You’re getting this email because you’re one of the 400 people I’ve spoken with since February 2020 when Sales Huddle was born. I'm going to start publishing content, the purpose of this article is to clarify within side myself and to you what I’ll be writing about, what I won’t be writing about, and what success looks like, so you can make the decision for yourself if you’d like to read it.
I’m aware that I didn’t ask most of you if I could email you, if this sounds useful for you, I’d like you to stay on the list. You’re already on it. If not, guilt free unsubscribe is here. Please unsubscribe :)
What will I write about?
Content that's useful for experienced salespeople that want to improve their sales craft the hard way. The hard way means going deeper then the tactics, tricks, silver bullets into the deeper truth of what's happening. It’s not that the tactical is not important, they need to happen. It’s that it’s rarely the underlying issue.
Share announcements. Last month, we held our first Listening Fest. It was really successful and as I host more experiential events, I want to be more easily be able to share them with folks that want access to it.
Honor, curate, and share others work. I’ve built so many relationships with salespeople I respect and are do amazing work, I want to share their wisdom.
Share lessons learned. We are learning a lot within each Sales Huddle. While the experience of a sales huddle can only be experienced by doing it and experiencing it, I think there are tidbits that we identify in each sales huddle that can be shared to a broader audience.
Why? What does success look like?
I want to maintain and build existing and new relationships with those I interact with and that are involved in sales huddle and I can no longer do that on a 1on1 basis.
I want to share information that will be useful for salespeople to improve their sales craft. I don’t have the answer, I’m still learning, so I plan to write about what I'm learning.
I want to make make it easier for likeminded professionals to find and join us. Sales huddles continues to be unique space in a place where there are more and more resources available for salespeople. We aren’t trying to crush it or scale, but find others that resonate with the kind of work that we’re doing and join us. ’Community’ means a lot of things to a lot of people, and like anything, none are the same. There’s a certain vibe to sales huddle, I want to create a beacon, a lighthouse of sorts, where sales professionals that are already searching and resonating with that type of work that we’re doing AND how we’re doing it can find us more easily.
Share the story of Sales Huddle. The 10 year vision of Sales Huddle, the beliefs that drive our work, what’s happening internally, why, and what the product looks like. These are the very early day, I think it’s important to share transparently what’s going on. This will not only help me to clarify my thoughts, but also provide transparency, direction and clarity to all those around sales huddle.
Who am I writing for?
Friends of sales huddle. those who are interested in what’re building and love the vision and for whatever reason doesn’t want to join.
Soon to be friends of Sales Huddle. sales professionals who are already looking to join a group of like minded peers.
Existing Sales Huddle members
That said, as I think about creating and curating content, there’s number of observations that come to mind that are driven the plan
There’s plenty of sales training out there on the tactics of what to do. If you want it, it exists. I have nothing to add to this area.
There’s an abundance of free sales content out there. Articles, webinars linkedin. I don’t want to add to the noise. In fact, I’m afraid of it.
I noticed what’s discussed privately tends to be very different than what’s discussed publicly about sales. I want to start bridging that gap.
Sales tactics > sales strategy > one’s characters. I’ve written a Linkedin post on this topic. This is what most of the content will focus on. Development of character is the utmost important.
Procedure knowledge is far different than participatory knowledge. Procedure knowledge is information that can be shared and taught and tested whether it’s known or not. Participatory knowledge is knowledge that can only be gained by experience, and it’s not always possible to test for it. I cannot teach you what it feels like to hit a grand slam to win the World Series, and certain folks have this knowledge.
I don’t expect to start writing on exactly what I want perfectly, I expect is to evolve over time.
While there’s a lot of content for folks newer to sales, there’s much less for people with 10 years of experience or more. The latter group is the one that I’m most interested in.
One of the ways I think about writing content is to follow a specific theme or question. That said, here are some specific themes and questions I’ve been noticing lately.
Here are some consistent themes I tend to notice
What’s true in sales that no one is talking about publicly?
What’s the difference between a good problem and bad problem? How do we know the difference?
What are the right questions to ask to troubleshoot a sales problem?
How do you know if something is a sales problem vs product problem vs positioning vs qualifying?
How make sure your expectations, words, actions are all in alignment when dealing with a customer?
Listening
Honesty
Clarity
Integrity
How to say what you want
How to say no.
How to set expectations with customers, get their buy in, and hold them to it.
Trustworthiness. Sales is all about trust, great. How to be trustworthiness?
Trust, how do you know when a customer trusts you? Doesn’t trust you? Change actions when you can?
How small changes in language will have a large affect on how something is perceive and what happens.
How to address the elephant in the room when talking with a customer?
Tension. How to deal with the tension of a situation?
How to frame a discussion
This is not an exhaustive listen, and I expect it to change over time, but it will give you a flavor of what I'll be writing about.
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