Breaking Down Sales Barriers with Alice Heiman, host of the Sales Strategies for CEOs with Alice Heiman Podcast

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness dot com. The digital copy is on for 99 cents.

So I think this is something everyone out there needs to hear, right? You may be still founder and co founder doing all the selling. You may have hired a sales team, you may have a sales leader, you may even have a CRO. But the thing that you need to understand is that sales is a team sport. It is no longer the individual contributor. You know, the white knight riding out to save the day. No large company wants one salesperson to show up and try to sell them something. It just doesn't work that way anymore. I'm not really sure it ever did, but we did have high expectations for one seller to be able to close these hundred thousand or million dollar deals. Now it takes your entire team and you really need to think through.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction. Hey, what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more. Hey, Traction fam. Our guest today is the sales sorceress with over 20 years of experience turning sales challenges into triumphs. Her deep roots in sales comes from her time at her family's former company, Miller Hyman, which pioneered a lot of the sales knowledge and systems we use in B2B sales today. In fact, that's where I got my start. The strategic selling and conceptual selling are some of the books I listened to when I started my career in sales right out of college. So from guiding global sales leaders through the labyrinth of complex sales to hosting the spellbounding podcast called SaaS Sales Talk for CEOs. Her expertise extends beyond the boardroom and when she's not helping people conquer sales, you'll find her navigating the slopes, sailing into the sunset, or sharing her insights as a professor at the University of Nevada. So super stoked to have you here, Alice Hyman, where sales meets pure magic. Thanks for joining us.

Well, I'm delighted to be here. I had so much fun interviewing you for my show, sales talk for CEOs. I'm really excited to be here to talk about sales with you today.

I feel connected to you from even before we spoke, given I've read the books at the start of my journey. So give us your backstory. You come from a legendary family of sales wizards. Was it a natural path for you? Tell us all about it.

Oh, my gosh. So some of your listeners who know me may know that I started as a public school teacher. So I did not start in sales. I went to college actually to be an art major. And then I thought, how am I going to make a living? So I changed my major and became a teacher. Not just a teacher, but a special education teacher. So I was in teaching for 13 years before I got into business. And during that time I got a master's degree and became a reading specialist. And so I've always worked with children and their parents who were struggling with something and help them change their behavior and become successful. As you mentioned, I come from a sales family. And when I was in college, my dad and his partner Bob Miller started Miller Hyman. So of course I knew of the company and I didn't really understand exactly, you know, what they were doing. I had a little bit of understanding. And years later when I was teaching, my father would ask me to do projects for him. And so I had been working in the business just part time, doing different projects and such. And he kept asking me to come work for him full time. And finally in 1994, I did. So that's how I got catapulted from the world of education into the world of corporate complex sales.

What was it though? Weren't you happy with education? Was there some burning desire that pushed you into sales? Family members ask for all kinds of things, suggest all kinds of paths, but like, we don't always follow them. So what was it? That was the tipping point.

There was a lot of things while I was teaching. Well, let me even rewind before that. I'm an entrepreneur. My dad's an entrepreneur. His dad was an entrepreneur. My mom has entrepreneurs on her side of the family. So I think it just kind of. It's in our blood a little bit. I didn't know I was an entrepreneur. I didn't even know that word till I was probably in my 40s. I was a starter of things, let's put it that way. And I started things from when I was a little girl. I started things in high school. I started things in college, right? So I was always starting things. And while I was teaching, you know, I found this need in the marketplace that parents and teachers had to be able to find really good and appropriate materials for their students or their children to help them learn to read. So as a reading specialist at that time, and I was teaching graduate courses for teachers, as well as teaching elementary school reading specialists during the day, I was doing that job. And then I was teaching these teachers in the evenings, and I started to realize, wow, they really don't know how to do this. Right? They don't know how to provide the curriculum and the books that are needed to really build good leaders. So I started a business inadvertently. I didn't really think, oh, I'm starting a business. But I was collecting all of these books that these teachers could use. And so I was putting them in this extensive newsletter that I was writing every month and explaining, you know, telling about the book and explaining how they could use it in their curriculum to help children learn to read. And especially in schools where the kids vary so much in their abilities, maybe a lot of the schools that I taught in, where the kids were socioeconomically challenged, right. And less fortunate, so they would come into maybe a fourth grade with a first grade reading level or second grade reading level or less. And then some of the kids were reading on grade level. So you had to be able to teach his kids to do all of the things and learn all the things they needed to, but some of them couldn't read. So anyway, I'm teaching them how to do all of this. I'm writing this extensive news letter, and I'm making zero money off of it. And somebody said to me, gosh, Alice, you could probably charge for that and you could charge for these books. And I did. I started a business, and I started selling these books, and then I wrote a business plan. I opened this center for parents and teachers where they could learn how to help kids read better and where they could get the materials that they needed to do that and all of the books. So it was a children's bookstore and resource center. So that was like my first foray into business, not really knowing or understanding that I was really, oh, I'm going to be a business owner. I'm starting a business. I was just doing what needed to be done to help. But I did write a business plan, and I did get it funded, and I did open. And three years later, because I Wasn't profitable. I had to close the doors. The smart thing was I built a board of advisors at that time and they advised me really well. And you know, it was like they the saddest day of my life when I had to close that place. But it was the right thing to do as a business move. So I learned that's. I always say I've never taken a business course, but that's how I got my mba, right? I started a business. I was just an accidental entrepreneur. So moving from there, I went back to teaching and I was still doing projects for my dad. But I was really kind of dissatisfied with what was going on in the public schools. And I felt like the adults were more concerned about themselves than they were about the kids. And so I was getting very disillusioned about education. I guess I was just open to it at that time. My dad had asked me a lot of times to come work for him, but at that moment in time I thought maybe a change would be good. And so I just decided to go ahead and go work for him.

Were there any life lessons that you learned up until that point? Point or soft skills or whatever you want to call it, like lessons that carry forward into your journey as a sales guru?

This business that I have now is the second for profit business that I've started. Like I said, I'm a starter thing. So I started lots of things. And I think that being a teacher, the thing that I learned the most is that when you help others and they succeed, everybody wins. And that is absolutely the same in sales. When we help others with our products and services and they succeed using what we sold them, everybody wins. So that is a lesson that came through loud and clear. I would also say that I have become an expert in changing others behavior or I, I can't change their behavior. They have to do it right. But helping them to change their behavior from all of the things I did when I was a teacher, I had to help parents change their behavior. I had to help kids change their behavior. And so that comes in very handy when I'm working with the CEOs of companies who want to grow and scale their sales, right? Because they're going to have to change something to get what they want. And so having this superpower is really helpful to me because I have a way, I just have a way of helping people see what needs to change and then helping them move towards that change. So those are definitely some life lessons. I learned some hard lessons too about starting businesses. So that's helpful. When you're talking to CEOs who they're CEO founders and they got the idea and started their business like, yes, I've done that too twice. I took investor money once and the second time I didn't. So I have some of those experiences behind me. And now I've helped many CEOs to grow their businesses and many of them successfully exit, including. I have one unicorn under my belt in helping. So life lessons, there's a lot of them. But I try to use what I've learned again, just to help people grow.

Now I'm just starting out, let's say, you know, my journey. I've just build a product. Customers love it, it's got product market fit. I don't know anything about sales. You know, I chanced leveraging my network and some relationships and finagled into getting a few large enterprise clients. What are some tactics? What are some things I need to have in place to be able to sell? What should my strategy look like from product market fit to maybe like the first couple million in revenue?

So the first thing I want to say is everybody knows something about sales. The first thing we have to do is change your mindset as the CEO, founder, right? Or any of the leadership team. I believe everyone sells. So you can't be in a startup if you're not willing to sell. It's just not going to move the needle. Everybody has to sell. Now, that doesn't mean everybody goes out and does the prospecting and the cold outreach and the whole sales process. It means that everybody has a role in sales. So that's the first thing you have to change your mindset. Now, when CEO founders tell me I don't know anything about sales, I say, yes, you do. Have you ever convinced your mother to let you drive the car somewhere that she didn't want you to drive it? Have you ever convinced a friend to go to a movie that they didn't want to go to? Have you ever helped anyone change their mind? Have you ever helped anyone learn how to do something new? Have you ever helped anyone? Then you've done sales. What happens? People think they don't know anything about sales because they think that sales is some sort of manipulation or trickery or some sort of magic. And it's none of those things, right? It can be magic goal. But it is not magical magic. It's not smoke and mirrors. It's very simple. I have a product or service that you may need and I'm going to find out if you need that and if you need It I'm going to help make sure that you understand your problem thoroughly and can utilize it thoroughly and be successful. Thus I'm helping you win. So that's sales. So if you go back to what do you know about sales? You know a lot of, you know a lot about people and how they make decisions because you make decisions yourself every day. You know how to help someone change their mind, how to educate someone. Now you may not be an expert in any of these things, but you've done them all. So you do know sales. So that's just number one. So now it's okay. Maybe there's a co founder, a technical co founder. You're the business end of the co founder and you're the one who's going to go out and do the selling. At first, what should you do first? You should go on a mission to learn, right? If you have product market fit, now if you don't like, we need three days for that one. But if you have your product market fit and you know that probably because you've already talked to some people, right, and they've nodded their heads and said, yes, absolutely. So you're just going to use your own network and the network of your co founder and anybody else that's working for you at this time or volunteering to help. I remember when I started my first business, I had to have my mom and my best friend's mom volunteer to help. Cause they didn't have enough money to pay them and luckily they did. Right. So whoever's helping you, you want to get your network open. Now if you can find a board of advisors quickly, just a few people who have great networks who can make introductions for, for you, things are going to go really well because you're not going to just go knock on doors and say, hi, you don't know me, I don't know you, you've never heard of what I sell, but do you want to buy? Just doesn't work. So what we have to do is have introductions to people who can possibly buy from us or refer us. And in those first conversations we just want to learn, right? We just want to learn. And then if we start hearing things that tell us, oh, there's a fit here, somehow either they could use our product or service or they know people who can and can refer us. Right? We just want to learn that much. So you need to be talking to people every single day. Yes. You also have to run your business and there's a lot of other things to do, but your main focus has to be talking to enough people every day that you will find those who can buy from you and those who can refer you to people who can buy from you. That's the beginning. Where do you want to go from there?

What are some ways in the early days for founders to grow their sales muscles?

Well, I think in the early days you just have to go out and do it and you learn from doing it. Now if you have someone like me or who knows a lot about sales, you can ask them questions. You can join a CEO group or a sales group of some kind and get advice. So ask for the help that you need, right? Don't sit there and be quiet. Go find the help you need. There are tons of courses on LinkedIn about selling. There are books galore about selling. So I would suggest that you start to school yourself on the things you need to know. Now I'm an expert in a business to business complex sale. So I know many books that will help you in that regard and we can put some of them in the show notes. Two of them were written by my dad and his partner. One called Strategic selling and one's called conceptual selling. They're quick reads. Read them. Conceptual selling will help you understand how humans make decisions and how to prepare for a sales call and how to ask the right questions and how to determine if there's a fit. That's important work in the beginning, right? Because you're making all of those calls to talk to people. So read something, ask somebody, reach out on LinkedIn to experts and see if they'll help you. But kind of get sales into your world. Right? Again, find a group that you can be in that there are people who will talk to you about sales. So just become a student of it, but also just go out and do it at first because you'll learn a lot just from talking to people and understanding their needs and learning how they buy, how they make decisions to buy the kinds of things that you, you sell. I think that's really just surrounding yourself is what I think will be a good start.

You know, I love that you said just do it. A lot of people don't just do it. They read and they spend a lot of time reading. And reading is great. Your books were great. But you know what I did back in the day was I just got thrown on the deep end. I was an engineer, I joined an early stage startup and they really didn't have product or product market fit. So I needed to get on the road and talk to customers and figure out what to Build. And so on my drives to customers, I would listen to audiobooks like Strategic Selling and Conceptual Selling and Spill Selling by Neil Rackham, which is another great book I recommend. And then by the time I'd get there, I just apply those techniques. There's no substitute. I like to read, but apply it just in time. And sometimes what happens is you may read and not retain it, but the best way as an early stage founder is read it and then apply it right away. For example, my book became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. But I needed to get my messaging so fluid. I appeared on 80 podcasts over nine weeks that all launched during our launch week. And by the end of it I could just speak on any topic related to the book. And that same goes for selling. And in the early days it's like sort of chiseling or making a sculpture, right? You start heavy and then you refine and refine. You just got to do more and more of it and then your messaging just gets better. But if you suck at it and you don't do it, you'll definitely never get better.

I can't agree with you more. If you suck at it, you just need to keep trying. You can't give up because I know a lot of founders just don't want to do sales and they just want to hire someone else to do it and get that part over with and like be done with having to worry about sales. That is never going to happen. Hello. That is never going to happen. You as the CEO founder will always have a role in sales. That role will change as the company matures, but you will always have a role and you need to learn that and be confident in it so that your company can grow at the speed you want it to grow at.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to gain sight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at From Grassroots to Greatness. Com. The digital copy is on for 99 cents. I think I started with conceptual selling. I think that was one of the first books I may have read and there was this concept of no sell selling and questions to ask yourself before you make the call. You comfortable talking a little bit about some of that?

Oh sure. It's kind of like just in my brain, those Concepts that I use every day. I think that the most important thing is to understand if you have product market fit and you have targeted your market carefully, so you are only outreaching to people who are likely to, to buy what you have, because they will have that need. Now, that doesn't mean they'll buy it from you or that they'll change from what they're currently doing, right? But they do have a propensity because you've targeted carefully and you know that they have to do this task or do these things that your product or service can help with. So now you're talking to the right people. It's just a matter of whether they're going to buy now or not. And so you have to understand the human psychology behind that. And you have to understand if they're thinking about their position in their world as growing or they're in some kind of trouble, right? Or maybe they're thinking, oh my gosh, we've never had it so good, so they're not going to change, right? So don't even bother with them. They're telling you how great things are, right? Or maybe they're just kind of even keel. It's like, oh, I don't know. So if they're in a trouble mode or a growth mode, you can get them to move, they're going to make a decision. So that's good to know. If they're an even keel, they need education so they can know whether there is trouble or growth for them. And when you talk with them about these things and you understand their need, there's no selling going on because you're just solving, right? And you're thinking about, here's how a person makes the decision. And this is in the conceptual selling book. They think, oh my gosh, this is broken. I need another one. Okay? So they have that moment and then they're like, now what should I do? So they run through all the possible things they can do. I could go borrow one, I could go buy one, I could make one. What are all the different things I could do? I could just not use one anymore. So maybe I just don't even need it so I don't have to fix it or buy one or borrow one or make another one. So they're running through all these scenarios in their head and then they're narrowing it down to which one is going to be the best for them. And then they start looking for the solution provider. So once they know I'm going to borrow it, who could I borrow it from? Where are the choices for that? Or I'm going to make one, then I need to do that in house. What tools am I going to need? Or I'm going to buy one. Now who are all the different companies I can buy it from and what research do I need to do? So in their brain this is all going on and then they find some of these solutions and they have to choose one. Well, that could happen a split second or it could take weeks. Right. Or sometimes longer. Especially in a complex sale where there are eight or 12 people who are all going to have to go through that same process with you and come to consensus and make a decision. So that's what conceptual selling is trying to help you do. So when you want to find out all these things, you've got multiple people you have to talk to. You have to ask the right questions. Now many sales methodologies talk about open questions and closed questions and that's fine. You need both of those. You need some open ended questions and you need some closed ended questions. Because if you want to ask them the timeline, the date, what's the date that's just closed, Just give me the date and that's enough information. If I need to find out what the results are going to look like when it's all done, that's an open end question. I need all that information. That's going to be a lot of talking, but that's not the end of it. In conceptual selling, we actually go into the different types of questions, confirmation questions, confirming what you already learned to make sure it's still true. New information questions, all of the things you need to learn that you don't know yet. Attitude questions to understand how people are feeling about things, about the changes, because change is hard. Right? Right. How are people feeling about that? Commitment questions to find out what they'll commit to so that you can move the deal forward. And what we call basic issue questions, which are the questions to try to find out things that they haven't revealed yet, like is there anything else we might need to know or is there anything that might get in the way of this project going forward? Right. So diving much, much deeper into the type of questions you're asking is going to make your sale so much easier. You spend a little more time on the front end really diving in. And it's not just Bant. We're not talking about budget, authority, need and timing. That is so 1980s. I mean, look, people today aren't going to even talk to you if they don't need what you have so they'll find the budget right? They know the timing or you'll help them figure it out. They don't have the authority. That's a given. No one human at any business has the authority to. To buy something complex and expensive. You know, maybe they can buy copier paper without another signature, but they can't buy anything beyond that. So you don't need band. What you need is to thoroughly understand their problem. And this is why conceptual selling is such a great methodology, because you really can dig into that and get the information and know whether there's a fit before you waste everyone's time.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile going through maybe a case study or a complex sales scenario, maybe with one of your customers or, I don't know, some company you're advising. What was the most complex scenario you advised on and how did you navigate that?

You know, there's been so many of them. I'm trying to think of something that's more recent that I've been working on. I have a client that's sells software that can be hundreds of thousands to, you know, a million dollars for a year's time or certainly over the lifetime of the customer. So it's a big expense even for a large company. They're a small company, right? They're probably under 50 million still. But they're not a young company. They're probably 20 years in. And they sell to some of the largest companies in the world that are in aerospace and auto and some other industries that build things out of metal. And they help companies move from prototyping to modeling. So this is something that all of these big auto companies want to do because it's much more cost effective to model than it is to prototype. And so they've got to move all of these engineers over. And a lot of them have like, edicts, hey, this will be done by 2025. We will stop prototyping and we will all be modeling by this date. So anytime you have something like that going on, you've got a lot of things in play because you've got leadership saying it must be done. You've got people who have to actually do the work who are saying that easy to get that done, right? There's a big spend that maybe somebody didn't realize that's going to have to happen in order to make this all happen. And so my client steps into this world with a product that's going to help them move from prototyping to modeling. So with some of their biggest customers, what we are Doing is mapping those relationships, not just talking about an opportunity now to sell them some software. We're talking about mapping an entire relationship with humongous auto companies, right? And looking at where they're positioned currently versus where they need to be positioned, who they know and how well they know them, what's going on in their industry, what's going on in their company, where's the expansion and growth? Who are the leaders that are leaning on this edict to change and who are the ones that are slow to make it happen? I mean, they really are just mapping the whole circumstance and situation for these very large companies a thousand times larger than them. And what we're doing to move the needle, right, to keep these opportunities moving forward is going okay. So big auto company name that we all know, just think of any car that you drive, right, Needs to move to modeling. And we're working just with this one little division over here and there's an opportunity to sell them the software. That's great. How do we make that into an opportunity to sell all the divisions, right? That is the strategy that I help them with. And then on the opportunity that they already have, what we're doing is getting better positions. So I think this is something everyone out there needs to hear, right? You may be still founder and co founder doing all the selling. You may have hired a sales team, you may have a sales leader, you may even have a CRO. But the thing that you need to understand is that sales is a team sport. It is no longer the individual contributor, you know, the white knight riding out to save the day. No large company wants one salesperson to show up and try to sell them something. It just doesn't work that way anymore. I'm not really sure it ever did. But we did have high expectations for one seller to be able to close these hundred thousand or million dollar deals. Now it takes your entire team and you really need to think through. So what I'm doing with one particular very large company is we have put a team in place. We've done this for several actually, but I'll just talk about the one. So we've put a team in place, we've taken a look. Who are the players at their company that should interact with the players at this humongous company in this one division where they're trying to close this deal and we've gotten them more involved than they had been before. Maybe they just knew of each other, but now we actually have them reaching out with what we call in Miller Hyman speak, a valid business Reason, Right. I'm going to just make a little side note here. I don't work for Miller Hyman anymore. Korn Ferry owns them. And I'm a big fan of the Miller Hyman methodologies still, and I use them every day. But I don't own that intellectual property anymore. It's just that I know it so well. I speak it right? So I just want to make sure everybody knows that. So we're reaching out from person to person, human to human, at different levels. The CEO has a role, the COO has a role. The head of kind of the software production or the product person has a role. The sales rep has a role. Right. There's several different people, some other subject matter experts, and they've all reached out to the proper people and started these conversations not just about are you going to buy? But about helping and solving and understanding how they're going to move. These engineers who are reluctant to move off of prototyping and move to modeling, how is that all going to actually happen? What will it look like? How long will it take? What will we do with the people who are extremely reluctant and don't want to move at all? You know, how is this all going to work? Because it's not just about buying the product or service you sell, in this case software, it's can the people we sold it to be successful using it. And that's where the team comes in with that assurance. And that's where the CEO can come in with that CEO confidence in saying to the leaders of these companies, regardless how big or small they are, hey, we've helped other companies like yours be successful and we can help you too. Then the CEOs can tell the stories, right? Like we're telling a story now, and they can give that confidence to the buyer. So no, the CEO is not in charge of doing all the selling necessarily and closing the deal. But they have a very important role to play today in these highly complex sales with big dollar stakes. They need to come in and give that CEO confidence where it's needed.

That's a good case study. Now, what are the different selling styles you've seen work today in the modern world here, especially post Covid. And what, when is the time to use each of them? Maybe your top two or three?

Well, I think selling styles and selling methodologies are two different things, right? I think that every seller should have their own style. They should absolutely be themselves, right? If you're a fun type, you should be fun. And if you're serious, you should be serious.

I think, you know, what I meant was methodologies.

Yeah. Because I feel like sometimes people are trying to change people's personalities. That's just not a good idea. I mean, we got to be ourselves. But I think the methodologies that you use depending on where you are in the sales cycle. Right. So today we know with prospecting it's much harder than it used to be and we need to try a lot of different things and we need to do those things over a longer span of time. And so I think if you look at your cold outreach methods, many of them aren't working very well today. So the things we do know about cold outreach that do work, the methods that do work are one, a combination of methods. Right. Not just email only, but you've got a call email. Use LinkedIn, maybe use direct mail. Sending something actually in the mail. There's other things. Sometimes it's texting, depending on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. So the multimodal kind of selling. Right. So there's lots of modes like people call it omnichannel, where you're hitting people where they are. Right. You're finding people where they are and striking up conversations. I think that is a methodology that works because when we strike up conversations, we find that some people are interested or some people know people who might be interested. So again, it's can you buy from me or can you refer me to somebody who can buy? So I think the methodology for approaching prospects is absolutely. The one that's winning is an account based omnichannel approach where we're very conversational and we're sharing a lot of insights and content and making people curious. So I think that methodology is winning right now for prospecting. And then as far as once there's an opportunity and you're trying to move that towards the close, I think the methodology that works best is salesperson as guide or orchestrator. Right. So the salesperson steps in and orchestrates their own team. As I was mentioning in my case study, where you're gathering all the players on your own team who need to be involved and helping them know their role and helping them know what to do and who to interface with. And then you're orchestrating the buying team and helping them through the buying process. Now, something to remember today as you're applying any methodology that you might be using to the sales process is that buyers that people say, oh, they're 70% through the buying process before they talk to you, I'm not so sure about that, that's an interesting one. I think that buyers are different now than they were because there is so much information. But because of that, I also think they have information overload. And it's your job as a seller to help make that simple. Here are the things you need to know. Here is how you can compare products or services. Let's simplify this for you. So as a seller, that's my role, Right. The method I prefer is where you're guiding them and simplifying and helping them make a decision making versus trying to sell them something. Right. Because the best decision will be what's best for them to be the most successful. That might not include you. So you really have to be careful. But if you do have a good product or service that is just as good as the other ones they might choose, then it's your job to guide them to choose right and help them do that. So that's the kind of sales process or buyer process I'd like to see. And the methodology is that we teach our sellers to be a guide and an orchestrator. We teach them to have the business acumen that's needed to understand the day in the life of the people they're communicating with and be able to help them solve in a way that will make them more successful.

Love it. I like that. Guiding. You're always providing value and you're guiding them. You're not shoving product down them. Customers want an outcome, they don't want software. Your job is to understand their pain points and guide them to their outcome. And that's what I found works successfully for me in the past. Now, can you share a few key sales strategies that businesses often overlook in their sales process?

Well, I think that businesses overlook a lot of things and the key here is that they're not customer focused. Right. And we're not listening to our customers. So the CEO's role part of it is to understand what's going on with customers today, what's going on in the industries we sell to. And I think that is extremely overlooked. The amount of time that should be spent by the CEO and others in the company to truly understand what's happening in the marketplace. It's not just marketing's job to understand what's happening in the marketplace. Right. Everybody who's talking to customers has to understand that. And so I think that's being overlooked. It's just not enough time spent. And I think that there's not enough time spent either. And maybe overlooked is what do sellers need to know today? Just as I Mentioned. They need to be guides and orchestrators. They need to have business acumen. But how are we providing that to them? I think it's being overlooked. We hire salespeople, we think they know how to sell, we send them out to go do it. And so I think that is definitely being overlooked. I also think that although it's becoming more clear, we don't understand just how many of the deals we're involved in end up in no decision. So that's so interesting. If we have sellers who can guide and orchestrate, there should be very few no decisions because that means they're staying status quo, they're not going to make the changes they need, and they're not going to get the success success they need. Why would we leave them in that position? That's horrible. Now, sometimes the no decision is, oh, the budget was cut or some other thing happened that's completely out of our control. But a lot of times that no decision is basically analysis paralysis. People just cannot come to consensus at their company. They've overanalyzed it, they don't really know what to do, and they decide to do absolutely nothing. So I think those are a few of the things that are being overlooked.

In terms of hurdles. You work with sales leaders globally. What are some common challenges you observe and how do you guide them to overcome these challenges?

I think the role of sales leader is such a tough one. I think most people just don't realize. In fact, I did an exercise this morning for a CEO who was asking me, what does my sales leader do all day? And I was like, oh my gosh, do you really want me to answer that question? So I did a week in the life of a sales leader just this morning. So it's very fresh in my mind. And this could have applied to any sales leader anywhere that I work with. So first, I think that people really don't know what a sales leader's role is or what they do or how much time it takes to do what they do. And I think CEOs misunderstand what sales leaders do as well. But some of the common hurdles are time. Time is global. There is never enough time. Why? Because you have five, eight, or ten salespeople reporting to you. They each need your time one on one every week. They need you to guide them, to grow them, to help them. They need you to help them with the deals that they're working on. They need you to help them with strategies for large accounts. They need you to level them up on sales skills. They need so much it just doing that piece of the sales leader's job is a full time job. So time is always a problem. There is never enough time for coaching. And so coaching gets put by the wayside. Yes, they have their weekly one to ones, but there's no real time to coach on the pipeline or coach on these deals or coach on the strategies for large accounts. So those things get squashed in or left out completely. So I find that is a huge problem because we just cannot have peak performing sales teams if the leaders don't have time to coach on all of those things that I just mentioned, aside from their one to one. So I would say time is the biggest hurdle now. The next one is if even if you do have time to coach, most of us have never been trained to coach. What is coaching? What's the difference between coaching and managing? Like I have my one to ones, I'm telling them what to do, I'm helping them close their deals, I'm putting out the fires. Yes you are. But true sales coaching is something that we need training on. Most leaders have no training on coaching. Sales leaders have no training on coaching, specifically on sales coaching, none of that. So that is a huge hurdle. And our CEOs and senior leaders need to understand how important it is. If they want their sellers to hit their quotas, if they want peak performing teams, if they want their teams not just to grow but to scale up their sales, they have to have excellent sales coaches available to coach those deals, to coach the pipeline to coach, development to coach on skills. And most sales leaders simply don't have not just the time but the ability to do that because they've never been taught. Some people have it naturally, but most people do not. So I'd say those are two of the biggest hurdles that are absolutely global. And then I just say the third one and there's probably many more, but the third one I'll mention here, it's just the amount of reporting that is still manual. Even though we have all these systems, we have these CRMs, we have these other tools. And yet I see leaders spending time pulling data out of one place and putting it into a spreadsheet of some type and doing some machinations to it and then coming out with a report. And it takes way too much time, way too much time. I know that AI can do a lot of this. I know that some of the tools should be able to do it. We just don't know how to make them do it. And I'd say in companies there is so much time Wasted, which equates to big dollars because we ask sales leaders to do reporting and they have to still do it manually because either they don't know how to use the tools that they have or, or the tools can't produce what's being asked for. So that's something that I think leaders need to pay attention to and fix.

Definitely I've experienced all of the above. Now, speaking of sales leaders, when is the right time to bring a sales leader? What are the key jobs? Because I think sometimes, especially in smaller companies, the CEOs think the sales leader is supposed to sell and coach and do everything. So when is the right time to bring in a sales leader? What are the key skills and what are the jobs? How do you coach people to find the right one?

Well, you know, in every circumstance it's different. Of course it depends on the age of the company. But I've worked with companies that are 10 years in and the CEO founder is still doing all the selling and then sometimes I'm working with them five years in and they've got a whole entire sales team built. I think it really depends one, of course on your funding and if you have the funds to do it, but two, on your understanding of what needs to be done right. So I think fairly early on, if a founder is doing all the selling still it's good to bring in some support rather than a seller. So bring in a sales coordinator who can do the follow up, who can set the meetings, who can get the information out the way it should be put out. They can do some of the communication so that you can continue wearing your CEO hat and also doing the sales. So I think that's a big mistake. They go out and just hire a seller first. Why not hire the support for yourself to continue being the seller? And I think then the next is if you're bringing people on, they need to be onboarded properly so that we can make them hugely successful with what they've purchased. So in that case, I think the next person to hire a lot of times is customer success. Now it doesn't always flow like this, but if you think about it, if you are in those early stages to hire a seller and spend the time training them to do what you're doing, when you don't really have any process written down or any way that you're doing it, you're just doing it is going to be really hard versus getting someone into help support you in your sales who could also start documenting some of the things that you do that work well. So it will be easier to train someone in the future and then be able to hand things off to a customer success person who's going to onboard and nurture that relationship for you. So thinking about that as a way to proceed versus just going out and hiring salespeople, however, there comes a point where your company won't grow big enough with just you doing the selling. So you're going to have to hire salespeople and you're going to have to manage them. That's the tough part. You've only ever managed yourself as a seller. How do you manage them? And you need to provide the coaching that I was just talking about that most people don't know how to do. So I think that sometimes it's easier to outsource a sales team, especially for the early stages, prospecting and such. But you can outsource end to end sales so your first sellers could be outsourced. That's one way to do it. Or you can think about how you could sell through the channel. So there's representatives that work for another firm, someone else coaches and manages them, then they go out and sell your product or service. That's another way to get started. And if you are hiring sellers and you thought, okay, I'm going to hire my own sellers, then you have to think about how are you going to coach and manage them. So you might hire someone like me, for example, to help you do that. Or you might hire a fractional VP of sales who would help you hire the sellers and help you coach and manage them. So there's lots of different ways to do it. But if you dive right in and start hiring sellers, that's fine. Just know that you have to coach and manage them. And don't ever just hire one. That's the key. People think, oh, I'll just hire one seller. And sometimes, yes, it does work. I've heard success stories. You can hear them on my podcast. But if you hire two now, you can benchmark. So you hire two, you train them both at the same time, get them up to speed and then watch them go. And you can see what they can do. If both of them work out, terrific, that's great. But if one is lagging and the other is succeeding, then you can see what kind of seller you need to hire for the next hire. So it really helps you understand what needs to be done when you hire two sellers at the same time versus just one. If you hire one and they fail, you don't know, was it the product market fit, was it? I Didn't give them enough training? Was it they didn't know how to sell? Were they a bad hire? We don't know. But when we hire two now we have something to benchmark against. So that's my suggestion. If you're going to run out and hire salespeople, the other thing is hire people who are entrepreneurial and scrappy. If you're in a small company, you can't hire somebody out of big companies like Cisco and Fidelity Investments and Dow Chemical. Any big company salesperson is going to expect a lot of support. They're going to expect you to generate leads, they're going to expect all kinds of things that you can't do as a startup. Right? So in the beginning you have to hire people who are scrappy, who are entrepreneurial, who can do it all and are not afraid. And they have a figure it out factor that they can just go figure things out. So you gotta be careful thinking about who you're hiring and maybe make some non traditional hires. Don't just hire people who worked in your industry and have been doing what you want to do. Maybe hire some different types of people. And I've heard a lot of success with that. Then as it grows, you're going to get enough salespeople eventually that you can't be their leader anymore because it's a full time job, as I already mentioned, to be the sales leader and you're also the CEO, so eventually that just isn't going to work anymore. I think fractional help is a great way to go at first and then you can move into finding a full time sales leader.

I love that advice because everything was on point and I found that for myself as well. Hiring multiple salespeople, hiring people who are scrappy from smaller companies and startups. Velocity is the currency and you can't hire people who need like infinite amount of help and resources. You don't have that. And then finding the right sales leader is also key. And I found that sure, somebody who sold your deal sizes is important, who can navigate the complexities. But ultimately it translates to can this person hire and can this person coach? Hiring and coaching is key. Now as we close out, I want to know two things. What are the top tools in your sales toolkit and what are your favorite sales books?

Okay, I have a lot of favorite sales books. There's just so many. I already mentioned two of them. Conceptual selling and strategic selling. Those are two different books. They're by Robert Miller and Stephen Hyman, so those should be easy to find on Amazon. Recently, I've been reading a few things that I think everybody should read. One of them is obviously awesome, and that is by April Dunford.

She's amazing.

Isn't she? Amazing. Have you had her on the show? She's awesome.

Yeah. She spoke at our conference attraction.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I love her so much because she talks about positioning from a sales mind more than a marketing mind. But it crosses over. Right. That's a book that. Whether you're the CEO or a sales leader, I would definitely read that book. The next one is by my friend Tiffany Bova. Now, she's written two great books. The first one was Growth iq. So if you haven't read that one yet, definitely grab that. But she recently wrote the Experience mindset that is definitely for all CEOs to read and sales leaders as well. But to really make the changes that she's suggesting in that book, it has to come from top leadership. So if you read it as a sales leader, you definitely need to get your CEO to read it as well. But that Experience mindset, we think about the customer experience that she's talking about, but we're delightfully surprised when she starts talking about how the customer experience is impacted by the employee experience and that we're not noting that. Right. So we might do something that makes it so much easier for our customers and makes hours and hours of work for our employees and that tips the scale the wrong way, which then will make it hard for them to serve our customers, maybe even grouchy. Right. And then the customers take the brunt of that. Right. So we have to be careful when we're talking about experience to make sure that it's a balanced experience. So I love that book. Take a look at that. I also love Dr. Howard Dover at UT Dallas. He's got a new book came out in the summer called Sales Innovation Paradox. If you haven't read, that's a must read. It's just a mindset shifter. So a lot of CEOs and sales leaders are stuck in five years ago or even 10 years ago, thinking that the things that we did then to make a sale will work still now, today, and they just simply don't. And he talks about this paradox and the shifts that need to be made. So those are just a few of the books that I've been reading lately. I'm sure there's a lot more, but that should do for now.

And then your favorite tools, I guess.

My most favorite sales tool is LinkedIn and LinkedIn Navigator. I don't know how anybody can operate without them. LinkedIn is such a great place to network, to share ideas, to share content, to get to know people. So I don't know how you sell without LinkedIn. Wouldn't even try anymore today. So I think that's a great tool. I recently have been trying out a new one called Connect the Dots and we can put the link in the show notes for that. I think it's CTD AI and that is developed by some people who used to work at LinkedIn. And they're using your email and your LinkedIn to show you how closely connected you are to people, so you know who to ask for an introduction. So on LinkedIn you can see that people are connected, right? And you could ask them, but then they usually say, oh, I don't really know that person, I'm just connected to them. But with Connect the Dots, you actually know how strong your connection is. So that's a cool one. I'm also using Van Gressel's Fly Message, which I love. It's AI. It works well with LinkedIn and it also works with some Gmail and Outlook. And it populates messages, right? So it can populate a recurring message really easily. You just use a short code and it populates. Or if you're on LinkedIn, it can actually write the comments or it can write a post for you. So you could go to ChatGPT and do the same thing. But this is integrated right into LinkedIn and I use that every day, so I really love that as well. The last one I'll mention that I am enjoying these days is xiq. And XIQ is a great software that helps you understand people better using the disc. So you can look the people up that you're selling to, you can look up the companies that you're selling to. And if you look up the company, it will give you a SWOT analysis about the company and it will feed you all of the latest news about that company. And then if you look up the people who work for that company that you plan on calling on, it will tell you their disc style is and it will give you suggestions about how you can communicate better with them. And then it also has an AI tool that will help you write in the style that will get their attention. So depending on their disc, it will write in that style. So that makes the messaging much more personalized as well. Those are some of the tools I'm using. There's a lot of other ones, but those are the ones I'm enjoying these days.

This has been a fantastic conversation. Where can we follow you? You got a fantastic podcast called Sales talk for CEOs, right? And where else can we follow you?

Yeah, you can find my podcast anywhere that you listen to your podcasts or you can just go to Salestalk for CEOs biz. You can go to my website alicehyman.com and if you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, please let me know that you heard me on Lloyd's show.

Awesome. Alice, this was wonderful and look forward to socializing it across our channels. Thank you so much and have a wonderful rest of the week.

It's been a pleasure.

I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike to Saster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomena. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's b o a s t a I forward slash blog.