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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
it does raise a question . So we've got all these things that we say sellers need to learn. How would you prioritize those? Right? If we say, okay, look, there's a limited amount of time for a seller. I could make a case that we shouldn't train sellers on what we consider sales methodologies, for instance. That, you know, it'd be more useful to train them on financial acumen to be able to make a business case and industry knowledge, as you talked about, Steve. skills, just how to hold a conversation, how to take simple steps to build trust and credibility and some of the things that we sort of focus on is, and then products, obviously, but I don't know. I'm curious what you guys think in terms of priorities, Lori.
Wow. That, you know, I want to talk to them about, I want sellers to be able to. respond and ask the right questions and listen. So I want listening skills, understanding the buyer's issues. What's their pain and what's their customer's pain and why is that? And all those underlying questions.
That's where I would spend most of my time.
So that's our place into industry knowledge, business knowledge. I'd sort of lumped the business and the financial together, but Yeah, I customers fundamentally, when they're making decisions, oftentimes they're saying, look, the decision is how are we going to use our available capital, right.
And what's going to give us, , the best return that's tied to what we want to try to achieve as a business and be able to, , that type of just basic analysis and trade off analysis for the buyers at financial level and business level seems to be more important than, you know, our latest sales methodology.
Yeah,
me, that's
It's interesting because as you said that, I feel like, well, we need that too. We need that too. But, you know, you have to be multi talented to do this job.
sure. But given that we have sort of limited bandwidth and sellers have limited bandwidth and, you know, we are, , again, if we look at the data that we say, okay, we've got this, , buyers are massively dissatisfied with the interactions with sellers and we've got, you know, real performance issues across the board and B2B sales in terms of quota attainment and win rates.
I really had to prioritize the things that could. In my mind, I look at us what are the things that help the buyer make their decision? , the sales methodology is pretty low on the list in my mind.
Yeah.
knowledge, business knowledge.
I was going to chip in there, Andy, is that it's so competitive out there now. There's just so many options for customers B2B world here, but obviously it's the same with the consumer world. But. There's so many options that how does somebody get an advantage over another company? Yeah, the product might be better.
The product might be worse. But regardless of that, one thing you can do is you can know your customer better than the other sales rep who's trying to open that same door. And if you do, if you know them better, because you've done your homework and you're going for quality rather than quantity approach, then you're going And you spend your time wisely investing in the knowledge acquisition on the industry and the intelligence of the client itself, you're going to get a much better rapport going.
And rather than being seen as a salesperson, I think the big win is if you can get to that trusted advisor status and you're no longer seen like a salesperson. That's where you're side by side with them. And I found personally. When I've trained salespeople in this way, and I used to sell directly as well that, that was my way.
Building relationships was key, but you can't do it if you haven't put the effort in and earned the right. It's not just enough to be a nice guy, you know,
Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. You go ahead, Kyle.
I was going to say like, just something that, you know, both you, Lori and Steve said that's sparked for me is there's a saying about like, great founders don't fall in love with solutions. They fall in love with problems. And that means you're not just too married to like, this is the one way and you're fourth functioning thing.
And I think it's very similar with salespeople, right? And to fall in love with the problem means a certain level of understanding of. The domain that you're in, the nature of the problem, how it comes about, why alternatives are good or bad. And once you can, I think, sufficiently answer that, then you could start moving down into these other, you know, parts of, , getting into the solution or financial acumen and then sales methodologies.
And then once you have a base there, then loop back and become better at how to understand the problem space and the buyer. And so I think that understanding the problem is a lot about understanding the surface area the industry the buyer, the profile, where they come from, what their history is you know, the nature of if you're selling to product managers, you should know that they come from two different camps.
Typically there's a technical camp and a business camp, and they think very differently about their approach. And that nuance is really important. If you're going to understand the problem properly, I
Yeah. So we're sort of coalescing around this idea is that maybe top priority is Training sellers on not to put words in your mouth, but as is for you to specific industry is understanding business. I'm, I think to me, this is something that I see as a real shortfall is that, and this has been true as long as I've been in the business is that, I think in my own experience, I came into sales selling, you know, on premise computer equipment you know, companies.
And it was like, I knew nothing about business at all. If I sort of, you know, fell into me or it fell, occurred to me early on that, yeah, this is what I really need to focus on is understanding the business side of things as even more important than the products, because that was the first level of conversation that was going to enable me to have a second conversation with them is connecting on the business level, not the product. And we don't seem to, yeah, I'm curious. I had Laura, I don't know if you have any of these resources and women's sales pros is just business training, right? It's just, I was having a conversation with a young seller while ago, somebody I coach and I was like, they really didn't know what accounts payable was, accounts receivable.
And Yeah. What yeah, operations department does just in functions of the business, let alone you know, how tied to the product they were selling. I'm sorry, Laura, go ahead.
I know in my own sales career, I realized this was important when I saw the top producers and they knew they understood how business works. And I thought, Oh, I better figure that out too. And so I learned about all the things that we need to know to, to be more effective. And when you mentioned women's sales pros, I would say the first thing that came to mind to me is that I don't want to just promote women's sellers because First of all, I don't think everyone is good at sales.
I think it takes being able to accomplish some different things and to have core, core competencies in a number of things. So that's the first thing. But also, yeah, if I'm promoting a woman in a sales role, She needs to have knowledge of how business functions. And so I have seen a number of different programs that are helping women in addition to men.
But yes, about women to really learn the fundamentals of business and otherwise you're not going to be successful. It's not a matter of just showing up anymore, right? Those days are over now. It's about really applying being able to add some value that somebody didn't have before you got there.
I remember
I'm sorry, Andy. I was going to say, Laurie, have you seen that built into like an onboarding program for. for salespeople in terms of the business training aspect.
Have yeah, and we you know, we have a little bit of it in ours So yeah, I've Seen some but companies tend to still focus on product Which drives me crazy?
Well, product and their methodology, right? It's like, are there sales process? And it's like, that's, that drives me crazy because first of all, sales process has no value to the buyer whatsoever. , those are your tools of extraction or your sales process. But , a simple question I find for, , Yeah, young seller sellers are newer in the career, but surprisingly, some people have been in a little bit longer is, yeah, I'll say, okay, well, who are you selling to?
Great. I asked the question and I say, okay, well, tell me, how do they make money? And I still consider it surprising how many people aren't answering that question or are unable to answer that question, which is, Hey you're selling to us, you know, even if you are verticalized, not verticalized, you're selling to a certain type of companies, you know, a certain size, you've got your ICP. How are they making money? Cause that's gonna have a lot of influence on your ability to actually get an order from them.