This week we’re pleased to welcome Matt Green to the podcast. Matt’s building an amazing community of sales, CS and marketing professionals in Chicago with Sales Assembly and is always learning from what they’re doing to crush their market. Matt shares his take on what they’re doing well and how he see’s the ways prospecting has changed recently…
In This Podcast You’ll Learn:
- Prospecting in Communities
- Balancing Automation in Prospecting
- Sharing Genuine Insight
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Prospecting in Communities
John Barrows: So obviously with your business, you’re heavily involved in community and there is always a balance of finding ROI for being in these things but also not taking it too far and ruining the group because you’re selling. So how do you find the balance?
Matt Green: If you’re looking to make the most out of a community that already exists, my thought process is always leading with what kind of value am I going to be able to provide here. If this is a community of HR leaders and I happen to be a sales rep at a company that happens to sell a product into HR, I mean, the absolute last thing that you want to do is just occasionally pop your head up and say, Hey, I saw someone mention this problem. My product solves it, that’s not it.
That’s not what’s interesting to the community itself. That’s not going to lead to any level of success at all. But if you join and start posting out some content that you’ve seen or read, try and be thought provoking. That’s totally different and it won’t be attributable to your product in the community members’ minds. It’s really about sparking those natural conversations and you go from there once you’ve earned the respect of your peers, as they earn yours too. There’s not a quick win.
Balancing Automation in Prospecting
John Barrows: But, most reps are using as automation tools in different ways. And so I’m wondering from your perspective on the companies that you work with, let’s talk SDR/BDR, where does automation fit in your opinion? Where does it make sense and where is it misused?
Matt Green: Yeah, I always look at this and I hit the rewind button in my mind about 18 months when there were a lot of discussions are around, is automation going to replace sales? And you know, maybe. I’m sure that there are probably still some conversations along those lines going on, on the fringes today.
But I think that that we’ve all agreed that, that is not going to happen, especially as sales is evolved to a point where you do need more and more of this human interaction with intentional interaction. So where I see automation having the most success is, as I alluded to a couple moments ago, is really just clearing the playing field. You know, opening up all these swaths of time that the sales reps have five to 10 years ago did not have. And the question is, okay, well what are you going to do with that time? You know, are you going to leverage the time that you via automation?
John Barrows: There’s a lot of things that would have been manual not so long ago that now are not, which I guess is your point, right? It’s making more hand crafted touches in that time you now have that you didn’t before.
Sharing Genuine Insight
John Barrows: Yeah. I was telling you, man, I’m a state school kid. I drank my way through college. The lack of knowing that I wasn’t the smartest kid in the room served me quite well over the years. Because I’m always genuinely curious about stuff, out to your point of people who are smarter than me. I never pretend like I know what the f**k I’m talking about. I just want to ask you some questions and learn.
That’s actually one of the reasons I started this podcast, because this is how I learn. You know what I mean? Like different people learn different ways. A lot of people are all books and all the other stuff. I’ve read less than 10 books in my life, but like cover to cover, I’ve read less than 10 books in my life because when I read I genuinely fall asleep.
Something in my brain sees more than five pages and it says, see you later tonight. This is how I learned. I learned by getting people who are smarter than me on and having a conversation with them. And, I think if more people took that approach of the genuine curiosity to their clients, to their clients with some context it would help them.
Not just saying, Hey, tell me about your business or tell me about your priorities. But doing a little bit of homework beforehand. Yeah. We’d serve them a lot better than learning how to pitch their s**t.
Matt Green: And it’s our particular mode of thinking. And you know, I’m fortunate enough to build and continue to build a rock star community here in Chicago with some really phenomenal sales, marketing, customer success leaders. And, that is my excuse for when people ask me what I’m reading, I’m going to, it’s always, you know, history in some way, shape or form. But you know, I try to explain to people why when they ask, well how, how come you haven’t read this sales book or that sales book and I’m reading every day.
I do 20 meetings a week with heads of sales, heads of marketing, heads of CS here in Chicago. And to your point, I’m just sitting there, I’m like, what are you doing? I asked questions and you know, from that, whether it’s through osmosis or you know, just the sheer volume of feedback that I get from these leaders in the community. I mean that is at least in my mind, the equivalent of reading a book a day.
That’s where you can build the insight into your industry on a more current-day basis I think.
That’s a wrap. Join us next time
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