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Hey friends, this is Andy. Welcome to episode 599 of Accelerate, the sales podcast of record. Joining me today on Accelerate is my guest, Henry Schuck. Henry is the founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg. And in today's conversation, we're going to talk about how to optimize the value of the list of names that your sales team or that you yourself are using to develop new business, to prospect, call on potential customers, build relationships with new buyers. And it's no secret that every market that we sell to these days is incredibly competitive. And so there's really a requirement for sales organizations of all sizes to really amp up the sophistication of how they sell. And so we're going to talk today about how you can do that, how you can amp up your selling in order to compete with the big dogs. So if you'd like to see the show notes for this episode, go to andypaul.com/599. As always, we provide detailed breakdowns of this conversation and actually all the conversations on Accelerate. Now, before I talk with Henry, let me remind you that today's show is brought to you in part by Henry and his colleagues at DiscoverOrg. The DiscoverOrg platform is a game-changer for sales and marketing professionals. This feature-rich sales intelligence platform is supported by 250-plus researchers who continually update contact data and provide account-specific insights to help sales and marketing teams break ahead of the pack. So see the product live at discoverorg.com/schedule-demo. All right, let's jump into it with Henry Schuck. Henry, welcome to Accelerate.
Thanks, Andy. It's great to be here.
Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here. So I've got a standard question I always lead off the interviews with, and actually maybe the last 300 interviews I had a different standard question before, but this time the standard question is for you: is, in your opinion, what's the single biggest challenge that's facing sales reps today?
Great question. The single biggest challenge facing sales reps today, I'm going to say the ability to connect with their buyer in a meaningful way. And I'll tell you why I say that. More and more, I see sales reps becoming younger and younger, and especially at the sort of SDR and BDR level, where a lot of companies, I hate to tell you that, just because you're getting older, they look really young to me. But we'll hire them, and we see our clients will hire sales reps right out of college and put them on the phones and they'll say, 'Go set appointments with CIOs and VPs of infrastructure and VPs of sales and VPs of marketing.' And so the ability to take somebody who's right out of college or even like one or two jobs post-college and then wrap their minds around the business context in general, like companies spend millions of dollars on technological tools and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on data and sales intelligence, and getting them to understand how the business world works in a short period of time when all they've seen is high school and college makes it not only intimidating but also very difficult to connect with a VP of sales, a VP of IT. And so they have to be able to process a lot of information in a short period of time and then figure out the context around that information so that they're able to be experts in their small little area and provide value to their clients and their prospects. So I think that's a tough challenge.
Well, it is. So let's dive into that a little bit. What's the answer? Because this goes back a long time. My first sales job right out of college was in the field calling on business owners, and I looked 12.
Andy still looks like 12.
Well, thank you very much. Yeah, I've got this screensaver picture on my iPhone is a picture of my wife and I when we were after our freshman year in college, and literally she looks 35, I look 13. I mean, it's... so there, I won't tell the other half of that story that the worm has turned on that one. But yeah, I always thought, 'Well, how did any of these people ever make a decision to buy from me?' Because again, I looked like an adolescent when out selling $200,000 computer systems. And so it must have been something about, well, yeah, I was able to connect at some level with them, able to understand what their concerns were and empathize and everything you need to do to build this trust-based relationship. And I'm not sure exactly what that was, other than, you know, somebody was asking me about this recently, is part of it was just being myself. And I think that's hard for a lot of people these days, because maybe they feel under pressure to make a lot of calls, do a lot of dials or whatever. But yeah, I just think that was part of it, and we don't let people do that as much.
Yeah, we don't let people do that as much. And I think on top of that, I bet you really understood the product and the service that you were selling and the value that it was adding for your clients, and you were probably passionate about those things. And you're probably intellectually curious, so when you didn't understand something, you went out of your way to figure it out.
And if you're doing that and you're able to explain the process or a structure or the system some way that your buyer hasn't thought of yet, I think that is how you get there. I mean, there are different... like it shouldn't be confused with rapport building, I think, because a lot of people go, 'Okay, I'm going into a sales call, I got the whole like, oh, I saw a picture of his son playing soccer or something or talk to him about the baseball team he likes.' I just don't think you buy a lot of credibility doing that. You buy credibility by asking questions about their business and what they're struggling with and challenged with, and then being able to triangulate that with solutions, whether yours or not, but solutions that solve those problems. And the more you ask questions and the more you dig, the more you're going to understand and the better prepared you're going to be to solve those problems. And that's sort of how I build rapport. I just ask a lot of questions until I feel like I really understand what they're struggling with, and then all of a sudden we're on an equal playing field and we're both working towards figuring out the solution to that problem. And that feels like a really good place to be.
Oh, I agree. At the same time, I'll defend small talk because I've just experienced through my life and through my career that it works in terms of helping to make that connection. I mean, it can't be trivial or stupid, right? I mean, it has to be authentic and you have to be authentically interested in someone else, and they understand when you are being as opposed to when you're not. I mean, if you're coming in, you're just scanning the room and, 'Oh, your daughter plays soccer,' it's like, yeah, that doesn't do it, right? But if it's something that we did a training years ago at our sales kickoff where we gave everybody a couple people's LinkedIn profiles and we said, 'Okay, use these to figure out how you're going to build rapport with these different people if you were on the call with them.' And then people looked at them and they had a couple ways and none of them were really great. And the guy who was putting on the session said, 'Look at the first guy. Before he went into technology sales, and he's had 20 years of technology sales experience, he was a sales guy for M&M's, the chocolate.' It's like, that's a really interesting thing to ask him about. And so the way you build rapport with that guy is you go, 'John, I was looking at your LinkedIn, it's so fascinating. You spent 15 years at M&M's selling chocolate. How does someone go from selling chocolate to selling technology?' And you know, the guy, when you say that, the guy lights up. It's an interesting thing to talk about. You're showing genuine interest, and it's so much more powerful than, 'I see your daughter plays soccer.'
Well, even something that's more light-hearted. I mean, like, 'I see you work for M&M's, so why do the blue ones taste different than the rest of them?' Yeah, I mean, just something simple like that is people will laugh and they'll say, and then you open the door to talk about it. I mean, you don't always have to tie it back to the business, but it's just like, be funny, make it authentic if that's who you are.
Well, I heard an interesting story along the same line. I saw on one of the late night shows, my DVR was scrolling through it, and Jerry Seinfeld was on and he talked about how his father had been in sales and his father had this game that he played where he was trying to build rapport with someone, and the people had, you know, you think it's old-time person sitting behind a desk, grim face, not breaking a smile. And I encountered many, many, many people like that. And I sort of ended up doing the same thing Jerry's father did, is suddenly the whole sales call came about making him break that face. And sometimes it was completely pointless, but sometimes that's what it took to get the person just to relax and understand that you're not there trying to shove something down their throat, but you're there to help them. You're another human being, because they went into the whole encounter with their walls up. How do you help bring those walls down? And I thought that was sort of an interesting way he had phrased the way his father did, is trying to break that face.
Yeah, definitely a little harder when you're on the phone, perhaps, because you can't see the person. Although, we're pushing our reps to use webcams way more often.
And it works. Our reps who own webcam, you know, look what happens when you're on a call and you're not using a webcam. You're free to respond to emails, look at your phone, multitasking. And when a call gets boring, your mind drifts. And so I actually found myself on calls when they would get boring or they would be off, the sales rep or somebody else would be off on a tangent, I would end up going on Facebook. And then I realized after like four or five times of doing that, like, what are you doing? You can't just... there's so many better things for you to be doing than flipping through Facebook on this call and you should probably be listening. But in the meantime, I went to IT and I said, 'Block Facebook. Just block Facebook. None of us really need Facebook right now at work, and I'll be the first one to have it blocked. Like, block me first.' From a habit perspective, all of a sudden I don't really need to go to Facebook anymore. It's just not something I do.
Yeah. Well, and talking about habits, you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier before we started recording, is that we're incapable of multitasking. You know, the science is absolutely, we as humans are incapable of doing it. And in my public presentations, I talk about this where a study was done by some researchers at Carnegie Mellon where they took study subjects, put them into a room one at a time and gave them a multiple choice test. And then about halfway through the test, they interrupted them with a phone call they weren't expecting. The phone call was a short call for like a minute, and then they let them go back and finish the test. And after they had done this for, I forget the sample size, 200, 300 students, the test scores after the phone call were 20% lower on average across the board.
