Does Your Prospect Think You Roll Back Odometers?

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0:35Pick up that guide today at belaysolutions.com forward slash gravy or text gravy to 55123. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, bestselling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. I'm Jeb Blunt, Jr., your host. And here's a fundamental question that every sales organization faces. Are your reps pushing products or are they trusted advisors? We talk about that a lot on the Sales Gravy Podcast. And joining me today is Paul Watts, founder and CEO of Base Over Apex, a global leader in technical sales training and a major sponsor of Outbound this year.

1:21Paul is also the award-winning host of the Sales Reinvented podcast, which has over 520 episodes, so go check that out. Paul is on a mission to change the negative perception of sales and elevate selling into a respected, honorable profession. Welcome to the show, Paul. It's great to be here. You're on a mission to change the negative perception of sales, and I think that that's a mission we both share, especially with our podcast and the content that we put out and all the information that we try and help other organizations learn. Why is that mission so important to you? And bringing sales back into an honorable light is the crux of the mission that we're on with all of this training that we do.

1:58Why does it mean something to you? And can you articulate kind of where you came to that point? I'm sure every salesperson who's listening to this podcast has experienced an example of what I'm about to describe. I started my career as an engineer and worked in engineering for a number of years before I decided to move into sales. and I still remember the day that I told my parents that I was leaving engineering and I was going into sales. I think I can still hear the moment that my mother's heart broke. Did it sound like a bunch of plates falling on the ground? Absolutely. Yes, it did. What's really interesting is you think about all the times that you've ever been to a barbecue or you've ever been out meeting a number of people for the first time and we're all kind of introducing ourselves and what we do for a living and you've got the doctors, the firemen, all the different positions And then you come up and you tell the group of people that you're in sales.

2:48And usually the first question that you get asked is, how did you end up in sales? I don't know. That sounds like how did you end up in prison or how did you end up in jail, right? It sounds like it's not a career that people would aspire to be in. And I don't think we end up in sales. I think people who have the right characteristics gravitate towards a career in sales. But I think it's a wonderful, rewarding and honorable profession. And for that reason, I don't think we should be apologizing for the fact we're in sales. I think we should be celebrating that fact. And my goal is to put some swagger back into the step of salespeople.

3:20I like where you started that story. You go out, you're at an event or you go to a networking event that's kind of cross industry and has lots of different people in there. And you're just, you know, chumming it up with a few folks and they say, hey, what do you do? And you go, well, I work in sales and you can see the light leave their eyes. As you then explain your elevator pitch that you've practiced because your company trains you to practice your elevator pitch. and nobody wants to take your card because that's just a phone call they don't want to receive the next week. But I like that you also want to bring the swagger back to it.

3:49And it's always shocking to me when I walk into a space and I'm a proud salesperson and I put that honor behind it and it does shock people. They almost want you to apologize. Like, how did you end up in prison? And it is a really good analogy there. I think that the key crux here is pushy salespeople versus consultative selling. So you guys are training and you mentioned this in our green room, technical sales professionals, including people who are engineers and other technical salespeople. And you've drawn some interesting parallels between like a consultative selling model and the engineering design process.

4:21Can you help like walk through what that parallel is and maybe some of the finer points that might help that analogy flesh itself out? I think first and foremost, one of the things that we do when we're training engineers or technical salespeople is we have to redefine what selling is and what it isn't. Selling's not what you see when you watch Wolf of Wall Street or Glengarry Glen Ross or Boiler Room. It's nothing like that, or it shouldn't be anything like that. So in our eyes, to use Connie Kodansky's quote, selling is solving people's problems for a profit. Once you think about selling in those terms, we're solving somebody's problem for a profit.

4:57You start to realize that selling is a helping profession. Selling is a profession that we should be proud of because we're out there helping people. We're helping organizations. We're helping them to improve. We're helping solve their challenges and their problems. So in that regard, if we think of selling that way, the natural next step would be a consultative approach because you can't solve somebody's problem until you fully understand it. And what we found by working with engineers and technical salespeople is that they often carry some of the strongest negative stereotypes towards sales.

5:29It's definitely something that they don't want to do. And I don't want to be associated with that. I'm very proud of my engineering degree. But once an engineer understands that selling is a process and consultative selling is just like the engineering design process, they realize that actually it's not sleazy. It's not slimy. It's not manipulative. It's not coercive. It's not pushing, pitching or persuading. It's basically developing a deep understanding of the other person's needs and challenges and objectives, and then designing and delivering a solution that meets them. So when you can put it in those terms, engineers really do get on board and technical salespeople really do get on board very quickly when they see it that way.

6:10It's interesting that you bring up, you know, Boiler Room, Glen Gary, Glen Ross, especially Wolf of Wall Street. If you watch Wolf of Wall Street and you think it's a movie about someone who defeated the odds and can make a lot of money, you've missed the point of that movie. He's a felon who cheated people out of lots and lots of money. But I work in the sales training field. I work with tons and tons and tons of sales teams. And it's interesting that, you know, there's almost this perception of Danny DeVito and Matilda, where he's rolling back the miles on this old beater car. And that's what sleazy salesy, pushy salespeople are.

6:38But almost no one actually acts like that in the real world. It's almost that people are missing these little notes in the sheet music that kind of tell a prospect that they are not as interested in solving a problem and they're more interested in getting a deal signed. And I wonder from your perspective as someone who trains technical salespeople who are naturally skeptical about sales process and what you teach them, what are some of the key fundamentals that make a salesperson consultative versus what might lead someone to believe that you're a transactional seller? I think the first thing is what your intention is.

7:12And I believe if you can set your intention in the right place, a lot of the things that we're talking about kind of fall into place. So we talk about cultivating genuine intent and genuine intent is where you genuinely have the other person's best interests at heart. You're not thinking about what can I take away from this interaction? What am I going to get out of this meeting? You're thinking about what value can I bring to this other person? How can I help? And I think if you get your intention in the right place, a lot of the negative stereotype characteristics that we think of, I think they disappear altogether.

7:48So for us, you know, one of the key tenants of our training program is, of course, cultivating genuine intent. Genuine intent is so fundamental, but it's sneaky because most organizations have KPIs. They have numbers you have to hit, you carry a quota. And a lot of people get into the role and again, maybe they fell into it. They ended up in sales and now they have a number to go hit and their intention for better or for worse is to hit the number and not to help solve problems. And when you see that distinction in a sales role, it becomes really apparent who is going to be successful long term, and who might be able to hit a number one month over the next but 10 years down the road, they might struggle with creating genuine connections and solving real problems.

8:27And this brings me to you know, why I have you on the podcast today, which is you guys will be sponsoring outbound base over apex will be in Las Vegas. And I wanted to walk through your flagship training program. So you've got professional selling reinvented, and I understand you kind of approach development a little differently than other sales training organizations or maybe even internal training teams. So start with fleshing out what this program is and why it's had such an impact on the organizations you've worked with. You know, fundamentally, a lot of the great sales training companies out there, they build a sales training program and then they hope that it kind of covers the competencies that they would like to cover.

9:05We looked at this like engineers, we looked at this and we basically built the competency framework first. So we looked at what are the skill sets, what are the characteristics, what are the behaviors, what are the criteria that we want to cover? What does a modern sales professional need to succeed? And then once we understood the competency framework and the competency matrix, we then designed a sales training program that would teach those competencies. So I think fundamentally that's one of the key differences around how our program is structured. We believe it covers everything that a modern sales professional needs to both survive and thrive in this changing sales landscape.

9:45That's one of the fundamental differences. And then I would say it's the way we deliver the program that really changes behaviors. So I'm sure a lot of the people who are listening, this will resonate with many of you. I think we've all been to that great sales training program where the instructor or the facilitator was extremely charismatic and you leave that training invigorated and excited about going away and implementing what you've learned. And then two weeks later, the training manual's back on your bookshelf, it's gathering dust, and you have reverted back to what you were doing previous or prior to the training.

10:19And unfortunately, if we treat training like an event, which many organizations do, that's what we end up with. We end up with a short-term uptick in sales, and then we revert back to what we always did. So when we designed our training program, we worked with learning and development specialists to encapsulate the best stickiness into our training programs. And we've adopted a four-legged stool approach or four pillars to our training success. So the first pillar is that we train leaders first. We train the leaders within your organization first. Because ultimately, it is the leaders that are going to hold the sales team accountable.

10:57It is the leaders that are going to coach and reinforce those behaviors. So we start with the leadership group first, and we teach them the concepts, the frameworks, the systems, the methodologies. Because often, sales leaders were just top performing salespeople who got promoted. And the skills that made you a top performing individual contributor and not the same skills that will make you a top performing sales leader. So we give them the coaching and mentoring skills that they need to be able to reinforce and coach and mentor their salespeople. So that's the first thing we do is we actually train the leadership group.

11:33The second thing we do, of course, is we then train the salespeople themselves. So we put them through the training program because you have to train people. You can't just assume that people have these skills inherently, or we'll just throw them in the deep end and they'll figure it out for themselves. We need to give them some best practices. We need to give them frameworks and systems to follow so they can be successful. So we train the salespeople. The next thing that we do is we test the competency of the salespeople. So we work with a third party association and through our partnership with the IPA, the Institute for Professional Advancement, We actually test salespeople against a competency framework.

12:12And we have an examination that will determine whether or not that salesperson actually meets the required standards. And where they fall short of the required standards, those become part of their training and development plan for how we fill those gaps. And then the last thing, the last pillar is we hard-code these behaviors into the CRM system. If you really want salespeople to adopt a new process or a new methodology, hard core that into the CRM system. And then the only way they can enter information into that CRM system is by following the process that you want them to follow. Let's start with number four.

12:48Now, imagine you customize your program for the customers that come to your door. They say, hey, we want to bring in the sales reinvented methodology and we want to get this program involved. you do a diagnosis, you go through the engineering process and you build it around them rather than fitting them into the box. What does it look like when you get everything into this theorem? What are some success stories or maybe a case study that, you know, you seem just really light you up because it was so awesome that you were able to get to that step. And they kind of took hold of the entire process that you taught them.

13:20There was an organization we worked with, they work in industrial wholesale, which is one of the free markets that we serve. So heavy equipment, manufacturing, industrial wholesale. This company was a very large US industrial wholesaler. We trained over 250 of their salespeople. And in parallel, or actually slightly ahead of the training, we worked closely with their own IT and CRM experts, their internal CRM experts, to embed this methodology within their CRM system. So when the salespeople had finished the training, they would then be able to use their own internal CRM to enter opportunities, but to follow the sales process that we trained them on.

14:00And the feedback that we've had from the president of the organization, the VP of sales, is that they are extremely happy with the sales results that they're seeing as a result of the training. So they have seen a significant increase in sales, but more so they were happier with the fact that their team now are using the CRM. They see true value in using their CRM system. They don't feel like it's just big brother keeping tabs on them. They actually recognize that a CRM is the salesperson's tool first and is sales leadership's tool second. So they're actually using the CRM in the way that we would want salespeople to be using the CRM.

14:41It's adding value to them in their sales process. It's increasing their chances of success. It's increasing deal velocity and ultimately it's helping them all to be more successful sales people it's giving them more confidence so that was a really feel-good story for base over apex that this four pillar approach actually does work going into a follow-up call i want every important note right at my fingertips not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes and with plod note pin s i always have them because it's a wearable portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting.

15:16Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepin S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. It brings a joy to my heart to hear that a company is implementing sales training into their CRM. Like, hey, this is such a unique process that a lot of companies don't ever go through.

15:51And I think that it is literally business changing. It's like life changing to the salespeople on the ground. So let's go back to leaders and the leadership group. You work with industrial wholesale, manufacturing, heavy equipment, and you start there. It leads all the way to getting this implemented in the CRM, but there's a lot of companies in the world. When you're having a conversation with a group, especially a leadership group, what lets you know that they are ready to take hold of the professional selling reinvented program or any of the other modules that you teach throughout your entire organization?

16:19You know, one of the things that we are really big on when we're interviewing and meeting through discovery potential clients is we're really big on understanding the culture that the organization has. And do they care about their salespeople? Do they truly care about their salespeople? Is this a checkbox? Are they just ticking a box or do they actually want their salespeople to improve? Do they want their salespeople to be able to live life on their own terms? Are they genuinely invested in that salesperson's success? And we think we've gotten pretty good at spotting the organizations that are just checking a box.

16:57And we also believe we've gotten very good at spotting the organizations that actually care about their people and recognize that your people are your greatest asset. And you have to protect your greatest asset. You have to nurture it. You have to develop it. So if you don't train your salespeople, how will they ever improve? How will they ever get better? How will they ever deliver what you need them to deliver next year and the year after when the sales targets have gone up? So for sales to get better, salespeople need to get better. And for salespeople to get better, sales leaders need to be better.

17:33I can imagine that as you're in these conversations and you're seeing the different qualifiers come up to play in your own sales process, you see the people who are checking boxes versus the people who are investing in their biggest asset, their people, you start to see a few things that come down the pipeline, which is maybe they've really got an eye for developing their folks, but technical salespeople have a very particular way of going about their process. Not in all cases are they delivering on business acumen. They have a good engineering knowledge, but maybe not so much being able to relate that to how they would help another business solve their problems.

18:09And you have a key module inside of your trainings. It's called business acumen and your return on time invested ROTI. You teach salespeople concepts like revenue versus profit and margin versus markup and return on time invested and all these little good acronyms that we have. Why do you believe that just like financial literacy, this is so important, but overlooked by a lot of training organizations when it comes to training their sales teams? Yeah, that's a great question, Jeb. And we believe at Brace Over Apex that salespeople are in effect business owners. They own a book of business within their organization.

18:42So if you're an account manager, you have a group of accounts that you're responsible for and you have to maximize the profitability of those accounts. You have to make sure that you retain their business going forward. You need to squeeze as much potential business out of those accounts as you possibly can. It's extremely important as a sales professional that we have that basic understanding of, as you term, financial literacy, that we know the importance of cash flow to an organization. So we understand the importance of getting customers to pay on time or pay faster. We need to know the difference between gross profit and net profit, EBITDA, margin versus Marco.

19:20A modern sales professional needs to be financially literate in our opinion. So we put a lot of time and energy into helping salespeople understand what their time is worth to be able to make those informed decisions about where and how they're investing their time and what is a good use of their time. So without that financial literacy, ultimately they will just follow the instructions that they're given. But with financial literacy, they can make their own informed decisions. This is a really cool topic that you train on, this financial literacy of business. It's something that most sales professionals, whether they are engineers or they come from other backgrounds, they sort of learn over a period of years and just by hard-nosed experience and asking the wrong questions and, you know, making mistakes all over the place.

20:05What are some of the ways that you see people exercise this training in the field? How does this become relevant once they kind of leave the training program and they start to have conversations with real life prospects where they have to diagnose challenges and then ultimately come up with solutions. This feels really, really important, but in the field, what does it look like? What we tend to find is that this directly translates to increased profit margin because weak salespeople tend to sell through discounting and discount. We believe that a top performing salesperson, instead of sharpening their pencil, needs to learn how to sharpen their value propositions.

20:42And sharpening your value proposition requires you to have that financial literacy. So you need to know all the different levers that you can pull to increase the profitability for an account. So one of the exercises we teach in our program is helping salespeople to understand what are all the different levers that we can be pulling that will actually improve the profitability of an account. For example, a simple one would be getting the client to pay earlier, which doesn't just improve cash flow, but actually increases profit. Because once the money is in our account, it's earning interest for us as opposed to earning interest for the client.

21:18So being financially literate helps you to understand all the little small things that you can be negotiating in a deal that help increase your organization's profitability. And ultimately, profit is not a dirty word. It's not something that we should be afraid to discuss. We need to be able to make a healthy profit in order to be in business two years, five years from now to support the customer with their next challenges. Because of course, if we're not making a profit and our competition is eventually we're going to lose, we're going to go out of business. And it helps with all of your internal conversations too.

21:52Sometimes the hardest sale you have to make is not to the customer, but it's actually to your internal team, right? And so if you have business and financial literacy, you're able to speak to the value, not only for your business, but for your CFO who's approving this deal that's coming through or the operators who need to understand like, look, this might actually be less in terms of total revenue amount, but we're getting cash flow faster because they're willing to pay with a net 30 days instead of net 90. And once that's in our account, you're going to make up that little margin with interest paid.

22:21And it's a great deal. We can get the cash now rather than waiting. And that's like a big conversation that most salespeople aren't having. Talking about conversations, I want to dive into another area that you train on, which is communication with style, communicating with style. It's sort of like Buzz Lightyear, falling with style. It's like flying, but a little different. I think you train people who otherwise have really great value props, have really great value positions, have a really great logical reason for a prospect to make a decision in the affirmative to move forward with them, but otherwise lose that deal because of communication style.

22:52So what is it that you're training in that module? What are you seeing in the field? And how are you helping, again, technical salespeople overcome communication challenges when it comes to their interactions with prospects. This is one of my favorite modules in the program, and I know it's a very popular module from our training program as well, but we look at communication styles. There are many different psychometric tools available, DISC, Myers-Briggs, Colors, Insights. I mean, you name it, there are so many different psychometric tools like this. Communication styles is the tool that we use, and basically it categorizes people into one of four dominant styles.

23:28And those are driver, expressive, amiable, and analytic. And what we know to be true is that the greatest barriers to sales success is actually communication style bias. And yet, it's one of the least well-known and it's one of the least discussed. When you understand that more often than not, you didn't lose the deal because you didn't have the right solution or or you couldn't meet the customer's lead time, or you couldn't put forward a proposal that met their financial needs. It's none of those things. More often than not, it's because your solution didn't resonate with the person you were selling it to.

24:06And it didn't resonate with them because you weren't presenting the information in a format, in a style that would resonate with them. You weren't sending the information in a way that they like to receive information. And communication styles helps salespeople to understand that we all have a tendency to sell the way we like to buy. So we tend to only do business with people who buy the way we like to sell. So what we have to recognize is that if what we're saying doesn't appear to be resonating with the other person, we need to understand why that is. And more often than not, it's because we're not speaking their language.

24:40And then we need to be able to convert our message into their language. And that's what communication styles is all about. and we teach salespeople how to recognize the style of the person that's opposite you and then to understand your own style and what changes you need to make in order to be able to communicate more effectively with that person. People live their entire lives communicating in their style and then they get into a sales role or they've been in a sales role for many years and they're very practiced at their own style and now you're teaching them new skills to recognize other people's styles and flex themselves to that communication style so they don't lose a deal that's very good for them just because they couldn't communicate in the right way.

25:20What are some of the biggest barriers you see people have to overcome in order to step into the shoes of other kinds of communication styles? The biggest challenge that we find, it's being aware of this. Once you become aware of this, it's then keeping it top of mind when you're in front of a customer in the moment, because that in itself is quite challenging. You know, if you're in a tough meeting and what you're saying doesn't appear to be resonating, it takes a very confident salesperson to be able to just take a second to ask themselves, am I saying this in the right way? Or am I saying this in the wrong way?

25:52Is that why it's not resonating? And then just being mindful of that in a meeting can make a whole heap of difference in the meeting in terms of the way that you will then adjust your communication and can have a huge effect on the outcome. A big part of the training is really helping salespeople to be self-aware, to have the confidence to pause for a second or a couple of seconds and ask themselves that question. And then to be kind of looking at the other person for the clues as to what communication style they are, which will then allow them to be able to know what they need to change in order to be able to make their value proposition more compelling.

26:31This has been a really great conversation about what you guys do, how you serve different teams, and ultimately your four pillars of success for any training program around leaders, around the salespeople, around following up with the tests that help people make sure that they are holding themselves to the standard and then implementing that across the CRM. Really, really in-depth training in what you bring to the marketplace. I definitely want to encourage anyone listening to this podcast, especially if you're joining us at Outbound, you can check out Base Over Apex and everything they do and connect with Paul, especially his podcast with over, again, 520 episodes, the award-winning show Sales Reinvented Podcast.

27:06To end the conversation, you are sponsoring Outbound Conference. This will be in Las Vegas this year. We're so excited to have you there. You're going to be bringing a whole booth. What is something you're most excited about sharing with the leaders and the salespeople who come to Outbound while you're on site? Well, first of all, I mean, I'm very excited to meet yourself, Jeb. Of course, your father, who is somebody that I respect and admire. I've interviewed many of the actual speakers who are going to be speaking at Outbound. So first and foremost, I'm just excited to meet all of the speakers and to hear what they have to say.

27:37about what the latest and greatest techniques are for Outbound. Why are we there and what are we excited about? Well, I think one of the things that we're very excited about talking to people who stop by our booth is actually sharing our new CRM system that we are launching, which is a Microsoft Dynamics platform, but with the base over Apex methodology and generative AI embedded within it. We've created a CRM solution that actually does not require salespeople to go through the administrative burden that they all despise. And why many CRMs fail is because salespeople don't want to enter information.

28:15We have a generative AI tool that allows you to upload transcripts from Teams, from Zoom, from wearable AI like Claude and Lucerne technology, so that you can actually get the information into the CRM without having to go through the laborious task of having to type it all up. And then, of course, our AI will actually automatically append those notes to the appropriate accounts, will assign the actions, and even has a coaching tool that will tell you and score your meeting and tell you what you did well, but also where the gaps were. So we're really excited to showcase this at the show. This is going to be incredible.

28:56I'm so glad we were able to have this conversation because for those listening, I did not know that this was going to be launching. Now I'm really excited to have Paul and his team at Outbound joining us in Las Vegas. We're going to be at the Red Rocks Resort, and I can't wait for you to be a part of all of the events. We have a bowling event. It'll be on the VIP day. Since you've interviewed some of our esteemed speakers, who are you going to challenge to beat at our bowling event on our VIP night? Who's on your list to take down? I don't know if I'm going to take anybody down because bowling is not a skill that I possess, but I'm just really excited to be around these thought leaders.

29:29And I don't care if I come first or last in bowling, but I'd really love to spend some time with yourself, with your father, Victor, Amy Franco. There's just so many people. So I'm just looking forward to being a sponge at this event and soaking up all of the wonderful insights and information that's being shared. A very nice political answer. I'm letting Victor and Amy know that we're taking them down, OK? I appreciate you joining us on the Sales Gruby podcast. And look, y 'all go check out Base Over Apex. They've got a new CRM solution that they're going to be launching, and you should go ask them about that while you're at the show.

30:01You should also connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Go listen to his podcast and, again, go to Base Over Apex and check everything that they've got out from the training to technical solutions. If you are in the heavy equipment, industrial, wholesale, or manufacturing space, you've got to go connect with these folks. Again, lots and lots of good information, and we will see you at Outbound Conference in Las Vegas. Thanks so much for joining us on the Sales Gravy Podcast, and we'll catch you next time. Thank you.