Categories: Podcasts
The best athletes put in extra time, even just 15 minutes a day to improve their skill set. Extra shots after practice, another lap around the track, ten more reps — they put in the work to take their career to the next level. The same is true in sales. How can you put in extra effort?
If you want to have your best year yet, find ways you can improve your skills every day. Sales is a game of inches, extra effort can be what separates you from the rest. We are partial, but listening to the Audible-Ready Sales podcast is a great way to exercise that sales muscle. There are dozens of episodes to choose from. Here are a few of the most popular.
1. How To Negotiate Early
While you’re working on your current deals, there are key steps you should take to start the negotiation process early and minimize late-stage margin cutting. In this episode, Senior Partner Tim Caito shares how you can set yourself up for success before price conversations begin — and in the end, close for a premium. Tim’s perspective is helpful for anyone who wants to improve their negotiation process and put a stop to closing for a discount.
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2. Three Questions You Need to Answer For Your Economic Buyer
The best way to drive urgency and big dollars in your deals is to get in front of an economic buyer and make an impact. In this episode, we cover three questions you need to answer for an economic buyer to get them to demand an urgent solution to their business problems.
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3. Navigating the Decision Process With Multiple Buyers
Making the shift from selling smaller deals to enterprise solutions that require multiple decision-makers is a common career progression path. If this is your situation, congratulations! You’ve done the hard work to progress your sales career to this point. Now, make sure you’re prepared to adjust your sales process in a way that accounts for more complicated discussions with key decision makers. In this episode, John Kaplan shares tips for getting multithreaded in your deals, including how to communicate effectively with high-level players in a buying organization.
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4. Stacking Customer Requirements in Your Favor
If you want to steer a buyer’s solution requirements away from your competition (including a “do nothing” or a “no decision”), there are a few key areas of your sales conversation that you can focus on to successfully stack customer requirements in your favor. In this episode, Marty Mercer, Force Management Facilitator, talks through how to effectively prepare for conversations around decision criteria in a way that enables you to validate a premium price and beat out tough competition.
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5. Getting Comfortable with Uncomfortable Conversations
Learning how to have uncomfortable conversations with buyers in a positive way can drastically shift your sales career. Great conversations only happen when salespeople aren’t afraid to be uncomfortable. Being elite often comes down to being the person who can ask great discovery questions with patience, empathy and confidence. In this episode, Force Management Facilitator Antonella O’Day shares how to dig deep in discovery conversations in a way that creates a healthy tension in the conversation.
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6. Why Are You Talking?
If you find yourself talking too much in sales conversations you may be missing opportunities to show your customer that you’re focused on them and want to genuinely understand their business pain. Consider, have you ever caught yourself babbling in a sales conversation? In this episode, John Kaplan admits that sometimes, he catches himself talking too much and has to pause and refocus the conversation on the person he’s talking to. He walks through some of the small tricks he uses to keep sales conversations centered on the buyer and their needs and challenges.
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7. Finding the Business Pain
One of the most common reasons deals stall is when sales reps aren’t attached to the biggest business issues facing their buyers. Minimize your number of stalled opportunities next year by improving your ability to uncover business pain. Finding and attaching to a big business problem gets you access, funding and urgency. How do you find the pain and then how do you attach your solution to it? In this episode, John Kaplan shares how to adjust your approach.
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8. Making QBRs Valuable
Listen to this episode to help make your QBRs a differentiator for your customers. Tim Caito joins us to talk about how you can flip the script on negative buyer perceptions and get your customers to see value in a QBR. He covers the pre-sale, during-sale and post-sales steps reps need to take to improve QBR execution, long-term account monetization and most importantly, customer outcomes.
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9. Selling to More Experienced Professionals
If you are just starting your sales career, it can be intimidating when you’re selling to much more experienced executives. After all, how can you convince them that you understand their business, when they can tell you’re only a few years out of college? Great selling, is great selling, no matter your experience or background. If you’re new to a selling role and routinely calling on high-level professionals — this podcast is for you. John Kaplan shares how to prepare for conversations with experienced buyers in a way that will drive success and help you feel less intimidated going in.
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10. Lessons Learned in Sales Series
Our final recommendation is a bonus! Our Lessons Learned in Sales series is meant to provide reps with anecdotes from sales veterans, stories that changed the course of their careers. After all, one of the best ways to become elite at what you do is to learn from those who are already at the top of their game. Even if you’re coming off one of your best years yet, take it from Mia Hamm, “It is more difficult to stay on top than to get there.” Listen to one episode in this series a week and you’ll have new tactics and skills you can use to start the year off right.
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/Patrick McLoughlin
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Brian Walsh
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Antonella O’Day
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Tim Caito
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Marty Mercer
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Dale Monnin
- Lessons Learned in Sales W/ Kamonte McCray
Sharpen Your Skills Next Year
Becoming the best of the best—and staying there—takes a concerted effort. The Audible-Ready Sales Podcast is built for uncommon salespeople; those who are willing to go the extra mile and do the uncommon actions that their competitors aren’t willing to do. We publish new episodes every week. Download, listen, and write down some top takeaways. Save each episode for a refresher when you need it. You can subscribe to our podcast on all the major streaming platforms.
