Peak Performance Selling
Jim Speredelozzi, VP Sales, The Predictive Index
Episode Summary
Jim currently leads the direct sales, customer success and partner growth teams for the Predictive Index (PI), a firm focused on the Talent Optimization discipline. Before joining PI, Jim built and ran the velocity sales team at Black Duck Software, an application security company. Hear his thoughts on how to be a great leader
Episode Notes
- Sales might be the only profession where people commonly have the “this is how I fell into sales story”
- College roommate had a father in sales. Roommate said he was going to be in sales too…..why would you even go to college?
- Finished college with Liberal Arts degree but no liberal arts jobs
- Didn’t think he would be a fit for sales, but he was a nerd and passionate about computers so it seemed to work out
- Sociology stigma in sales and he had it but thinks it is changing - colleges starting to teach sales, guest lecture at MIT & Harvard & Bentley
- Helping people make a positive change is how the best salespeople operate
- The best sellers and sales leaders instill a belief system FIRST, before they focus on the tactics
- Assumptive close….probably not the best
- Your Belief system is the most important part of sales - ATTITUDE
- Sandler- Success Triangles
- If you do not believe you’re there to help people, you will not be successful in the long-term
- Shouldn’t sell to people that you can’t HELP
- Make the world better through Better work! Make people’s life at work more enjoyable, be more engaged at work
- More engaged at work = happier employees = happier relationships at home = better world
- 90%+ of revenue comes from a partner network of business consultants
- PI Tools & Talent Optimization platform to enable those changes - But first WHAT IS THE PROBLEM THAT NEEDS FIXING?
- PI Reference Profile - Captain - Proactive, task orientation, assertive, extroverted - good for sales - flexible but enjoys process too
- PI founded in 1959
- Collaborators - ME- help teams be cohesive, get everyone to feel good, useful when you have a toxic culture because they help the teams gel, long-term affiliations, patience, struggle to deal with transactional sales role, enterprise sales
- Anybody can do any job. Question is what is NATURAL for them? It’s more WORK for someone to do some of those other things, like me to do a transactional sale
- Find something that aligns well with your innate behavioral needs
- Sales hiring - I don’t want to build a Sales Team- I want to build a team of leaders and a LEADERSHIP Development function. They could be used internally or expand outside of the organization
- @BlackDuck if people hate it and don’t want to be a part of it and you only hire them based upon sales experience. So people quit and you’re set-back
- ⅔ of the sales people he hired quit within a 3 month period - looked to see if he could start using Behavioral Assessment - got attached to PI
- He was hiring for experience vs. looking for behavioral fit for a leadership role
- Get rid of sales experience as a qualifying factor and your pool of candidates opens massively
- Can create a great salesperson in 6 months. Hard to breakdown bad habits
- Best way to start learning how to sell is, make Cold-calls, possibly the hardest job in sales. Get a lot of looks and some of the belief systems.
- If you can’t get your attitude right, you can’t cold call effectively
- Learn to quickly establish rapport in an efficient way
- Most people don’t want to talk about sports or weather
- You can’t make a positive change with somebody if you don’t spend time talking about the business problems and challenges they are trying to solve
- How to use Empathy & Humor (self-deprecating) to build rapport
- You believe the people you’re calling you can help
- Build empathy- quickly - The Like Switch - build rapport with Russian Agents
- The Empathic Statement- quickly build rapport by showing empathy- greet someone new and Notice something about them and STATE IT…..”SO You….” “So you seem….busy, stressed, frustrated”
- Empathy = experiencing someone’s emotional state with them or at least a concern for theirs when you match tone that focuses on concern.
- Working with MBA candidates - they are not envisioning themselves in sales in an end state - they will attempt to found a company or be senior exec- they know they’re going to have to sell to be effective in so many business roles
- Lou Shipley- CEO of Black Duck - “The first thing the board asks you is how does the sales forecast look”
- How to bounce back - Extreme Ownership - Jock Willink - Cannonballs, when something bad happens- CELEBRATE IT now you can figure out how to fix it
- First thing as a sales leader when you miss a month- look at yourself and your leadership to see how YOU can be accountable to that result
- You don’t make excuses
- Don’t want to be in a position where you feel as bad as your worst month or as good as your best month
- What could I have fixed and done better? Even in a great month
- What did I do wrong?
- Mike CEO @ PI - Avid Sailor- “Let the storms show your mastery”
- You control your ship, your team, what you do
- Office Olympics - Captains are Hyper competitive
- Behavioral interview and tailor it to the person. If you suspect someone will be weak in an area- a question about a time when they’ve shown - Look for the emotional response, why they won/lost.
- Favorite question for sales people- Do you have any questions for me? ASK SOME QUESTIONS- At the most senior level to not seem curious or excited is a way to fail!
- Curiosity sells you, because people love to talk about themselves and their company
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