How to Use Podcasting to Connect with Your Prospects w/ Will Barron [Episodes 322]

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Among the many topics that Will and I discuss are how Will’s background in chemistry and medical device sales led to starting his podcast, how sales professionals would benefit by podcasting and how to build trust into the customer relationship. Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is Will Barron. Will is the UK-based host of the Salesman.red podcast.

Key Takeaways

• Will talks about his degree in chemistry and his sales experience — first in chemicals, and then in medical devices.
• A podcast gives, first, a platform to reach your prospects, and second, an effect of expertise by osmosis, as you interview authentic leaders.
• You want to drive prospects to your LinkedIn page. That’s where you differentiate yourself from your competition with your brand, and with original and repurposed content.
• Why it’s jumping the gun to teach sales skills to people who lack underlying foundational behaviors and good habits that would support the skills.
• There’s a presumption that people come to the job with basic behaviors and habits. But even seasoned salespeople can benefit from a reminder of the basics.
• Why you need prospects to tell you something about themselves, before you talk about your products and services.
• What are the psychological needs that a sales career satisfies for certain individuals?
• In some sales environments the salespeople really feel, every single month, that if they don’t hit their numbers, they’re going to be fired.
• What are the portable habits and skills you need to grow a successful sales career.
• Why you can’t expect your customers move with you as you move to a new sales role at a different company.

More About Will Barron

What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

Using the power of podcasts, and adding value by making it seamless.

Who is your sales role model?

Gary Vaynerchuk, for empathy; Grant Cardone for hustle.

What’s one book that every salesperson should read?

Awake the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins.

What music is on your playlist right now?

Classic rock, dubstep, electronic dance, and “Like a Prayer,” covered by Rufio.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul 0:35

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! Joining me on the show today is good friend of mine, Will Barron. Will is the UK based host of the Salesman.Red podcast, which I know many of you listen to as well. Will, welcome to Accelerate.

 

Will Barron 1:11

Cheers, Andy, I’m really excited to be on, mate.

 

Andy Paul 1:14

Glad we finally got you on the show. I’ve been on your show a couple times, and it’s been a great time. So take a minute, introduce yourself. Give yourself some background, and talk about how you got started in sales.

 

Will Barron 1:27

So my background is probably quite similar to a lot of the sales professionals versus perhaps a sales management in that I didn’t intend to get into sales. I started with a degree in chemistry.

 

Andy Paul 1:38

That’s a very common tale, by the way.

 

Will Barron 1:40

Yeah, of course. And perhaps that aligns with the fact that there’s no degrees in the UK to study sales, to study becoming perhaps more of the account management and the B2B side of things. And perhaps there’s a gap in the market for that. But I did a chemistry degree because I enjoyed science. I ended up in a chemical sales job, which led to medical device sales. My whole family is based in the NHS. 

 

That’s the National Health Service. People over here in the States don’t know what NHS was. 

 

So with my mom being a pharmacy technician, my brother being a pharmacist, my girlfriend being a doctor, there was no way I wasn’t going to be wrapped up in the NHS somehow. So yeah, I went selling endoscopes there. And then, more recently, I moved on from that and started the Salesman podcast. I saw there was a gap in the market for content for the millennial salesperson clearly. And you’ve talked about on your show before, I know, Andy, that sales are changing. And I want to be at the forefront of that, doing some of the things you do. 

 

I’ll bring in sales leaders and then wider guests such as entrepreneurs, such as Olympic athletes to talk about mindset and that kind of thing to give both the shift in sales and all the ammunition we need to become better at sales as this shift happens. But also the wider side of sales and the mindset which is clearly in the DNA, which is just as important as anything tactical that we can put out there

 

Andy Paul 3:09

Well, it is. So when you have guests on the show to talk about mindset, so what aspects of the mindset are you focusing on? And are you tailoring that specifically for millennials?

 

Will Barron 3:20

I’m tailoring everything. And this is why the show is pretty unique. In that I am no sales expert or no sales guru. In the medical device world, I was pretty good at sales, not exceptional. There’s room to improve. So I have people on selfishly, and to help the audience, but selfishly to help me with my mindset as well. 

 

So for example, we’ve had people come on to talk about discipline. I am inherently undisciplined, but I put hacks in place to help me with things like that. So when I talk about mindset, a big proportion of what we do is the discipline of getting through if you’re still cold calling, but emailing and all the admin boring side of things. So that then you can get through to the other end to do all the exciting stuff, which is building relationships and closing deals.

 

Andy Paul 4:09

Got it. So, also, let’s look at the podcast I guess from the perspective of, which certainly has helped with you, as building a personal brand. I mean, personal branding I speak about a lot on the show. I’ve had a lot of guests on to talk about it. I mean, how has the podcast helped you with that?

 

Will Barron 4:27

So I’m glad you said this. I think this is the biggest change that’s coming to sales. You can tell me otherwise, Andy, because I’m sure you have thoughts on this as well. But I’ve seen huge benefits, like uncalculable benefits from having a personal brand becoming seen as a known expert in the industry through purely osmosis from interviewing over experts. As I said, I don’t consider myself a sales expert or guru, but I constantly have outreach to me to ask for my opinions on things purely from starting the show. And I think this is going to become more and more relevant for salespeople if you include Google search results as an example of this. 

 

And someone searches for a product, clearly, you only click on the top two or three links that are there. We’re taking the ads out of things for a second, because that complicates things. But those top two or three results, if you can become an expert in your industry as a sales professional and get within that bubble, you’ve got then people coming to you, prospects coming to you rather than going through and doing their own research. 

 

You’re in control of giving them content, of giving them information. And you’re seen as a trusted adviser before you’ve even picked up the phone and spoken to them. And I found that with myself. So I’m getting asked to do consulting. I’m getting asked to do all kinds of crazy stuff at the moment, purely from just raising my image within the sales industry and having people know me. I think it’s almost as simple as just being known. Because that obviously adds to the trust element, which is the basis of any sales process.

 

Andy Paul 5:58

Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, not every sales professional is listening to this podcast and is going to start their own. Well, they could start their own podcast. It’s not necessarily that they have to start their own podcast. But it’s not the podcast. It’s more about having a point of view, having an opinion, having content, sharing something with your potential audience.

 

Will Barron 6:18

I think it goes deeper than that, Andy. I think a podcast, right now in 2016, is the perfect medium for salespeople. Obviously it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort. You don’t see results for a long time. But you don’t need to have a million downloads a month for a podcast to be useful. The downloads almost don’t really even matter. Because a podcast gives you, one, a platform. Two, you get this osmosis expert effect by interviewing experts that are happy to come on the show to promote whatever they’re promoting. So it’s a win win for everyone involved in that front. 

 

But then your customers, if you align the podcast correctly, you could almost– for example, let me put it in perspective from my medical device background. If I was doing medical device sales selling urology endoscopes to urologists and a bit of gynecology as well, I would set up a podcast or blog or an email list or some kind of content as a salesperson to target urologists and gynecologists. It could be super simply just interviewing the world’s top urologists on the techniques that they’re using to perform the surgery. So other urologists will listen and just inadvertently, I’m in the conversation without me pitching them, without me advertising to them, with no kind of ad spend with nothing else. It’s as simple as I’m in the mix. 

 

And so because of that, they know my name, there’s an element of trust to it. And so when I do reach out to them, they’re gonna go, hey, I was listening to your show a week ago, driving over to California. I really appreciated it. And they know who you are, and you don’t need any introduction. So I think it doesn’t have to be a podcast. It could be a blog where you go back and forth with experts. But I think there’s real value in this space for salespeople to break through that barrier of the customer and an audience not knowing who they are.

 

Andy Paul 8:06

Exactly. And so more and more, and as I’ve talked about in my books, you as the sales professional, you are the first line of differentiation between yourself and your competitors. And to Will’s point, and one we’ve talked about in the show before, you have to be in a position of building that brand around yourself. 

 

And so what are some of the elements you use to do that? It could be a podcast, but it could be content of some sort. It could be you’re sharing some content. But it has to do something that supports your knowledge and expertise within your market and within your ability to support your customers.

 

Will Barron 8:42

And before the internet, perhaps this would just be done by building relationships with the individuals offline. With the advent of the Internet, with people actively searching out all this content, it’s almost a no brainer to have that relationship being built on a platform where you’re going back and forth, that’s then scalable. Even if it’s only 10 other urologists that listen to it, you’re getting way more out of that one relationship, that one conversation that you’re building. And it just adds that scalability to it, which clearly is what everyone is looking for. 

 

Andy Paul

And you can’t just rely on your company’s website to be that for you. Think about your LinkedIn profile. That is your personal website, if you will. That’s your platform to create to say, okay, this is what I know, this is how I can help you. This is how I can add value to what you’re trying to do. And I’d hazard a guess and say that easily 90% of sales professionals haven’t really looked at it that way yet. 

 

Will Barron

For sure. Let me ask you a question here, Andy, if you’re okay for me to turn the table slightly. Do you feel that sales professionals should be building their own LinkedIn profiles, podcast website, whatever it is? Or should companies be encouraging the sales professionals under the house to be creating content on their platform?

 

Andy Paul 10:06

I think they have to use LinkedIn. I mean, if I get contacted by a sales rep about something, yeah, I’ll go to the company website. But I’ll also go to LinkedIn and look up and see who this person is. So I think that more often than not, you’re going to have your prospects go to your LinkedIn profile, and actually you want to drive them there. Because that’s you, right? That’s the start of creating this personal rapport, this intimacy in the relationship they aren’t going to get from going to your website. 

 

And you can share and repurpose content and should from your corporate site, blog, podcast, whatever the corporate puts out. But then also, what are you doing yourself? What’s there that’s about you and how you feel and how you think? And I think that personalization creates a huge difference.

 

Will Barron 10:55

Definitely. I think it separates you, right this moment, from 99% of the other salespeople. But then, in five, ten years perhaps everyone’s doing this.

 

Andy Paul 11:06

They won’t be. In five, ten years, we’ll go from 5% doing it to 25% doing it. I mean, look at what the bulk of sales training and sales books talk about, right? So we could pick up any sales book, except mine, off the shelf, and they’re talking about the same skills that they’ve been trying to inculcate into salespeople for generations. And nothing’s really changed, right? 

 

I mean, the reason people are listening to your podcast or listening to my podcast is they’re still finding some of these things to be a challenge. So people are people, and we’re not born with the DNA to be perfect in a sales environment. So there has to be this continuous reinforcement. And I don’t think there’s a lot of carryover from generation to generation. I think there’s more acceptance of tools. But in terms of building better profiles on LinkedIn, yeah, bit by bit that’s gonna come in and be more habitual. But it’s gonna be a while.

 

Will Barron12:12

Well, where’s the problem here, then, Andy? Is it with the format of a book in that salespeople are too busy to read a book? I don’t agree with that. I’ve read every sales book under the sun and I enjoy reading. Or is it the fact that we – I say we, not that I’m including myself in this – but have we, as an industry, been telling salespeople perhaps to do the wrong things, to try all this, and some of it just doesn’t work?

 

Andy Paul 12:39

Well, gosh, you’ve opened up Pandora’s box with that discussion. I think the real issue is that most of what salespeople are taught is higher order skills, right? So we sort of jumped the gun a little bit. And, to me, there’s a hierarchy at the bottom are our behaviors. In the middle – there’s three layers of this hierarchy – the middle layer is habits, and the top layer is their skills. 

 

And we should be spending more time teaching people about behaviors so that these behaviors become habits. And then you can put skill on top of the habits to help them master and perfect them. And we tend to focus on skills first. 

 

Will Barron

Why is that? 

 

Andy Paul

Because we think that’s the point that’s closest to the customer in some respects. We think that’s what makes the difference. And I don’t really think it does as much if you’re not doing the other things. For instance, in my book, I talk a lot about responsiveness in both of my books. I think that if you’re committed as a salesperson to master being responsive, which you can do. Because no one else controls that but you. The ripple effect, and Charles Duhigg in his book, The Power of Habit, talks about keystone habits, right? Keystone behaviors that have this ripple effect. That’s one if you master, that if you commit that every time you get an inquiry from a customer you get back to them in five minutes and you get a lead from a prospect, you can get back to them within 5 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever that standard you set for yourself. That does ripple throughout your entire sales process, your personal sales process. 

 

Customers feel that that respect for their time coming from you. They they see the difference. Their perception of you becomes changed. And that has nothing to do with skill. That just has to do with behavior and turning that behavior into a habit.

 

Will Barron 14:39

And I’m coming at this from a slightly different angle, Andy, than perhaps most of your guests in that I am a quote unquote “salesperson”. I still sell the ad space on the podcast so that I can continue this role as a practitioner. And I test everything that my guests come on and suggest. And some of it works great. Some of it is atrocious and is absolute nonsense. 

 

So from this perspective then, why don’t we teach people behaviors? Because that seems like a no brainer. It seems that there are plenty of great books out there that have to do with sales that perhaps can help with some of this. Within the industry itself, is it just because it’s a bit wishy washy and less tangible than, hey, you need to write a cold email like this. Is that what it is?

 

Andy Paul 15:22

Yeah, exactly. And then it’s also just the presumption that people come to the job with these behaviors. And I’ll tell you, some of the people, the most ardent fans of my books and my podcast, are people that are really experienced in sales, who say  I’d forgotten all about that I took my eye off that ball. That was such a fantastic reminder. I’ve gone back and I’ve rededicated myself to these basic behaviors, and it’s made a huge difference.

 

Will Barron 15:53

Cool. And so to put into perspective, then, where we started the show. I’m getting a lot out of this as well. What should we be focusing on as the sales professional perhaps rather than the management side of things? Should we be working on becoming an expert, building this audience, and having expert status by osmosis by interviewing people or things like that of that nature? Or should we 100% just narrow down, no matter how many years we’ve been in sales, just focus and narrow and hunch down on these core basic skills like being responsive?

 

Andy Paul 16:30

Well, again, I don’t call them skills. I call them behaviors or habits. I think that’s what I do. This is what I do personally, this is what I encourage and teach people to do. Because there’s lots of these. It’s not like there’s two or three. I mean, you want to focus on two or three initially. But take something simple like you referred to before, you like to read books. Most sales professionals aren’t doing enough to keep themselves educated about the state of the art and the profession. 

 

And you can have this as a standard interview question when you interview candidates for a job. Hey, what’s the last sales book or what sales book are you reading right now or which one have you read in the last two weeks? And you get blank stares. And given the volume of information that’s out there and volume of books out there, there’s really no excuse for not dedicating an hour a week or two hours a week. And if you do that, reading a book or listening to a podcast or doing something, in 12 months time you’re gonna be so much more educated. 

 

If somebody listened to your podcast every single day, they would have learned so much after a year compared to what they knew before. And it just took a half hour a day. You know, same with this podcast or reading books. So that, to me, is a behavior. That has to become a habit. If you have that self development, let’s say just reading. I call it you know, reading, listening and learning, if you have that as one of your behaviors and it becomes a habit to devote half an hour a day, turn off the TV for a half hour so you can do that. It’s amazing how much you’ll improve, how much more you’ll learn, how much more value you can provide to your prospects and your customers.

 

Will Barron 18:16

Definitely. Well, I can attest to this firsthand of a year ago when the show started, when we started the blog, as I mentioned at the top of the show, I’m a pretty good salesperson. I’m top 10%, 20% but never top 5%, 1%. Whereas I feel now, after doing a year of interviews with myself and other people within the industry, I would go back to my old sales role and absolutely crush it. It would be absolutely incredible. 

 

And the people listening from both the management and the sales professional level, as I alluded to, they would get the same knowledge that I’ve got. Perhaps not as driven and direct as I can ask more personal questions on the show since I’m in control of the conversation. But if they listened to– 

 

Andy Paul

I thought I was too. 

 

Will Barron

But if they listened to your show in the morning, my show in the evening, they’d get that same wealth of knowledge and insight as what you’re putting out and what I’m absorbing. And they would be in the same position a year later. It’s almost a no brainer when you’re driving to work and back almost every day that you wouldn’t listen to something like this.

 

Andy Paul 19:27

Yeah, well, take another example that’s very clear cut. And you can’t go on the internet and look at sales articles and not hear this or read this. It’s all about the customer. Customer first. So when you first engage with a prospect, lead with a question. Have them tell something about themselves first, as opposed to first launching into your pitch. And you can cruise through online and see all these articles about how to perfect your elevator pitch and all these behaviors that do nothing but turn off your prospects.

 

Will Barron 20:10

Andy, do you think this stems back to the fact that most people end up in sales and they weren’t expecting to be in sales? So perhaps they see it as a short term gig, and 10 years later, they’re still doing it?

 

Andy Paul 20:23

Still stuck in it? No, I think people– possibly, but I think people stay in sales because it meets certain needs within themselves, right? Given how difficult it can be and how challenging it is on a day to day basis to go out and do the work that needs to be done. My first boss told me, selling is simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple. And he was right. It is very simple what you need to do to work with a customer to get an order, but it’s not easy, right? 

 

You have to put yourself out there. You have to handle rejection. You do have to master these behaviors and on top of that acquire some of the skills you need to become more professional and to rise to the top of your profession. But I think people stay because they see that path. And they get some of those psychic rewards, whatever ones they’re looking for, from the profession. 

 

So I don’t see sales as being a place where people start going to park themselves, hoping that that they can wait out the rest of their career. There’s lots of office jobs they can go to and do that where no one’s really saying, well, what did you do this month? Because sales, there’s that never ending spotlight about what you did. Every 30 days, the clock sets back to zero.

 

Will Barron 21:37

Is that a positive thing?

 

Andy Paul 21:40

Is that a positive thing?

 

Will Barron 21:42

In the context of, we want to build deep relationships. We want to become an expert in the industry, yet we’re focused down to 30 days, a quarter of hitting a very specific target. And then once you’ve hit it, there’s the paradox of if you hit it, great, your target goes up. If you don’t hit it, you get a shouting at, and you’re back to square one.

 

Andy Paul 22:04

Well, you’re back to square one even if you hit it. And they give you a lot of attaboys and pats on the back, you make a big commission check. Well, I think that’s part of the personality driver for people in sales is that it’s that recurring challenge. But it’s clear that some people feel very oppressed by that. And perhaps sales is not the right profession for them in that regard. 

 

Is there things you could be doing that mitigate some of that? Yeah, there’s some sales environments that I’ve seen, one I’ve worked in, I’ve worked in others that I’ve helped clients get rid of where other salespeople really felt that every single month if they didn’t hit their numbers, they were gonna be fired. And that’s not productive. 

 

But having goals that you need to hit, depending how those goals are defined, just read an article yesterday that somebody had written that said perhaps the way we currently set goals are counterproductive. But the company has things they need to achieve, and sales are the engine for driving them. So I don’t think you completely do away with them. Certainly how you manage people to achieve those and coach them how to achieve it makes a huge difference. 

 

Because I’ve been in sales environments, again, where I’ve worked where you really didn’t really feel that pressure in the same way that you do in many. But it’s a very high performing organization and very high performing environment. And you weren’t completely without pressure, but it was different than it was in other places. So it starts with the top actually in how it’s managed.

 

Will Barron 23:43

Because I’ve worked in both. And this is the reason I asked that, because I don’t know what the correct answer is. But one medical device company was very CRM oriented of every single phone call– This is in the field, running around with medical equipment, meeting with surgeons every day. Every single phone call, almost every email, because they didn’t have the integration between email and the CRM. It had to be logged. Every meeting had to be logged. Literally, you’d come out of theaters, and you’d be expected to sit in your scrubs, log the conversation before you went anywhere, did anything else, which comes with its own hassles when nurses are going back and forth and you’re trying to meet other people and network and mingle and that kind of thing in the theater environment. 

 

The next company I moved to, it was more relaxed. If you didn’t hit your target, but you’re doing everything right, they were supportive, and your job wasn’t on the line. Because they were very process driven. The company I moved to, billion dollar company, did not have a CRM. And they were trying to get one implemented when I was leaving. But I think it was a longer and bigger process than what they realized. 

 

The second company, it was very much, we are the best salespeople in the industry. We’re dog eat dog. This will set the tone of the company, perhaps, a little bit as well. There was only one female salesperson on the team. Because they strongly believed that they should only hire ex-athletes and male salespeople with medical device experience.

 

Andy Paul 25:10

Aggressive, outgoing hunters. 

 

Will Barron 25:13

And there was a huge shift there between the two dynamics. And I thought, I punted on this in the past of I genuinely don’t know. And I was successful in both environments. I genuinely don’t know what the best way to go about it really is.

 

Andy Paul 25:30

Yeah, well, you’d get a lot of opinions on both sides. And part of it, I think, maybe depends a little bit on the environment. But I think one of the great things about sales is you can find that environment, I think, that fits you. If you’ve done a good job in your career, if you’re investing in yourself, if you have the right habits in place, and you’re building your skills on top of that, it’s a very portable profession. Even from industry to industry in some cases, I mean, you could broadly define industries. 

 

And I think that’s one of the great things about the job is that if you’re in an environment that, as you talked about, is much more oppressive, high testosterone fueled, everyone’s a closer, which isn’t sustainable over a long period of time by the way. But if you get in that type of environment, it’s not for everybody. And so you have that opportunity, if you’ve done the right things for yourself in your career, to take your skills somewhere else.

 

Will Barron 26:37

Definitely. And I think this ties back with what we started the show with to become an expert in your industry. You, as an expert, have that option to move between different companies within the same industry, different positions, a whole lot easier. Because you’re a lot more likely to bring customers with you, which makes you, forgetting all your sales skills, habits and everything else, it makes you an asset for the company to employ at that point.

 

Andy Paul 27:01

I’m always a little skeptical about this whole idea about bringing your customers with you. Because quite frankly, it doesn’t work as smoothly as most people think. Maybe if you’re a lawyer, an attorney, and you take your practice with you. That’s one thing. But yeah, I’ve rarely seen it work, and I’ve been in cases where I worked for CEOs that go, yeah, we’re gonna hire this guy because he’s got such a great rolodex. These things don’t translate from one company to another as well as you think. Sometimes they do. 

 

In my experience, the vast majority of cases they don’t, Because it’s a different product, different selling environment. And maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago it was different when the relationships oftentimes between seller and the customer really were personal. Drinks after work, play golf, take out for a three martini lunch, but you don’t see that nearly as much anymore. And it’s partially because customers don’t have time for it and partially because, as we’ve read and experienced, the purchase dynamic is so much more diverse and it’s a broader subset of stakeholders that you have to work with. Relationships that you focus on that one or two key individuals, it’s not the same anymore.

 

Will Barron 28:11

And is that the problem then? And again, to add a bit of context, when I left from one company to the other, they were direct competitors. I moved slightly up further up the country territory wise. So there was perhaps a little bit of overlap. But in that overlap, I brought all my customers over. 

 

One of the deals was over a million pound to convert their theaters. And that was purely because – and I don’t want to blow my own trumpet – but it was because of the relationship I had with them and the value that I added. When the products are very similar, there was not that much in it once you cut out all the marketing hype. The practical user aspect of it, they were very similar for the surgeons to handle, and use, and perform the surgery.

 

Andy Paul 28:49

The key point you just made is that you were the value. You added a lot of value. So yeah, moving from one place to the next, if you weren’t somebody that could add that value but you still had a previous prior relationship, you wouldn’t have been able to execute on the second deal at the new company.

 

Will Barron 29:07

So is that what we’re lacking, perhaps, in an industry? And is that a question that we can all ask ourselves of, if we did move company, have we added enough value as an individual to bring customers one way or the other? And should that be more of a focus for us?

 

Andy Paul 29:21

I don’t think you want to build your career around being able to have your customers move with you. I mean, it’s nice perhaps if they do. But if your selling point going into a new company is looking at, hey, I think I can bring General Motors with me or Company ABC down the street, and you can’t, then you’re gonna be gone. But if your promise is, look, I have a tremendous track record, and I can develop this territory, or whatever line of business you give me, or these accounts that are brand new. 

 

I can do an excellent job, because look at what I did at Company ABC down the street or General Motors. That, to me, is a much more solid way to approach it. So if I were a rep and I was changing jobs, I wouldn’t be selling yourself based on your Rolodex. You may find some takers for it. But unless you deliver, you’re gonna be out looking for that next job pretty quickly.

 

Will Barron 30:15

And someone with experience of hiring that kind of thing, Andy, turning this totally on its head, which is why I enjoy these discussions with you because we can go back and forth and you follow these insights. But could that potentially be a negative for someone, a hiring sales manager, in that they could feel that, well, if they can bring the customers to us, he can then in three or four years move all our customers onto someone else?

 

Andy Paul 30:37

It really depends on the hiring manager. Because oftentimes, depending on what their incentives are, they may be short term in their focus that they don’t care, right? Yeah, we’re gonna go public in two years, so I just want to scale this thing as quickly as I can right now. And if this guy leaves in two years, oh well. We’re gonna be going public at that point. I’ll get my stock, and I’m gone in that environment. 

 

But when you’re building a longer term company, yeah, some people are concerned about it. They sometimes get seduced by that idea that, hey, this guy can bring this book of business with him. And it does happen on occasion, but more often than not, it doesn’t. 

 

So, all right, we’re gonna move on to the last segment of the show. We’ve got one last segment we have  with all of our guests where I ask some standard questions. And we’re just going to rapid fire questions here at the end. So the first one, you can give me one word answers or you can elaborate if you wish. The first one is when you, Will, are out selling let’s say sponsorships through your podcast, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

 

Will Barron 31:39

The attribute that I pitch mainly is just the power of podcasts. It’s nothing to do with me. I try and take myself out of the equation as much as possible and let the product speak for itself. And then I try and add value on the flip side of it. What I mean by that is I will personally add value by making it such an easy process to come on board and use my expertise from the sponsorships that we’ve done before to make it work and to make it seamless. So I don’t know if that answers your question.

 

Andy Paul 32:11

That’s good enough. So who’s your sales role model?

 

Will Barron 32:15

So I love Gary Vaynerchuk. I love the way he empathizes with the people he’s signing to his audience. I love the way he’s building an audience from that perspective. I think empathy is something that’s really lacking in sales. So on that front, him. And then on the hustle, motivation side of things, I don’t agree with the way he sells a lot at the time, but I really enjoy 50% of his messages is Grant Cardone. I think no one does the whole motivation, you need to get out of this–  you want a class system, you want to put yourself in. And I think his message of success is really good.

 

Andy Paul 32:53

Okay. One book every salesperson should read.

 

Will Barron 32:57

Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. Not necessarily a sales book. But it goes back to the behaviors that we talked about at the beginning of the show or the middle of the show. I think they are key. And I know me, personally, it really drove me to leave my sales role to start the podcast, to do a whole bunch of things by purely just understanding myself and my motivations better.

 

Andy Paul 33:18

Okay, last question. What music’s on your playlist these days?

 

Will Barron 33:20

Oh, man, so I play drums. So I listen to a whole bunch of classic rock, pop punk, things of that nature. But I also used to DJ. So I listen to a lot of dubstep and electronic dance music and that as well. So if I had to pick a very specific song–  the last song I listened to was a cover of Like a Prayer by Rufio, which is a pop rock cover from about 15 years ago.

 

Andy Paul 33:44

Okay, good. All right. I have to write that one down. I don’t have that on my list. All right. Well, good. Well, Will, thanks for joining me. Pleasure to speak with you as always. So tell people how they can find out more about you and your podcast.

 

Will Barron 33:56

Very simple. If you have enjoyed this conversation, if you are a salesperson, B2B salesperson, just click pause, go to wherever you’re listening to this, in iTunes or Stitcher, wherever it is. Go to search, type in Salesman podcast, and subscribe to the show. If you want to watch the shows that we do on video, Andy’s been on a bunch of times, just head over to Salesman.Red, slide onto your browser, and it’s as simple as that.

 

Andy Paul 34:19

All right, excellent. Well, again, thanks. And remember, friends, make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success. And an easy way to do that is make this podcast, Accelerate, 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, Will Barron, 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. 

 

Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or stitcher.com. For more information about today’s guest, visit my website at AndyPaul.com.