver bullet. So, don't overinvest in one space. Yeah, the key is to learn through doing, but learn who your customers are. Really know who your customers are. If your customers hang out in one place, double down your efforts there. Don't fragment your approaches and your efforts. Learn where your customers are, learn what they need, and really master that space, because being known for That one thing will be the thing that attracts the people to your sales pipeline. And I think therefore the last one is just build your network with those people. Build your network with not only the people that you want to serve, but the people that can help your network, the people that can educate your network, the people that can refer your network. Think broader than just your suspects and prospects.

Yeah.

No silver bullet. Don't overinvest. Know where your customers are and really learn through doing. Learn what fascinates them because it should fascinate you. And then, build your network broader than just suspects and prospects. Come out and make sure you're serving that network end-to-end.

Wonderful! Just again, just a quick— I'd like to get your input on the The value of associations. We're seeing in the association space that members are becoming less and less engaged with associations. We're definitely seeing that sponsorship now is demanding higher return on investments when it comes down to sponsorship. We're seeing that associations are losing a lot of traction. Do you still see that industry associations have value to their members?

I think it's a little bit into the subject. I think it's about modernizing and redefining. So if I think about an expo that— no, it's not an expo, it's a congress. Excuse me, if you're watching, Valentina, it's not an expo, it's a congress. The European Lubricants Congress in Athens. And the subject is all about innovation. And I think innovation in a in a space can be a new product, sure, new technology, sure, but actually for me innovation is innovation in how our buyers buy and how we have to sell. So associations, I think, have to go through that same reflective piece of recognizing why their buyers are buying, so who are they, what is it that from an emotional level is attracting And serves them, and then how do I make sure with what I'm doing I am uniquely talking to them as an individual and adding insight versus information? If we answer those questions, we will attract people who want to join that association or that event, that expo, that whatever, and it will add the value. So I think there's a there's a journey of rediscovery. For chambers of commerce, for exhibitions, for the way we used to run conferences. I think we've got to think about it differently because these are classic places where we've always done it that way. So, that's the way we'll always do it.

Yes, yes. And unfortunately, it's our generation, Steve, that needs to retire and make way for the younger people to reinvent that. Because as long as we're still doing what we've done because this is the way we've always Done it is the true definition of insanity. So, this has been a fabulous, fabulous topic. Do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

I think just go back into the hashtag, don't sell to suspects. Master that piece. I think there's a space here. Trust the process but have one. And make sure that your process connects to how your buyer likes to buy and not how your habits have driven you to sell. I think that would be the 3 takeaways to probably hang your hat on.

Yeah, wonderful. Steve, I want to thank you so much for sharing your passion and expertise with us today. Could you just remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Yeah, thanks Marc. So, I'm on LinkedIn, Steve Knapp. Just find me, connect. So, you watch the show. Tell me what resonated. I'll accept the connection. And my email is steve@plan-grow-do.com.

Thank you, Steve, so much. This has been absolutely brilliant. I've just enjoyed this. I can't believe how quickly the time has just flown by. So, thank you for doing this.

Pleasure. An absolute pleasure.

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