When it comes to communicating with your prospects, are your conversations all about you? Are they all about your company? Or do you use that opportunity to engage with them, to learn about them, and to tell them which of their problems you can solve? If you aren’t engaging with them, you aren’t going to know how to properly serve their needs, and they will just find someone else.
In this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales, Darryl has the opportunity to discuss engagement with Jarrod Best-Mitchell, the accomplished and sought-after Sales Trainer from Help Me Sell. Darryl and Jarrod have a fantastic conversation about effective ways to engage your prospects, as well as ways to create opportunities for engagement. They also will show you how to integrate branding, share which channels can be most effective, and ways to build credibility through consistency. Learn how to give value and get value through engagement, only on this episode of INSIDE Inside Sales!
Not in the mood to listen? No problem, you can read the transcriptions below.
Host: Darryl Praill, VanillaSoft
Guest: Jarrod Best-Mitchell, Sales as a Profession
Darryl Praill: Good day everybody. How are you doing? I love this show. I love talking to you guys, I tell you that every week. Are you ever tired of me telling you how much I love you or all these cool kids I hang out with? Because you know, as much as I love you and I do love my job and I love what we talk about, life is an interesting thing sometimes, right? You have your ups, you have your downs, good days, and bad days and sometimes it’s easy to get out of bed in the morning, take yourself to the office, wherever that office might be, whether it’s at the local coffee shop, in your spare bedroom, or the man’s corporate offices, and do your thing. And other days, a little more challenging, a little more like, “I’m not motivated, I’m not ready. I’m not feeling my mojo.” Oh, I’ve been there. I get it.
Darryl Praill: Today’s been a good day. I always have fun when we do videos for LinkedIn and they turn out well. So when you’re listening to this, this will already have happened, I will have had a conversation with Daniel Disney. He’s like a social media god. He’s the man when it comes to social selling. And I like Daniel. Daniel and I get along quite well.
Darryl Praill: But today, the show, of course, it hasn’t taken place yet, and we had to produce a video to promote, drive attendance to get folks like you to listen to what Daniel has to say. And we went out and I got a couple of guys who are on my team who are way more talented, and way more gifted, and way more skilled, and way more creative than I could ever hope to be. And they put together a couple of scenes to make this video interesting and intriguing and provocative.
Darryl Praill: And you know it’s a hit when the minute you post it on LinkedIn, you put up the video along with some supporting content, because you’re trying to drive awareness, it’s all about building the pipeline, right? It’s all about building that pipeline. And within minutes of my doing that, I get a private message from Daniel Disney, who had no idea this was coming down the pipe, and he said, “Oh, my gosh, dude, that video was fantastic. It may have been the best promotional video I have ever seen.” And I’m choosing to believe him when he says that as opposed to assuming he probably says that to every single person, because that’s just how nice he is.
Darryl Praill: What resonates with me in that process and why I feel good is that when I am able to physically create awareness, create awareness for my product, create awareness for our services, create awareness for some kick-ass content we’re doing just like this, this content, inside, inside sales, any kind of content awareness, any kind of noise and hype you can do to further the goal, to further your objective, that makes my day that much easier. And then I reap the rewards from that.
Darryl Praill: The problem is making time to make awareness a priority in your schedule, because you get distracted. I get distracted. Oh man, do I get distracted. Let me tell you folks, it’s nonstop. So that’s a huge issue for me. I imagine it’s a huge issue for you. And that’s why I want to talk about how do you go about intentionally making awareness for yourself. It could be social, it could be other ways, tips and tricks.
Darryl Praill: A lot of this stuff you guys have heard before. If you’re feeling comfortable, then I would say, just stop the podcast now. Just stop it now, I don’t want to waste your time. But if you want to hear a kick-ass case study of a real-life individual who’s gone through this, continues to go through this, some of the tips and tricks that he uses, then you’re going to have fun with this. And I assure you, you will learn something new that you’re not doing now.
Darryl Praill: So with that said, I am so delighted, I genuinely am delighted to introduce to you Jarrod Best-Mitchell. Jarrod, welcome to the show.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Thank you so much, Darryl. I’m super honored to be on the podcast. Really, really, really excited about this.
Darryl Praill: Okay. So for those of you who don’t know Jarrod, you hear me say this every week, but Jarrod has a special place in my heart. Because often I go reaching out to people on certain topics that would make sense. I reached out to Jarrod and I said, “I just want you on my show. What can we talk about?”
Darryl Praill: His content is killer and I have only kind of stumbled into Jarrod in the last three to six months. I don’t know where he’s been. Maybe he’s just started, or maybe I was sitting in a cornfield somewhere. I don’t know. His content is great and it’s not just great on LinkedIn, it’s great on Instagram. His stuff is great and he could give textbook classes on how to engage. So he may bring this up, but in the course of this going back and forth with him and I, this man used LinkedIn, he used the messaging capability, he used video on LinkedIn and he used the audio recording on LinkedIn, multiple channels that connect with me and it just blew my mind. He was like the most prolific user of all the tools available to him. And ironically, that has the benefit of creating awareness, if you will, within me, of Jarrod, because no one else is doing what he did with me.
Darryl Praill: I can’t tell you the last time I got a personal video on LinkedIn. Most people don’t even know how to do that. It’s hidden there, you have to go looking for it. So, he’s the man. So if you don’t know Jarrod, he’s a man of many talents. You’ll see it on his LinkedIn profile, but he is with Sales as a Profession, as he says, SAAP. And I said, “So what’s your official title?” And I loved it. His answer was, “I’m the other guy. I’m the other guy.” He didn’t say, “I’m co-founder,” or “I’m co-CEO,” or “I’m a partner.” “I’m the other guy.” And you’ll also notice he doesn’t sound Canadian, nor does he sound American. He’s got a beautiful accent and I believe you’re in Trinidad and Tobago. Am I getting that right, Jarrod?
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yes. Trinidad and Tobago. Yes, correct.
Darryl Praill: See, I blew it already, man. But I love that you corrected me in such a polite way. That’s Tobago. I have to ask you a question, how many times are you correcting morons like me on how to properly pronounce that?
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: I think just because it’s the natural way of the English language, that most persons just automatically assume that’s too-bag and go, so they say it like that. But it is a common occurrence. But once you learn it and once you see it, like going forward, when you say it to someone who’s from Trinidad, they are very impressed when you don’t say Tobago. They give you a gold star immediately.
Darryl Praill: The one thing, we have this here in Canada and I’ll probably still screw this up even though I know better, one of our provinces, one of our states, is called… Well, I should do this right. Most people who are uneducated, would call it Newfoundland. But it’s actually Newfoundland. It’s the emphasis is on the other end. Right? And it’s the same thing. People are screwing it up nonstop. And like you, they’re amazing at correcting us without feeling corrected. So that’s cool. Now my friend Jarrod, you are the man when it comes to creating awareness.
Darryl Praill: Talk to me, because you actually got a real case study how you applied your tools and tactics when it comes to a sales conference. So maybe walk us through, set the stage for the audience about what you’re trying to achieve and then how you used social awareness to drive your objectives. Which of course as a sales guy is always engagement and commitment. That’s what we always want. So set the stage for us.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yeah. And let me start it off because I know you said your audience is a lot of comp executives, but essentially what I did was create so much awareness about my events that everyone was actually talking about it on all the different channels I was utilizing. But the way I got it done was that I wasn’t actually talking about my conference. I was just sharing information about the general topic. That was [inaudible 00:08:22].
[bctt tweet=”‘The way I got it done was that I wasn’t actually talking about my conference. I was just sharing information about the general topic.’ ~ @workjarrod #SalesEngagement #prospecting” username=”VanillaSoft”]
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So just to go back a bit, then June 18, 2019 my business partner and I, we actually held a sales conference here in Trinidad and Tobago, the first sales conference ever. And it was all focused on, of course, the greatest profession in the world of sales where we’ve got 11 local speakers all to actually talk about how they are succeeding in 2019, what they are doing for their customers to exceed their targets.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: And just to give you a bit of insight Trinidad has been in a bit of a no-growth with regards to the economy. So it’s not in a recession, it’s just basically in a plateau. So there hasn’t been much growth for a lot of companies locally as time… just because of this, to grow their sales, to grow their business, which is the reason why we did the Sales Conference. And the lead-up to the conference was absolutely amazing, because when we first decided to do it, the event planner that we hired, we had an argument with her because she was saying, “Let’s just aim for a hundred persons.” And we said, “No, let’s get 150 because we can get 150.” And two weeks before the conference she called us saying, “What the hell are you guys doing? Why are you still selling tickets? We are sold out. Why are you still selling them?” I’m laughing on the phone telling her, “I thought you said we could only do a 100.” And it all stemmed from creating too much awareness.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So one of the first things I’ll tell you, and we talk about engagement and commitment, for the month before the conference, I posted every single day on LinkedIn, almost every evening and afternoon. And if there was any opportunity when I did not post, I was going through my feed, finally create opportunities to things that I could join and engage on and have conversations with persons and also add business to my network. That was creating awareness on all fronts even if it wasn’t coming from my end.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So that’s again something that’s really important, which I think a lot of persons don’t realize. You go on LinkedIn and I think sometimes you just have like, and we’ve all seen it, as you said, you have standard messages, you copy and paste messages to everyone. You really need to get down to doing customized messages. So a few niche people instead of a 100 with customized messages for like 15 to 20 persons, and get back way more engagement than what we were having before.
[bctt tweet=”‘You go on LinkedIn…and you copy and paste messages to everyone. 🤦♂️ You really need to get down to doing customized messages.’ ~ @workjarrod #SalesEngagement #prospecting” username=”VanillaSoft”]
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So that’s what really worked for me. So when we enter the conference, we position ourselves as being some of the top minds with regards to sales in Trinidad and Tobago and the region. So when persons came onto LinkedIn, they would just see our content and every time I met someone, people would be stopping me in the road, my friends will stop me, “Jarrod, I’m seeing your content everywhere.” And I immediately smiled and said, “Great! That’s the objective.” And my second question was, “Is the content I’m posting all valuable?”
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Because that’s the next step you want to make because, I mean, next part of engagement is that you want to make sure that the engagement was quality content. Not garbage that people just scroll past. You’re putting out information that persons are actually stopping, taking time to look at and actually responding to, which means that you’re actually hitting the right messages that persons want to hear.
Darryl Praill: Okay, I want to stop you right there.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yeah, sorry.
Darryl Praill: No, no, no. Don’t apologize. You’re going to keep on going on in a minute because I got a feeling once you get going, you’re going to be going on and going and going, because I want to interrupt because you’ve got a couple of really killer points you just made. The one thing you made that was really huge was just about having, if you will, micro messages. So you said eight or nine, whatever. The idea was it wasn’t personalized necessarily at the individual, which a lot of people think, “Oh, I’ve got to personalize every single message and I don’t have time for this.” But it was personalized maybe for a specific audience. In sales it could be a certain job title or a certain industry or certain job title within a certain industry, right?
Darryl Praill: So you kind of have a very specific micro message. So you were able to dramatically increase your ability to connect with your audience because it was effectively speaking to them. The other thing-
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: That’s right.
Darryl Praill: That’s huge, and I know many of you rush your social engagement. It’s kind of reactive or it’s kind of like prescriptive in the sense like, “Yeah, I got to do this, I got to do this, I’ve got to do this.” In other words, you’re in a sales cadence and it’s step number four and this is a social [Dutch 00:12:49] and you go and you pick your template, you send it, and away it goes. Okay, did it. Move on. Because you’re worrying about getting through your activities as opposed to worrying about the outcomes you want the activities to generate. And that’s a big difference. That’s a mindset. And you had the mindset.
Darryl Praill: The thing you said was really powerful and I have never done this. Let me share. I have people all the time, especially when I’m at shows and it’s trade show season again. I was just at a show last week, I was at the Inbound [crosstalk 00:13:17]. You got it.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yes.
Darryl Praill: And that’s a classic case-
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: My business partner was actually at Inbound. He stopped at your booth but you weren’t there. But he had a great interaction with [Kitty 00:13:28] .
Darryl Praill: Oh, that’s fantastic. Because we did put a fire up their asses. So that’s good to know. Thank you. And what happens is people stop you, and I almost always get the exact same comment, which is kind of fun. “Hey, Darryl?” Yeah, yeah, I’m Darryl.” “Hey, I’m George. Nice to meet you. Love your content.” And it’s nice and it’s affirming to hear that. And I do want to hear that, but I’ve never come back and said, “Is my content of value to you?” Because love your content, and maybe they do love it or maybe it’s just a pleasantry because they recognize me and it’s a soft intro and therefore I could dismiss it somewhat. But asking that, I’m going to do that next time and next time and next time, because that’s huge and it’s personal and it’s reactive and it’s real time.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yeah. And when you engage with them to get their feedback, it really shows that you care and it brings you back to, I think a story you were telling. I’m not sure if you did it or the person you were with did it, where you went to Subway to get a sandwich and you told the artist, “You make it.” Yeah, you make it how you think it’s best because that’s what we want. If I meet someone and they tell me, “Jarrod, I don’t think it touched on this aspect of sales.” I kid you not, I would stop and tell the person, “Okay, let’s do a video talking about that right now. If it’s important, let’s do it now. If I have the time or if not, let’s schedule it then.”
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Because when you start to know the topics that people care about, and again, imagine if you are account executive and you’re trying to reach out to your audience and we keep seeing this all the time, if your audience says A, B and C are my key problem, you should be talking about A, B and C consistently because that’s what’s going to get their attention. That’s how you’re going to create the engagement. If you’re talking about X, Y, and Z, there’s a high probability they won’t care. And X, Y and Z in most cases why they don’t care is that you keep talking about your company instead of keep talking about how you help solve problems or what are some of the key things that you’re seeing in their world that you could help resolve, not your company.
Darryl Praill: So that’s huge. That’s all around content. And you were doing that regularly to kind of generate awareness. But you, I mean a big part of those is that you were doing engagement as you said with their micro messages. And I want to frame this because we talked about the micro messages a little bit already. But another example, both with you and others is that you engaged with me. And actually when we got connected, you were reaching out to me long before the podcast. You were reaching out to me and that was very… I know it was very intentional on your part.
Darryl Praill: Just like I’ve got a podcast recording tomorrow with a wonderful woman whom I met at a David Delaney’s 10 Bound Conference and we had a great time and then she followed up and reached out to me proactively, connected on LinkedIn, and then after that was done, came back and said, “How do I get in your podcast?” Now because I had met her, I knew she had content, I knew she knew her stuff. So she already passed that first test of, “Do you have great value, great content?” But she took the initiative.
Darryl Praill: So how important was that with you when it comes to your Sales Conference to proactively seek out people? If you wanted 150 not a 100, you wanted almost a dozen speakers. Not like by, even though Trinidad and Tobago is not the same population as the US, so you would have probably more difficulties getting quality speakers.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yeah. So let me give you some… I’ll give you some quick insights. With regards to all these speakers, they all volunteered their time because indirectly over the course of the year teleconference I give every single one of them value with regards to their business. I made that intention up.
Darryl Praill: So they reciprocated because you gave them value to their business.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: That’s it. So when I asked them, they all said they will do it for free because I already gave them back way more in terms of what matters to them. The second thing though, just to go through, currently I have, if I’m not mistaken, over 3,600 LinkedIn connections. And LinkedIn Video was introduced probably back in March to May of this year and I was around 3000 contacts. If I estimate it correctly and taken the percentage persons who I know directly. If you sent me a connection request on LinkedIn or I sent you one and then you added me, you automatically got a customized video from me.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: And I think I told you before, I could safely say for the record, I’ve done 300 customized videos for persons on LinkedIn. Saying, “Thank you so much for adding me to your network. I’m looking forward to engage with you on your content.” Or in this case, if a person has consistent activity, I can make mention of what they are talking about because what they are posting in their LinkedIn is different from what they are active on their LinkedIn. Because posting means they actually care about this item to post it. And I make reference to their topic and speak on one of the articles and say thank you so much and just looking forward to engaging with your content. The reason why video [crosstalk 00:18:48]-
Darryl Praill: Yeah, no, no. Finish it. Finish it. Yeah. Yeah.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: The reason why I do some video and I only realized this on LinkedIn Video, which is an amazing trick that a lot of people don’t realize, if you want to connect with your customers, record the video directly from your LinkedIn app, make sure you have your company logo, T-shirt on, or there’s the company logo in the background. Because when LinkedIn uploads your picture, every 50 videos to the person who’s watching it doesn’t see it [inaudible 00:19:15]. It’s like when you normally do a selfie. So you can literally be doing branding out the gate without even having to make mention of your brand.
Darryl Praill: So I love so much what you’re talking about here. There’s a couple things. You’re talking about developing loyalty and by adding great content which you can then claim or harvest or get the ROI on that at a future day. Like, “Okay, I need speakers. Well, you’ve been grooming great stuff, I’m loyal to you.” “Sure I’m in.” Just like if I needed a customer reference or I needed a third party to say, “Yeah, my company is good” or that, “Me, I’m credible,” whatever it might be. In my sales cycle, I need an influencer to influence my cycle and I’ve been given great content, then I can call upon that influencer, or I can call upon that trusted individual that my prospect knows to say good things about me.
Darryl Praill: And then you’re using not just text because anybody can do that and you should do that. Don’t get me wrong. But the power of video is so different and you do that over and over again. And I got to tell you folks, first video I got, this guy is smiling, he’s engaging. You just watch his video and you just want to connect with him. Right? And that’s your personality. You let your personality come through. You don’t hide. You don’t let fear get in the way. You are you.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yes, correct. And I think that’s one of the big differentiating factors. I think no matter if you’re shy with video, I mean there’s Voice, but I think video has a way bigger impact. [inaudible 00:20:47] actually sees it because the amount of persons I will tell you is also very temperate and who I send that video to actually says, “Oh my gosh, wow. Thank you so much. Really personalized video. Thank you for saying my name,” which is a big thing to your prospect. Because imagine being a push on only getting generic emails every day and nobody puts in writing your name. Saying the persons’ name and them seeing your voice, you’re pasting their name, you’re definitely going to build that engagement in terms of definitely being able to engage with them through the… so that you can actually eventually ask to meet them or make mention or something that you do follow them.
Darryl Praill: All right, so how many of you who are now listening are you using Vidyard or [inaudible 00:21:25] or other video platform to send video in email? All right, your hand is up. Okay, keep your hand up. Of you who are doing that, how many of you are using video on LinkedIn to connect the same way? A lot of your hands just disappeared. Why aren’t you doing that? This is what you should be learning from this man here. It’s not just the content. Content is critical. We talked about this before, but it’s about engagement and it’s about multiple different channels, texts, video, audio, and you use them all. And it’s about, like you said, over 300 videos you’ve sent in the last several months. That’s crazy. Just by using it all the time. And I love your idea of branding. You don’t have to say it. It’s right there. So it’s subtlety. So smart. So smart.
Darryl Praill: Now what’s going to happen is if you do this and you do this well, we’ve talked about this before folks. I’m going to beat you up on it and I’m going to ask Jarrod his impression, his thoughts. They’re going to check your profile out. Jarrod, does that happen to you?
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yep. Yep.
Darryl Praill: So do you have any advice-
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: They always check my profile.
Darryl Praill: Yeah, do you have any advice on profiling? What has worked for you?
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Right. So firstly, here’s the interesting reason why I spent 30 days posting content on LinkedIn. That was really the city conference. Remember if you have a great headline, and my headline by the way is ‘I’m the person you hire to get customers excited about your product or service.’ Remember when you are posting and when you’re commenting on LinkedIn, that headline is what customers are seeing. Th second thing the customer is doing is that if they like your headline, they’re going to pick then go to your profile. And guess what my banner was on my LinkedIn profile leading up to the conference. It was about my conference.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So I was just creating three adverts at a time and I was getting approximately 1500 to 1600 views on average of who’s viewing my profile every week. So I was just picking some simple advertisement without actually saying what I was doing. And from there, persons who picked connect and engaged, “What’s the Sales Conference about? What’s this SAAP thing that you’re doing? Please tell me more.”
Darryl Praill: So I have a question for you guys listening right now, did you hear what he just said? He quoted for me how many views he was getting on his profile. Do you know how many views you’re getting your profile? Do you? Have you gone and figured out who those people are that are viewing you? Imagine if you went to those same people and sent them a video like Jarrod does, introduce yourself and ask, “What kind of content are you looking for? Let me point you to some of my best up pieces of content that people love.” I don’t know, whatever. You use it.
Darryl Praill: Using those micro messages that he talked about earlier on, how would that change your success at developing your social awareness so you could harvest that loyalty that you’re developing with your tribe to influence your sales cycles or to drive new sales cycles? Listen, the phone is important, email’s important, but social is where they actually check you out for street credit. Jarrod has nailed this. He’s a rockstar.
Darryl Praill: All right, Jarrod. Final point here. If there is one piece of advice you could give to my audience, these are kick-ass SDRs and accounting [Zacks 00:00:24:37]. These are the world’s smartest people because they listen to my show. What would that advice be?
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: That’s just genuine engagement. If you’re not doing it everyday across all your channels, whether it’s your phone, your email, your social media channels, you’re not going to have the success that you want. So you have to consistently do it every single day. I have persons telling me, “I see your stuff all the time and you’re everywhere,” but in reality it’s just my consistency that has me everywhere. I might not have the best content in the world, but I have it every single day and that’s what it is, that you need to be in front of your clients right now.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: So also there’s that you are looking at options of where, “Okay, I’ve mastered phone and I do my prospective and I do my calls, but I’m still not getting through the times,” otherwise then you need to look at the other channels to help support what’s your main bread and butter, it’s to reaching out to customers so that it builds that validity. It builds that, sorry, credibility so that persons know, “Okay, beforehand I keep the Jarrod’s stuff everywhere. When I get a call on the phone, I have a certain measure of trust in him because I’m seeing it and I’m not only seeing it from him, I’m seeing my peers in the industry comment and engage in his stuff.” And it takes a while to build, but again, consistence, genuine engagement. It’s how you’re going to win.
Darryl Praill: Three things. Jump off the page, I mean, I want to make sure you guys heard what Jarrod just said. Consistent, it’s huge. That’s your biggest flaw. I know it is. It’s my biggest challenge. You got to be intentional guys. Second thing is he said it’s going to take a while, but it’s going to build. So stop looking for that instant win. Think six months to a year out, you’re making an investment now that you’re going to reap dividends on in the future. And it would just snowball. Play the long game.
Darryl Praill: Three, the most self-aware statement I’ve heard in forever. He said, not every post that I make is good. You didn’t hear him beat himself up. You didn’t hear him use that as an excuse to not the post. He accept it. I know some posts to be better than others, but I’m striving. I’ll try another post. [crosstalk 00:26:50]. Yes. I had this conversation yesterday with one of my sales reps. Exact same thing. Love it. All right Jarrod-
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Let me just give one quick advice. If it is that you sign engagement with a client, it doesn’t matter which form of channel that you use, and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you stop. It just means you just haven’t found the right key that gets their attention. You have to try again.
Darryl Praill: It is a constant game of A/B Testing. What works, what doesn’t. Rinse and repeat.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Yes.
Darryl Praill: Guys and gals, you want to meet this fine man, check him out on LinkedIn. All right? That’s where you go, Jarrod Best-Mitchell. linkedin.com/n/jarrodbestmitchell. You can email my Help Me Sell at jaredbestmitchell.com. Check him out. Add him to your list. Jarrod, thank you for your time today. I’ve had a blast.
Jarrod Best-Mitchell: Thank you so much as well. I mean, I really appreciated our lovely opportunity to discuss this with everyone.
Darryl Praill: There you go. It’s social awareness and adding value. Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, are you adding value today? You tell me. I’ll talk to you soon on the flip side. Take care. Bye-bye.