12 Simple Tips to Elevate Your Sales Effectiveness

In today’s episode of the ‘Sales Samurai’ podcast, host Sam Capra, who helps marketing leaders in the retail space go beyond the sale/transaction, talks with guest, Brendon McAdams, the Managing Director and Founder of Kinetics. He is giving 12 simple tips to elevate your sales effectiveness.

Episode Highlights

• 01:49 – If you get back to some of the fundamentals, those are oftentimes all the things you need to be successful, says Brendon.
• 03:07 – Brendon shares his sales background. Now he is doing sales coaching and consulting on a very specific basis, usually with early-stage start-up founders.
• 05:02 – Sam enquires from Brendon, about what has changed for the better and what’s gone in the wrong direction, in his opinion from a sales perspective.
• 07:59 – Sam always looked at sales tools as it drives efficiency and allow you to scale faster.
• 09:00 – Sam asks Brendon if there is any context he wants to provide before we jump into the list of simple tips to elevate his sales effectiveness.
• 11:20 – When customers are measuring you at the beginning, it's the little things that they catch up on like if you can't get their name right in the email it seems such a little thing but it is an attention to detail.
• 20:00 – Brendon highlights, your customers don't know how you're going to deliver and so they use these little events to measure you.
• 22:33 – Sam questions, sometimes we get lost in our process and what we need to do is to qualify or disqualify it that we forget the root cause, how can we help this?
• 24:35 – If you ask the right questions when you need to, it is so liberating.
• 26:30 – Brendon shares, you have to figure out ways and say this isn't going to work. 
• 28:56 - When you're promising something that you can't deliver, that again is in the category of first impressions, states Brendon
• 30:48 – You can look at things and say, here's how we can help your business. 
• 41:43 – You've spent less time talking and more time listening. Then when you do speak, you're more educated because you understand the question better.
• 45:22 – If someone has to leave early, cover the stuff that they need to cover and you can even pin them down and say to follow up with you afterward.
• 47:00 – The two assets of a salesperson are, being professional and yourself.
• 48:41 – Brendon shares, he thinks that authenticity helps you to connect with your customer.
• 50:31 - I don't think you should be doing things that aren't rewarding and satisfying. 

Three Key Points

1. Brendon says, he tributes this episode being sales tips, but they're just good practices in general and that's intentional because, for a lot of people that he coaches and talks to they're not professional salespeople, their founders are oftentimes very technical. And so, what he is trying is to bridge this gap and get them to understand that these skills aren't exclusive to salespeople, salespeople tend to execute on them better if they're good at it.
2. The customer discovery process is critically important, and the thing you have to do and get better with practice is being able to explain to the customer why you want to ask these questions. 
3. If you've got 30 minutes to get through something, you want 10 minutes, in the end, to be discussing where this goes, and working out calendars and figuring out who needs to be involved and what the action items are and who's responsible for them.

Tweetable Quotes

• “I didn't necessarily aspire to be a salesperson initially, but I ended up doing things that were sales related.” – Brendon McAdams
• “One of the obvious things that have changed is you have a much more informed consumer, or customer they have the opportunity to learn so much more.” - Brendon McAdams
• “The more people that are in the meeting, the less productive it becomes.” – Brendon McAdams
• “The admins have always been kind of a secret weapon for me, I try and work as much through the admin as possible.” – Brendon McAdams
• “If I would show up five minutes before, those little things carry so much value when it comes to first impressions.” – Sam Capra
• “What salespeople oftentimes get wrong is that they think somehow or another it's not a mutual relationship.” – Brendon McAdams
• “Do what you say you're going to do.” – Sam Capra
• “Customers are more knowledgeable and so the way that plays out for salesperson is you have to become more knowledgeable about their business.” - Brendon McAdams
• “I find that everybody's perspective can help me to understand the company and what's going on.” - Brendon McAdams
• “You want to get the customer to speak and if they speak, you end up learning a bunch of stuff.” - Brendon McAdams
• “If you don't get to the next steps, the deal is dying before it ever began.” – Sam Capra
• “This is why minimum viable answers are so important because you're eating up your clock.” - Brendon McAdams

Resources Mentioned

• Sam Capra on LinkedIn
• The Sales Samurai B2B Sales Podcast
• Flexengage
• Brendon McAdams: Website com   Twitter   LinkedIn

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