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snails friends happy weekend to you I hope it was a great week and you're refreshing and recharging over the weekend I'm on my patio catching up on some reading and I'm way overdue for a blog post and the story I want to tell you just seemed better to share verbally than trying to put all this in writing it was a fascinating conversation with a Senior Sales Leader I've had and there's a couple lessons from it I want to pass along and and also speaking of stories you probably noticing that gash on my forehead let me just leave it at this I had an incident on Wednesday with a unicycle and that's all I'm gonna tell you I'll rather leave it mysterious because if I told you what really happened and how I was injured by this unicycle you would make fun of me so I'll leave it with intrigue to my story with the Sales Leader I was having a planning call for an upcoming training session I was supposed to do this one in person and we moved it to virtual like 90% of my meetings although I do have a live in-person workshop coming up in a city next week I'm not gonna name but I'm gonna be in a room with 60 sales managers that'll be very far spread out and I'm really excited about the opportunity to do that in person so I'm having this planning call with the Senior Sales Leader to talk through this session I think I'm gonna be leading about messaging and sharpening their sales story and then upgrading their prospecting because that's certainly a challenge they've been having but as I began to do more discovery and the Sales Leader was very transparent with me about what was going on in their business right now he started to tell me about some deals they were losing and struggles they were having where they weren't owning their sales process and they they felt like they were going in and doing these really polished presentations and they didn't feel natural and deals they felt like they should be winning they were losing two smaller competitors and as I listened I basically just got real blunt I said it sounds like you and your sales team are getting outsold and you're counting on doing this big polished you know presentation in the boardroom trying to win these enormous deals but from the feedback you're getting it sounds like your competitors are more relational they're more invested they're more flexible they are coming across as more understanding of their current situation so as I started to dig a little more he started to share more about their process and some of the discomfort on how it doesn't feel right and they used to sell in a more I'll call it casual informal way where it was dialoguing and building relationships and getting to understand and they would be out in front of the client and kind of planting seeds for them and leading him down a path and it then became natural for them to win deals so the whole process led me to ask some really hard questions and we decided right and on the fly of this planning meeting to talk about sharpening their messaging and improving their prospecting to change the whole focus of the meeting they even changed who we were going to invite and actually turn it into a coaching session on owning our sales process doing better discovery on the front end not just following some arbitrary instructions from some consultants buying process that their big client was laying out saying come on in and you know do your dog and pony show and submit this proposal and you know having everybody lined up like a circus act for their their one hour pitch in the boardroom so I'm really looking forward to putting that that meeting together I just want to challenge you are you owning your sales process or are you letting the prospect dictate to you how you're gonna work and are you presenting prematurely where it's impossible then to come across as a consultant and a value creator and an advisor because you're showing up in demo or presentation mode or are you short changing the relationship building and the discovery on the front end are you really pushing them to let you get exposure to various stakeholders or constituents who are gonna influence this decision or whose opinions you may really need to put together the right type of presentation and also proposal so what I'll tell you is well I don't love everything in the Challenger sale and and I've been critical of it in several ways in the past the one thing I'm absolutely on board with is that in my own business when I'm selling and in my big clients business who like the folks that are involved in deeper longer more complex sales the reality is the salespeople that win those deals are the ones that stick to their guns they sell from pundants mentality they don't just acquiesce to everything the prospect asks I have a whole chapter and sales truth on this about owning your sales process and staying out of the procurement pit so you can differentiate yourself and you can come across as a consultant and an adviser and you're not just putting little numbers and boxes for procurement people so there's my challenge for you that was just a really intriguing story I've got that training session coming up with that client sales team and their and their leaders and and I can't wait to do that so there's my challenge for you how well are you owning your sales process and the other thing I'll just share with you while I've got you is I want you to read my other blog post that's on my website Mike Weinberg comm slash blog about the successes I'm seeing right now in the industry in the last couple weeks I'm getting a ton of email and messages from salespeople that are setting personal records for selling and as hard as it is and as confusing it as is and as strong as the coronavirus headwinds are I see b2b and b2c sales people bragging right now about setting some personal records and sales and I I know that might not be the case in your industry and your market may be destroyed but I tell the story in that blog post of my favorite car salesperson who set a personal record and the month of May this guy is number one in the country for Volvo it's Tom I highlight him in a chapter 15 of sales truth and there's a link also in that post if you want to download that chapter for free there are people like Tom whose dealership is effectively closed he's seeing prospects and customers by appointment only and he set a personal record you can doing this for 20 years he sold more cars in the month of May than he ever had in his life and I'd have sales people just said to me no it's about 400% of quota blowing away goals I talked to a chief revenue officer at a client just yesterday morning I was at the park taking a walk and we were just catching up and and she was telling me about a ton of changes it that they had made and the upgrading of their messaging and doing better accountability and having people be really focused on the right accounts and being more strategic and they are beating their sales plan so be encouraged friends there's lots of good stuff going on I wish you great selling in the next week and of course tons of new sales