016: Understanding Buyer Problems as an Industry Expert for Sales Success with Shane Healy

Show highlights:

• 01:00 - Shane Healy talking about what got him interested in enterprise software, sales, and marketing. He introduced automation to a job that allowed him to do other work instead of manual processes.
• 05:00 - Using an alumni network and LinkedIn to get a job.
• 09:00 - How did college athletics make Shane successful in the Account and Sales Development Representative (ADR or SDR) role? Practice and constantly working on your craft as a baseball pitcher takes a lot of work. ADR role is the same and you have to decide you're going to be the best, or very, very good.
• 12:00 - How did Shane get interested in Customer Service and how those workflows can be improved by software? Especially customer service in software and how we can do better making it easier on the customer with data and predictive analytics and connecting siloed departments with workflows to connect the back end.
• 18:00 - Positioning value props as an SDR to different buyer personas. For example, in software it's that the buyer can get a better Net Promoter Score with improved customer service. Shane recommends working our way backwards from what problems the customers are trying to solve.
• 20:00 - Reps get too caught up in personalization. Shane empathizes with reps who have to get a lot of volume in their outreach, because his greatest success was leveraging 10k Annual Reports. "We solve a similar problem and helped a similar company with their Net Promoter Score. Outreach.io has a piece of content that helps reps leverage 10k reports. "Don't think these people are too big to respond if there's a problem to solve."
• 23:30 - Being careful in how you mention information you find in your research and having empathy in, say, a cybersecurity breach or an outage.
• 25:30 - Hand-off between ADR and Sales Rep. Shane supported product line team with shared quota with some district managers. When in doubt, loop everyone in internally.
• 30:00 - Shane walks through his ADR process and workflow for breaking into accounts. Shane used targeted accounts and similar case studies that made sense to the other accounts with similar companies. Then, he breaks it out across multiple emails for his cadence, so example: 2 emails problems we solve for similar companies, 2 are trends in the industry, and 2 initiatives with the company over a time period build out in Sales Loft. THEN, LinkedIn and DiscoverOrg are good cross-reference, then everything goes into the CRM.
• 34:00 - Philosophies on calling cell phones. Shout out to Jeremy from LeadIQ. The fact they have cell phone numbers is powerful. Not intrusive if it's not abused.
• 37:00 - Getting promoted from ADR to quota-carrying Inside Sales Executive. His mindset was that if he was close to or at quota, Shane spent time focusing on the toughest meetings his sales reps needed, which helped his internal brand at the company.
• 41:00 - First impression of quota carrying and leading demos, first meetings, deep dives to deal close. One, Shane says understand who you bring in and when (e.g. partner ecosystem). Two, the best sales reps don't know every nook and cranny about the product, but they know how to listen and bring in resources. Two, is time management. Shane has a lot of customers and some have more upside than others, so a sales rep has to choose where he or she spends time.
• 45:00 - Personal branding and Shane's take as a sales rep that they themselves get their views about the industry out there. Shane says you have to bring value as a sales rep other than taking orders, expressing ideas, and being a human is the new form of marketing.