In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin introduces the show and its sponsor Rev Genius before interviewing B2B revenue leader Rachel Mae. Rachel reframes the traditional notion of "selling" by defining it as a transactional, often negatively‑perceived activity, and contrasts it with "influence," which she describes as the capacity to affect a prospect’s behavior and decisions. She outlines three core influence objectives that should guide every sales interaction: (1) influencing how prospects perceive their current problems and the way they currently do business; (2) influencing the prospect’s desire to change – the "first sale" that convinces them they need to alter their status quo; and (3) influencing the decision‑making process after a proposal is delivered, ensuring the seller stays engaged with all stakeholders and prevents the prospect from falling into a “black‑hole” of indecision. Rachel provides practical signals that indicate a lack of influence, such as a high rate of deals lost to indecision or status‑quo, prospects going dark after proposals, and the seller’s reliance on generic follow‑ups. By consistently applying these three influence levers throughout discovery calls, demos, emails, and proposal stages, she argues that the desired outcome – a closed deal – will emerge naturally.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
We're going to talk about how to influence the sale today. And, um, so what I'm going to be talking about is how do we go from being salespeople to being influencers, and what's the difference? Mind you, I am not talking about like selfie Kardashian influencers. I'm talking about like those who influence, right? So, um, I actually was like Googling, um, the definition, okay, of the word sell. And I'm just gonna read this to you. Here's the definition of sell: to deliver or give up in violation of duty, trust, or loyalty, especially for personal gain, to give up property to another for something of value such as money, to offer for sale, to exact a price, to give in to the power of another. So it kind of goes on, but like none of them are very nice. The word sell does not necessarily have a very good connotation. Even in the dictionary. So let's do the same thing, and we're gonna do definition of influence. All right, so the definition of influence: the capacity to have an effect on the character development or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. Right. So what's the difference there? When we talk about influence, we're talking about influencing the behavior of another person. And at the heart of sales, that's really what we want to be doing. That's really what we want to be focusing on is instead of focusing on selling, you want to think about influencing. And so real quickly, when I talk about Influencing the sale. What does that bring up for you? What do I mean that you need to influence? Roll some stuff in the chat. Hi, Andrew Rosenbloom. People influencing people. Yes, yes. Influencing their buy-in. Absolutely. Summer influencing their perceptions. I like that. To change someone's perspective. All right. You guys are spot on. Okay. So a lot of times I think when we say influence the sale, What people think about is like influencing the outcome. And salespeople think about outcomes. But influencers think about the fact that all along this process, this engagement that you have with this other person, every single word, every single interaction that you have with them, whether it's on that first initial appointment setting call or the first meeting, the discovery, the demo, the follow-up conversations, every single word, every single interaction, you have to be thinking to yourself, what am I trying to influence right now with this interaction? And making the most of every single communication, every single word that you say to strategically make sure that you are influencing the right thing. Because in every single sale, there are multiple moments throughout the process that you are actually trying to influence something different. Right? So let's talk about those, uh, those things for a little bit. So number one, You need to influence, and some of you said this, Sam said this, how people think of things. Your job is to influence the way that the prospect thinks about the problem that exists. And most importantly, you need to influence the way they do business today, the way they think about the way they are doing business today. So I'm gonna go back to what I just said, because I want this to really sink in. Every interaction you have, every word that you say, you have to ask yourself, is this influencing the way this person thinks about the problems that are showing up for them and about the way they're doing business today? So it's like a good barometer, right? When you're asking questions, when you're giving a demo, when you're writing an email, Anything that you're doing, ask yourself that, and it's going to change the way that you communicate. So that's the first one. You need to influence the way they think about the problems and the way they think about the way they do business today. The second piece is you need to influence their desire to change. So salespeople are change. Agents. That's what we are. We're agents of change. And so again, in every conversation, every communication, every word that we say, are we using that to influence their desire to change, to make a change? Because I can tell you, that is your first sale. There's 2 sales in every sale. The first one is, are they going to change? And the second one is, Are they going to change to you? And if you skip over the first one, are they going to change, and go straight to are they going to change to you, which is talking about your product, talking about your company, trying to close, all that crap, then you're gonna miss the boat. That's why you get ghosted. That's why they get go dark. That's why they loved your presentation and they loved you and they thought you were super spiffy. But at the end of the day, they don't buy, and you're wondering why. Well, it's because you didn't get the first sale, which is the sale that to influence them to know, hey, I need to change. I don't know if I need to change to Andrew or not, right? I don't know if I need to change to whatever you're selling, but I definitely need to change the way I'm doing things. Today, and a good indicator that you're missing, not influencing that desire to change, is if a lot of your deals like are being lost to indecision or status quo. Right? So if you you rarely actually are losing to a competitor, right? They went to the other guy, but they definitely changed. You're usually losing to them just doing exactly what they were doing before they ever spoke to you. And that's a good indication that you're not influencing their desire to change. So you really want to pay attention to this if that's coming up a lot for you, which 80% of deals lost are lost to indecision, not to a competitor. So there's a good chance that you're falling into that bucket. So, number one, influence the way they think about the way they do business today. And if you do that, it's going to be much easier to influence their desire to change. And then, the third thing is you have to influence the decision-making process. And a lot of times, we're not actually doing that Past the first meeting. So like you— or second meeting, depending on how your sales cycle goes. So basically it's like you meet with the person, hopefully you do discovery, and hopefully you have a second meeting where you do a demo. Hopefully they're not the same meeting. Just gonna throw that out there. But in any case, you do both of those things, right? And at some point you send over a quote. Or you give them pricing, all that jazz. Then they fall into the black hole because they need to talk to someone else, run it by their team, have another meeting, look over the proposal, meet with 3 other competitors, whatever it is. They have to do some stuff on their end that does not involve you. And then it goes into the black hole. And then you're left with— Hey Bob, I'm just checking in. I'm just following up. Just circling back all this non-influencing, non-valuable garbage because you got nothing else, right? And so after that point where you drop that proposal, right, and there's this stuff going on in their end and it falls into the black hole, you are not influencing the decision-making process. You are not influencing the other people who weren't in the room or on the Zoom when you did your presentation. Right. And so, again, a good indicator of that would be that you have a lot of people who just go dark and you fall into the, the dark hole and you don't really have a lot to bring to the table during that time. And then they come back and say, you know, well, Joe doesn't want to move forward and you never met Joe and you don't know Joe. And Joe apparently doesn't want your shit. So if you find that's happening a lot, then that's a good indication that you're not influencing the entire sales process. You're probably dropping the ball at like that proposal stage. So influencing the way they think about their business, Influencing their decision to change and then influencing the process. If you do these 3 things, then the influence of the outcome is going to happen on its own. It's not something that you need to do. It will just happen naturally as consequence of everything that you did in the process.
Whoa. Another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
