Why are some salespeople extraordinary and others not? This is an age-old question that is not easily answered.

Sometimes even the best salespeople can’t tell you exactly what they do differently so it takes some expert observation and investigation to be able to unlock and codify these best practices.

Kim Ades and Frame of Mind Coaching has figured this out for you and in this #SalesChats she will share some of the secrets to extraordinary performance in Sales. Tune in to hear her interviewed by host John Golden.

Recorded Live April 21th, 2022

EPISODE QUESTIONS:

Q1: What are the Qualities that Separate Extraordinary Salespeople from the Rest?

Q2: What are Bad Sales Habits?

Q3: What are Key Differences Between High and Low Sales Performers?

Our Guest

Kim Ades

Kim Ades is the Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching™ and Co-Founder of The Journal That Talks Back™. She is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach, and mom of five.

Links › Kim Ades | Linkedin.com | Twitter

Our Hosts

John Golden

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Martha Neumeister

Martha is a social media strategist, responsible for all social media platforms of Pipeliner CRM. She is a communication expert with social media affinity, which she has been focusing on throughout her professional career. She has a bachelor´s degree in Entrepreneurship & Management and a master´s degree in Online Marketing which supports her in her career as Social Media Strategist.

About SalesChats

SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.

SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Paolo Pironi discusses the concept of self-managed teams. Paolo Pironi has worked with Google, led three tech startups to exit, and is the founder of Elevating Pioneers. He now helps high-growth pre-IPO companies with consulting projects and training programs for their managers.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The advantages of having a self-managed team
• The importance of self-accountability in hybrid workspaces
• How to hire the right people and train them for self-management

Self-Managed Teams

Imagine what it would be like for everyone in your entire team, from your senior management, through middle management to the junior employees, to know precisely what is expected of them and what they need to be doing day in and day out. That’s what self-management is all about.

Of course, the more junior team members may ask the more senior team members for help, and the latter would be readily available to provide that help. Either way, this should not affect you as the leader. You should be spending time refining the company strategy and making sure you find the best possible way to communicate that strategy outside and inside of the company.

Hybrid Workspaces

The whole construct of work is changing nowadays. During COVID, many people went virtual, and now we have an increasing number of “hybrid” workspaces, with employees coming in and out of the office as they please.

In an organization like this, you need a clear understanding of what you can do, and you need the people to be able to manage themselves. The self-managed team is not a new idea. It is based on the concepts of management best practices that have existed for a while. The problem is that you can’t “wing it” with remote teams, and you need to be very deliberate with it.

Good Hiring

The concept of self-management doesn’t come naturally to most people, so much of it comes down to recruitment and ensuring that you have the right people. This is why hiring is such a crucial step.

Taking personal accountability and managing yourself can be very empowering. Still, it isn’t easy to set up a self-accountable team or, in most cases, one that can be coached to start thinking that way.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Dr. Natalie Nixon discusses harnessing wonder, rigor, and creativity to move an organization forward. Dr. Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker, author, and president of Figure 8 Thinking. She advises leaders on transformation by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The crucial role of creativity in innovation
• Why companies need to learn to put more trust in their employees
• What it means to show up to work “from the gut up.”

Creativity and Innovation

Dr. Nixon first started to tinker with the ideas of wonder and rigor when working with companies to help them build cultures of innovation. As she discussed innovation with different people, she discovered that people had different definitions.

She then realized that innovation starts with creativity because creativity is the engine of innovation. The challenge, however, is that in most of the “hallowed halls” of corporate America, using the word “creativity” doesn’t come across very well, primarily because people don’t seem to understand what creativity is.

Invisible Work

In organizations, we are hard-wired for activity and constant motion. Also, we live in a world where people have become somewhat intellectually lazy, and intellectual curiosity isn’t celebrated in the way it should be.

That said, some companies design the space and the time in a way that other companies may look down upon. This allows for apparent downtime, which Dr. Natalie calls “invisible work.” She argues that this is the key to unlocking our most productive selves.

Working from the Gut

Modern management requires trust to let people be fully human and embody their work. We often forget that the brain is connected to our spinal cord. We disembody our brains and show up to work from the chin up, maybe from the heart up, but not from the gut up.

Showing up to work from the gut up is actually what is required, especially now in this 4th industrial revolution where automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics will be taking over basic tasks.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Michael & Kathryn Redman discuss a fascinating book that they authored called Fulfilled: The Passion & Provision Strategy for Building a Business with Profit, Purpose & Legacy. Michael & Kathryn Redman are the husband-and-wife team behind Half a Bubble Out, a marketing and business consulting firm.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The problems faced by every aspiring entrepreneur
• How exponential growth leads to more difficulty
• The need for leadership and structure for success in business

Growing Pains

The lead into Michael & Kathryn’s book is fascinating, dealing with the problems they discovered when they first started a business. This beginning stage was challenging, but it taught them valuable lessons about running a company.

They started their business in the spare bedroom, moved it into the converted garage, and finally moved into what they call their “real office.” They had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to do during this period, but they realized they had to think about things like marketing, communication, etc.

The Big Break

Michael had always been a good salesperson, and Kathryn was also in sales at the corporate level. Still, suddenly, they realized that it would be challenging to balance working for their existing clients and going out there and continuing to sell their services.

This got to the point where they got overwhelmed and wanted to focus on just one of those things, and it usually wasn’t selling that they chose to focus on. Over time, as they refined their message and started gaining momentum, they got into the groove and finally hit that opportunity they had been waiting for, enabling them to grow exponentially.

Leadership and Structure

Unfortunately, they discovered that in the process of growing that fast, they made some really poor reactive decisions. They hired people who probably weren’t the best fit for the position, nor was the company the best fit for them, worked with clients who sucked the life out of them, etc.

This was all because they didn’t have the leadership and structure needed for such a rapid expansion. If your business goes above your ability to lead, it will most assuredly come back down, and if it has enough downward momentum, it could pull you down with it.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Felipe Zamana discusses how to be a creative leader and challenge the status quo at work. Felipe Zamana is a creativity professor, researcher, speaker, and strategic advisor dedicated to exploring creativity applied to educational, cultural, social, and organizational development.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The differences between creative and non-creative leaders
• How our environment affects our creativity
• Why leaders must step outside their comfort zone

Traits of Creative Leaders

The difference between a creative and a non-creative leader is how they think. “Regular” leaders do not think about doing things differently or stimulating your team to think differently. On the other hand, creative leaders always focus on improvement, not just on financial growth but also on creating a suitable environment for their team.

There are two elements to building a creative environment. First, there’s trust. If you’re not comfortable sharing your ideas with others, you don’t share, and if you don’t share, people don’t get new ideas. The second element is support. Each team member needs to feel that their group supports their ideas and growth.

Finding the Space to Be Creative

To build an environment where people can be creative, you have to give them their space. If you’re always working without time to think, explore, or experiment, you can never be truly creative.

Many people think that the more they work, the more ideas will pop into their minds, but the complete opposite is true. We need to rest to allow our brains to find new pathways between existing ideas to come up with something different.

Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

If you always stick to the same environment and the same group, you’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to learn from people in other domains. You need to venture outside your comfort zone and deal with things that are not necessarily your specialty to develop new ideas.

Hints from people in other walks of life could lead to ideas that only you can have because of your specific background and experience. This is why it is crucial to keep exploring areas outside of your expertise if you wish to reach a new level of creativity.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Donnie Boivin discusses the fact that a sales pitch is a conversation with an outcome. Donnie Boivin is the CEO of Success Champion Networking and the founder of the Badass Business Summit and the Growth Mode Podcast.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The idea of a sales pitch being a conversation with an outcome
• The importance of authenticity in sales
• Why “closure” matters more than “closing”

Conversation with an Outcome

Although sales pitches often seem like conversations for conversation’s sake, they are conversations with an outcome. Conversely, people often try to hard-close in sales conversations, and if you’re trying to hard-close in this day and age, you won’t get far.

If you want to succeed in a sales position, you need to understand that the more human you become, the more conversations you get into, and the easier the sales conversations get. Trying those old hard-sale tactics is a surefire way to get your teeth kicked in.

Authenticity

Even before the pandemic, people had begun to crave authenticity from salespeople and people in general, but COVID accelerated that. If you’re in sales today, and you’re not authentic and not taking a deep interest in what’s going on with your prospect, you will not succeed.

If you want to do your job right from a sales perspective, you’ll go into every conversation with a genuine approach. You’ll tell people that it is 100% OK for them to say “no,” and mean those words. If you do this, you will get closure in every conversation. You should note the difference between “closure” and “closing.”

Closure vs. Closing

Closure means getting to a “yes/no” or a significant next step. Closing means you beat the crap out of your prospect until they give up. For Donnie Boivin, it is all about getting the prospect comfortable and getting to actual closure. He does this in several ways. For example, he doesn’t believe in overcoming objections. You probably screwed up somewhere else in the sales call if you’re overcoming objections.

So, it is more about getting them to say “no” when they’re beating around the bush and giving you all these crazy excuses when they don’t want to do business with you. This allows you to focus on the prospects you can convert and make money on instead of wasting time on people who made up their minds long ago but don’t want to say it.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Collin Mitchell discusses selling with video. Collin Mitchell is the founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Salescast and the host of the Sales Transformation Podcast.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How some excellent salespeople were caught out by having to switch to Zoom
• Why people are still reluctant to use video in sales
• The fact that simply using video is enough to help you stand out.

Selling on Video

People have been on Zoom for the last couple of years, some of them forced onto it, especially salespeople. It’s interesting how some salespeople are phenomenal face-to-face, going into a room full of people and lighting up the mood, only to freeze entirely when faced with a web camera.

Selling into a camera puts people in a situation they’re not used to. These people often rely on reading body language, energy, “vibe,” and other things that humans typically rely on in an interaction. It is much more difficult to “read the room” on Zoom.

Reluctance

With everybody forced on Zoom due to the pandemic, people suddenly needed to learn about “virtual selling.” The truth is that virtual selling is just selling but with a camera. Some things have changed, but not a lot. You still have the same framework and the same process.

The good news is, especially if you used to sell in person or door to door, you could now meet with more people in a day without traveling. Despite that, and despite the fact that video was hardly an entirely new concept in 2020, many people were still very reluctant to start using it in sales.

Standing Out

Video has been around for a long time, even in sales. There are a lot of providers out there for those who want to do video messaging, for example. Yet, it still doesn’t feel commonplace. You still notice when you get a video message instead of a typical text message on LinkedIn or in an email.

Collin Mitchell is baffled that simply using video is still a way to stand out. He sends a lot of videos every week. Along with his team, he uses videos through all parts of the sales process, from the very beginning, all the way through to closing, in many different ways.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Brian Mayne discusses how he changed his life through Goal Mapping. Brian Mayne is a global speaker on personal development, seminar leader, author of four books on personal development, and the creator of the following empowerment techniques — Goal Mapping, Life Mapping, Action Mapping, and Self Mapping. He has worked with organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Disney, and many others.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• His early childhood and how he became a successful entrepreneur at a young age
• How things changed for him radically in his late 20s
• How he discovered the concept of personal development

Upbringing and Early Success

Brian Mayne grew up in a traveling funfair circus family and moved around a lot as a child. He left school just before turning 13 — a typical situation for traveling Gypsy children. He had no qualifications, had never learned to read and write, and worked for his father’s funfair business, which traveled around the country.

His father’s business thrived for many years, and from 13 onwards, he worked full-time. He became the youngest licensee in England ever when he was granted a liquor and entertainment license at age 18. He became very wealthy at a very young age, but obviously, he had a very unusual early sales and entrepreneur career.

A New Chapter

Things changed for Brian at age 29 when tourism ended on the Isle of Wight because airfare prices came down in the late 1980s and English people started taking their main summer holiday in the Mediterranean. His father’s business ended, so at age 29, Brian found himself in a lot of debt, with no qualifications.

Because he had never learned to read and write, Brian didn’t have a lot of options open on the job market. Luckily, some friends offered him a position in their direct sales team. He wasn’t very successful in sales at first, but this opportunity turned out to be the biggest blessing.

The Path of Personal Development

Enjoying the sales team put him on a new career path and, most importantly, introduced him to the concept of personal development. He used personal development, particularly the science of positive thinking, to develop himself as a person and advance his career.

He primarily focused on overcoming his learning challenges and teaching himself to read well. Once he had learned to read, the topic he wanted to read most about was personal development and motivational psychology, which he now uses in every area of his life.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.