[00:00:00] Darryl Praill: My name is Darryl Praill. I'm your host and you, my friend, well, you and I we're gonna go on a journey every single week, talking to the industry's most accomplished sales legends, as they share with us, their tips, their tricks, their techniques, and their tactics to becomes sales rockstars. You simply need to do what they're doing and you will achieve similar nirvana. If you like to laugh, you like to be entertained, if you'd like to go off on tangents and tell stories, you're going to love what you're going to hear next. Sit back, relax, it's going to get real.

How's everybody doing today? Folks, it's another freaking great day. That's right. It's not just a good. It's a fricking great day. I'm looking outside. The sky is blue. It's sunny. The trees are waving in the wind. There's green then, you know, in Canada, Ryan Bass, like our summer season is very, very short and it's, it's like very, very hot.

So I have to savor these moments of, of awesomeness. So that. That's I'm just in a good mood. It's put me in a good mood. I hope you're in a good mood too, where you're at today. Gotta ask you. Are you, are you out running? Are you driving the car? Are you out for a walk? Are you at the gym? What is it you're doing?

Because I would suggest that many of those activities, like, for example, let's say you were out running, listening to this podcast. Let's say you're at the gym. Let's say you're like me and you listen to your podcast. Well cutting the grass. I listen to 'em everywhere, but cutting the grass is what I'm gonna put on the I got my Bose noise, canceling headphones.

I put on the, the, the muffs put on my baseball cap, which is the only time I ever seen to wear a baseball cap. Cuz this head does not look pretty in a baseball cap. I just want you to know that I am not that guy who can fall off a baseball cap. But it's blocking the sun and I listen to my podcast and every one of those things, what I'm being, there's gonna be a theme today.

Ready? I'm gonna get ready to right. Normally I'd like to tease you and torment you, but the theme is gonna be I'm being proactive. I'm being proactive about my health. I'm being proactive about my, my lawn care. Although some, my neighbors might argue, I need to be more proactive about my lawn care, but that's a whole different conversation.

We had a conversation recently with James Buckley, where he was being, he was being reactive. Which then segue to proactive, because if you recall in that episode, he'd been diagnosed with type two diabetes. So then he had to react to that. And how was he gonna respond? And then he was, then he took the initiative and got working out and doing the gym thing.

And six months later, he is now pre. Type two diabetes and on his way to, you know, wonders things. So he took control of a situation that James would not argue that perhaps he allowed to happen. And on that one, I shared how I'm overweight and I've allowed that to happen. That's the thing, when we look at our lives, When we look at our decisions on a day to day basis.

When we look at our jobs, we have all these DEC these mini decisions, right? Am I gonna take lunch now or not? Am I gonna open this email now or not? Am I gonna respond to this troll on LinkedIn or not? So we're either reactive or we're proactive. And what's really interesting is your approach to how you are.

Choosing to tackle these daily decisions has a direct impact. On your success on your wellbeing, on your mental health, on your success, as you may define it, whether that be career income, happiness, whatever.

Give you another example. I I'm laughing cuz I used to be reactive when it came to my wife. Oh sugar. Today's her birthday. I don't have a card or a gift. I should go get something. And then I learned over the years, my life got better. Cuz she would know she would wake up. Right. It's my birthday. And then she would see, I gotta go honey. And she would know I'm running to the store to get something. She could figure that out. And that just didn't look good.

So I started to figure out that if I was proactive. So if she said something, you know, I really want. I just, my I'm really, so lady, I need a massage and she makes a comment in passing. Take note of that, write it down massage, and then know a couple days later, go buy a massage.

When the birthday comes around a week later, boom, it's God. Then she's got a massage. Right? So my life was less stressful and she thought I was far more. In tune and with what she wanted. And she thought I was an active listener and she valued that more and her relationship got better. Whew. All of this is about how you make decisions that are affecting your life.

Let me ask you this guys every single day, how many times a day do you get a phone call coming. You look at your phone and you see the number coming in, or you get an email or you get a slack or a teams message. And, and as soon as you see the number or you see the name coming in or go bold indicating there's a new message there.

You've not even opened it. You've not answered the phone. You've just seen that boom, this person has reached out to you. You start freaking out a little bit because you're like, I know what this is about. Son of a bitch. I don't, I don't wanna deal with this right now. Right? I do it all the time. Which is ironic because one of the things I mentor my staff and I have for years, and this is something I do all the time is I get very proactive about setting expectations about communicating up and communicating down, because about, about making sure there's a paper trail of our decisions in case there's any blow back in the future about these decisions and who did what those are some examples of areas where I've gotten proactive to protect myself and to make sure that everybody's.

And when I've done that, it's been huge. When you're in sales, you have an interesting kind of three-legged stool. You've got on leg, number one, you and your success. You've got on leg. Number two, your boss, your employer, and, and how you interact with them and how they view you and how they nurture and grow you, or get rid of you.

And you get on leg. Number three. Your customers, your prospects you're dealing with and how they rely upon you. And they need to negotiate with you and they need to get information from you and they need to trust you. This three-legged stool. Is proportionately comfortable or uncomfortable based on how proactive or reactive you are.

[00:06:56] Sponsor: Are you in sales, but you're not using a sales engagement tool? Then you're probably losing out on revenue because you are not engaging with prospects at the right time, with the right cadence, and with enough persistency. You need VanillaSoft. Go to vanillasoft.com.

[00:07:11] Darryl Praill: That's me setting the stage. We've never had this conversation before. So. I was hanging out with my good friend, JM Wilke. If you don't know who JM is, she is with Scott Leese she's you know, I don't think Scott would disagree. She's ready to secret sauce in that organization. She's the one that makes everything rock JM. She's amazing. Scott, you know, he looks pretty. He wears the hats, which I can't do, but it's JM.

JM will come, and she will tell us today how everything is proactive and reactive and you are a byproduct of the decisions you make. She's gonna give us some coaching, some advice, and hopefully she's reactive right now and tells me how awesome I am. JM. Welcome to the show.

[00:07:57] JM Wilke: Ah, thanks for having me. Yes, you, you can pull off the hat. Oh, you can do. I believe in you.

[00:08:02] Darryl Praill: It's so bad JM I was cutting the grass last weekend and I had the hat on and I, I, so the hat only comes out when I'm cutting the grass. That's it. And my wife happened to be in the house in our screen room. So we we're, we at three acres of land. So I'm like out a distance from the house going back and forth on the lawnmower, LoRa lawnmower.

And, and she tells me afterwards, she's like, who's that? Because a, I was wearing a hat and I, she's not used to me wearing a hat. And I happened to be wearing, I was definitely not wearing work clothes. It was a reactive decision. Like, oh, I gotta cut the grass. And I was still wearing, I was still wearing nice clothes, if you will.

She's like, The hat with the clothes you look good. That was, she was like, I don't know who that guy is. Cutting the grass, but you look good. So now I just proactively decided, decide to wear a hat everywhere in the hopes. I get lucky. So who knows? That's

[00:08:54] JM Wilke: Wear a hat in your nice clothes. Cutting the grass.

[00:08:56] Darryl Praill: Exactly. Whole formula. Talk to me a little bit about the, the topic. This is something. And folks often when I go to my guests, I, you know, sometimes I go to them because I've seen them say something and I'm like, I want you on the show talking about this other times. I know that they're amazing. Now Scott and JM are working with us here at a Agora so I've had a chance to get to know them really, really well.

We've had Scott on the show before first time for JM. And I said, what do you wanna talk about? And she was the one who said this now I underst. JM talks to tons of sales people every single day. So I want to hear the backstory on why this was near and dear to your heart.

[00:09:31] JM Wilke: Yeah, I mean, it there's, there's not a lot of science to it. It's just that I've learned both from myself when I was an AE in my, in when I was in ops. And then from talking and, you know, working with so many sales people over the years, that if you're not proactive about. Being taking care of the little things, taking care of the basics, taking care of, you know, making sure that you're doing the things that the other person might not be doing.

You know, that's the, that's the sales rep at the competitor. That's trying to, that's also trying to close who you're, who you're talking to. If you're not proactive about really, you know, making sure that you're uncovering all the things with your prospect and having really clear action plans with them It's just not gonna clap.

[00:10:16] Darryl Praill: All right. So there's a lot of things we can be proactive about. What do you wanna touch on first?

[00:10:21] JM Wilke: I think that a good one would be talking through controlling what you see control. Oh, cool. And then building from there. Okay.

[00:10:28] Darryl Praill: So where do you wanna start? Cause I've got lots of thoughts on this one. Cause I've seen too many people who want to control everything and they have serious issues. Mm-hmm and then I've seen other people who voluntarily decide to control nothing and then complain why their world and their life sucks. So talk to me about this.

[00:10:49] JM Wilke: Yes. You hit that spot on. And a lot of it comes down to being one, okay with delegation. Being okay with, you're gonna mess up sometimes. Right. And being okay with getting all the feedback from people around you and using those resources to really make sure. Sales is a team sport. Right. And so what you wanna do is make sure that when you need to do, when you're trying to close a deal, that you can go in, you can say, I can control when I call this person, I can control how I present my, my product to this person.

I can control how I'm uncovering the pain I can control the mutual action plan that I build with them. I can control making sure that I'm getting all the different. Parties involved that need to be involved. Whether it's, you know, a sales engineer or if it's, you know, getting them in touch with a, a past customer or whatever it may be so that they have the best buyer journey.

Buyer's journey starts so much earlier nowadays. And you know, I'll, I'll never forget kind of reading this book. I don't know. Have you ever read the book about Disney and Disney U it's called Disney U yes. Yes. It is a phenomenal book for those that haven't read. It is a, it's not your typical sales book, but for me it was one of the most impactful books for reading about sales, because it talks about you wanna delight people from the beginning to the end.

Right. And those are the things that you can control. You can control your attitude that you bring, you can control all those different things. You can't control their attitude, but you can't control yours and all those different things. And so that is so important as you think about, you know, how we're gonna close deals and, and just what you bring every single day.

[00:12:31] Darryl Praill: So let's flip the opposite. Let's look at the, the consequential side. If, if I don't do this. Because when you say you can control. Yeah. That's a proactive requirement. In other words, I can, I have to proactively adopt a good attitude. I have to proactively, you know, reach out to my prospects. I have to proactively engage the buying committee or address their questions or respond to their objections.

Which means I may have to proactively do research and I may have to proactively do education. So if I ever get an objection like that, I'm prepared what happens when I don't what happens when I react? What are the con, what, what if I'm listening to this right now? And I'm perhaps I'm a little uncomfortable with the, the topic.

What would some of the symptoms be? I be experiencing that. You're about to share with us that there, that my audience is gonna go, oh, shit. Yeah. That she's talking about me.

[00:13:22] JM Wilke: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when, when now there, now let's take a step back for a second, right? There's not a world where you can be a hundred percent proactive.

There is an element where parts of your day are going to be reactive. So it's how do you minimize the part of your day that you're having to be reactive? And so some of the things that start to happen when you know that reactiveness starts creeping up, let's say it's, you know, 80% of your day, 90% of your day.

You ever been the end of the day. And you're like, God, that was a tough work day. God, I don't feel like I accomplished anything. Oh, I didn't really move the needle on anything. I feel like I have so much more to do. I can just never handle it. Those are the kinds of things that start happening when we're.

In control, you just start losing kind of that element of, you know, I know that I'm moving things forward as opposed to trying to, you know, boil the ocean there. And you know, not really being, having to be reactive with everything that's coming at you as opposed to leaving part of your day and proactively setting aside, you know, calendar time so that you can, you can do those things, right.

Otherwise you're just, you're not developing in the same way. Right? One of the things that you can do instead of, you know, being, you know, an example of like being especially proactive would be all right, every single day, I'm going to, you know, at the very beginning of the day, I'm gonna listen to a podcast.

I love that Darryl guy. He has the best voice, and I love him talking about his hats and his lawn and his sales stuff. And. I wanna listen to that every single morning, cuz I wanna get better and hear new things and hear new people. Those are the kinds of proactive things that you will do. And then you're gonna feel like you're actually growing, you're developing and that's how you start really enjoying things more too.

[00:15:13] Darryl Praill: It's so funny. You mentioned that. Because, so I was listening to you. What was going through my mind was the easiest way to be proactive on so many of these things is with time blocking, which says I'm gonna allocate. I wanna be very intentional about saying this is a, a time to do self education, whether it's a podcast or a blog post, or just read a book, read, read Scott Leese's latest book and, and learn better more about, you know, my, my, my craft and my discipline.

Call blocking about prospecting time call, blocking about follow up with clients. Exactly. And call blocking about being researching my industry and, and, you know, being part of it, call blocking about doing social media, whatever it might be. That's all proactive. The issue comes is I watch two. I watch many people be proactive, take that the other, they do it.

And then they, they just willingly. Walk away from it. Like, you know, yeah. You block this time to do some prospecting, but Y you're really on LinkedIn and you, and there's some great conversations going on. And before you knew it, you just blew an hour on LinkedIn and did zero prospecting. You've gotta look in your face that says, yeah. Oh, I've, I've seen this. Talk to me about that. Cause that's a conscious decision. It's true to abandon our proactiveness.

[00:16:33] JM Wilke: I mean, I, I actually not sure. It's totally conscious, right. The world we live in now is. Kind of a, a world of rabbit holes, right? It is so easy. I've watched my son, he pulls up here. I have a three year old son and he'll look at, you know, YouTube kids, let's say, and I'm watching him.

And I'm like, he's looking at, you know, one, one second. He's looking at a kid unwrapping a toy, which that's a whole nother conversation that we can talk about, but he's looking at a kid unwrapping a toy. And then I look, you know, two minutes later and he's. Looking at, you know, a cartoon in Indonesia and I'm like, how does this happen?

It's very easy to go down rabbit holes nowadays. And so just like a sport, right? If it was going back to the, the part that this is a team sport, right? Sales is a sport. It is not easy to do those little things and to be proactive, right. If it was, and everybody would be a top seller, if it was easy to, everybody knows that, you know, you need to, in order to.

Be healthy. You do diet and exercise, right? But those kinds of things are not easy, right. To be the top athlete. I bet you, if I worked out six hours a day on certain things that I could go through and be pretty darn close to being one of those top athletes, cuz I'm setting aside that time and time blocking.

But the fact of the matter is it's not. Easy. And so making sure that you don't skimp on those basics and that you do do that, but giving yourself grace, if you do fall away from it and then having somebody that can check you on it, right? Like if I was working directly with you Darryl I would be like, I need you to be my accountability, buddy.

And you tell me when I'm. Messing up here and hold me, hold me to the fire. Right? Set yourself a slack note that says, Hey, did you do this today? Right. Hey, did you do that? Set yourself reminders in your calendar, right? How did you do, do a, do a retro every single week, right? What did I do? Well, what did I not do well? And then you can make those adjustments.

[00:18:30] Darryl Praill: So one of the things that I will tell you I've learned over the years, folks is that I, one of the thing you hear me talk about is being self-aware is so. I will be proactive. I will do the time blocking and then I will be the victim of my own stupidity, like I just described, or I get caught up in social media.

And then that's where the self-awareness comes in, where I go, Ugh, this just didn't happen once. This is a recurring tendency. I have noticed that I have, I get consumed and I get distracted. And I'm the only one here paying the price. Cuz then my pipeline shrinks because I didn't prospect. So, what I've started to do over the last several years is seek out certain tools that will help me overcome the things that are stopping me from being successful with my proactiveness.

Right. So for example, that could be as simple as saying I've got. 20 minutes to go on LinkedIn. I'm gonna send an alarm on my phone, 20 minutes go. All right. And there's whole time management tools and techniques out there. That'll have to do that. Mm-hmm but again, the irony of that is that what I just described is being proactive about your own shortcomings so that you can overcome them.

So again, those are conscious decisions. Let's segue for a second. I just mentioned the word pipeline. What are your thoughts about being proactive on pipeline?

[00:19:45] JM Wilke: Yeah, I mean, what does proactive pipeline management mean? Right? What does it look like? And so you can say, all right, so let's take a step, take a step over here.

Right? Pipeline management is, you know, moving your opportunities and your deals from. Through, through the pipeline, but it's also in front of that too, from prospecting all the way to deal creation. And so moving things forward is the key there. Right. And so how do you be proactive? You're reviewing your deals every day.

I understand. There's. Demos that come about. And there's people that wanna talk at certain times, and there's certain things that you, that, that you have to do every single day. But if you can set yourself five minutes at the end of every single day to go and say, all right, I've reviewed every single deal I've reviewed every single next step.

It's strategic. Right. It is something that's actually going to move the needle forward. I'm I know what date it's happening. Right. You can use to, to your point, right? You can use the tools at your disposal, right? You can say, all right, I know that they talked about this. Oh, guess what? When I was redoing my reading this morning, I, I read this article and it was so spot on that.

I think that they would find it very interesting. And so really just taking. Those moments to make sure that you are going in there and that no stone is left unturned and that you can actually go and move things forward so that you don't lose things. Right? The, the, the thing that I see in pipeline management all the time and what I experienced too, when I was in sales is.

You just forget about things or an opportunity goes stale or, you know, oh, I didn't have it. Multi-threaded shoot. I should have done that. Or something is missed. And so by setting that time every single day, it allows you to make sure that you don't miss any of those things. And you can really make sure that you have that whole view.

And the whole world of every single deal that's that's in your pipeline.

[00:21:43] Darryl Praill: If I look at my sales leadership, days over and over again. And, and some of the biggest laments I hear from my operations, my sales operations people is that so many reps have invested time in prospecting. They've got the pipeline.

But then they are not proactive about moving that pipeline on. And this is the part that always blows me away the most is that they're not good at reminding themselves. I need to review. I need to see what's change. I need to continually proactively seek reasons to engage with them. Like you said, sharing an article, this looked pretty, you know, relevant to what we're talking about as well as.

You know, making sure that they're not pro they don't proactively anticipate where they're gonna get stopped. They often I see this over and over again. They assume their champion yeah. Is gonna take 'em across the finish line. They don't proactively think, oh, maybe there's the economic, you know, or influencer, you know, the move, the CFO, for example, who says there is no budget, there's no budget.

[00:22:48] JM Wilke: Who's the who's gonna be the negative Nancy.

[00:22:51] Darryl Praill: Exactly. And then, and, or, or they understand this, but they let their fear of possibly offending their current people that their champion they're talking to. That I wanna, I don't wanna upset them. Mm-hmm or I don't wanna call them what if I call the economic decision maker and they say no, whereas I would rather just not know, and hopefully we can cross that bridge later and maybe they won't get involved as opposed to saying.

Proactively if I call them and they say no, and I realize it's dead. Then that gives me more time to chase other deals, as opposed to saying, and this one's dead now. I got time. I, I will stop working this one, whereas I could keep on working this one and waste a lot of cycles and it's still gonna die.

Right. So yes, proactiveness doesn't always mean good news, but. There's always a silver lining. If you choose to go look for it, but pipeline is huge. That's the, that's the, I's probably one of the biggest areas I see that reps are not proactive, even as stupid. I, I would ask you from your operations experience as making sure that a forecast at closing date is accurate.

[00:23:58] JM Wilke: Ah, yes. It's it's, it's insane, right? Like if I'm, if I wanna make sure that I know, right. Like I wanna be proactive about how much I'm gonna make and I wanna make sure I'm gonna make a boatload of money. And the only way that I can do that to your point, right. It might not be the best news. It might be that, Hey, guess what?

JM, next month your pipeline tells you that you are going to make no money. And I would. Okay, what am I gonna do? And then I can create proactively a really good plan to get there. And those are the kinds of things, a mutual action plan, right? Once you have a deal that's in motion is something that can help you really be and work together in that collaboration with.

The prospect and help you to be proactive together, right? It's not just having to be you, but it's how do you help your prospect be proactive with the people that are on their team? Right. So that you're kind of, you're you have this, you know, prospect collaboration and you can be an extension of their team cuz they are that's what you want is to make sure that they that's what they feel.

[00:25:01] Darryl Praill: I really liked. So I love the mutual action plan because that's just a, a recipe to continue engage into, into broaden the conversation with all the people who will touch or influence the decision making and, and, and the onboarding and, or even the vendor selection, you know, especially if you're in a, in a competitive cycle.

By that mutual action plan. You're just building trust with them. And that alone will differentiate you often nine times outta 10 for your competition. You know, you, you actually gotta have a more expensive offering and they'll choose you because they just trust you more. And it's about, it's not always the price.

It's about my, my tolerance for risk. And if I perceive you have your act together more, I will pay more to have less risk. So I love the mutual action plan, but what I really like beyond that was the simplistic point of view. JM just talked about here about updating your forecast, a date, because she said that way.

I'll know if my pipeline suddenly looks really thin next month, which means I make less money. So too many reps, too many of you're out there going, I just don't have time to update it. I did it once. It's fine. It's good enough. It's admin. I don't have time for admin. I'm a, I'm a mover and a shaker. I'm a deal maker.

No, it's not admin. It's about you knowing how much money you're gonna make and what you need to do to fix that. If your dates are accurate, you have that visibility. It's a totally selfish move. I'd love it. Okay. Ah, let's talk about

resources. This is something that I, I see a lot of reps, completely void. To their detriment. Talk to me about your thoughts about being proactive with the resources that are available to me.

[00:26:40] JM Wilke: Yeah. Well, it's, it's hard, right? You get into this world and you know, you mentioned it too, right? Where it's like, Hey, you know, I, I, I don't want this to go wrong or I don't want to offend a certain person.

Right. Put all the ego aside, put all of, you know, worry about anything really aside if you're making sure that you are coming at it in a way that is, you know, thought thoughtful. Then what you can do is you're able to use your resources, right? So many companies nowadays have knowledge bases. They have, you know, they have the playbook that you can see what's worked, what hasn't worked.

They have, you know, something that they have the case studies at their disposal, right. They have full teams that are willing. If you're talking to someone, you're like, Hey, the person that I'm talking to is actually in marketing. And I want to really understand what a marketer does by. Someone on your marketing team coffee.

Right? Understand what, what makes them tick understand the pains that they go through on a day to day so that you can better talk to them and better help your prospect, right? By doing those kinds of things, and then not only you being proactive there, but also if you need something done, right. You're the quarterback of the.

And so for lack of better words, right? You're the person that is gonna go and you can go tell people what to do. Hey, I need, you know, I need this presentation, so can you please go do this? I need the, this amendment in the contract. This is what they need. So I need to get it by X date so you can plan and execute.

And so using those resources and making sure that you're delegating and not trying to do it all. Because if you try to do it all yourself, then it's not going to, it's gonna take longer to close. And there's no reason to.

[00:28:26] Darryl Praill: One of the biggest things I've heard my rev op teams say to me over and over again. This is when they vent. This is often something that reps don't hear. Okay. I want you to know this. Okay. You do things reactively that causes them to inwardly say, when does your poor ability to plan become my problem? Right. So all of a sudden I need to go. And get you that document. I need to go and get legal to review this thing.

I need to go and whatever I need to go make something because I need to drop everything and hop on a call right now and do a demo. With their technical expert because you promised them this, but you didn't talk to me and I've got other stuff to do. And now it's a big deal and I have to drop everything.

The biggest thing I see is resentment builds up and then those people don't want to help you. If they can avoid it, they do everything they can to not help you because you just. Annoying to them. You're annoying to them. So, but if you're pre proactive, Hey buddy, I may need to bring you in on a demo next Wednesday because we're still lighting this up.

The technical experts is coming in and they wanna specifically look about they wanna drill down on feature a, B and C cuz it's core to their it infrastructure. Cuz then that person can say, okay, I need to go make some custom data. As I custom demo to show that, or I need to go practice to make sure it works or practice, make sure I know what I'm talking about and I'll do that.

And if they reschedule totally cool. Cuz then I'm smarter. I've done the work and I'm ready for whenever they come, but I'm on it. You're doing yourself a disservice when you're reactive and you. You will have all of the resources of the firm given to you when you're proactive consistently. Now. Very true.

This does this. Doesn't just end with sales. So gimme, I mean like the sales rep role and I love the example. The JM just said, she said, if you don't know about marketing, you need to know, buy them my coffee, talk to a marketer. True story. Big shout out to my friend, Chris, big listener on the show. Chris calls me up the other day and texts me and says, dude, we haven't talked in years, but I do listen to your show.

I still think you're a moron. Nothing's changed in that one. Can I buy you a drink? And I'm like, sure. So I have no idea what it's for. All I know is he wants to buy me a drink and he has, he wants to, he wants to pick my, my brain. So we go there and Chris is an accomplished sales leader and he's given me kind of the lay of the land and the company he's been at for several years and what's happened, which was a buildup to say, I'm the head of sales.

And they're now offered me the head of sales and market. And I don't know if I can take on this role, help me understand, cuz you've been a CRO, you've done the VP of sales and marketing. What am I getting myself into? Should I take this on? Do I not? What do I need to do? What am I setting myself up for failure?

You know, what, what should a based on my company and my situation that I've described to you in the staffing levels and the budgets I've got, can I be successful? Help me understand. So here's the senior executive. Being proactive before they made a decision about accepting a job offer, as opposed to just reacting going.

Sure. And then setting themselves up for failure, cuz maybe they. They're just not equipped. Right? And then I gave him some feedback which allowed him then to go on and do additional research in a different, additional due diligence before he made his decision. That's what proactive is all about. Those are resources that are available to you with this revenue ops, whether it's the internal people, it's even the, you know, the whole buying committee, you could be proactive with that.

I love that. Mm-hmm Or do you wanna go from here, JM? What do you wanna talk about next? Anything?

[00:32:02] JM Wilke: I mean, I think we, we, we covered a lot of the, the points here as we kind of went down the different, the different rabbit holes, right. It's just really remembering to use the resources that are at hand controlling what you can control.

Looking at your pipeline and don't let those little things fall by the wayside and that you can keep moving things forward to, to kind of wrap a nice bow around it. Right. It's also making sure that you're asking for, for feedback, right? Hey, I am proactive about asking for feedback. And then I think to your point as well, it's proactively building those relationships so that you can, you know, do all these things easier.

Right? I don't wanna just get a slack message when you need something from me. I don't wanna just get a slack message when something went. I wanna, I want I'm a human, right. I wanna have that connection. And so making sure that when something does go wrong, you go and you can even, you know, sit down, look back and get that feedback and then that'll help you to then better execute in the future.

You're not gonna, we're not gonna do everything perfect. Every single time. And so how do you make sure that you can, then you can proactively ask for that feedback and then. Execute on that feedback, as opposed to just, Hey, I asked for feedback. Cool. Check the box. Right. It's I asked for the feedback. I internalize it, slept on it.

And then I was able to actually do something different the next time that you know, that situation comes up.

[00:33:29] Darryl Praill: All right. For those who don't know JM's a rockstar, you need to follow her on LinkedIn. It's a really cryptic address, right? It's it's, you know, linkedin.com/in/jmwilkie

[00:33:39] JM Wilke: I know very inventive. Yeah.

[00:33:43] Darryl Praill: Very creative. If you're wondering, JM stands for Jean Marie, that is her whole name. Jean Marie. Right. We had this conversation in the green room. It's not Jean. That's not it. It's Jean Marie. Get it right. Or call her JM. But regardless you should call her. She is with Scott Leese consulting. Now you've been there.

What? Six months as their VP of ops, is that right? Yep. Yeah. So, so what's, what's the biggest, what do we need to know about Scott Lee? That the world doesn't know dish on us? Give us the low down. What will he be? Embarrassed or angry on if you shared, go ahead. Do it now. Go.

[00:34:18] JM Wilke: I, I don't know. I, I, I, I feel for the guy he's he's, he's there right here. I've known him for, you know, 12 plus years worked together off and on. He has a, a absolutely massive heart, even though he comes off with a. Steer. And so he's really inside, you know, quite the softy and knowledgeable about what he does and, and open to, you know, working with a lot of different people.

And that's what I love about working, being able to work with, you know, so many different clients is you get to talk to so many different people, solve different problems and you know, work with people and try to you. Be extensions of their teams as much as, as they let you in.

[00:35:00] Darryl Praill: So if I'm listening to this right now, I'm listening to you.

How do I know. That, you know, what challenges let's go with that. What challenges might I be experiencing that would make me a good candidate to work with Scott and yourself and the whole crew there.

[00:35:14] JM Wilke: Yeah. So good question. So some of the challenges that you might be experiencing are, you know, Maybe things aren't progressing through the pipeline, maybe, you know, messaging is falling flat.

Maybe, you know, you can't get the insights that you need. That's a huge one, right? Is maybe you see that, Hey, you know, my reps are spending so much time not doing selling activities. And I wanna free up some of their time. Things like that. Right. And so how do you, you know, make sure that you can give them time back in their day so that they can be more efficient, they can be happier.

How do you make sure that if you're looking at data that it's actually going to be accurate, right? Cause that's a mistake that a lot of people make is they look at data and they're like, Hey, you know, and I've. I've done it myself, right. Where I look at it. And I, I, I do the wrong thing. Right. I was just talking with you the other day and I sent an article and you're like, Hey.

Mm don't even think about it. Right. This article's old. And I'm like, you're right. That's exactly right. And so making sure that you can look at these things and understand that you're looking at something and you can trust it so that you can then think of new strategies to drive the business.

[00:36:22] Darryl Praill: You like JM. I do too. She's kind of cool. And I tell you the crew here at ultz, who's all work with her thinks she's pretty special. Follow her on LinkedIn. You want more information about the crew she works with? Just go to Scott Leese Consulting.com. And you know what I think in fact, folks, you need to be proactive.

Go to Scott Lee's consulting and follow JM on LinkedIn. Right now. Don't be reactive. Don't wait til it's too late. Take control, own your destiny. And if all else fails. Get on a tractor, put on a hat, maybe a hat Scott's worn. Put on a podcast, maybe the Inside Inside Sales show and proactively make yourself a smarter cat.

My name's Darryl that's JM. We're done here. We'll talk to you next week. Take care folks. Be good.

This episode was digitally transcribed.