Sales Pipeline Radio

This week's episode is entitled "A Mind For Sales: Sales Book Club with Mark Hunter" and our guest is Mark Hunter, one of the best voices in B2B sales today. Mark is the author of numerous books including the brand new book, A Mind for Sales.

These are uncertain times.  A lot of prospects are slowing down on things.  Mark is talking to sales leaders all day long trying to figure out how to keep their team motivated and how to keep selling, how to keep selling with empathy.

I ask Mark what general advice he's giving based on what he's seeing in the field?

Look at the long picture. Look at the long game. Don't try to play the short game, play the long game. We're going to get through this. We're going to get through this. I'm very optimistic.

The piece that I'm saying right now, short term, is you need to be listening to everybody's backstory. Everybody's got a backstory, a personal backstory and a professional backstory and you got to take a couple minutes and listen to that. Listen to it with empathy because you know what?

You've got a back story. What's happened so far to you and how are you responding to it? And if we demonstrate that, it's amazing how we create a much better connection. There's a lot of business being done out there, a lot of business, a lot of opportunities, but you just have to take the time to listen, and listen more intently.

And that's advice that you could give at any time. You could've given it three months ago. You can give it six months from now-- Use your active listening skills and understand where someone's coming from. I've heard pros and cons of people saying, giving the what's keeping you up at night question and making questions too broad.

How do you exercise active listening? How do you let your prospect share while still maintaining control and direction of the conversation?

Mark, in his book talks about minefields and the mind traps, M-I-N-D traps.  I ask him to talk about the things many sellers face when they have good intentions. They develop their systems, they do some of the things he's talking about, but then they start to execute and they lose. Seeing they lose momentum, they lose confidence. I ask, what are some of those common minefields of mind traps and how do you get around those? 

This and a lot more...

Listen in now or read the full transcript on our blog starting Monday, 4/20.  

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Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

We were thrilled this last time to talk to Dan Englander, in an episode called, "The Death & Bright Future of Marketing Agencies"

Dan Englander is the founder of Sales Schema and he is also the host of the Digital Agency Growth Podcast.

There are so many different options across digital and non-digital. Is it possible to have a full service? As nice as it would be to have one agency, one throat to choke, is it feasible for organizations to still have that even when large businesses require big thinking? This is just one question I ask Dan.  I also ask him to talk about how companies should think about this and about what he sees with marketing service companies in terms of their ability to find and win big deals.

You'll also hear him share what he sees in terms of their sophistication around sales pipeline strategy.  We touch on multichannel marketing and a lot more.  Listen in now or read the transcript on our blog.  

Sales Pipeline Radio is hosted by Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.  Heinz Marketing is the sponsor of Sales Pipeline Radio.

This week's episode is entitled "How a Nurse Practitioner Turned Sales Rep is Selling into Health Care Right Now" and our guest is Lindsay Leeder, Clinical Consultant, Nurse Practitioner at Vera Whole Health

This was an amazing episode, we covered selling in today's environment as well as why 20 seconds of washing your hands is important, where we usually "miss" regardless, why vaccines and treatments take so long to develop and more!  We talk a little bit about sales.  Lindsay shares some great insights:

"Selling is very similar to providing direct patient care because we have to understand what are the symptoms, what are the ailments, what are the pains that people or populations are going through, and then what resources do we have to address those pains and then does it make sense? And then out of that, what is a management plan that's going to work, that's going to stick."

Listen in now or read the full transcript on our blog starting Mon. 4/6/20:

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Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's episode is entitled "Virtual Sales Training: How To Support Your Now Entirely Virtual Team" and our guest is Ray Makela, CEO and Managing Director at the Sales Readiness Group. 

I ask Ray, what's the advice you're giving to your client around how to adapt their selling strategy right now?

I think this is the time to check in, to build the relationship and hopefully collaborate .... but it's certainly not a time to push to close the deal... I think we do need to be sensitive to how they're showing up and how we're showing up. And I think we want to maybe frankly do a little less challenging and a little bit more consoling these days because it's a long game. And if there was ever a time to pay it forward and say, "How can we help? Let's kind of take the deal off the table for a moment. But how can we help you or what can we do to support you?"

I ask Ray to talk a little bit to the tension between getting close to the end of the quarter and hitting their numbers. How do you address that tension?

Listen in NOW or read the full transcript on our blog starting Mon. 3/30/20

Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

This week's episode is entitled "Selling from Scratch: Foundations and Fundamentals for Building Your Sales Team".  Our guest is Jim Wilson, Operating Partner at Costanoa Ventures.  

We talk about the impact of the COVID19 outbreak on sales, but we also get down to some good, timeless sales team building wisdom and give you some great takeaways you can use both right now and going forward.

I love the advance of social selling tactics. I love the advance of challenger sale and the teach and tailor type mentalities. But I think in our effort to create more value as trusted advisers, a skill that isn't being taught as much today is how to ask for the deal, how to ask for the sale, and how to close.

I ask Jim to double down on these and provide examples and ideas. You'll love his Four Cs of Closing.  Listen in to hear his answers about how companies put more of a focus on these in the organization. He answers if this a training issue and shares the best ways for companies to get better at closing. This and MORE.  Listen in now and read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 3/23 at 6am PST. 

This week's episode is entitled "Coronavirus, Trade Shows and Value vs Venue".

So many cancelled conferences!  The people who wanted to attend are missing out on something. The people who wanted to sponsor are missing out on something. The people who produce the conference are going to miss out on something. So what was that and how do you now use that?

The last thing I want anyone to do is think about this as an opportunity. I've been really trying not to use that word this week because no one should be opportunistic when lives are at stake.

For the people organizing events, for the people planning on producing the events, the most common response I have seen is, "We are going to do a virtual event. We are going to take all of that learning in-person, we're going to do that online."

But what if what attendees really want isn't just the content, they want the community? What if you took those same resources and created small micro versions of your event? What if you use this as a way to catalyze actually creating and activating those local user groups to help your customers to help people in your community get together in person? There's a thousand ways you could actually do that. But in the past when you've just said, "Wow, we'll just go to the regular trade show and just do it all at once." It feels more efficient. Now a virus has forced our hand, but you got to think about where is that value exchange, what is actually valued in that process along the way? 

Listen in for this and MORE and/or read the full transcript on the Heinz Marketing Blog starting Mon. 3/16 or check out our related blog post.  

This week's episode is entitled "Successful Selling for Professional Services: An Unstoppable Approach from Steve Gordon" and our guest is Steve Gordon, Founder of The Unstoppable CEO.

We cover strategy methodology for sales and marketing professionals all the time and naturally end up talking mostly about selling products.  It's not often we step back and say, okay, "What is it when you're selling what people DO?"

I facetiously tell people, as a consultant I talk and type for a living, so I don't necessarily have the same widget to be able to sell to everybody or the same piece of software to sell. So selling in professional services obviously is very much a thing.

In this episode I ask Steve how is that different and why do people need to think about this a little differently when you're selling professional services versus selling product? And for smaller organizations--- is the answer to that to separate your services from your selling? Is there a way to make that transition? If you are a small firm and representing yourself, what are some of the strategies that you've found work best?

This and a lot more!

Listen in now or read the entire conversation on our the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 3/9 at 6am PST.

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Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

I think as people have the opportunity to just publish things off the cuff on social channels, to just write stream of consciousness on a blog platform and just click, press, go... I don't feel like we are as good at editing ourselves as we used to be. And so we talk about this.  To start I ask Lisa how she decided editing is what she wanted to do? How did she begin her career in journalism and why is that something that she's so passionate about today?

This and a lot more!

Listen in or read the entire conversation on the Heinz Marketing Blog starting Mon. 2/24/20 at 6am PST. 

Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.

Please join me and my guest, David Keane, Founder and CEO at Bigtincan.

We're seeing such an emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning in sales and marketing and over the last six to eight months, we've seen a lot more companies say they feel like it's successful, something they can actually get their arms around and use. It seems to me that part of that is taking what we think of as big data and all this information out there and prioritizing the right data, prioritizing data that we can get access to quickly, that you can make a decision on it and hopefully continue to engage and mobilize the prospects.

I ask David how thinks about that and how you take big opportunity and make it real and make it right now for customers. This and a lot more! 

Listen in NOW or read the entire conversation on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 2/17 6am PST. 

Sales Pipeline Radio is hosted by Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.

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This week's episode is entitled "What Do Tina Fey, The Ohio State University and B2B Marketing Have in Common?" and our guest is Marilyn Cox, Vice President of Marketing at Clubessential Holdings, LLC

Sometimes I think of this term content marketing and it sort of demeans what the form and what the opportunity is. Is there a value in thinking of it as just content? How do you create content that engages, that persuades, that teaches, that makes people better? By doing that well, you're earning ongoing attention, you're earning the right to continue the conversation that might turn into a sales conversation, but is it wrong or is it counterproductive to call it content marketing or should we just create good content?  We talk about this and a lot more!

Marilyn is into WWE.  I ask about her interest overall, but also what makes these athletes such good storytellers?

I also ask her, given her diverse career, the different places she worked in marketing, what she'd say if she was sitting in front of a group of soon to graduate college students, what's some advice shed give them they might not hear from others that she thinks is important for their careers moving forward?

I think one of the biggest is ... 

I think I would agree when a lot of people say that you have to recognize that you don't have all the answers and you can't stop learning. For me, that's huge. If I were talking to people that were getting ready to graduate and were going into marketing and they were earlier in their careers, I think the one piece of advice I would give them to build on that concept is start to learn outside of marketing. Not to discourage people from reading good marketing content and best practice content, I absolutely do, but I think there is a lot to be gained from reading more on financials. I will say probably aside from, of course, aligning with a sales team, the organization that I align with the most at a company is always the financial team. The CFO is somebody that I make my best friend very, very early on.

Listen in NOW or read the entire conversation on the Heinz Marketing blog starting Mon. 2/10 at 6am PST.  

Sales Pipeline Radio is hosted by Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing which is a program on the Funnel Radio Channel.

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Sales Pipeline Radio is sponsored and produced by Heinz Marketing on the Funnel Radio Channel.  I interview the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena.