Conversations with Emotion: A Deeper Dive into Sales Communication

Rod Weir [00:35:09]:

You call it whatever you want, soft skill, interpretive skill, listening skill, call it whatever you want. But this process, this is just a mini example of what I believe is a fundamental key skill and characteristic of someone who's really good at selves, not someone who can do it. Someone who's really good at it, is that they will become master of getting what I call discovery, facts, information, opinions out of a prospect and using them effectively throughout the sales cycle until they buy.

Alexander Laurin [00:35:46]:

Rod Weir joined Easy Projects almost three years ago, bringing more than two decades of experience in all things sales. Sales leadership, business development partner, reseller management, gotomarket design, execution and more. After a number of years in account executive director roles in large tech and telecommunications companies, he moved on to pursue sales in either true startups or in smaller but established software companies. He helped two of the companies where he worked to be acquired. In his first year at Easyprojects, he changed many of the key components of a successful sales team, such as people, process, price tools, focus on customer success, sales collateral, and achieved a 42% annual revenue growth. The next year's, sales grew 24% and we're well into this year's achievement. Rod, welcome to the biggest Win sales podcast.

Rod Weir [00:36:44]:

Hey, Alexander. How are you? Sometimes a little bit of embarrassing to hear something like that read back, but I'm hoping our audience here can appreciate what's behind what you just stated there.

Alexander Laurin [00:36:56]:

Well done. So Rod, let me just ask you off the top, where were your first couple of sales jobs?

Rod Weir [00:37:02]:

Yeah, well, I started several decades ago now, indicating my age. So my very first sales job was quite frankly, brutal. And the reason for that is I graduated and then went into selling where you sell to mutual funds. So it was kind of selling to people where you want to promote the study and research that you've done on a company. So you're basically selling opinions. And at that time, probably 1012 months in the stock crash happened. I saw an incredibly ugly and see me and aggressive side of the business in my first twelve months or less in a sales role. So that was quite a sobering experience. So I ended up transitioning that into, I'll call it a company that serviced the needs of those types of customers, where that went. But then after my masters, I would arguably have what I would describe as my first sales role. And for some of your listeners, and even for me now, looking back, this is kind of an odd situation. But at the time I joined Bell Canada and if you can believe it, even the sales role at Bell Canada was a unionized position. So not a true meritocracy as we might think. But regardless, it was at least at the time, it was a great place to work and that basically kicked me off into the sales journey that has ended up on this call here today.

Alexander Laurin [00:38:40]:

Hey, Rod, in 2018, what do you think would be a really good start in a sales career? What kind of organization should someone look at joining?

Rod Weir [00:38:51]:

That's a great question, and I'll say it probably because I have a bias to it. But I'm recruiting right now and as I'm talking to people, I would generally hear a very steady undercurrent and interest in SaaS. So being a true online subscription based type service, obviously we're a B to B solution. So this is business selling to businesses as opposed to consumers. So if I was taking what I know now and applying it to myself, if I happen to be graduating and entering the market to be a sales professional, then I would definitely lean personally to pursuing some type of SaaS solution. And what I mean by that so there are many forms of sales. So you can sell things like hardware, you can sell things that have software but run on a hardware platform. So what I'm really saying is, if I was starting again, what I would do is day one, I would say, you know what, I'm going to focus on the software as a SaaS, as a solution. And because the outlook for SaaS companies is very promising and you obviously want to focus your time, energy and talents in an area where you think the outlook for that entire offering is very optimistic.

Alexander Laurin [00:40:17]:

If someone's young, someone's new to the field, they want to get into sales, and they go for a company that is working with SaaS, what kind of training do you think that they should look towards?

Rod Weir [00:40:32]:

Well, hopefully it's similar to what we do here. So one of the things we do is that we encourage, we don't sell generally to individuals, although it can happen, we're not going to prevent it. So what I would strongly encourage someone to do from a training perspective would be to immerse themselves into the solution. What I mean by that, Alexander, is like in my current team and the teams that I've been involved with over the past several companies that I've been working with, in Title we might call them an account executive, but in Competency I would describe them as a product specialist and what that really means. And so the reason I'm bringing those up is if I was entering the SaaS space, I would want to become very proficient in whatever that online tool did. So here I actually call my team members product specialists, and I do that intentionally to set a couple of things. One is an expectation on the prospect or client side that the person you're dealing with is very knowledgeable about not only the market and the needs of clients, but also the tool itself. So in other words, they don't generally have a technical or presales resource that they would lean on. So the type of people in my mind that would do well, in the SaaS world are those who are, my wording, technically inclined, those that are comfortable getting themselves very proficient and very compelling and articulate around why people want their platform, and then obviously being very proficient in explaining it using terminology and nomenclature, that's very appropriate. So in our particular case, where we are now, project management is a horizontal solution, much like WiFi or telecommunications. What I really mean is there are many, many types of businesses that run projects, so we're not pigeonholed to a particular function like marketing. So in that kind of scenario, how you speak to someone, say, who's a director of marketing, and the type of wording you use, the terminology may be quite different than the kind of terminology you would say if it turned out to be an It department that's using our platform. So that's what I really mean is not only do you have to be confident in the scope and scale and functionality of what your platform or tool is, but also you have to be very careful in the word. Choice to be very compelling articulate and making sure the types of words that you're using are landing with a particular terminology that resonates with your prospect.

Alexander Laurin [00:43:20]:

That's very valuable. I'm just curious, Rod, you mentioned product specialist calling the reps product specialist. Is there an advantage to that? If you're making a phone call and you're introducing yourself as an account executive, is there an advantage to calling yourself a product specialist instead?

Rod Weir [00:43:38]:

Well, I like it more, probably not so much from that kind of call perspective, because in my mind, once you have a conversation actually underwear, much like you and I are having now, then it's things like emotion and tone and all those sorts of things to catch in and keep the conversation going. So where I find the benefit is more kind of on the email side very early in the sales cycle where you're trying to engage and engender some interest. So if you're dealing with something or someone who's indicating a product or some kind of specialist, which implies a high degree of acumen, maybe market awareness, et cetera, then perhaps you can learn. Maybe, and again, this is a premise, a hypothesis, but maybe the willingness to engage some of the product specialists on the assumption of learning more might be a little bit an easier entry than someone who's obviously trying to sell you something. So I don't know. Is it a big deal? Not sure. But is it how we roll currently? Yes, it is.

Alexander Laurin [00:44:47]:

In your bio, I read about the components of a successful sales team. Can you tell me what some of the components or the characteristics of a successful salesperson?

Rod Weir [00:44:59]:

Sure, you bet. One of them is what I just mentioned. And again, I can speak with most authority, I guess with what I'm doing currently, which is this interest and aptitude to get close to being expert might be too high a bar, but let's call it specialist, where I kind of like to describe a call let's call it an hour long demo call where you're kind of explaining the platform and the solution and trying to convince someone of the merits of it is that I don't really like to parking lot anything. I'm hoping that there isn't follow up needed to answer questions. There might be follow up for other reasons but maybe not to answer a question. So obviously over time it's going to take someone some time to get that level. But I would say that kind of approach in terms of the ideal salesperson quote unquote in my mind it's not the competence to do that because there are arguably a lot of intelligent people out there willing to be in sales. So it's really not a competence determination like are you capable of doing that? Sure but do you want to do it? Is that something that is appealing to you? Is that something where you think you can be authoritative and compelling and articulate? So in my mind an attribute today of someone who's going to be a very have a long and fruitful career in sales would be someone who has the aptitude and interest in first off, understanding sort of technology and the ramifications of things like hosting and security and all those sorts of things, which, at least in my mind, for a b two b client, those matter. Maybe they don't matter initially, but they're going to matter ultimately because often in the sort of selling process we do, and this would, again, I would think, speak to the kind of characteristic that would be good in a professional salesperson would be what you talk about, what you emphasize, what you lead with with an end user would be quite different later in the sales cycle when perhaps you're dealing with someone who's concerned about the security or uptime or integration capability of a solution. So again the characteristic of a salesperson, I think that's going to serve them well, would be someone where you very definitely read your audience and very definitely use that to guide and emphasize what you start to lead with, what you end with, what next steps shoot you go with.