[00:00:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: By the Sales IQ Network, this is the Sales IQ Podcast. I'm your host, Luigi Prestinenzi, and each week we'll be going on a journey that will inspire you, motivate you, and help you be the best sales professional you can be. Our focus will be on mindset, tactics, and the strategies that will enable you to create more pipeline, and win more deals. 

Welcome to another episode of the Sales IQ podcast. I'm excited to have you back again for what will be another incredible podcast. And if you're joining us for the first time, welcome, we hope you take away some content or some ideas that will help you be the very best sales professional you can be because that's our mantra here on the podcast.

We're all about elevating the world of professional selling, helping sellers become the best I can be. Now this week we have an episode where I was a guest. I was a guest on one of our other podcast called the Inside Inside Sales podcast, hosted by the fantastic Daryl Praill who's, the Chief Marketing Officer at Agora Pulse.

And in this episode, we're going to talk about less is more, and you thinking you'd probably think, what do you mean. Meaning sales. I have to do more to make more, but the reality is in a world where there's so many pieces of technology, our prospects and our clients, and our customers are getting inundated with information.

This is where we, as a sales professional, need to take a step back and really give some consideration to why are we reaching out to our prospects in the first place and in a world where, as I said before, Our clients and our prospects are getting overwhelmed with information. We've got to give some and put some real thought into what is the point of view that I'm bringing to my prospects and clients today.

And why should they care? This is the subject of the conversation I have with Daryl, because it is around the fact that just because you do. Doesn't mean you're going to produce more results and we see these time and time again and, and the beak the best way to bridge that trust gap, because there is a trust gap.

There is a trust gap between buyers and sellers. We know that the best way to bridge that gap. Is to make it a more personalized, relevant experience for your prospects and your clients.

[00:02:20] Sponsor: This podcast is brought to you by the Create Pipeline program from Sales IQ Global. This program will equip you with the skills, tools, and confidence to run an outbound strategy so you can generate more qualified opportunities and close more deals. Hear what Ellis from DocuSign has been able to achieve since joining the program and our incredible community.

"So, my name's Ellis, I work at DocuSign as an ABR. And the reason I started Sales IQ was because I really needed that guidance and that training to make sure that the outreach that I was doing was hitting the nail on the head. So I was lucky enough to start the program early on in this role and since then I've been pretty successful and last quarter I finished on a 185%. So I've seen some huge results by adopting the principles."

Our next cohort is starting soon. So to learn more, go to www.salesiqglobal.com, or if you have a team of sellers, talk to us about our in-house offering. Control your pipeline, control your destiny, with Sales IQ.

[00:03:27] Luigi Prestinenzi: Now, as I mentioned before, I was a guest on the Insight Inside Sales podcast. So this is a new podcast. We'll start a new one. It's actually fast approaching 200 episodes, but we've taken the opportunity to partner with. And bring his podcasts to the sales IQ podcast network so that we can give more content.

We can give more insight and value to our incredible community. So the link will be on the show notes. Please go across, listen to that podcast from Darrell, Darrell shares, incredible insight. He's worked as a CMO. He's worked as a CRO, so he's worked across multiple. Areas of the revenue engine and he's seen it from both sides and brings a different level of thinking when it comes to the sales and marketing model.

So do yourself a favor, jump on, check it out. But before you jump on, don't jump on and check his first. Check out this episode, I get, as I said, I'm the guest, I'm the one that's being interviewed on this occasion, bringing my thought and my, my view on the world that is selling and my view on the world that in sales today less is more.

[00:04:39] Darryl Praill: Here to explain what I mean by doing less straight from Sales IQ Global headquarters in sunny, beautiful Australia who is the master of less? Don't ask the women in his life, the Luigi Prestinenzi, the man himself, a legend. How you doing, sir?

[00:05:00] Luigi Prestinenzi: Mate, I'm doing good Darryl, I don't know and that's the first time I've ever, ever. Anyone has introduced me as the master of less well electric master of LinkedIn, you know, title, the master of list.

[00:05:13] Darryl Praill: I was given that title by my wife. I'm a honeymoon. I think it's a compliment. I'm not sure, but there you go. What are you going to do? My first, before we get into, what do we mean by less? Thanks for having me on the network, dude. Thank you so much. I'm a part of the family.

[00:05:26] Luigi Prestinenzi: Mate. Well, you know, the minute I heard that there was a bit of a change I've thought, you know, that great trigger event to have a chat with you because obviously we've been working together for such a long time now, mate, and the big fan of the podcast, I listened to it many times on my run and yes, it makes me run a fire.

Just ramble your rants, get me angry. And as a result, that's tonight, it's absolute privilege to have you part of our network and either elevate ourselves the sales profession, because I think you know, the profession needs a bit of help. The more and more difficult as he comes, the more and more.

[00:06:03] Darryl Praill: So let's talk about less.

I mean, I gave him my opening ramp, but I know you've got an opinion on this. You gotta take did anything I say resonate with you. Do you want to go off on a different tangent? Do you want to build upon what I said? Where do you want to go with this?

[00:06:15] Luigi Prestinenzi: Absolutely. I think, I want to go down this path. I think the fact of the matter is that the data doesn't lie, right?

We are seeing what is it? Data tells us 24% of emails are opened 50% of deleted before they're open. Sellers under 30% of sellers are hitting target salespeople spending, what? 30% of their time selling. I mean, the data's sitting there, it's staring at us right in the face telling us that there's a problem.

If you're looking at this, if you are anyone that you're looking at this saying, you know, well, this isn't really good data. Like it's probably not something you want to be sitting around the boardroom table with the executive. Looking at this going, Hey, we're making a real difference. In our last day, 24% of people, I get, we're doing all these activity.

We're spending more money on tech than ever before. We've got, you know, CRM, we've got automation platforms. You've got call listening devices. We've got data in Richmond tools. You've got all these things, but yet sales performance is down. What's that telling us. And I think some really, you know, some real conversations need to be happening now about why, because I think throwing more tech at, at a problem is not going to fix the problem.

It's going to make the problem worse.

[00:07:32] Darryl Praill: So let's talk about some of the symptoms and, you know, I opened up kind of the same, we're trying to do too much. And, and we're continuing, we need to do less. So I'll give you I'll I'll, I'll share a symptom and then you jump in when you got symptoms. And maybe we can get sad for that from the doctor and make the H go away.

And so, you know, one symptom I see over and over and over again. As I get messages, whether it's cold email or it's a voicemail on my phone, which by the way, I do check my voicemails. And even when I don't, it's all automated, it comes to me as an, as a text-based email that I can read. Or it's a social media outreach, usually connection requests.

And there's literally zero relevance to me. And I used it and I've used this term before. With my tribe here on the show. I go, I think, I think relevance is more than just it's it's it's personalization plus, you know, saying, Hey. Yeah. Okay, great. But why do I care in my role? You know, what's the pain that I'm feeling?

What is it I'm struggling with every single day and how can you make this relevant to me? Because I need resolution to this pain, right. Freaking out. And by the way, I want to be clear on this one, for those who have missed me. Talk about this. When you come to me and say something, I'm like, Hey, you've got a big number to hit this year, a sales quota.

You've got a big number. That's not really relevant to me. Every single sales leader has got a big number. You know what I've got, I got a sales team right now, but I just listened to three or four of the recordings and they all sucked despite all their training. Can you fix that for me? Cause that's relevant to me right now.

Okay. So. Why do we have these impersonal generic outreach messaging? I think it's cause the rushing as opposed to taking time and to do less outreach and make the messages they send to people like me more relevant. To me, that's an example of doing less thoughts.

[00:09:28] Luigi Prestinenzi: Absolutely. But I think the less part requires more effort and work.

And this is like, we're asking sellers to go, well, think about a cadence. You're going to set up your sequencing tool and you want to do this and you want to do that. But hang on a second, let's actually take a step back and go, well, actually, who are we serving first? Let's think about what does a day in the life of them look like and simply just giving them a picture of a persona and saying here, we've done the work for you.

This is what your customer's pains are. This is what their challenges and opportunities and. But hang on. Do you truly understand what those goals and objectives are? Right. And I think that is a big issue because sellers are really going into the detail about what is happening in our buyer's world, because you know that the element of building a relationship or any form of trust comes from eight B empathy.

But I can, we truly show any empathy if we don't truly have an understanding of what. What the day looks like, what are the challenges in the dike? Like you said, you've listened to a call. What's the sales leader thinking when he listens to that call. Right? So these are the things that I think sellers are missing now.

And one of the things that I'm not that old, I, even though I turned 40 next month. Right. But you know, when I started in sale sales, we didn't have the remarkable LinkedIn. We didn't have some of the tools that we've got today, where I can press a button. I can get a mobile now. We had to be curious, we had to go out there and look, we had to search, we had to do research.

We had to talk to people. We had to build our own lists. Do you know what that itself is? A skill that I think is missing for a lot of people that searching under a rock. You have a look, nothing there, go to the next, you know, that whole, I think that process is being missed. And we're trying to quickly focus on ramp, but we're forgetting there's some fundamental skills that we're missing that sellers are missing.

And that is, you know, I've got an email here, ease video innovate in animation, something you're in the market for that's the first line wise with typically range between 5,000 and 12,000 per project, depending on length, if anything looks interesting, we'd love to pitch some ideas. And then I've got the next one.

And then the next one that says, are you not the person responsible for video in, you'll be automated. I've got it here. See automated sequence in play now. Right? Why is that even relevant for me, Daryl? Like what rate? Like, that's absolutely crazy to think that these are them and there is countless and countless emails like these.

Right. For me, that's not selling. That's absolutely not selling. That's the opposite of selling.

[00:12:26] Darryl Praill: Yeah, I agree. That's spamming, but people are trying to do more. They're trying to do the activity so they don't have time to do this. So we'll go down more examples. But I mean, I know what people are thinking right now, so let's just, let's just deal with that right now.

People are saying. I don't have time to do less because I've got a boss or I've got a big nut I have or I have to have so many conversations. I have to do so many outreaches a day. How can I possibly do less? I hear you. But that's not realistic. So what do you say to that? I mean, you're the sales trainer.

You're, you're the guy who not only trains the reps and this is true folks for those who don't know. I and not only just the host of the show, I also am a client of that man right there. Right? Yeah. I hired him for a long time to train my team. So you, you and I would have some blunt conversations where you'd say Daryl.

Dip shit. You got to do this with the teams that have that only dipshit is actually polite. What do you actually say when someone swears at you with an Australian accent, everybody hurts. So I mean, how do you coach these sales reps who would love to do what you're saying, but don't feel they are empowered to do that?

[00:13:44] Luigi Prestinenzi: Well, I think this is this, you know, the time, the time equation constantly comes up and it's easy to say, I don't have time, but I think the one, the thing that made. The high-performing sales professionals a little bit different is they find the time they make it a priority. And we all know that, yes, you can't manufacture more time, but you can choose where you spend your time.

Right. And we've known that we've seen people in your, in your team, that there are some that really, you know, they spend a little bit of extra time per day. Doing what needs to be done so that they can improve and they can change the way they craft messages you know, learn new skills. So yes, it's always going to be a challenge when you've got your manager saying, Hey, I need these.

This is, this is, you know, your activity levels, et cetera. Okay, cool. We can't change that. We can't control that, but you know what I can control. If I'm going to listen to a podcast. I mean, I remember you saying guys, he's a podcast. This is my podcast. This is my inside inside sales podcast. Go off and listen to this.

They had incredible content already. They could listen to, and they could implement immediately some chose to do it. Some did. And as you know, the ones that chose to do it made improvement. And I think this is the biggest thing that sellers have today, that it comes to a point of choice. There are going to choose to improve or they're not now.

Yes, we go. This is not about creating a hustle culture, mentality and work more hours, but you know what an erudite me, and you can find that era day. If your morning walk, you can listen to a podcast. You can, you know, read a little bit of a book. There there's many ways to find that hour where you can proactively even half an hour.

We did half an hour thinking about it. It's two and a half hours away. That's 10 hours a month of learning. Self-learning how many sellers have gone chorus, all these great platforms and they don't listen to a coal, right? We've had this conversation before they don't actually sit there and review a call.

They don't review their deals like that. For me is a choice. They're making a choice, not to focus on improving and not making a commitment to excellence. And this is where unfortunately, I, I believe that the people that make that choice not to focus on that commitment to excellence will actually be made redundant in the next five years.

They will not be, they'll not have a role to play because, you know, sellers don't, I mean, buyers don't want to engage with a sales person. They can't create value and isn't actually gonna deliver anything outside of what a website information sheet. And we've spoken about that, right? We've spoken about the demo, the demo that isn't contextualized, isn't customized and isn't fit to purpose for the prospect.

So why the hell do they need a salesperson running that when they can just watch it on YouTube and they can just watch it on the website. Right. Right. So I hope that answered your question.

[00:16:44] Darryl Praill: It does. And, but I bet you, we had people in our audience saying, okay, now I'm really confused braille, because you're saying to do.

Last, but then Prestinenzi just said, you got to spend a half hour a day learning new content and maybe another half hour today, you know, kind of just skimming, I'm listening to some of your calls. So isn't that more. And letting me clarify why it's less, because if you use the example, you have eight hours a day of doing prospecting, whether you're prospecting, closing deals, whatever, what Luigi just said was as you know, Negative seven hours a day to do that.

Cause you're gonna put a half hour into learning new content, half hour, reviewing your own calls and comparing what you did well and what you did, right? So you have seven hours a day, you're doing less prospecting. However, because you invested in the training and you invested in reviewing your calls and see what you're doing right and wrong.

What happens is like a pro athlete who practices when they practice. Their success rate goes up, their conversion rate, your conversion rate, my friend will go up. So you will convert more activity and more pipeline those seven hours than you do in the eight hours right now. So you're doing less prospecting, but you're being smarter and you're being more intentional about it.

That's an example of doing last nap. Let me throw an example out there, going back to the boss situation. I hear you. Your boss is a big believer in activity. I think what you need to do in any to have a hard conversation with them, maybe your next one-on-one and you can challenge them. Not every boss can handle this.

I get this. This is your call. You can be bold. You can be brave. I will tell you this. It is an, it is a employee, a job seekers market right now. So if you're not happy with the answer, you'll get another job in 33 seconds. I'm not making that up. Okay. I wouldn't go to the boss and I would say, okay, you want me to do all this activity?

95,000 outreaches a day. Okay. What do you really, what do you really want? Do you want that activity or do you want conversations or do you want outcomes? Are they like, what is it that really matters? Cause I'm thinking we have a quota. So I'm thinking you want closed deals. So I'm thinking, you know, you want, you know, a number of conversations.

And you're thinking it's a numbers game. If I do Donnie 5,000, I'll have one conversation today. And then one in three conversations with close, who the hell knows what if I could do, you know, half of those touches, but have two or more conversations, you know, two acts or more conversations. Would you be happy?

Cause then I have conversations, which is really what you're getting at. And they're going to say, if you can get more conversations, most of them, 99% of sales leaders will say, if you're going to have more conversations and do less knock yourself out, right. And they'll use that super voice. So you've got to have that conversation and easiest way to do it is say, great.

Let's do an AB test. You know, I'm going to spend the next week or I'll spend mornings doing my time and afternoons doing your time, or the next two weeks I'll do this. And my time we'll compare and contrast, do an AB test to see how it works. And then you, this way you can prove to your manager that doing less as, as she smarter, because when you're doing less, you have.

To personalize the message to make it more relevant, to do more research. In fact, you have more time to actually research before you do discovery. You have more time to actually do your call planning before you place the. All right. This is the point. Sometimes my friends less is more, believe it or not.

Anyway, Luigi have you had success in coaching, a sales leaders on our sales reps on how to do less?

[00:20:27] Luigi Prestinenzi: Absolutely. And I think there's a couple of good examples here, right? There's a gentleman that I keep referring to his name's Ellis Abrahams from DocuSign. He's been on our podcast before. And one of the things that he's done so well, He's the, he's the key when it comes to doing less and getting more, right.

He's doing when he was an STR, he was doing about 14, 15 outreaches a day. And your contacts to reaching new contacts. And you'd be saying, mate, that's low. It should be 50, but it was booking four to five appointments. Right. And the reason for that is because he was spending a couple of hours in the research phase of his list, finding the right trigger, making sure there was relevance and it was personalized and therefore he was getting a high level of response.

Right. Spending more time, making sure if they didn't respond to the first or second or third email in the thread, maybe he needs to alter the. And alter the relevant aspect of it. What did that, where did that lead into promotion? A finished a year, 180% of target, right? That's a key example of doing less activity, but making the quality higher level of quality, getting more outcome from the process.

But I think the key for this is. We know that there's a trust gap between buyers and sellers. So we know it. And again, we can reference a lot of data to say, buyers just don't trust sales. How can you, when somebody's pitching me on an email that they don't even know that I need, right? It's pure spam already on dubious about the type of messages coming in.

I'm getting these phone calls, et cetera. There's already that barrier that's update. Right? So why are we fueling the issue when it comes to trust? When, if I take the time to research you Daryl, if I take the time to, if I'm having a discovery, even a discovery call, for example, if I'm not doing any research on your organization, if I'm not doing any research on you, if I'm not coming with a relevant point of view, if I haven't got any really good questions that I've thought about before I meet with you, why should you take the time to spend with me?

We gotta, we gotta ask ourselves some serious Christians here. We are not order-takers, we've gotta be seen as value creators. We've gotta be seen as somebody that's actually delivering more than just a transaction because that's the risk associated with the sales proficient right now is the more that we try to automate and we don't deliver value and we don't create any value in the process.

The higher, the risk of the process being completely stripped out of the sales person's control. And we'll just give the buyer to say, Hey, don't even worry about interacting with someone, just go to this website and you can interact. You can get what you need to buy because you're not getting any value from these guys anyway.

Right.

[00:23:23] Darryl Praill: Here's the one thing I'll say to you, folks your sales professionals, what, what do you like more, what attracts you to this profession? Beyond the commission check. Do you like being a trained monkey? Who does all their sequences and touches? So you can hit those 95,000 touches a day. Is that what you'd like?

And that's what you like, great keep on doing, or do you like doing the research to get to know your ideal customer, to understand how your solution can have. Them why it's relevant to them, how you can make them more successful in a consultative fashion, doing that research. So, you know, the angle to take, to start a conversation, to have a back and forth.

Do you like it, the relationship side? Do you like the cycle and the process of selling from start to finish to, you know, close deal, if you like the ladder, as opposed to the form. Then the trick here is simply to have more conversations and to have more conversations. The answer counterintuitive as it is, is to do less selling and to do more actual training preparation.

Research bliss optimization. You know, that's what it comes down to. So the choice is yours, but Luigi would never lie to you because he's the man. When I was getting ready for the show, I had two thoughts come to my mind that I thought were just sound bite, worthy on today's theme. Tell me what you think.

Luigi. I, this is why I came up with my two sound bites. Results matter more than activity, soundbite, number one, and number two outcomes over

[00:25:10] Luigi Prestinenzi: outreach. That's a good one. That's a good one. That's a, that's actually one. And you know what? Just on that, right? Just like we do in selling people, don't buy what we sell.

They buy the outcome. We help them achieve. If your manager is, is banging on the door for activities, just ask the question. Are you paying me for activities or are you paying me for results? 'cause I'm pretty sure they hired you to deliver a result, not an activity active. Yes, it leads to result, but the most important part of the process is the result.

[00:25:40] Darryl Praill: Well, we'll leave it there. Okay. I'd be remiss because we have the man, the legend, the one, the only Luigi presidency in the house, Luigi, for those who are not familiar with your podcast, brother, give us the quick and dirty. What is it all about?

[00:25:54] Luigi Prestinenzi: Okay. The podcast, the sales, like you podcasts a passion project of mine, but actually I started it so that I could learn more.

I wanted to talk to people, the books that we read, I talked to these people so I can be better at being the, be the best PR professional that I can. But it talks about mindset. It talks about tactics and it talks about strategy. All around how to create pipeline and close more deals. So check it out.

Sales, IQ podcast. I think it's pretty good. I've even had the man Darrell on it, or he might have to be, you might need to be my I've never had a guest come twice. You might have to be the first Darryl.

[00:26:29] Darryl Praill: So funny story there. Folks I've actually been on there twice. Once we go to the actual library, there's only one version of.

Because Luigi recorded me very early, maybe the first 10 episodes of his new podcast when he launched it. And they waited for like six months for my episode, you appear. And I finally had to go to him and say, Louie, G just, you know, those sounding, you know, in polite or rude, where, where am I doing? And then he had to say, I buggered up the episode and I didn't record properly.

And I've just been hiding my head. Hoping you would never notice. So I contend I've been on it twice. Dammit. So there you have it three times. That's okay. But. That's it, that's it that's the first episode on the new network in the can. But this is episode number 176. That means we're 24 episodes away from hitting the big 200.

So if you have any ideas on what we should do to celebrate that milestone, let me know, would love to hear it. We're we're a little bit of ways maybe. Well, if I do, the math was I may, maybe six months away, so it's going to happen. I want you to be part of it in the meantime, check us out, follow like subscribe, share review.

Give us five stars. Tell Alexa you think we're awesome. Whatever it might be. I am just thrilled to be talking with you again. My name is Darryl. That's my friend Luigi. You should follow his podcast too. We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye-bye

[00:27:58] Credits: This show has been recorded remotely produced by Sales IQ Global, audio editing and music production by Stefan Malliate. Show notes by Victoria Mathieson and graphic design by Julie Marshall. Don't forget to leave a rating and review on your podcast player. And if you want to find more about the programs that we offer at Sales IQ, head to www.salesiqglobal.com

This episode was digitally transcribed.