ï»ż
Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsâŠteams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real-world and practical advice to help you develop your superpowered B2B sales teams. So today, I'm excited. I've had probably 15 minutes, three camera outages, and a broken chat with Chet, who we have online with us here now. But we're here. We made it. We got to the start line. And for me, a lesson in podcasting to go and get a few more backups in cameras. But today we have someone that I've never had before. We have a doctor on the program today, and in fact, he's a sales doctor, a self-proclaimed, I think we can say, Chet Lovegren, Sales Doctor, based out of the US, West Coast. I'm really happy to have Chet here today. He's doing some really cool things around the landscape of selling, particularly around training and actually building teams that deliver results, right? So he's helped develop companies anywhere with talent from SDRs to AEs to frontline managers, and he's very much here to share his sales development expertise with us. So thank you very much. Very grateful, Chet.
For me, I'm really looking forward to some powerful insights around how you can be prescriptive in sales development. And really, that comes about by following a proven and methodical process to heal any broken parts in that sales organization. So, Chet, thank you for joining us. I know it's really hot where you are, but welcome.
Chet Lovegren:
Yeah. Well, thanks, Ben. And I feel like I should be walking out with, like, a champion belt and some music behind me with that intro. That's the best dang intro that I've had on a podcast. I appreciate the thoroughness and the accolades and, yes, self-proclaimed sales Doctor, but I've been able to back it up over the years with the stuff that I'm doing. So hopefully things keep going well. You never know these days. Things could fall out of the sky at any moment. But so far, so good. We're not complaining over here.
Ben Wright:
I'll tell you what, first thing is, I'm going to make sure we've got some rocky music that comes out with some of our social media around this, so hold me to it. Listeners, if you don't hear anything around Rocky, then I want you to get on social media and really hold me accountable. But the second bit you talk about around the base falling out of whatever you're doing, there's some real logic in building yourself a team that actually doesn't put yourself in that position, right. Having a really strong base, a really big pipeline of leads and actually good, strong customer database. So it's nice, right? We actually hadn't planned on talking about that, but it's going to flow really well into what we're going to talk about today, which is mostly social selling and storytelling and how you can use that to build up a base so that you have a resilient sales team when the economy turns not so flash.
But before we do that, let's just hear a little bit, if we can, can you please tell me a little bit about yourself or the Sales Doctor, what you do, who you are and why you're successful at it?
Chet Lovegren:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like anything I say is going to be downplayed from how great of an intro you gave me, but I'll give it a shot. I'll try to match the energy. So, yeah, I've been in sales and sales leadership for over a decade now. Obviously, the majority of that was spent as an individual contributor. Leadership is right before COVID kicked off, basically for me was my first entry into sales development leadership. Moved from there to kind of managing outbound sales reps as well as sales development reps and then kind of went on to another company to build a global sales development team, talking to content creators and talent agencies to try to help them essentially create content for their business and land brand deals. Before going out on my own full-time at the beginning of this year. But the Sales Doctor has always been kind of operating in the background since the beginning of 2020. The very first part of my sales career, which is really interesting, I always think there's an interesting part of my story. Majority of my sales career as an individual contributor, I spent an outside sales basically. There was still some form of inside sales. Like I had an office I could go to, I could make phone calls, I could send cold emails, stuff like that. But a ton of the stuff that I was doing was, Southern California wearing a wool suit, I'm already a big guy, right? Summer heat, knocking on doors, knocking on dental offices and law offices, then doing a sprint through some cafes and family-owned restaurants to talk about commercial insurance and workers comp insurance. So I felt like I paid my dues. I learned how to generate appointments in the hardest possible way. No list. Literally, when I first started, it was, here's the Yellow Pages, go make phone calls. So now we have all these tools where it's like data aggregation and list building and enrichment, and then you can put them in a dialer that'll dial 500 numbers at a time. It blows my mind when people get mad about having to make 20, 25 phone calls a day when I'm like I used to basically make 100 dials a day manually from the Yellow Pages here in the States, where it's just business listings, and you're dialing and you're doing the âPursuit of Happinessâ thing that Will Smith did where you're not even hanging up the phone. Because you realize if you just click the hanger, you get, like, half a second back over 100 calls. You're making more calls. Like a total boiler room situation, we were making phone calls and then really pounding the pavement and paying your dues when you're on the outbound.
And so once I went into the world of software specifically, I was like, what a freaking cakewalk. In fact, there are these people called SDRs who set appointments for me. This is wild. Imagine how much more business I'm going to be able to close because I still by nature want to go do some prospecting on my own. Whereas other reps are like, oh, I get twelve to 15 opportunities from my SDRs per month. Cool. I have an extra hour in my day. I'm going to tinker around or whatever, go play ping pong or sit on a beanbag and drink a brew from the office tap that we had when it's like, I got an hour, I'm going to go freaking pound out 20, 25 cold calls to this list of people that I pulled. Boom. Two more appointments generated. So it was kind of weird to me because I was a late bloomer, right? I didn't join the software world until my thirties. I had already sold for six years successfully before that. Most of the people that I was selling with had been in the software world for that amount of time. They started as an SDR for two years, became an AE for two years. We're on their second stint as an AE. So it's kind of weird because they got in that comfortable mindset of what they think a software sales rep is supposed to do, and more importantly, not supposed to do, where it's like, who says you're not supposed to self-prospect just because you're an AE? I paid my dues for five years in the hot sun in Southern California. I still want to go make phone calls, and hey, if I could walk door to door to our clients, I would probably do that too. But it was just really interesting because I think that's kind of where I developed such a love for the stuff that we do now because we are in such a more remote world.
So to me it's like the fact that I can publish a TikTok that's educational, that gets people thinking about me, and I can reach 1500 people at one time as opposed to knowing that I would have to do three months of business walks to interact with 1500 people before, it's just so crazy. So that's why I love this concept of social selling and storytelling. Not social selling, let's be clear, social selling is not âhere's a picture of my dog, take a demo about my software with meâ. Or. âHey, I saw you went to University of Nebraska, Lincoln, I did too. We should do business together.â That's not social selling, that's connection. But connection has to be built off something. I mean, you can't post pictures of your dog if you want and draw relevant stories. âHere are five things I learned today while taking my dog on a potty breakâ. Like that kind of fluff, I guess it works. I'm not really into that fluff. The LinkedIn algorithm doesn't enjoy me. I try to post hard truths. Try talking about how there is no such thing as work-life balance on this day and age on LinkedIn and see how far that gets you. I have the numbers if you're interested. Talk track about work-life balance and work-life integration. And so to me, that's what social selling really is and why I think it's so valuable. And people need to take a bigger hold of this concept because a lot of people don't know what it's like to be on the other side of sales. I mean, even now I have people that knock on my house two, three times a week, pest repellent, solar sales, driveway repavement people. There are still people pounding the pavement out there who don't know what a sales engagement tool is, don't know what sales training is even. They don't have all the luxuries that we have. And so that's why I love social selling so much. Because it's like you have the ability to do so much more so fast compared to other people that are still in other traditional sales roles.
Ben Wright:
Well, we have lots of solar sales listeners on this podcast, so we have to be mindful of face-to-face or door-knocking solar bashing. But certainly, it's a big part of that industry. All right, so a piece of advice that I got when I was a lot younger was only trust consultants who've carried the bag, right? And clearly you have done that. We talk about wearing the rubber off your shoes. I think in your instance it might have been sweating the cotton out of your shirts, right? So you have absolutely, absolutely carried that bag there. So, today's world, we are seeing social selling. It's a buzzword. There is no buzz couple of words, there is no doubt about it. What do you define social selling as now? What do you think it means?
Chet Lovegren:
And let me clear one thing up too. There is no bashing of door to door sales reps because I done that myself. I'm just saying, like inside sellers, people that are account executives at Tech companies also need to understand the glory of what you're living in compared to what other people go through in the day to day, because going door to door is tough. And as you said, yeah, for me, it was more sweating the cotton out of my shirt, the wool out of my suit coat.
For me, social selling actually really isn't even about selling. I think that, selling to me is kind of an archaic term anyway, I believe that selling is just educating someone on the value of why you, why now. That's all it is. If you can't articulate that effectively, then nobody has any business working with you. Right? Here's why people decide to work with me. Here's why they do it now. And hey, here's a taste of what it is that I do. So, in my field, specifically in consulting, obviously, for me, it starts at content. I think of my selling efforts as the marketing AIDA funnel awareness, interest, desire, action. It's the same way I think about things in sales development. When we do outbound one-to-one outreach, I say you should be applying the same concept. You should have a phase of outreach tasks to the beginning. That's all about generating awareness about who you are, what you do, the problem your company solves and what that problem might look like in the person that you're talking to is business. That's personalization, right? Not, âhey, I saw you went to this school. Cool. Listen to what my company doesâ. No, âhey, as a VP of sales, it's hiring four account executives. Even in a down economy in the tech world, I'd imagine that these are the thoughts that are running across your mind. This is how the sales doctor has helped other VPs of sales like you solve for this by yada, yada, yada. Would you be opposed to learning more?â Right?
So it's that awareness side, interest. âHey, let me show you how you can make money off of this. If you're not interested in making money off of this, let me show you at least how you can cut your costs with this desireâ. It's kind of like that. Then that's when we bring in social validation. These are other people that we've worked with. Here are their testimonials, here's their case studies. And then that action. It's like, âokay, hey, I'm this far into my outreach, and I haven't received any feedback. Usually that either means you're not interested or you're interested but too busy to chat. Which one would it be?â And then the soft breakup. That's how I do cold outreach.
But I think of social selling the same way. And it all starts with content creation. We do a really good job. I have two podcasts, so we repurpose that content like crazy. And I think that's just value-add. But I want to purposefully create content for the different types of personas that I'm talking to. So you called it at the beginning of the episode. SDRs, AES frontline managers. So people that are doing a lot of cold outreach, people that are doing a lot of discovery and negotiation, and then people that are managing people. And so we segment those into the three different clips. So I do cold outreach conversations. I have discovery and pipeline management conversations. And then we do people management conversations. And for me, it's short-form video. And the reason it's so important is because I do this time and time again and then I end up getting connected to someone. And it's so crazy because everybody thinks TikTok is like a dancing app for 15 year olds. I had a 43-year-old VP of Sales this February tell me, âyeah, I've seen a lot of your TikToks. I think we speak the same language. That's why I was interested to have this conversation about training our account executives.â And I was like, wow, that's awesome, you know, TikTok is so much more than that. But you're creating someone that people can put a name to the face. People understand the language you're speaking, people understand your vibe and who you are pre-discovery to the point where when people come to me from LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, checked out my YouTube channel, whatever that might be, it feels like they feel like they're meeting a celebrity because it's somebody that they've watched and they've engaged with. And so they're much more interested to jump into that call than someone who I'm like cold outreaching or having one of my SDRs do cold outreach to, who's like, yeah, let me see what this is about. They're much more interested because they've already engaged with that piece of content ahead of time.
Ben Wright:
There's three things that I picked up on there that I really liked. First of all is social selling, it's about creating value. So it's not about just pushing content out into the world. It's about pushing content that's meeting your customers or your viewers or your audiences, whoever they are, meeting them exactly where they're at. Right? So that's the first part I'm hearing. Second part I'm hearing is that you are building a relationship before you're actually meeting with people. Right. For me today, right. I'd listen to half a dozen of your podcasts before weâd come on, so I feel like I already know you before we get there. And the third part, which was actually at the start, was that it's really important to have a framework behind what you're putting out there for your social selling. Right. So you used AIDA was your framework there. So you're actually using a framework to give yourself some consistency. And consistency actually really helps from a consumption point of view, because when you're seeing things in the same format time and time again, then you're getting used to that and you're getting comfortable with it. Here I'm going to throw a question at you. You can go right or wrong if you're a Sales Leader, right now I need to not worry about social selling because it's only for my team to be implementing right or wrong. In your book?
Chet Lovegren:
I would say. Right. And here is why this is really tough. But when you're a Sales Leader, there comes a point when you're a sales leader that you kind of stop learning how to do the job and you start focusing on the management and people leadership side of it. And you kind of learn by seeing what's working for other people. So I'll use cold calling as a great example. I don't think I've given a crap about a cold calling technique over the last four years. I learn from what's working well with people that I'm leading and then taking the baseline of what I know based on human psychology and how I like to cold call and what's worked for me. I go, well, is that because of the industry we're reaching out to? Is that a sign of the times? Is that because technology is smarter now and unless you have local presence, everything shows up as scam likely? Why is that person being successful?
Like a great example, we did a sales outreach sequence. It was fully automated, 3% meeting rate, 27% reply rate, and I even highlighted on LinkedIn when I made this post. The devil's in the details though. Well, here are the details. Not targeting Sales Leaders at Fortune 500 companies. I'm not targeting marketers at Fortune 1000 companies. I'm targeting companies that help work with startups because they are likely startups. And so the founder is more likely to respond to an email because it's a company of 15 to 50 people. So they are smaller companies. It's probably why we have a high reply rate with no personalization in this test sequence that we are running. It's a fully automated sequence. So I take those devils in the details and kind of look at them. So I learn from like, okay, what's this SDR doing? That's really good. What's this AE doing in discovery? So at some point as a Leader, you kind of stop trying to learn all the new fresh things about the job. You get more involved in How do I lead people? How do I create a better operation from a data perspective? How do I partner more with Rev ops? How do I work in hand with my CEO to make this thing a collaborative effort and not lose my job in 18 months? Like the average tenure of a VP of Sales, you kind of focus on those other things. So you don't really have time to go learn how to social sell. But you can find training and hire people and bring people in to teach your people how to social sell. So you don't have to do it from scratch because you've probably never done it too. Like if you're leading a sales team now, dollars to donuts, probably only 10% of Sales Leaders out there have ever actually social sold in their life because it's a newer concept to some extent.
So that's the other thing is you kind of have to do it. I do it because I was always doing it for Sales Doctor from 2020 to 2022, when it was a part-time on the weekends hustle that I had, even when we first started in January, full-time, I was doing it. Right. I didn't have salespeople working for me. I was doing all the social selling myself. Now I have people that are doing outreach for me. But you probably haven't done it if you're a Leader because the concept is so new. It's like storytelling in sales. Everybody wants to talk about it. Seeing people that are in their 50s talking about it. I'm not ageist, but I guarantee you that in the 80s when you were selling copiers that you know what I mean, like storytelling was not a common sales tactic. You were doing spin selling and Zig Ziglar, right? And Sandler. How can you talk about it?
Ben Wright:
So this is really important. So what I'm hearing from you is as a Sales Leader, you don't necessarily need to be the one that knows how to social sell, but it is really important that you're bringing someone in or using information from your team. Right. But your team is upskilling on social selling. So don't worry if it's not you as a sales leader. Don't worry if you're not the expert around social selling. But boy, oh boy, you better make sure that your team know how to do it and you're getting the right support if it's not you. Very very reasonable.
I'm an almost 41 year old male. Social selling wasn't around when I was 20 and boy, and I've carried the bag, right. I have sweated the cotton out of my shirts. I've done all of that to multiple levels. Right. Our big business that was really, really successful had 280 staff. I was front line of that business, helping our Sales Leaders and our sales BDMs and AEs the whole way through. Right. I was there for eight years at the front carrying that. But social selling still wasn't huge for me. However, I love it. So personally, as a Leader, I've got involved in it and it's something I want to learn and be able to teach my teams. But good to know that if you don't want to do it, you can get people in there to help you. So let's talk about then the businesses or the Leaders that you're saying be really successful about engaging their team. And engaging is the word. Right. About getting their team engaged to be social selling. Top two or three things they're doing as to how they're making it work.
Chet Lovegren:
Yeah, I would say there's one person in particular, his name is Joey Alvandi, works at a company called Touriol. They sell interactive product tours for software companies. So, like, really good interactive product tours after you buy software, company can supply with an interactive product tour, so you're kind of self-guided through it, especially if you have a PLG software. Great value prop. But he does a really good job of scraping through people that he follows posts and reading through the comments and seeing where it's relevant and just shooting people a light reply and then connecting with them with a light touch. âHey, here to help if you need anything or if you're interested in how marketing teams have increased their lead capture with interactive product tours on their homepage. Either way, glad to connect. Great comment on so and so's postâ. So he does a really good job of like, if I'm already on LinkedIn, messing around and liking stuff and commenting and reading people's posts. I don't just read people's posts, I also read the comments of the posts that are engaging and I scour those comments for potential interest of people that I can connect with. He's also the first one, anytime Touriol makes a company post to go in and start responding to people or connecting with people, that he'll even go if people like the post. And âJoey, I hope I'm not giving away your secret sauce, just you never told me this, but I just know it from analyzing and watching you workâ. You know, he'll click on all the people that liked the post and he'll go add them all. If he's not already connected, say, âhey, thanks for liking our post about this new product feature that we have. If there's ever anything I can help you with I noticed you're not a current customer, but happy to give you a free 15-minute demo of the platform.â
So I think leveraging LinkedIn and the people that are not only engaging with your brand on LinkedIn, but engaging with relevant people in your ICP and this is tough because this is very in our echo chamber of the tech sales LinkedIn world, right? So there's other things you can do if your primary persona, buying persona in your ICP isn't on LinkedIn. Like when I was selling logistics software, those people are not typically on LinkedIn. It's a little different, it's a little harder to social sell there. But I'll tell you where they were at. They were at ClubHouse. When ClubHouse was a thing, there were massive ClubHouse rooms where it was just logistics professionals. Great place to get on forum, a great format to be able to speak and share and educate people. But that's something that he does really well, is scouring the people that are liking his company posts, commenting on his company posts, connecting with them, giving them a light touch, and then scouring relevant people that he follows looking at their comments, the people that are commenting to them, giving his two cents, connecting with them and giving them a light touch as well. He sells mostly to like, marketing leaders, so he follows a lot of the marketing gurus. Audience, arbitrage. It's super easy. You don't need to go build a following of 20,000 followers on LinkedIn. Just go to someone else that has 20,000 followers in your industry or niche and piggyback on all their posts and connect with the people that are interacting with them. And you can see everybody that likes their posts. Like, it's super easy to do.
Ben Wright:
It's definitely not hard. And it is networking on speed, right. The old ways of networking, how they're still really relevant. I have not worked with a team where I have recommended that they stop your face to face networking within reason, right, where it's relevant for their teams, but certainly being able to network via social selling. If you can get the formula right, then you are networking at a far higher velocity, probably a slightly lower cut through rate, but a far higher velocity than those that aren't. Okay, so we've spoken a little bit about storytelling and you've told a few stories. Certainly there's a couple at the start that I'll remember for a while, particularly. I'll never, ever think about someone wearing a wool suit in summer in the same way again. Right. But storytelling, what's the role that you think it plays? And what I'm really keen to hear about is, do you have any advice about how Sales Leaders can grow their skills and their team skills around storytelling?
Chet Lovegren:
Yeah. And I'll tell you this, the day I made a really hefty commission check and was able to buy a microfiber Joseph Abboud suit, that was like Christmas heaven on Earth.
Storytelling. So whenever it comes to storytelling, like, I'll give you an example, when I do discovery call training with account executives, I always say what's needed to complete a sale. Everybody says all these things rapport, product, market, fit, yada yada, yada. Like all the things we've been told to say. And then I play the next line. It just says, Information. Sale is an equal exchange of information, and your goal should be to receive information and then return it with added value to your prospect. But what's really important about information is as you go through your line of questioning, this should not be you on the opposite side of the table, shining a light in their eyes, asking where they were the night of the murder. This is not an interrogation. This is a reciprocation. You should be on the other side of the computer, opening up the kimono with them, looking at their books, looking at their business and acting as a partner. Even that right there, like that, vivid imagery and storytelling. You're going to remember that anytime you think of discovery, discovery calls, you're going to think of, it's not an interrogation, it's a reciprocation. I'm not shining a light across the table from them, asking where they were the night of the murder. While they're in handcuffs, I'm on the other side of the table with them, opening up their books. And looking at their business and being a partner. That's even an easy example of storytelling.
If it's sales storytelling. So I think comparison contrasting is good, allegory all those kind of literary things. But there's a very simple framework that I follow in messaging, which is a before and after bridge framework. BAP - Before and after bridge Framework. Relevant trigger is where people like you were. This is the gap they knew they had. This is where they knew they wanted to go, but they couldn't solve for the gap. This is how we solve for the gap. Are you interested in learning more? âWhen I first met Ben, he had five AES that he just hired for his business. He decided to hire young scrappy account executives who were new to the role and weren't exactly the most tenured and needed help with discovery. But he was focused on other areas of the business that he needed to grow with Rev Ops and marketing. I came in and worked with Ben's team through a week long skill boot camp and then continued coaching and training for the next two months. Got them to a place where their deal win rates went from 18% to 25%. Are you interested in seeing those results? And if I can achieve the same for you as you're hiring five new account executives at XYZ Corpâ. Before and After Bridge Framework - we also use this for social validation with case studies. So that's why it's important to ping a case study, but make it ungated in your outreach and make sure that you actually tell the recap of the case study in your email using that framework. I hate when people are like, âhey, we did this for XYZ company. Check it outâ. And it's like, Bleck, give me like, a little preface. You also have to be tactical if it's cold copy because you want to keep it under 100 words and we can get wordy, and we're salespeople and we love the talk and yada yada. But that's the framework I like to follow in storytelling is the before and after bridge framework. Current State, future state gap in the middle, the gap is the goal. The future state is not the goal. Solving the gap should be the goal, because then the outcome is either going to be 10X, 5X, but it's going to be more than 1X. So if your goal is 5X, as long as we can fix the gap, that should be the goal. You might get 5X, you might get 10X, you might only get 2X, but it's still better than 1X. So we focus on the behaviors, not the outcomes. The behaviors should be the goal, and the behaviors are typically the thing we're solving for in the gap. Whether you're selling services or products or suits. If you work in men's warehouse, right, you're selling suits, it's the same thing. You look scrappy, you want to look better. Here you go, and let's figure out how we get you there. But, yeah, that's what I like to do is follow that before and after bridge framework when we're doing outreach.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, tell you what, if we don't have a suit sponsor as a sponsor, a suit manufacturer as a sponsor by the end of this, then I'll be staggered. So essentially what we're hearing is every story has a start, it has an end, and it has a vehicle that gets you through to that. So if you're a Sales Leader now, particularly a Sales Leader who didn't have to storytell with any great vigor in the early parts of their career, advice you're giving to sales leaders now as to how they can grow storytelling within their team.
Chet Lovegren:
I think it's the same thing as social selling. And I'm probably biased because this is the world where people bring me in to consult and advise. But bring someone in. Bring someone in who is well known for storytelling and sales, or meet with sales consultants that you want to upskill in your team in certain areas and see how they converse with you. And if you feel sold yourself and you feel like they told a great story, fantastic. Bring them on. It's actually interesting. As part of competitive analysis and intelligence, I want to know what other people in my niche are charging. I've actually found out that this world is actually a lot more affordable than business leaders probably think of. Sales Leaders probably think training is some massive $100,000 venture just to get someone to come out. And it's not. It's very affordable, especially for the potential returns. Now, the problem is, how do we know that person is going to get us potential returns? Well, good salespeople buy from better salespeople, right? Isn't that the saying? So get on calls with these people, especially if you are a Sales Leader and you're working in sales. And see if I always talk about LinkedIn followings. I just hit 10,000 and everybody's like, oh, congrats. It's great. And I said, no, it's actually a bad thing because I don't want that to be a reason for people to follow me. Nobody should look at my following anywhere. Nobody should look at the fact that I get 1500 views per TikTok on average as a reason to watch my TikToks. Nobody should follow me on LinkedIn because I have 10,000 followers. People should follow me if they actually believe in the content. And if anything, they should have their hand on the BS meter even harder to see if I have 10,000 followers because I'm actually worthy of that, or if I have it just because I found a hack to boosting my LinkedIn growth.
I always say, yeah, the bigger the following, the more scrutiny that person should be met with. But how do you feel at the end of the day when you're going through that sales conversation with that person? And do you feel that they're able to demonstrate value the same way. I meet sales trainers all the time, we're like talking about video prospecting, and then I'm like, but you don't send video after your discovery calls. You don't even practice what you preach. That's ludicrous to me. There's not a single thing that I preach in sales training that we don't actually do internally here as well, regardless of the situation. But I think it's a really tough one to get people to do the task if you've never done it before.
Ben Wright:
Absolutely. No doubt. For me, getting people in to help you with storytelling, really important. As a leader, though, something I want to jump on what you said is, this is actually one where you should be able to lead by example. Use storytelling with your team. That gap model that you've just spoken about. Right. Start where you're on one side of the bridge, present state, future state, and how you're going to get there, the 1..2..3..4..5.. X you're going to get on that. Great way to start practicing yourself as a sales leader because you're going to then bring your team along that journey. I could not agree with you more about the importance of making that happen.
Okay, so lastly, we talk a lot about learning. This is what this podcast is all about. What are your learning go-tos for yourself? What do you go to to try and improve how you are as a person, as a sales trainer, as a professional?
Chet Lovegren:
Yeah. This is a concept brought to me by the co-founder of the startup accelerator that I work with as an advisor, Hatchet Ventures. They're also a corporate sponsor, of my Founders Formula Podcast. But Dalton Van Hatchett told me a couple years ago, he said the key to personal growth is build a personal advisory board. It'll be a group of people that's comprised of direct and indirect mentors. And the direct mentors will sometimes change. You might have people for the moment, hey, I'm an SDR Leader or I'm a Sales Leader. So I have somebody one title above me that's kind of mentoring me. But obviously if I get promoted that I'm going to look for someone a title above that. Maybe that person's just a colleague now, like a directional colleague. But there's direct and indirect mentors. So when I think of direct mentors, I think about people that I can call when the chips are down, when I need help. I'm a Founder and an entrepreneur now, so I've kind of built that advisory board to some additional founders, whereas before it was a lot of senior sales leaders. But then indirect mentors. I follow Simon Sinek and Jocko Willink, like religiously, two people that I love watching their content. I listen to Simon Sinek's podcast. I listen to Jocko's podcast. I'm always on Jocko's Instagram. I love watching any kind of show that Jocko does. I consider him an indirect mentor. He doesn't know me personally, but he's feeding my soul in my development. So I think that that's really important about building your personal advisory board, because, just like anybody else, you're a business. You're a person, but you're a business, and you need to operate as such. And businesses have advisory boards.
Ben Wright:
Awesome. Well, thank you, Chet. I have loved today. I've really enjoyed it. For those, you probably won't see it in the edit, but we've had a few firsts today. We've had a mass technical failure before we started this podcast. We've actually had another person that I'm having a guest at this podcast accidentally jumped in halfway through. Right. So, it's been a lot of fun, Chet. I've really enjoyed it. So, for those that want to find out more about you, clearly they can look you up as The Sales Doctor. Where else can they find you?
Chet Lovegren:
LinkedIn is the best place. Chet Lovegren A.K.A. The Sales Doctor. It's the full title. Or you can go to my website, www.thesalesdocrx.com, and we have an entire resource page with episodes of our podcast past newsletters. We published blogs, downloadable resources, the whole gamut.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you again, Chet. Guys. Please look him up. Fantastic to have such a good, clear thinker on the podcast.
But for now, until next time, keep living in a world of possibility, and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Chet.
Chet Lovegren:
Thanks, Ben.
E34 How Social Selling and Storytelling Take Salesteams to Rocky Balboa Like Heights with Chet Lovegren
