Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 14: Get better at sales by learning from this athlete

Transcript

14: Get better at sales by learning from this athlete · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: She's probably the most dominant athlete in the world right now that you have never heard of, and we can learn from her about how to get better at sales.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Bite-Size Sales Podcast, where we believe that sales is the most important team in a B2B company, that complacency is the enemy, and taking bite-sized steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve results.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm using my 26 years of experience in B2B sales to bring you small, actionable ideas every day to help you get better.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Michaela Schiffrin is a US-based skier.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when I put her face up on live trainings on the screen and ask if anyone knows who she is, no one usually in the room recognizes her.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I say the name, you know, her name was Michaela Schiffrin, then sometimes, you know, a couple people might say, yeah, it kind of rings a bell.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not quite sure.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the surprising thing about this is Michaela is probably one of the top three to five most dominant athletes in the world right now in any sort of quasi or real mainstream sport.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And she does alpine skiing.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: She competes on the worldwide circuit for the US and for herself.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: She just turned 24 at the end of March of 2019.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And she's on track in the next three or four years to break all records, male or female, in the alpine skiing world.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: She's so last year she she won 17 World Cups, is how they call it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the significance of that is I think the next best woman ever in any season ever was 14.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think for males it was about the same.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: If she stays healthy over the next six to eight years, and skiers usually go to their early 30s, she's going to be by far break all the records that have been around for so long in skiing.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So very impressive what she's doing right now.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting though is that the last Olympics in 2018 in Pyongyang in South Korea, she was perceived to have actually failed and not had a great Olympics.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: She won one gold and one silver.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And going into the into the Olympics, uh the pundits, the press were and experts were saying that she might end up with three golds or two golds and a silver.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, she was on track to dominate the Olympics, but didn't do very well.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing about that is just listening to her talk about what happened and and how she changed things up for the season that was coming up, which was the one that just ended in 2018, 2019.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So going into the Olympics, all everyone was talking about was the number of goals that she was going to win.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's all what the focus was on her was from the outside.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it didn't sit that well with her.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, while she was there to win races and win gold medals, she was focused much more on more simple things and the day-to-day execution of being a great skier.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I think for her, when you listen to her talk about it, while she was ended up being actually herself pretty pleased with the season that she had, she felt the criticism coming from outside that somehow she hadn't lived up to her potential at those Olympics.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So as she exited that season and went into the season 2018-2019, she ended up having the single best ski season by a racer, male or female ever.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: She won 17 World Cups last year and therefore dominated the sport.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is, what happened between the Olympics of the year before and this season that had such an effect on her?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what's cool is that she actually talks about this specific thing in interviews after the end of the season when everyone was so hyped up about the season that she had and all the things that she'd done and they wanted to know what happened and why.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think they were expecting maybe a different answer.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And her answer was I got back to focusing on executing perfect turns.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And what she talks about is, you know, sure, she went into the season with big goals, right?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: She wanted to dominate, she wanted to win uh races, she she wanted to win the World Cup, things like that, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and dominate the world championships.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: That was her goal, but she didn't really think about those things every day and every week.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: All she thought about, everything she did with her team, all the replay of video that they did, all the things that she thought about in practice and races was simply how do I execute this next turn better?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do I execute more turns tomorrow better than I was able to do today?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she went down to the basics because she knew that if she could execute more perfect turns than everyone else, and what is in her control is executing turns, she will win races.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what her whole season was about.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And from a skill standpoint, that's what she was doing, but also from a mental standpoint, it was less about the pressure of winning races and all about simply focusing her mind on executing perfect terms.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when I think about what that means for us in sales, you know, there's lots there's a real big takeaway from this about what we end up thinking about.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you've been in sales for a while, you'll know that the all the talk around you is focusing on outcomes, focus on the win, winning deals, forecasting deals to be won, talking about deals that we've lost, um, all the things with with big outcomes.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Did we get the POC booked?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and less of the focus from around you in the organization is on the everyday turns, as it were, to help you get to your forecast and help you get to winning deals.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's all too outcome-based and not enough turn-based, to use the analogy from Michaela Schiffin's world.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, as you think about what you can do, though, to improve your betting average, to improve your success, change your results, it is all about thinking about what are the turns, what are the perfect turns that you execute in your world to help you get there?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Things that you can do and say to get better at your craft.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think about this in two buckets.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: One are the things that you do yourself to get better, about things that you say are how you handle situations.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then second thing is how you execute the sales process activities better to get through and win deals bigger and faster.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So things that you control yourself are what you say, the questions you ask, how you react to objections or questions from prospects, all the kind of you know, fundamental things that are part of selling, I would say are things that you can control.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And things that you can sit there and say, I'm I how can I get better at that one thing from this meeting to the next meeting?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then in terms of the process, it's all about how am I executing a sales process uh to get better at the next one than I was at the last one?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do to um make them go faster?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do to grow bigger deals?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: What can I do to execute, for example, maybe a perfect uh proof of value or proof of concept versus something else, maybe just doing a demo.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the two buckets to think about.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um and when you've got the list there, start with what are the higher leverage components, the things that you know that if I just change that, then it's gonna have a big effect on my overall pipeline, it's gonna have a big effect on my deals, and then figure out how you can execute those better from day to day, week to week, deal by deal.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And once you figure that out, then you have your game plan for success to think about as you're going into the end of this year's next year, how can you execute perfect sales turns better today than you did yesterday?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get the book mentioned in this episode for free, simply go to bite sizesales.com forward slash free book.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you sign up on that page for unstoppable.do, we'll send you your book on us.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Unstoppable gives you habit-forming action notes on great sales books such as Spin Selling, Never Split the Difference, New Sales Simplify, The Challenger Sale, and many more.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: In there you get the best ideas from these books, all organized in a straightforward and easy to implement way, and designed for you to take action and transform your results.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: All the equivalent of three cups of coffee per month.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Start now and get your free book by going to bite size sales.com forward slash free book.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with anyone you think would get value.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Coworkers, teammates, your boss, your head of sales, even that guy you worked with two companies ago who could probably do with some help.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, just overshare it.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the few times it's cool to do that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your podcast app will have a share button.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Please click it and share it wide and fun.