#96: Chet Lovegren joins Outbound Sales Lift to discuss account-based selling — building a strategy, working with your customer success team, and developing your outbound messaging. Chet and Tyler explore sales strategies like Challenger and Gap Selling, and how no matter their strategy SDRs still need to do the work to educate and entertain prospects through their outreach.
Explore the human side of sales and business with host Tyler Lindley. Leaders in their field share a dose of inspiration through stories about life and business. Sales professionals provide tactical tips you can put into practice today. It all comes together to help you chart your path forward.
Achieve your goals on your terms — get inspired by stories from extraordinary people, elevate your performance with the latest outbound tactics, and find the lift you need to take your career to the next level.
Outbound Sales Lift
Episode #96
Developing an Account-Based Selling Strategy with Chet Lovegren
Hosted by: Tyler Lindley
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[00:00:00] Tyler Lindley: Hey y'all. I'm Tyler and this is Outbound Sales Lift where you can elevate your SDR team and transform your sales development efforts. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy this show, please consider dropping us a rating to help others find us. And you can also subscribe to get each episode delivered to you on Tuesdays, right when they're released.
On today's episode, we're gonna be covering account-based sales strategy, and I have the pleasure of being joined by none other than Chet Lovegren, AKA the sales Doctor. Chet, how's it going?
[00:00:37] Chet Lovegren: What's up Tyler? Happy to be here for our second go around cause I know we are. You had me on the podcast earlier this year, so that was a great convo.
Looking forward to part two here. Yeah,
[00:00:46] Tyler Lindley: looking forward to it as well. Chet is the head sales RXer at the Sales Doctor. He's also the host of the Sales Rx podcast and the host of the Founders Formula podcast. So make sure you check out those podcasts. So Chet, when we think about like an account based sales strategy, what does good look like there?
If I'm an outbound team wanting to build that or start to create. What should I be thinking about?
[00:01:09] Chet Lovegren: Yeah, so there's a lot of things you should be thinking about, but I think the most important is to understand if you already had like, a great way to start is if you already have an inbound function, right?
Like, let's make the assumption that you've already had this inbound function. Now, especially with the way the economy looks to a lot of people, outbound is really important because we're not seeing as much inbound traffic. You gotta understand your data. I don't think you can really do anything unless you have the data.
If you don't have the data, that's a completely different conversation. Um, but I'd venture to say that a lot of people listening probably have the data and are just looking to make an outbound shift. So using the data and working in tand, Like your customer success team, you really have to understand not just your, your ICP and your persona and make that like really solid as everybody will tell you, but you really need to lock down your value proposition in three different pain points, right?
So you so understanding. Hey, Tyler, what are the three things that your customers come and tell you after a year of being on our product or utilizing our service or our solution? Because that's your CS is your crystal ball for what is gonna happen a year to three years down the road with your customer.
So it's a great place to get data and information and understand what does the trajectory of my customer look like. Customers aren't coming to you to maintain. Typically, they wanna grow, right? When they buy something, they're looking to, you know, Hey, we just had to let some people go. We need to implement some software to help us scale and automate some of those tasks.
Um, hey, our, our, our offering ourselves is growing and we need something to help us manage that workload. Or we need a tool that can help us bring in more ROI in this regard. The services typically should have some form of ROI so in essence, their business is gonna grow. So what does that growth look like and what do those additional growth challenges look like?
Especially if you're in software. Think about this. I used to, we used to talk about this in warehouse management all the time when I sold WMS software as an individual contributor. It is so hard to implement a WMS because it's such a technical product. A lot of what our value proposition was around was that this is not a bandaid solution, something you set up and then in two years you have to change again.
You implement this. You're a customer for life. Like we have customers that have been around 10, 15 years since the inception of the software at that time. And that's a really important thing for those people because they understand how complicated it is to migrate all the data, all their customer data that they're servicing all.
I mean, some of these warehouses have hundreds of thousands of s skews that they have for their barcodes and their, their serial numbers and things like that. So it's a very complicated process. What kind of happens in that world as a pain point is that somebody will do most of what they do off spreadsheets or in a Microsoft dynamic setup that somebody built in their IT team on a local server, and then they'll implement one or two little pieces of software like to help with small parcel shipping or something of that nature, and they're bandaid a bunch of stuff, and then they have to upgrade because the cost for those small parcels got too big with that enterprise level of software where they could get the same thing somewhere else cheaper.
They have the new, new implementation, so we understand. That growth pain point, we were able to sell against it. Mm. Um, so that's, that's really important. I think the very first thing is working with CS to understand what does a business that's been around for three to five years look like that we're talking to, What about 10 years?
What do our two year customers look like and how can we help? Align value props to what their growth trajectory and their pain points are
[00:04:28] Tyler Lindley: gonna look like. Right. When you talk about working with the CS team, do you think it's a matter of just like going and interviewing the CS team, or do you want to try to hear the voice of the customer as well?
Um, how do you balance like talking to the internal team and then talking maybe to actual customers or listening to call recordings, that kind of
[00:04:43] Chet Lovegren: thing. , It's a combination of all of it. When I started as an SDR manager at 3 PL Central, I moved from an AE into an SDR manager role. They were primarily focused on inbound, and so I was tasked with growing the inbound side, but also building a complete.
Outbound BDR program. Mm. And so part of what that was is I already had a lot of that feedback because I had done that in, in the CS land. Um, but it is, it's going and saying, Hey, if I'm building an outbound program as an SDR leader, go find some QBR to sit on some quarterly business reviews. See if you can shadow a CS person for an.
Twice a week. Yep. And just kind of see what they're doing, what they're working on, how their interactions are going. It's a lot harder now that we're in this Zoom world , um, than it was before. But you, you gotta find a way to make it work. And then it is about interviewing the CS leader, interviewing. Key people on the CS team, whether that's like a senior CSM or an enterprise CSM even, to really understand like what are our customers talking about?
What's important to them? It's easier said than done, right? Like who wants more meetings? But this, when you're building an outbound process and a strategy, the messaging has to be good. If not better than your process, right? Mm. Because it's, it's the thing that's gonna get them to pull the trigger. Like you could have the best process in the world in absolute crap messaging and nothing's gonna work.
Yeah. Doesn't mean you can skimp on process and just do all messaging. You kinda have to balance the two out. But the messaging is crafted by what you're learning in CS, and that's where you really gotta spend some time to understand your customer.
[00:06:15] Tyler Lindley: Yeah. So do you think the messaging, should it be substantially different for an inbound motion versus an outbound motion?
Or should they pretty much mirror each? ,
[00:06:24] Chet Lovegren: there are some things that are gonna play off each other because you're still the same company, the same product selling into the same icp. But there are key differences. Um, I've always said that on the inbound side, I'm a fan of the Challenger sale because that person is probably looking at several other companies.
Um, so education of not only. The problems that they're gonna have 2, 3, 4 years down the road once they buy this type of software. But also educating them on, One of my favorite things from Challenger is these are three things other companies are gonna tell you don't need. This is why they're gonna tell you that, and this is why I'm telling you that you do need it.
Like that was such an expertise level, challenging question. Mm-hmm. to get people to think critically as they were going through the buying process. When you're doing outbound, people aren't raising their hand. You're kind of helping them raise their hand, right?
[00:07:11] Tyler Lindley: Like you're, you're, you're getting that door jar yourself, right?
Yeah.
[00:07:14] Chet Lovegren: Yeah. You're, you're, you're kicking in the door, waving the floor for as biggie used to say. Right. Um, and, and so I'm a fan of like, gap selling from Keenan on that side. Mm-hmm. . Yep. Because it does a great job of showing you. He tells a story about the blackberry that he had when he was traveling, and he would always die, and he left his blackberry charger at home and he was at an airport and the guy kept telling him like, Well, why don't you get this case?
It would be a lot better for your blackberry. He's like, I don't need a case. I need a charger because I left my charger at home. My Blackberry dies a lot. And then by the end of the, the, the whole interaction, he goes, Let me tell you why I'm recommending this. This button that you have on the, that's getting depressed all the time with your current case is a button that drains the Blackberry's battery.
We have these cases that have an open hole where that button is, so it's not constantly being pressed. When it's in your pocket, your blackberry dices faster because you don't have the right case for it, so you don't really need a charger. I mean, you do immediately to solve this problem, but in the long run, that's just a core symptom.
That's a symptom of the core problem. The core problem is that you have this button that's being pressed all the time, and the guy knew that because he's the expert and he won Keenan over because he's the expert and he built trust because he's the expert and he knows what he is talking about. So like I said that all the time at Pavilion, I was like, we're calling sales leaders trying to get them on a corporate group membership.
Yep. But we need to show them that, hey, the content and the stuff that we put together for training and enablement has been built. With the customer base that we have, the 10,000 members that we have at our back, we have 10,000 members worth of feedback, worth of use cases to look at test results. Those VPs of sales have maybe three head of sales, VPs of sales stints managing 20 to 30 people at any given time, less than 200 people under their belt managing.
So what would I take? Would I want to take the experience of someone who's led 200 people or the someone who's led 10,000 people? Right? Right. We are the expert. That's why we can leverage that. And typically the problems they think, like, great example, we're not cold calling enough. Mm. So what is, is that a symptom of a core problem or is that your really, your core problem?
Are you not hitting your numbers? Cause you're not cold calling enough? Or are you not cold calling enough because people aren't convicted that it works because you're not showing them the data? Yep. So bad leadership, um, people aren't cold calling enough because they're not disciplined, because you haven't trained them on how to better manage their energy and their focus.
Again, bad leadership tra bad enablement, bad training. So you have all these other actual problems that are symptoms of this core problem, which. Bad leadership. Yeah. Which is usually what it is, right? When people can't perform at a higher clip, it should fall on leadership. It doesn't often enough. Right?
Um, but it's about how do you enable and train that leader to enable and train their people and be an advocate for them. Maybe they don't want a cold call cuz they're burnout because the person that's been there 18 months, who's at the top of the leaderboard still hasn't gotten promoted to ae. And we're still hiring AEs from outside the company when we have this promotion path that we want to brag about on LinkedIn, but nobody's getting to where they need to go,
And so it. Okay, that's a leadership problem. You know what I mean? Why don't we promote that person? So there's typically the problems that people think they have on the outbound are really just symptoms of a core problem. And that's why I love gap selling because then you turn these $10,000 problems into a hundred thousand dollars problems.
Yeah. If not more. Yeah. And that drives urgency and need. So like don't show up to a discovery call outbound and go, Hey, what brings you to the call today? Well, you called me. That's you needed here nine times out of 10. Yeah. But you used good discovery language to try to uncover. Those additional problems and then draw them into a core problem that you're aware of cuz you're the expert.
[00:10:43] Tyler Lindley: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up both Challenger and Gap selling because you know, I've always kind of struggled to view Challenger as like almost a sales methodology. It almost seems more like a mindset than like, Step by step tactics, whereas it feels like gap selling and, and what Keenan talks about is a little bit more prescriptive, like a little bit easier for a rep to follow, at least doing good discovery, which I feel like is what GAP selling focuses on.
And that's where all deals are lost in one anyways. But I hear a lot of coming, Oh, we, we use Challenger, right? We use Challenger. Is that, is that a sales methodology or is that more of a mindset? Like where do, where do you land on like what is Challenger, you know, and how does that compare to. I've always
[00:11:23] Chet Lovegren: felt like it was a sales methodology.
Maybe I was wrong in the way that I was reading it, but I mean calling it, you know, it is the Challenger sale. Yeah. I think there's, there's two sides of it. There's an operational side that works for sellers and there's also a structure side that works for leaders. Yeah. Cuz they talk about the different types of sellers.
The relationship builder. Right? The lone wolf. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think it's, it's a healthy combo of both instruction for leaders on how to build sales teams. And so you could call that like process and mindset. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also tactical in a lot of ways. Like the one where they're talking about the questions.
Yeah. I would do that as a seller in warehouse management all the time. Hey, this is why this company will not tell you how. Time they're gonna spend with you during implementation or why they say their implementation timeline is free because they press a button, you're good to go, and then you're just supposed to press buttons and then figure it out on your own.
Yeah. They have training videos inside the software. Like we sit you down with a real person, one on one via Zoom, 10 hours a week over four weeks to actually get this all set up, get a test customer live, all these kinds of things so you can enable yourself when report. And that was like, Oh, so I get it.
That's why you guys can charge me x. For implementation, other people won't charge me for implementation. So now I'm defeating that objection. Yeah. Because
[00:12:32] Tyler Lindley: I'm educated on the front end. Yeah, well, like and telling them why it's important. The teach tailor take control. I mean like that really resonated with me from Challenger, but like it's almost like you need the teach element, whether you're doing Challenger or Gap or banner, whatever.
Now there has to be some kind of consultative teaching that's happening where you're educating a customer either about a problem that they already know exists or maybe they, one that they didn't know existed. How do you enable like teams to, to teach, have their reps teaching, right? Teaching consultative, right.
What does that look like as you're trying to set up a sales org that is consultative, that does teach, that does tailor to the, to the prospect's
[00:13:09] Chet Lovegren: needs? I think awareness is a big part of it and a lot of. I mean, I don't want to tell you the real feeling behind the answer because the real feeling behind the answer is there's way too many damn salespeople and a lot of them suck
That's the problem. So they just need to get better. Like you just need to be better at thinking on your feet. Yeah. What was the big, big Palantir, I think was the name of the company, Palantier. They didn't have, Yeah, they didn't have, So they didn't have sales reps. They only had engineers. Okay. And there were two, There were two books.
And I, and I might be, I might be totally messing this up and I'm sure someone else that's into, into software and leader. Probably could fix my answer here, but the, the, I'm gonna paraphrase the answer, so to speak. Okay. What they did, from my understanding was instead of hiring salespeople, they had their engineers read two books.
Okay. The first book was about a group of people that were firefighters at ground zero on nine 11, fighting through adversity and this, that, the other. Hmm. So it was about like mental toughness. Rising to the occasion. It was kind of like a rah rah book. And then the second book was a more tactical driven book, and I believe it was a book about improv written by the gal who started Second City in Chicago.
Okay. Yeah.
[00:14:19] Tyler Lindley: And those, So they were trying to teach these engineers how to sell first with mindset, not teaching them how to sell first with mindset. Second, with like improvisational, like basically teaching 'em instincts about how to manage like a conversation and a sales process. Mm-hmm. .
[00:14:33] Chet Lovegren: Okay. Yep. And then, And then once that was figured out, The tactical stuff.
Okay. Started to make more sense. Right. Cause a lot of reps also, and you probably hear it evaluating software as well. Cause I know you work with companies. Yeah. Building their teams and so you're probably helping them implement software. You hear it in these calls all the time too. It's like, what are your pain points?
What are your problems? Like we know the box checking things, but it's like, how can you ask that question? Like Nate Raw does a really good job when he's trying to bring in multiple decision, uh, decision makers. And he'll say like, to understand if this is actually a problem at the company, he would go. So, hey, I'm curious to hear what are the thoughts and challenges that your boss is sharing with you in one on ones or what is at the company town halls?
What is top of mind for your CEO and your founders? That's such
[00:15:19] Tyler Lindley: a better way to ask that question, . Exactly. It's the same exact question. I always tell reps, you can't use those inside baseball terms like pain points and demo. Like you can't use that on the phone with a process cuz nobody talks that way.
Mm-hmm. , nobody says, Man, these pain points are getting us down. Nobody says that. So I think you've gotta use the voice of the customer and I love the conversational nature of that question now.
[00:15:42] Chet Lovegren: Yeah. Because if I'm an SDR leader and I'm going to someone. and I'm trying to buy, let's call it like a dialer, a power dialer or something.
Right. It's just top of mind for me right now. Cause the power dialer is a hot space. Mm-hmm. . And it's because I think people are lacking in activity and we don't have enough pipeline. But then in the all hands, what we're talking about is how bad our year one churn is. when I get a hundred thousand dollars solution to put in front of my cfo, do you think he's really gonna like be interested in that if pipeline is not top of conversation and so it helps you as a seller understand what other problems and priorities am I going up against?
Yeah, but you need to understand that. You need to understand that that's gonna be a thing that you're dealing with. A sale is an equal exchange of information. Mm-hmm. . That hopefully leads to a win on both sides. What's your pricing? What does your software look like? What is this? What is that? That's what the prospect's wondering.
We're wondering, Hey, what other problems am I going up against in the organization? What level of decision making authority do you have? Not that we should follow bant, but there is a buying influence Yes. Metric that we need to track, right? Um, how many other people should really be roped into this call?
And, but you don't say that. Like, how many times do people go, Who's gonna be the cider on this black? You know what I'm saying? . How about, how about asking? Who else would this software decision affect on a day-to-day basis? Yep, exactly. Yes. Oh, it's gonna affect our Rev people who have to set it up. My VP of sales is gonna want to take a look at all the metrics and reporting, and we'll probably want to have some admin access.
Great. Then I would recommend, like since you're tactically day to day running the operation, a lot of this is gonna fall on you. Let's bring your head of Rev. Let's bring your VP of sales on that call so we can get the other side of the coin and get all the things that maybe you and I don't think about talking about on that.
Yeah, now you got more buy in. Right now you have the people that are actually gonna sign, showing up and, and, and on the call looking to buy, looking to buy software. I'm surprised at some of the softwares that I've evaluated in the last six months where they were okay with just demoing it to me. Just demoing it
[00:17:35] Tyler Lindley: right outta the gates, just like, Yeah, we'll show you the tool.
Yeah. Yeah. We can't wait ,
[00:17:38] Chet Lovegren: nobody asked me about anybody else or tried to push for anybody to be on that call. You're
[00:17:42] Tyler Lindley: not making this decision alone, Chet. I thought it was just you there at the company.
[00:17:45] Chet Lovegren: Like it's just me. But that's just awareness, right? So that's why I say it's awareness. Yeah. It's about being able to train people on awareness.
But again, Tyler. Unfortunately, some people in sales just aren't that aware and aren't strategic in that fashion, and they shouldn't be in sales. Right. And that's, that's, that's the hard truth of it, which sucks. But it's all about that awareness and understanding. Yeah. And a little logic and strategy.
[00:18:07] Tyler Lindley: Yeah.
Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. If we were to think back though, to, like, we talk about framing better questions, right? Making that more conversational or making it contextual or just, you know, asking those right questions in the right way. How do we, like if we were to. Like back in the sales process as we're just starting to reach out to folks, right?
Mm-hmm. , if we're doing that outbound, like should we be putting those questions in our messaging as well to try to pick their curiosity in a cold email on a cold call? Like should those be like leading, we should lead with that or, or where do you think those kind of questions fit in at the very beginning of a sales interaction where we're just trying to kid our, get our foot in the door?
[00:18:43] Chet Lovegren: Well, so over text. Cold email, video outreach. Yep. LinkedIn message, social dm, whatever. Can you really have a good back and forth conversation? Rarely. So that's part of what I talk about in the strategy guide is like outbound. when you're doing written communication needs to be educational. Mm-hmm. and thought provoking.
Don't try to get people to understand your point of view. Get them to think critically about what you're talking about. Hmm. You're not looking for a response other than, Yes, I'm interested in learning more. Yes. I wanna see how you are able to help that team do that. Yes. I wanna see how you were able to, you know, help that CRO double their.
That's what we're working on. We're not trying to have a conversation about their pain points or this or that. Like we don't wanna do that until we're actually now, if it's cold call, right? Yeah. Or a discovery call. Or a qualification call. Yes. There's a lot of ways we can do that, but one of the big places that people fail, Is in, Hey, here's a list of five things that we solve.
Does any of this resonate with you? Yeah. Oh God.
[00:19:43] Tyler Lindley: See, and it's just overwhelming too because the list is so exhaustive. Like I listen to reps doing role plays all the time, and their managers will give 'em these scripts, and the script is like value prop A, value prop B, value prop C. Are any of those top of mind for you?
And it's like, my gosh, we just brought up so many different things that mm-hmm. , I mean, are they top of mind? Of course they are, because that's my job, but like, you haven't like connected anything to me that doesn't resonate, and usually it just gets, I feel like they're tuning out immediately when I hear somebody start reeling off a list of things, it's like, okay, you've already lost 'em.
You've just, you've lost the prospect. So, I
[00:20:17] Chet Lovegren: mean, it's a dating game. Yes. If you go to a bar and you meet someone that you're interested in and you say, These are five of my great qualities. Do any of these interest you? Like how freaking weird is that ? Whereas you set, you set the tone and you go, Hey, look like I'm a hilarious person.
I'm driven like this, that the other, And then you compliment the person. Mm-hmm. . Then they're like, Oh yeah, I'm into this. You know what I mean? Like you're setting the stage for who you are. I think, you know, I think, I think you're beautiful and you're really smart. I love hanging out with you, you know, whatever.
Yeah. Do the same thing in email. Hey, as, as a VP Sales Tyler, this is what we know most VPs of sales growing, uh, their business struggle with when they're trying to build an outbound program. If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to have a chat about how we were able to help so and so VP of Sales or similar company.
Right. Also, either way, love what you're doing over there. Yeah. Congrats on the new hires, like. Close it off for the compliment. Yep. But it's about educating and like-minded and action by association, because that creates fomo. And then Tyler's going, Oh shoot. Oh yeah. Eps who are doubling their pipeline and an economic downturn are doing this.
I better do that. I want to
[00:21:24] Tyler Lindley: keep my job too. I better pay attention. Right. And that's, That's the key outbound, you're like planning that seed, right? You're planting the seed. It's almost like folks try to. All the seeds at the same time and they're trying to plant the whole garden at the same time. It's like, no, all you need is one seed to grow a little bit and you've opened the door for conversation.
Now it's time to schedule, time to explore that one seed further. Then you can tell 'em about the rest of the garden. But I think folks just in and date with everything. Let's just tell 'em everything and hopefully one of those will resonate.
[00:21:55] Chet Lovegren: Yeah. And yet, and thinks you gotta remember. People still think selfishly and make buying decisions the same way they would in their personal life.
I don't buy a software differently than I buy a truck. Yeah. I just don't, I've realized that, Cause I went through that process and I was like, I didn't talk to people that were just like, Oh, you wanna look at the car? It's like, Well, I don't know which one's right for me. Like I actually need some help in this process.
Do I want Ford Ranger? Do I want Ford Maverick? What do I want? Why would I want this? Why would I want that? This is a hybrid. Do I want a trade hybrid to sit a little higher up? Mm-hmm. , how do my kids feel in the car? I brought my kids one day to the dealership to sit in both the different trucks. How much leg room do they have?
Is my two and a half year old gonna keep kicking my seat? Is he actually gonna have. Have a little extra room cuz maybe the truck's a little longer. Yeah. I need a six foot bed because I qualify for tax deductions. If the bed's over six feet, like these are all things that, like if you are, if you understand why I might be looking at a truck or like what other truck buyers have been into, you can sell it to me better.
Mm-hmm. . It's the same way in software. If you're just taking my word for everything, you think I got in a blank check and I'm the person that's gonna do all of it and this, that, the other, and you're not asking me about timelines or problems. Yep. You gotta strive for a little bit more there. You know what I mean?
Yep. A little bit more. A
[00:23:03] Tyler Lindley: hundred percent. What else haven't we discussed when it comes to creating this account based strategy? You know, for inbound outbound teams, you know, sales development teams. Anything else we haven't touched on that you think is important, relevant here? Chet? .
[00:23:16] Chet Lovegren: Yeah, I, I know we talked a lot about messaging, but I do wanna stress that process is still important.
Okay. Like at the end of the day, nobody's gonna be a perfect seller. Perfect is the enemy of great. And so you should be looking to define good and then find out what makes someone great. I can tell you, I know some account executives that are probably gonna clear. Minimum 300 K this year that were former SDRs and BDRs of mine.
And if I got on one of their discos today, I could still tell you I'd come up with 40 different things they could do better. Right? It's always gonna be that way. But what I know makes them top sellers is they can manage their energy, they can manage their focus. They know how to time block, they know how to stay task agnostic, like they're gonna go self-generate some ops because their SDR team is not filling their pipeline.
They're gonna sit there and. 25 minutes making 20 calls, and after every call, they're gonna write their note down on a piece of paper and then go put it in the CRM after five minutes. Where average sellers that are also average on the phone, which it's okay to be average on the phone, but average in process is gonna kill you because those people will go make.
Four cold calls in 25 minutes because after every cold call, oh, Tyler's actually the real decision maker. Let me go prospect. Let me add the notes. Let me do all that. Right? Next thing you know, it's like, wow, I made four cold calls and you're exhausted cause you just did all this admin work. Whereas if you just knock out 20 calls in a 25 minute sprint, Then you go spend five minutes doing your admin work.
You're gonna be like, Okay, cool. What's the next thing? I'm gonna go bang out five video messages. Sweet. Let's go do that for 25 minutes. Then I'm gonna spend five minutes emailing each one. That's the other thing, like video outreach. Don't send 'em one by one. You know who you gotta send your videos to.
Look at your five video tasks that you wanna accomplish. Go create each of those videos. Yep. Then go send them out one by one with your last five minutes. Follow, follow the Pomodora method, you know? Yeah. 25 minutes on, five minutes off. But it's about that, that process is almost equally as important. Um, because Yeah, I know plenty of average sellers, right, who are great at the things that other people aren't, which are, It's the discipline stuff.
It's the consistency
[00:25:13] Tyler Lindley: stuff. How do we as like, as leaders, like leading these reps, , How do we make our reps good at this? Is it a matter of just like educating them, training them, holding them accountable to these things? Uh, because a lot of these reps don't come in knowing these methods, these tactics mm-hmm.
these tricks to make their, their time more smooth. So what, what's our responsibility as leaders to make sure our reps, the majority of our reps, are doing these things,
[00:25:37] Chet Lovegren: So it goes a step higher. If you're a VP of sales, you need to make sure you sh you should, like, the problem is most VP of sales probably don't even follow this, the.
[00:25:46] Tyler Lindley: Don't follow the, the methods we're talking about, like best practices from the top reps? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:50] Chet Lovegren: They're, they're, they're, and I can tell you because I communicate with people like that during, in. And I'm in a network and I'm talking to VP sales, I'm like, How did I just send you a message? And you responded in like three minutes.
What are you doing with your day? Shouldn't you be busy doing other stuff? Shouldn't I be receiving a message from you an hour and a half later? Right. Like, that's how I know, Like that's how I know you're good at this stuff. Because I remember in the Pavilion community, when you and I would chat, if I sent you a message, it'd be like, Later that night or like the next morning and it's okay cuz it's not urgent.
I'm asking you about broadcast equipment, you know what I'm saying? Right, Exactly. Exactly. I have my time to go check my pavilion slack, you know? Right. Exactly My
[00:26:24] Tyler Lindley: time. Well if the time is all the time, then like you said, how are you spending your time? I mean, if you're always available. I also think you're training like the wrong thing if you're always immediately responding to every slack.
We're just training that I, I'm always available on Slack 24 7. Ping me anytime cuz I'm never doing. Like, I think you have to block it either at the leadership level, at the rep level, and I agree. Reps are watching what their leaders are doing, they're watching and they're looking to mirror that behavior cuz they know that's the seat I want to sit in.
I'm gonna mirror what that guy or gal's doing. Mm-hmm. . But if you're mirroring bad behavior, maybe they're thinking like, maybe I shouldn't be at this company. So, .
[00:27:02] Chet Lovegren: Yeah. Well, and, and, and like, right, If a VP of sales doesn't know how to do that, like VPs of sales should be helping enable their leaders that they.
Not their direct reports, their direct supports to be able to enable the team below them. But it starts at that level. If and if my leader doesn't know how to do it, if I'm an SDR leader, whether I'm an SDR manager reporting to a director, I'm a director reporting to a head, or I'm a head reporting to a VP of sales if, or cro, if my leader does not do that.
I mean, while you're listening to the podcast, you can go learn how to do it now. Mm-hmm. , because you're, it's again, awareness. Yep. And I think that's just something like being really committed to professional development and enablement. Over the course of the last four to five years, I've had a focus on this stuff and I picked it up.
So if people, but if people don't care and they're not focused on it, they're not gonna learn how, So you can't enable your reps to do it. So the, the, the how you do it is, I mean, you have to learn about it yourself. Yeah. There's a lot of different ways you can learn about it. I mean, Kevin Dorsey has great stuff about what they call time management.
Even though you can't really manage time, cuz you can only manage something if you control the presence or absence thereof and time's gonna happen anyway. But like en managing your energy, your focus. Time blocking. Even if you just look up like block scheduling on YouTube, you'll find like eight different videos that'll help you understand how you can set up a calendar and a routine.
Um, Noah Kagan, uh, founder and CEO of App Sumo. Mm-hmm. has like a great thing about how he structures his day as a multi-millionaire CEO and founder. It's like a 20 minute video, and he talks about color coordinating his calendars and like prioritizing tasks. And Fridays look a little different than Mondays.
Yeah. And here's why. And I mean, you just have to want to go find. But once you find some sort of structure, Yeah, then you can push it out to the team. Right. And then spot check. I pull up reps, calendars all the time to make sure they have block schedules set up. Yeah. Make sure
[00:28:47] Tyler Lindley: that, And that's a key piece too, right there is that spot.
Check that accountability like, Hey, we talked about this. Here's the resource. Now go and implement. And now what do you. Are you checking them? The week later? A week later? Let's go look at the calendar. What does it look like? Have they already forgotten it? Is that cuz all the training flies outta their head immediately after they, after they get it.
It's a matter of like, follow up, accountability, spot check. Like those kind of things are so crucial.
[00:29:09] Chet Lovegren: One of the best things. My former cr, my, my former leader CRO at three P Central now named extensive, Dan Salazar told me was inspect what you. Too many leaders are reactive and go, We need to get better time management.
Boom. Here's a block scheduling program. And then they never spot check the calendar. They never wonder why a rep's messaging them ASAP when they're asking them a non-important question. They're looking at someone's day and wondering why they made 20 cold calls as opposed to 50 and not investigating their time with them, or doing a time audit or talking about it in a one on one.
Yep. So it's like people aren't convicted or think it's important cuz you don't ever visit. That's reactive leadership. Yeah. You have to be diligent and understand, like I have a, I have a list of things that I put in front of people and I save it on like things we're focused on. And that's a focus and I put in front of people every meeting, Hey, we're working on, we're working on our block scheduling right now.
We're working on our objection handling. Like, you know, almost like OKRs, right? Yep. You gotta have a rolling list of things you're focused on is then when you're looking at it every day, you're like, Hey, aside from refreshing a dashboard and looking at the numbers, what can I inspect to make sure what I expect is being completed?
Yeah,
[00:30:12] Tyler Lindley: I like that. Expect, uh, like framework there. Mm-hmm. , I think that's awesome. Um, Chet, thanks so much for coming on. Uh, you can find Chet on LinkedIn and at thesalesdocrx.com. Um, he's got a great guide in his featured section called the Sales Rx Sequence Sequence Guide. Does I get that? Did I get that name right?
Chet? The Sales RX sequence Guide, it's a hundred percent free. A couple hours worth of videos. So go there, sign up. All you need is an email. Um, but definitely go check that out. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Outbound Sales Lift. If you need help elevating your SDR team, please visit our website at thesaleslift.com to learn more.
Also, make sure you hit subscribe wherever you get podcasts. To check out next week's episode, fill with some more great ideas on transforming your sales development efforts. Thanks again for listening. And remember, no sales starts until you book that meeting. Hey, I have a good one. Bye.