Podcasts about execvision

Steve Richard, SVP, Value Realization at Mediafly sits down with Susan to talk about sales and sales training in a recession. He says, "Really good demand gen marketers that are super targeted with what they do and have very little scrap rate have never been higher demand. That's one thing I'm definitely seeing that's critically important right now. And everyone's going outbound." Key points in this episode: SDRs, SBRs, are you in the top third, mid-range third, or bottom third? Time to start self-sourcing opportunities How many times do you need to repeat training materials, three, seven, 50, or 100 times?  The sins that steady renewals can cover. Is this current market downturn isolated to tech to tech, or is it across the board? Steve's advice to take from this episode: "If you're good at generating opportunities, you're always going to be fine.  That's it. It's simple. So learn how to generate opportunities no matter what customer-facing role you're in." ----more---- About our guest: Steve Richard is SVP of Sales Excellence at Mediafly following their acquisition of ExecVision, the company he founded, in 2022.  Steve also founded Vorsight which he sold in 2021. Steve's mission and life's work is to help as many sales teams as possible become wildly successful.  He has been featured in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, The Washington Business Journal, and The Washington Post.  Outside of work, Steve enjoys scuba diving, skiing, running, and watching lots of football.  He lives in Arlington, VA with his wife Ellen and their four kids ages 6, 9, 11, and 13. Follow Steve's one-minute sales tips of the day on LinkedIn.

In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction, talks with guest, Steve Richard, Founder @ExecVision: Sales Coaching & Conversation Intelligence Software. Steve's sharing 8 Cold Calling Tactics that have the potential to work for you. Episode Highlights 03:34 – Steve shares his background, how he didn't make it as an Investment Banker, and so he mimic what better people were doing at the time, which made him better. 04:20 – Steve realized that sales are about having the ability to impact and influence how people's lives go in some strange way. 07:25 – If you're not constantly trying new things and testing, experimenting, you're missing the boat, says Steve. 10:11 – It is about understanding all those different nuances to your business that you should understand and then testing it. 12:40 - You take a spreadsheet, you put your personas in your rows, you put your industry verticals, and then you fill in the use case and customer story for each of those. 14:01 – Sam asks, how to leverage a new initiative from a Cold Calling Tactics? 16:30 – Steve shares, they had clients who over time started comparing people in terms of their experiences, but they outperformed their people. 20:19 – People are motivated by fixing a problem, accomplishing a goal, or avoiding risks, states Steve. 23:41 – Steve questions, what about the fact that the seller has more information than ever before? What about the fact that the salesperson could know far more about their prospective customers and prospects than they ever could have before? 25:40 – Sam asks Steve about his thoughts around the title ‘X’. 27:00 – Steve discusses where you get to ask your qualification questions, your pain questions, or your goal questions. 29:30 – Steve points out about second vendor options and their two flavors. 31:30 - We do coaching and behavior change, tracking manager coaching, calibrating with multiple scorecards, some specific concrete things, reveals Steve. 34:10 – There are going to be situations that depending on what you sell and who you sell to, don't want to do the second vendor option, they use a certain competitor. 35:35 – Sometimes with clients, you would hear the same object every time. It was like you literally could predict which objection was going to be before you pick up the phone. 37:25 – Sam says, let's take 30 minutes to figure out if there's a path forward. 42:20 - Some solutions have to be seen to be understood. 43:50 – Steve mentions, in the last 3 to 4 years buyer behavior has changed. 45:55 – Never say pricing even arranger pricing until you have these 35 fields filled out in Salesforce that's not how the modern buyer will work, highlights Steve. 47:30 – Sam asks Steve to give some context behind Crawl Walk Run. 49:01 – Crawl Walk Run makes people feel okay to admit they suck at something. Three Key Points Steve had a sales training company and the clients were telling him that they want the sales training content, but how do you reinforce it? What are you going to do to help reinforce the sales training content? That was the origin of ExecVision, so they started using this in their company and realized that they can reinforce this mastery training. So, it was the marketplace that was asking for this new niche and now they have a new initiative to bring technology to reinforce sales training to a point of mastery. Every time Steve has a scheduled call with some

Sales, like any discipline, is something you learn and it is a lifelong process. In this episode, Steve Richard, co-founder of Vorsight and ExecVision, reveals his thoughts on the natural-born salesperson, the power of testing, and how sales leaders, as well as individual performers, can improve their overall efficacy. It always comes back to lifelong learning. He discusses training, coaching, the importance of learning from people around you, and more with Lance Tyson. Give this episode a listen, and you'll come away with timeless lessons applicable to all aspects of your sales career. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.lancetyson.com/podcast

Ryan O'Hara and Jon Mazza go through their favorite quotes and tips from B2B Tonight (LeadIQ's webinar programs). Video if you wanna watch instead: https://academy.leadiq.com/leadiq-academy/episode-24-top-sales-tips-of-2021 Getting a Start in Sales - Dale Dupree, Leader of The Sales Rebellion (02:49) Setting Sales Goals & Purpose - Gabrielle Blackwell, SDR Manager, Gong (05:42) Reaching Out Based on Company Size - Shikha Bindra, Senior Manager, Marketing Development, DocuSign & Sarah Brazier, Account Executive, Gong (11:30) The Science of Prospecting in 2022 - David Priemer, Founder & Chief Sales Scientist, Cerebral Selling (17:57) Getting Better Odds on a Cold Call - Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer, Blissful Prospecting (20:34) Opening Up on a Mobile Line - Steve Richard, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist, ExecVision (25:08) Prospecting with Voicemail - Shikha Bindra, Senior Manager, Marketing Development, DocuSign & Sarah Brazier, Account Executive, Gong (27:34) Cold Calling a Past Customer - Lauren Bailey, Founder & President, Factor 8 (30:54) Saying "Hello, How Are You?" - Nick Liemandt, Sales Development Manager, HackerOne (33:23) Images in Your Email - Justin Michael, Founder, Salesborgs.ai (36:56) Good, Relevant, Fun Subject Lines - Jack Wilson, Senior Director Enterprise Sales, Seismic (42:07) Prospecting from Content Engagement - Tom Boston, Social Sales Evangelist, SalesLoft (45:11) Finding Your Purpose - Nikki Ivey, Marketing Comms Manager, Emtrain (48:23) Anybody Can Create a Community - Jared Robin, Co-founder, RevGenius (52:24) The Discovery Process - Rich Stone, VP of Sales, Tech Target (56:03) Talk About What Similar Companies Do - Josh Normand, SVP Sales, Vimeo & Scott Leese, CEO and Founder, Scott Leese Consulting (59:08) Worked With vs. Learned From - Doug Landis, Growth Partner, Emergence Capital (01:01:17) Most Important Part of the Buyers Journey - Roderick Jefferson, VP Field Enablement, Netskope (01:05:25) Is a Stalled Deal Really a Deal? - Josh Normand, SVP Sales, Vimeo & Scott Leese, CEO and Founder, Scott Leese Consulting (01:08:43) Sales Process Causing Sales Issues - Andy Paul, Host, Sales Enablement Podcast (01:12:10) Avoiding Churn with the Right Product - Patrick Campbell, CEO, Profitwell (01:14:17)

Steve Richard is the Chief-Evangelist and Co-Founder of ExecVision, a conversation intelligence platform built to drive change in human behavior. We talk about the sales management code, practical prospecting strategies, and the effectiveness of cold calling in today's sales environment.    Time Stamps [00:40] Steve's entrepreneurial journey [03:43] Steve's experience with management blueprints  [06:58] The ROA sales framework  [08:42] Sales prospecting definition, techniques, and why it's important [10:54] Cracking the sales management code [12:43] Steve's “Outbound In” marketing strategy [13:30] Is cold calling really dead? [16:12] Data on the effectiveness of cold calling in diverse types of industries [18:23] Practical and effective alternatives to cold calling [21:49] The three by three sales research technique  [23:58] Defining the unscheduled expected call  [27:05] Pattern recognition and human intelligence in sales [28:16] How to change behaviour and create a better sales culture within an organization [32:02] Parting thoughts    Links and Resources Steve's LinkedIn ExecVision.io Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana Steve Preda's Book: Buyable Complete the Buyability Assessment for Your Business https://StevePreda.com

https://youtu.be/rjmDyl7DaDs Steve Richard is the Chief-Evangelist and Co-Founder of ExecVision, a conversation intelligence platform built to drive change in human behavior. We talk about the sales management code, practical prospecting strategies, and the effectiveness of cold calling in today's sales environment.    --- Be a Sales Diagnostician with Steve Richard Our guest is Steve Richard, the co-founder and chief evangelist of ExecVision, a SaaS platform that leverages pattern recognition and human intelligence to allow organizations and develop their sales teams and drive behavior change to increase revenue. Welcome to the show, Steve. Steve, you're hired for a sales job, done. I'm not for hire, but thanks for the offer. I'll consider it. So listen, I'm not for hire because I'm an entrepreneur like you are. And I'm always very curious about these journeys and what took you to be a co-founder and chief evangelist of a SaaS company. You had another business, at least one other business before. So tell us a little bit about your journey. Yeah, real short story here. Like many people who graduate college, I didn't know I want to go into sales. Sales found me. I didn't find sales. All of my classmates were getting jobs in investment banking in New York. I was undergraduate Georgetown Business School, so not an MBA undergrad. And I had 60,000 in school loans, our family business in septic tanks, literally Richard's Septic Systems, you can look it up in Connecticut. So I didn't wanna go work for Uncle Jim in the septic business. So I got a job in sales, went five for five in sales interviews when I went O for 22 for investment banking. This to me was God's way of saying go over here and I, and I initially was failing and then I came to love it. I really, I did. I worked for corporate executive board. That's where I met my business partner and I was fortunate to work with all these incredible salespeople that I was able to learn from when I was failing, do more of what they were doing, less of what I was doing, test and measure, test and measure. We'll come back to that theme later on. From there, my business partner looked at me and said, you know, you know, we're okay at selling, but what we're really good at is getting the meetings. So we founded this outsourced appointment setting business called Voresight and Voresight we recently sold. So we sold it in May, 2021, 16 years later. And along the way of building our, our company built a sales training company because the clients were saying, what are you guys doing differently over there? Like you guys are doing better than our team. She teaches your secrets. But what happened is when I was doing all the sales training, I was working with hundreds of clients in the field, you know, flying all over. I'd visit them later, six months later, and sometimes they implemented what they learned and they'd really mastered it and they had really significant breakthrough performance, double, triple, pipeline, like versus before on a per rep basis. And then sometimes I'd go visit them maybe two thirds of the time and they hadn't changed a darn thing. They went back to all their old bad habits and they didn't implement any of what they learned. All their training books were collecting dust on the shelf. So if I look at the difference, it was all about consistency and accountability and management, and they also used call recordings. So the people who got the changes, they were listening to call recordings and using that as a way to shift the performance curve, close those performance gaps that exist, and actually get people to change behavior. So they mastered the new way of doing it and they stopped the old habit. So that was the aha light bulb moment. We became a, my appointment setting business became a customer of this technology called at the time, Team Visibility. They were messing it all up. We bought the company. That's how we got into tech. We fixed it all up. And now,

The 1 Year Birthday Of The 20% Podcast Episode!! This has been such a fun and rewarding year, and I want to thank everyone so much for your incredible support on this journey. I have met so many fantastic people, and have build so many incredible relationships. This podcast has allowed me to speak to: Ex-Navy Seals TedX Speakers Best Selling Authors Shark Tank Contestants Olympic Gold Medalists Sales Legends CEOs , the list goes on. I have learned so much on this journey, and I hope you all have too! Today's guest is Steve Richard is the Founder at ExecVision, which is a conversation intelligence platform. It is Steve's Mission to help sales professionals become wildly successful. If you follow Steve on LinkedIn you will see him sharing tips of the day everyday, but they are all aimed at actionable things you can do that very day, so thanks Steve! In this episode, we discussed: Wearing Multiple Hats The Importance of Influence Lessons learned in Acting Class Consistency, Accountability, and much more Enjoy this episode with Steve Richard!

Steve Richard is the Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder of ExecVision. A conversation intelligence platform that is built on a simple, almost inarguable premise. It aims to improve performance by changing human behaviours with insights-based sales coaching and applies it to uncovering actionable insights from customer-facing conversations, allowing organizations to make better decisions, coach and develop their team at scale, and ultimately generate more revenue through performance improvement. Steve just recently sold an award-winning sales training firm focused on prospecting, qualification, and discovery called Vorsight in which he co-founded. You can follow and connect with Steve on LinkedIn and check out his huge library of “tip of the day”.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saleskickoffspeaker/Join the Sales Hustle Community! Text “Hustle” to 424-401-9300!If you're listening to the Sales Hustle podcast, please subscribe, share, and we're listening for your feedback. Also, if you are a sales professional looking to take your sales career to the next level, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a time with Collin and co-founder Chris.Please make sure to rate and review the show on Apple.

On Today’s episode we have Steve Richard, the Chief Evangelist and Co-founder of Execvision, to discuss the importance of call recordings and why this ought to be incorporated into customer support. Plenty of people thought the phone, or calling in to companies for customer support would die out, but if anything, especially with the pandemic over the last year, customer phone calls have increased and this continues to be a necessary tool for companies to have in order to work with their customers. What Steve does at Execvision 0:45Why call recordings matter 1:58Predicting email would die out 6:54How people are using the data to change 12:17Scorecard/best practices on collecting data 16:34“So I think there’s a lot that now companies are able to do that technology has improved, but they can take thousands, millions of calls, do their analysis on it, and actually make business decisions and those business decisions aren’t limited to the enablement of the agent. It’s change in policy, change in product, change in marketing offers. That richness of data is something that’s now available to the business at large.” 11:14https://www.linkedin.com/in/saleskickoffspeaker/

Communication is a powerful and essential tool for any business conversation. It is an essential element to winning sales and nurturing relationships. But do you know what those conversations are? Are your sales representatives hitting the right touchpoints? With the conversation intelligence platform from ExecVision, you can unlock valuable conversation insights to drive better decision-making and improve performance. As Pathmonk works to analyze buyer-persona behavior and increase conversions ExecVision works to offer insightful and useable data to convert those leads into sales. Chatting to Steve Richard, the co-founder, we discovered his marketing growth channels and insights into the marketing world. As they have received excellent generation from their LinkedIn strategies they are working to discover those anonymous customer personas who occupy the dark funnel on their website. Although they use tools to reveal web visitors there is still data that is missing. They hope to identify the correct customer personas and adjust the all-important Call to Actions accordingly. Offering targeted advertising and frictionless content on LinkedIn they aim to discover the customer personas on their web even further.

Steve Richard on the show today for episode 8! Thrilled to have him. Steve's mission in life and life's work is to help sales professionals become wildly successful. I believe that the quality of sales conversations matters, yet the profession of sales largely misses the mark on teaching sales reps how to have great conversations. After 10 years as a sales trainer I learned that the only way to achieve my mission was through the use of technology to help more sales professionals worldwide. JOIN THE CALL CAMP MOVEMENT: https://www.execvision.io/call-camp/ GRAB A CALL WITH ME: www.meetme.so/steverichard Can you imagine a sports coach who doesn't use game tape? Seems absurd. Yet it happens every day in sales organizations around the world. Many tools exist to capture sales practice, and practice is great. Which would you rather have: practice tape or game tape? More on ExecVision below... Outside of entrepreneurship and business, I volunteer for Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind and am an avid scuba diver, skier, runner, football watcher, dad to 4 little kids, and husband to the best wife in the world.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club: A Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m so excited to have Carole Mahoney join us. Carole, I’d love for you to just take a second and introduce yourself to our audience. Carole Mahoney: Yes, I am the founder of Unbound Growth. It’s funny because we were just talking before we started the call that — I’m in the country, so if you stalk me on Instagram, you probably already know that I’m a country girl, a dog mom, a wife, I’m a mother to two sons and a little bit of a nerd. I started Unbound Growth when I saw that salespeople were selling in a way that didn’t allow buyers to really want to engage with them. It was just a misalignment. And barely half of salespeople were making quota year after year, despite huge investments in time and in money and in tech and in training. I found that even if they did sometimes make quota, it was not always enough because there was customer churn happening in the company. So, I started doing some research and studying the science behind how people make decisions and how we change our behaviors. As a result of that, I transitioned my lead generation agency into a sales consulting, training, and coaching firm. And I took all of that science and data and I started testing it in the field with sales teams. And we’ve seen salespeople who were on plan about to get fired, go from that to being top performers in the company, selling the largest deals in company history, hitting over 200% of quota in some cases — in less than a year. By working with some frontline managers, we’ve seen teams go from barely scraping together 80% of quota at the end of every month or every quarter, to then hitting 130% of quota or more consistently, and growing their teams and the size of their teams. We've also consulted business owners and founders, and those in the C-suite to help them to hire the right people for the right role to begin with, because even today with the market being what it is, as far as hiring people goes, we still have to make sure we’re hiring the right person for the right role. We’ve also helped them cut down their hiring costs in the time to hire and increase the success of those sales hires by up to 90%. So, I really kind of see myself as a change agent. I kind of go when there needs to be a behavioral change happening in the sales organization and I really dig into not just what they see happening, but why it’s happening and really get to the root cause of it rather than throwing more training and tactics at people. Although that’s part of it — changing the approach and the tactics — we’re really digging into what’s going on behind the scenes. What are the hidden weaknesses that we might not even realize is the thing that’s actually tripping their teams up from executing the way they want to. OF: In your book “Mindset Matters”, you said that improving sales comes down to behavior change. Why is behavior change so critical to success in sales? CM: When you think of success in sales as being successful in any kind of a job function where you have to perform under high stakes pressure, managing our behaviors in those situations is critical. Whether you’re performing in sports or in the arts, whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer, even as parents and partners to our spouses and loved ones, being able to manage your behaviors, your emotions, and how you show up is critical to success. And sales is absolutely no different. In fact, I’d say even more important, I think. Because one of the things that I love about sales and I’ve talked to a lot of salespeople and a lot of sales leaders, and I hear this consistently — is that one of the things that they love is the ability to tie their results directly to their activities and their behaviors. That if they want more, if they want to be more, their efforts directly contribute to that. And you know, from how much we reach out to people, to how we follow up and follow through and what we said we were going to do, how we communicate with people to help them to understand their problem and for us to understand their world and be able to offer them insights that they might think differently about a problem or a solution. And hear things like, ‘well, you know, I never thought of it that way before.' This is also though our biggest challenge, right? In being able to manage our behaviors, to get our results. It’s also our biggest challenge because how we show up a lot of times depends on how we think and what we think. And that can be sometimes those hidden weaknesses that get in there in our way. Our beliefs, our mindsets about ourselves, our value, our environment, and the world around us. Those things become our mindsets and how we see ourselves in the world, which is then becoming our behaviors, and how we act and show up becomes our results. Behavioral scientists called this the theory of reasoned action and our intents in that is the theory of planned behavior. Our mindsets and beliefs directly impact our behaviors in all aspects of life: sales, weight loss, performance, in every way. OF: Behavior change can often be a difficult process, and you’ve talked about the need for sellers to really have incentives to put in the effort necessary for growth. What are some ways that sales reps can be incentivized to change their behaviors? CM: In a lot of the research and studying that I did is digging into this and identifying, why are we so resistant to change? It’s usually in relation to fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of an uncertainty of what the future is going to look like, which we are all suffering from to some extent right now. And this is why I think one of the reasons why it’s so important to have a cognitive approach to sales coaching embedded within your coaching framework. Because cognitively, when we’re dealing with those fears and those types of things, it’s hard for us to imagine the future. And because it’s hard for us to imagine, the unknown is scary to us. And so, we avoid it. And when we avoid it, that causes all kinds of other problems. In order to get over the fear of the uncertainty, we need to have identified what our personally meaningful goals are for making the change. What do we want our future to look like? And why is that so important to us? So, goal setting for — I see this happen in school, many sales organizations, when I asked them about, do you or your team have personally meaningful goals that are driving them to make these changes that you’re talking about implementing in your training and coaching programs? And they say, ‘well, they have quotas and they have activity plans and they have playbooks and they have a smart goal setting model to use.' And the problem with that is when you try to use quotas and commissions as a standalone to try and motivate and incentivize people, the problem with that is the data shows from over 1.9 million sales professionals that the top percentage of salespeople are not necessarily motivated by just money. They're actually motivated by things that are more interesting intrinsic, like being the best at something, being reputable with others, being a resource to others, mastering their craft, being the best they can be. And frontline sellers and managers who dig into the reason why those things are important and the why behind their actions are more likely to do whatever it takes to reach the goal, no matter how scary it might seem. And that might include letting go of some long-held beliefs and mindsets. There’s a story that comes to mind of a client that I worked with. His name is Michael Douglas, not the actor, the salesperson. And when I started working with Michael, he had a goal of increasing his income and his revenue by a certain percentage. And we dug a little bit deeper into it and one of the things that we found is that he really wanted to feel that he was able and confident from now and into the future that he was going to be able to provide for his family. And that he wanted to make that investment in being the best that he could be for that reason. Now that’s something that’s a lot more motivating than you need to hit X number of quota this month. For Michael, this was the incentive for him to change the beliefs, long-held mindsets, and now as a result of that, he’s closing largest deals in company history. He went from selling three, six figure deals a year to selling three times that in less than nine months. So, this is how we get people to change behaviors, is by guiding and helping them to tap into their why. And not that we spend forever there, that we have to imagine the perfect why that’s going to be the magic pill that’s going to motivate us through everything. It's still going to be hard. It’s still going to require grit. But when you dig and you think, why am I doing this? And you were reminded of the reason — then you’re willing to go through the uncomfortable changes that you need to go through to get there. OF: You have another book that’s dedicated to sales coaching, and more specifically about determining the value of sales coaching for sellers. From your perspective, what is that value and why is sales coaching so important? CM: Revenue. I think that’s every salesperson's, every sales leader's answer to that question is going to be its impact because of revenue. There’s a lot of other reasons why, so let’s tackle the revenue question first. Same data from 1.9 million sales professionals — I also did an analysis on the sales managers and the salespeople who reported directly to those managers, and the things that I found were that when managers who were trained on how to coach and had been coached themselves and consistently did coaching multiple times a week for an hour and more total per week per rep, and it was about 50% of their time — that those managers who did those things saw their salespeople were 49% stronger than those that didn’t. And if you acquaint abilities to revenue, you can look at a 10% increase in abilities can equate to as much as 33% of revenue give or take. You start increasing the abilities by 50%, imagine what that does to revenue. So, there’s that, there’s a retention of your top six salespeople. I think it was a Deloitte study that showed that salespeople who are coached are more likely to stay. And I think it was actually a study that was done by The Bridge Group and ExecVision, that showed the salespeople who were coached not only were likely to stay longer, but they were 45% more likely to recommend others to come and work for your company. So, imagine if more of your top performers who you’ve been coaching then had more others that were like them who could be like also top performers coming to your company, which goes back to the hiring piece. Here’s the other thing of it though, is that coaching doesn’t just increase revenue. It doesn’t just increase the retention of your top salespeople and make it easier for you to hire more salespeople. It also helps you to retain more of your customers. We talked about in the beginning, in the intro, how — I don’t know if I mentioned this part, but actually the increase in revenue is one piece, but we actually saw teams retain customers of over 98% retention rate. And when you’re a SaaS based company, that is an absolutely critical number, especially right now. But the interesting thing — it wasn’t just because of customer service. There was an interview that was done by Mark Roberge, who was the CRO at HubSpot, and he was talking about when they were scaling the sales teams there. And he said that when they started having churn issues, they thought at first that it was going to be related to customer service issues. But what they found was that it was actually tied directly to the rep who initially sold them. So, when they started instituting this type of coaching and training, they found that reps who set the expectations properly with buyers so that churn was less likely to happen later, and then retention went up. I saw the same thing happening when I was working directly with some of HubSpot’s teams and others that not only did retention go up but discounting went down because they were selling more on value and selling consultatively. So, they’re not only getting more revenue, keeping more revenue and the customer longer, but they’re doing so at a higher dollar amount. OF: How does sales coaching help create behavior change? CM: It creates behavior change if you’ve done it the way that it’s not just your sales manager going in and telling them what they should do, it’s not a pipeline review. It’s not a one-way conversation. It’s also not an hour-long conversation that you might have once a week. Ideally, sales coaching helps to create a behavior change because you’re challenging their beliefs. You’re helping them apply the knowledge that they’ve learned in training to actually execute in their day to day on the job execution. There’s a model that’s the adult learning theory model, which shows that the largest percentage of our learning happens in the application and then the day to day, and not theoretical, but real life. So the more that we can have coaching be not just a reinforcement of what they’ve trained, but actually allows salespeople to take what they’ve learned — the knowledge in their head — and apply it to the words and the actions that come out of their mouth. So that’s one way that coaching helps to create that behavioral change because in order to change the behavior, first we have to recognize that the behavior needs to change, so challenging beliefs and approaches, but then we have to practice those new approaches, those things that we’ve learned. And so coaching should really be like practice sessions, like drill sessions. The two-letter word, every salesperson almost hates is “role play.” And not like the theoretical, take it easy on you, this conversation never really actually happens kind of roleplay. But actually, even taking your recorded calls that you — everybody should be recording their calls right now — and listening to them and finding one point in the conversation, one set of questions to practice and drill and practice and drill until it becomes second nature to that salesperson. That builds their confidence in executing in those new abilities and skills that they’re learning. Or fine-tuning the ones that they thought they had perfected as well, because coaching applies to experienced salespeople as well as new and in the practice, in the challenging and in the beliefs, it also happens that coaching can help create behavior change. When we’re having managers who are not giving them all of the answers, not telling them what they need to do, but asking the critical thinking questions to get them to start coming to their own conclusions so that the behavior change isn’t something that’s imposed on the salesperson. It’s something that’s collaborated with them. That’s something that’s really important in the coaching and coaching relationship is that they have to feel like they’re part creating that conversation, otherwise you’re just nagging them. OF: In your opinion, what does good sales coaching look like? What are some of the skills that you really think are necessary for good coaches to have? CM: There’s over a dozen different skill sets and mindsets and even beliefs that need to be incorporated into a good coaching persona, and we measure for all of those with using the same data we mentioned. First, we talked about this before — what’s the impact? It has to be done consistently, not ad hoc, whenever issues arrive or end of the month or pipeline review time, but something that gets scheduled like a religious event on their calendar that if it’s Christmas day for coaching time. So that kind of consistency and structure to it. When I’m working with sales teams as their outsource manager, I sometimes will schedule two or three, a minimum of two or three, 15 to 20 minute calls a week, minimum. And sometimes it’s every day, depending on how much work needs to be done with the salesperson or how motivated they are to want to get to the next level. And each of those calls, like for Monday’s example, we’ll debrief. And Monday’s debrief or Friday afternoon's debrief is really looking at: What happened? Why do you think that that happened? And what’s a different approach that we can do? A lot of times a debrief might be like a call review, where I will have a salesperson send me a call and they’ll say, I really felt like I struggled at this particular part, here’s where I think it’s going on. They’ve listened to it and they’ve thought, all right, this is where I think I need to improve. And then I can debrief with them and ask them questions. Like, all right, how did you get to this point? What’s the background story? I’ll ask them questions like, why do you think that they reacted that way on the call? What question do you wish you had asked in that moment now that you’ve listened to it? And we’ll practice that so that the next time they get into a situation and call like that they can execute on it. But then I’ll also debrief with them to figure out okay, what’s next? What can happen next with this particular call? What’s the strategy? What’s the approach? What’s it going to sound like? Let’s role play that too. So that’s part of the debrief. And as I mentioned, I’m asking a ton of questions. I’m not telling them what I think happened, I’m asking them what they think happened, and I’m asking more and more clarification questions to get them to start actively recalling what happened and come up with a plan for attack, so to speak. Another thing that’s really important for managers who want to coach is you can’t have a need for approval from your salespeople. If you’re more worried about whether or not your sales, person’s going to like you because if you don’t like your manager, then you’re not going to listen to your manager, then you’re not going to be able to have those tough conversations. Those coaching conversations that you sometimes have to have when they fall flat on their face and they will. And you have to be able to do that and if you need their approval and you need them to like you, it’s going to be tough. Obviously, you’ve got to be able to control your emotions. If you’re emotionally invested in this deal closing, it’s going to be really hard for you to sit on your hands and close your mouth and ask the questions to get them to learn. They have to have a sales process. It's kind of like, if you don’t have a sales process that you’re following and using that in your coaching, it’s trying to give directions to someone who doesn’t know how to read a GPS or a map. You don’t know where you’re at and you don’t know where you need to go next. Obviously, if you can’t tell, I have a passion for this. And that passion for coaching and really that patience even for coaching –I have a side story. I have a little bit of a scar here on my lip because I have a rescue dog and this rescue dog has a few emotional issues. He’s been abandoned. And so he has some beliefs that get in his way, and it manifests whenever he has to go into his doghouse. He goes into his doghouse and he has this little front porch and he stands on the front porch and he stands there and he barks and he whines because he believes in his mind that he can’t take the one-inch step off of the porch to be able to get them to run around in his little doggy area. And so one day, I was actually getting ready for an interview, very similar to this one, and I had to get on the phone and he was outside and whining and barking because he was stuck on his dog porch again. And so normally what I would do I do is I would coax him out, I would basically doggy coach him to try to get him to come off of this thing. But that day, I didn’t have time. I was running around, I was going a little bit crazy and I’m like, you know what? I just need you to stop barking. So, I’m going to come over there and I’m going to rescue you. And before I realized what was happening, he got this look on his face. Like he suddenly realized, Oh, mom is coming. She probably has lunch. And he takes off running and he has this 50-foot long cable, and the cable hit my head, hit my face. I thought I lost teeth. There was blood everywhere. And I realized I had done exactly what I teach and coach sales managers to do all the time, which is don’t rescue your salespeople. You’ve got to let them work through it. And that’s what happens when you don’t have the patience and the passion for coaching, is that you’re going to give in, you’re going to try and rescue your salespeople, and there’s going to be a disaster at the end of it. And — you robbed them of the opportunity to learn. You have to understand those things — by rescuing the salespeople, you’re hurting them. You’re going to hurt yourself because you’re going to always be rescuing them and handling things like joint sales calls effectively, getting commitments from your salespeople to make these changes, these are all of the things that are necessary to learn to be an effective coach for your salespeople and not get clipped by a dog runner coming at you at 25 miles an hour. OF: Well, this has been some fantastic advice for our audience, so thank you so much, Carole, for joining us. CM: It's been so much fun. Thank you for letting me tell you about my rescue dog. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club: A Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. Today, I’m so excited to have Carole Mahoney join us. Carole, I’d love for you to just take a second and introduce yourself to our audience. Carole Mahoney: Yes, I am the founder of Unbound Growth. It’s funny because we were just talking before we started the call that — I’m in the country, so if you stalk me on Instagram, you probably already know that I’m a country girl, a dog mom, a wife, I’m a mother to two sons and a little bit of a nerd. I started Unbound Growth when I saw that salespeople were selling in a way that didn’t allow buyers to really want to engage with them. It was just a misalignment. And barely half of salespeople were making quota year after year, despite huge investments in time and in money and in tech and in training. I found that even if they did sometimes make quota, it was not always enough because there was customer churn happening in the company. So, I started doing some research and studying the science behind how people make decisions and how we change our behaviors. As a result of that, I transitioned my lead generation agency into a sales consulting, training, and coaching firm. And I took all of that science and data and I started testing it in the field with sales teams. And we’ve seen salespeople who were on plan about to get fired, go from that to being top performers in the company, selling the largest deals in company history, hitting over 200% of quota in some cases — in less than a year. By working with some frontline managers, we’ve seen teams go from barely scraping together 80% of quota at the end of every month or every quarter, to then hitting 130% of quota or more consistently, and growing their teams and the size of their teams. We’ve also consulted business owners and founders, and those in the C-suite to help them to hire the right people for the right role to begin with, because even today with the market being what it is, as far as hiring people goes, we still have to make sure we’re hiring the right person for the right role. We’ve also helped them cut down their hiring costs in the time to hire and increase the success of those sales hires by up to 90%. So, I really kind of see myself as a change agent. I kind of go when there needs to be a behavioral change happening in the sales organization and I really dig into not just what they see happening, but why it’s happening and really get to the root cause of it rather than throwing more training and tactics at people. Although that’s part of it — changing the approach and the tactics — we’re really digging into what’s going on behind the scenes. What are the hidden weaknesses that we might not even realize is the thing that’s actually tripping their teams up from executing the way they want to. OF: In your book “Mindset Matters”, you said that improving sales comes down to behavior change. Why is behavior change so critical to success in sales? CM: When you think of success in sales as being successful in any kind of a job function where you have to perform under high stakes pressure, managing our behaviors in those situations is critical. Whether you’re performing in sports or in the arts, whether you’re a doctor or a lawyer, even as parents and partners to our spouses and loved ones, being able to manage your behaviors, your emotions, and how you show up is critical to success. And sales is absolutely no different. In fact, I’d say even more important, I think. Because one of the things that I love about sales and I’ve talked to a lot of salespeople and a lot of sales leaders, and I hear this consistently — is that one of the things that they love is the ability to tie their results directly to their activities and their behaviors. That if they want more, if they want to be more, their efforts directly contribute to that. And you know, from how much we reach out to people, to how we follow up and follow through and what we said we were going to do, how we communicate with people to help them to understand their problem and for us to understand their world and be able to offer them insights that they might think differently about a problem or a solution. And hear things like, ‘well, you know, I never thought of it that way before.’ This is also though our biggest challenge, right? In being able to manage our behaviors, to get our results. It’s also our biggest challenge because how we show up a lot of times depends on how we think and what we think. And that can be sometimes those hidden weaknesses that get in there in our way. Our beliefs, our mindsets about ourselves, our value, our environment, and the world around us. Those things become our mindsets and how we see ourselves in the world, which is then becoming our behaviors, and how we act and show up becomes our results. Behavioral scientists called this the theory of reasoned action and our intents in that is the theory of planned behavior. Our mindsets and beliefs directly impact our behaviors in all aspects of life: sales, weight loss, performance, in every way. OF: Behavior change can often be a difficult process, and you’ve talked about the need for sellers to really have incentives to put in the effort necessary for growth. What are some ways that sales reps can be incentivized to change their behaviors? CM: In a lot of the research and studying that I did is digging into this and identifying, why are we so resistant to change? It’s usually in relation to fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of an uncertainty of what the future is going to look like, which we are all suffering from to some extent right now. And this is why I think one of the reasons why it’s so important to have a cognitive approach to sales coaching embedded within your coaching framework. Because cognitively, when we’re dealing with those fears and those types of things, it’s hard for us to imagine the future. And because it’s hard for us to imagine, the unknown is scary to us. And so, we avoid it. And when we avoid it, that causes all kinds of other problems. In order to get over the fear of the uncertainty, we need to have identified what our personally meaningful goals are for making the change. What do we want our future to look like? And why is that so important to us? So, goal setting for — I see this happen in school, many sales organizations, when I asked them about, do you or your team have personally meaningful goals that are driving them to make these changes that you’re talking about implementing in your training and coaching programs? And they say, ‘well, they have quotas and they have activity plans and they have playbooks and they have a smart goal setting model to use.’ And the problem with that is when you try to use quotas and commissions as a standalone to try and motivate and incentivize people, the problem with that is the data shows from over 1.9 million sales professionals that the top percentage of salespeople are not necessarily motivated by just money. They’re actually motivated by things that are more interesting intrinsic, like being the best at something, being reputable with others, being a resource to others, mastering their craft, being the best they can be. And frontline sellers and managers who dig into the reason why those things are important and the why behind their actions are more likely to do whatever it takes to reach the goal, no matter how scary it might seem. And that might include letting go of some long-held beliefs and mindsets. There’s a story that comes to mind of a client that I worked with. His name is Michael Douglas, not the actor, the salesperson. And when I started working with Michael, he had a goal of increasing his income and his revenue by a certain percentage. And we dug a little bit deeper into it and one of the things that we found is that he really wanted to feel that he was able and confident from now and into the future that he was going to be able to provide for his family. And that he wanted to make that investment in being the best that he could be for that reason. Now that’s something that’s a lot more motivating than you need to hit X number of quota this month. For Michael, this was the incentive for him to change the beliefs, long-held mindsets, and now as a result of that, he’s closing largest deals in company history. He went from selling three, six figure deals a year to selling three times that in less than nine months. So, this is how we get people to change behaviors, is by guiding and helping them to tap into their why. And not that we spend forever there, that we have to imagine the perfect why that’s going to be the magic pill that’s going to motivate us through everything. It’s still going to be hard. It’s still going to require grit. But when you dig and you think, why am I doing this? And you were reminded of the reason — then you’re willing to go through the uncomfortable changes that you need to go through to get there. OF: You have another book that’s dedicated to sales coaching, and more specifically about determining the value of sales coaching for sellers. From your perspective, what is that value and why is sales coaching so important? CM: Revenue. I think that’s every salesperson’s, every sales leader’s answer to that question is going to be its impact because of revenue. There’s a lot of other reasons why, so let’s tackle the revenue question first. Same data from 1.9 million sales professionals — I also did an analysis on the sales managers and the salespeople who reported directly to those managers, and the things that I found were that when managers who were trained on how to coach and had been coached themselves and consistently did coaching multiple times a week for an hour and more total per week per rep, and it was about 50% of their time — that those managers who did those things saw their salespeople were 49% stronger than those that didn’t. And if you acquaint abilities to revenue, you can look at a 10% increase in abilities can equate to as much as 33% of revenue give or take. You start increasing the abilities by 50%, imagine what that does to revenue. So, there’s that, there’s a retention of your top six salespeople. I think it was a Deloitte study that showed that salespeople who are coached are more likely to stay. And I think it was actually a study that was done by The Bridge Group and ExecVision, that showed the salespeople who were coached not only were likely to stay longer, but they were 45% more likely to recommend others to come and work for your company. So, imagine if more of your top performers who you’ve been coaching then had more others that were like them who could be like also top performers coming to your company, which goes back to the hiring piece. Here’s the other thing of it though, is that coaching doesn’t just increase revenue. It doesn’t just increase the retention of your top salespeople and make it easier for you to hire more salespeople. It also helps you to retain more of your customers. We talked about in the beginning, in the intro, how — I don’t know if I mentioned this part, but actually the increase in revenue is one piece, but we actually saw teams retain customers of over 98% retention rate. And when you’re a SaaS based company, that is an absolutely critical number, especially right now. But the interesting thing — it wasn’t just because of customer service. There was an interview that was done by Mark Roberge, who was the CRO at HubSpot, and he was talking about when they were scaling the sales teams there. And he said that when they started having churn issues, they thought at first that it was going to be related to customer service issues. But what they found was that it was actually tied directly to the rep who initially sold them. So, when they started instituting this type of coaching and training, they found that reps who set the expectations properly with buyers so that churn was less likely to happen later, and then retention went up. I saw the same thing happening when I was working directly with some of HubSpot’s teams and others that not only did retention go up but discounting went down because they were selling more on value and selling consultatively. So, they’re not only getting more revenue, keeping more revenue and the customer longer, but they’re doing so at a higher dollar amount. OF: How does sales coaching help create behavior change? CM: It creates behavior change if you’ve done it the way that it’s not just your sales manager going in and telling them what they should do, it’s not a pipeline review. It’s not a one-way conversation. It’s also not an hour-long conversation that you might have once a week. Ideally, sales coaching helps to create a behavior change because you’re challenging their beliefs. You’re helping them apply the knowledge that they’ve learned in training to actually execute in their day to day on the job execution. There’s a model that’s the adult learning theory model, which shows that the largest percentage of our learning happens in the application and then the day to day, and not theoretical, but real life. So the more that we can have coaching be not just a reinforcement of what they’ve trained, but actually allows salespeople to take what they’ve learned — the knowledge in their head — and apply it to the words and the actions that come out of their mouth. So that’s one way that coaching helps to create that behavioral change because in order to change the behavior, first we have to recognize that the behavior needs to change, so challenging beliefs and approaches, but then we have to practice those new approaches, those things that we’ve learned. And so coaching should really be like practice sessions, like drill sessions. The two-letter word, every salesperson almost hates is “role play.” And not like the theoretical, take it easy on you, this conversation never really actually happens kind of roleplay. But actually, even taking your recorded calls that you — everybody should be recording their calls right now — and listening to them and finding one point in the conversation, one set of questions to practice and drill and practice and drill until it becomes second nature to that salesperson. That builds their confidence in executing in those new abilities and skills that they’re learning. Or fine-tuning the ones that they thought they had perfected as well, because coaching applies to experienced salespeople as well as new and in the practice, in the challenging and in the beliefs, it also happens that coaching can help create behavior change. When we’re having managers who are not giving them all of the answers, not telling them what they need to do, but asking the critical thinking questions to get them to start coming to their own conclusions so that the behavior change isn’t something that’s imposed on the salesperson. It’s something that’s collaborated with them. That’s something that’s really important in the coaching and coaching relationship is that they have to feel like they’re part creating that conversation, otherwise you’re just nagging them. OF: In your opinion, what does good sales coaching look like? What are some of the skills that you really think are necessary for good coaches to have? CM: There’s over a dozen different skill sets and mindsets and even beliefs that need to be incorporated into a good coaching persona, and we measure for all of those with using the same data we mentioned. First, we talked about this before — what’s the impact? It has to be done consistently, not ad hoc, whenever issues arrive or end of the month or pipeline review time, but something that gets scheduled like a religious event on their calendar that if it’s Christmas day for coaching time. So that kind of consistency and structure to it. When I’m working with sales teams as their outsource manager, I sometimes will schedule two or three, a minimum of two or three, 15 to 20 minute calls a week, minimum. And sometimes it’s every day, depending on how much work needs to be done with the salesperson or how motivated they are to want to get to the next level. And each of those calls, like for Monday’s example, we’ll debrief. And Monday’s debrief or Friday afternoon’s debrief is really looking at: What happened? Why do you think that that happened? And what’s a different approach that we can do? A lot of times a debrief might be like a call review, where I will have a salesperson send me a call and they’ll say, I really felt like I struggled at this particular part, here’s where I think it’s going on. They’ve listened to it and they’ve thought, all right, this is where I think I need to improve. And then I can debrief with them and ask them questions. Like, all right, how did you get to this point? What’s the background story? I’ll ask them questions like, why do you think that they reacted that way on the call? What question do you wish you had asked in that moment now that you’ve listened to it? And we’ll practice that so that the next time they get into a situation and call like that they can execute on it. But then I’ll also debrief with them to figure out okay, what’s next? What can happen next with this particular call? What’s the strategy? What’s the approach? What’s it going to sound like? Let’s role play that too. So that’s part of the debrief. And as I mentioned, I’m asking a ton of questions. I’m not telling them what I think happened, I’m asking them what they think happened, and I’m asking more and more clarification questions to get them to start actively recalling what happened and come up with a plan for attack, so to speak. Another thing that’s really important for managers who want to coach is you can’t have a need for approval from your salespeople. If you’re more worried about whether or not your sales, person’s going to like you because if you don’t like your manager, then you’re not going to listen to your manager, then you’re not going to be able to have those tough conversations. Those coaching conversations that you sometimes have to have when they fall flat on their face and they will. And you have to be able to do that and if you need their approval and you need them to like you, it’s going to be tough. Obviously, you’ve got to be able to control your emotions. If you’re emotionally invested in this deal closing, it’s going to be really hard for you to sit on your hands and close your mouth and ask the questions to get them to learn. They have to have a sales process. It’s kind of like, if you don’t have a sales process that you’re following and using that in your coaching, it’s trying to give directions to someone who doesn’t know how to read a GPS or a map. You don’t know where you’re at and you don’t know where you need to go next. Obviously, if you can’t tell, I have a passion for this. And that passion for coaching and really that patience even for coaching –I have a side story. I have a little bit of a scar here on my lip because I have a rescue dog and this rescue dog has a few emotional issues. He’s been abandoned. And so he has some beliefs that get in his way, and it manifests whenever he has to go into his doghouse. He goes into his doghouse and he has this little front porch and he stands on the front porch and he stands there and he barks and he whines because he believes in his mind that he can’t take the one-inch step off of the porch to be able to get them to run around in his little doggy area. And so one day, I was actually getting ready for an interview, very similar to this one, and I had to get on the phone and he was outside and whining and barking because he was stuck on his dog porch again. And so normally what I would do I do is I would coax him out, I would basically doggy coach him to try to get him to come off of this thing. But that day, I didn’t have time. I was running around, I was going a little bit crazy and I’m like, you know what? I just need you to stop barking. So, I’m going to come over there and I’m going to rescue you. And before I realized what was happening, he got this look on his face. Like he suddenly realized, Oh, mom is coming. She probably has lunch. And he takes off running and he has this 50-foot long cable, and the cable hit my head, hit my face. I thought I lost teeth. There was blood everywhere. And I realized I had done exactly what I teach and coach sales managers to do all the time, which is don’t rescue your salespeople. You’ve got to let them work through it. And that’s what happens when you don’t have the patience and the passion for coaching, is that you’re going to give in, you’re going to try and rescue your salespeople, and there’s going to be a disaster at the end of it. And — you robbed them of the opportunity to learn. You have to understand those things — by rescuing the salespeople, you’re hurting them. You’re going to hurt yourself because you’re going to always be rescuing them and handling things like joint sales calls effectively, getting commitments from your salespeople to make these changes, these are all of the things that are necessary to learn to be an effective coach for your salespeople and not get clipped by a dog runner coming at you at 25 miles an hour. OF: Well, this has been some fantastic advice for our audience, so thank you so much, Carole, for joining us. CM: It’s been so much fun. Thank you for letting me tell you about my rescue dog. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

In this episode of Customer Service Secrets, we talk with Steve Richards, co-founder of ExecVision. Throughout his career, Steve has been committed to helping companies understand the data behind customer service calls and developing strategies for a continuous improvement around the actual interaction that is happening with the customer. Listen to the full podcast for his valuable insights on the steps to an effective customer service call and how to make sure your agents have the resources they need to improve their performance. Steve’s Background 1:04What is Broken in Customer Experience 2:15How are People Thinking out of the Box? 8:08How to Be Successful with Calls 14:30“Why do you measure a sprinter? Why do you time a skier? And the answer is to improve performance… It’s funny, I’ll get caught in this, where you start measuring to measure and you’re not actually looking at how it can affect the ultimate performance.” 3:45

Steve Richard is a legend in sales leadership, training, and coaching. But it didn't always start out that way. Long before ExecVision, Vorsight and Corporate Executive Board there was the big donut of 0 for 22, yes, TWENTY-TWO consecutive failed interviews. He then figured it out and went 5 for 5. Fast forward a few years and you now get the wisdom that is Steve Richard. In this episode learn about: 1. Cowboys, Librarians, and Snipers on your sales team 2. Why you should NOT call coach your bottom 20%. 3. Defining Good reps from bad

Host Tristan of the Tech Qualified Podcast talks with Steve Richard, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder of ExecVision. Steve Richard discusses the vision behind ExecVision, the solutions that it provides, the concept of conversation intelligence, and becoming a professional authority in his area of expertise.  Episode Highlights: Steve Richard expresses his mission statement.    What is the smartest decision Steve has ever made as a professional?  What is the ideal customer for ExecVision and the types of solutions it provides?  How did ExecVision originate?  How was the ExecVision title of Chief Evangelist decided for Steve Richard and what does that mean for a tech company?  What is the backstory of ‘conversation intelligence?’ How has Steve Richard become an authority in his space?   How has Steve’s high profile helped to increase revenue with ExecVision? How does he fit in his own content generation with everything else he is doing? Steve Richard shares what he means by ‘always put the buyer in the center’ from the perspective of a B2B company.     3 Key Points:   Steve Richard identifies the four different demand types as being: even angelical, same old same old, better mousetrap, and government regulation.   Conversation intelligence stems from the question of, ‘Imagine the amount of information, insight, and intelligence that exists in your conversations with your customers and prospects?’ Most of the time, when you pick up some information, your brain will purge it or forget it when you are sleeping.     Tweetable Quotes:   “My mission in life has been to help as many sales teams as possible become widely successful. I really do believe in that.” – Steve Richard (ExecVision’s ideal customer) “Anybody that has a lot of people that live and die by the phone, where they need to increase performance. They tend to be inside sales organizations.” – Steve Richard “ExecVison leverages artificial intelligence and surfaces coachable moments so people don’t have to dig through the big pile of call recordings.” – Steve Richard     Resources Mentioned: Steve Richard: Linkedin ExecVision.io MotionAgency.io/ultimate

We continue exploring the customer's perspective on what makes them choose certain technology vendors and continue to renew. Dan Moser is a CFO for ExecVision and a 20 year veteran in Accounting and Finance. He shares his perspective on the solutions he has chosen to make his department more effective as well as how he supports the technology decisions across other departments in the company. His insights will help you understand how to better serve and partner with your customers to make them highly successful.

In this episode we interview Steve Richard-Co Founder of ExecVision (www.ExecVision.io), a conversation intelligence platform that ingests, transcribes, and analyzes business conversations, including sales calls. The software surfaces valuable insights and data that can be applied to coaching sales reps on how to close more deals by improving their conversations. ExecVision is used by SMB and enterprise-level clients across a number of industries for inside sales, customer success, quality assurance, and support teams. Resources discussed in this interview www.ExecVision.io www.owler.com Owler is the world's largest community-based competitive insights platform that provides real-time news, alerts & company insights to help you win. Good books: Start with NO, by Jim Camp https://www.amazon.com/Start-Negotiating-Tools-that-Pros/dp/0609608002 Go Giver, by Bob Burg https://www.amazon.com/Go-Giver-Expanded-Little-Powerful-Business/dp/1591848288/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=go+giver&qid=1565207967&s=books&sr=1-1 Resources discussed in this interview www.ExecVision.io www.owler.com Owler is the world's largest community-based competitive insights platform that provides real-time news, alerts & company insights to help you win. Good books: Start with NO, by Jim Camp https://www.amazon.com/Start-Negotiating-Tools-that-Pros/dp/0609608002 Go Giver, by Bob Burg https://www.amazon.com/Go-Giver-Expanded-Little-Powerful-Business/dp/1591848288/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=go+giver&qid=1565207967&s=books&sr=1-1

In this episode we interview Steve Richard-Co Founder of ExecVision (www.ExecVision.io), a conversation intelligence platform that ingests, transcribes, and analyzes business conversations, including sales calls. The software surfaces valuable insights and data that can be applied to coaching sales reps on how to close more deals by improving their conversations. ExecVision is used by SMB and enterprise-level clients across a number of industries for inside sales, customer success, quality assurance, and support teams. Resources discussed in this interview www.ExecVision.io www.owler.com Owler is the world's largest community-based competitive insights platform that provides real-time news, alerts & company insights to help you win. Good books: Start with NO, by Jim Camp https://www.amazon.com/Start-Negotiating-Tools-that-Pros/dp/0609608002 Go Giver, by Bob Burg https://www.amazon.com/Go-Giver-Expanded-Little-Powerful-Business/dp/1591848288/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=go+giver&qid=1565207967&s=books&sr=1-1 Resources discussed in this interview www.ExecVision.io www.owler.com Owler is the world's largest community-based competitive insights platform that provides real-time news, alerts & company insights to help you win. Good books: Start with NO, by Jim Camp https://www.amazon.com/Start-Negotiating-Tools-that-Pros/dp/0609608002 Go Giver, by Bob Burg https://www.amazon.com/Go-Giver-Expanded-Little-Powerful-Business/dp/1591848288/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=go+giver&qid=1565207967&s=books&sr=1-1

Bill plays a strategic role not only in role-based development, but how people, systems, and departments can positively impact the success of the Sales teams, and ultimately their companies. He believes salespeople come to work every day to be successful in their role, and there is an opportunity through architecture to enable their roles in a meaningful way.  WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: How to use Storytelling in Sales How to build Storytelling Sales library within your company How AI and Video Will Change Sales  SHOW NOTES [01:03] Welcome Bill [01:09] Introducing co-host, Sahir [01:26] Business success stories that inspire Bill [01:58] Creating a Coaching culture within the organization [03:52] Call recording as game films [05:08] Gary Milwit story  [06:50] Working as a group [07:50] Creating a sustainable system (library of stories) [08:51] Sport and sales analogy [09:00] How Bill got into sales [13:46] Learning to be brief and specific [15:25] Speak and write in bullets [16:33] Tailoring messages [17:16] The importance of mentors [17:49] Expanding your network [18:15] Self-development [19:00] Taking a cue from your network [19:30] Education and learning [20:13] Learning and development [20:20] Digital Intelligence Systems  [22:18] Institutional knowledge [23:33] How storytelling affects sales [24:34] Behavior change [25:05] Customer [25:56] Neuro-coupling phenomena during  [26:44] Encouraging salespeople [27:32] Talent [27:37] Environment [28:24] Compensation and incentives [29:23] Pipeline review [30:48] Sales trends to watch out for [31:19] The role of Videos and AI [33:19] new Prospecting models [33:33] The art of storytelling for Bill  [34:14] Contact info Show transcript   Ed Bilat :                        00:31                Hello, this is Ed Bilat Joining me today is Bill Ball, the director of learning and development. of digital intelligence systems. Bill Is also a founding member of sales enablement society and he's very passionate about sales talent management, sales enablement, and sales effectiveness. Bill plays a strategic role load on them in the role of the development, but how people, systems and departments can positively impact the success of producers and ultimately are companies deal with. Welcome to the show. Bill Ball:                        01:05                Hey, thanks for having me. Ed Bilat :                      01:06                Absolutely great to have you on the show. I will be joined today by Sahir Ponderay is my co-pilot and the cohost as well here in Ottawa today. Bill, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. We would love to hear your story, but before we do this, I will ask you all a traditional question. What type of business success story inspires you and why? Bill Ball:                        01:30                So I thought about this and there are quite a few entrepreneurial stories that excite me, but I thought one that maybe I was a part of where I wasn't the ultimate success, but I was really proud to be a part of it is something that I thought I would share. Ed Bilat :                       01:43                Sure. Bill Ball:                        01:44                Great. So most businesses from a sales standpoint strive most modern businesses, and I'm throwing this out as not just a shared truth among sales organizations, but I think it's probably a universal truth at this point that many sales organizations are striving to have a coaching culture of some kind. So late two thousand I was working for an organization where we had one. We were really proud of it. You know, the job market at that time I think helped us a little bit where we had to people with greater tenure who are willing to give their time back. You know, they were brought in and they knew if they were sitting next to great other people doing their job, they'd be able to cross-pollinate and learn things from each other. So we created a circle of veteran peers who were coaching their peers and everybody was getting coaching from the leadership as well. But it's just, you know, as well as I do, people tend to make changes when they see their peers making those changes. They'll take guidance from the leaders, but they really make changes when they see peers making changes. Ed Bilat : 02:43                Absolutely. This is something useful. Let's see. Okay, I need to this for myself as well. Bill Ball:                         02:48   Exactly. So that got a little bit more challenging when the job market improved because you know, we were fine, but at the same time, we had people sort of circulating in out, because we're hiring a lot of recent college grads and so we had people circulating in and out, no fault of theirs. They were learning, you know, what they wanted to do or coaching culture was still solid. But you know, eventually, even with a coaching culture, you can't rely on entirely new people to carry a torch of that pure coaching because they don't have the experience and at some point, it becomes a little bit of the blind leading the blind. You don't know who was a real leader. Yeah, it's the last thing that you want to have happened is yes, great coaching culture, but you have what's called rogue coaching where it's like, well, hey, I don't know how everybody else is doing this, but this is how I do it. Bill Ball:                       03:38                Start multiplying that across the workforce. You know, it wasn't total pandemonium or anything like that, but it was just not like it was. At the same time, we started looking at technology to help with this kind of thing. We were an early adopter of thinking about, I mean this is an inside sales organization, so we're thinking about call recording as game film, which was very progressive at that time. We're talking mid to late two thousand so a little bit of a different story now, but very progressive. Then where you know, you bring up call recording. I think in some organizations now anyway, and they're still thinking, okay, this is the big brother, you know, why do you want to listen to my stuff? Versus thinking like, okay, most athletes watch game film to get better. But being a younger company and being noodle this and being sort of, you know, pioneers on are trailblazers. Bill Ball:                        04:27                We didn't roll it out very well. So some people you know appreciate it. Some people did and the technology wasn't where it is today. It was a little bit of a struggle. And so this forced us to learn a lot about change management, but we eventually did get to a place of where we were reviewing at least as leaders one on ones with people and listening to their calls and talking to them about their game film. And that was great, but we still weren't back to that pure coaching level. You know, like if appears going to review the game, fill them with another peer and they're both, you know, three to six months in like there's only so much advantage that can be gained from that. So we had a lot of friends. The previous business owners that I worked for a long time, we're pretty well connected within the inside sales world. Bill Ball:                        05:07                And there was one gentleman, his name's Gary Milwit, he works for a financial firm in Maryland. He's the sort of prototypical ex-football coach. Really tough guy that you know you either love or hate, but his people loved him. I believe he was an AI espy award winner for a sales leader one year too. Yeah, sounds like a really good combination. I mean I would see someone in those boats feel, especially coaching athletes would have a really good understanding of how to communicate with someone and actually help coach and various aspects of sales, like how to close a deal or how to pitch properly for certain. And so he like us had started embracing call recording may be a little after we did, but either way, he was starting to use it with his team as a group. And so we went and visited him and wash that an action. Bill Ball:                        06:01                And it's not as simple as you think there are rules, you know, everybody has to know. It's a safe place. Like there are certain kinds of comments that aren't allowed there. Certain kinds of comments that are allowed. There was, you know, in some way, like I think he had sort of stumbled into something that was tremendous. We brought it back to our organization and that was the whole reason we sat in, you know, we're like, hey, we want to see what's happening here. We want to see if this is something that's viable to bring back. And ended up being something that was really viable to bring back. So we started testing it with the CEO leading and testing out those rules. And it started out as a one-way conversation. But what it ultimately branched out to was I led them and our managers led them and our peers led them and we started breaking down those moments of the conversation where something really valuable happened. Bill Ball:                        06:51                And when you can do that as a group, it's so much more powerful than when you know you're sitting next to your neighbor as a sales peer and you're saying what happened? And you know, everybody remembers that last objection. But maybe three minutes before that, the call, you know, went off track somewhere. So being able to do that as a group and start establishing business specific best practices around that was a huge, huge win for us. The ultimate thing that happened though was it became a pure coaching thing again because we identified the key elements of conversations and we identified how to get better at them as a group and the top of the mountain ended up being every month we actually hosted a call competition where people would submit calls to their managers, the managers would submit them to myself and the business owners. We would judge and in some cases you know down the road, left appears judge and play them all back, you know, in a group meeting once a month. So using that and then actually taking these call recording elements and putting them in a library where people could say, okay, I want to hear what good objection handling sounds like or I want to hear what a good introduction sounds like. By doing that, we were able to bring back a pure coaching culture because we're able to, you know, get new people onboard fast, understanding what good looks like. Ed Bilat :                       08:09                I love that example. I think that's a great story. And I see you combining two elements here. So one is a starting your own story library, right? So like that's what we're trying to teach our clans that instead of having those separate stories, why don't you create a company-wide library that at any given moment any member of your team can go and borrow a book, have the particular volume on the situation, their work you with. Right? Right. And another one is starting your own objection collection. The library, right? So this is what exactly you have done with his help or that coach. I think that's a terrific story. So thank you so much for sharing. I think it's the actually good segue to my next question. We just talked about the combination of sports and sales and then I do look at your Ed Bilat :                       08:56                own background. I see you been majoring in English and creative writing before. How did you even get into sales world yourself? Bill Ball:                        09:04                Good grief. So I grew up with a father as a traveling sales rep who worked for himself. Nowadays, it's not so exciting when the phone rings in your house, you know, whatever you say. I got it, I got it, I got it right. You know, back and forth caller id, that was a really big thing. But literally, 80% of the time the phone rang at my house. Everybody would run to get it. And it was from my dad defeating. So you know, between that and you know, me being a free spirit, you know, I think I thought more about how much I wanted to play in a band my last year and college. Then you know what I was going to do the next steps and hopefully, my parents aren't listing. Bill Ball:                        09:42                But when I finished school he was like, Hey, you want to come work for me? You know, I tried to say in the nicest way like, are you crazy? Why would they do this? Yeah. But you know what? You can't deny personas and DNA to some point. So I was always that friend who had to recommend music to other friends or restaurants to other friends. Like I was that connector friend. You know, I had a vision of what I wanted and what I liked. And I would say probably my wife would say I'm pretty outspoken about those things and sometimes to my own detriment. But eventually, I just needed to find something that I was passionate in. So I played in bands and I ended up working in a recording studio, which I thought was, you know, what I wanted to do, you know, meanwhile, I mean this was the probably late nineties so meanwhile there's a lot happening with technology. Bill Ball:                        10:30                At that point. There was the megahertz race and this was before gigahertz with apple and IBM. There are all kinds of interesting things. My friends and I were getting excited about that. One day I went into the studio and I was working there as initially an intern and then a second engineer because I wanted to learn how to document music. That was a big passion of mine and the band was late and it was myself and the head engineer, you know, he was like, Bill, I'm x, Y, Z years old. We're talking about technology and lots of things, different things happening and kind of the future, you know, eve absolutely. Flash was exciting, iPods were exciting. You know, like this was probably even right before those. So lots of the talk about, and he said, you know what, I love this job, but I'm in a dark room for a really long time and I don't make very much money. Speaker 1:                    11:18                It's a labor of love. But honestly, if I had picked a different trade, you know, I think I'd have more options now in this guy was one of my heroes. So it really made me think, you know, and I grew up, you know, even as misogynistic as it is watching James Bond and be like, I want to have awesome sports cars and I want to travel and meet amazing people. And so that really made me think like, okay, you know what? Maybe this is not my way forward. So I made a hard pivot. I did a few temp jobs. I eventually started working for a retail store that sold Apple products, and this was before Apple even had stores. So this is kind of like a small business consultant place and I was rough at first, but by the end of my first, let's say the month and a half, I was leading the rest of the company in sales and it was because I had found something that I was passionate about. Ed Bilat :                       12:10                Well, what was the need to challenge earlier on that? Obviously, you haven't been trained in sales, right? So you just have to see that this is your passion, this is where you can sort of how that alignment through the 11 goals. But what was, was he a major challenge Bill Ball:                        12:24                earlier on? Well, earlier on I didn't have a lot of challenges. It was easy for me to say, okay, this is what I have in inventory. These are the people coming in. If I ask them for what they want and I don't have it, I'm going to lose. Right? I mean, it's that straight forward. I need to just talk to them and break. Sort of the typical mold of the salesperson. I mean we had competitions with us, you know, how quickly can you get this middle-aged woman, you know, on a first name basis that comes into the retail store. You know, just those kinds of things because it wasn't a big mental challenge once you have the product knowledge. But after that, you know, thinking that okay, I'm doing great here, I'm off for my next sales job. And that ended up being a traveling rep job where I had to do a lot of self-motivation. Bill Ball:                        13:09                I wasn't prepared at all. I had no idea. I was used to people coming into me. So that was hurdle number one. But I think it's a big thing that really clicked for me because I went from retail sales to outside sales and then back into inside sales where I was like, okay, you know what? I haven't done this. I really like technology. I need to take a step back to take a larger step forward. And what I really learned first was because I wanted to advance quickly in that business was how to make a business case. And I didn't know because of my degree that you mentioned I was an English major. I'm clearly talky. I'm very verbal. So learning how to be brief and specific, Ed Bilat :                       13:47                which is not a bad thing at all, right? Bill Ball:                        13:50                Sure. But you have to learn how to annotate yourself, right? So learning how to be brief and specific and point to deliverables and measurables. The CEO and I did not get along well at first on that level, but once I learned how to communicate and speak that language, you know, I ended up being an email coach for a lot of other sales reps. Ed Bilat :                       14:10                This is where the real writing helps, right? Yeah. And unless soul, good copywriters, like extremely, extremely valuable now. And then like every little sentence, every little inclination that told humor, everything that comes into place, like the real art to creating something, what people will pay attention out of all the noise will even today. Right, Bill Ball:                        14:31                right. What's breaking the mold of all of the other vendor noise, right? Absolutely. We did say you were alone. Yes. I was a lot more verbose than I needed to be. You know, I thought I needed to tell the story of my work. Say I wanted a promotion or I wanted to see a change happen. Getting changes to happen in business, you have to completely translate what you're trying to achieve to the audience of the person you're reaching out to. So if you're talking to a CFO, right? Being an l and d person right now, if I go in with a bunch of Jingoistic Ellen Detox, you know I'm going to be talking to a wall. You have to translate what you're saying to the audience that you have. So I didn't understand how to speak to a CEO. I didn't understand, hey, these are the things that I've accomplished. This is why I want this promotion. This is what I expect to accomplish. And be able to point to actual results and speak and write in bullets and easily digestible things versus a diatribe I really had to learn that sat here. Ed Bilat :                       15:32                Yeah, absolutely. Look the white spaces and formatting as so many times, you know, when we're talking to the sales leaders and they say, okay, one of my sales are up, just send me an email and I'm reading it and I understand that it's a good idea. I just don't have 50 minutes to actually read it and the really, really comprehend it. And then you get another email where everything is bullet points, you know, concise. And there is a what the coke engagement call to action. Even the internal communication and say, well Kelly, I want to talk to him. I'm going to call him right now and we'll figure this out. Right? And as simple as it sounds, that's the entire decision making. And it happens internally. And of course, it happens when we see some customers. So I think it's a tremendous skill view house. So that's great. So thank you for sharing this. Bill Ball:                        16:18                First of all, it's making the message about the person, right? So it's the first thing that name mean to see that why is this relevant for me? You'd have to put yourself in their shoes. Anytime you're creating something for somebody else, even in a first sales email. So individually tailoring your message for your specific audience. Yes. And making it about them, not making it about you. So speaking in a language they can understand, but also if it's an initial message, if you're talking about a prospect, it's gotta be about them. The first thing, think about this. Think about what you do and what you think about when you're scanning your LinkedIn messages or you're listening to your voice mails or you're looking at your email box, you're looking at your subject line, you're looking at the length of that email. You're looking at who it's from, all of those things. You're looking for a reason to sort or flag, do I need to pay attention to this or can I dump it because you already have too much of it, right. So we have to be relevant as communicators internally or externally, really quickly. Ed Bilat :                       17:13                Absolutely. I love it. Idea. Cool. Do you follow in sales, where did you learn their craft? Bill Ball:                        17:19                Who was helping you? Oh Man. So there's been lots of people along the way. Naturally. I spent a lot of time at this business called Vorsight, which is now associated with a business called ExecVision. And I have to think all of the people that I work with, they're including the cofounders, Steve, Richard and David Stillman, David Stillman as the person who I really, you know, struggled with to learn how to speak to an established business case. And once I did it, yeah, we're still good friends. But I think, you know, this is a chance where there are people that I follow. What I would advocate is constantly expanding your network and going to events and getting out of your day to day because that's where you know, you're actually taking a pause to work on your own self-development. So people are helpful. You know, there are lots of really smart people out there, but just being able to take a little bit of time, you know, whether you're reading something or whether you're actually going to an event because at that one point you're finally just focused on your own self-development. Bill Ball:                        18:17                It's very difficult in your job to do that. You know, you may be thinking that you're getting developed and your job, and you certainly are for people like me, from sales managers, from your peers, but if you don't do that extra layer, it really doesn't help you establish perspective that you can bring back inward with the things that you learned. That would be my thought on who do I follow. You know, I meet people all the time. The other thing that I've learned along those lines, and we may talk about this a little later, is if you think that you have to have all the answers, you're in for a struggle. So knowing that I'm part of a group outside of my work in my profession called the sales enablement society, and there are lots of advantages we're trying to define that, take the profession forward, a number of major objectives. Bill Ball:                        19:00                But the thing that's been best for me is saying, you know what? I want to try this. You know who in my network, somebody in my network has tried this before and failed before me many times. So just realizing like you don't have to have all the answers and reaching out to somebody in that network that you've built to try to get that answer just inherently expands your perspective here. Two points. The first one is basically education is what other people trying to do to you and the alerting is what you're doing for yourself. So go into those events, finding something really valuable for yourself, those golden nuggets you can use right then the second one, not to underestimate the power over your network because we already have that connection. You already have your own think tank where you can go in. The old you've got to do is just to ask cause anyone has done that before. Bill Ball:                        19:54                These are correct and that was way more succinctly than I put it and it was okay. Great. We are always looking for golden nuggets, flow listeners in a certain shirt just right. Then we just in the middle of the interview, so let's move to the second area, which was really interesting on the profile, which is the learning and development and then, I've read one of the statements and obviously you work for a technology company, digital intelligence systems, will you guys do global staffing and 90 consulting? How did you get to do that with technology? For somebody in my profession, even though my title is one of the more generic titles, it's director of learning and development. I'm a salesperson by trade. Certainly, that's evident in my background and some of the things that we've discussed, but I'm also enablement focused, meaning that I'm looking to help our people in our organization, particularly our salespeople and our delivery people. Speaker 1:                    20:46                So I'm technically field enabled that sales enablement. I've got to care about the recruiters too, so they're part of my key audience. It's helping them with what they need to know and what they need to show and removing those hurdles out of the way, whether it's things that they need to get better at or you know, how other people in the organization are affecting them. So for me, I chose technology, not necessarily because of the industry, but partly because the work, because of the type of job, the type of job that I wanted to do and the type of challenge that I wanted to have was here. But for me it's also not just industry, it's people. When I came through the interview process, it staffing is a consolidated industry. You know, it's a tricky play right now for some of the organizations. A lot of people are being acquired or you're acquiring organizations. Bill Ball:                        21:34                We acquired another organization earlier this year, so I heard two things from the CEO that were very heartening to me. One that because of differentiation, he saw learning and development as a key strategy going forward to motivate and develop our people here. And he saw that as a differentiating factor to second. You know, he shared that same bit with me that I just shared in it. Staffing people are being acquired or they're acquiring others. Diocese is in the business of acquiring others. They want to grow. So those the two things that got me on board, the institutional knowledge, it was hard though. One thing I'd like to point out, I was at a previous organization for nine years and in a series of different roles, so being a part of the institutional knowledge to coming to an organization where I had no institutional knowledge, it was definitely intimidating and an interesting choice. Bill Ball:                        22:25                So I had to feel right with the direction the business was headed and for the type of work that I was going to do. Absolutely, because you're also a leader in your organization, right? There's a manager as a director, as a mentor, as a trainer, console him, coach. So you do know those things. So I owe loading in the operational technology, but I spend the majority of my time on development and talent. So I thought those were really interesting. Look, many people could formulate it like that. Well, that was a little bit of knowing my audience on Linkedin, right? So I teach salespeople how to be more effective, but certainly, salespeople are going to be looking at my profile and asking questions. I kind of wanted to set them up and say what I really care about is spotting gaps and then going to the technology versus like if you hit me up with, you know, a one trick pony email over Linkedin, I'm probably not going to respond to you. Bill Ball:                        23:16                It's all about the business strategy and working with the business to identify the gaps and then mapping the technology back versus saying, hey, there's some sexy new technology I need to run after it. I want to get this. And speaking of getting the attention, as a leader, as a coach, how do you think storytelling could help to motivate your sales team and actually drive the success in terms of reaching Oh, evil, Sebastien quarters or objectives? I think it's in three ways and if I get lost while I'm explaining this, hopefully, you'll hold me accountable. Okay. First off, it ties back to the story I told at the beginning of our conversation where peers make changes because appears I'm going to make changes because of what I learned from another enablement person. You know, salespeople are going to make changes from other salespeople that they admire or respect in the organization. Bill Ball:                        24:06                So when I do an in-person training for example, or if even online being able to have people have wind stories associated with the learning objectives, you know, even if it's just about a skill like objection handling or it may be something as small as setting agendas for meetings. Just seeing peers key in on that and see that behavior change is huge, but you have to tee that up with peer sharing that to peers. You know, I'm a little modest about talking about behavior change because I don't know if we necessarily need to change somebody's behavior. It almost sounds like we're brainwashing them a little bit, just changes in their game. They're going to learn that by hearing other peer stories. This is where I was, you know, this is what I discovered about myself. Hey, I'm just like you. So facilitating a way for peers to share stories is how you get them to try new things. Bill Ball:                        24:58                So that's the first way. You asked me about a few different ways. I would say the second way is with customers, right? And this is something that, you know, we have to challenge marketing with what story moves one customer from learning about you to being a little bit more curious, to want to have a serious conversation. Those are stories that drive each of those steps in their buying process. And it's the same for the salesperson. What stories can you tell that is going to drive a customer to everybody wants to see themselves in somebody else's shoes? It goes back to talking about messaging, how we were talking about messaging before you know, you want to quickly say you're looking in your email inbox. How is this relevant? To me, the most powerful way that we can make something relevant to somebody is through a story. Bill Ball:                        25:46                If they can see themselves in that story, they're captivated. It's in a conversation, it's in a training environment, it's in content. It's imperative, wonderful things. Captains, one would fill the story and the look of love that you will, the science one is assumption gold in euro and another one is called [inaudible]. So when you were accomplishing means that they actually made a research letter, good stories fold the Bulls brain, set up your rate on the same frequency and the person that you're telling the story too, they see themselves in that story. Right? So like it's happening to them. And so that's one and another one they actually feel you are empathy created, right? Because they understand the feelings and the neuro your emotions and you can't create as little was anything else marketing wise. So that's why it's so powerful. I'm so glad he already utilize it within the organization. Bill Ball:                        26:39                That's terrific. So here I think you had the questions. Yes, Bill, I was wondering what is the best way to motivate salespeople? There are obviously many bays like there are a bonus says exotic Krebs as like a VIP club. But what do you think is the best way to the morning where it tells people? I don't think there is a way. I think it's a combination of elements that end up driving performance and driving people. There's you being the best judge of talent if you're bringing the wrong kinds of people. And it may just be roles. You know, someone's not inherently good or bad, and I know that's a Duh, but you know, if you're looking for an account manager and you've got a hunter, I've actually seen that backward. I know a lot of people say, you know, I want hunters and not account managers. Bill Ball:                        27:22                Sometimes that's a backward thing. If you have somebody who just wants to break accounts and they don't want to do the work afterward to go broad, deep, you don't have the right person for the role. So talent would be one sec. The next would be the environment. You know, are people motivated by what's happening around them? Do you have an office where like nobody shows up because everybody's working from home? You've got to figure that out. How are people staying connected and staying motivated environment's huge? I'm a big advocate for loud and for people being able to hear each other and for that spring, everybody's development. I'm, you know, open, public transparent with information, data stories, that kind of thing because why not communicate it? Why not share it? So environments a big key, you know, I think we can debate the whole open office thing, but that's not where I'm going necessarily. Bill Ball:                        28:12                It's just a, you know if people are doing the same role, like they need to be able to see each other's work and be a part of each other's work to expand and grow their work and drive things. Obviously, the incentives, if the compensation and the incentives aren't in line, then you're already fighting a losing battle that makes it tough to hire. That makes it tough to retain people. Even if you do a great pitch in the interview process and you don't have incentives, then you're not motivating people. You're going to lose, you're going to have just a treadmill of new hires over and over again until you know Glassdoor eventually calls you out. Finally, there are a few other pieces, but understanding what good looks like and what success looks like in a job from activities to objectives to results and being able to show that employee what good looks like from these are the things you need to do day in and day out and this is the equation of things that you need to do to be successful. Bill Ball:                        29:02                What does success look like from a benchmark? Yes, results, right? A lot of people do it, but what's the map of activities that lead back to that result? There should be an equation there. And then finally, how are they using those activities and objectives and results to self-performance manage. You talk to managers and I think the quintessential thing is the idea of their one on ones being a pipeline review and those things are great, but you know what I would say is a, certainly use some of those pipeline reviews as coaching sessions instead on a particular skill that you've inspected. But B, if it's a pipeline review, have the employee do it, have them own that data and have them drive that conversation. You know, that lightens the lift on you and it also lets you know that they're hearing you if you guys have the same vision of objectives and results. Bill Ball:                        29:51                So I think it's a combination of all those things. And then when you start throwing out, I think you mentioned you know, Presidents Club, that kind of stuff. Yes, like that's key to a culture, but that's also a tricky one. It's a moving target. You're not going to motivate the entire group of people with one kind of incentive. So you need to keep it going. You know, for more senior people, maybe it's time off for monetary incentives or trips or escapes just so they can unplug. For junior people, it's doing activities together, but it's also like getting out early. You know, like that's the one that I've seen time and time again be the thing that like presses the button. It may not be money, it may just be like getting their time back. So all of those things, great. Sahir :                           30:31                Why not think about trends, technologies that are rocking the sales end street today. You have the rise of artificial intelligence, automation, the rise of generation Y as they're becoming a rising powerhouse as both buyers and sellers. There is a trend towards account based selling. I want to ask you what sales trends do you think we should watch out and 2019 as the new year is coming by. What do you think we should watch out for in this industry? Speaker 1:                    30:56                I think all of the things that you mentioned, ABM and AI are are important as a simple one that's possibly obvious and possibly not as just video. There are lots of applications that aren't expensive, where are free for salespeople to shake up the typical email, voicemail saying and use video and some of them give you teleprompters. I mean they get pretty involved, but we can't deny that videos now and becoming a big part of selling. You don't have to be a social seller to use video. It's huge. And Ai certainly too, right? Scaling, you know that coaching and inspection are helpful, but what I would say is with AI you always run the risk of creating too much rigor. We need to look at AI and how it flatters the architecture that we've built. There's still needs to be some kind of jazz band in there. Speaker 1:                    31:42                Without it, there isn't any creativity. I've seen both sides with new hires and experienced people and if you really locked down too hard what good looks like and a machine can certainly do that. You start limiting what people can become. So finding a strike, a balance between the organic and the architecture I think is huge. And then how we use AI in it. But you know the people that say AI is going to replace sales coaches or you can let the AI do the work. There has to be the organic human touch in there too. Ed Bilat :                       32:13                This, this is so true Bill. So look, don't they just tried to use AI for scheduling sales appointments and the natural salespeople just start using AI mean though to send those appointed one sentence. Right, right. Let's see what actually happened. There's would be angry customers to tell me, okay, if my business is so important to you, but why did you throw them into the robot? Could continue to ask me some questions at the end and trying to see where I'm available like just call me and you know, let's talk because that's the reason that you wanted to talk to me. Right? So to have that conversation, why do I have to deal with the machine, which doesn't understand my responses? So like what are you trying to sell me at this point? Right? Bill Ball:                        32:58                That's misplaced, right? So maybe right now, where are we are a hair appointment and not a sales appointment. Somebody wants a sales appointment with me. I'm thinking like I'm the scale, right? One Hand has to fill up with value and it has to outweigh the amount of time in the other hand that it's going to take on my calendar. And I think it's really difficult to convey that through Ai. I know prospecting is possibly the hardest and most painful part of selling, but that's absolutely the reason that we shouldn't leave it up to AI. Ed Bilat :                       33:27                Absolutely. Thank you. You've been terrific and so really appreciate it. I'm going to ask you one last question. What does the arc of storytelling mean to you? Bill Ball:                        33:36                I think it's all of the things that we hit on, right. But when ultimately audience can see themselves in what you're conveying, that's where the empathy, that's where the change, that's where the way forward happens. It's such a key to our communication and frankly, communication and lack of it is where we go wrong. And our roles were way too committed to outputs versus communication. And if we can use more communication and stories to tell that that's what captivates people, that's what gets people engaged and that's what creates business and moves us forward. Ed Bilat :                       34:12                Excellent. Thank you so much. So Bill, what's the best way to connect with you or follow you on the social media for our listeners? Bill Ball:                        34:18                I think, you know, hopefully, you been entertained if he looked at my Instagram. But what I would say is professionally I'm just good old. Linkedin is fine. I'm happy to connect and talk to anybody as long as it's not a sales development representative who asked for a meeting on the first guy Ed Bilat :                       34:32                with using Ai. Yes. Okay, perfect. So we'll make sure we'll include your information. So conduct, I'll Lucentis. So I'm thrilled to have you on the show, so thank you so much for the great ideas. I think it was a lot of golden nuggets here. So again, thank you for coming to the show. So happy to have you here, Bill Ball:                        34:51                and this was absolutely a delight and my pleasure and really appreciate the content, the direction of the conversation, and the questions. Hopefully, somebody at least amused by it. Sahir :                           35:01                Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. That does it for this episode of storytelling for sale. You'll find show notes and links on our web page, storytelling sales.com you can subscribe to the podcast on Itunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.  

Steve Richard, founder at Execvision, joins me to talk about sales training and best practices.   Some topics we hit on are Making training stick beyond onboarding and events The forgetting curve Becoming unconsciously competent   Separating the art and science of sales How to get better as an individual or business with no budget for training

In our work with sales reps, sales teams, and sales managers, we encounter many people who believe that sales coaching doesn't work, but many of them fail to realize that there are 5 common mistakes sales managers make when coaching. Steve Richard, founder of ExecVision, shares how to avoid those mistakes, and he suggests you start by recognizing that there's a difference between coaching and training. COACHING Training is teaching someone to do something new that the person doesn't know how to do. Coaching is helping someone do something that they do know to the point of mastery. If we expect a rep to embrace a certain behavior, we have to train him. If we don't, that failure is on us. [04:37] Then, after we've trained him, we have to overcome the “forgetting curve” which is a function of our brain's tendency to purge information. Coaching is the act of training iteratively, focusing on the person, and repeating that behavior until it becomes second nature, like tying a shoe. Consider whether your organization is struggling with any of these mistakes. 1. FAILING TO DEFINE WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE. We must give our teams a definition of what a call should look like. Include the key things you want them to say, the behaviors you want them to exhibit, and give them a target. Give your team members total clarity on what you want them to do. [06:11] Develop consistency among your team members so you can hit bigger numbers. Also, build a team of people who will identify these steps. Include managers, senior executives, and representatives from operations, enablement, and sales. A varied team can ensure that these decisions aren't being made by people who haven't made calls in a while. Check out the book Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance for clarification about metrics. Learn the difference between activity metrics that you can control — things like making phone calls and sending LinkedIn connection requests — and objectives like having conversations with people which you have less control over. Aside from simply giving your team members goals, give them a roadmap to achieve them. [08:32] How many activities should they achieve in a week to achieve their goals? Many organizations have salespeople who are “unconsciously competent,” which means they don't know why they are successful. Though it's not bad, it's impossible to scale. You can't pair a new employee with someone who is “unconsciously competent” and expect her to learn the right way to do things. 2. NEGLECTING TO TRAIN BECAUSE OF TIME. Most every sales leader intends to coach his team. [10:26] Managers typically know they have to be more consistent as a team, and they know that the way to do that is through coaching. But they also universally say that time is the thing that prohibits them from doing it. They have the greatest of intentions, but something always gets in the way. 3. MISUNDERSTANDING HOW TO TRAIN CORRECTLY. It's shocking to think of the amount of money that is spent on sales rep training. Sales managers, however, typically receive very little training. Many of them have never been taught to coach the right way. Think, for example, of a sales manager who observes a call and then immediately launches into constructive feedback. Basically, he tells you all the things you did wrong. When the sales rep hears it, his system sends a hit of the stress hormone cortisol, which triggers the “fight or flight” response. [11:46] The sales rep either defends himself by digging in his heels or he puts up a wall and stops listening. In either case, it's not good.   People don't change their behavior when cortisol is present. They change when dopamine is present. Sales managers must coach in a way that motivates sellers to learn and change. #SalesTraining CLICK TO TWEET   Instead, try the model that Jim Kennan recommends: observe, describe, prescribe. Leave the judgment on the shelf. Listen to the call. Recount what the rep did during the call. Then ask a question that prompts the seller to figure out what he could have done differently to improve the call. People value more what they can conclude for themselves than what they're told.  4. LACKING OBSERVABLE MOMENTS. If sales reps can't listen to recordings of their calls, they'll have no way to improve their performance. [18:45] They will only have vague ideas of what they think they did during the call. During the 80s, the Japanese beat us in the auto industry because they were continually improving their operational efficiency. Adopt the continuous improvement mindset that served the Japanese so well. 5. MAKING TRAINING AD HOC. Your organization's training must be habitual. It must be part of the rhythm of the company. Make your training such a part of the process that it becomes the gospel. It can be as simple as listening to 5 minutes of a call with a rep and asking for reflections. It will do good things for your company. Instead of feeling like sales managers have to do all the work, involve the sales reps in their own development. [21:15] Run call-of-the-month competitions where reps submit their best call every month with written commentary. Give people an environment in which it's fun to learn and improve. “5 COMMON MISTAKES SALES MANAGERS MAKE WHEN COACHING” EPISODE RESOURCES Connect with Steve via email or call him on his cell phone at (202) 302-3193. Check out ExecVision's Call Camp that breaks down real sales calls like game tape to evaluate what works and what doesn't. It's a free webinar that shares practical advice with sales reps, managers, and leaders to improve their effectiveness. This episode is brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It's super easy, it's helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. They are offering a 14-day free trial, and half off your subscription when you use the code Donald at checkout. This episode is brought to you in part by prospect.io, a powerful sales automation platform that allows you to build highly personalized, cold email campaigns. To learn more, go to prospect.io/tse. It will help you with your outbound to expand your outreach. It allows you to set it and forget it. Your prospecting will never ever be the same. Previously known as TSE Hustler's League, our TSE Certified Sales Program offers modules that you can engage on your own schedule as well as opportunities to engage with other sellers in other industries. I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility. If you haven't already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss a single episode, and share with your friends! Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.

Read the complete transcript on The Sales Game Changers Podcast website. TED'S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: "There's always going to be an excuse. Some people live by the excuse, other people don't. If you truly want to affect change and if you truly want to make something of your career, in your life in general, don't accept excuses." Ted Martin is the VP of Sales at ExecVision, a leading company in the conversation intelligence space for inside sales teams. We also did a special episode with Steve Richard, the CRO over at ExecVision. Prior to coming to ExecVision, Ted was the VP of Sales at Wealth Engine where he grew a team from 0 to 50 in close to three months. Find Ted on LinkedIn!

Our guest on this episode is Steve Richard. Steve is the CRO at ExecVision which is a conversion intelligence software that empowers organization to coach people efficiently at scale, improving performance and driving revenue.    Steve and I start off the conversion discussing coaching sales reps and the difference between coaching and training. Steve introduces us to “the forgetting curve”. This principle is the foundation of the learning method known as “spaced repetition,” where material is learned then reviewed after increasingly large time gaps. Thus the reason why ongoing and consistent coaching is so important to sales development.

Read the transcript to this and all podcasts on the Sales Game Changers Podcast website. Steve Richard is the co-founder and chief revenue officer at ExecVision, a leading conversation intelligence platform. He's also the co-founder of Vorsight, a leading outsourced appointment setting company. Steve says his mission and life's work is to help sales professionals become wildly successful. He believes that the quality of sales conversations matters, yet the profession of sales largely misses the mark on teaching sales reps how to have great conversations. After 10 years as a sales trainer Steve learned that the only way to achieve his mission was through the use of technology to help more sales professionals worldwide.  Outside of entrepreneurship and business, Steve volunteers for Columbia Lighthouse for the Blind and is an avid scuba diver, skier, runner, football watcher, dad to 4 little kids, and husband to the best wife in the world. Find Steve on LinkedIN!

Steve Richard is a legend in the Sales Development space. From starting his own Sales Development appointment setting company to teaching countless SDRs how to do their jobs better, Steve has done it all and seen it all with regards to prospecting, team building and entrepreneurship. With his current venture, Execvision, he’s on the front lines of leveraging technology to help Sales professionals get better at their jobs and make a bigger impact to the bottom line. Listen to this legend break it all down on today’s show, and then go sign up for one of his free Call Camps! https://www.execvision.io/call-camp/

In this episode we talk to Steve Richard, Founder and CRO at ExecVision.

Steve Richard whose mission in life is to help as many sales professionals as possible to become wildly successful. He has been featured in numerous publications including The Harvard Business Review, The Washington Business Journal, and The Washington Post. Outside of work, Steve enjoys scuba diving, skiing, running, and people-watching. He’s from Arlington, VA, with his wife Ellen and their 4 kids all under the age of 7. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – RSVP Selling What CEO do you follow? –  Tony Bates Favorite online tool? — Owler Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “You got to start with the technology company in the beginning because you’re going to create much more impact on people’s lives”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:58 – Nathan introduces Steve to the show 02:45 – Steve shares the idea of ExecVision 03:17 – ExecVision is a SaaS business 03:20 – There are 50 organizations who are currently using ExecVision 03:34 – ExecVision allows you to access, analyze, and share call records 04:20 – Average pay per user per year and how it ranges per sales person 04:54 – Average MRR 05:24 – Sales professionals love ExecVision 06:04 – ExecVision has coaching requests for their customers 06:37 – Every month there’s a high volume of requests for coaching 07:13 – ExecVision has voice recognition 07:52 – Richard shares how their customers find valuable keywords in ExecVision 09:15 – Richard was running Vorsight before ExecVision 09:50 – People pay per meeting 10:02 – Richard used the profitability of Vorsight to fund ExecVision 10:15 – Richard has raised capital for ExecVision 10:58 – Richard shares what drives them 11:38 – They have raised around $1M 11:50 – Richard acquired ExecVision in April, 2015 12:07 – None of the original people from ExecVision are still working with the company, but they have equity 12:26 – Retention is 90% annually  13:38 – CAC 14:42 – Total head count is 15 14:55 – ExecVision is based in Arlington, Virginia 15:27 – First year revenue 16:08 – Connect with Richard through Call Camp 18:30 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Use your stress to CREATE an idea to relieve that stress. Sales professionals who analyze and assess feedback well WILL improve in their field. Make something that adds value to people’s lives.   Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Jamf – Jamf helped Nathan keep his Macbook Air 11” secure even when he left it in the airplane’s back seat pocket Call Camp – Steve’s Call Camp Movement website Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Steve Richard | CRO, ExecVision | How To Consistently Run the Best Sales Calls by Enterprise Sales Podcast

Every new year there are a lot of people who speak out about what technologies they think should be part of the an optimized sales stack. Most of the time those answers are clouded with companies pushing their own products or consultants pushing partner products where they know they will get part of the pie. Needless the say, the conversation get's confusing and it's mostly the end user who suffers. We thought we'd break through the fluff and go right to the source so in 2016 we asked 600 sales leaders across a variety of industries and company sizes, what technologies are needed most to win. In This Episode You'll Learn: The top ten technologies leaders recommend as part of an optimized tech stack Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Business Growth Index Study LinkedIn Article

Inside Sales is a model that is applicable in any market and any country. In this episode, Diego Wagner, CEO at Meettime discusses recent research regarding Inside Sales in Brazil and how his company is helping push this new model of sales in the emerging country of Brazil. In This Episode You'll Learn Research & Findings Regarding the first Inside Sales Benchmark in Brazil: The role of sales development and how companies are beginning to experiment with this model Conversion rates in the sales pipeline and how they are different in Brazil than in the US How compensation models are being approach and how that differs with the US What technologies are being utilized and what is most popular Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Diego Wagner's LinkedIn A Day In The Life Of A Millennial Sales Rep: Why A.I. Is Causing A Sales

Game film is a integral part of any football team's activities. Oddly, in sales many don't use game film. With the ability to record calls in an easy-to-use interface companies can create a structure to have managers and reps coaching each other. In this episode, CRO of ExecVision Steve Richard, talks about how companies are creating coaching programs that actually work. In This Episode You'll Learn: How to capture call recordings in compliance with State and Federal laws The one InsideSales.com PowerDialer feature you’re likely not using Step-by-step call coaching playbook: why, who, when, how How to break call recordings like Jon Gruden breaks down game film on ESPN Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: 26: Owning the Sales Conversation w/Josh Harcus @TeamHuify 12: How I Broke the Rules and Doubled Oracles' Inside Sales Revenues w/Dan Freund @InsideSales.com Coaching Webinar with Gabe Larsen and Steve Richards ExecVision.io

Reviewing your pipeline, making sure you have your fundamentals in place, taking a look at what's working and making sure your reps and your team are performing optimally...all are vital to your sales success. Today's guest, Steve Richard, is a perfect fit for our recent conversations. Steve Richard is the founder of Vorsight and Chief Revenue Officer of ExecVision. “Chop the dead wood out of your pipeline.”  Sales managers should be identifying what reps could be doing in the field to improve - more isn't always better. The conversations sales reps have with customers is an asset. Get them into your CRM system.  Get Steve's advice on how to coach your sales reps and make sure they are taking ownership of their own work - listen to one of your own sales calls per week. Cull the time spent on coaching. Even the best need coaching - continual improvement is the key. Ask yourself: What do my best reps do differently? This is a powerful episode filled with actionable tips for making the most out of your reps' sales calls. Don't miss it!

Most companies record their sales calls, but few of them are doing anything with those recordings. Your sales calls hold powerful information that will be able to help future sales reps. It’s not like brand new problems are constantly arising, you’re typically dealing with the same problems different reps. In this episode, Steve Richard, Founder and CRO of ExecVision.io, shares the 5-step process on how to actually use your recorded sales calls and practical advice about sales recording laws. If you’re looking for more information on what works and what doesn’t on real sales calls, and how to apply it in your sales life, register for ExecVision.io’s free Call Camp.