Podcast 135: The Broken Prospecting & Sales Process With Jake Dunlap

Jake Dunlap joins us on the podcast this week to talk about where and why the prospecting/sales process is broken.

JOHN BARROWS

Jake Dunlap joins us on the podcast this week to talk about where and why the prospecting/sales process is broken. Jake’s seen a lot of companies change their thinking on sales methodologies, activity metrics and their general approach to the sales process. But what’s broken? Where are leadership teams making life harder for sales managers and reps? If you want the answers, this is the episode for you…

In This Podcast You’ll Learn:

  • Focusing On Outcome Over Activity
  • Sales Methodologies… The Problem
  • Radical Transparency Across The Entire Process

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Focusing On Outcome Over Activity

Jake Dunlap: Activity based tracking makes sense. If all most of your activities are tied to generating meeting, right? If you’re in a transactional sale and I’m only calling you to set a meeting, of course tracking activities still makes sense, right? There are definitely times when that makes sense, but for our other clients are mid-market enterprise, we’re trying to move them to maybe having call minimums at times. But really tracking what we call the first outcome, which is what we call a meaningful conversation. That’s when you’re in the process of setting an appointment with the right person. You’ve got directed to the right person. We clearly define this for their clients and say, look, instead of saying you need to have 50 activities a day, you need to have four meaningful conversations a day. It’s very black or white, this is what’s being tracked.

All the emails are feeding to Salesforce. If anybody wanted to inspect. And I feel like that that is how we engineer for quality, right? It’s the first outcome before meeting-set. I might only need 50 activities. Maybe another rep will only need 20 because they’re better than me. I really feel like we just need to shift and again, this is only if you’re asking your team to do activities that are non direct based to appointment setting. That’s on the SDR side in particular. We just have to start to realize that it’s not fair. It’s why people aren’t hitting numbers.

People aren’t hitting their number because doing more sounds like it gets you closer to your number.

Sales Methodologies… The Problem

Jake Dunlap: The issue that I see with methodologies is I feel like we are plugging in these methodologies which are trying to force buyers into this new process. We all know that buyers have access to more information, they want less friction in the process. These methodologies, John were built, I mean challenger sale is the newest, and this is based off of data in 2010 and before most of these methodologies are literally having barely evolved and they are 20/30 plus years old. But the buyer behavior has changed completely. And it’s the same thing with predictable revenue. You know, an inbound SDR was cool. Inbound SDR was cool when the B2B sales organization was the only person with access to information. They put up with the process and jumping through the hoops.

But now, there’s like 2 million blog posts produced every day. Tons of eBooks per day. And so I feel like the whole customer framework, the whole customer side is where methodologies really fall down. They are just not adapting to the way that the access to information and the way that buyers want to buy. Because our consumer patterns have changed so much that now we expect that in all facets of life. All facets, including B2B and even mid-market enterprise sales.

Radical Transparency Across The Entire Process

Jake Dunlap: We practice radical transparency. We even have an email that someone on the team will send in advance of a meeting and it says, look, here’s what we do based on what we do. Here’s usually how much that costs. We’ll send that in advance. Wait a minute before that. There’s a high likelihood if you’re coming in with intent, you’re already comparing us to other people. Sometimes we won’t if we feel like maybe it’s like a personal connection or something, but if it’s an inbound lead then yeah. I mean we’ve got a whole email we just tee up that has like here’s what we do cause we’re trying to remove the friction.

John Barrows: We do the same thing cause like for, I mean I think you and I are similar as far as our ICP is concerned. If they’re not a fit or too small I can tell them that right out of the gate, we do have an online portal that has all this stuff and here’s a way to look at that. But if you’re looking for our core service then here’s what it is and here’s what it entails.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

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