Noob School - Episode 44: Rapid-Fire Questions with John Sterling

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

In this episode of the Noob School podcast, John answers a few rapid-fire questions from some avid listeners. Tune in for John’s tips on selling during uncertain times, how to be the top one seller in your organization, and how small businesses with little to no budget for sales and marketing can increase their revenue and reach more customers.  HIGHLIGHTSHow to use the same sales methodologies with different types of clientsDon't confuse your role with your identity Always make the best out of any situationJust make more calls Tips for businesses that want to reach more customers  QUOTESJohn on differentiating your identity from your role: "Always understand that no matter what you're doing, whether it's something really cool, something really big, or something really small, or maybe you don't you have a job right now -- know that it doesn't have anything to do with who you are."What to do in times of uncertainty according to John: "When some macro event is happening, instead of watching the news and getting freaked out about things, think about what we can do to make things better. If you have to pull back in your business that's fine too. Make whatever adjustments you need to have your life continue on like before or better." Connect with Noob School and John by visiting the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsterling1/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnsterlingsalesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnsterling_/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_TikTok: https://twitter.com/johnsterling_Website: http://salestrainingfornoobs.com/

Welcome back to Noob School. This is where we interview sales pros that can help you get off to a great start in sales. Welcome back. This is a little question and answer time. We got a few questions in through the question portal. First is from Brett Buskey. I hope I said that right, Brett, one of the Clemson NBA students. Like most of the Clemson NBA students, Brett's working, so I'm sure he's outselling.

And he's asking, how can you use a lot? a current selling methodology on every client without the client thinking, hey, this is kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. And I suppose what you mean is, you know, you might have a methodology like Sandler or Ziegler or somebody. And solution selling, in your mind, it doesn't really fit every prospect correctly. And so I would say, you know, first, the first thing I would say is you're good, you're good to ask. It's always good to ask.

But I'd say when you go into the client, you'd be amazed at what the client will let you do. If you ask them ahead of time, get their permission, explain to them what you're doing. I mean, if it was solution selling, you could say, you know, we use the solution selling approach. And I'd like to make sure you're comfortable with that, you know, before we go through the process. This is just to make sure we're on the same page at every step of the way. And if we're not, you know, we'll get out of your hair. And, you know, if you tell them up front, usually you'll be fine. If you just start doing the process, they might start wondering, you know, what you're up to for all these questions about, that kind of thing.

And then on a practical level, I'll say, you know, if they're small and solution selling might be more complex, you know, you can cheat a little bit, Shorten it down, skip some stuff, combine some questions. So just, you know, adjust it. If I was your sales manager, I'd say that's cool. Adjust it, you know, on the fly, in the field as needed to make it happen the way you want to. So good question. Keep them coming. And I hope that answer helps.

Thank you. So next question we got. This was about identity. versus role, okay? This is a big subject. I'm just going to go over it real quickly. This is referred to as I are, or identity versus role. This is just that you acknowledge and understand that there's a big difference.

There should be a big difference between who you are, like your identity, versus what role you have. and, you know, I've seen this, you know, in my own life. You know, we had a big company and I had 100 salespeople working for me and we sold the company, which is great. But the next day, you know, I wasn't ahead of sales anymore. I didn't have 100 salespeople. I wasn't, you know, flying around the world, you know, chasing deals.

I didn't have all these great people to work with every day. It's just gone, like, poof, you know. And you don't feel something. so good. At least I didn't. And you kind of confused, you know, was that my identity or was that just my role? And of course, it was just my role. I just had that role for a while and loved it, but it really wasn't who I was. And so I really wasn't prepared for it. And I hope in your life, you will be, that you always understand that no matter what you're doing, whether it's something really cool or something really big or something really small or maybe you don't have a job right now.

None of that's that anything to do with who you are, with what your character is, what your work ethic is, you know, where you're going to go in the future. So understand the difference between who you are, what your current role is. The other place we've seen this example, I'll give you, you know, example would be like a Navy SEAL. You know, most Navy SEALs, you know, most Navy SEALs, go in very young, let's say 20 years old. Maybe they get out when they're 30. And so after 10 years of, you know, multi-million dollars worth of training being put into them

and, you know, doing all these crazy, you know, James Bond missions around the world and being, you know, thought of, rightly so, as like some of the coolest, you know, toughest guys in the world, they get out, right? Can't do it forever. It's tough, really tough on the body and everything else. They're literally traveling, traveling,

80% of the time. And how do you adjust from that? And they struggle with the identity versus role thing, you know. When they lose that seal role, you know, they have to find themselves, they have to find their identity again. And we've got quite a few seals that have moved to Greenville. We have an organization that attracts them here, which is kind of cool. We've got about 20 right now.

But one of the things we do is people work with them on figuring out that transition plan from the seal world to the real world or other world, what they call it. So anyway, in your life, take it from me, take it from the seals, for goodness sakes. Understand the difference. And, you know, when things are going real well for you and your role might be really cool, don't confuse that with your identity. and likewise are the same if things aren't going so well, don't think that makes you any worse. You are who you are and don't confuse the two. So that's my answer to the IR. Hope it's helpful.

Plenty more on the internet you can go see if you want to look up more. Next question was macro issues. How do we sell in this crazy time, right? the price of oil being so high and maybe a recession, you know, coming up soon and all these things. I'll just say this. You know, I've been through several times like this. Of course, 2008, 2009 with the housing crisis and the stock market crash. You know, Y2K when the world was going to come to an end because there weren't enough digits.

in the computers for the year 2000. You know, there was a dot-com crash in 2002, I think. And then going back further, there was, you know, different recessions and depressions and different things. And every time, every time, you know, things seem worse than they are. And certainly there's times when businesses aren't buying as much and people are getting let go. and those kind of things do happen.

I'm not suggesting that they never happen. What I am telling you that I know for sure is the people who do well and make it through not just well, but sometimes better than well, or the people who they understand it's going on, but they figure out how are we going to make our number anyway? How am I going to be successful anyway? And so sometimes you use some of these macro events to your advantage, right? Right? Like, let's just take Amazon, for example, when it was really, when the lockdowns were happening and COVID and all that stuff, I mean, there was lots of people who just kind of pull back and didn't do anything.

And Amazon just went full out, you know, on the offense. They were like, this is our time to build more warehouses, hire more people, raise the rates of our employees to $25, $0.25,000. an hour so we can get more people in here because this is when we're going to get the adoption rate of people that are comfortable using Amazon up with a huge growth curve. I don't even know what the number is now, but I just know that we went, in my household, we went from buying like occasionally buying something from Amazon to buying stuff all the time. We don't even like to go to the grocery store anymore unless we have to because we can get most of those staples sent right to our door. So anyway, Amazon went forward and look what's happened to their company and their stock price.

They've crushed it. So, you know, when something's happening, some macro events happening, instead of watching the news and getting freaked out about things, think about what can we do to make things better? If you have to pull back in your business, that's fine too. Make whatever adjustments you need to have your life continue on, at least. like before or better, to make that your intention. But please don't just pull back and fear and do nothing and kind of make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So every one of these things I've seen, the people who have gutted it out and made good strategic decisions have come out fine. So I hope you do too. I got just two more quick ones. So, you know, for the reps out there, you know, I, you know, I. I get the question off and, you know, what can I do? What's one thing I can do to make me better than the other reps? And I'll just give a story of a guy named Todd Lorbach.

Todd, he was a guy from Clemson that we hired. He measured in finance. He was in fraternity over there. He was very much like some of the other people that we hired. Really good guy, but really determined. And he asked me, because I want to be. number one, how do I do it? I'm like, well, if you make the most calls, you know, I've never seen a guy make the most calls or not, you know, be the most successful eventually. And so he did

that. And he literally made, we had a call counter for everyone. And he made about twice the number of calls of anyone else. And, you know, he, he, I would say he was probably, you know, one of the better salespeople also. He was very good at what he did. But he just made a lot more calls. He was made a lot more He would stay later. He asked for territory that was on the West Coast, in addition to his East Coast territory, so he could work a longer time zone deal. So he did real well.

And then within two years, he was like 21 when we hired him. Within two years, we decided to send somebody around the world to kind of be our international sales manager. And we really had nothing going on. We had a few, you know, resellers around the world. We said, why don't you just go out there and see what you can do, Todd? And, you know, we picked this guy who's 23, 24 years old because he just worked so hard.

And we figured we can send this guy anywhere and he's going to work hard, he's going to call back, tell us what's going on. We can trust him, and that's exactly what he did. And he built up an organization, you know, all throughout Asia and the Middle East. Europe, Latin America, and we ended up buying companies in those areas also. But anyway, it's just a story about making the calls.

So the one thing you can do different is make the calls. And I'll tell you this, and I don't want to get negative, but I see a lot of reps not make the calls. They organize their desks. They get their proposals done. They have a sales meeting. They go to lunch. They have a break.

They talk to their colleague. They send a few emails. They respond to some emails, but just literally just calling people up and going through that process of trying to get people on the phone and having a discovery session to see if there's something there where you can help them. So make the calls. And even if it's 10 calls a day, 20 calls a day, have a little tick sheet, tick them off, get them done, and you'll be amazed at what happens when you do that first before you do all the other stuff that tends to creep in your day. And the last thing, we get this question from businesses a lot. You know, I do work with businesses. They're looking to increase their sales.

And very often, one of the things that frees businesses from doing too much in sales is they're thinking about maybe they're over-complicating things. They're thinking, you know, well, we need to hire a sales manager and some salespeople. We need the CRM system. We're going to need some computers. We need a place for them to sit. You know, we need some work. to advertise, probably be Facebook advertising and maybe sponsor something downtown. And, you know, you're thinking about all these things like the end result of this great

sales effort. And what I recommend people do is to just figure out that first thing. You know, what's the first thing we're going to do? You know, are we going to have, you know, one thing that every business owner could do is he could do one outbound, you know, outreach a day. You could have a list of, you know, the top. 50 businesses in town that fit the profile. And just once a day say, hey, you know, I'm John.

This is my company. Trying to meet all the people that might use our product. Would you like to come see it? Or can I come see you? Or can we have lunch. And you can leave that voicemail. You can send that email. You can go see them.

You know, you can do whatever you want. But, I mean, every business owner without increasing their cost one bit could squeeze in that one outreach a day. and over the course of a year, that would be 200 people that you've tried to reach. And, you know, I would say, you know, in this town anyway, you'd probably get 50 people, 50 callbacks. And out of that, you know, maybe 10 of them will buy something. So 10 new customers in a year for a grand total of zero marketing and sales costs. So that's where I would start most businesses that have a small budget.

or not much sales going on. It's just kind of the one thing a day. And anyway, if I can help you with that, you let me know. But I think that's the end of our Q&A for the day. And we'll see you. We'll see you next time. Keep sending those questions. I love answering them.