HOW SALES IS AND IS NOT A NUMBERS GAME?

Speaker A: Why you should not look at sales as a numbers game. There's a lot of reasons, and a lot of people give me a lot of pushback on this. Mostly managers. Uh, and I see it way too often because a website is a numbers game, digital advertising is a numbers game. But even if you look at that, you're like, okay, what's your ad? Is it driving an emotion? Is it driving an attention? The right type of intention, the right type of connection with the human being. All of us want to think of others as a number, but everybody wants to think of us as a human being. Why do we want to do this? Because we don't know these people. And connecting with people and thinking of them as a human being takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of focus. It drains us. It means we have to care. And if we have to care, that takes time. I've seen too many managers, and this has really kind of come about because of marketing automation and CRM. Uh, all of a sudden, managers stopped talking to reps and started just watching the dashboard, thinking that it's a numbers game. And guess what? Everyone games the numbers. Everyone does. I've been on the board of companies, and I see the CEO game the numbers, and almost everyone knows it's a game, uh, because it kind of is a game. But the difference is, are you telling the truth or not? And is everybody under the same delusion of this mysterious little game that we're playing? Now, you see this in politics all the time. But, uh, sales is a quantitative game, meaning that at the end of the game, you either, you have a certain amount of revenue you get paid on, and accounting is pretty good about determining, uh, what that is legally. And they also reserve the right to claw back if they didn't do a good enough job at determining. If the company doesn't pay your company, they claw back the commission. If the PO that came in, uh, turns out to be a spoof or some kind or a scam, uh, they sue you. And I've heard of these things happening where people do all kinds of things. So that part of the game is pretty quantifiable. But then we back up and everybody's, well, just reverse engineer it. Uh, every time I hear that, I'm like, that's a reasonable academic exercise. It is reasonable, but it's not, uh, something that you stick to as your only compass. It gives you a sense of how real the number is. You, you can take average deal size, uh, divide it into your quota. So that's the number of Deals you typically have to do. Then you divide it by the weeks. That's how many you have to do per week or per month or whatever. And each of them takes a certain number of demos, a certain number of proposals, certain number of calls. But then all of a sudden, quality gets thrown out. It assumes that every call is equal. It assumes that every prospect is equally likely to buy, but they're not. That's when Hawaii comes involved. Hi, Brian. You coined a new term. It's called human intelligence. And human intelligence is infinitely better than artificial intelligence when it comes to people. Ah, artificial intelligence is great. Chunking down huge, confined data sets. Unbelievable. Can kick our butt every day. But human intelligence can kick its butt determining what to do and how to do it. And that's where the magic happens. And when we start thinking about sales as a numbers game, we try and get away from human intelligence, the most powerful thing we have. And we focus on just doing a certain number of calls. Well, I always got away from that. I knew I had to work hard. Everyone who's smart knows they have to work hard. I would work six, seven days a week, a good 60 hours a week. There was no question about my work ethic. Uh, but I did never just made calls for the sake of making calls, or the person who says, oh, make one more call before I go home. And the person who says that, uh, hasn't made a cold call in 30 years. Let's get away from it being a numbers game. And remember, it's a human game. You're not selling to a number. You're selling to your quota. But the person who's buying is a person. And they're gonna buy for their reasons, not yours. And your job is to find out what their reasons are and to sell to that. Not about how your product works, but what they get out of it and what problem it solves for them, how it makes their life as an individual better. Even when you're selling to a company, then you have to figure out how by. And you go to my website, b2b revenue.com and get a free book on that. Did I say that out loud? I did. So this numbers game thing, it makes us feel comfortable that we understand the game we're playing, but we don't. That's just activity. And, you know, and what you see is a lot of people thinking it's, oh, like just go running to lose weight or just count calories, and that's a nice start. But counting a calorie as celery is different than counting A calorie of a donut, it does very different things to our body. And we also got to think that we are human beings too. And if you find out, oh, I've got to make 400 cold calls a day, guess, ah, what quality of life goes down the toity. What we have to do is, I've got a day. How do I use my day the best on the people who are most likely to buy, who are most like the people who have bought before. How do I connect with them as a human being instead of, oh, what's the best subject line and just some trickery, how do I sell to them the way they want to buy? This has not changed in centuries, but what we've tried to do is shortcut it. And each technology revolution, uh, the phone, email, uh, web and social, it brings about for a moment a faster way of doing it. But then quickly everyone does it. And then we have to go back to the century old way that people want to be approached. And that works because we still very tribal creatures, uh, uh, just go into any public setting and walk up to a complete stranger and start talking to them. Guess how it works. It doesn't. But we try and do this every day, all day on the phone, on email and on social. But guess what? There's a way to do it and the smart people figure that out. And is it the fastest way? In aggregate, it is the fastest way. In the momentary, it is not. What we're thinking of is, oh, uh, let's go find that needle in the haystack. Let's turn the haystack into needles. Let's use our brain, our AGI. It is what we have. We don't have AI, we have access to utilities that can help us. But what we do have is our own intelligence. We are gamblers, whether we admit it or not. Put your chips, which is your time, your energy, your capability on the things that are most likely going to score and do it the smart way. Hey, so thanks for listening to this episode. To fill you in on the courses, uh, there's two main ones right now. There's start the conversation, get the meeting. This is really at the top of the funnel. How do you get to outreach to cold opportunities in your total addressable market? And start those conversations, not pitching, but warming them up to the point where you can have a discussion and it's a natural, organic way. I have a testimonial at the end of this and if you want to check it out, go to b2b revenue.com, hit the training tab. And then you, uh, can schedule a call or just take a look at the courses. Uh, please do your due diligence before you schedule a call. And please be serious. If you do schedule a call, uh, time is precious. The other one is closing the complex sale. This is if you're running into trouble. Uh, once you get the meeting, everything goes well, but the deal doesn't seem to close. It doesn't seem to go anywhere. They're not telling you no, but they're not obviously buying. I teach you how to manage this, how to control it, how to drive it, how to make things happen. Uh, both courses you can pay per month. Uh, they're monthly payments. They're not subscriptions or memberships. Or you can pay all at once. I've got a sample email that you can use in the show notes, uh, that you can cut and paste and send to your manager, see if they will, uh, expense it and approve it. But you really should invest in yourself because these are the things that are going to make the difference in your income this year and the rest of your career. And if you want to talk about it, let's get on the phone and talk about it. Uh, if you like the podcast, it's probably a match. If you're listening to Brutal Truth, I'd say if you haven't listened to at least three episodes, please do that first, just to make sure it's a good match for you. And, uh, it will certainly help you also connect up with me on LinkedIn. And if you see my content on LinkedIn, I sure would appreciate a like comment and a share. Thanks for listening. Make sure you're checking out the Brutal truth and the B2B revenue show as well.

Speaker B: I don't have a question, but I have a, uh, story.

Speaker A: Go for it.

Speaker B: So I'm, uh, talking to, uh, we're doing, um, account planning now, sort of targeting what opportunities want to look at. And one, uh, I only have two named accounts and they're both Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies. And, uh, someone has a sort of an inside track from former employees and they find out about this possible really, really, really big opportunity. Really big. And, uh, they said, our main problem is we think we know who we need to get in touch with to start a conversation with. But, uh, nobody knows this guy. Nobody. He's a vp, gigantic company, but nobody knows him. And, uh, they mentioned his name. And I say, what was his name? And I said, give me a minute. And I sort of go off the mute for a while and I go all the way back to the very beginning of when I started this course. And he's someone that I started a conversation with because, uh, something that I found on LinkedIn Navigator, and he was on, and I didn't have anything to sell him, but he did a good job, so I sent it off to him. And so this morning I dug up that, um, thread, that email thread, and I go back on the call. I say, I kind of know this guy. I think I can get a conversation started with him. We could get in front of him as early as next week, and it may end up being the biggest sale of my career so far.