Ep #105: Tools for Today’s Sales Superstars with Tim Brown and Dan Streeter

Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley, author, speaker and educator on neuromarketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week, we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley.

Roger Dooley:              Welcome to The Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. My guests this week are Tim Brown, founder of Three Creative, and Dan Streeter, author and principal of IMPART! Learning Solutions. Tim and Dan have a new book out, Old School with New Tools: The Extra 5% that Takes You to the Top of your Sales Game and Keeps You There. Welcome to the show, Tim and Dan.

Dan Streeter:                Thanks for having us.

Tim Brown:                   Yes, thank you. Great to be here.

Roger Dooley:              First, I don’t know if you want to take this one, Tim, you guys can jump in as you feel most appropriate. Who is the audience for the book? If somebody asks you to describe what’s the underlying theme or purpose of it, what would you say?

Tim Brown:                   Really the audience is anybody that’s in sales. When we say sales, that could be outwardly focused or inwardly focused. Dan and my belief incidentally, Roger, is that everybody is in sales. We wrote the book specifically with, in terms of the value proposition, what is that last five percent of the things that you can do to really go from being good to being great?

To going from ordinary to extraordinary in a world where people are bombarded by ten times more messages than they were 15 years ago. And where competition has grown ten times greater as the internet has brought in this dynamic where just in the last 20 years we’ve gone from local to regional to global competition. How do you compete in that landscape? And how are you as most effective as possible by combining the best of both worlds between old school and new tools?

Roger Dooley:              Right. Well, before we get into the book, how do you see the sales function evolving? How has it changed and how do you expect it to change going forward? I mean, I got my career start in sales many many years ago and it’s a vastly different world today, that’s for sure. I spent time knocking on doors, cold calling on industrial customers, and that sort of thing. That’s clearly no longer the most productive way for salespeople to spend their time.

Tim Brown:                   I think the way we go about growing, maintaining relationships, building these, has basically not changed at all. What has changed are the tools that we’re using to accomplish that. When you look at sales up until sometime around 1990, really predominately, all we had were the phone and the feet to be out and about and creating sales. We saw email come into play. Then through that we saw mobile phones come into play. We saw the computing power, the number of apps on the mobile phone change.

Statistically, the average salesperson has 44 apps on their phone. Only two of those apps are used for communicating. You think about all the different apps that are available to us that allow us to amplify our ability to communicate. I mean, it’s an amazing world that we live in today if we’re willing to use technology more effectively with an operating system of an always-be-serving mindset. That consultative sales methodologies that have been with us since all three of us got into our selling career many years ago.

Roger Dooley:              I’ve had a few past guests talk about the changing sales function. Not everybody has the same theme. John Jantsch talked about the salesperson as being sort of a personal brand. That in an evolving world, no longer is a salesperson just sort of an information provider and order taker and sort of facilitator, but now the salesperson has to be this sort of expert, to varying degrees. Not everybody is going to be a nationally famous blogger or whatever but the salesperson needs to have that brand. Do you buy into that or would you say that’s just one of several possible strategies?

Dan Streeter:                I can answer that. I would say that, empathically yes. That now the salesperson role has changed dramatically to where the information asymmetry that used to occur between the salesperson and the person making the purchase is no longer there. You see, when we used to walk on a used car lot, we had no idea. We were basically at the mercy of the salesperson to be able to give us that information. So there was this dramatic information asymmetry that occurred.

Now that no longer exists because when I walk on the lot, I now have things like CARFAX and I now have things like Kelley Blue Book and I have all of this information at my fingertips that prior I never had. So now all of a sudden, the salesperson certainly has got to have an expertise in their role.

But even more so than that, the relationship cycle is even more relationship driven than it ever has in the past or the buying cycle is more relationship driven than it has ever been in the past because that difference in the information asymmetry is now gone.

Roger Dooley:              Another take on it was quite different, in fact, almost diametrically opposed to that, which was that the idea of the account manager, the salesperson, being that sort of single point of contact and even doing much outside of the customer contact function should be eliminated and reengineered.

As Justin Roff-Marsh talks about, breaking that sales function into multiple specialized functions and the role of the field salesperson, which when I was in sales, I did a lot of different things. I would certainly make sales calls. I would do prospecting. I would prepare proposals. I would expedite orders. Find out whether manufacturing was going to deliver on time. There was actually very little time spent selling. I think the number that he uses is something like, I don’t know, nine or ten percent was in the true customer contact mode.

The solution that he proposes is to really sort of radically break down those functions so that the salesperson is sort of an instrument of the home office where they’re sending the next stop to his phone and he or she is staying in front of customers, if not continuously, about as continuously as physically possible. What do you think about that approach?

Dan Streeter:                I think that that’s fantastic for the companies that can afford it. But the vast majority of us are not in a position where we can afford to be able to hire four people to be able to manage those sales components. I totally agree with him in respect to the specialization around each one of those fields, whether it’s in the contract position or whether basically you’re defining essentially the hunter role versus the farming role. Whether it’s the account management piece or the ones landing the accounts and so on. I think that that is a critical point to address.

However, most of us are not in that position. Most of us have a salesperson who’s doing exactly what you described, Roger, which is where they’re going out there and they’re managing all components of that sales cycle. Everything from the moment that that customer comes in, to the landing of the contract, and then the customer maintenance that occurs afterwards.

So our job as salespeople is to be able to understand, to be able to manage each of those components, unless we’re lucky enough to be able to end up in that position to where we’re literally getting emailed our next prospect, which in most industries is a fairly rare thing.

Roger Dooley:              Right. Yeah, that’s to some degree sort of an ideal world situation, if everything is working perfectly. Particularly in small businesses, you may just have one or two people on the sales function, and then of course that makes dividing it up a lot more difficult.

So if folks are in that situation where they have multiple sales functions that they’re dealing with, what are some of the things that they can do that technology lets them do now that simply weren’t possible before that hopefully makes them more efficient and maybe eliminates some of that drudgery or those tasks that are less essential?

Tim Brown:                   That is such a great question. When Dan and I give our keynote and when we open up the comments of our workshops we talk about our main goal is to give people back a 10x return on their time invested in being there. We go through game-changing technology that really creates that possibility.

I’m going to talk to you about one in particular that is very important to salespeople. Dan and I talk about this all the time. That’s the combination of Scannable, LinkedIn, and Evernote. When you think about all of the business cards that we get in a day-to-day basis, many people use applications that will scan business cards.

But what they don’t have is the power of Scannable, where you can take a picture of the business card, it then uploads your vCard in an email that gets generated right then. You can type in your information. It also has your LinkedIn contact information and a LinkedIn invitation to connect.

Three things are happening right now. Number one, you’re immediately getting back to a customer. So you’re communicating much more effectively than having to go back to the office or waiting a couple more days. You’re saving a ton of time in that process by the way of having all of that information already uploaded into Outlook as an example.

Number two, you’re creating now a contact that’s inside of your LinkedIn network and the likelihood that they’re going to leave that LinkedIn network is also very low. Then third, once your contact information as a vCard goes into their mobile phone—because it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you and knows about you—do you think that once your contact goes into their phone it’s ever coming out? Absolutely not.

So there’s three things that are accomplished by using Scannable. It’s really an amazing application. There’s 30 more applications like that that are game changing, including utilizing iBook, just as an example, on your iPhone. To where you have all of your sales decks or one sheets, you’ve got those in PDF format, they’re sitting on your phone, and you can be sitting there talking to a customer.

No longer do you need to wait to get back to the office to email them something off your laptop. You can email it directly from iBook. They can be reviewing it while you’re sitting there talking to them on the phone. I mean it’s so powerful.

Roger Dooley:              You mentioned Evernote in that process and LinkedIn of course. I’m curious, does LinkedIn become a key contact manager or would you then leverage that with a CRM of some kind? One of the things is today, so many apps do so many things that you almost have to prioritize.

Like which app is going to send the email? Are you going to email people through LinkedIn or are you going to email them through Pipedrive? Or email them through your primary email program, that might be a Google app or it might be Outlook or something like that?

Dan Streeter:                I definitely agree with you on that. I think there has to be a more global approach when you choose to be able to take on an application. For example, Scannable. I love Scannable. I think it’s an amazing app and what happens is that it allows you then to be able to connect the Scannable app directly into a feed, the contact for example, into an Evernote system.

Then you have the ability to take notes on a particular client or whatever it happens to be within the construct of Evernote that then you can share with your team. That’s part of the reason why I like it, is that essentially Scannable is owned by LinkedIn. And then of course, Evernote is also owned by LinkedIn. So it’s a tremendous tool and an amazing timesaver.

So we really have two rules that we have whenever we go about deciding whether or not to take on a new app. Number one is, how much time is it going to take me to be able to really invest in and learn the app? That’s going to be number one. Number two piece of that is going to be, once you decide that you want pursue it, what’s going to be the return on time investment that I’m going to get from it? So it takes me two hours to learn it, am I going to be able to get 20 hours back by doing it?

So something as simple as Scannable, imagine that you went ahead and you picked up ten cards a month. Then it used to take you 30 minutes to be able to do—well over the course of a year, you’re going to be able to shrink down that time to less than five minutes a month that you would go ahead and do.  So you’re talking about a huge investment of time that you would get on return. So that’s kind of how we want to look it.

That’s why Tim brought up the whole idea of the 10x return on any app that we would pursue. And there has got to be a global strategy so everything has to work together. So Scannable should basically connect to of course LinkedIn. LinkedIn should then connect to a CRM, whether it’s Salesforce or some other that happens to be out there.

Tim Brown:                   Dan and I talk a lot about time is really the great equalizer and how we choose to manage and invest our time has a direct impact on the life we end up living, right? How successful we are. Whether we like it or not, there are 8,760 hours per year.

When you think about that from a sales perspective, 50 weeks per year, 40 hours a week, 2,000 hours a year to sell, the reality is you probably have 1,200 to 1,400 by the time you factor in vacations, sick days, snow days, holidays, whatever that might be.

By being able to remove the amount of time that you’re essentially doing tasks that are not creating revenue, right? By entering business cards as just one example here, that’s a lot of time that you could be prospecting or that you could be in front of somebody or working at solutions for existing customers to potentially have them embracing more of your products, more of your solutions.

Roger Dooley:              Right, Scannable is a good tip. I’ve actually been doing the Evernote into LinkedIn and then just like a phone contact. So that works relatively well. Obviously business cards are different and not all of them scan as well as others but I’m going to have to check out Scannable.

Jumping over to a different topic for a second, in reading the book you do have some things that are not purely technology oriented. One of those is spending time dining with your customers. The recommendation in the book is three breakfasts per week with either customers or as part of a networking group, five lunches per week, and a few dinners per month.

That seems like a lot of meals. Is that really the way sales is going? On the one hand, we think of sales as becoming more electronic and not requiring as much face to face but on the other hand, do you see that the digital tools are freeing up time for this slightly more social business activity?

Tim Brown:                   Absolutely. Number one, I do think that’s it’s creating more time. But number two, people buy from people they like and trust, right? Rule number one of sales since the beginning of time. Creating a rapport with somebody, breaking bread with somebody, looking at them across the table. Everybody’s got to eat. Everybody. I don’t know, I mean, Dan, you’ve got to probably be—the number may be more like five breakfasts and five lunches that each of us have a week.

Dan Streeter:                Right.

Tim Brown:                   You get so much done at those breakfasts and lunches. I think that it’s gold. It’s absolutely gold. And as a sales professional, striving to have that be a part of your priority list is important.

Roger Dooley:              So, let’s talk about some of the specific tools that you guys use. We just got into that really good discussion of the combination of Scannable and LinkedIn and Evernote. What about things like appointment setting and reminders and so on? Do you have some preferences there?

Dan Streeter:                In terms of appointment setting, there’s phenomenal apps out that really supply a lot of the automatic reminder pieces that of course we could never do in the past. So tools such as Apptoto that basically establish a meeting time and then supply automatic reminders via text and via email to a client that ensures that they actually show up to the meeting.

Because I think that’s one of the hardest parts is whenever we deal with the appointment piece, is that for some businesses, they have a less than a 50 percent show up rate. So there’s got to be a way to be able to provide those constant reminders. That way at least if they do choose to cancel you have a way to be able to make sure in the future that you can fill that void and you’re not missing out on the sale. So I think that one of the tools I absolutely love though is Apptoto because it fulfills that function.

Roger Dooley:              Yeah, actually we set up this discussion with ScheduleOnce.

Dan Streeter:                Yes.

Roger Dooley:              I found that to be a huge timesaver because you can spend so much time going back and forth, “Well how about Monday morning?”

“Nope, Monday morning doesn’t work”

“Tuesday afternoon” and so on.

It can stretch over days especially if people are busy and not emailing frequently where if you can display available slots and the other person can choose an available slot, that then leads into the reminder sequence of reminding them the day before. And perhaps also an automated calendar update so they can easily stick it on their calendar and it gets on your calendar automatically too.

That’s the flipside, sometimes you set up an appointment, and confession, I am not perfect. I have once or twice set up an appointment in a phone conversation or something, jotted it down one a piece of paper but failed to get it onto my electronic calendar that ends up being my go-to tool.

When you use one of these tools like ScheduleOnce and there’s a bunch of them out there that perform relatively similar functions, they sort of eliminate the human middleman and it’s always there.

Dan Streeter:                Probably one of my favorite tools for scheduling group meetings is one called Doodle.com. It’s a great tool because it allows for people to be able to manage it themselves. You basically put in the time sequence that you think would be best in terms of dates and times and then you send the invite to others to go to that same schedule.

So then you can literally get 40 people on the same page if you wanted to. It’s a great way to be able to do—really any time there’s a meeting of three or more people, it’s a great tool to have. Doodle.com

Roger Dooley:              Very good. So what about calendar apps? I tend to use Google Apps so naturally I’m on Google Calendar, anything unusual there that particularly like in a mobile environment that you’d suggest or just basically be sure you’ve got the mobile version of whatever calendar system you’re using?

Dan Streeter:                That’s exactly right. So it’s got to make sure that it’s a connection to your email. So whether you’re using Outlook 365 or you’re using Google, no matter what that happens to be, you’ve got to make sure you’re using that app on your mobile device. That’s the biggest suggestion that we have is connect your calendar to your email and then of course, make it mobile.

Roger Dooley:              Then there is the to-do list, that sort of task list. I am very good at starting off using to-do list tools but not so good at really integrating them into my daily habits over the long haul. What have you found works, particularly in the sales context?

Dan Streeter:                I think that one of the best ones is going to be Evernote just purely because it allows for you to be able to create the list, it allows you to be able to share the list. I think that Evernote is a phenomenal tool for managing that piece. The other one that you can certainly use is going to be called, my gosh, it’s totally escaping me. It will come back. Oh, Slack, that’s the one.

Slack I love and even though it isn’t necessarily a to-do list type app but what Slack allows for is for project orientation that you include stakeholders in there. Then you basically update the project on a regular basis through the app itself. It is a great to be able to basically manage a project, manage individuals within the project, to keep to-do lists going, keep everybody updated. It is a great tool to be able to keep the projects on track.

Roger Dooley:              Yeah, as you get into that sort of group, not exactly scheduling but sort of keeping multiple projects on track, something that I’ve been playing with lately has been Pipedrive which is a tool. For instance, for podcast guests I can setup a guest—like I read an announcement about a book or read a magazine article and I say, “Oh that person would be maybe very interesting to my listeners.” I can stick them in as an idea and then I can have multiple steps in there. One would be getting their contact information, contacting them, actually scheduling a time, and so on.

You just sort of drag the project. They call them “deals” because it’s really sort of a sales-oriented tool but you just sort of drag it across as that particular prospect, if you want to call them that, progresses into later and later stages. So you can sort of then look at the big picture too of who’s in which phase of the process. Like I say, it’s really oriented towards sales and you can have multiple team members working it. So it’s a pretty interesting tool. Have you seen that one?

Dan Streeter:                You know, I’m actually looking at it right now. Pipedrive.com. So I’m going to let Tim answer there and then I want to tell you one other tool. It’s a similar tool that performs a little bit of a different function that may be neat to hear about. Go ahead, Tim.

Tim Brown:                   My only comment on Pipedrive is just I wish we had written about it in our book.

[Laughter]

Because I think it sounds awesome.

Dan Streeter:                And that’s what’s amazing for me is that over the course of time, products continue to evolve. So therefore, the book needs to evolve. There will be times when that absolutely needs to happen. There will always be sort of the stalwart apps that we have such as LinkedIn but we live in such an evolutionary environment, it’s just mind-boggling, the things that we can do.

So as an example, the one that we really like is called Autopilot. You can find it AutopilotHQ.com. An amazing tool that basically establishes and creates the customer journey from the moment that they come onto your website, basically sign up for membership, then it essentially manages and sends out emails over the course of time. Crazy easy to use. Very, very inexpensive and essentially manages the sales journey for you. Great tool to have.

Roger Dooley:              Very good. It’s got to be thankless job writing a paper-printed book about digital tools, particularly mobile apps. By the time the ink is dry, there probably are already revisions needed.

So, well we talked about LinkedIn as being a tool and certainly from a business and sales standpoint, that’s got to be the sort of premier social tool to use. What about Facebook and Twitter?

Dan Streeter:                Tim, do you want to do that or would you like me to?

Tim Brown:                   I think both of us on this one, Dan, I think you and I are both equally passionate on these. Facebook, to me, is a remarkable tool but it’s really, I think it performs better in a B to C environment than I think it does in a B to B environment. That’s just my, that’s Tim Brown’s opinion more than anything.

I think Twitter is where it’s all going. I am, of all of the social media engines that are out there, of all the apps to really embrace, they’re equally important in their own way, my favorite is the power behind Twitter. I think it’s been a very much a revolutionary technology.

Roger Dooley:              Right. Yeah, I tend to favor Twitter as well although lately, in the last maybe six months or so I’ve seen—to me at least—it seems like an increasing use of Facebook for business purposes. People setting up private Facebook groups for some particular business purpose and just quite a bit more business interaction where people are using that sort of blend of personal stuff and business stuff.

So you know, they seem human at the same time as maybe they’re getting some kind of message out as well as seeing what other people are saying from a business standpoint and commenting on it. So I’m not sure if that’s evolving or not. It’s just my impression that I’ve seen more business activity on Facebook than I recall in past years.

Dan Streeter:                I think that on that note, around the Facebook component is that all three of those, or specifically around Facebook and Twitter, that really what you have to be able to do is define your audience and figure out where your audience is and then do it consistently. Then making sure that you have a constant, ongoing methodology or theme that you are trying to be able to use within it.

So once you’re able to determine where your audience is and then you repeat it over and over and over again, then you have a much greater likelihood of being able to attract those individuals that are going to be helpful to you.

So determining your medium is one of the trickiest parts. Will you do blogs? For example, on LinkedIn, will you go in and publish to LinkedIn Pulse? Will you do podcasts? Will you do YouTube videos? And on and on and on. You can even use something as simple as Vine which is a six-second video that you might produce. You can do something as simple as Periscope that allows you to produce live video that you then can post onto Twitter and you can actually be watching, post that link and have people watch you live while you produce a video.

So there are so many different tools that are available that allow you to amplify your communication like never before in history. So the most important piece is choose your medium and then practice it over and over and over again to be able to gather that audience.

Roger Dooley:              What percent of salespeople do you guys think are really using the latest technology to full advantage now?  Just a guess?

Dan Streeter:                A great question.

Tim Brown:                   Dan, share some of the statistics on LinkedIn that you’ve done. I think that’s a great one.

Dan Streeter:                So whenever we go in and we do a seminar, so we offer seminars all around the country. We do basically 2, 4, 6, and 8-hour type seminars then ongoing coaching. So whenever we do that, one of the key pieces that we have is an analysis of LinkedIn.

So here’s some basic things that we know is that there’s 400 million people that are on LinkedIn across the world. 400 million. Of those 400 million, only 1 million actually produce content. So we’re talking about just a tiny number of people that actually produce content of any kind that are publishing their own articles, that are publishing slide shares, that are going out there and publishing video, whatever it is. A very tiny fraction of the people on LinkedIn produce content.

In addition to that, simple things, like putting your contact information out there. The vast majority of us, like 90+ percent of us that are on LinkedIn that consider ourselves to be in a sales role do not publish our contact information on our page that would it be open to the public. We hide it behind the LinkedIn wall rather than publishing it.

Well as a salesperson, we want people to reach out to us via email and via our phones and all that. So we’ve got to make sure that we have that out there. Well under half of us have ever actually recommended someone or have a recommendation for ourselves as well. So we’re missing the boat in respect to our ability. We have great customers out there who love us. Well ask them for that recommendation because it builds our social credibility.

Those are the sort of things that just purely in respect to LinkedIn where we just simply miss it and we have a huge opportunity to be able to build up our expertise, to be seen as someone who’s likeable. To be seen as somebody who is trustworthy.

Roger Dooley:              Great. Well on that note, I think we’ll stop. We’ve been talking with Tim Brown and Dan Streeter, sales training experts and authors of the new book Old School with New Tools: The Extra 5% that Takes You to the Top of Your Sales Game and Keeps You There. How can our listeners find you and your content online? Tim?

Tim Brown:                   Please go to our website which is OldSchoolwithNewTools.com.

Roger Dooley:              Great. Anything to add, Dan?

Dan Streeter:                Certainly you can find our podcast at Old School with New Tools podcast. And of course, you can find our book on Amazon or purchase it through the website.

Roger Dooley:              Great. We’ll have links to all those on our show notes page at RogerDooley.com/Podcast and we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too if you want to refer back to any part of it. Tim and Dan, thanks for being on the show.

Dan Streeter:                Thanks for having us.

Tim Brown:                   Yeah, thank you, Roger. This was great. Really appreciate it.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Brainfluence Podcast. To continue the discussion and to find your own path to brainy success, please visit us at RogerDooley.com.