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Use Transparency to Transform the Buying Experience, with Gerald Vanderpuye [Episode 308]

My guest on this episode is Gerald Vanderpuye, Co-founder and CEO of BuyerDeck, a sales enablement and collaboration platform. Gerald and I discuss, among other topics, Gerald’s inadvertent sales error with a prospect that led to a record-breaking order, what Gerald learned from that mistake that led to the creation BuyerDeck, and how to provide the transparency and responsiveness that transforms the customer buying experience and produces more sales.

Key Takeaways

Gerald talks about his sales time at Rackspace, where he found customers had an unremarkable buying experience, which cost potential deals for Rackspace.
Gerald relates an email error he made by copying his customer on an internal progress report about that customer. This error ended in Rackspace’s winning the largest deal in the UK at that time and led to the creation of BuyerDeck.
How incorrect sales assumptions about buying motivations, who the decision makers are, and why they care about the product can derail a sale.
Why true collaboration between sales and buyers converts a sales opportunity into a buyer-seller project where proposals and marketing materials are shared, questions are asked, and reps can respond instantly, in one space.
Sales reps using BuyerDeck have greater engagement with buyers. They can also see which buyers are the most engaged, which means the reps can focus on them for a higher close rate.

More About Gerald Vanderpuye

What’s your most powerful sales attribute?

Listening and asking the right questions.

Who is your sales role model?

Someone I worked with — Saj Coluji.

What’s one book that every salesperson should read?

Any of Zig Ziglar’s books.

What music is on your playlist right now?

R&B: Jagged Edge, Destiny’s Child.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul (AP)

It’s time to Accelerate. 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 will help you accelerate the growth of your sales, your business and most importantly, you.

Hello and welcome to Accelerate. I am looking forward to talk with my guest today joining me all the way from London, Gerald Vanderpuye. Gerald is founder and CEO of Buyer Deck. It’s a UK based company, Well, at least for now, UK based sales enablement and collaboration platform. Gerald, welcome to Accelerate.

Gerald Vanderpuye (GV)

Thank you, Andy.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to, like pressure you by moving the company, but I had heard a rumor that maybe you were relocating.

Yeah, that’s a good move.

So, before we get into that part of the story, take a minute to introduce yourself and tell us a little about yourself and how do you get your start in sales, and then you can tell us when you are moving over here.

Yeah, so firstly ignore my slightly American twin. I think my heart is in San Francisco, San Diego, somewhere in Austin, maybe. But my body is definitely still in London, not to say I don’t love London, but I’m definitely destined to move there. My favorite people are Americans. So yes, I said it and that’s why I have that accent.

But your accent doesn’t really sound very American. Just FYI. It does sound quite British still.

I hope it does. Because I kind of like my British accent and I want to sound British because whenever I’m in the US, everybody loves it. But when I’m in the UK, everyone thinks I’m American. So really put up right now.

Yeah. Rest assured, you still some British.

Thank you. I will take that. My name is Gerald and I’m CEO and co-founder of Buyer Deck. My background is very much sales. I’ve spent some time with Rackspace, which is one of the greatest company I’ve worked for. Prior to that I’ve been with Sun Microsystems, which is now with Oracle and a few other companies. But, my passion is sales and I am now changing the way that companies buy and sell.

Alright, well, we’re going to jump into that. So, but let’s first talk about your plans to relocate the company. I keep coming back to that. Yeah, I’m always trying to recruit entrepreneurs to come here.

The truth is, the space that we’re in, I think the early adopters is naturally in the US. 70% of our customers and users are in the US. A lot of my advisors and investors are in the US we have some of the San Antonio government trying to try to entice us to move there, and we know we have to do that, but it’s just about timing and doing it at the right time. So really, we have a goal as a company, we might get there in the next sort of six months and we have a very tough choice to make between Austin San Antonio San Francisco, maybe San Diego.

Yeah, well, you know what town I would vote for.

Yes.

So, but yeah. That’s for people don’t know. I mean, I split my time between San Diego New York. So yeah, San Diego would certainly be one of the choices. I mean, Austin, great place to live dynamic environment. Great barbecue, very close to San Antonio. So yeah, a lot of the same influences in terms of quality of life and so on. San Francisco, fabulous place, maybe the most expensive of those, but maybe not so expensive compared to London.

Right, it’s a tough choice. And I have two very important reasons to consider San Diego. So, there you go. Let’s put it this way. It’s going to be between Texas and California.

I think we got that part. All right. So, let’s dive into Buyer Deck Ben. You’re are a new company; you’re starting to sell the product. So, what does Buyer Deck do? What was the impetus for starting the company? What was the problem you’re trying to solve?

So, as I said, I think I spent– about two and a half years ago, I was working for Rackspace. And I remember working as a as an enterprise sales rep selling to large companies and just being really passionate about how buyers buy from us and sales enablement. I remember creating lots of tools that was used by the entire sales floor, just to help people with finding the right content and having the right playbooks, and people used to use the tools that I created. I mean, they were just basic tools, but people love that. And I remember most of my buyers loving working with me, and I was doing pretty well, I was in the top one percentile. But I always found that as a company, Rackspace delivered a really remarkable product and that was the majority of the reason we won, a lot of times was because of the product. However, whenever we lost and whenever it was really competitive, I found that it was usually because the sales experience and the buying experience wasn’t remarkable. We were probably average in the way that we delivered and we sold.

Because of the deals you lost you thought you were average.

Yeah. I think as a company, we should have won a lot more than we did. And the ones that we lost, the feedback we got was mostly to do with the way that we were selling and the experience that we were delivering to the stakeholders. And it was because it was complex sales, and I began to kind of think about this a lot more and was it particularly–

Complex sales, meaning that given sort of the length and the complexity of the sale, it was hard to maintain a consistency across the breadth of the sales process of the buying process?

Right. I define complex sales as really three factors. One, the deal size is usually over 10K in in average deal size, there are multiple stakeholders, which is really important. And then you’ve got a long sales cycle. So those three factors makes the deal complex for both selling and buying. And at Rackspace, these were the typical kind of deals that we worked on. In fact, I was working on one of the largest deals at Rackspace and I forecasted the deal to happen. And my CEO at the time, says, “Gerald, we are three weeks in, you haven’t had– we haven’t had anything from the buyer. Can you give us an executive overview of what’s going on?” So I summarized exactly what’s going on, who we’re selling to, why they were buying from us, who’s involved, the deal size, all the details of the deal, and I emailed it to the internal stakeholders. Of course, there’s the VP of sales, there is the CEO, there’s the pre-sales guys, there’s legal, there’s all sorts of different guys that are helping me with the deal. And I made a mistake and I copied in the buyer, what was supposed to be an internal email, and my VP of sales, who was in San Antonio at the time emails me and says, “Gerald, you idiot, were you supposed to copy in the buyer on this email?” It turns out, the buyer comes back to us and says, “Gerald, thanks for this.” He thinks it’s intentional, by the way. And he says, “Thanks for this. You know what, this is exactly what I needed to sell internally to my stakeholders about why we’re considering you.” So anyway, kind of long story short, this unintentional transparency leads to us winning one of the largest deals, in fact, the largest deal in the UK at the time, and the bit of the story that people always forget, because the CEO asked me, “hey, why did we win this deal? What did we do differently?” The bid they forget is when the buyer read the email, he said, “Gerald, you know a lot of these assumptions you’ve made? They are not quite right.” And it just highlighted how bad of an experience the buyer or how below like– it was average, right? And just having all this information allowed us to really deliver a much better experience. And that led us to us winning the deal.

So, what were the expectations or the assumptions you had that were wrong?

Sure. Some of it was about why they would buy it. Some of it was about the internal sort of selling and who needed to be bought in and why, and what they cared about. So, when you’re doing complex sales, there’s multiple stakeholders and everybody cares about different things. So, how the primary buyer goes about delivering the value proposition internally is unique to the different stakeholders. And of course, the timing when the deal is going to happen is a key assumption that typically we get wrong that I got wrong. And also, some of it was about the solution. So, fundamentally, there was a lot of things that I had kind of assumed because they just agree that yes, it should be the case. But it wasn’t a consensus from all the stakeholders.

So how did you get that change around?

I mean, just him seeing that alone was enough, right? It just allowed us to have this conversation around, “Well, no, Gerald, this is what it is.” And we were able to get to a point where we were in agreement, or at least the different stakeholders could have input in it and get us to a point where we– all the dots are in line, as they say. And I think that really helped us deliver a better experience for them, specifically for the primary contact.

So, this inadvertent transparency, how did that then help you sort of have this epiphany about need in the market that we can fill?

I’ve been invited to a boardroom to discuss how, “Such a hero, Gerald, you’ve just won the largest deal that we can win”, I’m thinking, I would have lost that deal. But they’ve asked me to present this and sort of explain what we’ve done right, and what we can learn, and the lessons learned. And I turn this around. And I said, well, actually, this is a great learning for me, because I realized that even though we had a remarkable product, this the buying experience he was delivering wasn’t anywhere close to being a great experience for the buyer. And the question that we should be asking within the sales organization is, are we delivering a remarkable buying experience to the people that are buying from us the same way that our product is remarkable, right? And is that experience allowing us to differentiate ourselves from the competition? Because during that period, that’s really all we have is this differentiation in the way that we’re selling. How responsive we are, how we’re validating our assumptions, how we’re listening, and that entire experience is really is critical. So, I was tasked with really putting this into practice and thinking about how we deliver a remarkable experience for every buyer that comes through the door. And we try to do this, we built some systems we built some rules and some processes around setting the bar at remarkability. And that was really difficult to do. So, I said, “Hey, I need a budget, I need to build some software around this.” I didn’t get the budget, I got frustrated. So, I said, “Hey, I’m going to leave that I’m going to build this.” And today we’ve built a buying portal that brings all those stakeholders that I’ve talked about into one single location to communicate, collaborate, transparently around the key insights and key points of the deal. During that entire sales and buying experience. And now Rackspace as a customer as well as some larger names. So yeah, I hope that paints a clear picture.

Okay, we’re going to dive into this portal because several sort of key buzzwords in there, I mean, transparency is one, obviously collaboration portal. So why don’t we start with maybe, let’s say the portal and tell people what it does, what you’re intending that it does, how maybe some customers are using it now. Then I want to get into this whole aspect of transparency. It’s because to me transparency is not really a feature of our product, it’s really a behavior.

Right. And you’re absolutely right. So, I’ll start with the portal. So, think of it this way, every time one of our customers so a sales rep has an opportunity. They rather than just thinking of it as an opportunity, they think of the opportunity as a project between his internal stakeholders that are helping them deliver this experience to the buyer, and the buyers, and the buyers’ stakeholders. And when they create a portal that brings–

You are talking about sales opportunity, right?

Absolutely. So, the sales opportunity is converted into a project between the buying team and the selling team. And we help them bring all those stakeholders that are involved in one single location. We then have all the different aspects of the deal and all the different pieces of content and questions and answers in one single location for all stakeholders to have access to. So, this portal becomes the single place where proposals are shared, marketing materials shared, if there are questions that need to be asked, if there is instant communication that needs to happen. Everything is housed in this single location making the buying experience for the buyer completely differentiated, but also really easy for them to ask any of the salespeople a question whenever they want to.

So, we’re in sort of communicating via sharing via email or social media, we’re going to do this all through this portal that everybody has access to. So, how do you get the buyer to agree to use the portal as a tool that they’ll use for their buying process, as a way to share and receive information?

Right, really good question. So, I think to go back to email, which is really what we’re replacing here for this particular use cases. Emails are great one on one communication, when you have three, four or five stakeholders on your side, and you have five plus stakeholders on the on this on the buyer side, it really isn’t the best tool for collaborating. And I think we’ve lived with email for a long time now, and there’s a lot of companies that are disrupting it for specific use cases. And we think that in buying and selling we can do a much better job than just using email to do this. But you’re right, the question is how you get the buyer to move out of the tool that they used to into a new tool. Well, what we do is we present the tool in a way to the buyer that doesn’t require them to sign up, it really is a two click process, from the email, they click on a link and it opens the portal. From that moment, we make sure that it’s secure to them, their laptop, their IP address, nobody else can access it. And it means that for them, it’s completely seamless. And they can go back to it at any point.

But they still have to use it.

While right, they can still use–

Yeah. So, let’s say you send an email to a customer, does it automatically get copied into the portal?

Right. So, if you send an email to a customer, of course, it’s not copied into the portal, we assume that because you’re sending an email to private email, right? But if you want to have an instant communication with a customer, you’ve got to Buyer Deck. For the buyer, the reason they would use our tool is because all the contents there, and all the people are there instantly. We’re not an email that might mean you’re waiting maybe hours before you get a response. There’s a link and they can talk to the salesperson or whoever’s involved, instantly.

So, it’s set up with sort of methodology that it’s like a workspace so that they know if you’re online, the buyer comes online, they have a question, they can tell whether you’re available?

Right. And that’s the beauty of it. So I mean, you of all people I’m sure agree with us on the importance of responsiveness from the salesperson, and that’s one of the major reasons, the fundamentals around delivering a great buying experience, which is, yes, the buyer comes online, you should know that, “Hey, this buyer is thinking about you right now, they probably have a question, they probably want to educate themselves or to ask you a question.” So, we notice them instantly, and it means they’re ready to respond and beat the competition.

Okay, so let’s walk through it. So from a salespersons perspective, a use case, because there are sets of collaborative tools that are emerging in the sales space, some bleeding over from sort of work space collaboration, others more purpose built like your own, so how are how is salesperson using them? And what are you finding in terms of adoption within your clients?

Right? Yeah, within our client base, we probably have about 60% of salespeople within the organizations that we use, use it religiously. Now the other 40% we know that they will for over a year, it will take them some time to kind of come on board and use it. But there are just individuals that are stuck in their ways. And I think we know that that’s going to change with time, but we know that the reps that use it drive a huge amount of engagement on their opportunities, they have a higher close rate. And they can see directly which buyers are truly engaged. And we know that, out of the buyers that they engage with around 28% of those buyers are actually completely disengaged, probably not a good fit or not ready to buy from them, and those sales reps that I use and our tool can focus their time on buyers that are qualified.

Yeah, I mean, certainly, it does become a level of qualification, right? If you are setting up a portal, that’s just instant two clicks, no sign in required. You tell the customer “Hey, this is how we want to communicate with you. We think you’ll hear the value of doing that.” And then they don’t engage, then and you have those analytics. I presume that that tell you, they’ve come to the site X number of times, are they opened these documents” or so on so forth, that’s the analytics you have. Yeah, that’s a great sign. Yeah, these people, there’s not worth more of my time.

Right. And for the reps, it really takes five seconds to create a project share content to the buyer, some of the behavior they already do in an email, and today, yes, we will tell you if they open the email, some will tell you if they click on the attachment, but we will actually tell you what pages the buyers are interested in and what they’re truly interested in, and help suggest the more relevant content based on how the buyer is behaving with the content.

Now, so we’ve seen the sort of convergence of sales tools, if we have a Venn diagram of overlapping circles are certainly areas of overlap. So certainly, email trackers, the sales development platforms and so on. So, how you are playing in that space? How do you play with those? How do you differentiate from those others?

Well, my advice to sales, people’s analytics, especially knowing who cares and when they care– now, it doesn’t matter what you’re using to get that, if you’re not using that, you’re really behind the curve. There’s so many tools out there, and that’s commoditized now. You really have to have some sort of insights around which of your opportunities, your accounts, your leads are really engaged, because those are the ones you’re most likely to sell to.

That’s a great question. I mean, without digressing too much, and I’ve had other guests, we’ve talked about this, I think the use of sales technology, sales automation technologies are heavily focused, across the entire– we’ll just say the US economy, focused heavily into the tech space. You get outside the tech space and the use of these tools is not very prevalent at all. So, what do you see is really the key, because this is one of my passions, I want to broaden the use of these tools outside of the early adopters. We see in the tech face that really drives their business and their productivity. How do we get those benefits to everybody else?

Yeah, I think the reality is that a lot of those companies just need leaders, right? They need some companies that are doing this, and they want to hear it from within their sectors. We spoke to a manufacturing company who were not even on Salesforce. They were still deliberating if they should use Salesforce on this huge billion-dollar company in Germany. They had a CRM system, but I won’t mention their name, but it was one that they should have moved away from a long time ago. It took them about two years to deploy that. But the point is, they’re a laggard. And three months later, they’re on Salesforce and then they will call on us to say, “Hey, this is important. We want to integrate this into Salesforce”, and once they did that, we had their competitor reached out to us saying, “Hey, we just lost the deal because the company– because our competitor was using this buyer portal, and we Google buyer portal, and we found you”, and not knowing that, that company was actually using our products. And so, I think a lot of this behavior is, they’re just not early adopters, they need a few innovators and the space for it to change. So, I think it’s with time.

So, what do you see as sort of the challenges in the space you’re at? I mean, these are great tools. I am huge advocate for tools that give intelligence to sales reps to help them do their job become more productive, more effective. Nothing stay still, right? So how do you this service evolving? Or the space you’re in in terms of helping shape the buyer experience, which I think is so utterly crucial.

I think what’s really interesting is how artificial intelligence is going to help us. Because selling is hard enough. We want everything else that helps the sales rep do a better job and provide a remarkable experience to the buyer to be automated, right? We shouldn’t have to update the CRM and we shouldn’t have to do all that manual searching of content, what’s the right response here? Am I educated enough about this product? All of those things should be at my fingertips. And I think the more data we have about where the buyer is, and how they’re behaving, just puts the salesperson in the right position to respond and help the buyer make a decision. And I think in the future of the company that utilizes the insights and the analytics that they capture the most in helping the buyer are the companies that are going to win. Right now, I think we’re focused more on how exciting the analytics is, but, who is using that data in the most intelligent way?

Yeah, and that’s a good question. Who is using those that most intelligent way?

You are asking me?

Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of lonely. You are the only one I am talking to right now. And we’re sending emails and they tell us what they want. But I think the challenge with sales technologies is adoption. Right? And how do you how do you get adopted embedded in such a way that before the next greatest thing comes along that might possibly supplant you?

Yeah. So, I agree with that. I think the challenge most companies have with adoption is because– well a number of reasons, sometimes it’s UX, sometimes it’s just timing. You’re too early. I remember when we started considering Slack two and a half years ago, we couldn’t get the rest of the guys to use it. Now the adoption is 100%. I know Slack, and there are many tools like that. And the salesforce, struggled with adoption. I think it’s a natural curve of– there are early adopters, there are innovators and I couldn’t convince my grandmother to use the iPhone for eight years. I think we just have to be patient and focused on really understanding the use case and really understanding what the user wants. I think we obsess too much over adoption, I guess is what I’m saying. I think you cannot have a 100% adoption for anything that is that is truly innovative. And we just have to accept it. I speak to a lot of companies who are looking for 90%, 100% adoption across the board. And the great ones, of course, have a team that helped drive adoption and we achieve that. We have a company that’s using our product that has 98% adoption, and it’s amazing, but they focus on that. But it’s not what we should focus on. The reality is that if 60, 70% of the salesforce is using a great tool, and you’re seeing a clear ROI, it will transpire over time, so we have to be patience, I guess.

Yeah. And are you able then to track your users’ experiences as you said, so you can say, “Okay, yeah, sales reps using this is getting a higher close rates, shorter buying cycles. I mean, are you able to track that type of analytics?

Right. 100% we can and we’ve been going for two and a half years now. So, we have that data and we’re using that to drive adoption. The reality is that sales reps, believe it or not, they see this data and they’re skeptical. If you have someone who’s been working in sales for 20, 30, 40 years, and he’s been doing it his own way his whole life and he seen that somebody else is succeeding and he’s still operating at 80%, 90% just enough to stay in the company, the RUI isn’t going to convince him.

What does? That’s a great question though. So, what does? A lot of these slough technologies that come out they’re really geared at sort of the upper crust anyway, the people that are succeeding anyway. And to me why the real power sales technologies are– if adopted by the people that are what I call the middle class of sales that want to aspire to earn more, be more successful and so on, become sort of– B players become sort of consistent B plus a minus type players. Then, tools like become important,

So, here’s the challenge that we have. As a co-founder of a tech company, we’re fanatical fans that love our product, but we know we have challenges with adoption. Here’s the challenge we have. So, the challenge is really about understanding the use case enough to simplify the product and have it really clear that it’s someone who is– let’s put it this way, is slightly slow or with a slightly slow uptake on technology access. If he’s not confused and he can use the product really easily, that’s really what it’s about. The challenge we have is when we see that something is exciting, it’s innovative, and we have a clearly that 80 out of 150 of the sales reps love it, and they’re using it. And they are asking us for more features and more cool stuff. The challenge is, why don’t we want to build that, right? And then you continue to build that. And of course, they love it. But the problem is, you struggle with UI and UX, because you’re making the product too complicated. So, this is the daily challenges that we have, how do we simplify it for everybody? Or how do we make it a really cool tool for early adopters?

Well, it’s a great question. I mean, I think that really has to do with your philosophy of selling, right? I mean, to me, keep it simple, right? Even people selling complex products, overcomplicate things, even people are really successful. Actually, let me rephrase that. In my mind, the people that are really successful in sales, learn how to keep it simple. They’ve kicked out the extraneous out of their processes, out of their lives, and they focus on the things that make a difference for the buyer. So if you can keep it simple I think you’ll be better off.

So, I’m not disagreeing with you. I agree with you. I’m just being honest and saying that’s the challenge that I have.

Yeah, well, that’s what a really premium price product as for, right?

Right. And I mean, this is what we focus on every day, what do we build and what do we sell them? It’s a constant question, right? It’s just that it’s really tempting to solve more problems, right?

Yeah. But the question is, are they really problems that will move the needle for you or for the sales rep? And I think that’s always the challenge. I think you nailed it right on, your adoption over time has been greater with the simpler direct, compelling value proposition that people can understand.

Right, 100%. But then you look at the market and you see that most products today are complex. And the reason they’re complex is because they solve lots of problems. And you need salespeople to explain that, and you need to drive adoption with customer success. I completely agree with you. But I’m saying, this is the reality is that you have great companies, you have even LinkedIn that is awesome. But it struggles with the width features, right? If they want to solve more and more problems.

Not always clear. That’s the case. But yeah.

But no, if you think of LinkedIn in the beginning, it was much easier to use like today, you can do 100 things with LinkedIn, and that makes it harder to use.

All except exporting your context.

Is that easy? Are you saying that’s easy?

No, you can’t do it.

Oh, they’ve removed that now? oh, you can do that.

I am not sure you can do it.

Oh, you can do it. I’ve done that six months ago.

Yeah. But you get the point.

It is the point I’m trying to make. Yeah,

Exactly. User experience, buyer experience. Alright, so we get to the last segment of show, which is everybody’s favorite, standard questions that I ask all my guests. You’ve been waiting, you’ve been studying for this part. So, the first question is a hypothetical scenario. You’ve just been hired as new VP of sales at a company whose sales have stalled out, they want you to fly over from the UK to the US to help put things right, get them unstuck. So, what two things could you do your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

So actually, I have to give props to one of the greatest sales VPs that I’ve worked with, Scott White Rackspace. Here’s what he did, he came in from the US and he came into the UK, and we’d had a few VPs of sales right that had come in and left six months in. And Scott came in quiet demeanor, came across initially like an introvert, and honest to god he spent about a month not saying a single word but interviewing every single individual, maybe 100 people, and spent so much time with every single individual that by a month, or month and a half in, he had built so much respect with the with the team, that whatever he said he would have got us to do. And I think that’s more important than whatever strategy or whatever advice that you come in to deliver. Is spend time with the human beings and get to know them and that was an extremely extraordinary thing.

Okay, so that’s one thing you do, what’s the second thing you would do?

So, after that, assuming I’ve learned something, and I can deploy it. I think for me, it’s always about passion for something in sales, it’s about energy and it’s about passion for something. And going back to our mission as a company and where we’re going, and why we’re going, and making sure that we all remember that. For me is the most important.

Good enough. So now some rapid-fire questions. You give me one-word answers, you can elaborate if you wish. The first one is when you Gerald are out selling Buyer Deck, what’s your most powerful sales attribute?

I think listening. I really take my time. I was a poor listener as a salesperson, probably the first five years, and it got to a point and I started to do this. Whenever I wanted to speak, I would put myself on mute and speak, and that forced me to listen and let the buyer sort of speak, and even those awkward silences that salespeople can’t handle, and they just forced themselves to fill it with words, I would put myself in mute and I would say something, say the things I wanted to say, but it would be awkward and the buyer would speak, they would literally feel that, “Hey, here’s a moment where I need to share why I care or what I’m interested in with them.” And that practice has got me to a point where I would like to believe that I’ve spend a lot of time really asking open questions and listening.

Okay. Good answer. Who’s your sales role model?

I have a lot. That’s an unfair question, Andy.

You get one.

There’s a guy that I worked with. I’ve read so many books, but Zig probably, but someone close to me, someone I worked with. His name is Zach Colucci. And I worked with him a while and I love that kid. He is my role model.

Okay. One book every salesperson should read.

Gerald Venderpuye

Great question. Which one? Any of Zig Ziglar books.

Okay, that’s fair. Last question. What music is on your playlist.

I’m one of those guys that like everything, but I’m not going to lie, I’m an R&B guy. I’m an old school R&B guy. I’m ashamed to say that I love Jagged Edge, Destiny’s Child. It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s R&B and I can shake my hip I’m good.

I definitely wouldn’t call Destiny’s Child old school. I think old school R&B is O’Jays and the Temptations, and people like that. That’s too old school. All right, you’re talking like 80s and 90s.

Yeah. 90s, 2000s. That’s when we used to call it rhythm and blues. Right? It wasn’t an R&B thing.

I wouldn’t even know if they’d call it R&B then. Well, thanks for being on the show. So, Gerald, tell people how they can get in contact with you or find out more about Buyer Deck.

Sure. So, if you’re listening to the show, and you care about the buying experience, doing something that delivers or truly remarkable experience for every buyer that’s buying your product, please reach out to us. Go to buyerdeck/giveaway.com. For I think about a week we’re giving away some licenses. We could give it away if you qualify.

I was going to say by the time this airs, it won’t be there anymore.

That’s so true. Just go to buyerdeck.com, email me gerald@buyerdeck.com, if you care about remarkable buying experiences and let’s chat.

Or email, Gerald, and claim all these coupons even though it’s long past time. So okay, Gerald, appreciate you being on the show.

Awesome. Thank you. I loved your show. Thank you all.

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 that is to make this podcast a part of your daily routine, whether you listen to 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, GV, who shared his expertise with how to accelerate the growth of your sales. So, thanks for joining me. Until next time, this is AP. 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 guests, visit my website at andypaul.com.

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