Enhance all Sales Touch Points with Social, with Jamie Shanks [Episode 312]

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Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life, Inc., author of the Social Selling blog, and author of the new book, Social Selling Mastery: Scaling Up Your Sales And Marketing Machine For The Digital Buyer. Among the many topics that Jamie and I discuss are common misconceptions about social selling; the necessity for engaging the buyer on every front, including social; surprising data about how different generations use social in sales; and how companies benefit, both in sales, and internally, by introducing social into their selling.

Key Takeaways

• Why successful social selling today requires a cohesive plan bringing together sales, marketing, and sales enablement.
• Why Jamie calls social selling the Venn diagram of trigger-based selling, insight-based selling, and referral-based selling.
• Social selling can be used for more than just prospecting. Why account execs and customer success teams need to master it as well.
• The common misconceptions about metrics for social selling. And what you should be using.
• The purpose of a sales professional is to identify the medium that best gets the buyer’s attention. Social selling is one tool in the tool belt.
• Andy says middle-of-the-funnel sales reps need to understand that social selling provides insight within the ‘dead zone’, to help move the buyer forward to an opportunity proposal, and win the sale.
• Find out why research shows that sales professionals in their forties and fifties have the best success using their networks with social media.
• Why companies that adopt social selling find they attract better talent and retain employees longer.
• Adding social selling to existing touches produces, on the average, 20% net new pipeline opportunities for Jamie’s customers, and it only requires 30 to 60 minutes of the day.
• Social Selling Mastery is written to integrate four people into a team: the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Sales Enablement, and the sales executive.

More About Jamie Shanks

What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

Digging ditches: working long and hard.

Who is your sales role model?

Between Grant Cardone and Gary Vaynerchuk.

What’s one book that every salesperson should read?

The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon.

What music is on your playlist right now?

Classic Rock and WWII Jazz: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: It’s time to accelerate. Hi, I’m your host, Andy Paul. Join me as I host conversations with the leading experts in sales, marketing, sales, automation, sales process, leadership, management, training, coaching,any resource that I believe to help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business and most importantly, you. Hello and welcome to Accelerate. I’m really looking forward to talking with my guest today. Joining me is Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life. Author of the Social Selling blog and author of a new book, Social Selling Mastery: Scaling Up Your Sales and Marketing Machine for the Digital Buyer. Jamie, welcome to Accelerate.

 

Jamie Shanks: Andy, thank you very much for the invite.

 

Andy Paul: Well, my pleasure. So take a minute, introduce yourself, maybe tell us how you got your start in sales.

 

Jamie Shanks: So my name is Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life. We built the world’s largest social selling training curriculum now deployed by 65,000, sales and marketing professionals around the world, every size company around the world. And how I got started in sales. Somebody asked me what was my first sales job and I owned a landscaping company in high school and university. And the big takeaway there was my mother approached me. I must have done a crummy job in the neighborhood. She sat me down, she said, Jamie, I want you to understand this: every time you do a great job, two people in the neighborhood tell me about it. Every time you do a crappy job in the neighborhood, eight people in the neighborhood tell me about it. I don’t want to meet our neighbors, so do a better job.

 

Andy Paul: Yeah, so the message being bad news travels faster than good news.

 

Jamie Shanks: It does. Absolutely.

 

Andy Paul: So how’d you get into the social selling as a specialty then?

 

Jamie Shanks: So this is the preface to the book you were mentioning. I’ll truncate the story. But I was the director of sales at a SaaS software company. I thought that I was the bee’s knees and what do self-proclaimed geniuses do? They start consulting firms. That consulting firm 18 months later, that firm and I were filing for bankruptcy, and the backstory is the days before my wedding, I was the vendor of a company that got caught with fraud and embezzlement. And so I was an unsecured vendor, didn’t get paid, except it was days before my wedding. So yeah left to my wedding went to Costa Rica, did my honeymoon in Paris didn’t tell my wife when we get home, we’re going to be eating ketchup sandwiches for a long time. And when I got home, I broke the news and I broke down and started crying and had to let go of my staff and then like you know that phoenix rising from the ashes kind of thing, I believe great ideas come from desperation. And I started experimenting with LinkedIn as a means of revitalizing my own career in business. And that was the starting point to then social selling mastery. Tips, tricks and tactics that eventually spawned into a methodology. 

 

Andy Paul: Alright, so let’s jump into social selling. So there’s a lot being written about social selling, and I think to the point where some people are exasperated by the fact that there’s so much being written about it. So how has it evolved over the last, let’s say three years, that’s when it really seemed to gain real legs and traction and where do you see it going from here?

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah. So I’m a huge believer that there’s this evolution and just think of it as a staircase of five or  six layers. And where it was three years ago was what people would call a random acts of social tips, tricks and tactics. So, people looked at social selling as these activities that a salesperson would do to book a meeting, drive business, but they were selling in a vacuum. It was John the sales rep, this is what he is doing. Where it needs to be or where it is today is a cohesive plan that brings together sales, marketing and sales enablement. And each plays a vital piece. Sales professionals become your distribution army of great insights and ideas and conversations. Marketing is fueling that funnel with great insights and conversations and enablement is stitching all of this together into your existing sales process. And I think that’s one of the failures that people don’t understand, is they think, oh, social selling, it must replace what I’m doing. No, it’s just an additive process.

 

Andy Paul: Well, I think even more importantly, that the perspective you just gave there is really crucial, is that people think social selling, is that something the reps do and what you’re saying is no, no, this is part of the selling process for the company.

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah. And, then you need to flip it and the language that I that I try to get our customers think about is be in the customer shoes, they don’t call it selling, they call it a buying journey. So everything will align to greater customer experience and buying journey. And everyone in the organization has a piece to the puzzle of social and digital.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, so you write that social can be an effective tool at every stage of the buying process, and again, I think that’s a different perspective than most people have because they tend to think about as being just sort of a top of the funnel type activity This is how we engage. But once we get beyond that there’s not a real use for social selling. So let’s talk about that in terms of the overall sales process because you sort of say that social selling sort of sits at the intersection of three types of selling.

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, absolutely. So social selling is the Venn diagram of trigger based selling, insights based selling, and referral base. None of them were invented by social selling. They’re just mechanized through tools like LinkedIn and Twitter. So each component of your sales functions, so your lead gen, demand gen, inside sales, ield Sales, customer success channel, they all have accounts and relationships that they need to forge and better and so you’re just applying triggers, referrals and insights based selling to your components. So if I’m an inside sales professional, of course, I am thinking about the idea of creating a net new leads through interest and intrigue. So I’m applying social as a means of starting new conversations. But if I’m on your customer success team, and I have five named accounts, my job is to socially surround those accounts, I get to know these people intimately. I am monitoring job change triggers, I am referral based selling in and out of the orc. And from a tactical level, I’m even applying from a business context Facebook, I am looking at forming real personal relationships with these people outside the work environment so that they get to know my kids, I get to know their kids on Facebook. That’s social selling it is it applies to every single person that is customer facing.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, so let’s unpack that a little bit because I think that’s a great insight for people to have. So at the top of the funnel, really, it’s more sort of trigger based, as you talked about. You could use LinkedIn, for instance, to monitor executive job changes.

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, so you would use all three of those components, insights, triggers and referrals. So let’s tactically think about it. Inside sales function. My job is to create a net new leader opportunity for the organization. From an insights perspective, this is where marketing is helping me share great new knowledge pieces with customers.

 

Andy Paul: So they’re providing me the content?

 

Jamie Shanks: They’re providing me the content, and I’m measuring what is called the content consumption story. Are they reading it? And this is where marketing and marketing automation becomes  full circle here. Are they reading it? Are they interested in it? If they are reading, what haven’t they read? I’m going to now share insights that I know that they actually haven’t clicked on and read. So I’m constantly moving them, inching them along the journey. Again, triggers job changes, referrals, connecting past customers to new customers, that’s inside sales. And that same circle starts moving its way along the buyer journey and passing along to new sales rooms in field sales, sales engineers, all the way to winning that customer.

 

Andy Paul: So has there been, you know, you talk about tracking what people are consuming and so on, is that something that demonstrates more effectively that when you do it through social versus having sent the guy an email that shares the same content?

 

Jamie Shanks: I think where a lot of customers had a misconception around the measuring the social selling. They understand now that you can track email, but they never realized social has the same ability and not to get nerdy, but they’re called the UTM parameter codes. I can put a cookie on every blog, your podcast, every video and I could make that as granular down to the individual sales professional and social platform. And I can tell that buyers are reading or watching or listening to your podcast on these days, and they’ve consumed podcast A and not consumed podcast B. Thus, if they did like A, I will find through the library, a likeminded podcast and share what they haven’t seen and give that to them to open up a new door or conversation to say if you’d like A you must like B. It’s all trackable.

 

Andy Paul: So it doesn’t. But the point, I guess my question was, is the data showing that social is something as opposed to somebody opening an email? Are they more likely to click on a link in a tweet that’s shared or an update to share through LinkedIn or through Facebook?

 

Jamie Shanks: Not necessarily. Every buyer is unique in the medium that they consume from. Your job is to identify the path of least resistance. So for me, my personal experience, I consume a lot more through LinkedIn than I do Twitter like 10x. When people message me or a great piece of content is shared on LinkedIn, you get my attention. On Twitter, there’s a lot of noise. But as well, email is effective for me if done in a certain way because I just happen to clean my Google inbox out every Sunday to zero. So those that messaged me on late Sunday nights, early Monday mornings get my undivided attention, right? So the purpose of a sales professional is to identify and you don’t necessarily- there are warning signs, of course you can see social activity, but your goal is to figure out the medium that best gets that buyers attention. And social is just another tool in the tool belt.

 

Andy Paul: Which sort of raises the question that you’ve seen I’m sure you’ve seen online and so on as someone saying okay, when can we stop calling social selling, social selling, and just call it selling?

 

Jamie Shanks: The day that will happen, it would be as goofy as calling an email selling now. It will be the day where you walk onto a sales floor and the cadence of every person in that room, they would look at you funny if you said, are you using social? They say, what’re you talking about? Of course I am. And that day, it’s just selling. Right. But we only delineate that word now, because we need to prop it up for search engine optimization and create businesses around it.

 

Andy Paul: Well, that’s a good point. Yeah. But also I think that well, let’s ask the question, then, without digressing too much. We are about penetration of social selling into Salesforce in general, because it still seems to me that it’s still a very thin layer in terms of salespeople in general. You’ve got 65,000 people taking your courses. But I speak to groups all the time. And I’m blown away by how little they’re using it.

 

Jamie Shanks: Oh, 100%. Outside of Silicon Valley if you were to walk onto the sales floor of an average business in London, England, New York City, Sydney, Australia. It is only the tip of the iceberg and you know the Pareto law of 80/20 it is without fail. So we’ve now trained 300 companies and without fail, the top performing reps were already organically doing what they would deem social selling their hodgepodging self-taught ideas, give or take on average 70% of all sales professionals self-taught themselves some form of social selling. So then you’ve got this Pareto Law lot of your rock stars are already doing it, but the average core performer or laggard hasn’t got a clue. And especially when you leave the valley go to a regular insurance company or financial services business. They’re at ground zero. 

 

Andy Paul: All right, so what about their buyers though? Is that true is a Silicon Valley buyers are more likely to be using it or do we find the buyers more advanced then sellers in general?

 

Jamie Shanks: And I wish I had more empirical evidence on this, so I’m just going to use my gut feel.

 

Andy Paul: Sure that’s good.

 

Jamie Shanks: My gut feel, and I don’t think ageism is necessarily important here. 

 

Andy Paul: We’re gonna talk about this, don’t get too far with that, we’re gonna talk about that. 

 

Jamie Shanks: I watch the way my parents buy. I watch the way my wife on the couch buys and myself. And I wrote this in the book that just a couple days ago just bought a brand new car. I spent a week online comparison shopping. I’ve bought TVs online, I’ve bought consumer goods online, but it’s such a misconception from a b2b sales professional that they think oh, they must not be doing ERP software searches. They must not be looking at corporate healthcare plans online. Are you kidding me? The buyer, whenever they have downtime is using Google and peer to peer networking and social as an education due diligence platform. Your job is to be front and center during that. The buyer is doing this. I can’t say every buyer and every industry but as a vast majority, this is how we all buy now.

 

Andy Paul: Yeah, so buyers are ahead of sellers in general, we’re saying?

 

Jamie Shanks: Oh, way ahead of sellers.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, so let’s jump back to the funnel finish that up quickly and then before going on to the next subject. So middle of the funnel, because I think this is fascinating part that sales reps listening to this really need to understand is that, you know, social is not relegated just to making those connections, it has a role throughout the process. And you talk about specifically finding insight sort of in what you call the dead zone in the middle of the funnel. So why don’t you explain that?

 

Jamie Shanks: Oh, fantastic. And Andy, I was just going to congratulate you for being really prepared for this.

 

Andy Paul: You don’t know who you’re dealing with here. 

 

Jamie Shanks: This is great. Okay, so now I’m in the middle of the funnel. So I’m a sales executive and my role is to qualify something into a sales qualified lead, move it towards opportunity proposal and then eventually, this period of time is most likely to be the biggest period of time where buyers go silent. They will do a demo, they will ask for proposals and then they will hum and ha for what could be weeks, months, even years depending on the complexity or sales cycle. Well, the reality is, your job is to inch the ball forward every single day. Because the reason that this has fallen apart, and it’s comes to the customer CEB’s challenge your customer, the Spinning Plate Theory is that everyone in their buying committee is moving at different speeds. And so it’s your responsibility to keep people up to speed. See that there are people that you can educate online or offline. There are going to be changes in the organization all the time. Those here triggers, mergers and acquisitions, competitors launching new products, and then referral based selling. Again, everybody’s moving at different speeds. Can you connect a previous customer to a future customer? Can you introduce one person in the orc to another person? Because this is the complexity of selling and it’s paramount that you’re using social as a medium to be able to help along that journey slowly but surely.

 

Andy Paul: That sort triggered an interesting thought in my mind,  I should qualify- interesting to me. The thought is, so are you finding that the adoption of social selling more in this complex sales environment is described in the challenger sale and challenger customer and so on and really has more of a role to play there?

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, I would say and I’m just looking from our own customer base, and maybe it’s because our customer base is primarily enterprise mid-market size organizations, transactional selling. When I started this business, I was working with local Toronto businesses, SAS software companies that were banging out deals all day long, because that was my experience, lead generation, top of the funnel. But as social has begun to emerge and mature, there’s no question it plays a much larger role in that trusted advisor concept, that complex cell. And that’s why it baffles my mind when field sales or customer success of in of larger deals. They say I don’t know that socials for me, I only have five named accounts. What? Your accounts are worth millions and millions of dollars, do you not want to know this information? Social still applies to transactional sales professionals. It just that you’re not massaging the data to the same level of due diligence that an enterprise sales professional might be. You’re still using the same material just in a more rapid pace. You know, I look at our inside sales professionals that deal with our inbound leads. They only have so much time in the day to a match information on that buyer. So they have to use social shortcuts to get enough information to have a contextual conversation. 

 

Andy Paul: Right. Okay, so let’s move on to the next topic. You sort of alluded to earlier, we talked about ageism. But you write about this generation gap in social, but with a surprising twist. I think that that would be unexpected for most people. So why don’t you talk about that?

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah. And this was Justin Schreiber, who’s the chief marketing officer at LinkedIn Sales Solutions presented at our digital growth conference in San Fran. And what he said on stage, I think, shocked people and when you see social selling launches that we do, it’s amazing. You see, the senior leaders naturally gravitate towards, well, let’s train the inside sales group because they’re 25 to 30 years old, and they’re on their iPads all day long anyways. So we might as well you know, give a process to that. But what the empirical data  has shown is that those that are in their late 30s 40s 50s, who have larger networks, bigger roles. The connections that they make with people are people with more power and influence and organization actually have outperformed their younger peers. And it’s just natural. I mean, Andy, I’m born in 1978, my friends now are becoming vice presidents of companies, presidents of companies. And so, if I’m connecting with like-minded people, these people are now in a decision making seat, whereas my 25 year old peers, they’re friends are becoming, middle managers or, you know, team leaders and so forth. So, age has actually proven that wow. And it’s called Digital Natives versus digital immigrants,

 

Andy Paul: It’s also interesting terms, too.

 

Jamie Shanks: I’m what they would call a digital immigrant. I wasn’t born with an iPad in my hand, it was a learned behavior. But once I learned these skills like any other skill, I can take more advantage of it than even my younger peers.

 

Yeah, it’s really a fascinating perspective because you think about that blob of basic networking skills. If you master those in some, which includes real networking and I think that’s some of the things that’s sort of the spin I was putting on it is that, you know, this older generation of people, certainly of which I’m a member, is people that by and large, I think are also more accustomed to the person to person networking type thing, then the younger generation. That has grown up not really using their phone, everything’s texted everything is, it’s not that they’re not in communication. They’re in constant communication, but it’s, it’s a different sort than that person to person networking, and I think that’s what really translates and I think is where perhaps, the millennials are at a bit of a disadvantage right now.

 

Jamie Shanks: I think the advantage that the millennial has is their sales environment will forever have social and only expand for the rest of their lives. They did not need to learn 150 cold calls a day, and then transfer and completely change their sales process to adding social into the mix. And I find that that’s what sales professionals my age and older are learning. They said, well, I’ve always been measured on talk time and dials and all these things. I have to change the way that I view my sales activities and the way that our company views as our sales activities. The millennials coming in, unless they’re working at very old school companies, they’re not accustomed to banging out 100 calls a day. So this transfer of knowledge for them is probably easier. Now I don’t even remember what it was like to learn this anymore, but it’s probably easier for the millennial but it has more impact, immediately, I think on the Generation X and the baby boomer.

 

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, it’s sort of interesting. Well, though, actually to your point though, if it’s a millennial working in a SAS environment, they are accustomed to banging out a lot of phone calls.

 

Jamie Shanks: Well, yeah, that’s true. It depends on the sales orc, there are still many that do, they bang out those hundred calls. The question that I have is around attraction and retention, and we’ve never done measurements on it. We have customers that have subjectively noticed it, but those that start introducing social into those environments, they are having stickier employees, they’re finding it easier to attract millennial talent, because now the millennial sees, okay, I have all of these tools in my tool belt that allows me to attract a customer rather than the phone book and email and banging out 100 class.

 

Andy Paul: Well that’s sort of interesting because that runs into this sort of fundamental tension you see with a lot of SaaS companies is that all the activity metrics are what’s measured.

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah. And well from an activity metric, and this is something that we just did recently. So we were able to hit a certain level of activity and social conversations a day with one of our inside sales professionals. And we bolted on sales loft on top of it, and it’s not that our teammate is making more calls, it’s they’re making more touches, he tripled his touch rate. Now, we still are approaching our buyers through social much more than the average organization. But there’s technology that can amplify touches to make the same level of touches that you’re accustomed to via the phone. Now, I’m not saying that you should replace one with the other. I think it should be a mixture of both but I don’t even know where I was going with that but

 

Andy Paul: I guess one of the questions I have then is so you’re finding because you’re using obviously you’re eating the dog food so to speak, is are you finding that in comparison with what you’re doing with outbound calling that your outbound social is generating more sales conversations or when it comes to outcomes? Do the curves tend to meet at some point, are you finding that yours is a different ramp with social?

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, and I’ll use our customers experience rather than ours because ours is, we’re so heavily weighted to social as a means of starting the conversation rather than the phone. But with our customers, on average, if you were to look at all of their, let’s say inside sales departments, on average, these organizations within six months are creating 20% incremental net new pipeline above and beyond what they were doing before. So whatever that sales rep was responsible for from an activity and results standpoint. Six months later, there’s a 20% net new increase because they recognize that if you do a social selling routine effectively, which is only 30 to 60 minutes a day, it’s not intrusive enough that it’s sucking away time from the phone, it’s just finding your down periods or working a little bit smarter rather than harder, and they’re able to get and yield better results. So that is the empirical evidence that we’ve seen. I wouldn’t use our company asa great Litmus for that. 

 

Andy Paul: Okay. Let’s talk about your new book social selling mastery. So who’s it written for?

 

Jamie Shanks: It is written for four different people. And so it’s actually segmented into four different sections. It is written for what we call the three amigos. The three amigos are those that lead a social selling program internally, the VP of sales, the VP of Marketing, the VP of sales enablement, or whatever you call them in your own organization. Each have an accountability and responsibility to the success of social selling. And then the fourth, of course, is the individual sales professional. And it’s very tactical on what he or she should be doing every single day and 30 to 60 minutes a day.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, so give some examples.

 

Jamie Shanks: Okay, so let’s come back to the accountability and responsibility. So of your three amigos, if I’m a VP of sales, my responsibility is helping people get to the water and making them drink. And that can only happen by me first showing that I can drink the water. And then on my daily coaching, or sort of my weekly or monthly coaching on one on one calls, whatever I do, is that I am actually driving accountability, that people are doing social activity. I can’t just talk out of one side of my mouth and not coach or align our metrics at all, it just would never happen. So then now comes to the chief marketing officer. My first responsibility is changing the mindset on how we’re going to measure ourselves and be accountable to social. And this is critical that the first thing a digital content marketing team needs to do is sit down with sales and understand how a sales team is measured. And what percentage of sales quota attainment did the sales team think was going to be driven through marketing? And that always surprises the crap out of the marketing. 

 

Andy Paul: Well, wait, on the plus side or the minus side?

 

Jamie Shanks: Oh, the minus side.

 

Andy Paul: They assume it’s zero.

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, because, well, no. Or, they’ve accounted for even some percentage. And the reality is, is marketing’s never measured themselves by sales bookings. We call this team revenue. Team revenue is three amigos working together in a service level agreement that there’s no role more important than each other. It’s just one teammate helping the other. But coming back to marketing, you’re looking at sales and you’re going, okay, you think that one out of every four deals you’re going to do is being driven from marketing? I’m not measuring myself that way. I’m looking at clicks and open rates and marketing qualified leads. And that means nothing, that’s a leading indicator. But that’s not how the organization pays the bills. So the marketing’s responsibility is first figuring out, what is my responsibility and contribution, and aligning our resources and our development of assets and our pipeline to get into sales quota attainment, that’s the only thing marketing should care about. And what that ultimately has them do is look at themselves like an ad agency and say, we are not deploying our resources properly, to be able to get to that sales quota attainment, we don’t build enough assets. So it’s volume, velocity and probability. We don’t build enough assets. Our assets aren’t performing strong enough and we don’t build them quick enough to achieve those goals. And then the third is sales enablement. And their job is to figure out the people process and technology. Who’s measuring this? How do we measure this? How do we reinforce this? How do we stitch this into our existing sales process? So tactically, those are the responsibilities of these three people and I iron out very clearly, what you do and how you do it, to get the three amigos in line.

 

Andy Paul: Yeah, it seems like your selling yourself short when you call it social selling mastery, because you’re really talking about modern sales structure or alignment, if you will.

 

Jamie Shanks: It is truly digital transformation. And that’s by becoming a social selling master. Social selling mastery is just a byproduct of sales and marketing, alignment and integration, in reality. The only reason it’s still called social selling mastery is it does really well on Google, and it creates a business around it. But there’s no the bigger thing that we solve is a digital transformation in sales and marketing departments.

 

Andy Paul: Yeah, best practices for that. So now, we move on to the last thing in the show. I got some standard questions I ask all my guests. And the first one Jamie, you’re the star of the show. You’ve just been hired as a VP of sales at a company whose sales have stalled out. The CEO is anxious to get things turned around and back on track. And I know it doesn’t happen in a day, but you’ve got to start somewhere. So what two things could you do your first week on the job that would have the biggest impact?

 

Jamie Shanks: So I would look at where our revenue mix comes from. And to one of the points we made before, I have a feeling that your inbound demand generation waterfall is really lacking and is not supplying your sales team with enough horsepower. So the thing that I would do immediately is sit with the chief marketing officer and figure out how we create a much bigger inbound lead flow because sales professionals that have to drive their own sales all day long 100% of quota attainment, they are not going to last very long. The second piece I would then look at is behavior and skill sets. So is rep A and rep B selling completely different? We need to standardize our go to market strategy. Those would be the two that I would look at.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, good answer. So here’s sort of a digression question for you. So I think people oftentimes conflate skills and behaviors. How do you distinguish them?

 

Jamie Shanks: Yeah, so a behavior I also think of as a mindset. So as an example, for a mindset for myself, I had to change my checking emails, right when I woke up in the morning to a mindset of, I’m going to educate myself and then my market first and I’m going to leave emails for later in the day. That was the mindset. The skill set is the actual tactic. So what I did is I removed all of the alerts off my phone, email alerts and I concentrated on making my social content apps front and center on the front page of my phone. So the behavior is the learning of the new skill and the mindset of learning that new skill and then the skill set is the deployment of it. I would say those are the distinguishing features between the two.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, great! So now some rapid fire questions for you. Give me one word answers or elaborate if you wish. First one is when you, Jamie, are out selling your services, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

 

Jamie Shanks: I’m a ditch digger. If did the challenger sale, I am the hard worker. I just work more hours and do more crazy flights and conversations than most.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, who’s your sales role model?

 

Jamie Shanks: I am a mixture of between Grant Cardone and Gary Vaynerchuk. So there’s elements of both of them I absolutely admire. 

 

Andy Paul: Alright. Besides your own, one book that every salesperson should read?

 

Jamie Shanks: It was the book that I think founded my business is The Challenger Sale. While I don’t necessarily think it’s as implementable, it changed my life.

 

Andy Paul: Okay, yeah. Good qualification there, I like that. So, last question for you. What music’s on your playlist these days?

 

Jamie Shanks: So I’m a hodgepodge of classic rock at the cottage and World War II jazz. I know it’s like the tale of two cities with me.

 

Andy Paul: World War II jazz, very interesting. 

 

Jamie Shanks: Like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald.

 

Andy Paul: Right. I was gonna say what vocals are with that? Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Very good. Well, Jamie, thanks for joining us. Tell people how they can find out more about you.

 

Jamie Shanks: So you can connect with me on social media. So Jamie Shanks on LinkedIn or Twitter, from a book standpoint, go to getsocialselling.com and that is going to be how you find the book.

 

Andy Paul: Excellent. Okay, well thank you very much. And remember friends make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success. And one easy way to do this make this podcast, Accelerate a part of your daily routine, whether you listen on your commute, in the gym, or make it part of your morning sales meeting. That way you won’t miss any of my conversations with top business experts like my guest today, Jamie Shanks, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me. Until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone. 

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