[00:00:00] We're going to be an organization that not only competes, but dominates our competition. We want to be the competitor in the marketplace that keeps our competition up at night, that gives them sleepless nights, that creates nightmares for them. We're going to be an organization that keeps score. We're going to be an organization that really is focused on the things that Mike talks about in terms of results and pipeline and activity. We're going to really focus on those things, and those are the things that are going to get measured, and those are the things that we're going to be focused on as an organization in order to hold ourselves accountable to those results. And so we're going to keep score, we're going to publish that score. We're going to publish results, we're going to publish the standings of the organization. I'm Dennis Sorensen, and this is the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
[00:01:04] Hello and welcome back to the Think Big Win Bigger Podcast. I'm your host, Dennis Sorensen, and welcome back for episode two. I wanted to start today by thanking again my good friend Mike Weinberg for being with me on the last podcast on my very first episode. And the reason that I asked Mike to be on that podcast is that Mike is a big part of my origin story. He's a big part of how I evolved and developed my management skill set over time. When I originally read Mike's book, New Sales Simplified, I found in that book a source of truth that resonated with me. It fit with everything that I believed as a sales manager and as a seller. And what it allowed me to do was it gave me a very good tool to be able to work with my sales teams and to help communicate to my sales teams the ideas that I wanted to make sure that they understood the things that they were focused on doing day to day and that they understood really what the basics, what the blocking and tackling of their job was in sales.
[00:02:12] And so new sales simplified was, was a really key aspect of, of that journey. And then later, sales management simplified helped to solidify for me as a sales manager again, the ideas, many of the ideas that I had had and experienced and the things that I had, but it helped me again to find a really strong tool to be able to Shape not only my own sales management skills, but to shape those of my sales leaders that were working for me in the various roles that I had. My sales career from a professional sales career really began right out of college when I went to work for NCR Corpor.
[00:02:53] And NCR was a tremendous place to go to work as a new seller because NCR had a really well thought out, well founded sales process. And they actually had a physical sales school that we attended. And we went there and we spent several weeks learning the NCR sales process, learning everything that we needed to know to be successful in selling for ncr. And it was by following that process and really becoming process driven on my own through that effort that I think I evolved my philosophy about being process driven as a seller and process driven as a sales manager and having a process driven sales organization. After ncr, I moved to Teradata Corporation. And at Teradata, I had the opportunity to again move back from a management role that I had at NCR back into a carrying a bag for Teradata as an individual contributor.
[00:03:47] And that helped to again ground me in those basics and be able to progress even further in my later when I became a sales manager again, to be able to take the things that I learned in my second go round as a professional individual contributor and understand the things that I needed to be able to do as a sales manager, to be able to help my sellers to succeed and to win through my people. And that was really, you know, the focus of that through my journey at Teradata through a number of different sales management roles. Ultimately, when I left Teradata, I went to work for a company out of Boston. I was there for three years. And then after I left there, I decided that I wanted to do what I'm doing today, which is I wanted to be able to do my favorite part of my sales management job. And that was to teach and to coach and to help be an advisor to salespeople and to sales leaders. And so at that time, I formed Cove Group, which was my first advisory and consulting business. And then as I worked through Cove Group, I developed a number of different partnerships with different consulting organizations that I worked with, including my good friend Mike Weinberg. And then as the business evolved over time to the place that we are now, some of the work that I did with a good friend of mine, Lee Paris, and another good friend of mine, John Gies, each of them with their own consulting businesses, we decided that we would together form a new company called Horizons West. And Horizons west is the company that we work through today and we go forward together as a team. And we're building out a team at Horizons west to be able to help bring what we do from an advisory and coaching and training standpoint to the market more broadly. And so
[email protected] is really how you find us and that's how you begin to connect with us. So that gives you a little bit of my background and my journey to this point and now going forward with Horizons west and the team that we have built at Horizons West. And really, as you think about what we do as we go out, we really talk about being process driven. And one of the key pillars of being process driven is ambition. And ambition is part of the equation. For me, that really changed the game. There was really two things that changed the game for me in sales and as a sales leader. One was ambition and the other was what I call execution or the ghost process. And so what I wanted to do today was talk to you just a little bit about our experience. So in my role in sales and sales leadership and as I went through the various different jobs that I had, one of the things that I found was that there were a lot of themes that were really consistent from role to role, from team to team. And I've seen that now that I've been out working with a lot of different clients in the marketplace across all industries, I see the same consistent problems across those teams. And it's really the things that hold them back from their growth are a lack of ambition, really poor non existent strategy, and then a lack or poor execution. And what those things really mean is that when an organization could and should differentiate itself through its ambition, its strategic account plans and through its execution plans, but it doesn't.
[00:07:12] What happens is those organizations leave themselves in a place that I call the commodity trap. They leave themselves in a place where the only differentiator they have is price.
[00:07:22] And so they end up in a game where they're being put through a spreadsheet exercise by procurement teams and they're looking for the lowest price. And so one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was to look at how we could change the game for sellers and how we could change the game for sales leaders. And I really think it comes back to those three things. It's ambition, its strategy and its execution, all under the umbrella of being process driven. One of the key things that I learned at NCR Corporation and then later applied heavily at Teradata Corporation was strategic account planning and strategic account planning. Is a foundational element of what we do. But oftentimes, strategic account plans get built for management, not for the seller, not for the sales team. They get built for management and management review.
[00:08:11] And then those plans end up in a file or in a file cabinet or in a drawer.
[00:08:16] If you're old school like me, a lot of things are printed on paper. And what we would have happen is that a year later, when it came time to refresh those account plans, because management wanted to review them, we would pull those plans out of the desk, we blow the dust off of them, and then we'd flip through those plans and we'd say, oh, well, that was a good idea, we should have done it. And that was a good idea, we should have done that. And one of the things I found was that that was something that occurred over and over again with my teams. And so again, the two elements that were missing were one, the ambition and two, the execution. And when that happens to teams and when they live in that place around commodity trap, they end up in survival mode. And when you're in survival mode, that's when you go back into really being desperate to try to achieve quota, and you end up in a game of trying to rapidly move through the process and leaving yourself in a place where you're competing on features and benefits and product differentiation versus really the outcome and the business value that you can create for your client. And so living in survival mode is really not the place to be. And so what we wanted to do with my teams was I wanted to be able to change the game. And as I mentioned, the two things that changed the game for me were really ambition and execution. And the way that we define ambition at Horizons west is we talk about ambition as being the total potential of an account and the total potential that that account represents to us. What we want to be able to do in sales is we want to be able to step back and take the time to think bigger about the opportunities that we have and really explore all the potential that exists inside of our accounts. To be process driven means that whether you're an individual contributor or you're a sales leader, you're building an organization, you're building for yourself a process driven sales culture. And what that means is that you want to be able to take the time and really think about what you want as a sales leader in a process driven sales culture. When I would take over a new organization or any new team that I dealt with, once I got into the team and I got to know the team and I spent some time doing that. I really wanted to establish what that process driven sales culture was going to look like for the team. And so as a leader, as a seller, what you've got to be able to do is you've got to be able to write that down.
[00:10:37] If you write it down, it makes it real. And if you make it real, it'll become real for yourself, it'll become real for your team. But putting it in writing is really key. I've worked with a lot of sales leaders who have a lot of tremendous ideas, but none of them are written down. That those ideas have to be captured, they have to be put together and consolidated in a way that they can be effectively communicated to your sales teams. And so when I would do this, I would establish, I would essentially create a presentation that I would give to my team. And I would say, you know, there are some things that are going to make us unique. And first of all, foremost of all in all of that is that we're going to build a winning sales organization. We're going to be a sales organization that wins and wins big. We're going to be an organization that not only competes, but dominates our competition. We want to be the competitor in the marketplace that keeps our competition up at night, that gives them sleepless nights, that creates nightmares for them. We want them to be very concerned when we walk in the door. We're going to be an organization that keeps score. We're going to be an organization that really is focused on the things that Mike talks about in terms of results and pipeline and activity. We're going to really focus on those things, and those are the things that are going to get measured, and those are the things that we're going to be focused on as an organization in order to hold ourselves accountable to those results. And so we're going to keep score, and we're going to publish that score. We're going to publish results, we're going to publish the standings of the organization. We want to attract and retain sellers in this organization who really are driven and want to earn big dollars. And so they know that in order to earn those big dollars, they got to be able to deliver on the results. We want to have a mindset in the organization that everybody sells, everybody in the team is in sales. A lot of times I would join teams and there would be different types of groups that would be working with us on our accounts. And it's really important that everybody who's working on the account, who's working with that customer understands that they're in sales and that they understand that they're in sales. To be able to deliver those results and to be able to deliver those results in a very effective fashion and according to a plan, according to a strategic plan that everybody's aligned to as the team. We want to make sure that we focus on the four Ps, right? Plan, prepare, practice, play, that we're going to be process driven as an organization.
[00:13:01] We're going to learn how to eat short term and live long term. Right. A lot of times when I begin working with clients, one of the concerns is, well, we've got a sales operation right now, we've got objectives that we've got to achieve right now. How do we begin to make this transformation and still be able to deliver on our short term results? And it's something that has to be balanced. It's something as an organization, as a sales leader or as a sales leadership team that you've got to be able to balance and you've got to be able to eat short term, to live long term. And what I mean by eat short term is you gotta deliver, you gotta keep the pipeline moving, you gotta keep those things that are in flight right now moving. While at the same time you begin to make the transition, the transformation as an organization to having that really long term, big picture perspective of what it is that you want to achieve. You've got to have a growth mindset in the organization. You got to have a team that's built who are relentlessly hungry to learn.
[00:13:59] Always trying to build sales muscle. You want to be building sales muscle constantly. You want to be always looking for ways that you can sharpen your edge and to improve what it is that you're doing. You always want to be looking for ways to grow and strengthen yourself in sales. That lesson was taught to me very early on as a sales leader. When it came time for me to have to actually exit the very first employee that I ever exited from the organization. And, and that was a very hard thing for me to do. But one of the things I realized in that process was that the reason that this individual was being exited was because they really had stopped growing. They were doing things the way that they had always done them. And that result ended up putting them in a position where they were no longer competitive as a seller in the marketplace. And so one of the key things that we have to do in sales is constantly have a growth mindset and constantly be looking to grow and build that sales muscle. Another key element in a winning sales culture is really having a bias for action. We want to have a bias for getting things done. You know, I adopted this mantra that I use with my teams, that we're going to always stay on offense. We're going to stay on offense, and even when things come at us or situations that we have to be able to play defense, we're only going to devote a certain amount of our effort to playing defense while we keep the rest of it. And it's really a two thirds on offense, one third on defense kind of mindset that we have to have as a team. And what that means for teams is as they're executing their ghost plans, they are executing those plans and keeping things on track, while also dealing with all the other things that come at us that force us at times in sales to be able to have to play defense. We want to be able to be surrounding ourselves with sales professionals, others who want to learn. We want to build a team of champions, right? In order to be able to do this, we need to understand that our sales story is our strongest weapon in sales. And so we have to constantly be working on our sales. We have to write it down, and we have to make it real. We have to own our mission as sellers. In particular, we have to own everything about that sales motion. But we don't have to do everything on our own. We got to leverage every possible resource we have available.
[00:16:13] Some of the best sellers I know, one of the partners I have now at Horizons West, Lee Paris, was one of the best at gathering the resources around him, inspiring those resources to help him succeed almost to the point of monopolizing resources in the organization. Organization. He was just so good at getting others to help support his success inside of his accounts. And I think that that is a really important thing. We have to own it all, but we don't have to do it all. We've got to really fully leverage the full team and have everybody doing their job. And a key to that is what we'll talk about later on in the series around managing that and holding people accountable and getting the team aligned through our execution. Ghost plans, some of the things that elite sellers really do right, they really focus on the core elements of sales. They create, they advance, and they close. And what we want are sellers who are going to go big, that are going to think big, they're going to dream big, they're going to go after the things that they. They believe are important. And all of these elements, again, need to be written down, and they need to be made real by you. If you're an individual contributor, write them down for yourself. And if you're a sales leader, write them down and share them with your team. We want to use speed in sales strategically. We want to be going out into the marketplace and competing with speed. And we want to be able to think about how we got to go high and wide and deep inside of our customer organization. And I'll spend some time talking about high, wide and deep in future episodes of the podcast. But high, wide and deep is a key aspect of what we've got to do as sellers. Elite performers don't just chase quota, they build a business. They build a business in sales that's going to sustain them over the long run in sales. And to be able to be successful, they want to be able to pursue earnings, but understand that in order to pursue those earnings, they've got to deliver incredible business outcomes to their customers, to their clients. They need to create opportunities and own outcomes. We want to always have an organization that's going to play to win, that's going to do whatever we've got to do in order to be able to understand, do the discovery we've got to do, do the scoping we've got to do, be able to put together the best possible proposals and alignment to value for our customers. But it's really about playing to win. We want a team that operates with discipline and with preparation and with relentless focus. Because again, greatness is built, it's not given. Being process driven allows you to develop a system that's predictable, it's repeatable, it's scalable, and it's forecastable.
[00:18:46] And I think that's one of the keys to being really successful in building a business.
[00:18:51] And I truly believe, and I think it's part of what we want to build in our winning sales culture is that whoever has the strongest process wins. What this really requires in our teams, as we set up our culture and we establish our culture, is really that we establish a growth mindset. We want to make sure that in our growth mindset that we move away from having a fixed mindset, right, where we see things as half.
[00:19:15] Half empty, right? We want to see things as half full. We want to seek out challenges and see them as opportunities to grow versus seeing challenges as threats that we need to avoid. We want a team that tackles difficult situations and develops new skills in doing so instead of abandoning their efforts when things get hard.
[00:19:36] And we want to be able to have a team that knows how and can adjust strategy in situations where they might be set back or experience setbacks that they, they can adjust strategy, they can work past those setbacks. And we want to be able to see those setbacks as, versus a mindset where we see setbacks as, as proof of futility. The number of times that I've been in and brought in as a new sales leader into a team and had had situations where teams would say to me, well, you know, that's just not possible. That can't be done. You know, they won't do that. It's that acceptance of that, of that mindset, right? That idea, that thing. These efforts would be futile, right. Are really things that we have to change inside of our winning sales culture. One of the keys to doing this, I think, is again, shaping the way that we teach and train our sellers. One of the books that I read a few years ago, a book called How Champions Think, is a book that again, really shaped my mindset in a lot of ways. It shaped my mindset around ambition thinking. It shaped my mindset around execution planning. It really helped me to be able to find another tool that I could use with my salespeople. That book, how champions think by Dr. Bob Rotella was a very impactful book for me and it helped to shape the way that I want to shape my winning sales culture inside my teams. And we'll spend some more time in future episodes on how champions Think. I really want to tell you, and I can't stress enough the importance of establishing that winning sales culture. And that I think is really the key. And then from that culture, you'll really build and develop that process driven sales organization and that process driven sales system that you need in order to have that repeatable, predictable, scalable, forecastable success in the future. So I thank you for joining me for this episode. In future, in the next episode, we'll talk more about being process driven and we'll talk about really the four Ps plan, prepare, practice, play and what we have to do as an organization to be able to get there and do that.
[00:21:43] Thanks for listening to the Think Big, Win Bigger podcast. Until next time, think bigger and just win.
