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How to Fall in Love with Selling · Sales Pipeline Radio

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  Music.
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  All right. Hello, and welcome, everybody, to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
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  My name is Matt Hines. I am your host. Very excited to have you here.
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  We've got a great guest and great topic today. I think you're really going to enjoy.
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  But first, I just want to thank everyone for joining us who is joining us live today.
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  Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio is always available past,
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  present, and future at salespipelineradio.com.
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  Very excited to have our guest today. He is the founder of of In the Funnel
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  Sales Coaching, the author of the new book, Learn to Love Selling,
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  Mark Cox. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.
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  Matt, thanks so much for having me today. I was really excited.
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  I was as well. I don't know if we intended to do a home and away exchange today.
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  You and I recorded your podcast earlier today and was super excited to have
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  you join here today and have known of you for a long time. I've followed you and your content.
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  And when I saw your new book coming out, I knew we had to get you on the show.
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  So for those that don't know you yet, maybe do a little bit of intro of you
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  and where and how you focus. Sure.
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  So I am the president and founder of a company called In The Funnel Sales Coaching.
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  We help sales leaders, salespeople, and BDRs and SDRs dramatically improve performance
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  through sales training that actually impacts behavior.
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  Prior to that, I spent most of my career running large sales organizations and
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  outsourcing or technology companies.
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  And two other passions in life, in addition to family, I'm a music fanatic.
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  So I love all types of music and I'm still a terrible drummer after all these years.
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  And I'm also a hockey fanatic. And so for 30 years, I've been loving the Toronto
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  Maple Leafs, which will prove to your viewers that I obviously can't be that bright.
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  Well, you're persistent and resilient, if nothing else. I'm in Seattle and we're
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  year three of the Kraken.
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  And it's been fun to watch Seattle really come up and really lean in with the
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  team. And the Kraken has done a great job in the community as as well.
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  Okay. So if we have time, we might get into a little bit of hockey because I
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  am definitely on the learning curve.
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  I love to watch, but it's much more technical than people realize.
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  But let's talk first about this new book, Learn to Love Selling.
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  You can get it at inthefunnel.com. You can find it on Amazon.
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  I mean, you've been doing this for quite a while. You have your consulting firm
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  for about 12 years. You've been doing sales and business for a while.
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  Why this topic? What about this topic and this angle was really important to you?
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  Yeah, what a great question. I think the topic and then the title.
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  So the content of the book is really this comprehensive playbook of thinking
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  about everything you need to do to convert your core business capability into revenue.
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  And the model works at the leader level, at the CEO level, and at the salesperson
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  level, managing their territories.
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  But the reason I call it learn to love selling, I think there's a lot of people
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  in the profession today having a pretty tough time. And I think that tough time comes from two things.
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  First of all, the core understanding of what sales truly is today in 20 is wrong.
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  There's a lot of folks out there who still believe it's the 40-year-old stereotype
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  of pitching and cajoling and doing demos and that kind of stuff. And that's all gone.
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  What selling really is, is just helping somebody achieve a meaningful business
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  outcome in a way that's beneficial to them and you.
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  So it's about helping not pitching and so
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  those are these two things that i think dramatically improve somebody's
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  joy of doing this job hey i need to know what to
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  do but first in my mindset i need to understand okay what am i really doing
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  here where am i adding value into the universe i'm helping people i'm making
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  deposits in the universe i'm not asking for withdrawals and if you are selling
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  in a way where you are interrupting someone's time asking them for
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  making it a hundred percent ask, not having anything really to give in response.
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  No wonder people have call reluctance, right? No wonder people don't want to get on the phone.
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  I think there's a lot of reasons for it, but in part, I don't think people feel
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  good about what they're delivering and what they're doing.
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  Conversely, if you can figure out what is the value you provide to someone,
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  not just getting them to sign the deal and to buy something from you,
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  but what do you have a value for them where this interruption becomes irresistible, so to speak?
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  Yeah. So well said. I think the first one, Matt, is this kind of spiral of doom, right?
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  If you think you're just pitching and cajoling, you don't like what you do.
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  The second thing you have to do in order to do that, people put up a veneer.
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  Salespeople put up a veneer and have to put on sales face.
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  I can't be my true authentic self. So they like what they do even less,
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  right? And it's draining and exhausting. costing.
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  Rather than looking at it saying, how do I prepare myself so that when I am
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  reaching out, I have real insight and value and knowledge and best practice
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  that I can give to someone.
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  And if that's my intent of every call and every discussion, don't worry about the outcome.
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  I'm not just trying to create a qualified sales opportunity.
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  If I start with trying to add value and help, the outcomes will come our way.
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  So when you get a lead that says, I want to learn more about you.
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  That's a pretty easy phone call. When I am prospecting, that is a lot harder.
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  So what are some approaches that you found work really well?
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  I know you cover some of this in the book and in your training and workshops,
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  but what are some approaches that can help people feel better about prospecting,
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  feel good about the value you're providing and really learn?
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  I don't know. Can you learn to love prospecting, Mark?
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  That's our third book. The second one's Learn to Love Leading for Sales Leader.
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  That's 14 14 months from now and then learn to love prospecting?
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  I think you can. But first of all, again, let's start with this mindset.
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  Yeah. You know, if people go into their job and what they do every day and they
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  just think this is, it's a grind, you're never going to enjoy it.
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  You've got to have a bit of the big picture.
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  And so for those doing prospecting today, you should realize you're doing the
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  most important part of the sales cycle.
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  Every company out there wants more new opportunities and you create them.
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  So when you get good at this, if you can figure out strategically how to get
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  good at this, you're going to be of huge value to future companies,
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  which means your value increases.
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  The way I'd like to look at how to do this, Matt, let's make it easy for the folks listening today.
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  What would you or I do? Let's say you're a president of a company.
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  We're reaching out to another president of the company to talk.
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  The two things we do if we reach out, first of all, there's no chance we're
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  reaching out to anybody without doing research.
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  So we would know the person we're reaching out to, the company.
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  We have a point of interest. We have a reason for the call. You and I have okay
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  business acumen and industry acumen. So we're doing that work.
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  The second thing is we probably have a pretty good answer when the other person
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  on the other end of the phone says, who are you guys? What do you do?
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  We probably thought about our value proposition message.
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  So we have those two things today, an articulate value proposition,
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  and I can explain what's in there.
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  And we do research and have that point of interest prior to every call.
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  I think we're going to have dramatically better outcomes. And by the way,
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  it helps us break through that wall that everybody feels.
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  If you interrupt somebody in the middle of the day, you got seven to 15 seconds
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  to break through the wall to get an authentic conversation out of them.
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  Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Mark Cox. He's the founder of In
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  the Funnel Sales Coaching, the author of the new book, Learn to Love Selling.
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  There's your approach to prospecting, and then there's the objections to doing
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  it. And some of them are email is dead.
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  No one responds to their email. You can't use the phone anymore.
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  People aren't at the office. There's barely any office lines that work from
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  home. Are these excuses or are these truths?
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  Well, by the way, I think there's a little bit of truth in any comment out there.
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  But depending upon who you've got on your podcast, you're going to have somebody
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  saying, the phone's dead.
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  You've got to do social selling. Somebody else is going to say,
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  social selling's dead. You've got to do telephone.
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  Somebody else is going to say, email is the way to go.
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  I really believe, Matt, if I'm trying to build pipeline, line.
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  I think the answer isn't either or,
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  it's an and, but I'll make a couple of observations people should digest.
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  You and I are old enough to remember a day where one of the more expensive expenses
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  we had was our actual cell phone because we would just get so many voicemails
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  in a given day, we would literally fill our voicemail.
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  That's all gone now. Nobody leaves me a voicemail.
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  So easy to stand out prospecting if
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  you're intelligent and can leave a decent voicemail the
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  second thing is as much as we say 40 50 of
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  all the email going back and forth is spam it still does work in certain circumstances
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  again i'm a big believer in doing the research and making it personal stop with
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  the generic just pitch pitch pitch pitch if you show in the email you know who
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  i am that might trigger a little more and then there are some great social selling strategies out there.
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  And of course, you wrote a book on social selling not that long ago that had
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  some very, very good ones in there.
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  So I think today, if we want to get the attention and interest of somebody,
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  we have to use every channel available to us.
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  But we have to be good at those channels. It's not a volume thing.
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  It's not a pure automation thing.
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  We actually have to leverage our intelligence to personalize, humanize the reach out.
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  Well, and I'm here to say the second biggest source of pipeline for us this
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  year has been the telephone.
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  I am calling people, leaving voicemails.
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  It's following up from there. But it's that campaign that has really been successful.
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  Now, it's not cold calling necessarily.
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  It's warm calling. These are people that know me. They're not necessarily current
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  clients or even past clients, but people that I know from various whatevers.
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  But you leverage that and you have something of value to share.
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  And I still have call reluctance. It's still hard for me to schedule and protect
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  the time I need to do my prospecting.
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  But I've really learned to enjoy it because I believe that I have something
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  valuable to share and contribute when I do that.
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  I know we've got a few more minutes here before we wrap up. I want to go back to May of 2013.
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  So you have a long, successful career in selling. And in May 2013,
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  at least according to LinkedIn, that's when you started in the funnel sales coaching.
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  What's your origin story? A lot of people listening to this,
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  people that are very successful in their career, people think about,
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  boy, it'd be interesting if I could take my expertise and do my own thing.
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  That is a very scary thing. You and I both know that firsthand.
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  But how did that get started and why did you do it? Well, thanks for the question, Matt.
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  So at the time I was in a break, I had been leading large sales organizations
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  and different outsourcing and technology companies and had decided I wanted
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  to pull back a little bit on my travel.
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  And so I stepped away from something.
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  And for being at that role, it was probably going to take me a year to find
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  the next really large US technology company that wanted to sell into the Canadian
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  marketplace, likely into big Canadian banks. And I'd want to run one of those.
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  So while I was engaging in a search campaign, a few smaller organizations came
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  to me and they kind of said, listen, we're not hiring you.
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  We can't afford or attract someone like you. What do you help us?
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  And before I knew what was happening, I was working with three of them,
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  two tech companies and then one financial services business.
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  But I was doing this while I was in this search campaign and I was actually
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  interviewing with a large US tech company wanting to change their leadership in Canada.
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  Left one of these companies, they're called Purefax, and I was working with
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  one of these companies. I literally told the team, hey, I've got an interview.
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  And this was a fifth or sixth interview.
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  And the Canadian operations were two doors down from them here in downtown Toronto.
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  So leave the Purefax offices, walk two doors down, go into this interview,
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  and there's five or six people around this table.
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  And as I was going through the interviews, I was already starting to think of,
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  okay, when I take over this organization, that person's gone and this person's not going to make it.
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  I'm thinking about the whole go-to-market. And it was asking them a lot of questions
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  about what's working, what isn't working.
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  And then it just hit me, Matt, right in the middle of this interview.
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  And I was probably in that room for three hours.
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  But about 90 minutes in, it was, I would rather go back and help Purefax than
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  actually run this thing.
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  So I played nice for the rest of the interview. I went downstairs.
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  And instead of going back to my smaller technology company, they're large now,
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  but they were small then.
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  I made a right instead of a left and went to a coffee shop and then just called my wife, Donna.
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  And said, hey, listen, I don't think I'm going to work for anybody anymore.
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  I think I can build a business out of doing what I'm doing here.
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  And that was the origin story.
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  And so it was super fun. Thank you for sharing that. We were talking about my
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  origin story in the earlier podcast.
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  I'll leave it at that. I'll tease it so people can check out the Selling Well
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  podcast in a little bit when our episode comes out.
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  But I remember it being very exciting and terrifying and assuming that that would wear off.
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  And I'm coming up on 16 years from when I just head out with a laptop and a bus pass.
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  Still exciting and terrifying. Yes. I can name countless reasons why it's 100%
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  been worth it. and at some point we should do a session on just the entrepreneurial journey.
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  Let's do that for sure. I know a lot of people that I think would be very,
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  very successful doing it.
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  And it is a scary thing if you haven't jumped off that cliff without a safety net and tried to do it.
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  But I think for those of us that have done it and have, at least speaking for
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  myself, made a lot of mistakes along the way.
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  You know, and can help others figure out what that path is with a little higher
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  likelihood of launch velocity.
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  I think that'd be great. Great. But I'm going to wrap up here on your LinkedIn
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  profile underneath your name.
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  It says learning never exhausts the mind. And we were talking about this in your podcast earlier.
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  What are some of the places you go to, to continue to learn about sales and go to market?
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  So one of the places is running my podcast.
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  So the Selling Well, we have these really smart, great guests like you earlier today.
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  And when we do that, Matt, we do the research on the guests.
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  So we're trying to read their books, understand their blogs,
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  some of their white papers. So we're We're digesting content to stay current.
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  And that's not just for sales, but for leadership and coaching and mindset and
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  all of those kinds of good things.
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  The second place, frankly, is we still have our subscription to Harvard Business
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  Review. I still love getting the magazine in the mail and reading through.
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  It'll trigger me to go online and look at other topics that they're speaking about.
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  And there's a handful of podcasts, including yours, Sales Pipeline Radio,
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  that we really enjoy. We've got those built into our habits.
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  And I listen to podcasts driving in and out of work. And I love to do my reading
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  first thing in the morning because I'm drinking coffee.
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  And boy, I am so happy when I'm drinking coffee.
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  So I'm also pretty happy in the morning. Love it. Same question,
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  different topic. Learning never exhausts the mind. We talked about hockey at the beginning.
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  I'm watching a lot of crack in hockey over the last couple of years and just
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  continue to learn about this sport that on the surface looks like they're just
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  peddling around a piece of rubber trying to get into a net.
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  But it's way more complicated than that and way more
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  interesting and the strategy and all the tactics and the approaches teams
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  have where are some of the places for folks like me that are emerging hockey
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  fans maybe this is the selfish question where where are some of your favorite
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  podcasts other places to read about hockey so to be honest with you i don't
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  listen to a lot of podcasts on hockey i'm a fanatic i watch watch a lot of hockey
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  and i still play a lot of hockey and I'm a goalie.
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  So I'll still go to training to try and get better.
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  Even though I think my chance of making the NHL came and went, it's all over now.
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  But a great friend of mine actually loves a podcast called Spitting Chicklets.
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  I think it's the most popular hockey podcast out there.
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  And the reason it's called Spitting Chicklets is because of course,
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  in the old days when there was no mask and cage, if you get a puck in the mouth,
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  you're spitting your teeth out because they're going to come out and they call
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  them chiclets. Hey, I lost a chiclet on that one.
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  That's why hockey players look like me. It's not the first time I've heard about that podcast.
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  I'm definitely going to have to check it out now. But before people check out
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  Spitting Chiclets, I want them to buy a copy of Learn to Love Selling.
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  Where else can people learn more about you, Mark, and continue to learn from you and read from you?
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  Oh, thanks. So easiest place, LinkedIn. Please check me out and connect with me.
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  It's Mark Andrew Cox on LinkedIn. and the
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  company name is in the funnel you can go to in
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  the funnel.com and we love to hear from you
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  on our podcast and everybody will know about our
• 17:16
  most recent podcast with matt hines that's the
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  selling well podcast wherever you listen to
• 17:22
  your podcasts on apple or spotify that's where
• 17:25
  you can hear about us we'll definitely check that out
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  find the book on amazon check out in the funnel.com for the selling well podcast
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  and more content from mark mark cox thanks so much for joining us today thanks
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  so much for having me matt what a pleasure absolutely well thank you everyone
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  for listening for watching for being part of this we'll see you next week another
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  episode of sales pipeline radio until then take care we'll see you soon.
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  Music.