How to Prospect with Digital Sale – In Just 7 Minutes with Jamie Shanks

Resources/Links:

• Learn about emerging best practices, strategies and insights on B2B sales today dedicated for the modern sales organization: https://www.salesforlife.com/blog

Summary

Jamie Shanks is the CEO of Sales for Life, the world’s largest Digital Selling training program for mid-market and enterprise companies. Sales for Life has trained over 100,000 sales and marketing professionals, in dozens of industries across 6 continents, for brands such as Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Oracle, American Airlines & Intel.

In this episode, Jamie shares how he teaches trusted experts to learn a proven digital sales framework that can improve their sales outcomes.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:33 – Jamie’s ideal client: Ideal client is twofold, one, global enterprise because we have such vast experience in every pocket of the world. And two, we are continuing to help high growth companies in the mid-market, again, on a global scale.
• 01:58– Problem he helps solve: Creating sales pipeline
• 02:51 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Jamie: Most sales organizations, mid-market, and enterprise have sales methodologies. But if you really look at your sales methodology, it assumes you already have a lead. There’s a huge part of the sales process that’s been forgotten then. So, our job is to inject modern prospecting as a sales methodology using social selling.
• 04:07 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: Number one is looking at how to solve the problem by using human capital to solve that problem
• 05:39 – Jamie’s Valuable Free Action(VFA):“You can do is reverse engineer your existing customers using something we call the sphere of influence.”
• 06:45 – Jamie’s Valuable Free Resource(VFR): Learn about emerging best practices, strategies and insights on B2B sales today dedicated for the modern sales organization: https://www.salesforlife.com/blog
• 07:22 – Q: “What do you do better than anyone else in the world?” A: We have the number one prospecting methodology in the world rooted in modern digital sales and our ability to create greater yields per seller. The average sales force creates 20% more sales pipeline in six to 12 months than the non-social sellers.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“Most sales organizations have sales methodologies.Our job is to inject modern prospecting as a sales methodology using social selling.” -@jamietshanks Share on X

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland: 0:09
Hello everyone, a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible. My name is Tom Poland and I’m joined today by Jamie Shanks. Jamie, good day and welcome. And where are you hanging out?

Jamie Shanks: 0:19
Thank you so much for the invite. I am in Toronto, Canada,

Tom Poland: 0:23
Toronto, Canada, and I believe you played rugby in Australia?

Jamie Shanks: 0:27
I did, I played for the University of Adelaide. I used to live on Henley Beach in Adelaide, Australia.

Tom Poland: 0:33
Wow. There’s not too many North Americans that I interview that have played rugby in Australia. We probably should get on with the other subject which is to me much less interesting but to folks that are listening to this or viewing it might find more valuable, certainly. For those of you who don’t know Jamie, he’s the CEO of Sales for Life, the world’s, get this, the world’s largest Digital Selling training program targeting mid-market and enterprise companies. Sales for Life has trained over, again drumroll, 100,000 sales and marketing professionals, in dozens of industries across six continents, for brands, big brands, like Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Oracle, American Airlines, and Intel. So pretty sure that Jamie knows what he’s talking about. We’re going to squeeze as much juice out of Jamie as the lemon in seven minutes. The title is, “How to Prospect with Digital Sales”, in just seven minutes as usual. Jamie, your segment starts now. Question number one is, who is your ideal client, please?

Jamie Shanks: 1:33

Ideal client is twofold, one, global enterprise because we have such vast experience in every pocket of the world. And two, we are continuing to help high growth companies in the mid-market, again, on a global scale. So, this isn’t a North American initiative. This is a Mia lad Tam Australasia, the whole planet.

Jamie Shanks: 1:53
Perfect. And six and a half minutes left, question two, what’s the problem you solve?

Jamie Shanks: 1:58

Problem we solve is creating sales pipeline.

The average seller, 50% of sales forces globally around the world are making sales quota, 50% are not. And a lot of that stems from the fact that 50% of your sales force is over the age of 40. And those sellers have lost the science behind prospecting.

So, what we do is reverse engineer modern digital sales techniques and your customer base of relationships to help you identify asymmetrical competitive advantages in prospecting. And we use social selling as our catalyst for prospecting,

Tom Poland: 2:36
Very interesting. Question number three, five and three quarter minutes left. What are some of the typical symptoms that your ideal clients are experiencing with this problem before they find Sales for Life?

Jamie Shanks: 2:51
The first is obvious as a lagging indicator, disparency of those sellers making quota. So, you walk around the sales floor, half your team made quota, half your team didn’t, and it seems to be a diminishing return. Then when you double click into leading and current indicators, you start to notice that seller ABC and D are doing drastically different things. You have no fundamental methodology to prospecting. Most sales organizations, mid-market and enterprise, have sales methodologies. But if you really look at your sales methodology, it assumes you already have a lead.

There’s a huge part of the sales process that’s been forgotten then. So, our job is to inject modern prospecting as a sales methodology using social selling. That would be what you’d notice first.

Tom Poland: 3:41
Thank you. Very interesting. Assumption that the leads are just flowing in. So just over four and a half minutes left, you’re going to have clients coming to you that long ago realized they had this problem. They’ve experienced the symptoms 50% not getting quota, 50% getting quota, etc., and they’re going to try stuff. They’re going to make a lot of mistakes before they find Sales for Life. What are some of the mistakes that your clients make, or made, before they find you?

Jamie Shanks: 4:07
I think twofold. Number one is looking at how to solve the problem by using human capital to solve that problem. So, most sales organizations have typically solved sales quota problems by filling holes in geographic regions or verticals, by hiring or over hiring people. So, you just start hoping that if you hire enough people, you’ll make your global sales quota attainment, knowing that some will make quota and some don’t. That’s a very expensive proposition between recruiting, onboarding and keeping this human capital, it’s six figure costs per head. The second would be around tools. Again, blowing their brains out buying millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars of tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and every other sales acceleration tool under the sun and it ends up becoming shelf ware because you haven’t set the mindset for change, and delivered skill set for change. All you did was bought the tool kit. And so, what ends up happening a year later, it all starts to rust on the shelf because people don’t know how to use it. So, you’re spending money in the wrong spots.

Tom Poland: 5:16
Perfect. Interesting. It sounds like they’re really just magnifying the problem because they haven’t got to the root cause of the issue. So therefore, question number five, just over three minutes left, doing well. What’s one valuable free action that someone listening to this could take that’s going to take them a step in the right direction? It’s not going to solve the whole problem, they’re going to need Sales for Life for that, but it will help them just a little bit.

Jamie Shanks: 5:39

Easiest thing that you can do is reverse engineer your existing customers using something we call the sphere of influence.

You can Google it.
There’s a process map to this, but here’s what I want you to think about. Put your best customer at the center of a sheet of paper and draw a circle around their name. Then ask yourself, who cares? Inside that sphere, there are people and companies that are interrelated to that sphere. If you were to draw spoke from the center of that sheet of paper, the first spoke would come to people that are what we call advocates. These are people that used to work within the four walls of one of your existing customers, and have now moved on to a new account that meets your ideal customer profile. That’s simple action can be tracked on LinkedIn. Now, if you start to extrapolate that across your customer base, you’re going to notice that you have relationship advantages in key accounts that your competitors don’t. If you start targeting these, you increase the probability that you can open that account and shorten the velocity, the time it takes to activate that account.

Tom Poland: 6:42
Very clever. Thank you. Question number six, one minute 40 seconds left, one valuable free resource that we could direct people to that’s going to feed their marketing soul just a little bit more with this concept. And I believe you got a blog.

Jamie Shanks: 6:54
Yeah. I would go to Sales for Life. That’s www.salesforlife.com/blog. We post articles all the time, you will see 4000 blogs over our seven-year history written about our best practices.

Tom Poland: 7:12
Perfect. Thank you so much, sir. And we’ve got 70 seconds left, minus this question which I’m taking a while to ask you. Question number seven is, what’s the one question I should have asked you that I didn’t? One minute left.

Jamie Shanks: 7:22
What do you do better than anyone else in the world? And that’s very simple. Number one. We have the number one prospecting methodology in the world rooted in modern digital sales and our ability to create greater yields per seller. The average sales force creates 20% more sales pipeline in six to 12 months than the non-social sellers.

Tom Poland: 7:44
Perfect. Jamie, thanks so much for your time.

Jamie Shanks: 7:47
Thank you, you take care.

Tom Poland: 7:49
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.