Mastering Modern Selling
At Mastering Modern Selling, our mission is to equip you with the insights, strategies, and tools necessary to excel in the ever-evolving landscape of sales. Traditional sales approaches, marketing tactics, and lead-generation methods are becoming obsolete. In today's market, buyers dictate the buying process and have little patience for cold calls, email blasts, or aggressive sales tactics.
In this new era of sales and marketing, success hinges on building meaningful relationships with prospects and buyers. We believe in leveraging the power of modern strategies, techniques, and technologies to foster these connections. This approach, often referred to as Modern Selling, encompasses leveraging digital and social channels to create demand and cultivate strong relationships with prospects, partners, and customers.
By mastering Modern Selling, you and your team can enhance your visibility in the marketplace, establish yourselves as trusted advisors, accelerate pipeline growth and revenue, and position yourselves as the employer of choice in your industry.
Join us on Mastering Modern Selling as we explore the principles, practices, and innovations driving success in today's sales landscape.
Mastering Modern Selling
MMS #142 - Entering the Revenue Zone in a Modern Sales Era
In this episode of Mastering Modern Selling, Carson Heady and Tom Burton dive into the evolving world of sales and introduce Tom’s Revenue Zone framework. As the buyer takes the lead in the sales process, it’s more important than ever for sales teams to understand the modern buyer's journey.
Tom, the author of The Revenue Zone, explains how building trust, creating demand, and using technology like AI can help sales professionals stay ahead in an increasingly complex market.
This episode offers valuable insights on reshaping sales forecasting, guiding buyers through the sales process, and leveraging the yellow brick road concept to drive revenue success.
Key Highlights:
- Modern Sales Forecasting: Tom shares how traditional sales forecasting methods no longer suffice and why understanding buyer readiness is key.
- Building Trust and Creating Demand: Learn why trust is the new currency in sales and how to generate authentic demand that moves beyond basic interest.
- The Yellow Brick Road: Tom discusses how to guide buyers along a personalized, trust-based journey, building the yellow brick road to the Revenue Zone.
- AI and Personalization: Discover how AI tools are transforming the sales process, allowing for personalized buyer journeys at scale.
- Practical Advice for Sales Teams: Whether you're a solo seller or part of a team, Tom offers actionable steps on how to implement the Revenue Zone framework into your sales approach.
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(Speaker 3) Man, you're amazing. Oh, sorry.(Speaker 2) I didn't realize we were already on.(Speaker 11) Yeah, so good.(Speaker 1) Good start. really good. Good start. Really good.(Speaker 2) Here we are. Episode 141. And today's episode, I want you to picture something with me, Tom, and to our audience. You're moving into a land of both logic and friction. Of sales funnels and frustration.(Speaker 10) You've just crossed over, not to the twilight zone, both logic and friction of sales funnels and frustration.(Speaker 2) You've just crossed over, not to the twilight zone, but into the revenue zone. Today's guest is not Rod Serling, but he is going to pull back the curtain on a new dimension of selling, one where the buyer is in control, the path to revenue is paved with digital breadcrumbs, and traditional sales tactics(Speaker 2) are as outdated as rotary phones. Our guest today, ladies and gentlemen, before we get to him, I want to give a shout out to our friends, fist bump for sponsoring us, as always. My name is Carson Hedy, and our guest today, Tom Burton, is the author of The Revenue Zone, which is really a blueprint for how to align with modern buyers, design data-driven journeys, and create revenue certainty in an uncertain world. Whether you're an individual rep or an enterprise seller, this episode is going to reshape how you think about building trust(Speaker 2) and earning trust, your timing and tech in sales. Buckle up, folks. We're going to follow the yellow brick road. And today, it is not going to lead to Oz. It's going to lead to revenue. Welcome, Tom Burton.(Speaker 1) Man, it's finally it's great that we finally have a really good host, like somebody who can do a really good intro and set the whole thing up.(Speaker 2) Well, you know what? I didn't get my name by accident. I think it was inspired by late night host Johnny Carson, who's arguably the greatest host of all time. So today I'm coming out of the woodwork to really help guide the narrative(Speaker 2) and welcome everybody to the Revenue Zone. So Tom, I wanna dive right in. I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. Couple of years back when you and I first connected, it was really talking about the revenue zone and recently it's been relaunched.(Speaker 2) So I want to really dive into what inspired the revenue zone, but also what's inspiring the relaunch amidst the changes in traditional sales thinking. So why don't you give us a quick origin story, Tom, what brought you here and what prompted you to write the Revenue Zone?(Speaker 1) Yeah, so I think as many of you know, I am a co-founder of a software company called LeadSmart Technologies, been around for a little over five years now. And I guess this was right around the COVID time, right shortly before or right after COVID in 2020. I was in a board meeting and our board members were asking us about our forecast, which almost all board meetings wanna talk about.(Speaker 1) And I went through a forecast and what I thought was gonna happen. And then they got to the end or we got to the end of the forecast and they're like, so how confident do you feel in that? Like, you know, are you really confident?(Speaker 1) Are you really? And it was like this punch in my stomach. Like I was like, I don't feel confident in this at all.(Speaker 9) Right.(Speaker 1) I would just basically painted a really nice picture of something that I can't back up or explain why we would generate the revenue and the deals that I was putting up there. What was the worst part about it is I couldn't explain why. I couldn't say, oh yeah, I was just sandbagging or bullshitting or whatever. I just couldn't explain why. So that was like, and I've been in sales off and on, not like you, Carson.(Speaker 1) I mean, I've been as a business owner, I've had to do sales, right? So sales has been more of a necessity or driven sales, but it's, I've been involved in sales my whole career and I thought I was a pretty good forecaster. I have been a pretty good forecaster. You know, I could forecast something usually within 20% of anything within a given quarter or a period of time.(Speaker 1) This I just didn't feel like there's no way in hell that I could justify. And I wasn't even like, I was wrong. I just couldn't back it up. I couldn't defend it from that was there. So that was sort of the wake up call. And then I ended up, and you'll appreciate this this Carson. I just kind of went down a rabbit hole of like looking at like what was going on, what(Speaker 1) was going on in the market? Why did I feel so unconfident? Were others feeling the same way? You know, all of that and all of that ultimately led to the book. So that's the quick answer.(Speaker 2) I love that. And I mean, it's everything that we talk about on this show of, you know, being able to stay at the pulse of what's happening and changing in the business. You know, we talk a lot on this show, especially nowadays, how buyers do, you know, depending on where you like to get your stats, 70 to 80 percent(Speaker 2) of their research before they ever even talk to a salesperson. But the old way that we did funnels and lead scoring and all of these things, it's irrelevant now. There's so much more data at our fingertips, but it's got to be used responsibly. You recently relaunched the book. What would you say has changed in the market that's made this the right time(Speaker 2) to revisit this message, Tom?(Speaker 1) Well, I think the situation's even gotten worse or more challenging, let's put it that way and You know, yeah as Bob's saying here, right sales forecasting is only 10% To do with how ready the seller is and 90% how ready the buyer is. And you think about forecasting, it's all about, well, how are we as the seller, how confident that we are, and how we're going to be able to sell,(Speaker 1) which doesn't necessarily match how confident we are as the buyer ready to buy along the way. But anyway, back to your question, Carson, is the situation has gotten more challenging, I think. The buyer is in more control than they've ever been. You add in AI to the picture, right?(Speaker 1) I mean, we talk a lot about using AI for sales homework. Think about what AI can be done for buyer homework, a way beyond Google, right? Way beyond just a Google search or things along those lines. So the relaunch, I feel like every day I need to do another relaunch,(Speaker 1) but try to take into account some more of the AI world, try to take account more of the sophistication of the buyer research that's occurring, the buyer journey that's going through. And then how do we align with some of the technologies that are more available(Speaker 1) with the salespeople? So the premise is the same, but just the tools and technologies we have at our disposal, both buyer and seller, continue to change all the time. And so I think there may be a couple more iterations before I'm all done.(Speaker 2) I love that. I mean, you hit on something there, Tom, And I think building and earning trust is really the new currency now with buyers. And buyers are going to do a lot more self-discovery of their path than ever before. All the more reason why we have to be cognizant of that, but we've got to show up armed with the goods(Speaker 2) and the value like never before. Got to look and sound like something new as opposed to everybody else that's out there trying and failing, showing up, talking about products and, you(Speaker 2) know, showing up as noise. You know, I love that you mentioned to just the opportunity to revisit and even the need to revisit regularly. You know, I looked at,(Speaker 2) you know, my first book I wrote when I was twenty nine years old and I revisited it about 10 years ago, and it was like, I disagree fundamentally with everything that I said. And so I repackaged it and changed a lot. But what I would love to hone in on, Tom, is as you revisited your work, and as you continue to really revisit and, and hone your perspective, what do you feel like has stayed the same?(Speaker 2) But also what would you say, like what did you most want to evolve in the work?(Speaker 1) Yeah, so the interesting part is the fundamental premise of the revenue zone, right? So the revenue zone concept, if you have like a matrix, right, in order to get somebody to the point where they're actually willing to do business with you, if you think about forecasting, right? And you even look at like, you know,(Speaker 1) we have opportunities and you have statuses or stages in your opportunities and all of that, right, everybody wants to get to a point where, again, there's that level of confidence that they're willing to do business with you. Now, what does that mean? Right. They're at a point, I think, to Bob's point earlier, right? They're at a place where they're ready to buy. They have the budget. They're willing to do business with you. You know,(Speaker 1) there's a lot of different variables to get into that place, right? But ultimately, what has to happen for a buyer to be in a place where at least up in no decisions. Right? So no decision is just as bad as a loss from, at least from the forecasting perspective. Right? So it's, we get to the point where we want them to make a decision. We want to at least have an opportunity for them to make a decision and make a decision in our favor. So there's really two things that have to happen. One is we have to have built trust, which we talk about a lot.(Speaker 1) And secondly, we had to have created demand, right? For whatever it is we're selling. And what I mean by demand is not just interest, like, hey, that's interesting or that, but hey, I really want and need what it is that they're selling.(Speaker 1) Now it doesn't mean that they're not looking at a competitor or you're the only game in town, but at least from the product category or the service category that you're doing, they're in a place where they have real demand and they have enough demand(Speaker 1) that they're willing to move forward. What we tend to do as salespeople, as we've talked about over and over, is we try and get the demand and then figure out the trust later. But as we've learned, or we talk a lot about, right, if we have to build the foundation of trust, and then we earn the right to create demand. But so the premise is still the same, right? We need to create demand, we need to build(Speaker 1) trust. And what's different, and the yellow brick road, as I talk about, is the journey that the buyer goes to, that you can influence. You can't control, but you can influence that journey of maybe where they've never heard of you, and they've never heard anything about your product or service, to the point where they're willing to do business with you,(Speaker 1) the revenue zone, or they're at least considering to do business. So there's a yellow brick road that the buyer goes through that we want to be able to influence the best that we possibly can, so that we have the highest probability of achieving the goal of them making a decision and going with us. So what's changed quite a bit is maybe that journey a little bit and the actions that they take and the research that they do and how you(Speaker 1) best facilitate that, but conceptually it's the same model.(Speaker 2) Preach, Tom, first, I love that you talk about probability as you know that that's very near and dear to my sales heart. I'm also gonna really try my best to avoid going down another rabbit hole, which would be falling into the very easy like layup wizard of odds analogies(Speaker 2) that I could do. I think that would almost be shameful. But something you mentioned earlier, oh my gosh, a no decision is the same thing on the scoreboard as a no, right? Like we've got to make sure that we're guiding folks(Speaker 2) toward the revenue zone. And I really want to hone in more on that concept. You really stuck the landing with this piece. And it's really about guiding that trust-based discovery. It's not about pushing leads. It's not about the traditional marketing qualified lead, the MQL. It's more about, and I do this a lot with a very vast business that my team supports today, where a lot of it is passive education. My sellers, where they struggle most is contactability(Speaker 2) and the ability to go out and find people that might've downloaded a white paper or opted into something as opposed to reaching out and trying to just score a demo focusing on like, okay, let me meet these folks where they are, like constructing value, a newsletter, letting them know what's new, what are other people in their industry doing, connecting them with people or executives that can be a value to them, as opposed to just showing up like everybody else is, guiding that trust-based discovery, I think is so important.(Speaker 8) I think you did a good job.(Speaker 1) I think what you're calling, but what you're calling trust-based discovery is that yellow brick road, right? You're guiding them down that road the best that you possibly can. You're trying to influence how they navigate(Speaker 1) through that process.(Speaker 2) I want to be that flying monkey that literally just swoops out of nowhere and picks them up and takes them on that road to bliss. I want to really dive in a little bit more on the yellow brick road and revenue zone concepts. What does it mean to move someone into the zone? What would you say is kind of the difference between that and that probability-based concept and kind of what we've always done with marketing.(Speaker 1) Yeah. So back to my own situation, right? One of the things as I was going through this and looking at even what was happening at my own company is what did it really mean? Like, what did it mean to be in the revenue zone? Could I define that? And what I realized that in kind of researching our customers and the people that have bought and the people that hadn't, and fortunately, I was able to get some interviews with customer prospects that, for whatever reason,(Speaker 1) didn't make a decision or went a different direction or whatever. And what I realized is to have somebody in the revenue zone, and this is awful simplistic, but it does boil down to kind of three things. What are three things that they need to understand about you and your company?(Speaker 1) And what are three things that they need to believe, right? Believe is the emotion, the understand is the logic, right? What are the three things that they need to believe about you and your company in order to do business with you and excited to do business with you? Right. So as we know, right, people buy with our, you know, they, they, they make decisions with their heart and they think with their, with the logic.(Speaker 1) So we want to combine the logic and the emotion part of it that is and say, all right, in order. So I went back and looked at all the customers that had bought. And I said, what are the three things that they understood when they bought? And what were the three things that they believed when they now there was more than three, but there was a heat map of those that were coming up to. There were common trends, right?(Speaker 1) That I saw that I could identify three things. And, you know, people say, well, I want to do 10 things. No, don't do 10, just come up with three, right? Three things that you think are the top three. And then I was able, there we go, yep, right there. Yeah, the little zone up on the right there. So that's the first thing.(Speaker 1) And I've done a fair amount of consulting with other customers who have read the book and I'll ask them, what are the three things that your customer needs to understand and the three things they need to believe to be doing business with you? And most people can't answer that question. Or it's like a, it's not, they'll try and answer, but they won't really be able to answer(Speaker 1) it. Right. And so it really, once you understand the things that they need to understand, what you understand, the three things they need to understand, the three things you need to believe. Now I can work backwards from there and say, OK, Carson, you just met me or met my company.(Speaker 1) You don't know anything. You don't know any of those three things or have any of those three beliefs. What do I need to do now to help facilitate you and influence you to get those three understandings and three beliefs? to get those three understandings and three beliefs. Now it starts to put a roadmap and a structure around my content and my,(Speaker 1) and what you just called it, I forget the word you just called it, but the directed approach, right? That you were talking about. Trust-based. Trust-based, right, right. And I'll just say one more thing and then I'll shut up,(Speaker 1) is, you know, we had Matt Dixon, we've talked a lot about the Jolt Effect and fear of messing up. One thing I've learned is in that yellow brick road, you have got to build in the DNA all the way through of that thought process of, what if I mess up here? And one of the beliefs that they need to ultimately get to, especially in a large B2B sale is, I feel confident that we're not going to screw up and we're going to succeed with this. Right?(Speaker 1) So you've got to handle a lot of these types of beliefs that people have when they get into it. You may go, this is easy. Why are they all up in it? But in their mind, it's like, man, I could fail. I could lose my job.(Speaker 1) I could lose my position. I could lose whatever. There's a fear of messing up factor all the way through. So any of those things have to factor into those three understandings and three beliefs.(Speaker 2) What I think is important about the revenue zone is when you really think about it, Tom, as you said, being in the zone basically says that this customer has high trust and there's intent. There's so much misdirection in sales. We invest in the wrong places. We say the wrong things. We think it's about this when it's about that.(Speaker 2) It's about the value. It's about de-risking the decision as opposed to the FOMO and doing the manipulation of pricing to try to force a decision. What I love about the revenue zone is when I think about it, like, all the things that we're trying to do, like reducing sales cycle time, increasing close rate, lowering customer acquisition costs, it's all in the zone. When you get(Speaker 2) people into the zone, and you're able to...(Speaker 1) Competitive advantage, right? You've eliminated a lot of the competitors as well.(Speaker 2) Bingo. And I spent so much of my time talking about the... I even made a post today. I was on the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter and I was talking about, frankly, my obsession. I've never thought about a quota a day in my life, my obsession with people and process. And if you invest in the right things and you are, you know, when I think about the revenue zone and I think about the behavioral signals that you can be attuned to, the, you know, the content consumption and basically, you know, doing what you can to influence in the right way,(Speaker 2) that's how I think we start designing that yellow brick road. That's what I want to influence in the right way. That's how I think we start designing that yellow brick road. That's what I wanna find out more about next. You know, you described that process that you call designing the yellow brick road. What is that?(Speaker 1) Well, again, you start with three understandings and the three beliefs, and then you look at, okay, so again, that's the end point, right? That's the goal. That's where we want to get to. We want to get our prospect to have those three understandings(Speaker 1) and those three beliefs. We're starting at ground zero where they have none of those, right, or at the starting line. So the first way that we start looking at the yellow brick road is, okay, how do we look at, and we usually identify five or six major sort of milestones, if you will, that they(Speaker 1) would then go through in that evolution from knowing, having no understanding and no belief into getting to those understanding and those beliefs, right? And you have to do them in the right sequence because people don't just jump from, they don't know anything about you till they're so confident in you that they're going to do business with you and they think you're going to succeed, as an example. So the way that you feed them content,(Speaker 1) how you deal with your sales calls, how you deal with your discovery call, how you deal with a demo if you've got a demo, if you've got everything should be architected to incorporate in the DNA, what milestone are they at, and then moving through. So what we do is identify the five,(Speaker 1) we identify five milestones between start to revenue zone. Again, most people have a hard time with that, I'll say. But once you work through it, it's very eye opening to them to get there. Then within each of those five milestones, we look and say, okay, what is the content, information,(Speaker 1) sales support, whatever is required to get them to that milestone, right? And again, let's look at the customers that you've worked with before to see what you've done well before, because you'll see a repeatable pattern(Speaker 1) if you go back and look at the customers that you've been successful with, and you will see where that pattern deviates to a degree when you either find no decisions or no results along the line or a bad result along the way, a competitor result along the way.(Speaker 2) So I love this because what you basically describe, Tom, is going back to what we were just talking about, influencing the journey into the revenue zone, you have a series of strategic touch points. And you're in essence leveraging content, engagement, education, all designed to build trust along the way.(Speaker 2) Now what I think is interesting and where I want to dive in a little bit more here is the playing field shifts and changes. You know, where our audience is has shifted, how we can best engage our audience. You know, I think about some of the big organizations that have evolved over time, like a Netflix or an Amazon. I mean, how they're engaging me now with notifications, recommendations. There's very curated and predictive ways to reach out and engage.(Speaker 2) Now leveraging AI, because AI, as we talk about on this show, enables personalization at scale.(Speaker 7) Absolutely.(Speaker 1) And it's based on- Oh, your revenue zone, I'm sorry, your yellow brick road can be way more personalized and on target than it was even a few years ago.(Speaker 2) So how does that fit into the path today? How is that changing the game? And what do you see as, what are the primary shifts from the yellow brick road five years ago to today?(Speaker 1) So when I originally wrote the book, my premise was go try and find content or assets that you have today, and sort of, I won't say shoehorn, maybe too strong a word, but kind of Lego them in to your yellow brick road, right? Because if I didn't do that, right, you would say,(Speaker 1) oh my God, I have to build all this content. I don't have it, right? It's gonna take forever. This is not workable. So it was like, okay, let's work with what you have, right? And there's nothing wrong with that, maybe as a starting point. But now, because we can create content so much more quickly,(Speaker 1) we can personalize content more quickly. We can personalize communications more quickly. We can research much faster and easier, right? The speed of which we can create a yellow brick road, and even a personalized yellow brick road, is so much faster than we could(Speaker 1) have done even a few years ago. So we're not stuck relying on, hey, here's our brochure, here's our webpage, here's a stock video that we've created. And that's, you know, it's just all these things that we had to rely on before because they were very difficult to create. And so it was, you know, know, there were few and far between.(Speaker 1) Now we have a lot more that we can rely on that's there. And we now have, you know, answer engines and chat GPT and all those things again, that we can incorporate into the strategy. So I think it makes for a much more dynamic, personalized and tailored Yellow Brick Road,(Speaker 1) but the premise still stays the same, right? How are you moving them through the milestones? How are you moving them up to those three understandings and three beliefs? Of course, you know, the customer doesn't follow a straight line(Speaker 1) and Bob wants to know what character we are. Maybe he should answer that.(Speaker 2) What character from the Wizard of Oz are you? So picture this. Actually, when I was a kid, and unfortunately, this predates like video cameras, actually, maybe that is fortunate because then the video evidence would exist. But in my now parents basement with friends, we used to like act out, you know, stuff. And like the Wizard of Oz was chief among that.(Speaker 2) I loved Oz, I read all the books. I've read Oz books to one of my kids. So a lot of Oz love in the family. My dad actually has met a litany of the characters, the people from the movie. Many of them have departed this earth since, but there's a lot of Oz love.(Speaker 2) I always had a fondness for the Scarecrow because the guy just, you know, he was well-meaning. He, actually, if you read the books, he became the King of Oz, but he, you know, let the throne go for the rightful owner of the throne when she came along.(Speaker 2) So I always liked the scarecrow. What about you, Tom?(Speaker 1) You know, I kind of liked Dorothy. She was very, you know, perseverance and kind of just made things go and figured out her navigation through the Wizard of Oz and, you know, dealt with the challenges as they came along. So I was kind of a big Dorothy fan.(Speaker 2) She brought her dreams to life.(Speaker 1) That's right. That's right(Speaker 3) That's right. And I don't know why I was really afraid of tornadoes when I was a kid(Speaker 2) Like even though I lived in California, I'm afraid of them now I feel like every couple weeks we get a tornado warning around these parts here in the Midwest(Speaker 1) So I was just sort of and you know, I don't know the character and the situation and everything I was kind of enthralled with.(Speaker 2) Yeah, I love Oz. Tom, I wanna talk a little bit about, so I think I feel good about the revenue zone, the Yellow Brick Road as a concept. If I'm gonna implement this, you know, let's say I wanna shift from my legacy model(Speaker 2) to a revenue zone approach, what steps do I take?(Speaker 1) How do I get started? Yeah, so again, defining that, defining what is, and this is another mistake that I see people make, right? If you're a company and you have one product, like our, my software company, we have predominantly one product.(Speaker 1) So it's pretty easy, right? We can say, all right, in order for them to buy that solution, product and service solution, what are the three things that our customer needs to understand,(Speaker 1) and what are the three things they need to believe? And if we have a high probability, if they understand those three things and believe those three things, we have a very high probability of getting a deal. We have a high probability of eliminating the no decision(Speaker 1) and them going our direction. So again, that is the step one that you have to work through and like I said that is easier said than done. I've facilitated all-day workshops on this literally all day where they were sorting this out for a company but it's well worth going through the exercise even if you don't do anything else right. Now if you have multiple products that you're(Speaker 1) selling or multiple solutions, you'd probably have to replicate that a little bit because there's different things that, you know, Carson, I'm sure you have a lot of things in your bag that you're potentially, you know, offering up that are not necessarily the same(Speaker 1) and require different understandings and different beliefs. So there could be more than one, but you could still start with one, right? And kind of can kind of work through it from there. And I really, I really recommend people taking the time with it, right? Really answering the question, bounce it back and forth,(Speaker 1) even get some feedback from your customers or prospects on it. Like make sure it's not just some glib thing, but it's really, you feel like, hey, if I achieve this, I feel comfortable. This goes back to my forecasting, right? I feel comfortable really at about a set,(Speaker 1) and people always ask, what's the ratio? To me, it's like a 70 to 85, 75, 80% probability, right? That I'm gonna get that deal within, let's say a 90 day window, depending upon what your sales cycle time frame is. So what we want to get to is like an 80% probability within a time frame that makes sense(Speaker 1) with your sales cycle that's there. Makes sense so far? Is that kind of the first step? Once I've got that worked out, then I would go through and work out those milestones that I talked about, which are, what are the five milestones(Speaker 1) that you would work through at a high level that that prospect you would like to get them to go through, assuming that they know nothing about you and that they know nothing about your product and service. Again, knowing that we ultimately have to create trust and we have to create demand or build that intent,(Speaker 1) as you said, right? What are the milestones that we wanna take them through? Now, some people will say, well, but sometimes our customers come in and they already know who we are. We already know.(Speaker 1) That's right. So you may have customers that enter in milestone three, or you may have customers that enter in, or prospects, I should say, they enter in in milestone three or one or whatever. That's fine. At least you know where they're entering, right? Because maybe they've done some homework and other things before you can actually do this. So that's the second step, building out the milestones again that lead towards that piece that's there. I'll stop(Speaker 2) there for a minute. There's a couple more, but does that make sense so far? It does. I think where you've really anchored is we start by understanding our buyer's actual journey. It's less about our own sales process or what we think it to be, but it's more about the buyer's journey, paying attention and getting from them, like taking cues from them where we need to be.(Speaker 1) That's a huge point because a lot of mistakes we see people make is I talk about milestones or like, well, our milestones are, you know, discovery call and demo and proposal as like, no, those are your milestones. Those are not their milestones. Right. That they're going through.(Speaker 1) So that's a super huge point that you just brought up is the milestones are not yours, they're theirs, right? And you're gonna, well, but other, some customers go to, yeah, of course, we're not saying every customer is going a straight line down the road, but they're likely going to navigate(Speaker 1) through those milestones at some point in time along their journey.(Speaker 2) Yeah, I mean, sometimes you scamper off the road because there's a talking tree that throws apples. I mean, you just never really know where it's going to go. Bob made a comment. We didn't nail on it earlier, but our most valuable commenter, Bob, earlier said something that I want to hit on here.(Speaker 2) Half the battle of overcoming no decision is understanding that decision-making is an emotional activity guided by rationality. Most sellers are avoid or don't know how to use EQ in selling. I could not agree more. What I really love is that you pointed out most sellers are going to avoid or don't know how to use EQ in selling.(Speaker 2) Meaning those that do, guess what? They stand out all the more. They stand out all the better. They are going to be able to pave this yellow brick road better than the rest because they are attuned to what the buyer needs, to what is valuable to them, to what looks like a win to them, to the risk that they foresee. I mean, and look, I'm not a perfect seller. Sometimes I ask probably(Speaker 2) stupid questions when I'm talking to an executive, when they say something that maybe throws me for a loop. But I'm not above saying something like, hey, I mean, it's clear to me that you see a lot of risk, or can you tell me more about the hesitancy? Because if it's about the change management piece, know what's on the other side of us working you know signing something I'd love to know because I you know this I don't feel comfortable moving forward unless you are I think we've got a really as sellers we have to attune we have to be human we have to make sure that we're(Speaker 2) there for the for the full kit and caboodle not just the purchase order and the signature.(Speaker 3) When I think that EQ, right, is your EQ strategy, if you want to call it that, is driven by those three beliefs that we're talking about, right? Because the beliefs, belief is an emotional thing.(Speaker 1) And again, a lot of questions I'll get as well, but you know, there's a lot of, there's a committee in the organization. There's a lot of, a lot of people involved in the as well, but there's a lot of, there's a committee in the organization, there's a lot of people involved in the decision-making process, all that stuff, that's fine. But if you've ever noticed when you've got to win, the majority of those people had similar beliefs instilled in them, right?(Speaker 1) That's how come they were able to make the decision that they made that was there. So that EQ really aligns to the belief part of it. And then the IQ of it, if you want to call it that, really aligns to the understanding part of it and the logic and, you know, do they understand how your product works and what(Speaker 1) features you have compared to the car, you know, that's all logical IQ stuff. It's not EQ stuff along the way. But but the so the EQ has got to be built into the DNA of that yellow brick road. Again, as it relates to achieving those three beliefs that we, that we talked about earlier.(Speaker 2) If we only had a heart, right?(Speaker 1) Right, if we only had a heart.(Speaker 2) Tom, you know, okay, so I'm watching this and I'm an individual seller or I've got a small team. Is this just for enterprise or do you envision a way that the solo seller or the small team can adopt these philosophies?(Speaker 1) Yeah, when I wrote the book, I kind of was assuming it was more for a larger enterprise or an organization. But what I found in the last few years is the best results have actually come from individuals or small(Speaker 6) teams.(Speaker 1) Ooh. And the reason is because they could make the decisions faster. They generally had more deeper understanding of their prospect than say the whole corporate side of things. And they could make the decision quickly and it allowed them to build a strategy for the team. Because now when you're coaching or managing your team(Speaker 1) or working with your team, you can look and say, well, what milestone do you believe that they're in? You can start asking questions in context of the yellow brick road and the revenue zone. And you can start to coach and help the. And I'm actually building(Speaker 1) some AI stuff that can be used for coaching on this so that you could, you know, kind of talk to the AI, but the AI is intelligent on the revenue zone and the yellow brick road premise so you could coach somebody on what's the best way to ensure that their deal is moving through the yellow brick road, not just moving through their sales funnel. And I talk a lot about that in the book, right? The sales funnel is dead because the customer(Speaker 1) doesn't give a shit about the sales funnel, right? That's the fact of the matter. They don't care at all about the sales funnel. They care about what they're going to do to get from here to there. And a lot of reasons too that decisions are not made(Speaker 1) is the customer gets lost. So the prospect, they don't know the journey they're going down. So they chase shiny objects, they get lost, they get completely off the road, they get apples on their head, whatever the case may be. And they get overwhelmed, right?(Speaker 2) They fall into a field of poppies. I mean, you know.(Speaker 1) Right, right. And as I say in the book, an overwhelmed and confused prospect is not a good prospect. So our job is overwhelmed and confused salesperson. And yet we probably know a lot of those. Yeah. So. So yeah, I think that and especially now we were talking about earlier where you can use AI and things like that to construct your yellow brick road, come up with your content, all that stuff. It becomes much more suitable for an individual(Speaker 1) or a small team than it was a few years ago.(Speaker 2) I love that. I mean, even going to a chat GPT and asking it point blank, you know, give me an email subject line that will stand out positively or have a maximum open rate for this prospect. Here's their LinkedIn profile or an executive at this company.(Speaker 2) Here's the web address based on publicly available information. And don't use it as the end all be all, but let it influence and kind of guide how you're approaching it. That's what I love about your probability-based foundation. It's probably one of the many reasons, Tom, that we get along so well is because we have a probability approach. But these things are not... These things aren't easy because as sellers,(Speaker 2) my gosh, we get in our own way so often. We step over our own tail like the cowardly lion because we're chasing buyers as Opposed to being aligned with them or we're so rigid in our process like oh my gosh I have these six steps on my process I'm on step two I have to do this and this and this and it's like To your point Tom the buyer doesn't care at all. I that's why I can't handle the rigid obsession with things having to be a certain way in our milestones. So tell us, if we're bought into this, what are some of the shifts today as(Speaker 2) sellers, leaders, teams, that we can start aligning with buyers instead of chasing them or trying to instill FOMO.(Speaker 1) Well, you just, right. The first thing is to rethink your playbook, your sales playbooks, because as you've probably seen, right, most sales playbooks are sales playbooks. They're not buyer playbooks. Right. So it's all about how do you get them to the next demo?(Speaker 1) How do you get them to, you know? How do you get them to review the proposal or whatever the different steps are along the way? It's trying to force the prospect down your yellow brick road rather than letting them move through their yellow brick road. And so it's philosophically you need to start with a playbook that is oriented around the buyer journey, which I think we've talked about since episode one on this show, right?(Speaker 1) About orienting around the buyer journey. I think it's, I think a lot of companies and salespeople are doing better with that certainly, but it's certainly not everywhere, right? There's still a lot of, you know, let's force them into our sales funnel and our, our process and you know, all the pitch slapping that we get and everything that we've talked about over(Speaker 1) the years, right, kind of falls into that. So think, rethink your playbook, rethink the mindset of that buyer journey and the fact that you're facilitating the buyer journey versus controlling your sales cycle. And I'll say that again, you're facilitating and influencing the buyer journey. That is your sales cycle. That is your sales funnel, not driving and trying to control them in your sales cycle. So it's a mindset shift, again, that we've talked a lot about, you know, over the hundred and forty one episodes. So that's step one. And then once that mindset(Speaker 1) is there, then you can kind of go through and do a lot of the exercises that we just talked about, defining what your revenue zone is, defining your milestones, defining those things. And then I'll stop there. But I can also talk a little bit about how you manage and coach with that.(Speaker 1) Because we've gotten, even in our own company, I can look at a prospect in our pipeline, if you want to call it that, and in two minutes, tell you in one minute, tell you exactly within probably a very short variance of what the probability of them closing(Speaker 1) within the timeframe and why. Not because of our sales cycle, but where they are in that journey and where they are in those beliefs and understandings. And have we done a good job of influencing and facilitating?(Speaker 2) Bob made another astute comment that I enjoy. A lot of the reason for our getting in our own way is the way that we're being led. And I think back in my career, and my gosh, we talked about this on a previous show. I mean, I almost feel like Chad GPT is a better sales manager than half the managers I've had in my career, sadly. It would have given me better advice in individual situations, but I mean, I literally had a manager that(Speaker 2) completely discounted the social selling way that I was selling a decade ago. And if I had listened to that, I wouldn't be sitting here. You know, it's we can't by default. And I do want to segue into your, you know, how do we leverage this as a blueprint for coaching as leaders? Because here's the thing. Leaders set the tone. They're the ones who either they create and instill the sales culture or lack thereof. And that's half the tone. They're the ones who either, you know, they create and instill the sales(Speaker 2) culture or lack thereof. And that's half the problem. If you've got leadership that is not conducive, they're not creating fertile ground for sales success, you're going to have a really hard time and you're going to be pulled in directions that are not going to be conducive to you adopting this type of an approach. What are your thoughts, Tom? How can we, not only as leaders adopt this framework for coaching, but how do we create(Speaker 2) a culture around this?(Speaker 3) Yeah.(Speaker 1) Again, I think the culture is created by, and let me back up, right? Where did this all start? Is I was in front of our board and had to give them a forecast that I could feel comfortable with, right? Look, that has not changed, whether we're in front of our board or our sales manager or our VP or whatever the case may be.(Speaker 1) As business owners or salespeople, we have to be able to have confidence in our forecasting. As hard as it may be, we have to be able to do that. So by no means am I saying that we no longer have to deal with that. In fact, we just have to be better at it. We have to level ourself up and be better at it(Speaker 1) and be more accurate with it. So I just want to make sure that's 100% clear. What I'm saying is, is the old, our old traditional way of forecasting is clearly doesn't work very well, right? And so you end up with a lot of forecasts(Speaker 1) and projections that make zero sense or are far, you know, light years away from reality on what they are. So the mindset shift again, that you have to have is, again, as a coach is, I still have to do what I, what I'm hired to do, which is to generate prospects, forecast and close, right? That's my job of what I'm doing, or end up selling my existing customers.(Speaker 1) But the way that I do it is different than the way I used to do it. And the way that I do it, again, is facilitating and influencing the buyer journey rather than trying to shove somebody through my sales. And when you start getting everybody culturally thinking in that direction, it changes the way that your sales meetings are going to go. Right. I think you, you know, you even said, I think you had, you said one of your sales(Speaker 1) meetings, one of your key statistics was how many conversations did you have on LinkedIn or whatever this week or whatever. Right. If that, I mean, that's probably a legitimate yellow brick roadstep, right. To start building trust, building the no like trust, right? That's a legitimate statistic,(Speaker 1) but it's an alignment with facilitating and influencing the buyer journey. It's not an alignment with, you know, how many phone calls did you make today or whatever the, right? And you were like real conversations, I believe,(Speaker 1) is what you were. You weren't just looking for connections, but actual conversations that you had on there. Well, those are legitimate things that could move somebody down that yellow brick road.(Speaker 1) So I guess the short answer, it comes back to mindset. Buyer centric mindset. Right. It's not that we're eliminating the seller responsibilities. We still have the seller responsibilities. We just have to build the culture around the buyer and then manage to that and then look(Speaker 1) at our statistics and our milestones and so forth and that, and therefore we will get the results that we're trying to get from the seller perspective.(Speaker 2) I love that. As I think about every step of a sales process that is buyer centric, I always think about what could I or should I say that gives the highest probability that this is going to resonate with the client? What's going to elicit a response? What is going to show up as unique, differentiated value? What are the reasons why customers usually won't give me(Speaker 2) or my company the time of day?(Speaker 1) And how can I show up differently? Well, and think about ghosting, right? I mean, why do you get ghosted is because you have tried to take the customer off of their yellow brick road, put them on yours, and they're like giving you the finger saying, I don't want to be over on your little brick road. I'll let you know if I need it. But if we're on their yellow brick road, they're willing to talk to you. They're willing. I mean, that's a signal. That's a signal that you're doing things in the right direction if they're willing to continue conversations.(Speaker 2) I always wondered where that red brick road went in the movie. I mean, the yellow, we obviously know it goes to the city. There was that red one too that was winding around. I think sometimes we go off on that path. Yeah, exactly. I think you've outlined to like, you know, the mindset shift that's required, the tools, sometimes tech, sometimes not, sometimes things like even LinkedIn that can help map and measure out these steps. You know, what are the buyer centric moves and, you know,(Speaker 2) ways that we can engage? I want to shine a light on wins or, you know, examples of, or examples of a company or organization or teams that have done this successfully. Can you share maybe a story or example of where an organization has transformed results by implementing a revenue zone model? What did they go through?(Speaker 1) What did they learn? How did it turn out? Yeah, so going back to the milestones that I talked about, the buyer milestones, where we've seen the biggest successes is that when the customer can look at where the prospect is on that milestone and then start to put probabilities related to that milestone. Right? So if I'm at milestone one, you know, maybe I have a 20% probability and there's, this is something that a lot of sales organizations forget when you forecast, right? There's two parts of the forecast. What is the probability of the close and then what timeframe?(Speaker 1) And sometimes people forget the timeframe part, or they have a timeframe, but they don't have the probability of it actually achieving the result, right? So we have to be able to look at each milestone and say, okay, as we get good with this, can we start to see, can we forecast accurately in terms of probability(Speaker 1) of nothing else, maybe it's just the next step, right? What's the probability of them getting to the next milestone and in what timeframe? And you start measuring against that. And when you're forecasting, so the success that we've seen is the forecasting(Speaker 1) has greatly improved to the point where they can look at somebody, a prospect, look at where they exist on their yellow brick road, where they are in the milestone and know with high certainty, what is the probability of them then reaching the next milestone or the revenue zone,(Speaker 1) and in what timeframe, right? And we've implemented this in my own company, in LeadSmart, and we are constantly refining it, right? We're constantly looking at it going, okay, well, we expected this and why didn't that(Speaker 4) happen?(Speaker 1) Oh, you know what? We missed something here. Or something happened where, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things that can happen. By no means am I saying that this is a simple, you know, process, but at least it gives you something to debug, right? I guess as an engineer, I'm always looking for ways to debug something when it doesn't(Speaker 1) work right. This gives you a way to debug something, see what could potentially be improved, and then keep improving that as you go forward. And the result that you will see is two things, your probability and your accuracy of forecasting along the whole sales cycle will improve considerably, and you'll get a lot more deals at the end of the day. I've seen our win(Speaker 1) improvement overall, probably up 70% since we've really implemented these things that are here.(Speaker 2) Boom. How, I'm interested in how does the revenue zone framework change how marketing and sales teams work together? I know we've talked about that on this show a lot too, because that sometimes that's an area of friction, sometimes it's an area of bliss, but it's critical that both parties know what matters to the other. How does this framework(Speaker 1) change that dynamic? It's a perfect framework to pull those two together, to pull those groups together. Because again, it gives the common objective, right? How do we get as many different prospects into our yellow brick road and how do we get them into the revenue zone and through the milestones as efficiently as possible? Right? I mean, if you think about it, what other job do we have as marketers and salespeople is to get them on the yellow brick road and get them to the revenue zone. However you may define that, right? That's our jobs.(Speaker 1) So this gives a common framework. It allows marketing to just determine what is the best content. What is the best assets that they need to be creating? It helps sales understand what assets and content and so forth. I should use at the right time. Obviously some sales assets are not, or some things are not created by marketing along(Speaker 1) the way, but the two definitely, I mean, I've had companies that have completely overhauled their website because they said their website was not helping get that customer through the yellow brick road. Right? In fact, if anything, it was actually a headwind for them getting through the yellow brick road.(Speaker 1) The website was so confusing, hard to find things. I mean, think again, what is the customer journey? It starts to cause you to think about how your website's done, your content is done, your, if you have a show, whatever the thing is you would do, it completely changes how you look at some of those things. And it definitely pulls the two groups together.(Speaker 2) I love that. I mean, we've talked about so many of these different ways that we can be engaging and kind of building that demand generation, influencing the right way, you know, as the buyers arming themselves with Intel, where you can kind of build that trust before you ever really engage or ask for the meeting. I really love that. So, you know, if you're listening and you're out there and you, you know, if you feel like you're just spinning in a Kansas sales tornado, trying everything(Speaker 2) to getting nowhere, it's definitely time to click your heels together and say there's no place like the revenue zone. Tom, I got maybe one or two more questions. I want to talk a little bit about how people can get the book. But you said something earlier that I definitely want to go back to, and it's that this keeps evolving. You obviously had an event a few years back where this was launched, and now you're relaunching. But you mentioned almost like that need to constantly relaunch because this is just ever changing. Where does this go? Let's say three, five years down the road,(Speaker 2) as we think about the revenue zone concept and AI and trust signals and buyer intent, where is it going? What do you think is maybe the next frontier for the revenue zone?(Speaker 1) I think there's a lot of opportunity with AI to have it really help you define your revenue zone more accurately, define your milestones and even your, I call them the bricks, right? The road along between the milestones. I think it causes the opportunity to even have that more refined. You said earlier to even have personalized or tailored versions, right?(Speaker 1) So you might have a primary one, but then you have some sort of derivative roads that are off or different side roads. I'll call them side yellow brick roads, right? That you may want to use and you can handle and manage those because the AI piece is there. I think then the AI can help you(Speaker 1) with the coaching. I think it can help you when something doesn't go right or something you lose a deal or there's a no decision, have it go back and evaluate what you did or didn't do against your yellow brick road and give you suggestions. Right. So it gives you a whole lot. I think the AI capability and the context that we can have with the AI to really make what and I'll be honest, right, when this came out five years ago or four years ago, a lot of people said this is all great, but it's hard.(Speaker 1) Right. It's hard. And and it takes a lot of thought. And I don't disagree that it's hard, but it doesn't have to be, it can be a lot, a lot higher velocity, a lot more, I guess, flexible with some of the capabilities as we move forward.(Speaker 1) But again, if we don't think about things and using AI those ways and using the tools those way and doing those things those way, it's again, if the right mindset's not there, we won't get the result that we're trying to do. So I think there's just tons of opportunity to take the concept and use the tools to make it even easier to use and more dynamic(Speaker 1) and more flexible for different scenarios.(Speaker 2) Well said, Tom. I got two questions left. One of them is what questions should I have asked? So I don't host a lot, as you can probably tell. I'm a little rusty. But one of my favorite questions to ask is what questions should I have asked? What question do you wish I had asked? Anything else that you want to make sure our audience gets from you today while we're together,(Speaker 1) Tom? Yeah, I would say the one question that will come up a lot is what you talk about, it seems like a luxury and a discretionary thing to do if we had the time and the resources to do it. And in my opinion, you follow the revenue zone that I wrote in the book, or(Speaker 1) you come up with your own orchestration of the buyer journey and mapping to it and however you want to do it, as we've talked about on the show over and over and over. If you don't look and change to be buyer centric, right, however you choose to implement it, in my opinion, you're either going to have a very difficult road or you're going to be in real trouble, right? And every day it gets more challenging and challenging and more challenging every single day to do that. So I think the question is, is this a discretionary action or a nice to have or the luxury? And(Speaker 1) I think the answer is, again, whether you follow what I outlined in the revenue zone or you do it on your own, the answer is no. And again, if I look it back, even we had a board meeting a month ago, I think, the confidence and the degree of what we discussed in that board meeting and what's actually occurred since then and(Speaker 1) what will occur and so forth is so much better than it was three or four years ago. And me and my business partner, we're not young guys. It wasn't like this was our first rodeo and our first startup and we hadn't been around sales our whole life. It was just adapting to the world that we were in. So(Speaker 2) I think that's the one question. Improvement is what it's all about. And I love that you've not only made, you know, given us a blueprint, but frankly, also just have the courage to revisit it and acknowledge what's changed and what's changing. favorite question. I've ever been asked on a podcast I'm gonna ask it because today I'm the host and I get to do whatever I want So my favorite question I was ever asked on a podcast was by Vince Menzione who's been on our show before And he asked me it's about music and if you're out your road warrior in it for the day(Speaker 2) Which I think we've all been there. I remember back in the day when I go to North St. Louis and I chart my day and head south throughout the day and live in my car and try to see six, seven, eight customers in one day. What's your playlist? You know, what do you listen to Tom to get you fired up for a winning sales day?(Speaker 1) Yeah. So I'm kind of a eighties,s new wave alternative guy. So, you know, I probably have a little in excess some tears for fears. You know, some of those 80s alternative vans probably sprinkled in with a little bit of eagles, I guess along the way. But yeah, that would be my playlist for sure.(Speaker 2) In excess, tears for fears.(Speaker 1) And the six, a little David Bowie maybe.(Speaker 5) All right.(Speaker 1) You know, that kind of stuff.(Speaker 2) Down with that Tom, we could ride together. We could be like Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute headed off to deliver fruit baskets.(Speaker 1) Yeah, you can bring your guitar. I mean, we could have all kinds of(Speaker 2) fun. We can do it all. We can do it all. Where, where do people get their copy of the Revenue Zone and, and, and what's the best way for people to connect with you, Tom?(Speaker 1) It's on Amazon. So the book is on Amazon, audio books on Amazon. That's where most people get the book. There's also a website called the revenuezone.com, which has a bunch of tools and stuff I put up there to help people and so forth. And always, of course, just connect on LinkedIn if you want any more information or whatever. But yeah, it's interesting, right? The reason that I was excited about starting what was our original show? Social Selling for Newbies, I think was the original title.(Speaker 2) Taking me back.(Speaker 1) Is, you know, the book had just recently come out, maybe six or nine months before we started this. And I was like, I was so excited to be able to meet and talk to all these different people that we've had on over the years. And think of the knowledge that we've gathered and gained(Speaker 1) and, you know, that took the concept that we've had on over the years. And think of the knowledge that we've gathered and gained and that took the concept and took it to another level. Larry Levine and Anthony, all these guys that have been on that we've had over the years, all aligned to the modern selling technique, but it just refines a lot of the stuff that I was targeting in the book. And it's been awesome to be able to do that.(Speaker 2) Poetic. All right, so as we wrap, I'm gonna, since we flipped the script today, I want you to critique my hosting, if I missed anything, but then also I want you to take us home today, Tom.(Speaker 1) Yeah, so that was some amazing hosting. It's hard to be a guest. It's easier to be the host and ask all the questions(Speaker 2) I've come to the house. I was gonna say, it is challenging. I was really trying to reach deep to find some things to keep us going and keep us.(Speaker 1) Yeah, I'll listen to it again and critique it and go, man, I could have done better. We'll have to do a version two or something. But anyway, yes, great job on the hosting. Way to keep it on track and let the guests go off base. You follow the questions. You did way better than the normal host that's on(Speaker 2) here. I wouldn't go that far. We wouldn't be at episode 141 without our normal host.(Speaker 1) All right. And I think we're going gonna get Brandon back next week, so.(Speaker 4) Wow.(Speaker 1) I know, I know.(Speaker 2) Glad to hear.(Speaker 1) I know, he'll have to reintroduce himself to everybody.(Speaker 2) Yes. I forgot what his voice sounds like.(Speaker 1) Yeah, so anyway, all right, well, thanks everybody. Thanks Bob, Jennifer, others who commented. Thanks Bob, Jennifer, others who commented. And until next time time happy modern selling.
