Sales Mavericks Unveiled: Mapping the Journey, Defining Success, and Thriving in Ever-Changing Sales

Celeste Berke [00:00:01]:

Here we are on the Sales Edge podcast. I'm so excited today. Hi, Celeste. Your host here with Amy Rahovchak.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:00:09]:

Oh, my gosh.

Celeste Berke [00:00:09]:

Right? Did I nail it?

Amy Hrehovcik [00:00:11]:

That was perfect.

Celeste Berke [00:00:14]:

I know we practiced out of time. No, we've actually been chatting and it's like, holy crap, holy shit. I guess I could say that there is so much more to talk about. So I'm really excited that link in led us here. I saw you randomly. This is what LinkedIn does, right? It's like the universe saying you need to connect with this individual because there's something about them that you're drawn to. Definitely. Your profile. Let's just say without a standout profile, nobody knows you exist without your sales edge. So I want to talk in the next 15 minutes about what is that? So my idea of sales is that you don't necessarily have to be like, the greatest at it. Right?

Amy Hrehovcik [00:00:53]:

Right.

Celeste Berke [00:00:54]:

I think you actually posted about this. It's freaking hard. You don't just wake up one day and say, I'm going to be in sales and I'm going to excel at it because I practice one time. No, but typically over time, what we find is someone carves out, like, a little sales edge, right? Something that makes them unique, their go to whatever it is. We're going to find out from Amy today what that means in her world. And then we will wrap it up with busting a sales myth that she either believes to be true or is ready to dispute. So, Amy, tell us a little bit. Just who are you? Why was your profile shown to me? And I immediately was like, yes, let's message this person.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:01:34]:

Oh, my goodness. Alessa, it's an honor to be you know, sometimes I find it's best to just not question the LinkedIn gods and just be thankful for the gift of a new friend.

Celeste Berke [00:01:44]:

Algorithm works in your favor.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:01:45]:

That's right. Universe algorithm. I guess it's all kind of merging together. But I like to describe myself. I'm a revenue human for life. I was raised by a sales leader. I sold enterprise tech for a decade. I was sea level at a startup that was acquired. So that was cool. Built out two sales enablement departments, and now I've got a boot camp called the Buyer Experience Boot Camp and quick little Plug. Open enrollment right now, we start again September twelveTH, but who's counting? And, yeah, I'm excited to be here and dive into all that is great and hard and scary and messy about the greatest profession on the planet.

Celeste Berke [00:02:24]:

Definitely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And you're kind of in this transition point yourself. But what I loved about what you said is that you're kind of like tapping back into knowing your true north, which is the name of my LLC randomly and where you want to. So, like, what is that? If we say, like, Amy, what's your sales? Like, what is that thing that at the end of the day, you're like, I'm great at this. This is what makes me a salesperson. What is that for you?

Amy Hrehovcik [00:02:53]:

Yeah. Okay. So I wrote down two things, actually, because I couldn't decide between the two of them. But I want to preface this idea with just a quick precursor that I believe that there's an art and science to everything. Right. And I think what most people get wrong about this idea, you hear it played out in the right brain, left brain dialogues or debates, like, are you creative? Are you analytical? Like, it's nonsense. There's an art and a science to everything. And just like sale, there's no such thing as a natural salesperson. Right. Which was the post I think you were talking about. There's a tremendous amount of work that goes into it in the same way that we've never met a natural lawyer or a natural doctor. Right. That doesn't exist for sales either. And I mention that because I think a key piece to developing an edge or finding the art in how I want to sell or how I did sell it requires me to first understand and master the science, the fundamentals of selling. And then once I have my head wrapped around the fundamentals right? And then you can kind of start to lean into that edge. And I will finish this thought with, like, when I was learning to sell. Celeste, I'm dating myself here, but I stopped listening to music in my car for an entire year in favor of books on CDs. Do you remember those?

Celeste Berke [00:04:18]:

That was a thing not too long ago, I listened to one on a five hour drive. Still a real thing if you have a CD player.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:04:27]:

Oh, my God. Well, there was also a Tom Tom in the car, and the Maps Quest directions were printed out, like, strewn all over the seat. Okay. But anyway, so learning the fundamentals. Now, that said, to your question about what's my edge, I think there were two that really were fundamentally different in how I approach sales versus how, let's say, a sales boss or the average sales boss would prefer to have a rep execute. And the first was that I did not worship at the altar of my sales process. Right. I understood that the value that a sales process delivers is not to the buyer, right? It's to the company. It gives them predictability on how much revenue they're going to generate at a certain time. And in fact, this idea that the sales process or excuse me, the buying process or journey, to use a trendy keyword is a linear thing is nonsense. That is not how buyers buy. And so one of the things that made me really stand out is that I aspired to understand the buyer's journey and meet them where they were at. And then the second thing, I think, that really allowed me to hyper focus on my own effectiveness was I was ruthless at qualifying which opportunities I was going to work at any given time. Like, absolutely ruthless. And so there was a very specific criteria that I needed to see, and a lot of it I really did develop for myself because I knew how I sold and what worked and what didn't. And so, yes, those are the two things that really, I think, brought an edge in my direction after, again, the grueling part of learning the science.

Celeste Berke [00:06:17]:

Sure. And what's really interesting about what you said is this buyer centricity of we have to put as a seller our thoughts and the way that we want the direction to go and our desired outcome kind of aside and really get to know our buyer. So I love how you said you became very buyer focused, which I'm sure meant you were a detective, right. Figuring out as much as you could about people who worked where, what were they focused on, what was a priority to them, what wasn't. And that is going to be different from customer to customer to customer. How much time did you spend researching just like, people?

Amy Hrehovcik [00:06:57]:

I'm laughing because I don't even think I could put a number on it. I used to say, I have a self, I can't even remember the phrase. But I've done so much reading on the psychology of purchasing, on the psychology of the buyer, on just the psychology of decision making and biases and all those things, and we're talking about 2020 years worth. But I could talk about my favorite report right now, gartner's State of Buying Report in 2023, and the top ten factors that go into vendor selection. Right? So it hasn't stopped, but I'll add one more. When I go to conferences, one of my favorite questions that I would ask of people just while milling out and about is, which session are you most excited to attend, which is a proxy of what are you most excited to learn about, which is a deeper proxy of what is the business problem that you're kind of working on right now? And so I never gave up a good opportunity or I never missed an opportunity to, to your point, set aside my own agenda, which is hard to do when you are going to get fired if you do not generate a certain amount of revenue every quarter. It is exquisitely difficult, but you got to figure out a way to do that. And then it's really pretty misleading in that when you do figure out how to do that, the size of the deals that you manifest, the referrals that come your way just because you do show up differently, you do. Spend the time to understand and uncover the most important thing to the buyer and then really root out. How can I help them achieve that impact?

Celeste Berke [00:08:34]:

This is all juicy tidbits and we just could keep going and going, encourage any listener right? I mean, this is someone who's sitting in front of me on the internet, who I'm just like, wow, tell me more, tell me more about that. And something that happened to me early on in my sales career was just like figuring it out, right? Throwing mud at the wall. And we both started in a time where the internet wasn't really a thing, right? It just started. So for everybody who's starting their career now, you are miles ahead of what information is available at your fingertips, right. And you have to keep sharp if you want to continue to learn about buyers and the change. We have a huge change coming with boomers. My parents are boomers, right? Like 76, 78. My dad is still working, but soon he's exiting the well, probably not, but he may be exiting the workforce, right. These great minds who are going to be leaving and now we have a whole new generation coming up, 50% of millennials in decision making roles, like the way people interact, the way people buy, it completely changed, right? And it will continue to change. And if we are not looking at research and talking with people about what's going on in their world and getting really inquisitive, we are missing the mark and staying stuck in doing things that ultimately aren't going to help us shape our career. And I will tell you, even as someone who's going to be 44 next month, the amount of learning that I've had in the last year, in the last three years is more than the ten years prior combined. Never stop learning. And I love how you said you're just feeding yourself that information so you can stay current and you can stay sharp. Now, I want to end with something that I think universally everybody in sales has been told in one point of their career a hard, you must do this. This is a widely held belief that exists out there. What is the sales myth you were once told, taught to follow that you know now that is not true. And I want to bust that myth today.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:10:49]:

There's so many, I don't know how you expect me to choose just one of them. I think we got a tremendous amount of group think going on and let's say tech sales in particular. It's pretty wild. The sameness. Okay, so if I had to choose just one, I would say the purpose of a question, right? When I think about how most sellers are taught to approach the sales conversation and I'll ask most people, what is the purpose of asking a question during a sales call? Right? And generally you get some kind of response back, like to gather information. I'm trying to bant them, we're trying to understand their needs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of these things are true. However, if we take a step back right, and the goal of selling really is you're trying to help someone change their behavior, trying to make a better decision and move in a different direction. So what is a precursor then to a change in behavior, especially a team of people, right? It's a change of thinking. And then you can take it a step back. What is the precursor to a change in thought? And that is and always has been a great question. And so the purpose of asking questions in sales is not self serving. It is not to gather information about your buyers. It is to help them think differently about the business problem that they're experiencing so that they can attack it in a different way and achieve the impact that you bring to the table. So that's the big one, is the whole point, the whole premise of questions during discovery.

Celeste Berke [00:12:27]:

I'm, like, in awe.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:12:28]:

Yes.

Celeste Berke [00:12:29]:

Tell me more. Tell me more about this. The premise of gap selling is along the same lines of typically people go in and they have this I'm going to check all these qualifications off. And it's rooted anybody who has a problem, it's rooted in this change management belief and the neuroscience behind change management of, you can say you need to go on a diet. You can say you want to change something, but if you don't agree, you have a problem. If you don't admit you have a problem, if you're unwilling to make that change, nothing's going to happen. And so it's right along those lines of, and now I'm going to go look this up even more and want to talk to you further about this. Now I'm intrigued of really the psychology behind it and right, opening up this Pandora's box that as salespeople, what is the psychology behind our buyers and us as sellers, and how do we meet that in the middle in this sweet spot? So thank you so much for sharing that.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:13:26]:

Of course, anybody that's interested in reading further on this particular topic, I think the great Adam Grant did a great job with his I think it's his most recent book, Think Again. Really spectacular work. And it changes the way that you start to draft questions. It changes the way that you think about the buyer journey. Right. And I don't know, it's just like a very different way to approach it. I would say the runner up was that win rate effectiveness is greater than quota achievement. Change my mind. Right. The average win rate in tech sales right now is like, 17%, which is insanely low. And it doesn't need to be that way.

Celeste Berke [00:14:08]:

Right. And we're not talking about, all right, that 83%. Like, what's happening to that your sales.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:14:14]:

Process you're so obsessed with, like, you're setting your team up to lose 83% of the time. Have fun with that.

Celeste Berke [00:14:22]:

That could be how you sign off on all your podcasts.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:14:25]:

I love that. I may feel that.

Celeste Berke [00:14:26]:

That's really good. Adam Grant, one more time. What is the book adam Grant.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:14:30]:

Think again.

Celeste Berke [00:14:33]:

Look at me writing that down. Think again. All of you take a note. Think again. That is an awesome recommendation. Thank you so much, Amy. We try to keep this super short because the attention span of everybody is a goldfish. So probably going to watch us on two point speed, which I love and it's my recommendation, 1.5 to 2.5 or two. You can't go about that. I don't think it's funny.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:14:55]:

I'll take you right in the middle. I'm a 1.75 girl.

Celeste Berke [00:14:59]:

I think it depends. I find myself definitely 1.5. I sound just normal. I've realized I talk so slow. So, any parting thoughts for our listeners today as you are the first to kick off this podcast, the Sales Edge. And we have a great lineup coming up of just really unique individuals in sales who have been there, done that and are doing it still. Any parting words from you?

Amy Hrehovcik [00:15:23]:

Yeah. One of the best things that you can do for yourself mentally is to redefine your own definition of success, right. If you were born or raised in a Western culture, we define success as based on an outcome, right? When I get married, when I win this deal, when I buy this house, then I will be happy when the challenge right with operating well, first of all, that's incorrect. The joy to be found, the happiness to be found is in the journey. However, that mindset is exponentially more problematic for us as sellers because our outcome never comes, right. You hit your month, you hit your quarter, and what do you get? A weekend to celebrate it and then it starts all over again on top of if you do not do this, then you will lose your job. And so focus very hard on changing that definition for yourself and understand that success is in the journey. Success is in the inputs that you put in, particularly the work, the practice, the effort, the going and talking to buyers after you lose a deal or win a deal to figure out why and then recreate that moving forward. That's what winning looks like in this profession.

Celeste Berke [00:16:30]:

I love it. And, yes, I'm all about the journey myself because I've been there. I've gotten the big bonuses and the big paychecks and flew myself first class when I got my master's at George Washington and I was like, now what? Right? It's anticlimactic. It is about the journey and the process and the people you meet along the way who can have significant impact on your life. It has been such a pleasure hearing your short snippet. I will link everything in the show notes so you get a whole slew of new followers because the content you're putting out there is awesome. And I can't wait to celebrate your sales journey as you continue to impact lives. So thanks so much for being on the show.

Amy Hrehovcik [00:17:10]:

It's my pleasure, Celeste. Thanks for having me. Good luck with the new journey. Woo.