Jeb Blount on Budget Battles, AI Coaching Tools, & Motivating Complacent Reps (Ask Jeb)

0:00Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. Amex Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash amexcorporate. Terms apply. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blount, best-selling 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. Nice to meet you, Jeff. Thank you so much. My question is, how do you get budget for outbound?

0:38Because now I'm moving into a leadership role and I want to be able to say, hey, this is a worthwhile thing. Yes, it has a dollar amount attached to it, but it's no more expensive than any trade show we ever go to. And we're just looking at leads in that case. You know, there's more of a value. I think getting budget for yourself shouldn't be too hard. Part of it's on us. Part of the onus is on us to give you the material that you need to say this is worthwhile. And we recognize that, which is not a lot of money when you think about it, but for budgets it is. So if you're doing that for yourself, what we need to do is give you the ammunition to go and say, this is why I want to go there.

1:11And most companies will be OK with that. I mean, I work for companies who always said, yeah, go do that. And I'm good with my own people who say, can give me a legitimate reason. Here's what I'm taking away from it. So if you want to get money for the rest of your team, there's a couple of things you can do. You can do it as a reward. So I'm going to take my best people. So you can say, I want to have like$5 ,000 in a bucket that I can send them. And there's travel calls as well. If you work for a small company, you do as a team event. When we first started doing this, we did this for small companies because big companies can afford to have sales kickoff meetings, small companies can't.

1:41So a lot of people who come to Outbound, they bring their entire team and that's their sales kickoff meeting. And that's one of the reasons why we're doing it at this resort this year is because it's such a neat place to take your team. The teams who come get time to huddle, to work, to go through what they've learned. And then there's cool places to eat so that you can go out and spend time with each other. So you can make that case as well. Those are the ways that I would do it. Reward, small team, we're taking everybody because this is gonna be our training event this year. And then for yourself, I think if we can add the leadership component on, it's a lot easier for you to make the case that I'm learning how to drive outbound in our team.

2:15That's great. Thanks for that. Perfect. Dennis, I think you had a question. I do, Jeb. Thanks. This is a new technology of recording sales calls, like to have a game film, a game tape. But what is new is something I'm working with. I'd love your opinion on it. I'm using AI to dissect the calls. How many questions were asked? What kind of questions? Open-ended, closed-ended? Did the salesperson try to at least address the needs? It depends on the prompts. But have you had any experience with anything like that? And what would be your advice, the pitfalls, the pros, the cons? I've got a client right now that's testing it at scale.

2:50So there's a company, they record every call and it uploads all the calls. It's not working very well at scale. The only way that it can work at scale is that they have to tell the AI all of the keywords, everything they wanted to say. And sales is messy enough that with the consultative type of sale, that doesn't really work. If you're doing it in a small scale where you're pulling the transcripts and you're dropping them to the chat GPT, and then you have a specific prompt that says, give me a ratio of open-ended versus closed-ended. test that prompt, and then it gives you an accurate answer.

3:20I think it can be a really good tool for coaching. That then can get a little bit messy over more than a handful of salespeople. But where it can help you, and this is for all the leaders, is let's just say that the sales calls are either on the phone or they're in a virtual environment. You can easily grab the transcripts, drop them in the chat GPT, and you can say, give me a highlight of all the times they use this keyword? How many times did they use this? Or what type of questions did they ask? I'm sitting here doing this blind, so I don't know what prompts you're using, but I would play around with the prompts.

3:52That could be a really great place to begin a side-by-side or a ride-along with someone. When I say side-by-side, you're going to sit and watch them make some calls, or you're going to sit down and do a one-to-one with them, especially if you're trying to find them doing things right. You could also look at words you don't want to say. You could have ChatGPT do that for you as well. You can also have ChatGPT do a summary. So I do this for podcasts. Like I'll just drop an audio transcript. I'll say, give me a summary of this conversation in bullet points, and it'll just give you a quick summary.

4:22I think from a coaching standpoint that it's a brilliant way to speed up your ability to become aware of the sales behaviors. The key thing, as you begin to perfect those prompts, build a prompt library and then play with them to see if you get different answers. The pitfall is everybody's figuring out that the software companies just want to sell you the software. But when you really get into it, is it really creating something that allows you to coach? And I've got insanely mixed results with my clients. I don't have anybody going, damn, this is a home run. They've knocked it out of the park.

4:57But I think the way you're doing it is brilliant. I got to go play with that. It's experimental. And the secret sauce is the prompts. And if you don't get the result that you want, you change the prompts. And that's the cool thing. And you can keep changing them until you get the result that you want. And you can even ask the AI to tell you a better prompt. Thanks. 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 Notepin 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.

5:32Plod 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 Note Pen 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. This is a question by Greg who couldn't be here. And Jeb, how do I create urgency to sharpen the sales saw and hone their skills for my two senior successful reps, there seems to be a lack of desire to do so.

6:09Got someone who's been selling for a long time, they're pretty successful and they get complacent. That's the conversation I had earlier with a large software company who said, they got all these enterprise reps and they're all complacent and they're not chasing new opportunities. There's a couple of ways you look at it. One way of looking at it is, are they successful at what they're doing? In other words, you gave them a quota and they're achieving their quota. And you look at them and go, they're not really honing their skills, but somehow or another, they're making their number every single year.

6:35In some cases, you got to think, am I wasting my time and energy trying to get someone to believe the same thing I believe when they're actually doing exactly what I asked them to do? Sometimes what happens is we get attached to their potential. We want them to be excited about growing and developing, but they just don't want to. We were talking to a company, a small sales team, about a team hub on Sales Grave University, and they were telling us about their salespeople. Same thing, they wanted them to invest in themselves. They were, I call them crusty old sales people that have been around for a long time.

7:04And they're like, hey, they don't like learning anything. And I said, this is not the right solution for you. I mean, I really appreciate you. I'd love to have your money, but your people aren't going to use it because they don't want to use it. And we're not going to be able to motivate them somehow into using it. Second answer is if they're not hitting their numbers, right? Are they're being inconsistent with their numbers? Or if you see there's a major change coming and they're not going to be able to get over that hump. That's when you need to sit down with them and have a transparent conversation.

7:30The world has changed. You've changed. Things have changed. And we need to start changing as well. And I want to understand you, what your goals are, what you want, what you're trying to accomplish. And I always start there like, hey, we got a problem. Things are changing. But I want to understand what you want. Because sometimes what happens is we try to force training or development or professional growth down their throats versus saying, what is it that you want? Engage them in a conversation. Find out what they value. Find out what their goals are. And then have them talk to you about what they would like as a professional development plan.

8:02If it's something that doesn't make a lot of sense to you and they're willing to step into it, praise them and let them do it. Support it. But work on a personal professional development plan for them that they're willing to buy into. Because what happens in a lot of cases is once a person starts learning and doing things, then they're more likely to keep learning and doing things. The third thing that I've done in my career that's really helped me with the crusty mature, been around for a long time salesperson, because they come to my trainings, they're like, I've been to a dozen of these things and blah, blah, blah, blah.

8:32And I know how to turn them around because I go, cool, you know a lot of stuff. Come up here and help me teach it. That's what you do. You have a sales meeting. You say, I need your help with this. Can you do some research and find out some information and teach this for me? And what you'll find is that they like to do that. And when they're teaching, they're learning. So get them engaged in helping pull up your sales team, sharing their wisdom, play to their ego. You're so super smart. You're amazing. Like you go to Salesforce conferences. I bet you know a lot about Salesforce. Could you walk our team through how you use it?

9:04And they'll lean into it. If they're failing and they won't lean into it, it's time to go get a new salesperson, figure out how to top grade that. But those are the things that have worked for me in my career with the crusty salesperson that says, I don't need to know anything.

9:30We'll see you next time.