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 teamsâŚteams 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 super powered B2B sales teams. So today I'm always excited, right? But I'm super excited today because we have Tom Slocum from The SD Lab. And when I was thinking about how I introduced Tom, I had this real dilemma because he is a guy who on social media, presents as super laid back, has lots of fun in terms of what he does. And then I got his profile photos and he had lots of nice laid back profile photos, but then he had this super professional slick, it might have even been AI generated headshot there. So I'm thinking, do I introduce him as a really professional operator or a salt of the earth type of guy who you can put your trust in? And look, in the end I wimped out a bit and I ended up going somewhere in the middle. So, Tom, you're going to get a bit of both right in your introduction. But Tom is absolutely the seasoned sales strategist. He's been doing this a very long time. He's the founder of a business called The SD Lab, right, has a terrific presence on LinkedIn and the SD Lab really is all about your top of funnel sales consulting agency, so building brand awareness, building social branding and you betcha, that type of lead generation strategy. So he's a decade or he's over a decade into experience in the sales and the revenue acceleration space, but he's really honed his expertise in crafting those personalized sales playbooks, optimizing sales books and even training teams for success. So in terms of where Tom's passion lies, it's absolutely in helping sales leaders and sales teams achieve their revenue goals by blending strategic insight, but with that human touch, right, all about EQ that we talk about. He's a pretty sought after speaker and very committed to elevating the sales landscape. But the one thing that stands out with me is he loves a good selfie or two. So welcome, Tom, to the Stronger Sales Teams. Podcast. Thanks for jumping on board and great to have you here.
Tom Slocum:
I appreciate it, man. So excited for you to invite me here, talk a little bit about some topics dear to both of us. And that intro was spot on, right? I'm a very chill guy. My headline says your future homie-in-law. And that's what I mean, right, is we could be friends, but I can get the business done for you. But I want you to be able to trust me, feel good when you speak to me, and be open right together in helping your orgs reach where they want to reach. If you come in with a bad attitude or you're the guru or cocky, nobody wants to work with that, right? So I'm your future homie-in-law and pretty laid back.
Ben Wright:
Excellent. I like it. So tell me about The SD Labs. What does The SD Lab do and what makes you really passionate about it? It comes out straight away. Love to hear more about this.
Tom Slocum:
So the value prop is helping organizations break through the noise with innovative prospecting methods, right? So ideally, I'm helping organizations from early stage founders to Series B optimize, scale and build an SDR team or an outbound sales motion that is actually repeatable and is actually successful all the way from the processes to the technology to empowering the people. So that's where I come in, taking that learning curve for most founders or companies from twelve months down to like 14 weeks, right? Helping them speed that up. Because I've been doing this for 16 years. I've made 500,000 plus cold calls, I've led teams. This is what I love. And it's just a passion for me because like you said in the intro, I really do love genuinely helping people. And last year I watched a lot of founders that I was kind of doing some side hustles with, working with. They just didn't get it. It's not their world. They're technical founders or these VPs or these CROs who are running playbooks from 20 years ago, and they're getting eaten alive with what post-COVID looked like. Most of them have never managed remote. Most of them don't know how to empower people. They don't know how to set realistic goals or bring in technology. They're scared of it. They don't want to touch it, right? They don't know. Or they add five tools to their tech stack that all do the same thing and they just don't know any better. And so I found this passion of, well, why don't I help you? Why don't we talk? Let me help you, let's see where I can help you take a lot of that on so you can focus on working on your business, not in it. You and I both know from our journeys and doing company, people get lost in working in it. And when they hire a sales team, they forget that they have to empower people but also get their job done. And so it's just a lot and so I just found this really exciting passion for let me help. Let me consult with you. Call me up, tell me your problem, and I promise you I'll help you find a way forward. And so SD Lab was born and I stuck with top-of-funnel just because that's what I love and it's a big gap. There's a lot out there for clothing and doing all of that, but people don't know how to bridge sales and marketing to build brand awareness and actually convert and acquire new customers and help them become advocates for that company. Right? So when you bring in that synergy between the two, you can have a well-oiled revenue machine that is kind of on rinse and repeat and you are able to work on your business. Are there some bumps? Sure. Maybe turnover, there's a couple of things. But reality is you'll have a very stable, successful sales motion running through me, coming in and helping. And so that's what I've just loved to do. I've had a great first year, celebrated my one year just a few weeks ago. So very excited. I'm excited for year two, doubling into more clients, helping some people, just about helping. I'm not out for a quick buck. I'm not out here to make a million dollar business. Well, I am, but I'm in it for the long game, not this, âhey, I'm in it. I want to make the million dollar empire. I want to set my family up and I want to make it a great agency.â But the reality is I'm very patient. And all I care about for this last year has been giving the best experience to my clients. Because when I can do that, the rest will take care of itself. The referrals, the partnerships, all of that will speak for itself. So I focus mainly on how can I help this client as most as possible, give them everything I got, give them my attention, and make sure that they walk away here with what they've asked for. Right. And have that motion set up or potentially find out they don't have a proof of concept and there isn't a market for them because there are clients I've worked with where the market wasn't there, and that's okay too. That was still learning for them and still worth it to them to say, okay, now we dodge that bullet. We don't have to build out that motion.
Ben Wright:
There's so much in there, right. We haven't even got into talking about the stuff you do. There's three reasons that I wanted to have you on this podcast, right? First one is you have the resilience. It's really clear through your social media work that you do is 500,000 cold calls. That's a lot. And resilience is something that is difficult to find in salespeople, particularly those who haven't endured really difficult times yet. I think we've got difficult times that are going to come in a form, but so I like that. So you come from a point of resilience, right. The second piece is you work with early stage businesses and for sales leaders out there, there is a huge parallel between running your team and running an early stage sales team. Right. It is all about building systems, proof of concepts, making sure you're providing value to customers to be able to get the results that you need. And the third one is that you really genuinely care about customers. And I think we could probably hit stop on podcasts now, right? Because we're talking about leadership today and we've just nailed three of the most critical traits in effective leadership moving forward; resilience as a leader and building resilience in your team, making sure that you are building systems and processes and a repeatable formula that allows you to scale and the third one is about caring, right? Caring about what you deliver. So what we're going to do is thanks very much everyone. Podcast over. No, we'll keep going. Okay, so today we are talking about leadership. That is our go to today. We've got a great topic around social branding with you, but we're actually catching up in about eight weeks time in Arizona. We'll get together and I think we'll record our social branding episode then. So stay tuned for that. But for today, can you tell me, Tom, how has leadership in particular, let's talk sales leadership. How has it changed over the last five or so years from where you sit?
Tom Slocum:
Yeah, standards have got extremely high from the employee to employer relationship. People are now challenging their sales leaders to help them grow and not be treated as just like a number or this whole mentality that for a long time was what did you do for me today? And the biggest one is the shift from traditional to virtual sales. Right. Pre COVID you had an office, a sales leader could be right there with their team, hearing the conversations, being able to support them, the little drive-bys by your desk, that would happen all day long while you're trying to work, rep just pops their head up and they're like, hey, yeah. They're like, hey, it's me. And you're like, oh man, I'm in the middle of something. Right. You go sneak off to an office and lock yourself in there so people would give you a 30 minutes to where now you're in a virtual world for a lot of organizations and small little fact that kind of blew my mind is there'll be people that are going into sales roles now that will actually never see a sales floor. And that just blows my mind. They won't get that because it is virtual. And so now you have this new era where how do you build trust with your team when you aren't there? Because it is hard. It's scary, right, to be a sales leader and not be able to see what your team is doing every day. They are in their own four walls at home, and there's nothing you can do about it. No slack is going to save you, no instant messaging. There's no way to just do a drive by and check in on them. And how do you let the team collaborate? Now, as a leader, not only are you working your one to one relationship, but how do you get the team camaraderie going together to where they are working with one another in a virtual environment? So those are some of the things that have changed now in leadership. And also leaders are now being asked to do less with more higher goals. Right. They're dealing with challenging markets. How are they avoiding burnout and mental health for themselves while empowering their team? And those are just things that day to day, every day that a sales leader has to face. And so that's why what you said is getting resilience, really focusing on your EQ, right. Where your emotional intelligence and how they can develop that or empower that. So they're picking up on things and being proactive with their sales team before those things arise. Right. And then personalized selling, how do you get your reps doing that to where they're not potentially playing the old school sales playbook, but they're now in this new world of maybe we should focus on quantity or quality, not quantity. Right? Old school days, there was quantity. Spam your tam, go out, rip the phones, send thousands of emails in your tool. Don't worry about email deliverability, don't worry about none of that. We'll just unlock your Google. If you get locked out, no big deal. To where, now you have sales leaders who are taking this approach of how do we really drill in and book quality and keep moving forward through the rejection, the days where you're stuck in four walls by yourself and you're having a bad day. Leaders are really having to step up in an EQ world, and if they're not built for it, they're getting eaten alive. It's hard for them. And so that's my number one thing, is as a sales leader right now, really dive into emotional EQ and intelligence there and find a way to push your team, but also be there for your team all in one.
Ben Wright:
It's funny. You talk about emotional. It's not funny. Ha ha. Right? But it's certainly timing is really relevant. I had an engagement yesterday with one of my really long term customers. Seven people did focus interviews around seven people. And just in the middle of that, one of the team members, you could see they were down. They were really hurting from having to work from home eight to 10 hours a day. They had a very small house. And I actually stopped the focused interview. I actually said, âwe're going to pause hereâ. And I spent the rest of that time working with them around his mental health space and how he could actually improve his mindset, little things that he could do that would help him through that. Right now I'm engaged to actually get some hard data out of these guys. But in that instance, my caring nature that EQ from Sales leadership took over. And I said, no, I actually need, forget what I'm paid to do. I'll go and spend some more time and get that information somewhere else. I actually need to help you then and there right now. Right. IQ is certainly trainable, but EQ is really difficult, but so important in that world where we cannot be together.
So how are you seeing sales leaders succeeding at growing their EQ? Right? This isn't linear to improve your EQ. How are you seeing people get good at that?
Tom Slocum:
The number one is listening. Everybody's trying to embrace. Some of the sales leaders are just trying to be a lot more open to hearing their team proactively, asking questions and just being mindful and listening to it and then processing it, which didn't happen a lot. A lot of sales leaders just pushed their team, told them what to do, and that was it. Now you see them kind of poking at these reps and saying in one on ones, asking deeper questions. They're trying to go beyond the surface with their reps. They're trying to say, what are you going through? What roadblocks are you seeing? And so they're trying to get into that EQ level of getting into it with them on a deeper level and uncovering stuff that they normally would have never cared about or asked before. So that's a really good one, is they're just paying attention to as much verbal and nonverbal cues as they can. They're paying attention in Zooms when they're meeting with the rep. It can get hard to get distracted when you're on zooms or cameras to be looking off, disengaged because they're not right there with you per se. So you see, leaders kind of putting âdo not disturbâ. A lot of sales leaders I know are getting to become really good friends with the Do Not Disturb function on their cell phone, right. It gets addicting, right, to just shut it off, be present with the person, pick up on how they're engaging in the call, verbally or nonverbally, what they can queue on. Right?
So that's one thing they're doing. They're practicing emotional control, which is another thing that I think sales leaders need to be wary of, is can't wear your emotions on your sleeve as much as you'd like to. And just being more aware of it, like how their body language is when they're in a team, in the Zoom with them or in the call or a mistake is made, how are they approaching it without raw or coming at them? Being so frustrated but maybe asking a question and not assuming before they come in with anger or frustration or concern. So you're seeing them kind of manage their emotions a little bit better because it's challenging right now. And you have to because it's not just your team you're taking arrows from. It's your VP, your CRO, your marketing, and it can become overwhelming. So I'm seeing a lot more leaders that are kind of this newer Post COVID world try to assess that. The other thing is adaptability. Like, you have to practice adaptability because things are changing so fast now in the sales process and in the world of sales, I think a little bit faster than we were used to. So what worked last week is now dead already the next week. So how are you adapting quickly, or your team wants to do one thing and then you're shifting gears immediately the next week because your boss told you to do something else. And so how do you adapt? And for some leaders, like we were talking about a little bit ago, is how do you adapt to a virtual world? You've had sales leaders ten years in the game, 15 years in the game. They never had to deal with remote work in their life. And then three years ago, they were thrusted into it. Okay, thrusted. This wasn't eased into. This was straight up. One day everybody went home, and that was it. And so now you have people struggling with trust issues, micro-managing trying to adapt to not being in a room in an office and being able to go to lunch with your team. You know how important that used to be? Just on a Friday afternoon after a really strong week by the team, just taking them out for a beer or a drink and chopping it up before they went home. You can't do that now. Or if you have lunch together, it's all in a zoom room, and you send them some Uber Eats cards and say, hey, let's have lunch. You can't high five, right, and root for them when there's big wins or things like that. And so it's just a new world for them. And so you see these leaders tackling that stuff head on right now. The ones that care, that want to level up, that actually do care, like we talked about, you got to have that care of. Like, this isn't a job, because that's where I think people forget SDR AE sales roles, for the most part, can just be a job. You can do that. You could show up and treat it like a nine to five and do your thing, and it's not really going to bother anybody but you. But as a sales leader, as a leader, you don't really get the option to phone it in. And it isn't just a job because every day you are under a microscope, your team is watching every behavior that you do, right? You see leaders do bad habits, and then they promote somebody, and that person does the bad habits, and they're like, wait and it's like you showed the way you paved it. I'm just doing what you did. Why is it okay for you? And it's like, do as I say, not as I do right. Kind of behavior. But you have to realize, you have to care every day because these people are looking to you. You're a reflection of your team. Is that what I always say? So if your team's not performing, your team's not excited to come into work, that's you. That's a reflection of what you've built and the culture you've put together.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm hearing four things from you around building emotional intelligence. The first one is ask questions without an answer, ready to go. Right. That exact thing we're trained to do as salespeople is ask a question, then ask another, then ask another. Right. And that's actually bringing out or allowing you to get to the bottom of what is actually going on. The second thing is around being present. So forget the do not disturb and hey, I'll admit, when I was this is a little secret. Please don't tell anyone, but when I was a leader about ten years ago, I actually was getting so much pressure coming in, so many people stopping by my desk, I actually ended up putting a bunny on the corner of my desk there. And I said to my team, when the bunny's up, I'd be grateful if you could give me a bit of a break and come to me later. Wow, did I get whacked in the face? Oh, my God. Within about 24 hours, I had my team at me. And it was a great team. Right. They were really upfront and open. We had that culture of candor and complete honesty, and they said, âGet rid of thatâ. That is crazy. Just tell us if you're too busy. Right. So that's my embarrassing moment, which I know no one else in the history of this world will hear about ever again. But being present, right. Really, really important. The third thing is control. Emotional control. Quite difficult, particularly when you're remote, because you can't see those softer engagements happening, but exercising and practicing that. And the last one you called Adaptability, which I would probably reframe almost as Agility, learning how to really get your personal growth metrics really happening. So I'm going to zero in. Look just a little bit around that Adaptability. If you are a leader getting ready, and we could talk for hours on this, right? But if you're a leader getting ready for the next twelve months all right, let's just say you're an emerging leader. Or you're a leader that's been in the role a little while, but you still want to get better. If you had a bit of advice for them about what they should focus on now to help them be a better leader over the next twelve months. What would that be?
Tom Slocum:
The one thing I would tell every sales leader right now is to get out of their bubble and talk to as many people that are in their role and in the space as possible over the coming months because you're going to learn more than you'll ever learn just doing it on your own. The problem right now is a lot of sales leaders are in their own bubble. They're at their company, they're doing their thing. They're not out there learning and growing or having as many conversations as they could be. So they just rely on themselves. And so that's hard and you're going to let yourself down sometimes⌠just how it goes. We're not perfect. And so when you try to be agile or adaptable, you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself to do that and even where to look. So what I would say in the next twelve months is talk to as many sales leaders as you can. Have one a week as a goal. Every week I am going to talk to another sales leader on my side of the house from a different space that I can just chat with. Because what you'll discover is you'll become adaptable, you'll become agile. You'll start telling your team to do some crazy stuff. You'll learn what other verticals are doing or other sales leaders on how they're managing stuff to where you're going to get faster and quicker and more efficient because they're going to help you find things, right? Or they're going to tell you of a tech tool that you've never heard of in your life. I get on a call with a lot of sales leaders and they're like, Tom, âI have no idea what you're talking what, what toolâ? And I'm like, this one, and they're like blown away. But it's because that's my job. I talk to sales leaders every day through cold calls, emails, my friends. So that'll help you get agile and creative. Another thing is of course, leaning into technology. I think take as many demos as you can of products, go look at what other people are running with to get adaptable because you're going to have to find a way to become above the API and the technology of things here in the next five years. And if you don't, you're going to get eaten alive. These older sales leaders are kind of struggling right now where you see the newer class coming in that are now 23 years old, right? Some of them are now in their 20s getting into sales leadership positions. And they live on a cell phone. They live in doing more with less and being efficient and operationally fast. That if you as a leader are not proactively finding tools to make your team run faster, they're not going to want to work there and they're going to be bored out of their mind because you're not empowering them or getting in the trenches with them. I think sales leaders enough don't get in the trenches enough. I used to set up call blocks with my team just so I could learn because they might not tell you everything, right? But if you get in there and start prospecting or trying out some of the own tools that you've rolled out and you're like, why are we doing it this way? And then you start finding things out. So you're agile, you're adaptable, you're moving everywhere to uncover things. So that's another thing. Dive into tech as much as possible, try things, learn things and then talk to other sales leaders. That would be the two things I'd be doing over the next twelve months.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. And that's coming out loud and clear. In fact, what we talked through today, in fact, my podcasting episodes, right, episode 28, episode 16, both talk around learning and these things come up, right? So they're your learning go to's as well. Getting out and learning from sales leaders and embracing tech?
Tom Slocum:
Yes, that's what I dive into as much as possible so I can be agile, move fast, figure out things is finding out how the others are doing it and what's going on in their world because that'll free me up to get better ideas or get creative in what I'm doing.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, well, I think coming out of that for sales leaders that are out there looking for other leaders to talk to, you've got two straight away; American, Tom Slocum, Aussie, Ben Wright, right. Two guys that love talking to people about how they can grow and improve and I think that is a perfect way to end today. Right. Leaders, focus on learning, embrace tech. Get in touch with Tom Slocum from the SD Labs if you need to. Tom, how can people find you if they'd like to learn more or catch up with you?
Tom Slocum:
I live on LinkedIn, I'm across pretty much all the platforms. Tom Slocum. Slocum. But I am on LinkedIn primarily. Got a little fire emoji next to my name so you can find me there. Shoot me a voice note, shoot me a DM. I do get back to them. I'm here to help. And from one leader to another, I know it's hard, so if you need somebody to bounce ideas off of or just know me and Ben are open to that as well.
Ben Wright:
Cool, thank you. Well, stay tuned for another episode down the track with Tom and I. This one's going to have a few surprises around it. It'll be all around social branding, but until we get to that point and until next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
