Scott Ingram has always been frustrated that there was no sales content coming directly from top performers. So about a year and a half ago he launched the Sales Success Stories Podcast where he ONLY interviews top individual contributors who are either #1 or at least in the top 1%. Today he shares those top tips and strategies.
Transcribe
Dylis: Hi there, this is Dylis Guyan and welcome to the Inspired Selling Podcast, the place where business owners and sales people who sell to bigger businesses discover how to attract, convert and retain more of their ideal clients. I’ve got a fantastic guest for you today and that is Scott Ingram and I’d like to tell you a little bit about Scott and why I’m really really looking forward to talking to him.
First of all, his day job is as an account manager for the professional services firm Relationship One and that works with Oracle Marketing Cloud clients. But what makes Scott really special, is that a year and half ago he set up his own podcast show called “The Sales Success Stories Podcast.” Now on this podcast, he only interviews top individual contributors who are either number one or in the top one percent of companies who work for larger organisations. So not only is he out doing it, he’s learning from the best and I’m sure he’s implementing some of these little pearls that he picks up on the way. So, Scott welcome. I’m really looking forward to talking to you.
Scott: It’s a pleasure to be here, thanks for having me.
Dylis: Yeah, you’re welcome. So, Scott, give us your back story; tell us how you got to where you are today both in selling and what prompted you to set up your podcast.
Scott: Yeah, well, I think my background is perfect for your audience since it’s a combination of entrepreneurs and sales professionals. I started my first company when I was 20 years old for Breaking Bad fans, this was quite the surprise as I was binging on that years later. The name of that company was Grey Matter Technologies, so it was an IT consulting firm and that’s where I realised you don’t really have a company if you don’t have clients and that’s where I recognised, gosh I better learn how to sell if I’m going to be successful.
So, I ran that organisation for about five years sold it when we decided to basically cash out of Southern California at the time and moved to Austin, Texas about 15 years ago. Since then it took me a couple of extra steps, but I basically came to the realisation that I don’t like wearing all of the hats as a business owner. I really enjoyed selling and I wanted to focus on that and let other people worry about the delivery and the accounting and HR and all the other stuff that goes with it. So, I’ve really been in professional sales roles for the last oh dozen years or so; started with ADP a, very large HR and payroll Processing Company. And then since have been in the marketing technology space.
So, have been part of two IPOs first with Bizarre Voice and then with Eloqua we were public for about one quarter and then we were acquired by Oracle. So I spend a little bit of time with Oracle and now as you said, I will work with a professional services company that services those clients, called Relationship One.
I have always been sort of a rabid student of sales. I’ve read all kinds of books and consumed so much content, but what has always been frustrating to me is that so much of this stuff comes from “sales experts” who haven’t sold anything but their own consulting or speaking services in years and oftentimes decades. I thought I want to hear…I think sales as evolving right? It’s moving very quickly. There’re so many more channels than there were 10 years ago 15 years ago when those guys were selling. I want to hear from people who are the very best right now, and I want to learn what they’re doing. And so that’s where the show started I wanted to get directly at the success stories and just dig in deep.
I’m a big fan of the Tim Ferriss Show and I really kind of style it after that, where shoot I’ve got an episode that’s coming out next week 100 minutes long. So, you know, I don’t worry about how long the conversation goes. I’m not trying to meet any particular target or keep it to a certain thing. They just go as long as it makes sense and as long as there’s value and I have had so much fun and learned so much and it is certainly made a massive impact on my own results and what I’ve been able to accomplish.
Dylis: I’m absolutely sure and maybe you don’t know this about me, but I used to be the regional director for Barclays Financial Services many moons ago. It was 20 years ago since I set up my own business, but as a regional director we used to have our monthly meeting and I used to take our top performers and ask them to share their best practices because funnily enough often they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was, but you got this from the horse’s mouth if you like. So, the younger people, the people in mid band and the new people who were coming along not only the started to learn best practice, but they were inspired and motivated by hearing these top performers who didn’t just one day become a top performer, you know they worked their way to become a top performer.
So, I think what you’re doing is absolutely fantastic and funnily enough, I have started interviewing very successful business people. I did my first one couple of weeks ago in fact, and he was down to earth is an understatement. He was phenomenal, he wasn’t beyond saying the odd f word which is probably going to have to be beeped out, but the inspiration from him and this get up and do it.
I read something somewhere Scott you talked about getting it done and doing it right. This is what I loved from this guy that I interviewed; it was all about that, getting it done, but doing it right and his biggest USP if you like was actually customer service and doing everything right in the company to make sure that the customer service was number one in his kind of market space, you know, so really interesting.
So, I’m loving that you’re doing that, and you know at the end I would like you to share how people can get access to your podcast because it’s inspiring as well as full of really good top tips for people to be able to take on board. So, tell me just from your own experience of selling and the people that you’ve worked with, what have you seen the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs and sales people have made?
Scott: So, I think the biggest mistake and maybe a little bit more for entrepreneurs, but I think I think it’s endemic of salespeople too. I think they buy into the stereotype, I think they think oh now it’s time for me to sell and I have to put on my sales hat and they become this wrong kind of person they’re doing unnatural things. It’s unnatural for them, it’s uncomfortable for the person on the other side of the table.
You know selling is a very human thing, right? You’re just connecting with people, you know, most of the folks that I’ve had on the podcast are B2B sales professionals. So yes, and just to the title of your show, right? This is for folks who are selling to big companies, but at the end of the day, I’ve never had a company sign my contract. There’s always a human on the other end that autographs that page and that’s what this is and so I think you have to get away from all of those awful things.
I mean and that’s what I’ve learned the most from the show is I really had some of my own stereotypes that I had applied to. What do the very best do and what are they like? Just like you talked about with the recent business owner that you talk to I find them to be the most humble, the most gracious, and oftentimes, have much less of an ego than you would expect at that level. It’s just a very down-to-earth and they’re very human people and that’s what you have to do. You have to find sort of on authentic version of yourself in a way that you go about selling that that fits you that you can be comfortable in and that’s how you find success. It’s not by being some obnoxious, aggressive, rude, you know “salesmen.”
Dylis: I find that often that I have clients that will say to me “Dylis I don’t want to be seem to be selling,” and I said, well actually, you know, you’re selling every day of your life in one form or another. But it’s your duty to allow people to say yes to your product or service or no not right now because if you don’t give them that opportunity then you’re leaving them subject to the problems and issues that they have without you giving them that opportunity to be able to solve that for them. So, there’s a big mind-set thing going on here isn’t there. It’s not just the steps of selling it’s that mind-set of being able to overcome that saying I do need to talk to people, but it doesn’t have to be in that stereotypical way of the car salesman. Good selling isn’t in that way is it?
Scott: Not at all, and what’s interesting is I’ve been working on a collaborative book project with other over 20 of the guests that I’ve had on the podcast. So again, these are all kind of top 1% professionals and I just got back from vacation because we’ve collected over 60 stories for this book and I thought gosh how the heck am I going to organise this, and it really became clear. So, there’s four sections in that book and the first one is mind-set and about a quarter of the stories are about that and how do you think about what this role is and how do you think about yourself? And you know, how do you stay motivated and all of those other things, but it is absolutely a mind-set.
At the same time, I think we need to not be afraid to call ourselves sales professionals and to be glad to be selling and what you called out there that I think is so important there is you have to ask. You have to ask for the business, you have to give them that opportunity and you have to lead them, right you have to sort of lead them through that process and have a place that you’re going together you can’t just leave it on them. Very few people are going to be like I’m ready to buy send me the contract, let’s go, it’s a little bit more work than and you have to really develop and define and execute that type of a process.
Dylis: That’s right and you are very familiar with buyers of course being an account director yourself, you’ve got the benefit of having all of this knowledge from these top one percenters, but also, you’re involved with buyers. But you know the biggest competitor is often the status quo where they think well, we’ll just stick with what we’ve got because they become nervous about making the decision. Something you said earlier about it’s not the business who signs the contract it’s the individual or maybe it’s a group, but they are taking that responsibility of making the decision.
So it’s very important that sales people and business owners take that responsibility of helping them across the line, of being able to convince them without any of these nasty sleazy sales tactics but be able to show them with testimonials or data or whatever and results that they’ve achieved in the past that it is the right decision and often it is missed.
Scott: I think that comes down to its understanding the person, right? Yes, the organisation has goals that they’re trying to achieve. But there’s an individual that they have their own goals, they have their own concerns and it’s understanding what you are worried about and trying to take that risk out of the equation for them.
And again, that’s where you don’t have to apply the sleazy tactics. It’s understanding what is going to happen for you and your career if this is successful. Right, what could go wrong? What’s the downside? How do we protect you from that so that you just make it easy for them?
Dylis: Indeed, and you mentioned that in your book Scott, that you’ve set this out in four sections the first one being mind-set. What are the other three?
Scott: Yeah, so it starts with mind-set, the other thing that’s really interesting for me and I’m wanting to actually have this conversation with some of the contributors because one of the most often cited books in sales of the last few years has been the “Challenger Sale” and I think a lot of folks have misinterpreted that in in a lot of ways.
One, if you don’t read it all the way through I think people come away with the idea that oh, I should just be a jerk and be really aggressive and that’s not what it’s about at all. It also really downplayed relationships. They sort of…they defined different types of sales people and went in with this idea that everybody thinks that the best salesperson is relationship-oriented, turns out that’s not the case. Well, there’s a lot more nuance to it than that, right in this Challenger profile that they had, those folks manage relationships really well.
So again, when I look at all of these stories and I didn’t provide a lot of guidance it was like let’s just write stories we’ll figure out how to organise them later. Right? What are the biggest things that have made the biggest impact for you was really what I was trying to get at but telling it in a way that wasn’t so preachy. I think there’s so many of these sales books are do this do that, do this other thing. We wanted to take more of an angle of ‘here’s a real-world example and here’s how this gets applied and this is why I’ve done this, or this is how I fell on my face and why I don’t do that anymore, you know.
So the second section being often relationships is a really big one, I think a really important one and then there’s a section on sales careers and a section on sales process, which is also the biggest; really lumped in a lot of things right that that is prospecting, that’s discovery, that’s negotiation, that’s all of the other things that are just part of the way you sell.
Dylis: I thought I’d lost you there Scott. Yeah, and this sounds to me like a really comprehensive book that people can get and get gain some really great insights. But insights that are implementable.
Scott: We’ll for sure and so here’s the thing, you know, when I asked…one of the questions I’ve always asked of each of the guests that I’ve had on the show is if they subscribe to a particular sales philosophy. Ultimately almost the universal answer is “Well, there have certainly been some influences whether that was Challenger or Sandler or Spin Selling or you know name your model but really what it is for everybody is, they have studied sales, they’ve looked at many of these models and they have pulled out the pieces that have worked for them.
So really what this book is about is showing folks a lot of different ways from a lot of different perspectives and styles so that they can choose the pieces that work for them. But again, applying a much more real world this is what actual sales people do versus here’s a specific model if you will.
Dylis: Yeah. and I love that because actually I have thought that for a long, long time that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all. You know, we’ve all got individual personalities, we’re selling to individual personalities, and yes, there’s some principles to follow but what works for one may not work for another and it may be that someone tweaked something. But what I would say certainly from my experience is the practice, is deciding what you’re going to do who you going to target and how you’re going to do it and practicing. Certainly, one of the things I’ve always done with anything when I finished is looked at it and said right what went well, what didn’t go so well, what can I do differently and better the next time so that you constantly moving forward and upwards on your journey.
Scott: Oh, that’s exactly right and that’s what I have found that the very best is the most introspective. They’re very good at taking an honest look at themselves and doing exactly what you just described. What went well about that? Whether it’s an individual call or the way, they ran their territory for the last year, right. What went well, what did I not do well, what can I improve and focusing on those individual things.
You can read books you can listen to podcasts. There’s no shortage of information out there, but at the end of the day you have to go out and do it and see what works for you and what doesn’t work for you and just continue to one step after the other just keep moving forward. I’ve been at this for 20 years and I try and get better every day.
Dylis: Yeah, absolutely and I hate to admit it Scott, but I’ve been at it even more years, I think I’m only 27 though. There’s also this difference isn’t there, when you look at the professional salesperson who will have in most cases been given a target, a territory and so on and they are accountable. So, they’re responsible for their targets and accountable up to their line manager and that is their role and you alluded to this earlier on when you said you were running your own business and then you became a sales person so that you could concentrate just on sales.
So, the sales person most times can just concentrate on sales, but the entrepreneur it’s different, isn’t it? So, they’ve not only have they got the sales, so they’ve got to do the prospecting and then the discovery and the follow-up and all of that. They’ve got to run their business as well. I’ve seen many many times where entrepreneurs have been sucked into the business working in the business and not on it.
I’ve told this story before but it’s very relevant and I’d like to just tell it again and that was my father who was an electrical engineer and he was a real expert at what he did. But he wasn’t expert at bringing in clients. I was just I was about 16 at the time and he actually went bankrupt because he was suffering from the peaks and troughs of cash flow, desperately working in his business he was an expert, but he wasn’t an expert at bringing clients in.
I see this so often and because of the consequences that we had to go through, where we lost our lovely house with view 30 miles across the valley and you know, you had his business and cars and we had vehicles and all the rest of it that went with that and we lost everything absolutely everything. But what was even worse it tipped him over the edge and I didn’t really realise this until many years later, but the stress, it was just too much for him and he was a drinker anyway, and he really started to drink heavily, and his behaviour was untenable.
We left our house and went to what we called here in the UK Council House where you pay rent to the council and he ended up in my grandfather’s garden shed for a week and then a caravan for 3 years. Then eventually him and my mother they got back together again, and he died at 52 in bed next to her with a massive heart attack. So, I’m like an evangelist trying to spread the word particularly to entrepreneurs to help them with the steps because they’ve got everything else to deal with and not just the sales. So, what’s your view on that Scott?
Scott: Well, I think it’s not just the business owners, I think to your point they’re often the most impacted by it because they’re experts in doing something else. And so, what often happens you alluded to exactly where I was going to go with the peaks and valleys.
Okay I need to go sell and they go do that and they bring on some clients and then they get so busy in delivery that that’s all they do and then those projects wrap up and it’s this feast and famine, right? We’re starving we’ve got to hurry, and we’ve got to get sales and then all we’re doing is delivering and now we’re making a lot of money and it just goes back and forth. I think salespeople though suffer from the same thing if they don’t consistently prospect.
So, what will happen with salespeople is the same thing like oh I don’t have very much pipeline. I don’t have enough deals that I’m working on. So, they prospect, prospect, prospect and then they’ve got this big pipeline and all they do is focus on moving those deals forward and then they close those deals and there’s nothing on the other end.
The answer to all of that is you have to have a consistent process of prospecting and generating new opportunities regardless of the role and whatever that is for you. If that’s 30 minutes a day, you know, it doesn’t need to be a ton it just needs to be focused and you need to know again lots of sales process stuff here though, as far as who is the target? What is that unique selling proposition? What am I getting in front of them? And frankly that’s the part I think has gotten so much harder in the last number of years because there’s just so much noise. We don’t answer our phones anymore we’re inundated with email. We just ignore stuff that isn’t differentiated and personalised. Those are a couple of my favourite sections of the book were written by sales development reps where their entire livelihood is they prospect and they set meetings and then they’re handing off to an account executive who is doing… who is sort of managing the rest of the sales process and I think there’s so much we can learn from them because again, that’s all they’re doing. They’re only opening those doors.
I think that for almost everybody, business owners, sales professionals. That’s always the hardest part right once I have that first meeting, once we’re having conversations the rest of the sales process is easier than that you don’t know who I am, I don’t know who you are, but we need to talk because I can help. That tends to be the very hardest part and where there’s a lot of mind-set challenge too. I think that’s the hardest…people really, really struggle with getting through that and recognising, look I’m here to add value you need to kind of get that across and have that mind-set of I’m here to help and I’m here to serve you and improve you, your business or solve whatever challenge your particular business does.
Dylis: I talk about you know, your thought process because if you if you go into this thinking right, how can I convince them that we’re the best? How can I get them to say yes today? How can I achieve my target? And you’re focused on that your behaviours will follow because your mind moves the most dominant thoughts and your actions follow so you will become more pushy and more desperate with that kind of thought process.
If you can change it to, how can I help you achieve your objective? How can my company help support you and be absolutely 100% customer-focused it changes the whole way that you approach the role of a sales either as an entrepreneur or as a professional salesperson?
Scott: Well in that mind-set section in the book, I think that is the most consistent theme is they care the most, they care about the outcomes, they don’t care…they care way less than you would think about their commissions and about their dollars. When you take care of your clients and when you serve in that way the dollars take care of themselves, like all the sales and quota and commissions and revenue and everything else like that is a great buy product when you’re serving your customers.
Dylis: This just reminds me of when I very first started in sales. I was a financial advisor and back then and this was back in 1986. You had to put a list of 500 names from the telephone directory; names addresses and telephone numbers, which of course you wouldn’t even be allowed to do now and the company used to send out 60 letters every week and I used to make 12 phone calls every single night and if I didn’t make 12, I carried over the short fall to the next night or following nights. Very early on…because we got a ton of product training, like tons of product training, but we didn’t get a lot of sales training and it was weird I don’t know how it even happened but maybe it was from my experience with my father, but I realised very early on that no one, but no one wanted to buy a life insurance policy or an income protection policy or a pension policy and what they wanted was that financial safety net. So that if their income stops for whatever reason then they could maintain the standard of living.
As I mentioned to you before my father died at 52 and I still had a younger brother and sister at home and my mother had nothing; she was she was just going from week to week to week trying to make ends meet. The kids would ask if they could go on the school trip, or could they have Levi jeans? They were the thing then and Nike trainers and it was always no, no. no I’m sorry, I can’t.
So very early on in my career I realised that it was no good talking about life insurance and pensions and so on and it was about this this safety net. Funny enough I was like an evangelist then in financial services, getting this safety net in place for as many people as I possibly could both individuals, families and businesses. So, I think this focus on being client-focused is one of the keys certainly is what I’ve found.
Scott: Well, and I had a conversation…so Colin Spector is the top sales professional at a company called Namely; extraordinarily fast-growing start-up company. When he first joined the company, it was fascinating to me. He didn’t really worry about the product training. He wasn’t worried about the features and benefits. He spent his time learning about his customers. He hadn’t sold in that industry before and so he would just go out and try and understand what is your day like? You know the last you made a decision about this type of solution how did you decide? Why did you decide? What sort of prompted that decision and I think that, that process has served him so incredibly well and nobody does it.
We’re so worried about the speeds and feeds and what are the features of my product to your point nobody cares about that, they care about what’s it going to do for me and you have to understand what’s going to matter to them to even get to that point.
Dylis: Yeah yeah, and so this guy you were just talking about would he call a prospect and just say that he wanted to come and talk to them or did he make an appointment with the view to eventually putting a product in place or it was a purely research? Did he position that as research?
Scott: Yeah in the early stages I know it was pure research and some of it was online. He was going into Quora and posting questions anonymously, but it was also reaching out and having these meetings without the intent to make a sale. Although I’m sure that he did. You know, when you go in and you’re sitting with somebody who cares that much and is that interested in you, you’re going to make sales.
Dylis: Yeah. I read some research, actually it was last year from Miller Heiman and they said that 18.6% of sales people will leave their organisation every year which is massive, and it takes up to 10 months to get a new sales person working to full capacity and fully productive. I started doing research calls with CEOs and Sales Directors just to find out if this was really the case and it in fact led to some really good business, but that wasn’t the purpose. I wanted to test to see if that was the case and then the impact of that on the business.
Of course its huge because if you’ve got 18.6% leaving, you know, if you’ve got 100 and you’ve got 18 leaving every year you think of the cost of the you know, recruiting, the recruitment costs and then the interviewing, the selecting, then the training and then you put them back into this kind of rinse and repeat cycle; it’s really costly to businesses. It was amazing actually how open these C.E.O.’s and Sales Directors were with me in terms of telling me what the impact was on the business.
Scott: Yeah yeah and again when the agenda is about them it’s amazing what happens.
Dylis: They were very open indeed and particularly when I was sharing with them this research that had been done by a reputable company, they were they were more than happy to have a conversation with me.
Scott: Yeah, I’m actually surprised the number’s that low right because that basically says that the average tenure is five years and I don’t think that’s the case. I think that number is much higher than 18.6%.
Dylis: Well that’s average so I guess that there are those who are suffering from higher attrition rates that that but it was very interesting. So, if we go back then to, again your experience with interviewing these top one percenters. What would you say are your top three tips that you would give to business owners and sales people who are selling to bigger businesses?
Scott: Yeah well, I don’t know that they’re tips necessarily let me just talk in terms of what I believe are the three most consistent themes that I’ve seen having done…I may write about fifty of these interviews at this point. The first is you have to believe, and you have to believe in two things you have to believe in your solution and the value that it brings and you have to believe in yourself and your process and your ability to sell.
I actually have an interview later today and she sent me this great note as she was preparing and she says I think a big part of getting to the top of the leader board and staying there is being in a role that you love to do. As cliché as it sounds if you do not love the role you are in and do not believe in what you are selling then I do not believe you can make it to the top and if you do I don’t think you will stay there very long while being happy.
So, I think that is that is at the core. So if you are not loving your solution if you’re the business owner fix your solution and if you’re in sales there’s so much opportunity out there, you know either find a way to fall in love. My recipe for finding that is go talk to happy customers. You’ll get two things out of that, one you’ll get sort of infused with positive stories that will help you build that confidence, but you also get those stories that you can now go tell to your prospects about those happy customers.
So, there is a path to refining it because a lot of times when you’re in the trenches the only people who call you is the people who are having problems. Right so to go proactively and find that’s usually a small percentage, right? Go find the ones who are happy they aren’t calling you up to say “Dylis I can’t tell you how much I love you” that doesn’t happen but go find it and get enthused with that positivity or go somewhere else where you can find it and you do have that.
Dylis: I just love that Scott because these are my values and my beliefs that you have to have that passion because if you don’t your customer’s not go into. If you’re half-hearted and again it goes back to this thing about your mind moves to the most dominant thought and your actions follow. So if you have that belief and you’ve got that passion then you become that evangelist with your project you know if it does it just takes you to the top.
Scott: Yeah 100% and then the second one we’ve actually spent most of our time talking about which is you have to care about your prospects and what they’re trying to accomplish and genuinely want to help them. It just it comes down to that caring and being about them and serving them; so I think we’ve belaboured that point enough.
The third thing is you have to have a process that is authentically you. There’s again two very important parts to that point; one is the process. What is it, right? So, if you’re going to avoid the peaks and valleys and the feast and the famine what is it that you have got to do every day to make sure that you’ve got a healthy pipeline of opportunities? Then what are the rest of the steps? What do you do?
In addition, it has to be something that fits you and your style and your personality and your solution because I have found…I think this is probably the kind of secret ingredient if you were to pull this all together and I were to look at everybody. I think that the very best sales professionals in the world are those who are the most extreme versions of themselves.
They’re not faking anything they’re just them and that’s not all amazing things. They’re embracing the negatives and the short falls too; whether they go out to solve that because you know I have I have somebody else who helps me with this part of the process because maybe I’m not as organised as I’d like to be or whatever that is. Again, it goes back to that idea of they have an extraordinary amount of introspection and ability to look at themselves objectively and really, really double down and maximize on the things that make them uniquely great and figure out how to solve for the things that make them maybe not so great.
Dylis: Absolutely and if I could just add something into that Scott you talked about caring and of course to demonstrate that you’re caring I mean you’ve got to genuinely care you can’t just fake that. It’s about understanding your client, the market in which they operate in, maybe their customers, their competitors and being able to identify what their issues are and their challenges. Where they are now? Where they want to be? What the challenges are and preparing yourself before you go along to see that client and avoiding the product dump. I call it P-ing too soon. To demonstrate that caring you’ve really got to understand them and go through that discovery phase.
The other thing I’d like to add to what you just said in that third element there of being yourself, it’s creating habits isn’t it, that fit you, that fit your style, that fit the way you work and creating those daily habits so that if you start and get the momentum its like a well-oiled wheel rolling forward.
Scott: Exactly right and that’s why I spend so much time on my show talking about the habits and the routines and the things that the very best do every single day. What are those, what is their playbook and they’ve all got them, and they’re very, very committed to them.
Dylis: Yeah, do you find that they differ greatly, or do you find that there is a theme that runs through all of these different people?
Scott: Really yes to both. So, one of the questions that I started asking early on and I realised that I had to tweak it because I started asking about people’s morning routines. I’m a very early morning person. I’m up most mornings for 4:30, 5:30 is sleeping in for me. But not everybody is wired that way and I had to start sort of asking first like “Are you a morning person or are you a night person?” Because the night folks their routine is completely flipped around and the most important part for them is what happens in the evening.
So again, it’s very unique to the individual. There are some themes in that there are a lot of consistent behaviours and there are consistent habits and actions in the way that they do things but they’re very different given their personality or the market they’re selling to. You know I talked to one individual who was selling globally, and you know worked this crazy time shifted schedule or he was getting in the office hours before anybody else because that’s when his clients were awake and that’s when he needed to do the bulk of his activity.
Dylis: I remember working for H.S.B.C. and I was out in Canada at the time and I was working with sales people and there was one of the guys…the delegates he used to come down in the morning before breakfast and he spent forty-five minutes researching just researching the domain in which he worked. He was expert in that and he sold that as his unique selling point that he had such knowledge of that domain that he worked in. That he could bring insights to his clients. So, he would do that as well as researching his clients and so that worked for him, but it wouldn’t work for everyone else. So when he was sharing this with the group there were others that were going well that wouldn’t work for me.
Scott: Right exactly and again you have to find those unique things for you. One of my superpowers…people look at me and they’re like “Scott how on earth are you managing a three-million-dollar quota, hosting this podcast, writing this book,” I also host an event every year called the Sales Success Summit “How on earth are you doing that?”
I’m like well first I get up really early in the morning that’s not for everybody but then I just have this organisational process that I go through that I’ve been working and developing for ten years that just helps me get organised to find those priorities and just absolutely attack the day so that by noon…if I quit working at noon every day that would be enough. I would have gotten more than most people get done in an average day.
Then anything after that is kind of bonus and I just…I manage my own energies. I know that I have that energy in the morning in the afternoon my energy wanes. I’m not good at doing the research and those other things so that’s when I schedule all of my calls because if I’m on the phone with somebody I’m going to get reenergised. It’s hard for me to be low energy when I’m talking with someone. I love the conversations, so again I just I’ve learned that about myself and I have structured the way that I operate accordingly and it allows me to accomplish a lot more than most people do.
Dylis: Yeah, brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you Scott, I could talk to you all day so maybe we need to schedule another podcast interview at some time in the future. For our audience how might they get in touch with you, both to get directly in touch with you, to access your book and your podcast?
Scott: Yeah, the easiest way send me an email you can reach me at scott@top1.fm The website is the same that’ll get you to everything so top1.fm has all the episode links and that will certainly have a link to the book and all the ways to buy it and that type of thing. Then obviously if you’re listening to this in a podcast player now would be a really good time to press pause, do a quick search for Sale Success Story subscribe to that and really dig into some of this directly. It’s one thing to get it filtered through me and get the broader themes. I think it’s even more impactful to hear it directly from a top sales performer and hear what they’re doing and why they’re doing it all those things.
Dylis: Absolutely and I’ve listened to them and they are inspirational and motivational and full of real good implementable steps if it’s the right fit for you.
Scott: Exactly right, exactly right. Well thanks for listening.
Dylis: Absolutely so can I just check though Scott before we go is it top one as in number one so scott@top1.fm?
Scott: Correct now I’ve solved it so if you type out ONE that will get you there too but the official is scott@top1.fm.
Dylis: Perfect absolutely perfect. Scott thank you once again and to our audience please go and access Scott’s podcast Sales Success Stories and subscribe and please leave a comment on this podcast and I’d love you to subscribe and listen to more inspirational people like Scott. Thanks again Scott have a great day
Scott: My pleasure thanks for having me.
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