Rich Chiarello—7 Proven Sales Strategies to Avoid Stagnant Revenue Growth

Rich Chiarello  0:00  
And so the number one thing you have to do is let them know before you get to that point. If at any point this changes in priority or you got a bad answer, you must agree that you won't ghost me. Whether it's good news, bad news or no news. Can I have your agreement? Now here's the beauty of this day, they almost always agree. Then when you text them, if they go through, you could say, is this what we talked about?

David Bush  0:25  
Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right. Well, welcome everybody. My name is David bush, and I get a chance to be your host and moderator today on this exciting topic of the seven proven strategies to avoid stagnant revenue growth. Are you feeling that? Can you feel a little bit of that pain right now? Maybe you're struggling with stagnant revenue growth, or maybe there's some other challenges that you're dealing with. But in this particular event, my friend Rich Chiarello is going to address the number one fear of the modern CEO CRO or senior executive hitting a revenue ceiling, you're going to discover the seven core strategies to diagnose why your growth is stalled and how to implement a systematic hiring and onboarding process that ensures that your sales team consistently hits their targets regardless of the economic environment. Can I hear a hallelujah amen on that one? Right? This is something that everybody is probably had at some point in their career. Deal dealt with if it's not right now. Rich giovello is a sales leadership strategist at Sandler Training. He partners with presidents and CEOs to build high performance sales cultures that drive Predictable Revenue Growth and market share dominance, and he's been doing it for almost two decades. And what we did is we basically took all of the registrants. Thanks so much for everybody that showed interest, we were blown away by the number of people that were interested and registered for this particular webinar. We know we're hitting on a hot topic, and these questions that I'm going to be asking of rich are really going to be the solutions that are going to lead you to a better quarter, a better year, and hopefully keeping you on the revenue rise, so that you're never hitting another revenue plateau so rich. I'm excited to get this thing kicked off. Thanks for being with us today. Happy to be here.

Rich Chiarello  2:27  
I look based upon the attendance, I think we picked the right topic absolutely well.

David Bush  2:31  
I know that we had a lot of questions come in, and we may not get to all of them, so thanks everybody for submitting a question. We want to honor those people that chose to be here with us live. If you have a question, go ahead and put it into the chat. We'll try to get to that as we navigate through these different questions that have been submitted to us prior to the kickoff of the event. But we'd love to end up getting as many questions answered. So without further ado, rich, let's just jump in. And first, let's get a bit of a background. You've been doing this for almost two decades, you've got a tremendous amount of experience in building peak performance sales cultures. Talk a little bit more about what has brought you to where you are today and why you're so passionate about having having revenue leaders to scale their businesses.

Rich Chiarello  3:16  
Well, you know, if you've ever run global sales, as I did at you know computer associates and Siebel systems, web methods, after a while, you know, you get tired of it being nine o'clock in the morning somewhere every hour of the day, right? And so when I said what I wanted to do differently after doing all of that, and, you know, and reclaim my life and still have fun, the thing that I always enjoyed best was training and bringing people into an organization and making them succeed as reps, managers and heads of sales. That's what this lets me do.

David Bush  3:50  
Yeah, well, if you've done a fantastic job at it, and that's one of the reasons why we chose you for this particular event, to answer these questions and look like we got some more people that are joining on, joining us, with us live. And if you just joined us, we'd love to see into the chat what industry you're coming in from. And also, if you're watching a recording of this, we're super excited to get your comments on this particular topic so you can use the comment section. We'll have all of the links and resources inside of the video description in the show notes. And yeah, we'd love to have anybody share this content with others that you think would benefit. Would benefit. So I'm going to jump right in with the first question rich and that is, why do successful companies suddenly hit a revenue plateau?

Rich Chiarello  4:31  
Oh, listen, that is the question of the day, right? So the first thing you have to do is separate facts from fiction. Is it a product issue, market issue, etc. And that's what a rep will tell you, right? It's the product. It's this is that the clearest way to separate that is, are other people buying our product? Are some sales people stuck? Other people are being successful. And the reason my revenue is plateauing is everyone isn't selling if indeed, that's the case, which for the very. Vast majority of companies that that's the reality. It's because we have a sales process that lets us start telling about our product too soon. And it's not a sales process that lets the rep answer three basic questions before they spend too much time. I bet you want to know what those three questions

David Bush  5:19  
are, right? I'm chomping at the bit. Man, let it, Matt, let us have it.

Rich Chiarello  5:23  
Why, Mr. Prospect, why do you need to do anything? Number two, why would you do it with us? And number three, why would you do it now? And as we look at most deals that get forecasted and don't happen and get rolled out. It's good news. Bad news. Good news is, if we ever buy something like your solution, we're going to buy with you. Bad news is, we don't have the funding. It's not a high priority, maybe next year, right? And so that's the problem that a good sales process needs to solve.

David Bush  5:57  
You've had a tremendous amount of experience in really helping organizations to find the bottleneck in the sales process, and helping them to really unkink the hose where there may be a blind spot or something that they just haven't they've just overseen it, or they've missed it. Can you talk a little bit about the sales process and how you're helping revenue leaders to identify those bottlenecks and kinks? Isn't kinks in the hose.

Rich Chiarello  6:22  
Sure? You know it's always best to exemplify this concept of sales templating or gateways. So in other words, if you have seven steps in your sales process right to go from qualified to forecast or to go for a marketing lead to qualified, you should have established steps that aren't arbitrary. So for example, if the rep has not answered the question, what's the decision process? Who's involved? How will this be justified? Where will we get the money? Then the idea of doing the proof of concept as your next step is ridiculous. All you're going to do is invest more time and effort. And it shouldn't be something where everyone could have their own sales process. They could pull that trigger. So the best companies, right? The best practice in that area is having a sales template that basically has gateways that says, here's what must be accomplished before we move it to the next step. Does that make sense?

David Bush  7:16  
Absolutely, and that is something that you know many individuals are dealing with right now is that they're trying to move that process into a free flowing environment. And what do you think some of the challenges are with that? I mean, why do you think that successful organizations are still dealing with bottlenecks? Is it through just abdication they don't want to deal with the problem behind the problem, or just curious.

Rich Chiarello  7:42  
Well, it's because things change, right? What worked five years ago, when you were the only one in the marketplace and people were coming to you, now you have seven other competitors, right? And so what worked in the past doesn't always work in the future, in the current the inability to sense that and change it makes people all of a sudden have this stagnant revenue. What happened? We're doing everything we did five years ago now, all of a sudden, it's not working.

David Bush  8:08  
Yeah, but you've got seven specific strategies to restart stagnant revenue. You mind just walking us through what those strategies are?

Rich Chiarello  8:17  
Sure, let me just go through. I'll give the seven so we make sure we get to continuous, and then we go back and ask you questions about every one. So the first one starts with a great story. When I was head of sales at CA, we would have great sports legends, you know, basketball, hockey, you name it, golf, come and be our guest speakers. And of course, since I was a head of sales, I got to eat dinner with them and spend three or four hours whenever I would ask them, you know, what made what made them so great, whether it was Larry Bird, you know, or Michael woods, they it said something sounded the same, which was a combination of, I practiced my technique and make sure I had the best technique, and had coaches do it. I did the behaviors that basically said, now that I know the best technique, I'm not only going to practice it, but I'm going to look at game films and everything to make sure that in real life I actually use it. And the last one was the attitude every one of them thought they could either score on or putt from 40 and make it sink. Every one of them believed that they could do it. And so those three things, your behavior, your attitude and technique. That's the number one, recommitting to measuring leading indicators and behavior metrics, as opposed to the ending result, which is revenue. Yeah, right. Number one, recommit to leading indicators and behavior metrics. Yeah.

David Bush  9:44  
So, I mean, that sounds pretty simple, anything that's a common obstacle. Just to get back to some of those basics,

Rich Chiarello  9:51  
because everyone gets paid on revenue. See, you're focused a lot on what are we going to forecast this quarter? Well, what you're going to forecast is quarter. Or is there or not because of something you did in most large sales cycles two or three quarters before right? So if you focus on the leading behaviors of am I calling on qualified people? Am I only doing proof of concepts with people who have answered the questions? Have I justified this deal for the decision step and pain, etc, if you're doing all those leading behaviors so you don't waste time with people that you should be dropping, then what am I going to forecast this quarter becomes a more happy story.

David Bush  10:30  
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Rich Chiarello  12:08  
Well, listen, that's a very good point. You know, we also I teach my sales management class, the first thing I tell them, when you look at someone who isn't doing what he or she needs to do is you have to decide, is it because they're unwilling or unable. If I teach you how to prospect, if I teach you how to ask for, you know, introductions to other customers from someone and you've got that technique down, great, you're no longer unable. But if you don't do it because you think that's beyond you, you have been selling so long, why should I need to prospect? You're now unwilling, right? How you manage someone who is unwilling is completely, you know, harder and different than unable. But at the end of the day, sales managers and CROs are only successful based upon the team's revenue. If someone won't do what needs to be done because they either can't do it or refuse to do it, then their value diminishes and needs to be replaced. And look, we've all managed people like that. They take up a considerable amount of our time and effort getting very little results and taking us away from the other people are willing to do whatever you want.

David Bush  13:12  
Yeah. And a lot of times that decision comes down to what is hard right now and then, what is going to be hard five years from now, which is going to be if you just, if you don't make the hard decision now, then it's just going to be hard for the next five years, and you're going to probably be stuck and have declining revenue, and you're going to wash out your culture. So I went, Man, there's a lot of packed in to just attitude, or recommitting to attitude, behavior and techniques. What's number two on the strategies?

Rich Chiarello  13:36  
So number two is really tighten the qualification standards. You know, the customer's journey today is much different than it was 510 years ago. On average, customers do 60% of the discovery of who's out there, who offers a solution in the area that they're looking for, and then approach our sales team with you made the cut of one of five. Here's the technical things we want to know if you can do this, so immediately you're putting the sales person into a oh, let me tell you all about my goods, right? And there's no need for there's no there's a need, but there's no effort or ability in their minds to understand what's the problem with solving is this is going to be a good use of my time, just because you're a fortune 500 company, if this is a big waste of my time for qualification reasons, why would I want to engage with you? So number two is tighten qualification standards. And in Sandler parlance, it means three things. One, qualify for pain, but most importantly, not just business pain, personal pain. What would be this person's motivation to go fight for the money for my solution, if I win this deal. Number two, how will we fund it? When will that happen? Where will it come from? And then. Number three, who else, other this person is involved in the decision process? Those three things make a point. Number two,

David Bush  14:56  
yeah, my goodness, I'm trying to type it all down. Here to put the notes into the chat for everybody. That's solid. Who else is involved in the decision making. So that's fantastic. So when we look at the tightening of qualification standards, how's that typically rolled out in best practices? Is it digital? Is it Digital Plus verbal plus visual? I mean, do you have a standard process or operating procedure for that.

Rich Chiarello  15:23  
Yes, you have to teach the sales people to be inquisitive and to hold back on the knowledge. We train them so much on our technology and our products and our competitors. But then in the initial part of the cycle, holding that back, you almost be better if knew nothing about the product, right? And so trying to understand, even if you got an RFP, trying to understand what's problem you're trying to solve. You know how to just compare? Is this the top problem for the company with the fifth? Is it your personal problem and and therefore won't get funded because other people are ahead of you getting into conversations? And here's the key thing that is really sort of the silver bullet, I'd say one of the big takeaways from today, if you ask your sales person, anyone on this phone today, you ask them, what's their value prop to the customer, they will most likely tell you, it's their knowledge of your solution and of the industry and how your product does blah, blah, blah, better than us. That would be the wrong answer. Just imagine you're selling a security product to someone who's been a CSO forever, right? You're never going to compete with them on that level. Your real your sales person's real value prop is the knowledge of the sales process today and what it will take for this prospect to buy anything from anyone. If you believe that they're very early in the sales cycle, even if they've come to you saying, set up a demo. I want to see your technical 123, see, look, just add curiosity. When's the last time you personally bought anything at this company in the last year? Last three years, 90% of the time it'll be they haven't purchased anything of that magnitude at this company. Would it help if I share with you what I'm experiencing out there in the market that says, whether you pick me or someone else, here's all the things that you're going to have to have in place. Because remember, the last thing you want to do is is a prospect is to get your whole team excited about some new technology or new solutions, and then find out that it's not going to be approved and not brought in, and then you're able to lead them. We're gonna have to find a way to justify we're gonna have to understand who else needs to be involved in decision, and what wins are they. So you could follow how, you can imagine how the rest of that conversation goes. But teaching sales reps how to interject that early on as a value added that they bring is really an important first step.

David Bush  17:40  
Yeah, I know that this is something that a lot of viewers right now are thinking about, is, what is that question that's simplified to really I identify and qualify for for business and personal pain? Do you have something in your bag, bag of strategies that you pull out and you go, Hey, if when you ask this question, it uncovers the pain.

Rich Chiarello  18:02  
Well, it depends on what the solution is, right, but typically you'll start off with, like, if I was selling sales trading right, I'm going to start off with, hey, customers typically come to me because they're, you know, struggling with being able to build a pipeline, or they're challenged by being able to close their forecast, or three, maybe what they're finding is they're seeing sales reps just have a drop in productivity. Which of those are an issue for you? I by 32nd commercial doesn't say the things that I do. It says the problems that I solve. You want to identify the problem they're trying to solve early on and ask them questions, like on the budget side, how long has this been a problem? What have you done to fix it? Do you have any idea how much this is costing the company? What's the worst that could happen if you don't fix it? And then you go right from business pain into personal pain with gee, you know, Dave, you seem to know a lot about this. Let me ask you a question, how is this tied to your personal gaze? I mean, this is like number one, have you been asked to fix it, or have you just been asked to go out and see who's got solutions? And here's the beautiful thing, if you've got personal pain, you can't hide it. If you've been told to fix it, if this problem happens again, you're gone, you'll start squealing, and you'll see visibly, yes, I have to fix this. It's been a problem forever. I've been told, you know, get a solution in place once you just keep asking them more and more about that personal pain and how it's affecting them personally, they'll tell you, personal pain is like waterboarding. If you get the person who has the personal pain, you ask them a few questions and let them talk about it, 510, 15 minutes, they'll tell you anything else you want to know about, where will we fund it? Who's it? What you know? What's the buying process like? Who else might be involved in the decision? But you can't ask those other questions until you're talking to the person. What is the personal pain? Does that make sense?

David Bush  19:59  
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm probably seeing a lot of other nodding, nodding heads right there, going absolutely I remember the six questions or the six words that I never wanted to forget, and that was ask questions skillfully and listen carefully, because it's not about a matter of the features and benefits that you tell people. It's more about her, about the questions you ask and the information that they give you before you decide to deliver. So we're in, we're into these seven strategies to break through, break free from stagnant revenue growth. And we could probably just end the webinar now and go to work, but you've got, you know, five more. So let's go into number three. What's number three?

Rich Chiarello  20:36  
Well, number three is this concept of reinforcing contracts. So in Santa we have this technique, and those on the call been in Santa classes know we're famous for these upfront contracts. So when I start every meeting, it starts with, here's what I want to accomplish. Here's what you want to accomplish. And look, if it turns out that after you see our presentation, we're not a fit, will you tell me? So ask for the No. On the other hand, if it turns out we are a fit, then we'll decide would go next. But here's the thing, the last thing I want to do is have this call end with you being concerned about hurting my feelings and telling me, I'll get back to you whatever, because that doesn't do anything. So at each step of the sales cycle, you put in there, the thing you're most afraid of happening, for example, ghosting. Is there a CRO on this call or sales person who hasn't forecasted a deal. And then when you're asked by management to go ask the customer where it stands and when it will close, has that customer go into the witness protection program, right? All of a sudden they don't return your calls. All of a sudden they don't return emails or texts, and you're standing there telling people you know they won't return a call or won't return my call, right? And so the number one thing you have to do is let them know before you get to that point, if at any point this changes in priority or you got a bad answer, you must agree that you won't ghost me, whether it's good news, bad news or no news. Can I have your agreement? Now here's the beauty of this, Dave, when you ask people ahead of time, can we agree that you won't do something bad, they almost always agree. Then when you text them if they ghost, or you could say, is this what we talked about? And it's amazing how their guilt conscience has them come out and say, oh, yeah, I should what, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

David Bush  22:30  
That makes sense. Absolutely. I love the giving people permission to give you bad news, because that opens up the gateway. And once you come to that agreement, now you're going to end up getting though, and that's that's really solid. So moving on to number four. We're keeping this party moving. So what's number four?

Rich Chiarello  22:49  
Sure. So you want to coach around pain discovery? Well, there's all sorts of AI tools out there. Matter of fact, one of the questions submitted ahead of time was, how could AI be used? Look, I'm sandals. We have a Sandler, AI coach, coaching product that you can practice with, and it will basically tell you at the end of the call, did you against the the AI body that you create? Right? It's like talking to a real person. You can make this person be wherever you want, but then, as a salesperson, I can go back and look to see, did I really uncover pain? Did I talk too much? I get personal pain and not business pain, and because there's just not enough time in the day for sales leaders to do that with every one of their sales people. So once you teach them what to do, having them have the ability to practice with an AI coach is really important. I love that approaching around pain discovery is number four,

David Bush  23:45  
good deal. I love the immediate feedback that AI provides to us and gives us that framework, because, you know, it's oftentimes a blind spot for people. I know that I've been guilty of talking too much, and I need to shut up and listen, and I need to not get into filling the void with more more noise and more more words. And so I love the feedback there, where you're getting a chance to really look at and go, how good of a job did you do, and asking those discovery questions. So moving on to number five.

Rich Chiarello  24:21  
So shorten the sales cycle by clarifying decision processes many times our inside sales people we're working with, even when they like us and it looks like they, you know, they want to recommend us, right? They'll tell you what they think the decision process will be and the procurement process and the timing, but they don't really know. So again, part of that your biggest value is that you understand that today, these things can go on forever. If they tell you, here's what the decision process is and the timing would be involved, you ask them, Could you do me a favor, give them homework? Could you go back and verify say that you're looking at this solution? We pick it. It's X amount of money. Either budgeted, not budget, or replacing something else, or the expense is equal whatever thing is. Can you go back and verify what that decision process will look like? Because otherwise you're just taking their word for it. It's not that they're intentionally trying to mislead you, but they turn out to be wrong. The net effect is the same, which is a bad net effect. So short, met sales FICO by getting clarification on the decision process where they go back and verify it is number five.

David Bush  25:27  
So would you say that clarifying would just be kind of this is what I heard you say in regards to the process. You're just reiterating what was been told to you,

Rich Chiarello  25:35  
and then you're and you're asking them to go back and check within their company, unless you're talking to the CEO of the company, right? Hey, let me go back and check to my boss, who checks with another boss, and make sure that what I'm telling the sales guy is true.

David Bush  25:48  
Absolutely. Great. Well, let's land the plane on six and seven. What do we got

Rich Chiarello  25:52  
for six? So six is proving the dead pipeline, right? So I know it's hard to get rid of pipeline that's dead because as a salesperson, they like, then I don't have anything in my pipeline but the amount of time wasted and and phony sense of security over keeping deals that you've now discovered maybe they were qualified once, but right now they're not qualified based upon the last demo discovery, whatever prudent free up the salesperson's time to move on so that we're not having a bunch of stuff roll from quarter to quarter to quarter is

David Bush  26:22  
number six. Yeah. And what would be the time frame? Just kind of curious of your professional experience? What's the time frame that you give for no answers or ghosting before you prune that that pipeline out?

Rich Chiarello  26:36  
Well, depending on the size of the deal, and you know whether the person you know is waiting vacation is waiting to talk to his manager. But when they're ghosting like that, typically what I would do is email them and first and say, Is this your way of saying it's over? It's the breakup email, right? Is this your way of saying it's over? If it is, that's okay. We'll still be friends. Just let me know, right? But even better, to make sure that something hasn't happened. And this is a true story, this actually happened once, where I told the person at this very large software company write them an email that sounds like this, Hey, rich, I'm concerned that you're okay. You know, you've been so reciprocal and so easy to communicate with during the sales cycle. Now here, it's been two weeks you haven't returned email. Please just let me know that you're okay, and then we can figure out how to pick up this thing later on. Well, that always, typically instills so much guilt, they've replied right away. Matter of fact, I told this woman to do it at this the largest software company in the world, when I was teaching over in England. She liked the idea so much she did it in the middle of my class, and five minutes later, she raised a hand and said, The sob. Just returned my email. He said, Oh, I'm so sorry. I feel so bad. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that was the other thing I would do. Look, if they're not responding in two or three weeks, that's their way of and you have no one else to talk to but just this one person. You know it's not happening.

David Bush  28:07  
Yeah, I love the phrase. It says, if you need them, you can't lead them. And so, you know, if you really want to be leading your clients and be seen as, you know, the the boat that the fish are chasing, you know, send the breakup email, send the off the hook message, and move on and go fill up your pipeline with more conversations so that people actually become attracted to the fact that you're actually moving forward and doing business with some of their competitors. So Well, let's talk it through number seven.

Rich Chiarello  28:36  
So seven comes into this this accountability and prospecting. So I haven't met a company yet, no matter how hot their product is, where they can live just off of inbound, even if they're using BDRs and SDRs, right? If I'm a salesperson, I'm coin operated or motivated by money, I'm supplementing anything else the company's doing with finding ways to get into new accounts or sell more of the product. And so unfortunately, that's two out of every 10 sales reps. And so I could tell you account after account where what we did was inspect, remember those leading behaviors, how many new we create a prospect and cook? It varies by company, but this one company, I'm thinking, I want to mention that name one was each week, have one meeting with a reseller where all you're going to talk about is, where else can we bring our solution? You know, you've got a bunch of customers installed each week. You can ask two of them who else they know in the industry in your area. You know that they can introduce you to but it might be a good fit, you could imagine, and then you hold them accountable for those behaviors. If they do the behaviors, then the increased new account pipeline will develop. And so having a system where you're inspecting that and holding them accountable for doing those behaviors invariably will make the thing improve.

David Bush  29:57  
So accountability and. Prospecting. So we talked about some of the core factors. Number one was attitude, behavior and technique, making sure that there's some you called it the reviewing the core fundamentals Is that what you said right then we got Titan qualification standards qualify for business and personal pain. How will we fund it? Who else is involved? Getting those leveled up, reinforcing contracts, recapping outcomes. What are you the most afraid of? Giving prospects permission to give you bad news? Number four was coach around pain discovery. Number five, clarifying decision processes and timing and asking them to verify it, pruning up dead pipeline. And then number seven, accountability and prospecting. I'd love to see any questions or comments from those that are live here with us. What was the number one thing that you took away from those seven strategies? Not the number one, but the best takeaway. What was the aha moment? I love the one about reinforcing contracts and recapping outcomes and giving people permission. I sometimes forget about that. I think it was Patrick Lencioni that said, sometimes we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. Sometimes it's just that great reminder of something that we've heard before, but we just we haven't implemented it, or we haven't put it into our standard operating procedure. So thanks so much for sharing that. That's great content. So let's move on and talk about, how do you hire sales reps who can actually sell in today's environment?

Rich Chiarello  31:25  
Well, we all know stories of people who had a great track record. We checked out their background, we brought them into our company. They didn't do well. They left somewhere else and did well again. And unless you think is the master You're the problem, you scratch your head and say, How could that happen? And so the key thing is understanding, separate from their their background is what they're going to sell to who they're going to sell in the volumes, whether it's transactional or enterprise, etc. Is this something they've done in the past? And I always recommend to everybody, not just role playing during the interviewing, but use an assessment. And we have, like, four or five different vendors that we use, right? Because what you need is someone to prospect. You know, no one's going to apply for a job if you ask them about prospecting, say, Yeah, I hate it, right? So if you use these hiring assessments, they really can let you know the strengths and weaknesses, and you could have a meaningful conversation about what areas that you would need to coach versus come, you know, with the package, but making sure that you're really looking at, can this person sell this product in today's market, in the volumes or size deals that I need, and is there any demonstrable proof that they've done that In the past really solves a lot of problems.

David Bush  32:42  
Yeah. Do you have any kind of like, descriptors or questions that you're asking now about AI, and just making sure that there's some basic fundamental knowledge of using AI? Is that becoming more and more popular in your world?

Rich Chiarello  32:58  
Well, yes, but in the interview, and you got to build more clever right? So if you ask a rep during the interview, it's interview, so how do you use AI today? Well, I'll use game McCue, right? Oh, I use it everywhere, you know? I use it to tell me what TV to watch. I use it to tell me what sports teams to bet on. Better have them describe talk to me today about what your week looks like. Show me your planner how. That's how you'll be able to see if there's any time put aside for prospecting already, right? And then, well, how do you go about finding new accounts? Don't leave them with how to use AI to do it. Let them tell you, I use AI, use I use Gemini, use chat, GPT. Here's how I use it. Here's how I morph my letters and intro so they're meaningful, right? As opposed to leading the witness too much.

David Bush  33:44  
One of the questions that was submitted by one of the registrants was one or two levers to get reps to be more accountable. Think better, plan better and execute better. Any specific levers or levers that would jump out at you as being something that really helps to increase productivity, sure?

Rich Chiarello  34:04  
Well, like any type of coaching or counseling, no behavior changes until the person admits something, right? So the first thing you got to do is imagine, is have a call with them and say, Listen, you know, you're making half of what you used to make year or two years ago, right? Everybody else is selling. So it's not a product issue, right? Are you still motivated by money? Right? If they say, Yes, blah, blah, blah says, Listen, as your manager, I'm willing to invest my time and effort. That's how you could hold me accountable for giving you some direction on how to increase your revenue. But then you have to be accountable for doing what we both agreed you would do once you have that, that accountability, and they admit, yes, I want to make more money. Yes, for whatever reason, it's not happening. But if we put a plan in place, then hold it accountable, then you set up, you know, whether it's once a week or whatever regular accountability calls, and you come up with the new behavior. Remember, it's leading indicators. Your coaching can't be, go sell more deals, and I can sell more deals on my own. I'm going to do that. The coaching may be, here's the prospecting plan, or here's how you're going to do a better job of qualifying, and you're going to do it with these three or four calls. And then, you know, we're going to meet next week, and you're going to tell me how the three meetings with the tree roots saw his Lent and will perfect the process. And we'll talk about, you know, new opportunities you identified, if that was in their cookbook as an example. Does that make sense?

David Bush  35:30  
Yeah, yeah. Another, another question from one of the participants was relating back to staying motivated, or keeping reps motivated when there is a silence or there is a bit of a ghosting, whether it's actually because there's a lack of interest or there's just a reality that there's, you know, moving parts and lots of decision makers, decision by Committee, any specific tactics or strategies that you recommend around motivation and mindset, Just to keep reps staying in the mood to continue to do the things that are the seed planting and the prospecting that are going to lead to those opportunities when things are a little bit quiet,

Rich Chiarello  36:12  
I can tell you, nothing has changed from when I was a sales rep. Of course, it was 170 years ago to today, which is the best antidote for people who you think are wasting your time or not treating you as equal. Is to have so many other people to talk to that you cannot worry about, right? You only have one or two deals and that return your calls. Man, you don't sleep at night. You know life is horrible. You know every time your boss calls, you're afraid to pick up the call, and so the best antidote is to have a behavior of prospecting where you you are so tough on qualifying deals that if they disengage or won't do everything else, you know, you don't feel that bad because you have so many other people to talk to. The reverse of that is I have no one else to talk to. Have no other chance at revenue. This is my only deal I'm working on, right? And that's like a death Spire.

David Bush  37:04  
Another common theme, many people that registered asked the question around, how do you get your percentages up with phone calls and emails, and how do you get your response rate email and phone calls to go up? What are some of your best practices to increase response rates?

Rich Chiarello  37:22  
Well, it's depending on the volume of calls that you're making, right? So there's two things. Number one, everyone uses LinkedIn, you're much better off asking someone who you know if if they can make an introduction to someone you want to talk to. That increases your chances of them taking a phone call. It might be a cold call, but you'll get the conversation. And so that increases it 100 fold. And people should be doing that. The next thing is that you have to be persistent. And we have something in Sandler called the no pressure sales call, right? The last thing you or I want to do is to get a phone call from someone that sounds like we always get, which is, hey, I'm Rich from Acme plumbing. We've got pipes. We've got this, we've got this. I'm so glad I got in the phone. Don't hang up. I'm going to talk really fast, because I know you hang up any second, right? So I can't go through a whole no pressure sales call, but I'm happy to follow up whoever asked that question separately, you know, in a call. But you know, it goes something more like this. You have to start with a patent intern. Hey, Dave, I'm a seller trading. Have you heard of us? And when they say yes or no, that's a patent interim Well, listen, that's okay, just tell you why I'm calling you. You decide if we continue. I work with folks like yourself who are struggling with x and challenged by y and maybe overcome by you know, Z, those issues for you as quickly as you can make it not about you and into Do you have any of these problems? And get them talking about the problems. If they're still on the phone and talking to you, the rest of the conversation is all about that. If you want to ensure a loud hang up, start reacting about your product and company and how great it is and everything else, you'll just get hung up on it. Take that same thing and put it into emails. But emails are a lot harder today because of the numbers that people are getting.

David Bush  39:11  
I think that really just separating the right fit from the presentation, making sure that it is a good match to have that conversation. I'm assuming that that's a strategy that many people need to apply into their world before they get into the presentation mode. I know that, you know, with inside of LinkedIn, I just saw a post the other day that said, you know how to, how to do LinkedIn, wrong, talk about yourself and your first message, right? That's just, unfortunately, that's still true for a lot of experienced sellers, is that they're just, they're short on time. They don't want to spend a lot of time building the relationship. They just want to know if the person's interested in their services. And I don't know what your strategy is and how you would train or coach a sales rep, but would you say that there is still a bit of the Ford or form acronym that's, you know, talk. Talking about relationships, talking about mutual connections and building rapport, before you get into the details. Well, yeah,

Rich Chiarello  40:07  
I think it comes from two things. One, you know, if someone's in their 20s or 30s today, they didn't grow up as a conversationalist. They they grew up using partial words and emojis, right? And so they probably couldn't have a meaningful conversation with their best friend or brother, right? So now you're asking them to get on a phone and have a conversation with a stranger, right? That is open ended and friendly and makes the person feel comfortable about talking and not be a threat. So that's why that attitude part is so important. You know that in my mindset that this is what I'm going to do. I don't mean to be a knowledge expert. I want to be a conversational expert, and then as quickly as possible, getting them to talk right. And so that younger generation, I mean, I know a lot of my CRO customers are using chat GPT just to make sure that that younger generation writes coherent emails to people that the email doesn't look like it was done by, you know, fourth grader, but that whole mindset of being able to hold back on the knowledge, and I guess the best analogy I would use, it's okay, just like a medical doctor, to learn All about your products, all about your industry, learn all about that. But when I go see a doctor, I want them to ask me questions that are diagnostics, and then, based upon my answer to the first question, they use the knowledge to ask me the next question, right? And so use your knowledge like a doctor uses it to diagnose a patient, right? But you'll scare the heck out of the patient if all of a sudden you start telling them about his heart and his coronaries and everything else, right? And they'll go running out of the room. Well, that's what we do, figuratively, right? On on the phone with the prospect, we start talking about us and our company.

David Bush  41:56  
Let's move on to talk a little bit more about sales leadership. So what do you think is the sales leader's role in the current, modern sales management era?

Rich Chiarello  42:06  
Well, you know, at the end of the day, they're responsible for bringing in the revenue from a group of people, right? So whenever I ran sales, I say, here's what you're based on, number one, bringing in the revenue. Number two, your ability to be promoted to second level revenue leader, etc, is your ability to hire people that can move up in the company after those two things. You did those two things, right? You know, short of doing something dishonest or unethical, anything three, number three or four is really, really secondary. And so those are the two things that or make someone most powerful? I mean, if you're a sales leader today and you're being interviewed to be the head of sales somewhere else, with either a bigger company or with more people underneath you, or maybe you're going from a North American lead, and you're being interviewed to run all the world, you're going to want that CEO is making that decision to hear for people will know you. Hey, David does two things really well. Number one, if he gives you a forecast, he's going to make it. And number two, the people he hires, he's going to bring in people that are only, not only talented, but he's going to coach them and morph them to take he's not afraid of hiring someone who could take his job, because he expects to be out of that job. And moving upward? Does that make sense?

David Bush  43:22  
Absolutely, yeah. Is there any common barriers or obstacles that you're seeing inside of traditional sales leadership right now that you think need to be identified and kind of opened up as like a blind spot in sales leadership?

Rich Chiarello  43:38  
Well, look, the most common one that hasn't changed for decades is you look at someone who was a great individual contributor, always making their numbers, and you say, Great, we'll put them in charge of the team. Everything that made that person great as an individual contributor dooms them to failure. Right by now, being a manager, they try to do it all themselves. There's no coaching. They're going to try to close every deal themselves. They're going to micromanage everyone, right? And so that movement from being a individual contributor to a great team leader is really one that people can make, but you have to make sure that that's what the person wants, that they understand that their role is going to be to be successful through others, right? And that they're going to hire people who they can coach, maybe show you how to do it one second time I'm there just to make sure you don't hurt yourself. Third time you're on your own. Have that type of mentality of leadership and not I'm going to do this all by myself till my head explodes.

David Bush  44:42  
Right? And you've talked a lot about the ideas of, you know, really shifting into predictable forecasting and generating predictable results by having structures and systems in place. So how do you move from, you know, hope based forecasting to predictable results? You have a a. 123, on that or a process.

Rich Chiarello  45:04  
Forecasting accuracy varies based upon your average deal size, right? So the good news is, if you're in a low average sales price, or lower average sales price, but higher volume, the more transactions you have, the more likely it is that you come to a mean of hey, every month, you look at history and say, Hey, every month we have $3 million worth these deals that my guys are forecasting. We seem to only bring in for whatever reason. 2425, that's where I'm comfortable, right? Can't tell you which of the deals are going to happen or not happen, but I have enough transactions that I can look at, right and create something other than just gut feel for those of us that aren't that lucky. And you know, especially, you know, if you have a couple of monster deals, right, you have to keep those monster deals somewhat outside of the forecast and say, look, here's my forecast. That's what I used to do. You know, it's going to be X million. I'm working on this other deal, it's 40 million, 50 million. I'm not trying to hide it, but here's the reason why it can't be forecasted right now. And here's what I'm doing to try to bring it in right. And that's the best way how you want to position it, as opposed to putting it in right. And so those are sort of the best practices. The other thing, especially in the larger deals, is in your sales process, you want to have a step that says, let's say this one customer I do work with, if the deal is over half a million dollars. Arr, when it goes into qualified the sales rep must set up a call with me as the sales manager and the person he's dealing with his boss, right? No one's thinking about bringing in a new vendor without wanting to talk to them, right? And if all of a sudden you get, oh, no, you can't talk to my boss. It's because the boss has no idea what you're doing, right? The boss has no idea you're looking at, right? And that does two things. It lets you, as the sales leader, be engaged with that person, at the customer, at a management level, before it's the end of the month, end of the quarter, when you're trying to squeeze them, establish some relationship, then later on, do a checks and balance that says, Hey, are we still on track to close it? You know, if not, let me know. You know, important forecasting is so that that executive leadership step has to be in that sales template.

David Bush  47:22  
Good. Well, I know we've kind of battered around a little bit the concept of using AI to accelerate revenue, and that could be a whole nother session just on that one topic. So any top strategies, best practices that you're seeing that organizations that are on the growth side of revenue are beginning to adopt as a common practice.

Rich Chiarello  47:46  
Well, there's, there's, literally, I just saw a report today that looked like there were 60 different AI based companies designed to help sales people. So the biggest challenge is trying to know. But I've had customers like I said, who use AI for coaching, I've had customers who use AI within their CRM. So sale as a product within your CRM, it will learn based upon the steps that have been completed and not completed, and whether it closes or not. It will learn whether you should be forecasting the deal or not, and based upon all the deals in your pipeline at all the different stages. If I were AI forecasting, this is the number I would pick. So there's, there's tools in the forecasting. Other customers, I have used tools that actually look at the listen to the recording of an actual call and come back and use AI to say, here's what you did, right or wrong and you didn't get to it. So where coaching tool helps you before you make the call. There's other tools that do it after it. You know, look, I'm not exactly a youngster in this, but I use AI and trying to figure out how to relate Salah to people before I reach out to them. So doing it, using that to do the research before a phone call, before an email. You know there's, there's just no end in sight for how many places you could use?

David Bush  49:06  
Yeah, I got two more questions for you rich, and then we'll put a nice bow on this thing. But the next question is, how can you create a prospect sense of urgency in deals?

Rich Chiarello  49:19  
Well, the prospect sense of urgency has to be there that you uncover, right? So you can't go in where there's no urgency. And unless you're going to kidnap one of their family members or take their pet dog hostage, you can't create it. Think of it this way, if I was selling tires, the absolute best time for me to cold call someone would be when they got a flat on their way to work, and now they're at the office in all this personal pain. Supposed to get home, take my daughter to soccer practice. What am I gonna do? Phone picks up. It's rich for Mac. Re tires. Hey, listen, we sell tires. You sell tires. I can't believe you called me. I was I didn't know what to do, right? So I'm not creating that. Just arriving at the absolute perfect time. So what good sales people do is they uncover people through prospecting who they could move to. The Hey, your tire is not flat now, but I looked at them. They're pretty tread wear. Imagine if it happened on a day I do X, Y and Z, and so it's that personal pain that I get you into and especially in the technology world, where the people who are event, Technic technologists are risk, aware of risk, avoidant. The trick is you convince them that inaction is more risky than taking action. You convince them that if this flows up and you don't fix it, who's going to take the fall for that, right? And isn't it more likely, let's say you're selling security products, isn't it more likely that you're going to be hacked into and that someone's going to say, how can we allow this to happen? Isn't that a worse scenario than you buying my solution to prevent it from happening? Right? And so that personal pain and being able to be have an expertise in how to use it, that's where the sense of urgency comes from. And you have to be honest with yourself, to say, right now, there's no way to create a sense of urgency in this deal. I'm going to come back next year, and I'm not going to forget about them completely, or, you know, no way I'm just going to drop them forever. But it doesn't mean that you're going to take every customer and basically say it's now or never. You have to use that sense of urgency as to when that

David Bush  51:33  
will happen. Wow, you've given us a tremendous amount of fire. I mean, you've given us a lot of really cool, hot answers to these questions that a lot of us are just thinking, thinking, to ourselves, researching, and you've, you've delivered the goods today. So my last question for you Rich is that, what is it that you do for organizations, and how do people work with you, and what capacities Do you help and serve and support them and their teams?

Rich Chiarello  52:01  
Well, the way I work with people, every customer I deal with, is different, but I encourage everyone to just take a phone call where all I'm going to do is listen, right, just like your sales people, how can I try to sell you something? I have no idea what your issues are. If I can help you, if you need my or want my help, right? But that first conversation where I just listened to where you are, and I ask you a very simple question, if you could change one thing about your current sales results right now, what would it be, right? And if everything's perfect, great, go away and then, you know, nice to meet you as friend. But we start with just trying to understand if there's a problem, and if so, how it's affecting the business and how it affects the person. So that first call where we just have a conversation is how it starts. And then out of that, everybody has a different fixed plan that they need based upon their priorities. There is no one one size fits all.

David Bush  52:56  
And as far as more details or information, we're going to put the links inside the show notes and the video description for those people that are watching the recording, but any specific next steps that you could share with those people that are watching this video today?

Rich Chiarello  53:10  
Well, sure, for those that are on the video, and if you're listening to the video, you're going to get a link to the video and the materials, just in case you weren't able to be on for all of it. And I ask of you in return is, Listen, I'll reach out to you and just set up. You know, could be as short as 15 minutes. Worst case, at least, we get to know each other, right? We're on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is supposed to be about networking referrals, right? It might very well be that we have a conversation. I end it this way. The worst that could happen is, you talk to someone who's been training technology companies for 20 years, and there's not a single thing that I could offer to improve your revenue. How good are you going to sleep at night? Right? The next thing after that is going to be, hey, there's an issue that you didn't think that could be fixed, that we could fix, right? And so if that's the case, can anyone sleep even better, just take that call and let's just see where it goes.

David Bush  54:04  
Yeah, well, I'd love to close up with maybe a success story or a recent experience that you had with a business. It's a real life scenario about some of the problems or challenges that an organization was facing anonymously. We don't want to call anybody's name out. And what did you do specifically? And then what was the results that came out of that? Anything come to mind quickly?

Rich Chiarello  54:27  
Sure. So real quick. It's a company that was large software company growing through acquisition. And the problem was that, you know, I have 100 products, you're only selling five, the next guy's selling a different five, and next guy's selling another seven. No one's trying to sell all of them, right? Because people sell what they're familiar with, and if you're growing through acquisition, you're bringing in people from those companies. So we went to the behavior model, we taught them how to have conversations about products that they're not familiar with. Because it's not about technology, it's about asking questions. We then manage the behaviors to. Sure that everyone tried to sell all the products, whether they were successful or not. And long story short, their pipeline in three months, not only increased by 60% that's six zero, but they went from the average rep selling five products to the average rep having 12 products in their pipeline. Well, leading indicators are the key, at least, for that problem.

David Bush  55:26  
Wonderful. Well, we appreciate your time today. Thanks everybody for watching this, either live or recorded, and thanks for all the comments. We've just really appreciated the interaction from everybody. And yeah, we'll make sure that everybody has next steps, and you'll see that inside the video description, if you're watching recording, if you registered for this webinar, we'll send you some follow ups as well, but rich thank you so much for dedicating some time and for all of your expertise that you've shared with us today.

Rich Chiarello  55:52  
My pleasure. Thank you, folks. Thank you Dave,

David Bush  55:56  
thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today. Hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders, just like you, to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building you.