The Brutal Truth About Sales in 2025

24:54John Barrows:What does your solution do for them? I'm sure you have founders who had a vision for why they started this business. Go knock on your CEO. You want to elevate yourself in any organization. I don't give a shit how big it is, by the way. Go knock on your founder's door or your CEO's door and say, hey, I'm a new rep here or whatever it is. I'm trying to do my best to represent us. Could I just grab lunch with you? Could I just pick your brain here and help understand, why did you start this company in the first place? What keeps you going here? Why do you do what you do? And you tap into why the founders created this.

25:35John Barrows:You'll hear that passion. You will hear that transfer of enthusiasm. When you go talk to happy customers, they'll tell you why. And then you can internalize that and start to project that to everybody else. Our book is out now. Sales is therapy is available everywhere. For people who are looking to get better at communicating. Asking better questions, closing more deals, and bringing in more clients. Beware it is not for the faint of heart or for closed-minded people. You can buy it in all good shops. Links below. I love that. Let's stick on this then, right? So let's stick on the belief idea, the idea of helping and giving value.

26:15So this 22-year-old that's going to be speaking to CISOs, they've done the research, they've done the value. I've connected on LinkedIn. I've tried to give them the value. They're probably getting a million LinkedIn messages. I've done the same on email, probably a million. And that cell phone number is staring at me. Today's the day. I'm going to pick up the phone. I've probably got 27 seconds to make that work. What advice would you give them based on what you know about cold calling? Cold calling.

26:41John Barrows:Well, are we talking Europe or are we talking the United States? let's go let's go us we'll go us first yeah because the gdpr has a big big impact on that as well as far as what you got to tell people here in the u.s we are a lot looser on our uh on on the contact information that we have and how we get it and all that other stuff so we have a lot more excuses to be able to make that phone call like oh sorry right whatever so um but regardless i think it you know ultimately it comes down to having a reason for your call and also not looking at cold calling as an independent scenario, right? Like if you look at cold calling as a silo where it's just, I got to make cold calls today and you're just ripping through a list, I don't know what to tell you.

27:19John Barrows:Well, I do. So there's the quality and quantity approach. Okay. Let's talk about the quantity approach. I just brought it up. If you're going to make cold calls, you know, I actually think making cold calls and sprinkling phone calls throughout the day is a drastic waste of time. I just, you can't get any momentum that way. You can't learn anything that way and whatever. And you, and you kind of have to be generic, right? So what do a lot of people do? They, they create, they do power hours. It's like, all right, cool. I'm going to do a power hour. I'm going to rip a list. Right. And again, good job right now we're focused.

27:50We maybe gain momentum, whatever problem with power hours is usually bring people bring

27:54John Barrows:their list. Okay. And their list is anybody and everybody who's in their territory. And quite frankly, I don't know about you, I am not bright enough. I am not that smart to be able to call a VP of sales in the SaaS industry, a director of IT in the manufacturing industry, a CMO in the financial services, and have relevant good conversations with each of them. I'm just not that bright. So with that approach, I have to be generic. I have to say stuff like, tell me about your business, or here's my pitch, right? Regardless, it's a generic pitch, and that's just not going to work. But if you hyper-focus on a singular persona, CISOs and financial services, whatever, well, now I can come up with a message that is relevant to CISOs and financial services.

28:37John Barrows:I can come up with two or three questions that are relevant to them to get them thinking. And I might even have a case study in my back pocket to tell a story or two about somebody just like them. Then I can go to work. And then it's, hey, thanks for taking my call. Can I get 30 seconds? not 27. That's cheesy in my opinion, but can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me or whatever intro you want to use, by the way. And by the way, here's another tip for people like how you introduce yourself matters. Literally how you say hello dictates the entire call. And that's something you can AB split test.

29:05John Barrows:So go into chat GPT and say, give me 10 different ways for me to intro to introduce myself on a cold call with a goal of me keeping them on the call to hear about what I have to say, pick the two that you like and test them. One of my favorites is, Hey, can I get 30 seconds? Tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me right? I usually get phone, fine. Who is this? What do you want? And this is John Barrows with JB sales. And actually the reason I'm calling is, and then whatever that is, we're working with other CISOs in the financial services industry to show them how to do X, Y, and Z. Got to be worth the conversation.

29:33John Barrows:You know, can I get some time on your calendar to have that conversation, right? Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat that way. And then if they say, well, you caught me now, kid, what do you want to talk about? It's like, oh, great. Well, you know what? I know you weren't expecting my call. So I'm going to be brief here. Do a little Sandler upfront front contract if you want. I'll be brief here. I got three or four quick questions about your current scenario. And then after that, I'll tell you how I think we may or may not be able to help. And after that, you can tell me whether it makes sense to take the next steps or not.

29:57John Barrows:Is that all right? Sure. Relevant question, relevant question, relevant question, tailored value proposition, close. So that flows if you want to hammer. My preferred state is the quality approach. I do some homework on you. I have a reason. There's a trigger event. There's some sort of relevance here. Hey, Zach, thanks for taking my call. Can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me? Who is this? What do you want? This is John with JB Sales. And actually, Zach, the reason I'm calling is I noticed recently you just hired this, did that, whatever it is. And we're working with a lot of other companies who are going through that process and they're using our training or whatever it is to help address that.

30:36John Barrows:And I was just wondering if you'd be open for a brief conversation to have that, right? Like that reason for your call that's relevant to them, you know, about their personalized, ideally with some research. So those are the two quality and quantities. But in general, also, you have to tie them to a contact strategy. You have to tie them to a story because if it's an individual thing, good luck with that. But if you're telling a story with your sequence, with your cadence and calling as a part of that, well, now you can start to justify it a lot more. Because if you tell me right now, I had to make cold calls and that's all I had to do, I'd probably, I'd probably leave sales because it's just not, it's a, it's, you're just hoping for the best needle in the haystack type of stuff.

31:16John Barrows:But also making cold, like the likelihood of you getting a connect right now these days, and then getting somebody who is worthwhile talking to, and then keeping them on the phone for more than 30 seconds and then closing them. I mean, like the likelihood of that happening in today's world is, I mean, I got the data. It's like 2%, something like that these days on average. So it's hard to justify phone as an independent thing. But if you look at it as a contact strategy and part of it, look, everything is about impression points these days. So that's why I think sales reps need to look at themselves as mini marketers.

31:51John Barrows:That call, right? That voicemail might have, you know, somebody might be sitting there reading it on their iPhone that pings them the memory. Oh shit. Yeah. I remember that email that that kid sent me. So let me go look at that. And then all of a sudden that's going to lead me to your LinkedIn profile that's going to lead me to your website that might lead me back to you and however I want to communicate with you. We test sequences where we just do all email and then email with phone, right? So touch three, five, and eight or phone or whatever it is. Same sequence, same message, same personas.

32:19John Barrows:When we do that, the overall, we don't get a lot of callbacks and connect rates, but the overall conversion ratio of the sequence with phone is typically five to 10 % higher than if it's just email. So if you think of it that way, now all of a sudden you can start to justify it a lot more nice you um you mentioned up top there around you need to be thinking about the way you say hello so you need to be thinking about the the whole thing and you made me think then there's a lot of people who might have read the sandler books let's say for example you mentioned sandler so we'll take sandler and then they say i'm doing the bits but it's not really landing like people are actually getting pissed off at me they're hanging up but then there's another guy in my team who's saying the exact same words and having the success so what are those bits that are kind of fundamental in kind of tone and delivery that make the difference?

33:07John Barrows:It's all individualized, man. That's science and art. You know, I think science, the science of sales, I've always been a science, science over art when it comes to sales, because I think the science lays the foundation for the art form to be that much more effective. This is why I can train all over the world because, you know, what kills me about training, U.S. training is, you You know, U.S. companies take U.S. training and trainers and ship them overseas and train it the exact same way in every other culture, assuming that that's the way to do it. And I mean, first of all, the ignorance of that is just palpable.

33:40John Barrows:But but also, you know, different people, I mean, different people like different personalities and forget about, you know, Europe versus U.S. I mean, Boston versus Georgia. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm about as direct and in your face as it gets when it comes to selling. I go down to Georgia, North Carolina. Like I can't use that same approach down there. They'll literally kick me out of their office, right? I'll offend 90 % of the people I talk to if I say what I say here compared to there. I actually got more in common Europeans than I do with Southerners here in the United States for crying out loud.

34:15John Barrows:I love Germans, for instance. They're my favorite group of people. They're as objective as it gets. There's no bullshit involved. And I love that. People think Bostonians are direct. Fucking Germans? shit. Yeah, man. I love you guys. So, you know, I, that's why I think it's, it's, it's not about like, Oh, make sure that you're happy tone. Like you, if you're, if you're not a happy type of person, don't fucking fake it. You know, like, should I use humor? Not if you're not funny. You know what I mean? Like, like cut the shit, stop trying to be, but you got to figure out your style. And so this is why the big, the biggest recommendation I have is, you know, somebody asked me if I could go back and tell my 22 year old self something, what would it be?

34:52number one answer to it is a b split test everything you do everything so figuring like

34:59John Barrows:let's talk about uh messaging CISOs and financial services come up with two different messages to CISOs and financial services make 20 phone calls with this approach make 20 phone calls with that approach see which one yields a higher response right intros google or chat gpt give me 10 intros that with the goal of you know keeping somebody on a cold call pick the two that you like. The next 20 calls, use this approach. Next 20 calls, use that approach. And be conscious of it. Be conscious of testing and trying things. We're doing the activities anyways. We might as well learn from them, right?

35:27John Barrows:So I think that's where you start to figure out what works for you compared to the kid next to you. Now, don't get me wrong. The kid next to you might be able to pick up on their tonality and you like that and you can adopt that to yours. But if you try to mirror them and you're not their personality, it actually might be worse because it won't be authentic to you. And so I, and I think authenticity is, is what people are craving right now. So if you can't figure out your style, this is why I used to rail on scripts and like screw scripts, you know, turn reps into robots. I don't mind them anymore because I, you know, I, I, I appreciate the fact that if you don't know what you don't know, you need something to go off of, right?

36:07John Barrows:But if, if you don't turn that script into your own or that presentation deck into your own very soon after you get certified or badged for your stupid bootcamp, then I don't understand what the point is of you is. Because I could record that and dump that voicemail in a thousand times faster and better than you can. I can record a presentation on a WebEx or Zoom session like this and send it out to anybody and everybody. I don't need somebody to act like a robot. I need somebody to be a fucking human here. And the way you figure that out is by constantly testing and trying different things to figure out what works for you compared to me.

36:48So when we think about founder-led sales, that's something that gets thrown around. I guess what's your take on founder-led sales versus sales teams? Who do you typically see outperforming?

37:03John Barrows:well i mean i think that's a it's a tough one because founder-led sales is usually you know one two three person companies right like they have to sell the founder always has to sell first and then they build a sales team so i don't think you can really have an effective sales team unless the founder actually understands how to sell uh and the funny thing is is you know i wrote this a while ago called the founder's dilemma, which is the perception of sales specifically from an engineering standpoint. So where it comes to is, you know, when an engineer starts a company or builds a product, right?

37:41John Barrows:Unfortunately, engineers always think sales is kind of a necessary evil, right? There's always this perception that the product is, that's what's great, right? You know, the product is best. So that's why. And I understand why they have that mentality. First of all, let's go back to the transfer of enthusiasm. I can take the nerdiest engineer. Like my first startup, I was one sales guy within 50 engineers. I was supporting 50 engineers. Okay. 10 of those engineers were Linux engineers. I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with a Linux engineer. They're a different breed, right? They will swear upside down and sideways that they're not in sales.

38:18John Barrows:Ugh, sales. I ain't in sales. No, I'm not. Blah, blah, Yeah, you are. What? No. Listen, do me a favor. Explain to me the last time you fixed something or found a bug in a software application or created something that was kind of interesting and unique. And you will watch them light up like a Christmas tree and be like, oh, the other day I was deep in this code and I found this fucking thing and boom, right? Holy shit, man. I need that. Like if I needed what you just told me right there, then you sold me, man, right? So that's what happens with founder-led sales is they come up with a product.

38:58John Barrows:They obviously have passion for that product, right? Because they created it themselves. And so what do they do? They go out and they talk to friends, families, and fools, like a very nice audience and a receptive audience. And they get a lot of good feedback early on. Like, man, that's awesome. They might even get a couple of sales early on because people want it. And then after that, they're like, oh, shit, man. And everybody needs this. You know, sales is easy. Let me hire a VP of sales and go to work, right? And then that's the VP of sales doesn't have the knowledge, doesn't have the passion, doesn't have the network that they do.

39:27John Barrows:So they inevitably fail. And then the engineer is like, oh, I knew sales was a fucking nightmare here, right? Let's do a marketing approach. And then they dump into marketing, right? And it's this game that they play. So if you don't respect it, I see very few companies fail because their product doesn't work. These days, if your product doesn't do what it's supposed to do and it's comparable to the market, you're not even at the table. So right now, that's table stakes. I've very rarely seen companies fail because the product market fit or it didn't work. I've seen almost every company fail because I can't sell the shit.

39:58John Barrows:And so if you're a founder and you don't have a healthy respect for sales and build your entire organization to support sales, I think you're destined for failure. Right. And I tell sales reps all the time. I go, if you're looking for a job, look for a founder, look for founders that are business slash sales founders, not engineer founders, because you will always be a second class citizen as an engineer. If you're working for an engineer founder in rare cases, like the Mark Benioffs of the world, you know what I mean? Who are who are salespeople? Right. Like that's a different story. but you know he was an engineer so so i think so with that i think the sale the engineer the the founder needs to understand the sales process needs to understand and be conscious of all those meetings that they're having what were the objections that came up what was the process how many times did they you know who's the competition out there like it's it's actually not hard especially now that we can record everything you know what i mean even if it's face-to-face just throw your phone open and just transcribe it and and then dump it in and be like Like, hey, what are all the commonalities?

41:02John Barrows:What are all the objections that people are coming up with? How long do these sales cycles take? How many stages do we have to go through to get this thing done? Who's the competition out there? And now, again, it's easier than ever. If you just extract all that information, dump it into a GPT and say, tell me what are the commonalities here? Then you have a process. Then you have a structure that you can follow. And once you have a structure you can follow and stages, now you can transition that to a sales team and replicate that. because if you don't have a structure to, you know, to building out your team, you're just going to throw bodies at it and get inherently frustrated with it.

41:34John Barrows:So that's why I think, you know, founder led needs to start, right. To then build a sales team. I don't think of us. I mean, hopefully the founder still is always involved in sales in some way, shape or form, because it's going to keep their ear to the grindstone as far as what's happening out there in the marketplace. And they're still going to go on sales calls, but not obviously, you know, when they're running the business, like a hundred percent of the time. but if they if they remove themselves from sales they're gonna they're gonna talk about market knowledge you know i mean like people spend thousands if not millions of dollars on like mckenzie and all these stupid freaking consulting firms that are irrelevant right now to come and do an assessment of their market and what go on some fucking sales calls that like there's your market research jackass all you got to do is set up a bunch of sales calls and sit in on them be like what are these people like what are you know are these people even the right people to talk to like it's not that hard so i think that you have to lead by example in that regard and then create a structure to put people in and then test and try and go from there john we've had we've had so many different sales heads on this podcast i could sit here and listen to you all day you're obviously an an expert and you've done the tenure so for for someone before we let you go for someone that's sold across multiple different decades when you when you think about 2025 and the next 10 years obviously sales is a profession where do you think we will end up what are your predictions uh 10 years man i can't answer that question i i won't answer that question things are moving too fast right now um five years even i don't know uh two to three years i think we're headed towards full cycle sales supported by true abms intent signals and everything else and um eq over everything and so my vision for this is to well i got two visions that'll uh consolidate it which is one is iron man iron man iron woman um if you think of tony stark right uh as a human being he's got it all right he's good looking he's rich he's super smart jerk anyways.

43:44John Barrows:But as a human, if he were to go out there and fight all these aliens by himself, he'd get smoked, right? He'd just get squashed. So what does he have to do? He has to create the suit. Well, the suit, the suit was cool, but I don't know if you remember that first Iron Man, it was the big clunky thing and it blew up in the desert and the whole thing, right? He didn't really become Iron Man until he added Jarvis. So now, so like think like sales loft outreach, something like that, like as the suit or Salesforce as the suit and then AI added. So now you have the human, the tech, the suit, and the AI.

44:15John Barrows:Now you can go out there and whoop some ass. Because I think as long as humans are buying things, this is why I can't say anything past two or three years. My fear isn't all the AI stuff that is coming to automate sales and all this. That's not my fear. I used to be like, holy shit, this stuff's coming fast, right? I don't care about any of that stuff right now. What I care about more is when the client wakes up and realizes they don't need us. And for anybody listening to this right now, if you don't think you're in trouble, go into pick your AI and act as a potential customer for your solution.

44:46John Barrows:For me, I would say something like, I'm a VP of sales at a 50-person sales team. I have 20 SDRs. I have 38 E's. I'm looking at sales training for prospecting for my team. And I'm looking at the JB Sales sales training. What do I need to know about the JB Sales sales training? What are the pros and cons? How does he compare against the other three vendors in G2? And what are some questions I should ask the rep to make sure? And literally, when you realize in five minutes, you get more value out of some dipshit little 22-year-old kid who's going to ask you bant questions and then wait a week to set up a call with an AE who's going to ask you more same questions and give you a drone through a piece of shit demo.

45:20John Barrows:And then wait another week for an SE who's probably going to give you the value but ask you the same stupid questions because none of that's coordinated. When you realize that, you realize how much trouble we're in. So if you don't become the Iron Man of sales or the Iron Woman of sales, you're irrelevant. it. The other image that I have is, I don't know if you've seen the movie Minority Report. So with Tom Hanks, right? Or Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise. There's a scene in there where he's standing in front of this huge board, right? With these gloves on. And he's just kind of like swiping stuff back and forth and like throwing things here and there.

45:50John Barrows:That's kind of where I see sales is I think we are going to be sitting in front of a dashboard, pick a solution. I don't know which one's going to win. And instead of me thinking about like, who should I call today? right or what cadence should i run today it's going to be like oh no you john you need to call jack um and and because jack and his company just did this he just posted about that and his business is doing xyz and his industry is going in this direction by the way he likes phone over email because of his personality traits because we were able to do that with like a tool like crystal nose or something like that um and here's two or three talking points so and it'll make the call and then we'll have the conversation it'll try to describe the entire conversation dump it into crm so i don't have to worry about that and schedule next steps and i'll be on to the next one so that's where I think sales is going to be, right?

46:34John Barrows:So that's why I think the 20 % or the 10%, I'll stretch it out to Pareto's rule, 80-20, and say the 20 % that figure out that and can go a little bit deeper in the product knowledge and add value almost every part of the conversation and then get all that information here, I think those are going to be the ones that excel. I think everybody else is in deep shit. I want to say I'm excited to see where it ends, but I'm also terrified. I'm terrified. Well, here's the deal. I'm excited to see what I can do with it because I know I'm genuinely curious. I know I have business acumen and I know I can work out work anybody out there.

47:15John Barrows:So I think for somebody like me, the future is a lot brighter. I don't want to say bright. It's a lot brighter. I am terrified for the average anybody. I terrified because I don't see how this doesn't like people say, Oh, you know, it's just like any other technology and it's going to displace some jobs because they're going to create some jobs like wrong, wrong. In my opinion, I graduated in 98. I was before the internet. You know what I mean? Like, but like I was in, I was a computer lab at my college. So I saw computers come out. I saw dial up, go to DSL and fast internet. I saw the iPhone hit, you know, all the, every one of those technical advances was like, all right, cool.

47:59John Barrows:Like it was a nice little grant. Holy shit. Yeah, this is crazy. But hey, we're displacing these jobs and we're creating new ones. This is like a hockey stick shit that none of those technologies learned on top of itself. None of those like literally AI is as dumb as it's ever going to be in this moment right now as we're talking like three seconds from this conversation, it's going to get smarter and better and faster and better. And so to me that like all these people is like, oh, history, you know, shut up. History never had something like this. And so that's why I think if you are not on this train right now, you might as well just unplug and go live on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica, which is where I'm going in three years.

48:37John Barrows:So my daughter's graduating for like she's a she's a sophomore in college. I'm sorry. She's a sophomore in high school. She's got three more years until she graduates high school. After that, my wife and I are cashing out. I'll see you down in Costa Rica. I got a house down in Playa Potrero. If anybody wants to join me, I might do a little sales ecosystem down there where you can come down and hang out and surf and smoke some weed and, you know, talk sales if you want to. that's where I'm going to be in about three or four years though. So that's about as far out as I can see, my friends. I'll see you there.

49:04We typically at this point of the conversation say, if people want to find you or get in touch, how can they do that? Just head down to Costa Rica in three years. Yeah, just find me down there, man.

49:14John Barrows:I'll make it easy. Yeah, I mean, the easiest is obviously the website, right? jbarrows.com. On there, you'll see on the resources section, you got my Make It Happen Monday podcast. I just launched, so I do corporate training, obviously. if anybody's interested, but I also do individual training. All my stuff is in my on-demand portal for 420 bucks a year. You get everything that I got. And then I just launched a one-on-one coaching program where, uh, for those people that give a shit, those, those top end of that 60 % that are willing to put in the work, uh, work with them for three months to get them to that next level.

49:44John Barrows:So if anybody wants to hit me up, uh, and the last one for free, uh, consulting YouTube channel has a ton of free shit on it, but also if anybody's looking for some free consulting or tips or whatever, just hit me up on Instagram. Um, that's where I answer any question that anybody has all you got to do is dm me with a video and be like hey john i'm struggling with this and i'll get right back to you my handle on that is john j-o-h-n-m as in michael barrows b-a-r-r-o-w-s and uh yeah so that's those are the places you can find me thank you so much for joining us john yeah thanks for thanks for having me