Mark Ackers: Welcome to the podcast. Here's a sneak peek of
what's coming up in today's episode. Brian, did you used to
be crap at sales?
Bryan Mulry: Yes, 100% at the beginning of every new chapter
in my sales career, I have been bad at that chapter and then
quickly stopped being bad at it
Mark Ackers: on a scale of one to 10. When you think about your
crappist, how crap were you?
Unknown: Oh, we're talking like sending 700 word mass emails to
1000 people at a time. We're talking hanging up on someone
when they pick up the phone, doing a cold call and then
blaming it on technical troubles in an email after them. Like
we're talking, not asking people for the money when they were
ready to hand over money. We're talking pretty bad at the
beginning, I'd had this wonderful two months long
training about Google Cloud. As far as I was concerned, I knew
everything about Google Cloud. I was 2122 years of age. I knew
nothing, right? There were people who had been working on
cloud computing longer than I was alive.
Mark Ackers: In today's episode, I want to use your sales
coaching brain to pick apart what sales leaders that you've
met Google at sales loft, and people that you've spoken with
to understand what made them so good. What do the best sellers
do, and what don't they do, and what are the winning habits talk
to you about at Google, the sales leadership team that you
got to experience. What did the best managers have in terms of
traits and habit my
Unknown: manager, as SDR manager, he
Mark Ackers: knew 100% what's the one thing that you do
consistently as a coach to really help reps level up.
There's a lot
Unknown: of limiting beliefs the reps don't know they have. And
they will come to a coaching session with someone like
myself, and they'll say it out loud, and I'll go, hang on,
what? Where did that come from? What are we talking about here?
And my job is to pull them back into reality.
Mark Ackers: Hello and welcome to the I used to be crap at
sales podcast. My name is Mark Akers. I'm the co founder and
Head of Sales here at my sales coach. And we called the podcast
that because it's true, and all of our guests say the same. And
today I'm joined by a man with a very interesting background,
someone who went from selling suits for six euros and a half
an hour at the age of 15 to making over 100,000 pounds in
sales. This person is a former SDR at Google, SDR and then
account manager for sales loft. They are now self employed sales
coach and my sales coach coach today on the podcast. It's Brian
Murray, Brian, welcome. Great to have you with us. How you
feeling?
Unknown: Hello, I'm feeling great. I'm really glad that
we're getting to do this absolutely
Mark Ackers: in today's episode, I want to use your sales
coaching brain to pick apart what sales leaders that you've
met, Google, sales loft and people that you've spoken with
to understand what made them so good. I want to also understand
about sellers. You know, what do the best sellers do, and what
don't they do, and what are the winning habits, so to speak,
that's what we're going to get into today. But before all of
that, we always start with a yes. No question, Brian, did you
used to be crap at sales? Yes, 100% what point of your career
rushed to the front of your mind? What
Unknown: really kicked into my brain there was actually the
beginning of each role in each new chapter. At the beginning of
every new chapter in my sales career, I have been bad at that
chapter and then quickly stopped being bad at it. But yeah, I've
been crap at sales multiple times, and I will be again on
Mark Ackers: a scale of one to 10 when you think about your
crappist, how crap were you? Oh,
Unknown: we're talking like sending 700 word mass emails to
1000 people at a time. We're talking, hanging up on someone
when they pick up the phone, doing a cold call, and then
blaming it on technical troubles in an email after them, like
we're talking, not asking people for the money when they were
ready to hand over money. We're we're talking pretty bad luck.
Share
Mark Ackers: with us your biggest howler in sales. One
Unknown: of my biggest haulers is actually pretty interesting
one, working in sales loft as an account manager. I had a list of
people who were not going to renew with us, and burnt people
who were very unhappy with us. They unfortunately got a message
asking for more money and asking, you know, hey, we've
built these wonderful new new features. I think they'll be
wonderful for your team. Let's, let's speak about them. And I
got a lot of angry messages back. Though I had, I had one
job send the right message to the right person, and
unfortunately, in a moment of tiredness, I sent it to about 50
of our least happy customers.
Mark Ackers: So bright. What were the repercussions of that?
There's
Unknown: obviously that emotional moment when you get
that first email back. Go back going, you know, I've already
told you I'm going to cancel, or, you know, I've already told
you that I don't want to use this product, or I don't already
told you that I'm not doing this. And you get that first
messages back and you go, Oh, no, I can't believe I did that.
Your start goes into the pit of your stomach, but, yeah. The
repercussions were that, I guess if I had wanted to try and
salvage any of those customers, all the goodwill was gone.
Mark Ackers: I'm guessing you learned from that, though,
right? That was a learning moment. And speaking of
learning, let's talk about where you learn to sell. So it feels
like I need to go to when you were 15 years old, selling suits
you. You say, this was your first sales job. This is where
you learn that sales should be a conversation between two people,
and at some point that conversation money changes
hands. How did you learn that in that role? That
Unknown: was a really interesting one. It gave me my
foundation for what real selling is, even though I wasn't on
commission, I was a retail assistant. I was this young, 15
year old guy who knew how to help people find the right
clothes. In the eyes of the business, I shouldn't have been
anything more than a guy who knows how to operate a till and
hang clothes on a job, right? I actually started quote, unquote,
selling out of almost pure boredom. In that place, there
were three layers. I was in the basement. And, you know, if
people don't come down to the basement, I had no one to talk
to. So what happened is I just start chatting with people. You
know, someone would be over in suits, and would be over with
the with the jeans, we over the shirts. And I just go, you know,
have you an event coming up? Or, you know, those suits are great
for weddings and things like that. And I just start chatting
with people. And after about a year and a half or two years of
doing this, and I was, you know, I was in school at the time, so
just weekend work, I started to turn it into a game. My greatest
achievement, as far as I'm concerned, it was a dude came in
for socks and left with a full new suit, three pairs of jeans,
three four shirts, a new pair of shoes. And he just came in. He
came in wanting socks for a specific thing, and then ended
up with a lot of others. And I sort of turned it into a game
of, all right, well, let's see what people need. Let's see why
they're coming in here and actually looking for clothes.
And that's, that's where it really sort of began, of just
having conversations with people.
Mark Ackers: And was that all self taught? Like, would you
just try to learn from every conversation? Or do you have
someone in store that was older than
Unknown: you? So I did that completely myself, but it was
more so, yeah, again, it wasn't. There were no benefits to me
doing this. I could have been on my phone the whole time, and I
would have been paid the exact same amount and got the exact
same amount of reward from it. But I, I've always enjoyed just
talking to people. I've always enjoyed sort of having these
conversations and just striking up conversations with people and
seeing what comes from them. And I found very early on that if I
put pressure on myself to quote, unquote, sell something or have
someone buy something, and I put pressure on the outcome, then I
would make a total mess of it. But if I just wanted to chat
with people, then that usually sort of ended up having a good
time for
Mark Ackers: both of us. So that's interesting. The game
wasn't to sell. No,
Unknown: the game was just to have a conversation, and then at
certain points I would introduce new things and see if, see if
people would have would add to their interest or not. Yeah, it
was just a really interesting sort of start to it. But I, at
the time, I wouldn't have considered a sales whereas now,
now I would understand
Mark Ackers: that. And I think what's interesting though, is it
feels at a very young age, you learn, what I think takes
sellers far too long to learn, is disconnecting from the
outcome, and that's probably because you you weren't paid if
they bought anything. It was just a game. But I'm guessing
that being able to disconnect from the outcome is something
you took with you into your first sales job. And it looks
like in between there, there's a little bit of a marketing role
with media, HQ, but your first real sales job, to me, looks
like was an SDR with Google. Well, it's
Unknown: funny. There's a bit of a gap in there,
and it's really interesting. I was a chugger for a little
while, a charity mugger, for anyone who doesn't know that
word, you most people on the street that are wave at uni
going, Hey, can I have your bank account details? That was me. I
did it for a summer, and I would consider that to be one of the
best sales trainings I've ever had, even though it was one of
the worst and most toxic environments I've ever been in
in my life. That one was 100% commission sales, that one was
standing at the street and waving at people, and that's
where sort of numbers and the law of averages really gets
hammered in. It was interesting where, you know, as far as we
were concerned, 100 waves was eight stops. Oh, sorry, it was
10 stops. Of those 10 stops, you'd get eight conversations.
Of those eight conversations, you get five closes, and of
those five closes, you get one sale. So it was one of those
things where you had to know your numbers, and you'd people
talk about it with door knocking, but I knew that if I
had spent six hours in a shopping center in the middle of
Ireland waving at people, and I'd wave at 300 people and not a
single person had stopped, I had to believe, in my heart of
hearts, that the next three people that I wave at, just true
through law of averages would be the ones that would stop, um,
and there was a bunch of different elements that added to
that. I would learned a lot about what good sales management
is by learning what awful sales management is. And then I
learned a lot about sort of myself and how I work in high
pressure environments through through that as well. That was
kind of a sales environment. That then projected me into
deciding that I wanted to go into sales and SDR for Google,
because it was a much better environment for
Mark Ackers: I can imagine. I would love to pick your brains
on being a chugger. That's not a phrase I've ever heard of
before. But let's remain true to the mission this podcast, and
let's focus on on later stages in your career. But yeah, I'm
sure there's loads you could talk about, and loads of funny
stories, I'm sure as well. So we took the job as an SDR with
Google. Just tell us about that, right? Google is one of those
companies that everyone just thinks must be fun to work
there, right? They've got the slides, the bean bags, the table
tennis, the whatever, fun chairs and all this stuff. What's it
like, being what must be, you know, a young man getting that
job at Google, going from working in a clothes shop, being
a chugger, using your phrase, to working at Google. What was that
like?
Unknown: Well, you know, what's funny, I never saw bean bags,
the slides or anything like that, because I started in July
2020,
we were all locked down,
so I had the glamor and glitz of working from a Chromebook In my
bedroom. So that was sort of the extent to which the glam of of
Google Cloud came in, um, however, the experience that I
had there, what it was like, it was actually really, really
interesting, because you'd think that a massive corporation like
Google would have everything nailed down, and it's just like
every other sales org, you know, we still have problems with
sales apps. You still have problems with updating your CRM.
You still have problems with, you know, Product Market Fit and
messaging and targets and accounts and commissions and
everything. It has the exact same challenges. And I think the
way they do that is they keep everything small. So I was on a
team of about 20 SDRs targeting the globe. However, in that I
was broken up into a smaller team after a little while. And
at the beginning, I started selling enterprise, and then I,
later on, I started selling SMB, but they kept it in quite small,
siloed teams to keep that startup culture and that startup
feel throughout the massive organization. That's kind of the
way that it felt. That's what it was like while I was in there.
Mark Ackers: Would that surprise people? Some of it maybe not
like the CRM universal problem, but having that product market
fit, I think, would surprise people. Talk to me about the
SDRs that you work with when you joined. You've obviously said at
the start of the podcast, every job you took you initially were
crap at it, and you progressed. But when you reflect back on
that SDR team, were you on par? Were they elite? How did that
team compare to to yourself?
Unknown: We were normal sellers. We were just regular people. You
go out, you make your calls, you send your emails, you do your
LinkedIn steps, and you come up with tactics and plans and
messaging, and then you send them out to people. And it's
funny, I actually think selling for Google Cloud was really
difficult, and some people would say, Hal, you're Google. Reason
being is, my prospects knew more about Google Cloud than I ever
could. There were three players in that space, AWS, Azure and
GCP, so it's Amazon, Microsoft and Google. I would reach out to
a CTO about a specific problem, and they'd go, yeah, all of my
engineers already know about that. They're using this to do
it. Your product is crap because of this. You know, Google Cloud
doesn't fix that problem. For me, they knew more about it than
I did, so a big part of my job was either re educating people
or finding the right people with the right messaging. It was a
lot of testing, but that was a strange environment, and that
you think you know, everyone wants to talk to Google. They
don't, if they know exactly what you do better than you do,
Mark Ackers: and I think that's really interesting. One of the
things that I talk regularly about when it comes to the
challenges SDR face is they're reaching out to people that they
just don't understand, right? Right, like, unless you're going
to tell me otherwise, I'm guessing you've not really got a
clue at this point in your career what a CTO goes to work
for, the challenges they face, the problems that are going to
resonate, what they moan about, the pain of not being on your
platform and product and and you don't speak their language, and
when you're spending someone that thinks they know everything
that can be really difficult. So who enabled you as an SDR and as
an SDR function at Google, who helped you level up and combat
that?
Unknown: There was a couple of people in that. So there were
obviously the internal ones. There were people who'd been
around for a little bit longer. Were the actual ladies in Google
Cloud who obviously had been there longer and knew more about
it. Them bringing me on calls really helped me understand how
much I didn't know. Obviously there was enablement people
internally, a guy called Ludwig Hofmeister, which is an
incredible sales enablement leader based in Ireland, despite
his very German name. However, that actually, at that point in
my career, I actually discovered John Barrows sales and for
anyone who doesn't know him, he's an American sales trainer,
and he puts out a lot of content. And I was kind of
looking at it going, Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting.
That's interesting. I connected with a dude called James Buckley
who used to work, or still works with John Barrows. James is this
American trainer. And we just got chatting, and then all of a
sudden James was introducing me to new ways of thinking and new
ways of doing that were very brilliant. They were very me and
how I operate. They were very authentic. And I had to lean
into the fact that I didn't know as much as the CTOs, and my
messaging changed from I know everything to I know a lot about
this one thing that you probably don't know about, let me educate
you. Let me help you. Let me let me challenge you on this. Or
while you know way more about the technical specs, here's what
everybody else is doing. Can I show you how this could benefit
you as well? And it became a really interesting sort of way
of leaning into my incompetence or not knowing what I was doing.
Have you come across the Dunning Kruger effect
Mark Ackers: I have? But why don't you tell it for those that
are listening? Okay,
Unknown: it's very, very simple.
At the very beginning of learning about a topic, after
you get about, you know about 10% of the material, your
confidence is super high. You're like, I put 20 hours into this
thing. I know so much about it. And then you put 56789, 10, more
hours into it, and you realize you know nothing. And what
happens is you go into what's known as the valley of despair,
where you go, I will never know everything that I need to know.
And the more time and energy and effort you put into that topic,
that task, that skill, you go way back up in your confidence
levels, but it takes a lot longer, and you go from sort of
unconscious incompetence, where you think you know a lot, but
you actually don't, to conscious competence, where you know All
of the things that you should know, plus, plus what you don't
know and what I what I ended up doing as an as an as an SDR is
at the beginning I'd had this wonderful two months long
training about Google Cloud. As far as I was concerned, I knew
everything about Google Cloud. Was 19 years of age. Oh no, I
wasn't. I was 2122 years of age, I knew nothing, right? There
were people who had been working on cloud computing longer than I
was alive that I was trying to sell to. But after, after a
while and listening to people and understanding just how much
I didn't know, I realized, all right, I'm now going to lean
into my actual role here, which is connecting people, making a
connection, putting messages in front of people working hard.
That's my value here, not my knowledge.
Mark Ackers: And that's a great sound bite. Hello. I'm Mark the
host of the I used to be crap at sales podcast. Thank you for
listening. We called the podcast that because it's true and all
of our guests say the same. As a sales leader, you would have
been crap ourselves once, no doubt, but that changed, and now
you're responsible for a team. It's your job to help that team
get to where you need to get them to, but also it's your job
to develop and grow them as sales professionals. Here's the
problem, you don't have the time. You are too busy with
other competing priorities, and I get it, but that doesn't mean
your sales team should miss out. It doesn't mean they shouldn't
fulfill that potential and grow that's where we come in. If
you'd be curious to hear about how we're working with
organizations providing their team with expert coaching on a
one to one basis, get in touch. Be happy to have a conversation.
What I love about how you explain that is it? It could be
coupled very nicely to, I think the challenge we also face as
sellers and as humans is this desire to give away information,
to show how smart we are. You know, it's, it's, it's like the
little professor in us. And I think one of the things you see
when people start a role is because they don't know they ask
loads of questions. But when they get to sort of six, 912,
months into the role, they think they know the answers. So their
discoveries come more about giving information than
gathering information because they want to showcase. Look, I
know I know this. I'm an expert in this. You will trust me. But
actually, what you've got to do is you've got to get over that
hump and get to a place where you've got the knowledge, but
you act like a novice, and you continue to discover. And then
only when it becomes really the right time do you share the
information. It couples really nicely with with your theory, in
my opinion,
Unknown: that actually comes from a place of almost
insecurity. It's like, I need to prove that I know about this.
Instead of actually knowing about it, there's a there's a
big level to it, where people go. Go. It's almost like
imposter syndrome, where they go, if I don't show in my
questions, then I know exactly what they're talking about. Then
they'll think, x, y, z, and when you get to a point where you
realize nobody's thinking about you, that then can help get
through that hump that we're talking about
Mark Ackers: absolutely and that is a little bit like what you
spoke about earlier on. You're reaching out to CTOs that have
been doing this longer than you've been alive. And imposter
syndrome is just something that affects everybody from SDR all
the way up to the very top of the chain. Right? Everyone has a
level of imposter syndrome, but it's something that's hard to
self diagnose. It's hard to admit. It's even harder to get
coaching on that, and it can affect people so much in their
sales conversations because they don't believe that their
prospect will see them at the same level. One of the things I
always say to people when they start working with me is, even
after a day, you know more than 99.99% of the world about this
company, because you've had eight hours here, right? And
it's about giving them that confidence. Let's talk about
your manager at Google. Then talk to me about, well, not just
specifically Google, I suppose, because you were speaking to
other managers in the business as well, right? Like you would
have met other sales leaders, but rather than Yeah, focus on
the one person. Talk to me about at Google, the sales leadership
team that you got to experience. What did the best managers have
in terms of traits and habits, because you've alluded to
learning about bad practice in an earlier role. Talk to me
about what traits and habits good managers have from your
experience at Google. In Google,
Unknown: there was a couple of different levels, but every
single manager knew their role in that almost hierarchy. My
manager, as SDR manager, he knew 100% his job was to look after
me and make sure that I as his rep was fine, emotionally,
physically and hitting target. All of those were key to him,
especially during a pandemic. Right above him, he that manager
knew that he needed to make sure that all the SDR managers were
fine, that they were all working well, but they were able to
produce their results, and then above them, they actually had to
look at overall org structure. And it's funny, knowing this
from an SDR level, I knew my manager, knew exactly his role,
who supported him, and how he was supported, and knew how that
rolls up the chain. And because it was so clearly defined, not
in rigid senses, but in a secure sense, he knew exactly where his
boundaries were here, where his responsibilities were, and that
allowed him to then be creative within those walls. As far as
I'm concerned, when the walls are blurred or when the
obstacles are blurred, you there's no room for creativity.
Creativity is wonderful in a box. You just have to know where
the box is. So my manager knew exactly what he needed to get
out of me, and then he focused properly on two things. I was at
the beginning of my SDR career. We focused very much on numbers,
not on output, but on the numbers that actually mattered.
He shared with me the difference between, you know, your vanity
metrics of KPIs plus the ones that actually mattered, and then
how they filtered into the overall org. And we also focused
on numbers of other performers and top, top sellers and top
performers. He gave me something very, very tangible to do, and
now looking back, it was because he wanted me to get my reps in.
He wanted to make me to make sure that I was getting 1000
calls in, you know, a year or 1000 emails. Because the more he
knew, the more I did it, the better I was going to become. So
throughout that, he focused very much on where I was at in my
career, not where he wanted me to be. That was key. And then it
was funny, because we're a sales where we were sales role, he
actually took the pressure off on the results side, not more.
So he took the thread away. He was like, if things start to go
south, here's the process. And he did this very early in my
career. He was like, here's the process. You're not going to get
a knock on the door one day and be told you're out. Here's what
the process is for and why it is the way it is and how it works.
And that removed the anxiety from me, not the anxiety of
selling that, but that didn't leave for years, but the anxiety
of, if I'm bad at this, I will be let go. I was almost like I
was given permission to be bad at it at the beginning. And that
was really key. So it was a couple of different elements to
it, and that he was secure in himself and knew where his
boundaries were. I knew where my boundaries were. I knew the
worst case scenario. I knew the best case scenario, and he gave
me something very clear to focus on, which was, here are the
numbers that we need to look at. At the beginning of your career.
That was key for me.
Mark Ackers: Sounds like he just knew how to create an
environment where you felt comfortable. All to do what was
being asked of you and be successful. About the pressure.
What did your one to ones typically look like? Then my
Unknown: one to ones were manager one to ones. They were
not coaching one to ones. They were number run throughs. Here's
what other people are doing. Maybe show me an email or two,
but it was every center will know this. You get in, you talk
about your numbers, you talk about what, what's going well
and why it's cost going badly. You're asked a couple of
questions. You don't really have any follow ups to do afterwards.
It's quote, unquote check ins. Are you doing? Okay? What are
your numbers like? Okay, when you change that number, make
more calls, make more emails, do these things, etc. It's nothing
it's nothing crazy. The coaching element was led by somebody
else. So he just, he just did the standard manager stuff.
Mark Ackers: How did that make you feel?
Unknown: Pretty fine. I was happy with that at the time. I
didn't know what I was missing. Okay, I did feel a little quote,
unquote scrutinized at the time, but that's kinda, that's part of
the job. That's part of the role. You know, it was more
being held accountable to the right things. I don't have any
sort of really positive or negatives to say, with that sort
of management style, it suited what he needed to do and it
suited what I needed. Kind of at the time, I would never take
that management style now, given you know, the journey I've been
on so
Mark Ackers: you said you didn't know you missing out on, looking
back now, with your coaching hat on, what were you missing out on
questions,
Unknown: not answers? I would say something along the lines
of, I'm not getting enough call connects. And the response would
be, here's how you fix that. That's a manager hat. Or we need
to get your call connect rates up. We're going to focus on
these numbers and hits, hey, this is how we're going to focus
on those numbers. A coaching hat is very different. The A if
someone comes to me and says, I need to get my call connects up,
I start asking questions. And that's what coaches will do.
Coaches will ask questions like, Who you're calling, when are you
calling? Them, what numbers are you using? And they will try and
gain a much deeper understanding. And then what I
would have liked was for him to ask me questions, whereby the
direction of the questions helped me to come to my own
conclusion. Easiest way to describe this is, at the
beginning, I would tell Nathan, every single time, I'm bad at
cold calling, because all I was getting was non Connect. I
wasn't really connecting with people. Turns out CTOs don't
pick up numbers who knew. And as because I wasn't getting enough
reps, and I was like, I'm bad at cold calling. And as a manager,
he'd go, No, you're not. Here's how we boost your Connect
rights. As a coach, you have to ask the question, why are you
bad at cold calling? And you get down to making the other person
realize that the reality is that they're not talking to enough
people because of call connect rates, not that they're bad at
calling. And I would have enjoyed a little bit more of
that sort of paradigm breaking at the time. Breaking earlier on
in my career.
Mark Ackers: Here's the thing, that's how most one to ones go.
Most managers don't coach. Why do you think that is
Unknown: they don't know any better? Um, you know, they were,
they were managed in a certain way, so they'll get mad. Don't
matter someone else in a certain way. But also, their managers
are asking them about about numbers and results and things
like that. So if the CRO is asking the VP of sales, asking
the sales directors, asking the SDR leaders, asking the SDRs and
its numbers all the way down, what else you gonna get when I
was in, when I was an account manager, at least at the
beginning, most of my one on ones were just deal reviews.
What's happening this deal? What's happening this deal?
Something this deal? What's happening this deal? Do you have
next steps? Yes. Yes. Deal? Do you have next steps? Yes, yes,
yes. Okay, cool. Update the CRM, please. You know that was most
of those sessions we then had to dedicate time to coaching, and
sometimes, sometimes it happened and sometimes they didn't. But
you know, the manager one on ones where someone was about was
going to ask them what I was doing, those answers were always
given, whereas the coaching ones now they weren't always
fulfilled, at least at the beginning of my time as an AM,
Mark Ackers: and that is where the challenge lies. The manager
using the one to one to fulfill their agenda and their goals for
what they need to provide up, rather than making it about the
individual, you talk about how your journey has shown you a
different way. Let's get into that SalesLoft, you took another
SDR role at SalesLoft at the time. What was the appeal?
Unknown: SalesLoft had the best sellers in the world selling a
technology that I loved. I got to a place in Google Cloud. So
Google Cloud bought sales left as a tool to use, and I was the
EMEA guinea pig for that. So I was spending half my days
teaching people how to use sales left, and half my days teaching
people, you know, cold calling and selling for for Google
Cloud. And at that point, I was quite good at in Google Cloud, I
was the top there's a story about me hitting q2 target in
four days with my my second last quarter there. So I had a lot of
time on my hands to fulfill with this. And I kind of looked up
for a second, and I saw the AES that had years of experience in
Google Cloud, and I could see myself on a track earning 100k a
year, 24 years of age. Working for Google, living in Dublin,
selling Google Cloud to small businesses. You know, really,
really cool work, but it would have required me to care about
CTOs, CIOs and their problems. And I went, I don't know, I
spent half my days talking about this really cool tech. And then
when I looked at the business, it was full of some of the best
sellers, the best sales leadership, the best sales
thought leadership, the best sales culture. I'd come across
given the opportunity to move to London, and I went, you know
what I want to get in there. So then I did that. I applied for
sales and after and got in there, and
Mark Ackers: it feels like you had huge success there. I
noticed in your LinkedIn, it said you were the second highest
performing SDR in your region, Callum McKenzie and yeah, shout
out to Callum McKenzie for for being number one. Um, what was
Callum doing differently to you? That
Unknown: man is a workhorse. That man is nothing but
consistent. Callum just gets it done. So
Mark Ackers: I was going to push you on that, because when I ask
sales leaders, what do their top performers do differently? And
they say, Oh, they work harder, or they're a workhorse, I'm sure
they are. But there are traits and habits that are different,
and it feels like you've just touched upon it there as well.
So Callum would just continually ask for help, seek feedback and
use that, I'm guessing. What about in his conversations? What
was he doing differently there, when he was reaching out and
booking meetings as an SDR, was he doing anything different with
his outreach? To you very
Unknown: little we'd always share things across teams. In
his continuous work on himself was consistent. So I
Mark Ackers: get he was working on himself. I get that he was
seeking feedback. I get that he worked maybe just that, just a
little bit harder and maybe more focused and didn't maybe veer
off the track to try new things. But I'm curious in his actual
conversations, was he doing anything differently with
prospects?
Unknown: The conversations that we were, we were having, would
have been quite similar, maybe 1% to 5% different. It was the
it was the the other work that I think made the made the
difference
Mark Ackers: talking about people that weren't as
successful as you and and Callum in the role, what mistakes are
they making that could have been avoided.
Unknown: There is a set way of doing the SDR role, or a role in
your organization, and what everyone will do is they'll tell
you go and copy the top performer. Okay, so let's say
you do that. You go in, you take exactly the top performer is
doing, and you copy it. If that is all you do, you will be a
middle of the middle of the rail performer. Because what people
would do is they'd set one way of doing things and then
consistently repeat that one way of doing it, regardless as to
whether it was working or not, or getting them the results. Are
they not it was the quote, unquote, right way of doing it,
and they were looking for the right way of doing it.
Unfortunately, with sales, there's no right way of doing
things. Everything is relative. Everything is relative to the
situation that you're in. The markets. Change the person in
front of you, change their mood has changed from the last time
you talked to them. Everything is consistently changing, and
you as a seller need to be able to maneuver that and watch out
for that, and be ready for that. Rather than going, Hey, I've put
the right ingredients in and I've put it in the right
process. Why am I not getting the results? Sales isn't like
that. And people like to think of it as, you know, people like
to think of it as that, especially because we were
working with a product that sort of processified the outbound
process. It was, you know, it was almost conducive to having a
mechanized or a process driven methodology of, if I just put
more inputs in, I'll get more outputs. But that that gets you
a baseline, the extra bits of becoming a top performing
seller. You need a bit of creativity. You need a big extra
ways of doing things. You need consistent, continuous
improvement. That's, that's the difference that it makes between
someone who becomes a middle of the road performer and someone
who, who, I guess, yeah, gets bored too quickly to stay, to
stay a middle of the road performer. It
Mark Ackers: feels like it sounds loft is where you really
flourished and developed as a sales professional. Talk about
the manager that you had there and the impact they had on your
development. So I had three
Unknown: managers in sales left.
I had one as an SDR, and then I had two as an account manager.
What was really consistent was their care and attention for me
and my personal growth and my personal professional
development that was above and beyond anything I'd ever seen.
They really taught me the difference between a manager and
a leader. Managers focus on numbers, leaders focus on
trajectory
and just growth in general.
And I. What I really learned was that a great leader can manage a
team quite well, but a great manager isn't a good leader, and
we can spend a long time chatting about the differences
between the two, but what they did quite differently was find
opportunities for me proactively, or point out things
I didn't know, be able to tell me exactly what other reps were
doing that was and wasn't working, and proactively provide
that information to me so I could add it into my mix and
force me to take breaks. That was key for every single one of
my managers forced me to take breaks I didn't take a proper
break in sales loft for 10 months. A reason being was
because for my first five, six months, I was on the Enterprise
team, and then I was like, Yeah, I'll take an I'll take a new
I'll take a break when the new year begins. And then all of a
sudden, I was kicked to a new team, and I went, Well, I can't
change now. So spent a couple months almost completely burned
myself out, went on holidays for two weeks, came back, hit my
target in about a week and a half, and they're proactively
making sure that it doesn't matter what Brian thinks. If
Brian thinks what he's doing is okay, I'm gonna push him to look
after himself. That was key for me, a guest
Mark Ackers: I recently had on the on the podcast, spoke about
that. Spoke about managers identifying burnout, encouraging
people to use their holidays and actually not just have, like one
day off. It's like, take a break, take a week off, take two
weeks off, and you speak about experiencing burnout. What are
the early signs to look for in someone burning out.
Unknown: You're on autopilot.
You're working on autopilot. You're going to work because
work is the next best thing to do. You your calendar is
dictating everything in your life, and you're just following
that. You're up. You're living life on autopilot. As a lot of
people will feel that they live in life on autopilot, and that's
fine. You might not necessarily be burned out, but in the sales
role, if there is no creativity, if there is no new way of doing
things, if there are no choices in your day, if it's okay, I'm
gonna get in. I'm gonna answer my emails. I'm gonna answer my
slacks. I'm gonna do these meetings, and then I'm gonna do
x, y, z, and then I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna do this
thing. I might go to the gym. You might go to the gym. You
might be doing all the right things, but if you're not
actually making any choices, including in your day, that I
think is a first step medically, you lose touch with your
emotions. You start to dissociate. I'm a well
therapized individual now at this point, after having burnt
out twice, so I have now able to spot it way quicker with my
connection to emotions. But for anyone who isn't, if you find
that you're on autopilot and haven't taken a break in a long
time, check just see at that point. Oh, and if the thought of
taking a break scares you, they're probably burned out. If
the idea of, oh, wow, I can't take a week off, not because of,
you know, extranuting circumstances, because I but
because I don't know what that's like, then you've been living in
the matrix too long.
Mark Ackers: So as a coach, how do you spot burnout in an
individual before they spot it themselves? You you speak about
being proactive. As a great leader, how do you proactively
spot burnout in someone else?
Unknown: They have absolutely no emotions when they're speaking
about the problem that they're coming to you with. Nobody goes
to a coach without having some kind of problem in their head,
or at least our jobs as coaches is to pull problems out of
people. So even if they come in and go, I'm fine, my job is to
help find areas of improvement. And if I can't attach that to
any kind of emotion whatsoever, that's a red flag for me. If
someone is telling me, you know, I'm not hitting my target, and I
go, how does that make you feel? And they go, Well, I'm not
hitting my target. Like, hang on, how does that make you feel?
And if they can't verbalize any kind of emotion whatsoever, I'm
I'm red flags are going off in my head. And I'm going all
right, where am I finding you? What's going on here? There's
additional things, and I'm starting to talk about life and
family and situations and things like that, which can make some
people relatively uncomfortable, because, you know, you come to
me for cold calling, email writing, just getting better as
a seller, and all of a sudden I'm talking about your dad. It's
not even that. It's all linked. It's all imperative to each
other. Do you know the worst sales days I've had have been
after fights at my girlfriend, but not realizing that I was
walking into work with that energy. No wonder they weren't
enjoying my cold calls. I was still angry about the
conversation I had with my girlfriend. I was angry on the
phone. Um, so that is how I spotted as a coach, I try and
attach it to some kind of emotion. And most people are
able to verbalize an emotion, even if they're not, you know,
Zen and monk like you're able to verbalize some kind of emotion.
That's what's key to me.
Mark Ackers: And let's talk about now the people that you've
had that you would speak to, right? So your boss is at
Google, at sounds loft, and you spoke really high. In particular
about sales loft hiring the best sales leaders and sales talent.
No doubt they didn't suffer any falls at Google as well from a
leadership point of view. Indeed, let's imagine you were
tasked with creating the perfect sales leader. What habits and
traits do they have? What do they care about where do they
spend their time?
Unknown: A manager is someone
who internally cares deeply about the data, and externally,
could not care less. It's such a strange sentence, but what I
mean by that is they themselves need to be on top of the machine
that they're running, every element of it, know, every cog,
every spoke, every single element of that. And then when
it comes to working with their reps, they shouldn't even talk
about numbers. They should go way deeper into the person who
they are, what they're getting on with, what they do and don't
even like finding, creating in their environment that works
best for them. Metea shaper, who now runs her own business and
was an incredible SDR for sales out on the doc market, didn't
call call because she booked all of her meetings through
LinkedIn. And then there were some people who just co called
in sales lot and booked all the meetings through that and did
never, never did a single thing on LinkedIn and being able to
find the right thing for your reps rather than telling them
what the right thing is. That's what the manager should be. But
they themselves should know every single element of the
data, the KPIs, how it marks, how it moves, everything like
that. But I, as a rep shouldn't know that you care about your
numbers at all, because when you are only numbers focused, I'm
only numbers focused, and that's going to lead to bad behaviors.
Mark Ackers: And how does your answer change? And if I said
sales leader, leaders
Unknown: are all about empowerment. So with them, it's
almost like a folly. Sharp is one of the best people in this
space where what he does is he goes, All right, is the entire
sales org happy? If it is, I know that if the targets are
realistic, they're gonna hit it. Now, obviously he's way more
detailed than that, but a leadership in a role is very
much about empowerment rather than enablement. Managers job
should be to take all the obstacles out of the way and
just let you run. A leader's job should be to point you in the
right direction and make fill you up with energy juice. If I
were to create a leader, what they do all day, every day, is
speak to reps, customers, things like that, and focus deeply on
the human element and the human level. And then they should be
solving problems on, how do I make the humans happier and
better? Not the machine, but everybody in that machine that I
think is the difference between a leader, some
Mark Ackers: great answers there. I've really enjoyed
listening to you there, Brian explain what a great manager
comprises of and a great leader, and the analogies and stories as
well. Let's come with some closing questions to bring us
towards the end of the podcast. I'm keen, as a sales coach that
you are to get your take on this. How often should a sales
rep receive one to one coaching from their manager?
Unknown: My standard is once a week, right? And it's dedicated
coaching time, not manager time. It's dedicated upskilling things
like that, right? That's that's a standard answer. Some managers
shouldn't coach and some reps should not be coached by their
managers. Reps will need continuous development and
someone they can speak with about the coaching element. But
the whole point of a coach is to ask questions and guide people
to answering their own questions. A manager's job, in
some cases, is to give answers, and a coach's job is not to give
answers. So how often it should be happening? Happening is, you
know, as often as needed, at the very beginning of a career,
perhaps mainly coaching, every 123, days. Whereas, you know, if
you've had 30 years in sales, you're actually going to
probably shy away from a coach because you might not even want
to
Mark Ackers: be called out. Talk to me more about that. What?
What is your experience of the average manager and their
coaching ability.
Unknown: This comes from not my experience as a coach E but my
experience of selling to sales managers and sales leaders.
Typically the route is, you were a wonderful rep, so let's put
you in charge of a bunch of other reps, and then you can
just, you know, create a bunch more use right? That's the
standard track for for managers. And someone goes, Wait, I can
make money off somebody else's deals and earn a commission on
their percentage as well as my own. Yeah, sure, I'll do that.
I'll just tell them what I did, and then they get numbers
focused, and the skills that helped them really excel as a
rep are the exact. Opposite skills that help them as a
manager. Harvard Business Review did deals on did did work on
this. Years ago, I studied, I learned about this in college.
Number one skill of a of a sales manager is listening. That is
not necessarily, although it should be, but that is not
necessarily the number one skill of a top performing sales rep.
The idea is that most managers are results focused and results
oriented. From a numbers perspective, coaches are growth
focused and progression focused. So they're not necessarily
always focused on numbers. They're they're focused on, I
guess expanding the human being that's in front of them. And
those are not always the same, and they should they shouldn't
have to be. You know, sometimes, if you need a hardcore numbers
driven manager that can instill fear in a bunch of junior reps,
and that's what your business is built on,
they're not going to be a good coach, and that's on purpose. I
Mark Ackers: couldn't agree more. But therein lies the
challenge, because we spoke about this earlier on, you feed
up as a manager, and therefore you have your own goals, your
own objectives. You've got your own reports to put together, and
it's almost an impossible task to be a manager and a coach,
because you have your own agenda. You have things that you
need that team to do, and that might not align to their growth
needs, and therein lies, lies the challenge. And that's why we
have people like you and my sales coach to be that external
person that isn't connected to the goals, isn't connected to
the to the company, number and visiting and you can spend your
time what you're very good at not being connected to the
outcome. This is about being connected to the individual and
their needs. What's the one thing that you do consistently
as a coach to really help reps level up?
Unknown: Every rep has a stupid idea in their head that I need
to squash. And it's not the same one, but it is every rep has
this limiting belief, or a limiting belief, or just
something in their head that they believe about themselves
that is not reality. If you say I'm bad at cold calling, or I'm
not a good salesperson, or even something as innocuous as I
shouldn't be here, or I'm the worst person on this team.
There's a lot of limiting beliefs the reps don't know they
have. And they will come to a coaching session with someone
like myself, and they'll say it out loud, and I'll go, Hang on.
What? Where did that come from? What are we talking about here?
And my job is to pull them back into reality and go, hang on.
You're telling me that because you missed target last month,
and you're working really hard, but you're selling to the French
market, and they're all gone in August, that you're a bad rep.
And they're like, Huh? I'm like, Yeah, that's what you're telling
me that is sort of key for me as a coach, is pulling these
limiting beliefs and just pulling these these things that
people just take for granted about themselves, all day, every
day, and then all of a sudden they speak in front of someone
like me, and I go, what? And I get to break those beliefs.
That's that's a big part of my job.
Mark Ackers: I see that all the time. One of the things that we
do at my sales coach is we provide assessments that assess
individuals and actually compares them to 2.4 million
other sales professionals. And one of the competencies it looks
at is self, self limiting beliefs, but actually supportive
beliefs. And one of the things that we see is in low to mid
performers is their supportive belief is low. And what that
means is they let what they think be true, become true,
right? So they think I'm a bad cold caller. They take that into
their work, and they don't do it. They shy away from it. And I
think this all ties back to that self limiting belief, that
imposter syndrome, that anxiety that turns into reluctance, that
turns into what is a real killer in sales or procrastination, not
doing anything, focusing on other tasks.
Unknown: Oh, man, I remember being busy for two hours a day
filling info at the CRM
Mark Ackers: exactly that. I'm going to end it with one final
question, cool. What's the best piece of advice a sales leader
has ever given you?
Unknown: It's not about you,
simple as that. It's not about me, but that works across every
other area of sales. Do what I mean, had a good day. Great, not
about you. Had a bad day. Great not about you. Someone hangs up
on you, and you know, I've been told some awful things. I'm
calling cold calls that have nothing to do with me. I was
just the wrong play, wrong place, the right time. My
messaging. Soon as I'm talking about me and what I do and how I
work, I'm in the wrong place, because it's not about me, it's
about them and their pains. When bad things have happened in
sales, it's not been about me when great things have happened
in sales, it's not been about me. This idea of it's not about
you, really puts things into perspective. You're still in
control. No, you're still in charge, still your
responsibility. But when you realize that the world of sales,
it's not about you, it's about everything and everybody else,
you start focusing on everything and everybody else, instead of
focusing on yourself.
Mark Ackers: It's a great answer. The only thing I'd add
to that, as you said, it's across sounds. I think that's
across life. I think if you can put it's not about you at the
front of your mind, and engage other people like the
conversations you have, what you learn like just be interesting
other people to be interesting. It's one of the worst habits you
can see in someone is when you start talking and they try,
they're trying to connect with you, but they make it about
them, right? It's like, oh, yeah, that's happened to me. And
all of a sudden you're hearing their story. And it comes back
down to what we said early on, those insecurities that need to
be like that, that little professor, where you want to
connect with that person, and the only way, you know, do that
is to talk about the same thing, but make it about you, because
that's where you're comfortable. I think that is one of the
things that you have to break in sales, and you do that by
learning it. So I think whoever gave you that advice really knew
what they're doing, and I'm sure stood up with shed. Think
whoever gave you that advice really knew what they're doing,
and I'm sure stood up with shed. Can I
Unknown: give you a second free one? Please? Second free one.
And this was given, I can't remember the exact context, but
it switched my brain when it came to sort of like internal
promotions and things like that, or just how I worked. Everyone
will tell you, it's not about what you know. It's about who
you know. That's incorrect. It's about who knows you. It's very
different. It's not about who you know in your sort of
corporate ladder or internal stuff. It's about who knows you,
so making sure that you're in front of the right person with
the right message at the right time, and that the internal
conversations are being had about you, that's key. So don't,
don't think about it as you know. It's not about what I
know. It's about who I know. Doesn't matter who you know.
It's about who knows you and Associates you with that
specific thing that's going to be key for quote, brand
building. But internal brand is what got me my my promotions in
sales left and in Google, and what got me from Google to sales
loft, and then what got me from sales left to going out on my
own. So make sure that when you're focusing all this stuff,
it's about who knows you as well, really,
Mark Ackers: please. You added that Brian, that was, that was
really, really interesting. Um, that does bring us to the end of
the podcast. Even what you just said there, I can ask so many
questions about that, but mindful of time, where can
listeners find more about you and connect with you, what tell
us more about what you're
Unknown: doing today? So you're gonna look you're gonna find me
on LinkedIn. That's the number one place to find me. I'm gonna
ask you a request of you, though, when you find me on
LinkedIn, if you've come for me from this podcast, or if we're
already connected, just drop me a message on LinkedIn that says,
you know, hey, saw you on that podcast. Loved it, hated it.
Hated your accent, hated your background, whatever. Why are
your face covered in spots? Those kinds of things, right?
And the reason that I say that is not for my benefit, it's,
it's for yours. What I say this on every webinar I do, if, let's
say, in a year's time, you reach out to me needing help with
something, and I scroll up and I see that we've already spoken
briefly about the podcast that I did, and I've got really
positive associations with this podcast, then I'll go, oh yeah,
cool. I'll help that person, rather than the dozens of people
who will reach out and go, Hey, Brian, can I have 10 minutes of
your time to pick your brain about X problem? And about X
problem? I will be more likely to help. And I would recommend
you do this with every single person that you listen to on a
podcast or or a webinar or a live event or anything like
that. Just send them a quick message when you're connecting,
saying, I saw I found you on X thing because it will benefit
you and it benefits us as well, because people we love to know
where, where and how people come from, come to us. You.