The world of sales is always changing. The needs of customers change. Their spending habits change. Priorities change. Even the way we buy continues to change. Whether you like it or not, change is real, constant, and often happens with little time for you to prepare. So how are you when it comes to showing empathy in sales…adapting to change?
In this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl is joined by international award winner and world-class sales leader, Rob Jeppsen. Darryl and Rob discuss how adaptability is the number one indication of the success of a salesperson, and offer valuable tips on how you can strengthen your own level of adaptability. They share advice on how to spot the key indicators of change, as well as ways to use tools like A/B Testing. Darryl and Rob also go over why you should not be too product-centric, and offer ways to engineer customer experiences to your benefit. Learn how to adapt and stand out from the crowd on this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales!
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Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Rob Jeppsen, Xvoyant
Adapt or Die
Darryl Praill: Okay, so I have a question to ask you. I want you to sit back, relax and I want you to… by the way, you ever noticed that I’m always asking you all these questions? Do you listen to this podcast because it’s interactive enough. For me I like to… The reason I love podcasts is that I’m not talking, is I am just listening to people. I’m eavesdropping. I’m cherry picking, I can zone out I can then tune back in. It’s kinda like on my terms.
Darryl Praill: But I always come to you and I say I got to ask you a question. I wanna know and so I’m just curious. How do you guys think about that? Do you like that? Do you not, if not let me know, drop me a line. I’d love to hear that. But of course I do have a question. My question is today is about adapting. I was reflecting how my career which has spanned, computer science has spanned sales it’s spanned marketing, it’s spanned industries.
Darryl Praill: I’ve sold hardware, I’ve sold software I’ve sold in different countries. How it’s been a nonstop state of transition. Adaptation, if you will, I remember when I had my first real important, I would call my first real marketing job. And they said, “Darryl, you own this big ass database product, “that’s got millions of users worldwide. “You’re gonna a market at all. “And by the way, you’re going to run the Japanese office, “and you’re going to meet with them, “every night or once a week or whatever.”
Darryl Praill: At nine o’clock my time, which is probably. Whatever, eight in the morning, their time. And we were doing video conferencing, in the days when video conference was rare. And I had to figure out the Japanese culture if I wanted them to understand what we’re doing. And then I needed to work with them to adapt ’cause everything we were doing over here wasn’t over there. And I’ve never done that before.
Darryl Praill: And I remember to this day, my good friend, Tanaka Son, and I talking and he was so polite, and he would say such nice things to me on these video calls. And then of course, the challenge was and you’re doing this… I’m a young kid, right? Inexperienced like you wouldn’t believe and then they would talk amongst themselves and they would hear five minutes of Japanese. And I have no idea what they’re saying. They could be saying him a moron. He’s a stupid North American, he’s marketing like a North American, ignore him just be polite. Or they could be saying really great idea.
Darryl Praill: Or they could be saying, what are we having for lunch? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I had to adapt and figure out how to work with them, because it was my ass and align for the results. And then I remember when I went, and I actually moved the family to the states for the first time. And even though I’m Canadian, and the states is just, a few longitudes down south, I hope I got that right, we are different. You may think we’re a lot alike. If you’re… The Americans, you may think Canadians are just like you, we’re not. And if you’re International, you may think, “Everybody in North America is the same.” We’re not. And I had to adapt.
Darryl Praill: So, one of the things I recognized when I was living in LA, for example, was I picked up the word dude and that has never left my vocabulary since and It was a very different culture. And it was much more direct. Canadians aren’t as direct. I would suggest Europeans are not as direct. But Americans, they’re direct. I had to adapt if I wanted to be taken seriously. At so many points of my career. Even when, you think about, the emergence of the internet ’cause kids, I was doing this before the internet. You’re like, “Okay, how’s this gonna replace media?” That was before Google and pay-per-click, and these things would come out. And you’d go, “I don’t know. “I don’t know.” You have to adapt. You’re adapting. I have been through multiple recessions. You adapt.
Darryl Praill: One recession when I was in LA when I got there. I had 24 staff when I started that job. When I left four years later, it was me and one other guy, from 24 to two. You adapt. I had raised at a certain point in the previous recession, I had raised $50 million in VC funding. We were on fire, the economy tanked, dot com crashed, boom, no one’s buying. You adapt. We went from perpetual licenses to software as a service. That’s just bizarre. Where all of a sudden there’s software as a service, you’re not getting a big chunk of change, you’re actually losing money up front because they’re giving you 100 bucks a month versus a check for $10,000.
Welcome Rob Jeppsen
Darryl Praill: Alright, so how you run the company is you adapt. When we sell. We need to adapt constantly, and we need to recognize that our buyer is changing and they’re adapting. If you’re stuck in your old way. You’re stuck in old ways. I know I’m repeating myself here but old ways are not what win new business. New ways win new business. So let me ask you this. Are you adapting? Are you stuck in your old ways? It’s a really important question. And that my friend, is why I brought on a really important guy.
Darryl Praill: If you followed the great debate we did between Team UK and Team USA. This guy was bigger than life. He was potentially the loudest, most vocal, most opinionated guy on the show on Team USA. He wore his football jersey, it was just prominent and he had so much presence. His name is Rob Jeppsen, he, my friend, is the founder and CEO of Xvoyant, if you don’t know them, they are the world’s number one sales performance, improvement platform. He’s a keynote speaker, he’s host of the Sales Leadership podcast. This guy not only exudes sales improvement, sales leadership, he actually practices it. Rob, welcome to the show, my friend.
Rob Jeppsen: Darryl, thanks for having me. Super excited to be with you, man. And I appreciate that introduction. So honored to be a guest of your show, and I can’t wait to have this conversation about adapting.
Darryl Praill: Okay, so let’s get into it. So, you and I were talking about this, as we’re getting ready for the show. We’re talking about the whole idea of adapting. There’s a lot of… 2020 has… Say this, 2020, I’ll just be really generic has been a year of adaptation when we began, we began it with no pandemic. And then along the way, we had this pandemic then we had work from home. And then the do we open up? Do we not open up?
Darryl Praill: The list goes on. We are constantly in a state in 2020, of adapting. So you actually brought up this topic, when we’re… And my immediate reaction was like, oh, bam, ’cause that was personal. I get it as I spoke there at the start. And I’m not sure if you’re new in your career, you truly understand. This is your first time through any kind of economic downturn or maybe the last time you just were in a position to control it. You’ve got a whole company there. Not just from a sales side. You are the founder and CEO of the company, talk about adapting. Why is this topic so relevant and personal to you? I gotta ask you that.
Rob Jeppsen: It’s a great question. Listen, first of all the term modern sales. You and I both work in the world of modern sales and you guys do amazing things to help sales organizations be relevant to customers. But that term modern sales, Darryl, I think it’s changed in the last 45 days. There’s a lot of people that think modern sales means like in the last couple of years no, I’m talking about the last couple of months man and in with really no time to prepare, all of a sudden the way people buy changed, the way people allocated cash changed.
Rob Jeppsen: The needs that people had suddenly were prioritized differently. There were a lot of things that happened really quick and it reminds me that… There’s some player sort of funny thing happened on the way to the whatever store, market. I love how you said 2020. A funny thing happened on the way to quarter two. A pandemic happen.
Darryl Praill: Funny thing happened to it. Yeah, that’s a good good way of putting it, yes.
Rob Jeppsen: Yeah, funny thing happened and for a salesperson and a sales leader but for this show, salespeople. There are study after study, Google it you wanna talk about, I love your introduction. I’m pretty Google guy too. I cut my teeth in sales. Early on, there was no Google, there was a fricking phone book, man and a phone that I used.
Darryl Praill: Yes.
Rob Jeppsen: Yes. And so one of the things that’s happened that I would say to everybody listening to the show for at least 20 years, one of the number one indicators of success of a salesperson is their adaptability, their ability to adapt. And so you wanna be the first one to adapt as conditions change. You don’t want to lose opportunities, and wait for your leader to come and say, “This is the new script. “This is the new ICP. “This is the new, whatever.”
Rob Jeppsen: You wanna be a salesperson that’s so close to your market and understanding what’s making it work, that you’re gonna be able to adapt with it and be the first one there. Marc Benioff is one of the ones that said it. “We don’t go to where our customers are, “we go to where our customers are gonna be.” And I have always loved that quote. They always wanna go where they’re gonna be. And so as a salesperson, you should ask yourself, where am I? Am I going to where the salesperson… Where the customer is gonna be? Or am I going to where I thought they were? Because funny things happen on the way to quarter two Darryl and if we go to where they were, we’re gonna get left behind.
Darryl Praill: I think Benioff is ripping off Wayne Gretzky ’cause he always says,
Rob Jeppsen: Yes.
Darryl Praill: “Skate to where the puck’s gonna be, “not where the puck is.” There you go, yes.
Rob Jeppsen: It is for sure Gretzkyism. For sure.
Darryl Praill: Yeah. And you’re spot on. And… Here’s the thing I find, when I was younger, and by the way, folks, if I make myself sound like an old man, when I say when I was younger, I am. When I was younger–
Rob Jeppsen: I’m with you Darryl, I’m with ya.
Darryl Praill: Are you’re with me? I love it. I didn’t know enough to know that things had changed. I didn’t know to go to where the puck is. I didn’t even know what the hell that meant. So what I want to do with you today is I wanna understand, How do I identify that I need to adapt? In other words, what are the symptoms? What’s going on? Is it an economic indicator? Is that all of a sudden, in the sales tactics I used to do, don’t work anymore.
Darryl Praill: And then what I wanna do, once we understand that, okay, warning Will Robinson, by the way, if you don’t know what that means Google it, it’s a 60s reference. Warning Will Robinson, that happens, that alert happens and I was thinking like, “Shit, I gotta change.” Then I wanna drill down to you on three, four, five ways to adapt. So let’s do that.
Run A/B Tests
Darryl Praill: So how do I know I need to adapt? Is it just as simple as my what used to work isn’t working anymore or what?
Rob Jeppsen: That’s one way. Unfortunately, that’s the way most people do. I think Darryl, is they come back and they say, since we’re both going old school, I’m gonna go to the famous 80s movies for 500, Alex. We’re gonna go to Ghostbusters, okay. And when they’re chasing their first ghost in the New York library, they get up there and they say, what are we gonna do and someone says, “Someone go talk to the ghost.” And he tries to talk to ghosts and she goes, “Shh!” And he comes back and he says, “The usual things aren’t working.” So yeah, sometimes that’s what happens, Darryl. They come back and say, “The normal things aren’t working.” and then we gotta adapt. I think there’s a better way to do it. I think there’s a better way.
Rob Jeppsen: And that’s to make sure that we’re always in a mode of AB testing. Okay. We’re always in the mode of saying, “Okay, is this still working as well as it used to? “And is there other things “that we should be looking at.” People that are having those kind of relationships with their customers, they’re able to have different kind of conversations. And I think one of the big problems, Darryl, that I think happens is too many salespeople are product centric, rather than problem centric. And if you want to know how to adapt, remain problem centric, because as you may remain problem centric, you’re having conversations about what problems you’re able to solve or what results you’re able to achieve. You’re able to dollarize the value of changing those things.
Rob Jeppsen: And then you can have conversations on where does this rank in terms of the problems in your company. And as you take that kind of an approach where you’re making about the problems that they prioritize, you will have customers volunteer the new problems or the emerging problems before they become like the common problem. That’s the quote unquote “New normal”. You wanna solve emerging problems as well as existing problems, if you wanna find out where the adapting should go.
Darryl Praill: He’s dropping an 80s reference, Ghostbusters, my producer’s whispering
Rob Jeppsen: Yeah, baby
Darryl Praill: In my ear that it’s not warning Will Robinson, its Danger, Will Robinson.
Rob Jeppsen: It’s danger.
Darryl Praill: Which of course danger, so I got that wrong. And then what I just had so many thoughts I wanna talk about with you because you were nearly… You mentioned the AB testing. I say I tell you guys over and over and over again, AB test and I tell you that AB test nonstop. That’s what you need, you AB test. So okay, so what I wanna do here is I wanna get right into it. I know we’re going fast and furious. I love the pace we’re at, but we got to pay the bills. So, we’re going to go to commercial break and then when we come back, Rob, is gonna walk us through exactly once you finally go, oh, sugar, it’s time to adapt.
Darryl Praill: I know what I was gonna say before… But I wanna get this in before the commercial break. Rob mentioned, are you product centric, or are you solution centric, okay. If your voicemail script to me, if I pick up the phone starts off with, “Hey, Darryl, I’m Joey. “And I’m with ABC company. “And our product does this.” If your connection request, or your first communication to me on LinkedIn says, “Hey, Darryl, I’m with ABC Inc. “and our product does this.” If that sounds at all familiar to you, your cadence email templates early on says product ABC does X, Y and Z. You my friend are product centric, fix that. We’re going to commercial break. We’ll be back shortly.
Darryl Praill: Okay, we’re back. We beat them up on product centric, we dropped some good vintage pop culture references, and we’ve told them how to adapt. So that leads us to how do we adapt? What are all the different ways we can do because it’s not just simple, by the way, the thing about adapting guys, is that you can adapt to your team, you can adapt to your product, you can back to the financial situation, you can adapt to so many things, okay. Rob, let’s just start. So go in no particular order. What’s the first thing you do–
Rob Jeppsen: I’m gonna give you three.
Darryl Praill: Okay, go for it.
Rob Jeppsen: I’m gonna give you three in no particular order. And for some of the listeners, I’m gonna have to keep this high level because this is a 20-minute conversation. We’re down to our last eight, okay. Here’s the first one, adapt to the usage situations. This is how Steve Jobs saved Apple. He starts a company, he gets booted from his old company and he comes back. And what’s the first thing he brought an adaptation called 1000 songs in your pocket. That’s more than just good marketing. That’s a usage situation.
Rob Jeppsen: And if you look at what happened there, it says go… Do yourself a favor, and go watch the video, Google it. Video of the opening of the first Apple store where he says people aren’t buying computers, they’re buying games, they’re buying education. They’re buying, four things that he identifies. And he set up the Apple Store to do those four things. That’s understanding usage situations.
Rob Jeppsen: So, when you wanna adapt, make sure you’re being, yes, problem centric. Make sure you are, yes, understanding why that problem matters, but identify those use of situations. Let me give you an example, Darryl, of something I saw just last week. I’m a road warrior. I travel all the time. I don’t anymore now obviously. But I have learned that the portable cell phone chargers are my best friend. I have a couple of them, they need to have power to charge me twice. They gotta be small because I don’t wanna have something filling up my backpack.
Rob Jeppsen: ChargeTech is a company that has sold me several of them. I’m on their mailing list. And last week I got something else sent to me. It was the marketing was how to beat cabin fever. And now instead of a little tiny usage situation, they actually have a big device that sits on a desk and it says, “Since everyone’s working from home “and since it’s spring, “here’s how you work outside, buy our big charger. “It will charge a computer a monitor, a printer, “a musical device, “a whole bunch of things all day long. “So enjoy the spring weather, “still have social distancing with ChargeTech.” That’s a perfect example of adapting to a usage situation.
Rob Jeppsen: For everyone listening, your customers are going through changes, your companies are going through changes. Do yourself a favor and list on one side who are my customers. Go on the other side. What are the emerging problems. Make a grid that way and identify what problems matter. Get good at dollarizing the financial impact of those and you’ll know where to adapt. So I’ll push pause there and get your take, Darryl, that’s the first one is adapting to usage situation.
Darryl Praill: I’m just glad to see that I’m the only one who swears and lives by those portable chargers. I have them in my car, have them in my backpack I have in my suitcase, I have a backup to the backup, i get it, i love it. Rob talked about adapting, and used the example of the Use Case over and over again. Okay. I’m gonna throw another word that at you, you may have heard and then equally applies here. It’s just a different word, okay. Which is pivot. They pivoted from the mobile one that… The traveling.
Darryl Praill: Road warriors like Rob would have because it’s light and it’s nimble, and they can put it anywhere to the big honking one because you’re home already and you got to charge all these wonderful things. So adapt, pivot, same concept. You’re reacting and you’re kinda dropping what’s not working and you’re going into something that is working and if you’re not sure it’s working, remember Rob said you test it so a AB test it, okay. So that’s the first thing–
Rob Jeppsen: That’s the first one.
Focus on Experiences
Darryl Praill: You do the adapting on a solution. What’s next?
Rob Jeppsen: But after you find the usage situations, the next thing that I would suggest is look at the experiences that you need to create in order to take someone through sales. Now listen, a lot of things have changed, but let me tell you what hasn’t. Sales has not changed. you still have to have experiences where they say I have a problem. This is why it’s worth solving it. I identify that VanillaSoft is the people that I wanna use to solve the problem.
Rob Jeppsen: And now I’m willing to get the financial and political resource to get it done. Those experiences at a minimum still have to happen. Here’s what you should look to adapt with. How do I engineer those experiences, different ways now? Okay, the mechanics if you you may not be able to have access to the same kinds of people the same way because they aren’t all in the same office. There’s a lot of things that may have changed in how you engineer those things. Timing certainly may have changed as people are either in hunker down mode, grow mode or shrink mode depending what’s going on.
Rob Jeppsen: So you need to sit down and say how do I engineer that experience? Here’s another example. I’m a sports fan. Famous basketball player. Again, we’ve been old school the whole time. So I’m gonna stay old school, Darryl. I’m standing on this–
Darryl Praill: Hey man, do it. Look it up for you young guys, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, okay.
Rob Jeppsen: Oh. He was trying to be the next will Wilt Chamberlain. He was dunking all the time. NCAA makes it illegal to dunk. What? Young people are out here. You’re kidding me. They used to not be able to dunk? He doesn’t know what to do. So, what does he do? He develops a new shot called the skyhook.
Rob Jeppsen: And here’s why I tell everybody that’s listening about it, it made it so he could be dominant in the post without being physical. It extended his career, he played into his 40s. He’s still the NBA scoring champ to this day, and nobody’s even close because he found a new mechanic. So here’s the thing, Understand the experiences for the usage situation, but then say what is the version of the Skyhook that will help me engineer that in a different way, either different than my competitors, or before my competitors figure it out? I’m gonna push pause, throw back to you, Darryl.
Darryl Praill: When we just had a similar conversation with Costas Perkas on a previous episode, where we talked literally about this, we’re talked about when things aren’t working for whatever reason, It could be like we’re talking about here. It could be environmental and all you have to adapt. The point he was raising was that you need to try new things. You talked about a different mechanic, Kareem went to the skyhook, Costas was using an example of they never did video, their email templates weren’t converting the way they needed to.
Darryl Praill: So they literally start to experiment, a whole bunch of different tactics that they hadn’t used. And they’re evaluated the tactics they were using, but weren’t converting to the same way. So that’s another way they adapted their mechanics, they re-engineered what they were doing. They got rid of what was no longer working, they brought in some new stuff, and then they re-optimized the old stuff. So, I would ask you right now, as you look at your mechanics of what you’re doing, are you doing what you were doing when it wasn’t a global pandemic? If that’s the case, and you’re wondering why things aren’t performing the same way. It’s clear, you didn’t adapt, you need to adapt, just like the battery charger example did, they adapted, they pivoted. Okay, so the mechanics was great.
Rob Jeppsen: Can I add one thing to that really fast, I promise it’s fast.
Darryl Praill: Yeah, go ahead.
Rob Jeppsen: Three things for your listeners, I want your listeners to have a framework of ways they might look for those mechanics. Number one, you said video, I’m gonna tell you, get great at video. Okay, get great at it. Don’t get good at it, get great. Number two, in the experiences, learn the financial, why did those experiences matter? Get very good at the financial impact of that. It’s a great adaptation to say, “How do I speak fluently about the situation?” And then third, I call it the homework assignment. In your sales engagement, it’s not about what you do, and then you hope they sign. You do this so the customer does this.
Rob Jeppsen: And then we advance. Get good at giving homework assignments to customers. Get really good at having them say, “Because we did this, I’m going to do this “and you’re going to do this “and then we’re gonna move forward.” If you get good at the homework assignments and adapt there, your customer sales processes. The win rates will go up and the cycle time go down. Sorry.
Darryl Praill: So the homework idea is brilliant. We’ve never had that conversation before. I’ve had it done to me. The reason I like it ’cause you know what? It actually gets me invested in the process, ’cause now I’ve put a time in. And I want you to do something with this. So that’s the first part. I haven’t made this offer in a long time, I simply just forgot. But you mentioned video.
Darryl Praill: And if you’re not good at it get good at it of course we know the number one reason people don’t do this, ’cause usually they’re insecure, they’re vain, they’re uncertain, they don’t think they look good. It could be whatever it may be, you may have three heads, I don’t really give a crap. If you’re not sure and if you wanna practice it, here’s my offer to you. Send me on LinkedIn, a LinkedIn video, you can do that you can send voice messages and video messages, gotta connect with me first to do it.
Darryl Praill: So, if you haven’t done that, what are you thinking stupid, connect with me, and then send me a video message and say, “Darryl, I want you to tell me what’s good. “What’s bad about this?” I will tell you. I will probably send you a video back. So, do that, free offer, and it is just you and I, I promise not to share it or show it to anybody else. That’s video. Okay, so we’re talking about doing all this stuff Rob.
Rob Jeppsen: Last one. Okay, are you up, you’re going.
Darryl Praill: Number three, go.
Lead with Empathy in Sales
Rob Jeppsen: There’s one more, I said I’d give you three. Here’s the last one, learn. Here’s the adaptation. Learn what it means to lead with empathy. Too many people, like I know you have a good relationship with John Barrows. He was one of the first ones to say, “Yo, get good at empathy.” And what that led to, I get sold to 10 times a day. I get every email with one first line, says I trust things are good with your family and you and then there’s a hard left turn and they pivot and they start pitching.
Rob Jeppsen: I’m gonna give you the statement that I said in our UK versus USA that got a lot of people reaching out to me. I’m gonna say it here, it’s the last one I wanna say. This is a really important way to adapt. We are all in the same storm. We’re just not all in the same boat. And you need to get good at understanding what boat the people you’re in, and what shore they’re going to and how the storm affects them. For a medium sized boat. This may not be a bad storm for a dinghy a little rubber raft, they could be terrified. But the cruise ship, they may still be in the casino and not even know a storm is going on. You need to know how to do it.
Rob Jeppsen: There’s three ways You can understand what boat they’re and based on their persona, maybe you’ve done their job or you work with tons of people who’ve done their job, you can understand what boat they’re in based on the company size and the structure they go to market. They work with lots of people that are geographically dispersed that sell like this is a service. And the third way is it could be market or vertical market understanding. If you get good at understanding and demonstrating this, you can create what I call, “I get you moments.” The biggest mistake that I see salespeople make here Darryl, is they have a, “Got something for you moment.” Create an, “I get you moment.” Not an, “I got you moment.” and you will find that things change fast.
Darryl Praill: I cannot support what he’s saying hard enough and strong enough. That is a dramatic shift. And here’s the other thing that Rob’s not even mentioning. So few people do this, that you will actually stand out from the crowd. So, if you find yourself in a competitive cycle, they’re just wanna buy from you ’cause they’re gonna feel like you get them, okay. So–
Rob Jeppsen: 100%.
Darryl Praill: Let’s bring it back a little bit here. I’ve heard all the advice. I’ve heard you’re three steps. I agree with them, I wanna do them. But here’s the problem, Rob, my company culture, my sales leader, my sales manager, my CEO, they don’t get it. They think we just got to do more activity, more of the same. We’re not doing enough. It’s a cultural thing. Can I affect change with the culture so I can do exactly what you’re telling me now, in order to adapt.
Rob Jeppsen: You can to a point. So here’s the first advice, and this is a great question, Darryl. You’re good. This is one of the most common questions that I get on this. Number one, winning kind of solves most problems. And I still haven’t found a sales leader that wants to suck, wants to lose when they wake up in the morning. And so if you can go show that this adaptation you’re making is doing something in a measurable way, like I’m getting my deal size to get bigger, or I’m getting new opportunities, or my cycle time seems to be coming down.
Rob Jeppsen: Or I’m able to hold price better. There’s a few things like that, if I can demonstrate those things. That’s gonna help and you should wanna do that. We should all be process oriented. We don’t want to ever just win. And they say, “Why did you win?” “Well, you got me?” No, it’s because I followed this process. That’s what makes it repeatable. That’s what makes it scalable. And so if you can show that something, you’re doing this and it’s having an impact.
Rob Jeppsen: You do wanna be someone that can go from creating individual impact, to organizational impact. So this is something that a salesperson should be looking to do, you should be signing up to show ways that you can create organizational impact instead of individual impact, because those are the people that become the stars. Now, if you’re doing that, and you’re finding that that’s still being pushed down, saying this is just not how we do things here, you’re gonna have to make a decision. I mean, honestly, Darryl, sometimes having poor culture and poor leadership is good enough reason to leave. For me, it’s absolutely good enough reason to leave.
Rob Jeppsen: And I interview people when I’m on the hiring side. If I’m them, trying to join the company, you should wanna know, are they gonna be responsive for this before you go, so if they won’t listen, sometimes you have to leave but my experience has been if you can demonstrate it’s more than just, “Hey, I have this idea.” People wanna win.
Rob Jeppsen: And if you can break it into a process that then becomes scalable, not only will they often listen, but you’ll get the opportunity to help roll it out and build your cache and your influence inside. And that’s what we really wanna do. As salespeople we’re about creating influence, influence with customers, influence with prospects and as a sales leader someday, if you become one is having influence with your team. So start learning how to have influence now.
Darryl Praill: Okay and I’m gonna bring back full circle. Remember what he said? He said, testing, remember, I keep hitting testing. He said, Nobody likes to lose, your sales leaders all want to win. Now if they’re pushing back on you. Then this is how you get the compromise. You say, I hear you, I understand you. You wanna do the same old, same old, just more activity. Tell you what, let’s test it. I’ll spend half my time doing it your way and I’ll spend half my time doing it my way. Let’s give it a week or two or a month and come back and then we’ll look at the numbers sound good to you? Because if I’m right, we do wanna know this. Don’t we?
Darryl Praill: And if you’re right, you’re the hero, if you’re wrong, they were always telling you the way it was. And all you got to do is say, you know what you were right, I was wrong. Thank you. I’m glad you indulged me with that. But even when even if they are right and you are wrong, you will still learn something new. Because you will have adapted and you can take that back to the team.
Darryl Praill: So, it’s a win-win no matter what, and it’s a nice way to sell that final answer. Okay, Xvoyant. The world’s number one, sales performance improvement platform, my good friend Rob, how would I know I’m a candidate to be your customer?
Rob Jeppsen: You’re a candidate to be my customer. If you have a sales team that you’re serious about trying to help improve. That’s what we do. We help leaders intentionally improve their sales teams. Generally, we wanna have, it’s not like a two or three or four man shop. Usually you have multiple sales managers, leading larger sales teams, and we help you take, just like you have a sales process, say we’re going to scale out how we sell.
Rob Jeppsen: We help sales organizations scale out how they lead and demystify the improvement process. If I’m a sales leader, here’s what I would suggest. If you can’t answer this question, What’s my plan to help every single rep on my team get at least 10% better? Call me because we can help you with that. The website, Xvoyant, if you’re not sure how to spell it. X-V-O-Y-A-N-T, dot com.
Darryl Praill: All right. And of course, that’s Rob, you’ve been talking this whole time with Rob Jeppsen, the founder and CEO and he’s just a rockstar sales guy, he’s been doing this forever. He might even been doing this as long as me but I don’t know. He looks pretty young. Okay, with that all said, we’re done. We’re out of time. Can you believe it? The week is gone by. Kids follow Rob on LinkedIn. That’s my one takeaway to you. And then tell all your other friends who aren’t listening to this show right now that they need to adapt and subscribe and follow the INSIDE Inside Sales Show. My name is Darryl Praill. That wraps it up. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care, bye bye.