179: It's About the Customer, It's Not About You with Andrew Barbuto

0:00 Scott Ingram: This episode is brought to you by the 2024 Sales Success Summit coming here to Austin on October 7th and 8th. For all the details and to grab your tickets, click over to top1summit.com. That's top, the number 1, summit.com. You're listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast, where we deconstruct world-class sales performers to provide insights and strategies to help you improve. To learn more, visit us at top1.fm. Here's your host, Scott Ingram. Today on the Sales Success Stories podcast, my guest is Andrew Barbuto. Andrew has been the number one top sales performer at Basis for the last 3 full years and counting of over 100 reps and is the author of a soon-to-be-published B2B sales book. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

0:54 Andrew Barbuto: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me.

0:56 Scott Ingram: So let's jump in like we always do with some immediate value. I want to talk about the 3 things that you believe have contributed the most to your consistent success in sales?

1:06 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, great. I love this exercise. It gave me an opportunity to reflect. And one of the things that I'm personally most passionate about, about my job is customer service and providing customers with value is really the center of everything I do on a daily basis. I'll give you 3, but everything we talk about is going to come back to that, which is how can I provide the most value for my customers and prospects? The first one I would give you is customer Customer obsession, just relentless laser focus on providing as much customer value as possible. Every day I wake up and I think about how can I help my customers be better, do better at their job, be more effective, be more efficient, and it drives everything I do. So whether that means providing research, whether that means keeping them up to date with the latest industry trends, or even if it's related to our offering, but here's an offering that you guys are not taking advantage of that could potentially provide value for you to offer your clients. So that's the first one, which is just laser focus on my customers. It's the most important thing to me.

2:13 Scott Ingram: And what's the second thing?

2:14 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So the second thing is I would give this the description of just hard work, which sounds very generic, but I'll go deeper than that. It's not just the hard work, right? It's doing more. So That means doing everything I can to find more customers to help and find more ways to help those customers. And what that naturally leads to is just relentless outreach and follow-ups. If I believe that I can help somebody, you're either going to tell me that I can't help you, or we're going to have a conversation and we're going to find out. And listen, it's not always the case where we can help, but I'm going to do everything I can to find out. And so what that means is Outreach, follow-ups every few days, phone calls, LinkedIn, basically do whatever I can to get in front of them to find out whether we can help them. I think so much about a salesperson's effectiveness is what comes below the surface. This was one of the things that was the biggest learning for me when I first started sales. I'm like, wow, this isn't as glamorous as they make it out to be on the Wolf of Wall Street. And it's not all about pitching clients and stuff. It's everything that goes on below the surface, right? So it's how the sausage is made. It's the reaching out to strangers constantly, all day, every day. That is such a big part of the job. And a lot of people don't realize that when the IO closes, you don't know about the 100 emails over 2 years that it took to get there. It takes a special type of person to be able to do that and to continue to do that. That would be number 2. And then the 3rd one is expertise. So this is, I think, the biggest change about the modern-day sales professional, which is It's no longer about the golf outings and the lunches. Relationship's still important, but what creates, in my opinion, just a top sales professional today is the person who knows the most about your industry. You have to be an expert, not just actually on your industry, but also your company. Of course, that's table stakes. You need to know everything about your products and offerings, and you need to always be updated on it. You also need to know about your customers and you need to understand their business. You need to be business savvy and technical savvy. The way that you can offer continuous value and how I do is just always trying to be up to date, taking additional trainings when I can, reading the trades every single day. When there's a new product offering that comes out, reading everything I can to know about it. I speak for myself, but also I've spoken to a lot of top sales reps at my companies, other companies. It seems that when today's top salespeople, they are experts in their fields, they are strategic consultants. I want to be able to offer so much value that Whether my customers worked with me or not, they would want to pay me for my consulting. They don't want to lose me because I help them make their jobs better and be better at their jobs. And so the only way to do that is by being an expert and always being up to date on everything there is to know.

5:01 Scott Ingram: Yeah. So well said. This is funny because it'll be probably out of order and I haven't really sat down to articulate this, but I've got a pending daily sales tip in my head that will probably get released before people hear this interview. So folks may have already heard that and we'll for sure have it in the show notes. I think I'm going to call it just to be super aggressive and annoying about it, I'm going to say relationship selling is dead. But the thing is, relationships are table stakes. They're at the core of everything, right? So it's not like, well, you can't have relationships. That doesn't matter. The inner human, forget about that. But it's really, it's this value side. It's what's the value that you are bringing, right, to every conversation. And also, how are you articulating the value of what it is that you're selling so that it fits within all of the other priorities and budget and everything else that the folks we're selling to are facing. So cool. Let's contextualize this now. So talk about your current role a little bit and how you got to number 1 there.

5:58 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So one just quick comment on what you just said there. I don't think that, although I do think that it's a great headline, the relationship, I don't think that the relationship selling is dead per se. I think the nature of the relationship is different. So what it means to have a great relationship with your customer has changed. So it's no longer about Hey, like I'm taking them out to golf outing and I'm taking them out to a nice dinner or a nice steak dinner or what have you. It's how can I help my customer do better at their job? That's the value that you're bringing, right? And also how consistent can I be? Like, are we getting immediate responses? Is this person listening to me and giving me what I need? Are they as detailed as possible? That's the new way of having a great relationship with your customers. How much value can I bring for you? So that's just what I would say to that. But of course, it's important to have a good, like a relationship with the person on a personal level as well.

6:47 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And for me, the biggest issue is if somebody is claiming like, oh, the relationship is the biggest differentiator, you're in trouble.

6:55 Andrew Barbuto: Yep.

6:56 Scott Ingram: Because it's really hard. Like you're the best friend. I'm like, is that really what your buyer needs? I don't need friends. Right.

7:04 Andrew Barbuto: I have lots of friends.

7:04 Scott Ingram: Yeah.

7:04 Andrew Barbuto: Well, friends aren't gonna buy from you most likely. Yeah. Right. It's like, how can I help you? If I can help you, then that's what's really important. Although it's great to have rapport and it's great to have a good personal relationship with somebody. Like you do need to have that person, right? Like how many people are going to work with someone they just disdain? That's probably not going to be that common.

7:18 Scott Ingram: Yeah, exactly.

7:19 Andrew Barbuto: But that's not the main factor, as you said. Yeah. So for my job, so what do I do? I work in digital media advertising services and technology. I work at Basis Technologies. What we primarily sell is software to both streamline media agencies and advertisers' workflow on a daily basis, as well as execute paid media campaigns. I've been here for a little over 5 years, and how I got to the top is I've been very methodical with how I start at a company and go from zero to building a big bulk of business. And I break this down into number one, first learning everything there is to know about my company, of course. So having a thorough understanding as to What we offer, what type of customers would most benefit from our offering, what are our customers' typical challenges? That's really important to identify what your ideal customer profile is. And it's important to do research. This is one of the things that I think separates me is I spend a ton of time with finding those customers that I'm most likely to be able to help. We can't help everybody. There are some customers that they already have a built-out tech stack and it just doesn't really fit. I spend more time with identifying who are those customers that are most likely to need our help. And then from there, the relentless outreach, like I said, once I've determined, hey, I can likely help these people, I'm going to find out if I can. And then from there, once you do get into it, I want to set up as many meetings as possible. That's what I did when I started from nothing. It was all outreach. It was calling on my old customers when appropriate and Getting in front of those customers. And then I have a very, very simple sales philosophy when I have these conversations. It's, listen, I'm going to do as much research about you as possible before we ever speak. When I get on the phone with you, I have a very simple objective. I have an idea as to where I think I may be able to help you. All I need to do is find out if I can. The way to do that is by asking questions and listening. So once I've shown, hey, I'm credible, I've done my research, I did my homework, here are the ideas that I have. Let me ask you, like, tell me a little bit about your day. Tell me about some of the things that you are experiencing, and then we'll make a decision together whether we can work together and whether I can help make your life easier. And so you do that with as many people as possible, and you're very, very targeted with who you're speaking to. And then you do that over and over and over again. Like I said, all that below the surface, and that's how you build a big book of business. And then you maintain that book of business by making sure that your customers are as happy as possible and they're getting better value from you than they could get anywhere else.

9:55 Scott Ingram: Nice. When you are having those conversations, are you setting it up with them in that way, or are you just kind of showing it? You're showing that, hey, I've done all this research. I have kind of this hypothesis.

10:07 Andrew Barbuto: Great question. I set it up. It's kind of a yes to both of those questions. So the way I approach it is, hey, I start out by telling you what I know about you. Hey, I've done my research. I noticed that you've been investing in AI lately. I noticed that a big objective for you guys is to grow. And once I've told that, I'll hopefully identified something about our companies that maybe we've worked together in the past, or maybe I know something, maybe there's a mutual connection. From there, I'll say, listen, based on what I found, I have some ideas to share with you, but you can't find everything on the internet. I just want to clarify a few things upfront to make sure that we're having the most relevant conversation as possible. And then from there, once we've determined, okay, Once I've made the determination as to what I'm most likely to be able to help you with, once you've confirmed the fact that it's relevant and that would be helpful, then I will present my solution. And then if that all makes sense, we'll set up next steps.

11:00 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. What's interesting about this, just personal experience on the backend, I learn a lot about the folks I interview before we interview them, right? Not just the research I do looking at LinkedIn profiles and finding what I can find on YouTube or whatever, but it's the way people prep. And also you're working with Tina to help promote your book. Tina is maybe the first and only PR type person who has reached out to me to bring somebody onto the podcast that's ever succeeded because most of those folks, I mean, they're positioning traditional book authors and things like that who aren't active quota-carrying individual contributors. And my criteria for the show is so ridiculous. I only interviewed number one, top 1% quota carriers, but she reached out. Tina knows that. Like, I know Tina. We haven't talked in years, but she's like, Scott, I have somebody that meets your criteria. Here's Andrew, laid it out freaking perfectly. And it's just a great example of that's what that is. And again, just the work that you did, I knew that you were super prepared for this. You sent me some really helpful material just to help me in my prep, and it's awesome. I'd love to experience that because great salespeople do everything in this way, right?

12:18 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. Well, she sold me, so I get it. She sold me so well that I wrote a blog post about it because the way that she had sold me is I think the best way to sell in B2B these days, which is we get on the phone. She literally said, why don't you tell me a little bit about your book? And she just let me go off on a tangent. And at the end she's like, oh, that sounds great. It sounds like there is a need in the marketplace for that. Here's who I've helped. What do you think? Like, let's get this going. And I was like, great, send me a contract. It's so simple, right? The best conversations that I've been on have been the ones where I've spoken the least. I've literally have said 2 words in some meetings and they're like, all right, send me an IO. And I'm like, that's amazing. And it makes sense. And I think about in this, the opposite direction, the best conversations I've been on with salespeople, I've spoke the most. Like I've gone on a tangent. I've told them everything they need to know about how they could sell me. And the worst ones I've been on have been the opposite where the salesperson just rambling and doesn't ask many questions. And like, we ran out of time and it's like, we came on the call with a specific request. We didn't address that. And then they think, oh, like we're going to set up next steps. You didn't even answer the question we had because you didn't let us speak at all.

13:25 Scott Ingram: Yeah. It's one of those things. It really encouraged people to get into more buying situations. But closer to what you're selling. I'm not talking about, hey, if you're selling B2B, buying a car isn't the same thing. One of the things I like to look at is, okay, whoever I'm selling to in an organization, right? So if I'm selling to a marketing leader, maybe I go to the marketing leader inside my organization and go, hey, are you buying anything soon? Like, are we doing any evaluations? Can I just watch? And just seeing what's going on in those conversations. And in those cases, if you're doing it inside of your organization, you have a lot of the context. Like you probably know, you know about your organization, you know, probably what they're trying to accomplish. So you have that perspective and you just get to see who's good and who's bad. And it becomes so clear so fast.

14:17 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, you nailed it. And I think that that's an example of something that I think top salespeople will do, which is thinking outside the box to learn. Before I went into sales, I did a couple of things that I think are relevant to this conversation. The first one was I didn't just set up one-on-ones with the people that I work with directly. I set up one-on-ones with each department to understand what their day-to-day is like. And I asked everybody the same question. What do you think is our biggest differentiator? What do you think that customers love most about working with us? And I got very different answers, but it's important to get different perspectives on that. And one of those perspectives is from the buyer's perspective. Before I went into sales, I set up meetings with every salesperson that was reaching out to me because I was an account manager. So I got called on all the time. I knew I was going to go into sales. And so I said, all right, let's get on the call. Let's get in person and let's speak. I took very close notes. My goal was to get through those meetings without saying anything and just observing. And the best salespeople didn't let me do that. And they didn't let me finish the meetings without getting next steps. The worst salespeople let me get through it. And I didn't say anything and I was like, great, we'll be in touch. It was super helpful because having that perspective from the other side of the table, it's eye-opening. You get to see, oh, this is what it's like to be presented to. And this is what it's like to be in their shoes. And that's where I learned pretty quickly that the best meetings are the ones where the prospect or the customer is speaking most of the time. I feel good about it. I came out of a meeting, I made a great point. He was listening to me, thought I made some really smart points. He actually truly was listening to me and they can help. You don't need to speak the whole time. You don't have to go through your entire value proposition, tell you all about your awards and stuff. What does that mean to them? Really not much. You do need to show credibility, but you don't need to spend your entire time talking about yourself. It's not about you.

16:07 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Andrew, let me ask you this. What percentage of your overall sales effort is directly working with your clients versus working with your team internally in service of those clients?

16:20 Andrew Barbuto: I love that question because this was very surprising for me. Which is, you know, in sales, you think that you're going to be mostly selling externally. But the reality is, is that you have to do a lot of selling internally as well, because not everything is going to fit very nicely into a box. To answer your question, I think that it is more split. I would say 60% talking to clients and then post-sale a lot of times, or even putting together proposals and making sure that you bring this business in and the business and the clients remain happy. In order to do that, you do have to work a lot internally. So it's probably more of a 60 externally, 40 internally split.

16:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah, very common answer. And what I would say is the more complex your sales are, the more internal work you have to do because you're reliant on so many people. What made me ask that question is when you talked about the work that you did to meet internally with folks across departments, that to me is one of the greatest hacks and in onboarding, like it's really hard to do if you've been with a company for years, but it makes so much sense. It's so easy. Not that you can't do it, but it's so easy when you're just starting and you're trying to get a feel for the organization as a tool to build all of those relationships that you're ultimately going to need to be successful later. So having relationships with your product team, with your delivery team, with your implementation team, with your customer service team, with your legal team, with your finance team, with all of the different players. That in one way, shape, or form are going to come in play that you're going to need to ask favors of.

18:00 Andrew Barbuto: 100%. Yeah. And that's the thing is you can't do this by yourself. You're not on an island unless you're selling something that's just like B2C, it's transactional. Like if you're selling at like a hot dog stand, if you're selling complex B2B sales, you can't do it by yourself. That goes for both the fact that you can't help clients by yourself because Unless you're the person who's also pulling the levers, if you're offering them a service or it's not something you see both, you can't service them by yourself. You also can't close a deal by yourself because you need all of these people's help. You need all of your colleagues' help. And so it's important that you have strong relationships with them, but also important that you know what they do. This was a really big learning for me when I went into sales was I didn't spend enough time truly understanding all that goes into these deals, knowing what are the different roadblocks that I could potentially run into. Didn't realize that legal could shut down a deal after I spent 2 years working on it because the terms and conditions weren't right. Didn't realize that stuff. And when I came to my current company, that was one of the things that I made a priority, which is understanding where do I go for what, what needs to happen, what are potential roadblocks that I could run into. And also it's important that you build strong relationships with them because you're going to need something from them at some point or regularly. And it's important to have a good working relationship with everybody you work with directly and indirectly. So having those relationships throughout the company is something that I think is really important to be successful in sales.

19:28 Scott Ingram: Yeah, for sure. And I left out a super important group, and that is your executive team. So being able to lean on them and pull them into deals and leverage their influence when legal tries to shut you down, for example.

19:39 Andrew Barbuto: Exactly. You got to do that.

19:41 Scott Ingram: So, Andrew, let's put your results in perspective and just kind of quantify what you've done here lately?

19:46 Andrew Barbuto: Sure. Yeah. So I started at the company that I work at now, Basis, back in 2019. I think that the entire book was like $2 million and this year I'll do $80 million. And each year I've exceeded the sales quota by at least 100%. At some point you get to the law of big numbers. So I think my first year was like 200-plus percent. It was a little bit over 200, 170. And then the last couple of years have been 130%. But The scale is pretty incredible because an average salesperson's goal is like $5 million. I'll bring in $80 million this year. And listen, some of that, you can't get to that point without having some luck, but I always think about like, you create your own luck. Nothing's ever handed to you. So it needs to be a combination of hard work and luck to be able to be successful.

20:33 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep, absolutely. Let's talk about your origin story. And you sent me a very detailed version, maybe not quite that detailed. We can share that because I know it's on your website, but how did you get into sales in the first place?

20:45 Andrew Barbuto: So that's a great question. Again, this was very fun to like do some reflecting on my story because I think it is really important, the beginning of your story. And a lot of what I thought back then is what I believe now. When I was back in college, I really didn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I thought maybe I would go into journalism or be an English major. When my teachers told me that, one of my teachers, the first thing they said to me was, I'm 37 years old. I went here. And I'll be paying off my student loans for the rest of my life. So I'm like, I love to write, but I think that that might just be a hobby for me. What was I going to do? So I realized going into my senior year that my stints working at Robert Moses Beach or United States of America weren't going to cut it for me. As I made my trek into the real world, I realized I needed an internship. And one of the companies that does a lot of recruiting at the University at Albany, which is where I went, it was Enterprise Rent-A-Car. And they have a really great management trainee program. What that program taught me were 2 main things. One taught me about that I had the ability to connect with people and that translated to sales success. I learned that I was able to do a good job with selling our insurance company. I was the top salesperson on Long Island for all the interns. And so I realized I was good at it because that's what I really wanted to ultimately get into, something that I enjoyed doing as much as you enjoy a job and something that I was good at. And of course I wanted to make a lot of money doing it. I thought maybe I would go into B2C sales, but it is stressful to sell somebody every single day. You got your numbers on the board and they go up and down depending on how you're doing it daily. I was like, I don't know if my mental health can handle this. I really enjoyed it and I was good at it. But the other thing it taught me was what I really fell in love with was customer service. They put so much emphasis on providing excellent customer service. They don't let you leave. I don't know the last time you rented a car, but they won't let you leave until you tell them How was our experience? And if it was anything besides amazing, they'll say, how can I make it up to you? And I was like, that is the way that you do business. I still didn't want to graduate college. I was loving school. I was like, I never want to grow up. But summer going into my senior year, my dad worked at GroupM, which is a massive media conglomerate, completely outside of marketing or anything like that. His job, he did business continuity. But he helped me get an interview for a sales internship at one of the digital media subsidiaries called Zaxis. I was the sales intern leading into the year after I graduated, and I was able to observe the inner workings of salespeople, what they do. And I was like, oh, okay, this makes sense. B2B sales is the way to go. It's a longer sales cycle, but it still has all of the same things that I liked about it. And it was even more customer service focused. By the end of the internship, I was like, all right, bring me on. I'm ready to go. But they said, not so fast, not how it works. You gotta start at the bottom and you gotta learn the ropes. And then maybe 2, 3 years down the road, you can potentially go into sales. So I was like, oh, okay. I mean, that's kind of annoying. I was ready to start selling right now. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was, I started at the company full-time as an associate, literally doing Excel sheets in these platforms, doing what anybody would consider to be the grunt work. And it was a necessary thing to do because it taught me so much. And it taught me what we talked about earlier, which is you need to be a domain expert. And how are you going to sell something if you've never been in the platforms and actually done it yourself? So anyways, I know I'm rambling here. So I went in from an associate to an account manager, which was a client-facing role. And then I always knew I wanted to go back into sales. So I made it known. When there was an opening, they told me to interview for it. I was a little bit sooner than I anticipated, but got the role and the rest was history.

24:28 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. I guess the other thing that's maybe worth calling out is the transition from that world to the software world. You want to talk about that just a little bit?

24:36 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So there was 2 big learning curves for me in my career so far. The first one was learning sales, B2B sales, like truly understanding, because no one really taught me, like there was no, like formal training. I was like, oh, I was expecting someone to teach me how to sell, but no one ever did. So I had to kind of learn on my own, which I think that's not that uncommon, which is part of the reason why I wrote the book. Cause there's a lot of trial and error. That was one learning curve is actually learning what it took to actually sell. And then the second one was switching from services to software, which was where I switched my first company to my current company. And very big difference between selling services and software because the conversations switched from, hey, let me make your life as easy as possible to let me help make your company as profitable as possible. That's a very different conversation. It involves a lot more decision makers, a lot different stakeholders. Getting a software platform into a company takes a while. There's a lot of factors in terms of the different stakeholders and how it impacts them. That took a little while to really learn how to effectively navigate that change management, which is required to sell software within an organization. You're going after different companies, you're looking for different things. Took me a little while, but once I got it down, once my first one came through, everyone got easier after that. And I think that that's one of the things that one of the biggest learning curves that I understood was so much of your sales success is a result of your experience. So it's very difficult to sell something if you don't have active experience with making customers' lives easier with it today so that you can reference that in your meetings. It's a challenge. And that's what I think that is part of the ramp-up period and why it could take a longer period for new salespeople is you have no experience to speak of.

26:21 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Let's talk about how you would approach it if you were starting over right now. So let's imagine you're graduating college and you already know that you want to go into sales. How are you tackling the early stages of your career? How are you setting yourself up?

26:36 Andrew Barbuto: I would recommend doing what I did, which is Don't rush into sales. You need to really understand what you're selling, especially in complex B2B sales. You need to learn the ropes. As not ideal as it is, everybody's first job is the grunt work. It's just how it works. Everybody puts in their time. So that's what I would do. I'd get a job in the field that I want, and I would spend the first 2 years or 2, 3 years, however long it takes to learn the ropes, really Understand the inner workings, keep up to date with the industry, set up meetings when you have the opportunity with other salespeople, both internally and externally, to pick their brain. If they'll let you listen on to calls, absolutely. That's something that's been a huge benefit for me is listening to other people's calls, because then you can see what works, what doesn't work, and spend those 2 to 3 years as a preparation. Just treat it as like, hey, this is the time that I get to learn. Because once you go into sales, Then the clock starts, then you're expected to deliver results. Take advantage of the first few years when you don't have to deliver those results. You can use the time to learn and not feel the pressure of a number on top of your head. So that's what I would recommend doing to begin your careers, to get one of those entry-level jobs where you can learn and then see as an opportunity, make sure that before you say yes to a job, you tell them, hey, this is what I want to do. Do you see a pathway for that for me?

27:58 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I think one of the other things you can think about if you're going to take that kind of a path is what industry do you ultimately want to sell to? What industry or what types of roles? If, I mean, it can be hard, right? If you haven't experienced any of this, you may not know what really feels right, what really resonates. But I think it's so much easier to be successful when you're just interested in and like the types of people that you're selling to. Are they your kind of people? I mean, one of the things I've learned over the course of my career having sold to not all, but a lot of parts of the organization, I have to hang out with the forward-looking, optimistic people. And those people live in sales, they live in marketing, they do not live in finance, in HR. Yeah, I mean, it's more conservative. It's more we're trying to protect what we have, not like we see this great future and we're trying to run towards that. It's just something I learned about myself over time of, oh, I just have to spend time with these people. I can't… not that I don't like those people, but they think differently than I do.

29:04 Andrew Barbuto: 100%. And I think that's so important. I think that there's a different type of top salesperson that sells to lawyers and finance people. I don't speak that language personally. If you go into sales, you got to speak their language, not your language. I think that's a big part of it is understanding the inner workings of your clients or potential clients. Like what, makes them tick. But yeah, you're right. You obviously need to get along with the people that you're going to be selling to. You need to be able to empathize with them. You need to be able to understand, try to picture yourself in their shoes. And if you can't, then you're going to have a very difficult time selling to those people. Yeah.

29:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Well, we call the show Sales Success Stories. What's your favorite sales story?

29:45 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So I'll go with the biggest success of my career. Which was, I'll start at the beginning. I'll try not to ramble too much. When I first started in sales, I was cold calling. I was sending out tons of emails. I was just casting a wide net and just throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and hoping something stuck. One person I was reaching out to, probably my 5th or 6th attempt, they said, just call me, get on the phone with them. And they tell me, oh, they cut me off. They're like, I'm not the right person to speak to. This is the right person to speak to, but they didn't give me their email address. So I had to spend the next 2 weeks reaching out to the wrong person before I finally got the right email. And then once I got on the phone with them, I actually thought it was a different company completely because when I Googled them, it was like a very generic agency name. So I didn't know who I was speaking to, but then as soon as I got on the phone, I realized that, okay, there was something here because she starts telling me about, she was actually looking for somebody at our company and she works for a big global, massive shoe company. And this is a huge opportunity. It's an area where they haven't been investing in, but she wants to make it a priority for theirs. So within a matter of weeks, she helped me set up a meeting with their chief marketing officer. And I got our CEO, I got her because I knew it was a big opportunity. In fact, before the meeting, we almost missed it because we were stuck on a subway. It was the biggest meeting of my life. I knew this was a huge opportunity. I was meeting with a massive global shoe marketer that could have just changed my career completely. And then We're about 10 minutes away from the meeting and we're stuck. And I'm like, uh-oh. Then the CEO goes, who's the one who recommended the subway? Was that you, Andrew? I'm like, no, I was just leading you guys there. Ultimately, we did end up making the meeting. And when we got in the meeting, it was very intimidating for me. I was 24 years old, right out of college, basically. Like it was my first year in sales. This goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is the preparation. Because everybody was selling this company. They're massive. It was a huge opportunity. Everybody's been trying to, they hadn't historically invested at all in digital media. India, old school type of company. Traditional TV was where all their dollars went to. The issue that other salespeople were making was that they were pitching, hey, we can help drive sales on your website. And that wasn't a priority for them. They didn't care about that. It was one sales channel. Most of their sales still took place in retailers. Once I learned that, I was able to make a case. Listen, I get that most of your sales are taking place in retailers. That's totally fine, understandable. We're not going to sit here and tell you that we're going to drive a bunch of people to your site because it's not a priority for you. But let me ask you this. Is there a more direct way that you can support your retailers, which I know is a priority, than driving people directly to their site to actually be able to direct people that you served an ad to and say, hey, I served an ad to this person and they end up going to your retailer site and you could bring those numbers to your retailer partners, show them that you are supporting them. That resonated with them because there was no direct way to do that outside of that. The meeting went well. It was turned into a small $2 million test, which most tests are about $10,000 over a 3-week period. And the rest was history. It turned into a massive customer and I've been working with them ever since.

32:52 Scott Ingram: Very nice. Love that story. Wait, a little sidebar, because I've sold to a number of global shoe brands. So super interesting, reminded me of ye olden days, because I haven't worked with those folks in quite a while. I mean, you've had some really good consistent success. I mean, you've been the number one top performer in your current role. I know that was true for the previous company as well. What are you most proud of?

33:13 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, I love that question. I think 2 things. One is the consistency. Like you said, sales is really hard. It's really hard. One of the things that makes it really hard is that it's every year starts over. So it doesn't matter what you did last year. It matters what you did this year. And so you have to, regardless of the size of your book, regardless of how many deals you've closed every year, you're expected to continue to bring in new business. And that's one of the things that makes it a challenge to have sustained success. And so one of the things I'm very proud of is being able to continue to, regardless of any past success, continue to work hard, continue to act like it's day one. Because of that, it's not just been like, you know, I had this huge customer win and I've been riding on that coattails ever since. No. Every year I'm bringing in new customers because I realized that's my job. That is the role of the salesperson. It's not to sit on past wins and be an account manager. It's, you have to continue to bring in new clients and we know how much goes into that. So the ability to sustain that over time is something that I'm really proud of.

34:18 Scott Ingram: Nice.

34:18 Andrew Barbuto: Nice.

34:19 Scott Ingram: What about the flip side? What is the hardest part? What do you struggle with the most?

34:23 Andrew Barbuto: I don't want to say that it was just what I mentioned, but it's definitely that. I think that It is very difficult to be able to… every year there's very much a what have you done for me lately kind of mentality, but that's the job every day to come in every week to come in. And you're your own boss to a certain extent, or I should say your customers are your boss, but you have to be proactive. You have to figure out what is the best way to spend my time. It's mentally taxing. It gets to you after a while. And I'm sure every salesperson can relate to this, especially when you've been in sales for years and years. One of my mentors told me this when I first started, which has always stayed with me. He's like, it's very easy to be enthusiastic about being in sales on your first day, but it's 6 months in when you realize whether you actually want to be in sales or not. And I've always remembered that and it's 100% proven to be true.

35:11 Scott Ingram: What drives you? What do you draw on for motivation to just keep going?

35:15 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So I can get deep and philosophical with you if you'd like, but I think that I'm really driven by my own internal anxiety about being a failure. And every day that drives me to prove that I'm not. That's probably like the deep, deep level of what drives me every day to keep going. It's, I'm never satisfied, right? Like I wrote a book in like a few months and I didn't need to do that, but I did it because I'm always looking for what's next because I always want to prove myself that I can do something. I think that's like at the core of it. I should probably be speaking to somebody, not you about this, but as relates to my job, I think that what drives me is my customers. I really mean it when I say that everything I do is to help make my customers' lives better. I see this on a regular basis when it comes to my own experience being a buyer and working with big companies. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to call somebody for customer service, like an airline or any big company really, and not being able to speak to somebody. That's common in my industry too, but it's with the big giants, it's with the big tech giants. You're not going to get personalized service unless you're spending Tens of millions of dollars. And that's not at all what I believe is the right way to win or earn somebody's business and continue to earn their business. That's what I really take passion in. I really have passion in is really giving that personalized attention. I want every one of my customers to feel like they're my only one, regardless of how much they're spending. I treat every customer like my only one. I don't want any customer to ever have to follow up on an email or you give me a call, you're going to get a response or you're going to get a call right back. That's what I take great pride in is providing as much value and that personalized attention to my customers. That's what I love about my job.

36:53 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. Let's talk about the book for a second. The last interview I did, one of the conversations we had is we were kind of talking about what's the curriculum if you're new to sales and you're trying to figure this out, because I think for the vast majority, There's no help. It's like, here's your quota. I guess way back in the day it was, here's a phone, here's the phone book, here's what we sell, get after it. And that really hasn't changed. There are very, very few organizations where you get legitimate sales training. And by and large, it's go figure it out. I mean, we've got a presentation, one of my favorite titles coming up at this year's summit is Self-Enablement, because that's kind of what it comes down to. And I think that's a little bit about what you're trying to solve for with your book. So talk about like What instigated this? What are you hoping to do with the book?

37:43 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, I was surprised by that as well, by the way. I was like, how are you going to bring people into sales and not give them the tools to know how to sell? And some organizations do invest in sales training courses. Some don't. Sometimes you're getting training from the marketing team. That's not quite the same thing. They're not the ones who are dealing with being in the trenches on a regular basis. They're not the ones who are following up 7 times to get a response. I was surprised by the lack of sales training because of how important it is to an organization's success. The reason why I wrote the book was I like to write. Like I mentioned, I was a journalism minor and I always fancied myself a good writer, or at least my mom tells me I am. So I was like, oh, maybe we'll see what we can do with it. I remembered not having that sales training when I first started, not having the directions. There was no directions. It was like, go figure it out. And it's like, no one's going to tell you what to do. Just here's your number and do your best. And I was like, that's not right. I just know that there's a lot of salespeople that are in that position. And what my book attempts to do is to tell my story of how I learned to go from day 1 to where I am today, step by step by step. Literally, it starts with, it's your first day in sales. What do you do? And it's step 1, meet with your manager. Step 2, meet with the supporting team, then learn the sales cycle. Then really use your products and services. And it does that for both, regardless of whether you're selling software or services. The sales process itself is what I think, because I do think that companies do give the training to learn the product itself. They do teach them about the industry and there's a lot of material you can find on that, but there's not as much material on the actual sales process and the sales cycle. And so what I do is I take you through 10 steps of what I've used at both of my companies to build a book from $0 to $80 million. And I've sold over $250 million in digital media services and software over the last 8 years. And it tells you how I did it and it tells you what to do and say at each stage. So how to conduct a sales meeting, how to onboard, how do you conduct a demo and ask questions, what questions to ask, all of those things that I didn't know and I wish I did know. It's basically that book. Is what I wish I had on day one.

40:02 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. It's so funny, just the range of training. I was lucky. My first real sales job, I was working with ADP and the training was extensive. I mean, it was months, 4 or 5 months of, I mean, it was probably 20 hours a week virtually for weeks, weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. You kind of went through with this cohort. You had all these different things you were working on. It was like, yeah, we're going to teach you this. Here's how to structure your cold call. Now go make some cold calls the rest of the day. It was really good, well thought out, a good balance of we're going to teach you something, now you go do some stuff. And then it culminated in we were on site together outside of Georgia or outside of Atlanta for a couple of weeks. Contrast that with I just did kind of a partner's sales certification thing and I was working through this. It was supposed to take 5 hours. I watch all videos on double speed, so I cranked through it in about 3 hours. But about halfway through, I realized, oh my gosh, this is their internal sales onboarding. And while it was one of the best kind of structured things I'd seen in a while, that was exciting for me. I'm like, okay, they were actually really thoughtful about the way that they put this together. But then that contrast of I had months of in- in-depth, like really, really thoughtful training. This you could do in half a day and that's all there was. Good luck.

41:27 Andrew Barbuto: Yep.

41:27 Scott Ingram: Insane.

41:28 Andrew Barbuto: I think there's a big difference, guys, is big organizations. I do think there's a difference between a sales organization and then an organization that's more services oriented. But yeah, big organizations like ADP, I know they have a great sales training program. I have friends that work there today, actually. Places like Salesforce, these big companies, They do often have sales training. There's a lot of companies out there that don't. Startup type of companies, they need salespeople. And a lot of times they bring new people on board out of college and they don't teach them how to sell. And to your point, you can't learn how to sell in half a day's training. It takes a long time.

42:03 Scott Ingram: I would maybe augment your suggestion of kind of the onboarding. I think step one, if you can get experience in the types of roles and the types of industries that you want to sell in, just to understand that from the inside out. I love that advice. I love that direction. But I think when you go on the sales track, find one of the best vendors that serves that market that's big and actually has training and spend a couple of years there. Do a few years where you're actually going to get some support because it's so freaking hard to figure this out on your own. It's really challenging.

42:42 Andrew Barbuto: It is. I'm biased, obviously. Because this was my experience, but especially in really complex sales, like I work in programmatic advertising. There are so many different types of terminology that has a different language. You need to be able to speak that language before you can sell to anybody. So you need to learn that. And you can't just speak from like a surface level. That's another thing is like, you need to really understand what you're talking about so that way you can explain those complex topics in the most simplified fashion possible to somebody who doesn't understand it. As in-depth. You need to know so much more than the person you're speaking to. How are you going to teach something to somebody if you personally haven't been using this product for a long time? How could you speak to their experience with it?

43:26 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Yeah. Love that. All right, let's get granular. I want to dissect your day. So your alarm clock goes off. I want to know what time that happened. And I want a pretty detailed blow-by-blow of how you're kind of structuring things from there till your head hits the pillow again.

43:41 Andrew Barbuto: We won't start at the most recent time because I've been waking up at like 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning to write before work. I'll start at like a normal workday. Typically I'll wake up at maybe I'll have my alarm go off like 7:00 and I'll be working by 8:00, full throttle in the zone. My wife will wake up. She'll say hello, I'll make coffee. And then I'll be already fully in the day before most people are working because so much about your day is dealing with what comes up. Once you have a big book of business, you have clients reaching out, you have issues that come up, et cetera, et cetera. So I try to what I call beat the whistle, which is starting my day before that happens, before other people sign on, before the service team signs on, before my clients start emailing me. And what I'll do is I'll focus. The first thing I do is I have a list. I have notes. I'm like a crazy person. I have notes up, which are a list of all my prospects, all the opportunities in order of most likely to close. I also have a list of my customers. I look at that. That list, and it's always being updated, of course, I'll start at the opportunities that are most likely to close. And I'll say, okay, what can I do to move this deal forward? That'll be the first thing I start with. What can I do? Like, I'll just think about it like in depth, like, what are next steps here? What can I bring value, provide value that can help move this deal forward? I have a to-do list, which I go through and I knock out the most important things first. And then as things come up, Throughout the day, which I always do, then I'll tackle them as they do. But I try to structure my day with spending as much time as possible on revenue-generating activities. So I want to be speaking to clients all day, every day, or prospects. That's what I want to be spending all my time with. I structure my weeks. I'll just kind of break it down in terms of each day, because every day is obviously very different, but I have certain days where I'm like, okay, I'm going to spend a few hours researching prospects. In my company, in my industry, it's like sometimes it's a bit of a needle in the haystack because we have 100 salespeople. So we've been around for 20 years. Every company has been taken. You're going to have a difficult time finding a prospect that's not already in Salesforce assigned to another salesperson. I will spend a lot of time taking a look at my CRM, taking a look at LinkedIn, doing research and finding those new customers. The next day I will reach out to those customers. As I'm doing my research, I'll identify certain things that I can include in my outreach that would turn them from a cold prospect into a warm lead. So if there's any connection between us, and then also I'll try to find value. So at every touchpoint, I want to provide value regardless of whether it's to check in. I don't believe in the check-ins without providing value. I don't think there's anything wrong with checking in to find out, hey, you mentioned we were going to set up a call, but can we do it? But regardless, every single touchpoint, I want to provide some sort of value. So I think about that before I send out an outreach. I'll think about, okay, is there an industry trend which I can let them know about, or is there an update or what have you? So anyways, I'll do the research one day. I'll send outreach the next day. I will move proposals forward the day after. I'll follow up every couple of days. So I kind of rotate like that while mixing in all of the things that I have to do as client initiatives come up. My goal is if I'm spending a lot of time with research and prospecting one week, I want to fill my calendar the next week. So I want to have as many meetings on the books as possible. And then I need to give myself enough time to prepare for those meetings. Like we were talking about earlier, I think those are the 2 things that maybe salespeople don't always spend enough time on is doing enough research to find the right prospects. And how I define qualified is someone who's got a means to buy from me and someone that's got a need that I can help with. Those are the 2 things. If they don't have the means and they have the need, which happens all the time, you're not going to be able to work with them even if you wanted to. And if there's no need, they could have all the money in the world. You're never going to get their business because it's already signed to somebody else or they don't need your services. So anyways, I think that it's the research and then it's also the meeting preparation is being a bit of a stalker. I want to learn everything I can about you, but it's not for me per se. It's for you. I want to make best use of our time. I don't need to spend a ton of time at the beginning to learn asking generic questions that I could find out on my own. I want to be respectful of your time and I want to make this as productive as possible. So that's why I spend a lot of time with doing preparation for those meetings. And then of course there's proposals mixed in and then contracts and then putting out fires, et cetera. That's kind of how the week typically goes.

47:57 Scott Ingram: Talk about your prep in more detail. Walk us through kind of that process specifically.

48:02 Andrew Barbuto: Yep. Let's say I set up a meeting and it's a completely cold prospect. I've never spoken to them before. I got right place at the right time. They were interested in learning about us. I have a list which I'll go down. The first one is I'll check my CRM, see if there's been any activity between our 2 companies. I'll go all the way back to 2015. Whatever is available in there, it doesn't matter. I want to read all of the notes. I want to look at any opportunities that there have been between our companies. That's so important in my opinion, because you need to have that context for the meeting. A lot of times there's notes in there. It's like, oh, you may find out they're not actually qualified, or you may find out they didn't work with you because of a service or offering you didn't offer 3 years ago that you offer now. That's important information to have. You also want to know if they're… who you spoke to, who on your end was speaking to them and who at the company. Are they still there? That will tell you if they have any knowledge about you guys, if they've spoken to you in the past, because one of the first questions I ask is how familiar are you with us? If I don't see anything in Salesforce, I can kind of make the assumption that they're not familiar with us at all. And maybe they've heard of us and they're just kind of talking to us to find out what we do. I'll Scavenger our CRM. From there, I will go to their LinkedIn and take a look at both their company's LinkedIn page, as well as their own LinkedIn page. And I'll look at their job description. I think it's so telling the way that somebody describes their own job, because it also tells you what they care about. So it tells you what their roles and responsibilities are, and it also tells you what are their likely goals and likely challenges. Once you've done this long enough, you can identify that. So in my industry, I'll give you an example. Let's say it's somebody who's like a media planner and they have a description of, my role is to plan across all paid media channels to achieve an objective. That tells me right there that, okay, this is somebody who likely, who does more than just one media channel. They're probably doing it across paid search, paid social, and programmatic. That tells me, okay, like that's information that's important for our conversation so I can identify the right solution for them. There's a different type of customer that is right for services versus software. You can also tell their seniority level, how experienced are they? That's all important information as well. Take a look at that. Also take a look at their company's LinkedIn, see what they've been posting about lately. That's what's important to them. How do they describe themselves? What are the services they offer? There's a part of LinkedIn you can see that. And then also a lot of times it'll tell you what their differentiator is. So how they describe themselves, the company describes itself, will right there tell you how they separate themselves from their competition. Go over to their website. There's a lot you can learn from that. Key players on their website, case studies, review the case studies, review The partners. So that's another thing. Is this going to be a new partnership for them, or are you gonna have to replace somebody? One way you can tell that is by seeing who's listed on their website. A lot of times they'll list preferred partnerships, and if you see one of your key competitors there, you say, okay, I'm probably going to have to replace them or complement them. So that's the kind of thing that I'll do. And if there's anything after all that I feel like I need to know that I wasn't able to find my research I'll just send them an email. I'll say, hey, looking forward to our meeting coming up. Did my research. One of the things I was most curious about is whatever information I couldn't find. Could you let me know? If not, we'll hit it on at the top of our meeting. And then I always ask before I have any meeting, what are you most interested in learning about in our meeting before we even speak? People are happy to answer that question because they want to make sure that it's as relevant as possible too. And then once they tell you that information, that's the focus of the conversation. If I ask you a question, you say, hey, this is what I want to learn about, then that's what you need to focus on. This is also a way to disqualify somebody. So earlier in this week, I set up a meeting with somebody and they responded on the first email, which I'm always a little bit skeptical about. And then a lot of times, sometimes you can't tell, like, is this salesperson potentially… I made that also, that mistake a lot of times earlier in my career is like setting up meetings with salespeople and then you don't find out until you're in the middle of a conversation. I'm like, Uh, there's nothing here for me. You're trying to sell me. Am I trying to sell you? I've learned that if you're curious, just ask, hey, what are you looking to learn about? And in this scenario, it was, hey, we're looking to get our inventory on your platform. So, okay, great. I'm not the right person to speak to. This is the right person to speak to. And they don't want to waste their time either. So it's like, we'll cancel the meeting. That's what I think that is the crux of my conversations is what is the most important thing that they want to learn about? And then I spend all my time talking about that.

52:30 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. One of the things that you called out and a piece that I might steal, I really try and in a discovery call or in an early conversation, I never want to ask a question that I could have found online. I think that it's offensive. I hate it when people ask me that stuff. I'm like, there is an about page on my website that if you had spent 3 minutes reading, you would know all of these questions. So it's driving me crazy that I'm having to waste my time to explain this to you.

52:57 Andrew Barbuto: Exactly.

52:58 Scott Ingram: But what you're doing that's so cool is getting in front of that even. And again, it's just a demonstration of research. Like, hey, I'm doing this work. And one of the things I was curious about was X. I couldn't find that answer. And my research would love to know this to help me finish my prep. Amazing. Amazing.

53:15 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. When you do all that research, it really, really comes down to, hey, do you have a problem we can help with? It cuts out all the noise. It cuts right to the crux of the conversation. And it's, listen, you can either help this person or not. And that's what you want to focus your conversation on is gathering the details to make a determination. And by doing that research ahead of time, asking them, hey, what do you want to learn about? Then you're able to skip a lot of steps and you can get right to that. So that's as productive as possible. That's how you have a conversation where they're doing most of the talking, because whenever a prospect goes on a tangent about something, that's how you sell them. That is the way to sell them. Typically, if they're speaking about something for a long time, That's what you need to focus on. But to your point, like, it also is a rapport builder. That's the thing is like, how good does it feel when you jump on a call with somebody? Hey, I noticed that you went to my school. I noticed that this is a priority of yours that I found an article about. That immediately builds credibility. It makes them feel good. It shows that you care, which is so important. I'm here to help you. And I want to make it as easy as possible, which is I'm going to do my homework. I'm going to prove to you that we can help you if we can help you. Because I'm going to do my homework before we ever speak to each other. That makes somebody feel special. It immediately gets the meeting off to a good start.

54:27 Scott Ingram: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I'm always looking at how can I do things where in the way that I do it, it's going to immediately put me in at least the top 10 or 20%, maybe even the top 5 or 1%. And I think just that research, right? If I can start my conversation essentially 20 minutes in because I'm not asking you something stupid like, tell me about your role. Geez, do you not know how LinkedIn works?

54:52 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

54:53 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it's amazing. You talked about your crazy person list. Where do you manage that?

54:58 Andrew Barbuto: Where do I manage my list in terms of like…

55:01 Scott Ingram: oh yeah, do you have like a stalker with y'all?

55:04 Andrew Barbuto: That would be a smart thing to do. Yeah, yeah. So yes to the second question, no to the app. It's Excel. I have an Excel. I have a master document which I have columns, I have tabs One is my customers, which is always getting updated. Of course, I want to move my top prospects to my customer list. So one of them is my customers. And by the way, like, that's a very important list to me. Like I said earlier, like, customer service is super, super important to me. And I always make a point to tell, like, my customers once they sign the contract, that's not where the relationship ends for me. At least that's where it begins. As hard as I work to get you in the door is as hard as I'm going to work to make you successful. There's nothing more frustrating than spending all this time building rapport and trust. And like, clearly this person that you're talking to, the salesperson, is competent. And then you never hear from them again after the deal is closed. And I get it. Our job is new business, but don't go away completely. Don't be a stranger. Check in from now and then. Like, you put in all the work to spend all this time to win business, which we know can sometimes take years. And then it's like, as soon as you get the business, it's like, onto the next one. No, make sure they're successful first. Also, that makes you show that you're a man of your word anyways. So yeah, so I will have a list of my customers and I always look to try to add value to all of them as well, regularly check in on them. Always want to know everything that's going on with them. Second column is my top opportunities that are outstanding in order of most likely to close. And then I'll glance at that and I'll see, okay, what can I do to move the needle forward? How can I add value and then try to move the needle forward? And then I have a list of cold prospects that I, or old, I should say, before I get to that point, it's old meetings. So deals that had, I've spoken to them before, but for whatever reason it didn't progress into a deal. Maybe it's not the right time. And I think that's one of the other key things that's really important is timing is so important with B2B sales. A lot of times it's not their money. It's not like they could take their credit card out and say, hey, okay, like I want to buy, even if they want to, the timing needs to be right. And it's not always going to be right. So what I do, the approach that I take is cast a wide net. I always try to have as many qualified prospects in the pipeline as possible, because I never know which one is going to be ready to buy. But if you have enough in there and you're constantly adding value, then when the right time comes, you're there to win that business. That's another key part of my sales process.

57:25 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Love that. I mean, it's kind of like, just like you wouldn't walk away from a customer right after you sell them, like you did all this work, you built all of this goodwill. Why would you abandon that? It's the same thing on, hey, I did all of this work to get this meeting. We had a conversation and maybe it's not progressing right now. It's just being efficient. It's a lot easier to stay in touch with that and sort of revive that conversation than it is to start something absolutely brand new if there's still an opportunity there, right? Different from…

57:56 Andrew Barbuto: that's a big difference.

57:57 Scott Ingram: If it's not qualified, right, then go away. Like, don't waste any more time on it. But there's such a lack of efficiency. And this is a big sales organization challenge I see a lot too, of like new year, shuffle the deck, everything gets moved. And so sometimes you don't have that opportunity to follow up on that. Hey, I had a great conversation 9 months ago. Maybe now is the time. It's about to be the start of their new fiscal year. Like maybe there's new budget, maybe there's new opportunity, or maybe there's a new person. I digress. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the other kind of tools and apps you're using. So we've touched on Excel and you've got kind of your primary list. What else are you using just kind of day in, day out?

58:36 Andrew Barbuto: I mean, I live in my Salesforce CRM. I'm not being sponsored, although I would accept sponsorship if they're interested. I think it's so critical for salespeople, top salespeople, like Salesforce is everything, or CRM regardless. Your CRM system is everything. And I think this is another thing that some people like, it's not technically a revenue generating activity, but it is because so much of my sales success I can attribute to taking really good notes in the meeting. This goes back to what you just said, and then immediately transferring them to my CRM system. Because again, it's not always going to be the right time to move forward tomorrow. That doesn't mean that they're not qualified. That doesn't mean that in 6 months from now they're not going to be qualified. Or hey, it might mean that that person might not be interested. And then somebody comes on board, they leave, they go to another company, etc. So by having really good notes, by transferring them immediately, that allows you to in 6 months go back to your Salesforce or your CRM system and be like, what did we talk about? What were their pain points? What were they interested in? And then you could then follow up with them with the most relevant email as possible, going back to their core desire or core interest in potentially working with you. So Salesforce is huge, or CRM system is huge. That's another one. ZoomInfo. I don't know if you want me to name all these companies, but ZoomInfo is amazing. I love it. You can find any information. I use it sometimes in my personal life. I know this is weird, but I couldn't get in touch with one of my wife's friends at work because we were having a surprise party for her. And I was like, oh, I could find her email. Because they've got information on everybody. It's pretty cool. And then LinkedIn obviously is massive. Not just LinkedIn, the standard LinkedIn, but Sales Navigator. They've really, really improved that service to cater to salespeople. It's incredible. I mean, the work that they've done to… the best way to find new qualified prospects and to find people at your qualified prospects, in my opinion, is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, because you could type in all of your requirements, everything that typically your ideal customer profile looks like, where are they located? What size company, what kind of services, that sort of thing. You could just search for it and then it'll give you a list of companies and then you could just follow them. And you could also then identify what is the typical job title of my customer. And then you could search for people that have those job titles at those companies. So that's another amazing, incredible tool. I use ChatGPT daily, getting to the point where am I questioning, like, am I getting too reliant on it? I was thinking about this the other day. I'm like, I'd rather be someone that's too reliant on ChatGPT than someone that never uses it. Even though I don't think you should be too reliant on it because I could easily see that happening. The amount of efficiencies that you can get from using it in so many elements is incredible. I would not have been able to do half the things that I did for this book, building a website, making a YouTube channel, like any of those things without ChatGPT. It was a huge, huge help. But I also use it on my daily basis from my job standpoint, because questions come in from clients all the time and they're technical questions. And I can go on a goose chase to identify who might help me best answer this, especially when it's not like core to what we do. It's like you get random industry questions all the time that have nothing to do with our core offerings. They're just like utilizing us as like a consultant. And I'll just be like, oh, okay, you just go into ChatGPT or another generative AI tool. And easily get that information in a detailed way. It's scary. It's really scary. I feel like, but we're going to ignore that for now and we're just going to assume everything is fine.

1:01:59 Scott Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that, as you talked about getting your conversation notes kind of into CRM, there's some great tools out there now to help do that part for you. I haven't found, if somebody knows about this, hit me up. I'm looking for, okay, looking at these consolidated notes, looking at the conversations I've had. Prompt me when something happens. Like, if something's a little bit more aware and go, hey Scott, 4 months ago you had a conversation with this executive at this company and this thing just happened in their market, or this happened on their earnings call that you might have missed, you should follow up because it ties directly to X or Y. Those are the things that I think are going to be absolute game changers when you sort of start to combine the context, right? Like this happened in conversations, we know this about these customers or this opportunity, and now this is what's happening real time in the market because sometimes we catch that, but not always.

1:02:56 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. And you could piece that together. There's nothing that I've seen that's been like really good. That's like the one part that like AI is kind of missing is like really truly understanding below a surface level, like somebody that joins a company or something. What are the triggers? So I use Winmo. I've used Winmo in the past. In my industry, it tells you if a new decision maker joins the company or if they're in the news, there's a new pitch out. There's tools out there that can kind of like give you that alert. LinkedIn as well. New person joins regularly. I will run, I'll have like a list of leads and then I'll look at any of the new contacts that joined and that'll tell you, okay, somebody new has joined. And it also brings in information from your CRM system. So you could see if one of your outstanding opportunities, somebody had left and went to another company. There's nothing really perfect. That's like the human element of it. Knowing when there's an opportunity that opens up at one of your prospects, very difficult to find. Most of the time they'll reach out to you if you're top of mind. So that's like one of the things that I also think is so important is I'm not just using my CRM system to like keep track of these opportunities and stuff like that. I am. But what is important is that one, even if there's not an opportunity right now, that person, I've had many situations where like I've been calling on this person for years and there just hasn't been an opportunity. They go to a new company. It's part of my prospecting list. Boom. They reach out to me sometimes, or I notice to them that there's a new opportunity. Or my own customers, they leave and they go somewhere else. That opens up another opportunity as well. So keeping track, regardless of whether you're actually doing any business with them, maintaining those relationships, keeping in touch with them. It's a small industry, at least for me, it's a small industry. So a lot of times there's movement. That's another great way to get new opportunities.

1:04:34 Scott Ingram: Absolutely. Absolutely. Movement is gold if you really capture the opportunity, right? I mean, it's rare that people spend years and years and years inside the same company these days. And if you've been able to help them in one, it's way easier to do that again inside a new org. Andrew, talk about your information diet. What are you reading? What are you listening to? What are you watching? And when does that happen?

1:04:56 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, just to add one quick note on that last part. The reason why it's important, I think, to always be adding value to customers or prospects, regardless of whether you're working with them or not, is because once those people leave and they come into a new situation, that's an opportunity now that wasn't an opportunity then. I can't tell you how many times that they've reached out to me and were like, hey, like, I know that we weren't able to work with you back then, but you've been so helpful for me and we never did business together. So that's why I would make a point to like, whenever possible, provide updates to them and provide value in any way, regardless if there's any money that's being exchanged. To answer your question, what does my diet look like in my industry? I always try to keep up with the trades. I read Ad Exchange or MediaPost, Digiday, MediaRadar, et cetera. That's a great way to know what's going on in the news and know if there's been, if I see some of my prospects mentioned in an article, that's great. Google's got this great new, if you have your phone, they track basically what you're interested in stuff. So whenever there's the big news, I'll just go and it'll be like recommended articles. So I'll see what catches my eye a lot of times in my industry. That's a good way to see what the latest is. Obviously LinkedIn, they have the trending articles. I follow all my companies on LinkedIn so I could see when they post and I go about my day. That's another thing. I go about my day and I see something that's posted about one of my prospects. I'll send it to myself if it's off hours, and then I'll reach out about that later on when I'm working. That's for my job, for, for sales, which is obviously also always trying to improve is sales books. I've read tons of them. I listen to sales podcasts like this one. I think that there's always more to learn. And that was huge for me, especially when I first started, is reading sales books because I didn't have somebody that was any formal… there was no formal training. So reading all of the sales books that I get my hands on was how I learned. And I basically have consolidated the best learnings from them to put it into my book, but I'm regularly reading new books. Now I'm reading books on how to do personal branding. And then also trainings and webinars, whether it's related to my core role or not, I want to be well-rounded. So for example, a few months back, I realized I don't really know paid search as much as I should, even though I'm not in paid search. I don't work in it personally. I'm not hands-on keyboard. I want to know. So I took a training. Our company offers free trainings. A lot of companies do. And it's super helpful to be able to find something that you're not core… it's not a core competency on and brush up on it. So I'll take that training on Saturday, much to my wife's dismay.

1:07:32 Scott Ingram: Let's go back to the sales books for a minute, given kind of the impact they've had. Top 2 or 3, whether foundational or even maybe more recent, that has kind of impacted your latest thinking. What comes to the top of the list for you?

1:07:46 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. So the sales books that have had the biggest impact on me sound generic, but I think are foundational is How to Win Friends. Of course, classic. I'm talking about these are like core to… I think any professional really should read it is How to Win Friends and Influence People. It teaches you basic fundamentals of how to be a professional, not just a salesperson, but how to be influential and strike good relationships, right? Internally and externally. That was huge for me. Another book that was core to my philosophy is book Influence. Another famous one with Dr. Bob Cialdini. They teach reciprocity and stuff like that. Like it's conceptual stuff, but it's important concepts of how to influence people in sales. Of course I have a ton, so I read like a lot of them, but to keep it down to like the top 3 or so, I mean, Challenger Sale was another one that had a big impact on me. I was listening to your podcast before this and stuff. I know your take on it. I know that's not like, and I actually do agree with you. In the sense that like, not everything, right. I do agree with some elements of it, but not others. I did go through a phase where I was like, oh, I'm going to build Challenger Sale decks and stuff like that. But I kind of moved away from decks altogether. What I do think that makes sense from it is the teach and tailor part of it. Coming with insights is you should be teaching your prospects and your customers new things. That's what really stuck out to me about the book. It wasn't necessarily everything about the approach. I agree with you that it's very individual. That's why this podcast is amazing because every salesperson that's a great salesperson, like, has their own style. And I think that that's really important to embrace your own style and what makes you unique and what works for you. Being an independent thinker is super important when it comes to sales, because not everything's gonna work for everybody. But I think it's also the concept of, hey, teach your customers something new about their business and the whole idea of knowing so much about your customer's business that you can teach them something that will help improve their processes, I think does get at the crux of what it takes to be a modern-day top B2B salesperson, which is you need to be a strategic advisor. You're no longer just trying to sell your product. You need to help be an extension of their team and consult with them whenever they need help with. So having so much knowledge that you can teach your customers on how to run their business better is what I think is required to be a top salesperson today. And that requires a steady diet of information.

1:10:10 Scott Ingram: I want to go back to like a throwaway comment you just made, because now I'm super curious. You said something along the lines of, I moved away from decks. Say more about that.

1:10:19 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that. I just kind of mentioned that it's important because I think that's one of the things when new salespeople, they come into sales and then me too. I don't think there's anything wrong with decks necessarily when I first started and it's when you don't have your script down as to how am I going to describe my company, how am I going to describe my offerings when they come up? It does help to have something to give you a little bit of support. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What I think is important is that when you do create decks, you're the one who's making the story. The deck isn't telling you the story. So when you describe, when you want to tell a story about your company, you should be putting in the deck, building it from scratch based on what's available so that way you can tell it in the way that you want to and then just have the deck as like kind of a backdrop. Up to help remind you of what to say and such. But I think when you get more experience, especially for your first initial meeting, whatever, the only reason to have a deck is to remind you basically what to say. That's the only reason why, basically. And that's my opinion. And sometimes there's a place if there's like a lunch and learn or what have you. But one of the things that I, as I got more experience, I learned is that it's not about you. And so that's why I recommend too for new salespeople, and I do this myself, is like, Learn what you want to say to describe certain things. Learn how you want to tell… you want to describe your company. What is the best way to describe it? And then say that every single time. And you do that for 2 reasons. One, it's so that way you do describe it in the best way possible. Like, if it's not broke, don't fix it, right? And then 2, more importantly, so you can spend most of your mental energy thinking about your customer, because that's what you want to do when you're in these meetings is you want to make it about them. So yes, you do have to describe your company. Of course, but you don't want to spend any time thinking about how you're going to describe it. I want to spend all my time on my customer and thinking about them and their needs. And if you're in meetings and like, you're thinking about what to say about you, you're not able to dedicate the necessary energy. That was one of the things that was a big learning for me is do you make a presentation or not? I don't think you do in an initial meeting if you have the experience and know what to say, but that requires prep work to be able to put in that extra work ahead of time so that way, you know, it without the slides. Yeah.

1:12:20 Scott Ingram: Yeah. I don't remember the last time I used a deck. I seriously don't. I mean, for me, it's all conversation these days. And I think a deck is often so constraining. It's okay. I mean, yes, I did the prep. I put this in it together in advance. There was some thoughtfulness there, but it kind of locks you into a particular track and that may not be where the conversation is flowing. Those may not be the most important things. And I want to be to be completely agile and completely focused on the conversation and what they're saying and not which slide do I show next and what do I say? And like, no, no, no, no, let's just be a little bit more real about this.

1:12:57 Andrew Barbuto: It's an experience thing. I think I see it a lot with new salespeople. And again, me too. It's part of the preparation of like, okay, like when I'm doing my prep work, I want to look at like to remember certain things that I want to present in my meeting. Oh, I noticed that they're going to do this. So I'm going to put it in my deck. But when you have the experience and you can learn on the fly, I agree with you. It's a conversation. It's not a pitch. It's a conversation. It's, hey, I'm going to tell you a bit about what I learned about you. I'm going to ask you about you based on what you tell me. I'm going to then tell you, okay, great. This is what we can help with. But that takes time to really be able to like have your offering down pat, to be able to know what to say and be aware of how to pivot. And the slides can help with that in the beginning. But if you are going to use a deck, I just recommend having a ton of slides in the appendix so that way, Scott, like what you said, when something comes up, you want to be flexible. You want to talk about what they care about. Like you put together a deck, but if it goes in a completely different direction, I used to do this too. It's like, oh, I'm still going to present what I was going to say. Well, that doesn't matter to them because they just told you what they want to talk about.

1:13:56 Scott Ingram: Yep, exactly. Exactly. So Andrew, do you subscribe to like a specific sales philosophy?

1:14:03 Andrew Barbuto: Yes, I do. And I feel like we've been talking about it a lot. I've kind of been describing it to a certain extent, but I think that it's the method that we kind of been talking about that I write about in my book, which is it's about your customer. It's not about you. Everything is about your customer. When you are in a conversation with a prospect, you don't really matter that much. The only reason you're in that conversation is to let them know how you can help them with their needs, but you need to find out what those needs are and see how you can truly help them. Like, it's very simple. They have a need. You should find out what it is. And then based on that, Hopefully you can help them. That's the only reason why you would present your solution. Like I said, I've been in situations where I've been on the receiving end and we'll reach out to a vendor about something specific that our client is asking about. And then we get in a meeting with a vendor and they just give their stock presentation. That's an experience thing. But I think that the core difference is that that meeting was all about them and what I'm in conversations with customers. I don't want to be talking that much. I want them to talk the whole time. I want you to be a 70/30 split. I ask you a question, tell me about what you care about. Why else are we meeting? I'm only here to see if I can help you out or not. There's no other reason for us to be talking right now. This is how I describe it. Nice.

1:15:20 Scott Ingram: Nice. And at the end of the day, nobody wants to hear your pitch.

1:15:23 Andrew Barbuto: No one cares.

1:15:24 Scott Ingram: They just don't want it. I mean, they might ask the question, can you help with that? Or how can you help with that? That's different. And again, the whole pitch idea, like, I don't know how we ended up in this spot, but it's not quite right.

1:15:36 Andrew Barbuto: Yep. Yeah, I agree with you completely.

1:15:39 Scott Ingram: Is there something you believe that the average or typical sales professional would think is crazy?

1:15:46 Andrew Barbuto: Wow. Interesting question. Is there something I think the sales professionals might think is crazy? My philosophy is one where I don't think you're going to be able to sell everybody. I don't believe in the fact that like everybody can be sold. And that's not what I'm here to do. I'm not here to turn a no into a yes. I don't believe in that. I think you want to turn maybes into a yes. There is a big difference between being in a debate with somebody and like having a sales conversation, because I don't know if you've spent a lot of time debating people. There is no winner in a debate. You're just two arguing, right? It's a matter of finding those people that they might be interested. Why else would they be talking to you? But if they say, listen, I'm not interested, I don't have a need, You're not going to convince them otherwise. So there's no point in spending a ton of time trying to change their mind because they either have a need or they don't. And if they don't, then you're wasting your time. And I've personally experienced this myself where I've had prospects that have expressed interest and they've kind of led me on and I've spent a ton of time. And then by the end of it, I just found out, oh, in fact, they weren't qualified. I just wasted a ton of time and a lot of resources by calling on somebody who's not qualified. That's why I spend more time upfront identifying those people because I know exactly what I'm looking for. I know because I've worked with plenty of customers at this point, so I know which ones we can help, what services and offerings that they have, what kind of tech stack they have. I know everything about what makes a qualified prospect, and I'm not going to go and chase somebody that I've determined is not likely going to use our help. I won't even waste any time on that.

1:17:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah, it goes back to… I actually kind of wanted to reframe when you were talking about kind of the working hard piece, it was really clear to me that part of what you mean by working hard is really working effectively, like working hard on the right things, right?

1:17:37 Andrew Barbuto: Different things.

1:17:38 Scott Ingram: Yeah. And part of that is, I mean, it's very obvious in your approach, right? Like, I'm not going to waste a lot of time reaching out to people and doing all of the prospecting work to try and get a meeting to then learn Oh, I just wasted all of that effort because there's no there there.

1:17:53 Andrew Barbuto: Exactly. That's exactly right.

1:17:55 Scott Ingram: That's a great example.

1:17:56 Andrew Barbuto: Working smarter, not harder, but it's still working hard. Like anybody who tells you that they could do it and it's not hard, they have not worked in sales very long. Yep. I don't subscribe to that whatsoever.

1:18:05 Scott Ingram: Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Anyway, no doubt about that. So what about the flip side of this question? Is there something within like maybe the sales dogma, right? Like, are there things that the average or traditional or typical salesperson believes that you think are crazy?

1:18:20 Andrew Barbuto: I think that the description of an ideal customer profile needs to be nuanced. I think that it's not a one-size-fits-all situation, and you shouldn't be looking for what you want in a customer. You should be looking for the customers you can help, most likely to have a need that you can help. I don't think the cookie-cutter approach makes a lot of sense because not every customer is going to have those attributes. And just because they're your ideal customer profile does not mean that you're their ideal vendor profile or partner profile. You know what I mean? So I feel like the approach needs to be a more nuanced approach. There are certain things that will be the same in every single customer that is the right fit for you, but it's very difficult to scale that out in any meaningful way. I think that you should have certain attributes that you look for, But that shouldn't be your limiting factors per se. Like you shouldn't just, okay, I have this ideal customer profile. I'm going to then just go after everybody who technically fits that profile. You have to be more nuanced because that is your ideal customer profile, but they're already working with 3 of your competitors. Well, you could spend all your time calling on that person and it's like, that's actually not your ideal customer profile. You won't know that's your ideal customer profile until you talk to them, until you learn whether that actually is a qualified prospect or not.

1:19:39 Scott Ingram: Nice. Nice. So we talked about kind of your prep process. What is that pre-qualifying process? How are you determining, okay, this is a legit prospect for me that I'm going to invest the energy to get in front of?

1:19:54 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah. I'll look at their website and I know that there are certain things to look for. For example, the type of job titles that are at the company, right? I work in paid media. So I go to the LinkedIn page and I want to see digital media planner, digital media buyer, those types of roles. If I don't see that, well then what, are they not in the media business? Because that's a different conversation. I also want to make sure that they have a LinkedIn profile, right? If you go to somebody and you get a 404 message on their website, like probably they don't have the means. I mentioned this earlier, but like I look for 2 things, like they need to have the means. They need to be able to afford you. They need to have money. They need to have money now. So it's not dedicated to a competitor that they're locked in a long-term contract for. They need to have a need. They need to be able to… someone who could truly benefit from your offering. And that comes down to the nuances of their tech stack. And my bit, it's going to be different for everybody, but in my industry, it's okay. Do they already have a built-out tech stack? Can our technology integrate with that? Can we make their days more efficient with our offering? That's what I look for is, is this somebody who I know from my experience based on the customers that I've been able to help that have benefited most from our offering? Do they have that tech stack that matches that, or is there certain things we're not integrated with, or do they not have the offerings that we most often help with? That's another thing. What are their core competencies? What are their core services? Those are the type of things that I look for that makes a determination because I've been down the road of trying to help a customer that ended up not being qualified It's even worse than not getting their business at all because all you're going to do is spin your wheels for a long time. It's not going to be a good customer experience and it's just going to be a waste for both you and your customer. And the worst thing that could do is to have ruined the long-term potential of the customer relationship and also potentially reputation. I'm not going to just try to win your business just to win your business. If I don't think you're going to have a good customer experience, it's not worth it.

1:21:50 Scott Ingram: I love that position perspective. That's one thing that I wish more sales professionals thought about just more holistically. Is this really the right customer fit for us? And I even think about… I'm not sure the best way to describe this, but just the working relationship. I mean, I work for a professional services firm. My product is people, and I want my people to be happy so that they're delivering well for all of my clients. And if I've got a That's abusive. That's no good. I don't need you ruining my people. Don't break my people.

1:22:26 Andrew Barbuto: No, no, no, no. I've done that. I've dealt with that before.

1:22:29 Scott Ingram: Yeah, I mean, it's good for nobody, and you pick it up in the sales process. You're like, okay, life is too short. I have plenty of pipeline. I don't need this company. That is for dang sure. And but not just that, right? Thinking about are we going to be able to provide value long term? Again, it's one thing. To win business, but then have that business churn and especially churn for dissatisfaction. Like, oh sure, we spent all this money with you, but now we're pissed about it. Most of us work in small enough industries that word gets around. Like, I can't have that.

1:23:00 Andrew Barbuto: Right. That's what I mean by I think time management is critical, which is, and part of good time management is working with and targeting the right customers. I've experienced myself, if it's you spend 2 years calling on somebody and then it's a one-and-done situation, that was a huge waste of time. Like you have to balance. What is most likely going to be… not to use a cliché, but like, when is the juice worth the squeeze? I've also been in the situations where sometimes the smallest customers that tend to be the most needy and sometimes can be a little bit rude if they're not easy to work with, then is it worth it? I had a really tough time with this, which is knowing when to cut ties because it's just not worth it. And when I did finally make that determination, my life was so much better. This was what was causing the most of my headaches. Also freed up a ton of my time because I'm not spending all my time trying to put out fires. That's why you got to be very selective about who you work with. Like you said, you got to make sure that if this person is going to drive you nuts and it's going to cause internal friction, then you got to think about, is it worth continuing to pursue that or should you go your separate ways?

1:24:02 Scott Ingram: That's a really interesting thing that, again, I think we've all probably had to learn the hard way that some deals, some clients are just not worth it. Are there any other unobvious lessons like that that you've learned along the way that just maybe don't fit into the standard? Oh yeah, we talk about the prospecting, we talk about all the other stuff we've talked about. What's the unobvious thing?

1:24:25 Andrew Barbuto: I got one, which is when I'm calling on customers, I don't believe… I mean, I usually include a call to action. I don't think that it makes a difference. Timing is so important. It's about reaching that right person at the right time. Where they're going to be ready to buy. And I think that, again, you're not going to be able to convince somebody to buy right now. If they can't buy, they can't buy. You want to provide value until it is the right time to buy. So if now's not the right time, but they are qualified prospects, continue to provide value. Don't continue to try to make the sale. Continue to be a useful resource to them so that when the time does come, you can be there and they'll come to you because you've provided so much value over the span, right? So every touchpoint It doesn't necessarily need to be asking for something. You should just provide value. And then trust me, if there's something that you have that they need, if you've provided enough value over time, they're going to ask you. Most of the time they're coming to me for things because they have a need, not because I asked them to do business with me. When they have a need, they come to me. I'm going to be a resource in any way possible until that happens.

1:25:30 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Love it. Love it. You've been at the top of your org for a while. What do you want to know about the consistent top performers in other companies?

1:25:38 Andrew Barbuto: That's a great question. I think the longevity. I'm always shocked, honestly, where I'm like, these people that have been doing sales for 20 years, I'm starting to get grays here and I'm like years into it. Like, how do you maintain that over time knowing that it starts over every single year? When you're someone like me and you're wired where you stress out about that sort of stuff, it's like, how do you not let it get to you? Because it's a roller coaster. There's highs and then there's lows. And this is on a daily basis. If you are very, very invested, it could drive you nuts. So longevity, like how do you spend 20 years doing something? And some years you hit goals, some years you don't hit goals, you know, like how do you deal with that mentally and like continue to keep going?

1:26:19 Scott Ingram: Yeah. Here's an interesting observation that I sort of started to make a number of years ago around the summit and actually did a little bit of kind of an informal study. I looked at of all the people who had been on the podcast, just kind of where things had gone for them. Like how many of them were with the same company as when I interviewed them initially, how many had moved, how many had gone into leadership, all of these different things. One really surprising thing that I found, I would say almost most were able to be very successful in a variety of roles. It was typically early in their career. And when they hit like that peak success thing, If they moved from there to another company into another individual contributor role, they often didn't get back to that level. I think part of that longevity, part of what I think about, because I've been in my current role for, yikes, 8 and a half years, is I think we discount how hard it is to do that initial ground-level work that we actually talked about before. We forget how big of a strength it is that we have all of these relationships inside of our organization, and we're very efficient and effective at bringing those to bear on behalf of our clients. And when you move to another organization and you have to start that whole process, because it takes… I mean, the reality is I think it takes at least a year, probably closer to 2 years to really understand how any organization just functions. How do we do things? How do I get things done? What are your processes? What are your systems? Who do I go to get what? And having to start that over. And over time, I've really leaned more and more into the direction of if you're in a good spot, if you work for a good company that has good leadership, that has a good product, and you've got customers that you've been able to satisfy, milk the cow. You're in a great place because trying to replicate that, especially from the top, if you've already sort of achieved the pinnacle and you're having consistent success at a high level, it is so difficult to rebuild that from scratch, especially when frankly you've gotten older. Like I've been doing this for 8, 10, 15 years. Got a family, I got kids, I got, you know, I got a And the amount of energy it takes to start that over again, again, very different than if you've been in sales for 5 years and you've done that, you've been super successful. It's easier to kind of replicate that. And I think we have to kind of acknowledge like, yeah, I'm older, I have more responsibilities, I got way more junk on my plate, and maybe I don't want to replicate that. So for what that's worth, right, for you and for folks who are in the right situation, it's been sort of an interesting, very anecdotal observation of of mine, but again, even if you've been like the uber top performer, nothing's guaranteed going forward.

1:29:18 Andrew Barbuto: Right. Yeah. And I think that that goes back to what we said earlier about how you can't do this alone. And I think that one of the things we didn't talk about was it's critically important that you have, you have to be top of your game, but you also need a great support team and service team, great team that can train new customers and a great offering, right? You need to get in the right situation. And that was one of the reasons why I switched companies was because where the market was going at the time was software was bringing these services in-house. And so I had more and more of my customers were asking me like, can you help us with internally, like moving this in-house? And the answer was no. So being in the right place where you have a great support team, you have a great service, you have the right culture, and you have a great offering that's going to keep customers happy. Because if you're continuing to put all this effort into winning new customers just to lose them, then you're not going to be successful long term.

1:30:07 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. Amen. Amen. Good stuff, dude. We have covered a ton of ground. Was there anything you were hoping that we would talk about that somehow we didn't touch on, or I didn't ask the right question? Did we miss anything?

1:30:21 Andrew Barbuto: You asked a lot of great questions. It's difficult to come up with new stuff on the top of your head like this, but I do have one other thing that I actually think that is relevant for something that we talked about earlier, which is getting next steps in meetings. So one of the things that I do, and I feel like this is something that's been very helpful for my success, is establishing next steps early. So when you first start a meeting, like right after the agenda, what I'll do is I'll give them a quick overview. Hey, this is what we do. These are the different ways you can work with us. I will have them tell me what makes the most sense for them. I try to transfer like the idea that I'm offering to them. I want them to tell me. I don't want to be the one who's telling them. I don't want to put words in their mouth. One, getting them to agree that this is the right partnership model. Now you can use that as you go forward is like, okay, you mentioned this was the right partnership model and the same thing applies for all of your offerings and such. The other thing is, is getting them to agree to next steps. If the meeting is a productive one, if it's something that seems like it could be helpful. That's something that I do, and I go through the entire script of how I secure next steps right early in the meeting on my website at andrewbarbuto.com. Meeting hacks is a video where I have a script where I literally word for word what I say to right at the start of a meeting when I start having a conversation after the agenda, I say, okay, if what we discuss here seems like it might be helpful, this is what we do for next steps. Does that work? And then get them to agree to it. Then you don't have to worry about later on in the meeting having to go back to that and like actually asking for those next steps because they've already said yes. Then once you've demonstrated personalized value, then you say, okay, like it seems like this would be helpful. Why don't we set up that next step? So having that established initially so that you don't have to worry about that. And everything that I say whenever I'm presenting our solution is always using their words. What I mean by that is ask a question. They'll tell me, okay, this is my challenge or what have you. Then I'll reference what they said to present our solution. You mentioned this was a challenge for you. This is our solution. What do you think? Continuing to reference what they said, it shows that you're listening. It also presents your solution the best and most relevant way possible, because at the end of the day, your job is to help their problems. So when they tell you about a problem, refer back to that problem, let them know this is the solution. And when you present it, remind them this is the problem they told you about.

1:32:46 Scott Ingram: Nice. One thing I will call out that I see happen all the time is people run out of time. I'm super cognizant of when we get to 5 minutes to the end of the meeting, we're talking about next steps there. Even if we're having an amazing conversation, we're gonna run out the clock and not having that next step defined before you get off the call. Ugh.

1:33:07 Andrew Barbuto: That's where deals get stalled from not having those next steps.

1:33:10 Scott Ingram: And exactly, because now you're in chase mode of like, oh shoot, we don't have the next meeting scheduled. So now I gotta do all this work and I gotta ping you 100 times to get this next meeting because I didn't do my job and I didn't carve out enough time to make sure that we got this set.

1:33:25 Andrew Barbuto: So before the meeting ends, you get those next steps, like actually on the calendar. That's what I do. Like, hey, like, great. Like, next step is demo. You mind taking out your calendar so that way you don't have to go chasing them? Because like you said, Scott, like, even if they say yes, let's do it, you're still most likely going to follow up multiple times to be able to get that on the calendar, which then pushes back your sales cycle because people are busy. Chances are you're not their number one priority.

1:33:45 Scott Ingram: Yep. Yep. 100%. I love this track that we're on because I always like to end on something very actionable. So what would you challenge our listener to do over the course of the next week or 2 to improve themselves and improve their results?

1:33:59 Andrew Barbuto: Yeah, great question. I did think about this. I would say carve out 3 hours next week and just focus on research, researching prospects. Look for new prospects to target. Use LinkedIn, use whatever sales tools that you have available for you. Don't do it while you're doing anything else. This is one of the things that was a huge learning curve for me. It was like I would be trying to research and prospect at the same time. I think they're 2 different things. I think research needs to be a step by itself, which is I want to focus all my energy on finding a list of prospects. And that's how you go deeper than just, oh, they fit my ideal customer profile. Check out if you have any mutual connections with them. Them. Go through your manager's list of connections. Go through the companies that they're connected with. This is one of the things I did, and I've gotten deals from it, is literally went through their LinkedIn. Now, now you should ask for permission. You shouldn't just do this. Just say, hey, I know you have a lot more experience. You've been doing this for a long time. Do you mind if I go through your LinkedIn connections, see if I can identify anybody that's on there that might be a good fit? And then if there is, I'll send you that list. You let me know who you know well enough. For me to reach out to, I'll draft up the email and you can either send it or I can send it. But that's a great way to get a warm lead where one didn't exist. If you spend more time doing research, I guarantee you'll find 2, 3, maybe 4 potential prospects that you weren't previously aware of that are warm leads as opposed to just the cold outreach that you've been doing. Spend more time researching. I guarantee you'll find some new leads and get some results from that.

1:35:32 Scott Ingram: Brilliant. Brilliant. Andrew, did you finalize the title of your book?

1:35:37 Andrew Barbuto: It's been the bane of my existence. So no, I'm still working on it and I keep going back every day. But I think right now where I'm at is potentially top seller, How to Crush Your B2B Sales Quota. That's where I'm at right now. I just want to lock it in. That's going to be the top one. I did put out a poll. That was the winner, top seller. So we're going to go with that for now.

1:35:55 Scott Ingram: All right, cool. We will have potentially the final answer in the show notes. So if you go to top1.fm, I hope so, top1.fm/this episode number or top1.fm/Andrew-Barbuto, you'll find all the links, all the books, all the stuff that we've talked about. We'll get you to Andrew's page. We'll get you a link to the book if it exists, or if not, the place where you can preorder or get on the RSVP list. Andrew, this has been awesome, man. Appreciate you taking the time.

1:36:22 Andrew Barbuto: Thanks so much for having me. I love this conversation. Thanks so much.

1:36:24 Scott Ingram: All right, man.

1:36:27 Andrew Barbuto: Thanks for listening to the Sales Success Stories podcast.

1:36:30 Scott Ingram: To be sure you never miss an episode and for an invitation to our Sales Success Community powered by Influitive, subscribe to our newsletter at top1.fm.